holding it together as I journey through therapy – a personal account of what it's like to be in long-term psychotherapy navigating the healing of C-PTSD, childhood trauma and neglect, an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, as well as giving grief and cancer an occasional nod.
Do you remember the old roundabouts in kids’ play parks that were really super-fast and basically death traps? Everyone would grab the handle and run like hell round and round then jump on and hope not to fucking die as the force was so strong and could ping you off? There was always the potential risk of getting your foot trapped under it when it was getting going, too.
So… that’s one aspect of how it feels at the minute. Like nearly all the parts of me are stuck on this fucking roundabout and feel soooo sick. Some are screaming that they “want to get off!” and to “slow it down!” Some are on the verge of losing their grip on the handle and are soooo scared and crying…and then the Inner Critic keeps spinning the thing faster and faster because suffering is fun…apparently.
It’s disorientating and exhausting and I feel like I am expending a ridiculous amount of energy just trying to hang on and not puke…only it feels worse than that because it feels like it’s life or death in the moment. I am so fed up of feeling ill and overwrought.
I am wondering a bit, whether it would just be best to let go, tumble out, sustain a little bit more injury but at least be off it. Although, given I have to be more-or-less functional I don’t necessarily think that’s possible. Having said that, functionality is riding at about 50% at the moment and I can’t believe how much of my teaching timetable I have cancelled recently. I just can’t do it.
Everything just feels impossibly hard and I feel a little bit like I am splitting apart and don’t have an especially good handle on myself. I guess it’s not surprising everything feels catastrophic for a lot of me – the problem comes when I can’t hold it all, though, because when that happens everything feels unsafe…mixing metaphors really badly, it’s like the little rowing boat has somehow ended up in whitewater rapids. I always thought I’d enjoy rafting until I did it in Thailand and ripped my big toenail off. I still feel sick thinking about that. And so, it’s really not good at all.
So yeah – it’s a mess and because it’s a HUGE mess I feel like everything is about to explode or implode, maybe. It’s like all those alarms are going off again and as much as I’d like to think they’re malfunctioning – or I am – it doesn’t change how scary it all feels. And, it’s nearly Christmas and that’s terrifying in its own way too ☹ especially if this is the starting point.
Ummm so please stay close because it’s bad.
x
This was an email I sent to Elle after a recent session a couple of weeks back. The stuff with Anita and the box still felt really live (my god there’s sooooo much to process there) and I could feel myself edging closer and closer the to place where it gets very very bad.
I had wondered whether or not to even tell Elle how it was feeling, because really what could be done with only two more sessions until Christmas? The holidays were looming large on the horizon and therefore the dreaded therapy break too (the most wonderful time of the fucking grinchy year).
Although it wasn’t a lot of time, I decided I wanted to be able to try and get something in place to hold this…disaster… so that I didn’t combust or disintegrate or get pinged off the roundabout and sustain some nasty injury over Christmas, and the only way that could happen was if I was honest about how bad it was feeling.
I think I was pretty numbed out in session that came after the box and the elephant and Anita’s note and we didn’t really talk about it … but then that’s because I couldn’t see the box in the room and part of me, at least, felt embarrassed to bring it up.
Later on, in that session Elle said she’d had an idea about creating a nice new box for the stories to go in, but tbh I was pretty shut down at that point because I’d felt like she’d forgotten. She absolutely hadn’t. She was being led by me and when I avoided it she brought it up, safely, as I was cuddled into her. So I do get this is me not her – but it’s all VERY VERY sensitive and I feel as though I am edging my way round quicksand. Hence sending the roundabout of death email.
Elle replied kindly and said that she really understood how hard this time of year is calling it “a memory-cake covered in the sparkly frosting of multiple crushing disappointments” and said that she was ready and waiting with a blanket and reckons she can break my fall if I choose to let go of my grip on the roundabout.
It was around then that I had decided that it made sense to use one of the remaining sessions with Elle unpacking more of my box from Anita, and then use the last session on Christmas Eve to really try and connect with Elle, give her my Christmas gifts, settle the little parts, and create enough holding and containment to get through the Christmas week.
I woke up the next morning feeling really sad and little and out of sorts and took myself back to bed for a nap in an attempt try and snap myself into a better, more adult, place before a massive day of lessons. The nap didn’t really help and I felt really unmoored and upset having had some nightmares with Elle in – you know the usual stuff around abandonment and rejection… awesome.
I was just about to get up and shower but checked my phone first, and imagine my absolute horror when I saw and email from Elle telling me that we wouldn’t be able to meet on Christmas Eve having had a an email from the landlord of her building saying they were closing up for the whole of the Christmas week and that the space couldn’t be used. I literally couldn’t believe it. Although, of course, parts of me absolutely could… because this is my life, isn’t it?
The message felt really jarring. Elle basically said that our last session would now be the 17th and that she also would be away on the week of 14th January (I didn’t know about this until then, although the phrasing of her message made it seem like she thought I already knew.) and that she hoped it didn’t feel too “unsettling”.
It wasn’t just unsettling. It felt like a huge body blow and I basically crumbled in a heap and sobbed face down in my bed for half an hour. I left it until the very last minute before I had to teach to get out of bed, quickly washed my face, and tried to adjust my mask so I would be able to work. There were soooo many feelings. But hurt and disappointment felt like the big ones. The email from Elle wasn’t horrific but it wasn’t really holding either. I didn’t know what to say. Part of me had already cut and run and another part didn’t want to be too needy. So, I simply replied:
Ok. If you get a cancellation can I see you?
Because at this point there was still a week and a half until the office shutdown and perhaps this would give her enough of a head’s up that a single session wasn’t going to cut it.
I think I probably need to give Elle a bit of lesson on my communication style and let her know that if I go quiet for a period of time or hardly respond, THINGS ARE BAD… like VERY BAD.
Elle said that she would let me know if anyone cancelled – which is fine – it was the sort of reply my short email required. Only it wasn’t. I just needed a bit more warmth and a bit less admin at this point when I was totally losing my shit… but then I suppose she didn’t know I was losing my shit…but I would expect by now for her to have an inkling because I’ve done the crumple in a heap a few times now around contact/sessions/extra sessions.
So, when I say I fell apart at the news of no Christmas Eve session, it’s no exaggeration. I absolutely and totally crumbled inside. It all just landed so heavily at time when I absolutely don’t have enough coping to handle it. I was mad at myself for being so upset. I was angry that I had let myself get to a point that it mattered to me whether or not we would see each other. I was gutted that the little parts of me had been excited to see her so close to Christmas and that this year the break wouldn’t even really be a break as there wouldn’t be a missed session.
It wasn’t Elle’s fault we couldn’t meet on Christmas Eve but there was a part of me that was really sad that knowing how this might land Elle just seemed not to really care. Like – was there no work around?
To say that I felt totally abandoned would be an understatement and my system went into apocalypse setting. After all the stuff with Anita being so activated again, and it being December and the anniversary of the wheels falling off with Em all the alarms were switching on…plus there’s all the non-therapy trauma with my mum and wider family, the fact that I had an actual mental health breakdown that saw me off work for 17 months that was triggered at Christmas…well, the funnelling into doom was rapid. Like this time of year is not great for my mental health outside of therapy but adding in the complicating factors of failed relationships and then this…well… it was fucking awful.
There was just this horrible empty feeling and the sense of being ‘not good enough’ and ‘unimportant’ and we all know how bloody awful that is. Over the course of the day, I basically unravelled in the biggest way. It was hideous. My runners were running and my protectors were going all out. As I say, when I am in this kind of a place the last thing I do is reach out and say anything or tell the person I am upset, instead I spin in ever tighter spirals until I am so dizzy and sick that I fall off the roundabout.
I was so disappointed. I had genuinely been just a little bit hopeful this year, that despite everything, Christmas might not be quite the shitshow it has been in recent years. I realise too, that a lot of this is about how I struggle with change. Like, I do know that it wasn’t like Elle and I weren’t going to meet at all and she had at least given me the head’s up rather than telling me in the session the next week. It just meant my plan for how I wanted the run into Christmas to be was not going to happen…and…one session instead of two…was a sucker punch.
It was agony. I can’t really put into words how bad this stuff feels when it’s happening but I do understand that it feels so catastrophic because SOOOOOO MANY parts of me are in play. The entire mini-bus is in the mix- and the driver too.
I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place and there wasn’t a good option (in my wonky brain at least?!). What should I do? Turn up on the Tuesday and pretend like everything was fine so as to avoid a deeper rupture when there would be a two week break and then another two week break in January? Like, this has probably been the option I have leant towards in the past, but I also know that leaves a lot of my system feeling angry and resentful and hurting afterwards and then I am left in the doom loop.
Then there was a part of me that thought about going and saying how awful this had felt and how unseen and abandoned I felt but then I didn’t want the last session to be fraught and there not be enough time to make a repair… but also, I didn’t want her to know that I needed more than what she’d put on the table. I was already swimming in shame for getting myself in a place where I imagined this sort of thing wouldn’t happen between us.
It wasn’t so much the cancellation, rather that there was no alternative options given. I felt like I had been dealt a hard slap of reality of what our relationship was…and it wasn’t what I had thought. I didn’t want to go in and embarrass myself by showing her how much this had hurt me and for her to come back with something like, “I’m just your therapist.”
And so, then that really only left me with this option… and that was to not go back at all. Told you the protectors were activated! But it’s not surprising. There are only so many knock backs I can cope with and after Anita’s shit note in the box and sending back ‘The Rabbit Listened’ and all that has dragged up, I just wasn’t in a place to hold this, too.
I felt really really sad. I had been planning to write a story for Elle to give to her in our Christmas Eve session. We had talked about writing a story together a while back and she’d told me the animal she thought she’d be. I had ordered a plushie version of this animal and just needed to write the story – I thought I had two weeks to do it and had mostly mapped out the plot line and characters. Now this just felt stupid and my brain was in no place to write.
There were a few other bits I had ordered over recent months to give Elle this holiday that felt very specific to our work and the conversations that we had had. I had another card with buttons on, referencing back to the year before when we had done the session with the buttons and I had put her in my button circle. At this point I just felt fucking stupid – like really, why bother and what was the point? None of it is real…and of course I have evidence of just how not real even the therapeutic relationships that seem to be galvanised in love are.
There was part of me that had an idea to write the story and leave it with Monty outside the room with a note that said I was done and not coming back just before the session….but as loud as the teen part was, there were lots of littles crying and begging for that NOT to happen.
For fuck’s sake. Like it was seriously all kicking off. Part of me feels really embarrassed that it gets like this but these days there is a huge amount of compassion for all those parts – the reactions I have are only as big as the hurts I have endured over the years…and this with Elle was just poking a massive stick in the mother wound again.
So, I suffered out all of Wednesday and most of Thursday before being talked down by a friend who strongly encouraged me to reach out to Elle and let her know what was going on for me because she probably had no idea at all. She said that Elle always responds well when I let her know what is going on and that I should give her the opportunity to help.
The stubborn protectors didn’t want to contact her at all and were so angry when I sent on Thursday:
I’ve had a massive meltdown.
I couldn’t say more than that. But that really said it all didn’t it?
And thankfully the Elle that I think is Elle, that most of me knows to be Elle showed up. She sent the most holding email and it completely settled my system down – it was like switching my nervous system from complete overwhelm and panic and putting it into safe mode (I really hope she wouldn’t mind me posting this- but I think you can probably see why it was so effective):
Oh lambkin, I feel sad hearing that, and I hope you’re not feeling shame about it, because sometimes a meltdown is exactly the appropriate response.
There is so much happening right now, and this is historically the toughest time for you for so many reasons. I feel so sorry that there’s not more I can do for you, other than offer you my love and understanding, and a hand to hold and a body to lean on every week. And I feel really sorry that we won’t be able to meet on Christmas Eve as we’d planned, as that felt like such a holding thing to do and imagine would potentially have helped with the tricksiest week of the year.
And I wondered if maybe we could possibly have a phone call that day instead? I know you said you struggled with Zoom sessions in the past, but I wondered if it would feel different to maybe have a phonecall, maybe snuggled up in bed with the duvet over your head? Maybe we could try it at least and see how it feels? It might be a good solution for when things get tough or when it’s not an office day for me.
I hope you feel me holding your hand, even when I can’t physically be there to do it.
Elle x
So, I sent an email back with all kinds of fluff in but also saying that I would really like to talk to her.
My system was still in a state for quite a few days – the hangover from the mess I had got myself into, I think. I felt quite dissociated and just couldn’t really get my brain to work even though things felt tonnes better than they had. I must have read that email a million times last week and each time it had the same calming effect… because even if I don’t remember always, or don’t feel it, she does understand doesn’t she?
I badly wanted to write the story for Elle ready for our last session on Tuesday but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even get myself to go near my laptop until the Friday night because it felt like I was thinking through cotton wool. I have definitely found with my writing that when I am in the zone it just comes and when I am not… well… it’s like wading through treacle. My vocabulary isn’t there, my ability to hold the story in mind, the characters, speech, ALL OF IT feels nearly impossible and honestly, it’s given me a whole new level of compassion for my GCSE students who get 45 minutes to write a story on an unseen stimulus in their exams.
Anyway, I started to write the story but quickly realised I would not be able to finish it in time for Tuesday. I couldn’t even edit what I had done properly… and for someone who generally likes time for things to marinate and settle this felt shit…ESPECIALLY as it was something I wanted to give to Elle. I don’t feel this way with the blog because it’s just me wittering away in a stream of consciousness but a story, for someone whose opinion matters…like I at least wanted to give her something I was happy with and something that was FINISHED. ☹
I’ll write another post on our last face-to-face session (which I did go to!) in the next few days…and the phone call…whatever that ends up being like. Eek. I’m trying hard not to get worked up about it.
Tbh I am feeling a bit meh this weekend. The emotional nose dive is real folks. Christmas is catching up with me. The same old shit is rearing its head. I have retreated into myself and feel pretty fucking shit if I am honest. Once again, I am in that place where I know that if I hide it’ll be way worse than if I reach out…but reaching out feels too much and too scary especially when the Ghost of Christmas Past is sitting on my shoulder reminding me that everyone is tired at this time of year and capacity is at an all time low. And maybe had I not had an emotional meltdown this time five years ago, Em might not have given up.
Most of me knows that to not be true…but…at least some part of me is aware of not wanting to be a burden.
Deep breaths eh?
I imagine lots of you are feeling a similar kind of heaviness and … ugh… sadness…and grief…and ALL THE THINGS right now. So, sending out heaps of love of Christmas as you run the gauntlet of the holidays and corresponding therapy breaks. xx
Right – so – part 2 – ummm so this actually ended up being 4500 words on its own and I don’t have the mental wherewithal to break it further… so…yeah…maybe grab a coffee or something?! Here’s the stuff about what’s been going on recently with therapy as we headed into a bastard therapy break…which ends today…PRAISE THE LORD! Phew. Man am I ready to see Elle…anyway, let’s fill in the gaps!
*I went into a freeze hole with with the US election so this is a bit delayed posting.
A little while ago I was writing about how I was struggling with the therapy container with Elle not feeling big enough – or me basically ‘being too much’ and having ‘too much to process’ and not enough time and space in which to do it (same old same old! I was actually thinking of getting myself a t-shirt made with ‘same shit different day’ on). I can’t lie, I have been in an absolutely horrible place with it all. And it’s not Elle – it’s ALL of it. EVERYTHING has flooded all at once and there is just TOO FUCKING MUCH TO COPE WITH.
The last month heading into this therapy break (me being away not Elle – pray that she isn’t going to spring a break on me anytime soon, please!) I really did start to unravel and it was bloody awful. I mean I literally was sliding downhill on my arse, at speed, and it was fucking painful despite sessions with Elle having been really good. Like really good and holding…. and just lovely, actually.
I mean it’s really brilliant that we aren’t lurching from one shitty rupture and misattunement to another and that sessions feel safe and calm and useful – but it’s really hard when therapy is really going well that things outside the room feel so fucking hard. Complex trauma – as I have said soooo many times – really is the gift that keeps on giving.
Elle and I seem to have connected in a really deep way (or at least it feels that way to me) and it feels very safe and just nice when we are together…but the problem with that is that it’s really brought the young parts up to the surface and when they’re here it’s a LOT. There is so much need (and grief) and as I keep saying, the week between our sessions is tough going.
I think part of it, is that it’s almost like everything with this young stuff has been on hold for the last year-and-a-half since everything went south with Anita and it is only now that the trust is really there and the solid foundation has been built with Elle that my system is prepared to let it all be seen again. Until relatively recently much of this stuff has been in hiding or protected (and understandably so!).
So, whilst it’s starting to feel a bit like an emotional rollercoaster inside again, I do understand why. I’m finally letting the lid off a pressure cooker that’s been madly boiling away for too long a time and it’s not surprising the contents are a bit hard to handle. Elle seems to have a good solid set of oven gloves so I don’t appear to be burning her in the process which is really good, and I do, at least, feel like my sessions are useful and not fucking traumatising or triggering which is great!
Sitting together on the new and bigger sofa all the time has been a game changer in how I allow myself to be – or who I let be- in the room with Elle…it’s so much better than her being in a chair across from me. I know all I needed to do was say, because any time I have asked for her to come closer to me she has, but it’s been a real slow and steady process after everything that has happened before with Anita and Em, and I haven’t always felt able to ask express what I need. There’s always been that very real fear of not wanting to be ‘too much’ or come over as ‘too needy’. Elle assures me that I am fine however I am, but of course it’s not only her voice I have rattling round in my mind, is it?
It’s very hard having a need for someone who ‘appears safe’, now, because I thought Anita was safe and it turns out she absolutely wasn’t – or she was, and then she wasn’t. It really is like doing tiny baby steps with Elle – thankfully she is a very patient person and she meets me where I am at and doesn’t push me too hard, but is right there ready alongside me when I want to go to the hard places…I think it’s really clear to her that this is delicate work and I am very fragile after all that has happened. We aren’t in any great rush and I am determined that this time I do not end up worse off than I went in.
I mean basically this is like exposure therapy, isn’t it? I’ve been bitten by three separate dogs in the last four years and here I am, in a room, with another dog. Fortunately, this latest one is a golden retriever trained as an assistance dog and will just sit beside me calmly for as long as I want them to. Well, that’s the impression I’ve been given. I can’t see Elle suddenly becoming vicious or running off…
I wonder what breeds Em, Anita, and Hannah would be? Em?…are there any dogs that just genuinely hate people and savage them for even wanting to pet them? Anita?… something that looks soft and cuddly but in actual fact is nippy and has a tendency to bolt- but when you find them they’ve snuggled up to new people and pretend they don’t know who you are? – some kind of terrier perhaps? And Hannah?…ummm… maybe a dog that isn’t very used to humans yet and is flighty and doesn’t trust?!
Anyway…back to the story-
My system settles so much quicker at the start of sessions than it did because of the physical proximity I now have with Elle and I am not bothered by the fucking table between us because it isn’t between us! I still do the internal safety checking at the start but it’s nothing like as bad as it was. I don’t think that will ever go away with a history like mine. I am always going to need to scan for danger before letting my guard down because the reality is people change, people drop bombs on your heart, and I would be foolish to not be cautious.
A key difference being beside rather than across from Elle is that I am less likely to let False Adult front the show. In fact, that hasn’t happened at all since we’ve changed things up. When Elle was in her seat I could sometimes find it hard to figure out where we were at and so talk endlessly about stuff (that was relevant but didn’t leave space for the vulnerable parts to connect) and this would sometimes mean that I would head into dissociation (very well disguised and still carry on like nothing is wrong) because I’d feel like I wouldn’t get what I needed until we said goodbye and could feel the session slipping away.
Goodbye hugs are not really enough and would often leave me feeling bereft that I didn’t get more of what I needed in the session (even though we would have talked about useful stuff for at least some parts of my system) and now had to wait until the next week to try again. This really is one of the crappy things about one session a week. It seems to put a lot of pressure on the session being ‘enough’ whereas two sessions means that if things don’t feel quite connected enough that there isn’t an age until the next contact which means there’s less time to catastrophise and for Brian to go wild.
I like that now, instead, I will come in, sit on the sofa and already be close to Elle… The other day I was having a bit of a freeze and shut down (anticipatory dread for the upcoming break that was still a couple of weeks away). Elle had got the playdoh out that I had brought with me and left with her at the end of the previous session. She had it all set up when I got in the room which should have delighted me but instead I was just sat still, I didn’t even reach for the play doh but did discuss colours and textures and was generally chatting so hiding the extent of the hell I was feeling inside – like it wasn’t obvious I was having a hard time.
Why was I upset? Because it was a day where I just wanted to come in and cuddle into her and sob. I had been totally overwhelmed and in a panic, and I didn’t want to play at all – or not right then, anyway. I think Elle sensed something was up even though I was doing a good job of hiding because as she was making a frog she moved her leg over a bit and rested it against mine so we were touching so that I could feel that she was there.
This was enough for me to come out of wherever I had gone and made me realise (again) that I am safe and Elle doesn’t mind me being close and that we are connected. I really need that almost continual reminder that I am not unpalatable and disgusting at the start of each session because that’s the message so many parts of me now carry. They feel that I am easy to discard and it must be because there is something wrong with me…like I have always felt that from the beginning but it has been heavily reinforced by Em, Anita, and Hannah and it’s hard.
So, being next to one another, I can edge my way closer to Elle as and when I want to. I can reach out and hold her hand, or shuffle over for a hug, or I can just lean up against her and be in physical contact whilst we talk. It REALLY helps…and makes me realise how bloody awful it was all that time with Em when she refused to come anywhere near me… it was sooooo terrible for me and my nervous system. It’s bizarre to think that in all the years we worked together we never touched once, not even a handshake. For someone that struggles with feeling unlovable and untouchable it did a whole load of damage – especially as there was no emotional holding either. Crikey.
Elle and I talk in a way that I haven’t been able to with any of my other therapists. She is smart and insightful and funny and kind and makes it very easy to just be me with my jump around brain that is always changing direction. Sometimes I talk a lot and other times I say little, or nothing at all – and not because I am being withholding, just because it’s nice being with her and feeling my system rest a bit.
So therapy with Elle feels really comforting and connected but also like I am wading through all kinds of stuff in a very safe way. It’s different to with time with Anita – although it probably sounds exactly the same. I feel like Elle has a much better sense ‘the work’ and me, like, she’s not just phoning it in and having an easy time if I choose to ask for stories or cuddles or whatever. I get a sense that she is thoughtfully in the space with me. I think Anita really used to be at the beginning, but I think towards the end when she was on her slow spiral into burnout and breakdown, she was just grateful if I turned up and didn’t want anything from her but a hug because she could zone out and I wasn’t being challenging or difficult.
I would sometimes ask Anita what she was thinking when we were having a quiet time, imagining that she’d say something like “I was just thinking about when you said x or y” but often her brain was on things like taking the dogs to vet, or what she had to do later that day or… empty and nothing at all. And this always felt a bit shit. Like I get our minds wander but I think when we are paying someone to be in our experience with us, you’d think they’d be tuned into us and what was going on for us…not mentally making their shopping lists. Again, this was not how Anita was at the start – she couldn’t have been more attuned in that first 18 months or so.
Still, back to me and Elle because fuck me – what else can I really say about Anita? (Loads I am sure, but fuck it for today!). A really lovely thing that has happened in the last couple of months (basically after I shared the post I had written about what a perfect therapy room would be like with Elle) is that she seems to have really taken it on board. One day she came in with new packs of colouring pens and asked if I wanted to draw a version of something I had sent her in an email. She has also brought in story books she thinks I would like, that she liked as a child, and has read them to me so there’s been some lovely sharing of things we’ve liked back and forth. Elle is really good at reading too – and does such good voices – and the little parts of me really love this.
I think after how it all ended with A I didn’t imagine that I would ever be in a position to be safe with someone in this way again. I am now really hopeful that when I eventually get my stuff back from Anita that Elle and I will be able to do some work with the stories and maybe move that all on for the little parts of me. I know there will be a lot of tears if Elle reads me ‘No Matter What’ or any of the books, actually – but I think it’ll be a safe grieving process and something that really needs to happen. I need those little parts to be able to reclaim those lovely messages and have them held with Elle because right now it all just feels really upsetting.
Sooo…the break? Shall we venture into that shithole territory?! Well, it was fast approaching and there was just a lot of stuff coming up especially after Anita’s most recent message about how her life hadn’t been as she’d imagined and how she was now working that came around the time I noticed her website had changed. Talking through that was really helpful but stirred up a whole world of pain.
Then the next week I had left a session that was soooo lovely (the same one with the playdoh) but also really opened up a lot of deep emotional stuff – we’d read a new book ‘Following The Moon’ by James Norbury and both of us cried at the end of it. It is really moving. I had told Elle how much I hated my brain because I had been so anxious about coming to the session and had feared something bad was going to happen (the only bad thing was the upcoming break but my brain was having a meltdown).
I asked Elle if she was real and she had said that she absolutely was and reminded me of the bracelet on my wrist that she had given me. She said that I could message her to check she was real anytime I liked and said she might get another bracelet to remind herself that she was real too – or that I am real – but then corrected herself and said, actually she has no problem remembering me at all. It was all very connecting but I was immediately aware that I was going to experience a fucking huge therapy hangover from the session You know when it’s so raw and vulnerable that it is hard to put yourself back together afterwards because part of you needs that stuff to be exposed but safely in the room and shoving it all back down and carrying on with everyday life feels impossible?
When I got home, I sent an email and asked Elle if she got a cancellation if I could see her. She said she would let me know but if there was going to be a cancellation it would most likely be Friday…because apparently, she’s now working Friday mornings too.
For some reason, that week I didn’t check in with her like I would usually. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was trying to prove to myself that I could do without her and that as a break was coming, I needed to be less needy… I don’t know. So because I had disconnected (despite absolutely needing to remain connected) I was already not in a brilliant place by the end of the week and so when I didn’t hear from Elle until late afternoon on Friday I was pretty awful. Obviously, no space had opened up to see her and honestly, I felt like utter shit. I don’t ask for extra sessions if there isn’t a reason for it and even though it wasn’t Elle’s fault, I felt like I just wasn’t seen and it felt abandoning to the parts that needed her.
Elle messaged me saying she was sorry that no space had opened up and attached picture of the Russian doll set from the room – apparently the little one had been returned (months back she’d realised it was missing but didn’t know where) as an outgoing client had left that day.
This was absolutely a million percent not the right kind of message to have sent me. I am so fucking sensitive to ‘other clients’ but that day in particular it just felt like Elle totally didn’t get it at all. But then why would she – for the first time in months I had not reached out in any way at all. I was probably fine, right?!
Nope.
As I stared at the picture and the lack of anything that felt personal to me and her I just felt at a complete loss and I replied. “I don’t even know what to say to this. I am million miles away from ok. See you Tuesday”
She clearly clicked that shit was hitting the fan… (it totally was) because I am not really a three short sentence type of a communicator – lol – and replied:
I’m so sorry to hear that flower. I hate to think of you feeling so far away from safety and warmth.
I wish I could hold your hand right know, and tell you how loved and important you are, but please know that I’m thinking it.
Elle x
When Elle sends me messages that use affectionate terms like ‘flower’, or ‘sweetpea’, or my best favourite – ‘lambkin’ it cuts through to the places that really need to be seen and heard and everything that feels very wrong sort of just melts away. I want to tell her this at some point but it just feels a bit cringey!
Of course, the disconnect had felt fucking awful that week alongside my panic about the break and so I bloody did a running bomb and decided to be brave and send her the post I had written about the container and asked her to read it.
Shiiiittttt. Go big or go home RB!!:
🥹😭❤️🩹
Can you read this because it’s got much worse even since I wrote it. I feel like a snow globe that’s been shaken so violently that even the scene inside has come unstuck and is tumbling inside the glass. I’m going to bed because I’m sick of myself x big hug 🤗
So, I took myself off to bed and tried to sleep…in the morning when I woke up, I had such a thoughtful and holding reply – I don’t think Elle would mind me posting this here and actually it’s one of those things that would be useful to have here so I can find it quickly in the future when I am wobbling because it was exactly what I needed in that moment – she is soooo good at these kinds of messages when I let her know how I am actually feeling rather than hiding behind random memes:
Oh lambkin. My heart proper hurts after reading all that.
And the first thing I want to say – to maybe give you even a tiny corner of reassurance – is you cannot burn me out.
I never say things I don’t mean, and burnout is not something you need to worry about with me. I did burnout on a grand scale about 12 years ago, learned some very hard lessons from it, and will ever allow myself to approach burnout ever again. I take very good care of myself, and part of that care is making sure I never work harder or give more to people – friends, family and clients alike – than I know I have to give.
People who burn out do so because they try to give more than they can, usually because they feel they have something to prove to themselves (or the world), and I have nothing left to prove to anyone. I know who I am, inside and out, and I’m enough as I am.
You carry this story that you’re so very much, so messy and overwhelming to deal with, but all I see is this lovely human with many many facets.
I don’t see confusing jagged ugly parts and separate fun sunny delightful parts, I just see RB, in all her beautiful complexity. And I think she is amazing and brave and smart and vulnerable and sweet, and sometimes she’s terrified and frozen and shutdown and hiding inside herself, and all of that is equally beautiful to me. Because it’s all you.
So you can tell your followers that you let me read that entry, and I said it was wonderful, and that I am super proud of you for putting all your confused thoughts into such eloquent words and then being brave enough to tell me to read it.
And I feel like some of the suggestions they gave you in comments were great, but let’s talk about what else might be great when I see you on Tuesday.
Tightest of all possible hugs and the biggest of all loves to you beautiful girl.
I hope you sleep well. Elle x
And honestly, that just settled the shit inside right down. It felt like a massive cuddle in an email and every time I read it is has had the same settling effect.
I replied to this when I woke up and we exchanged a few messages over the weekend about other things. I tend to do the big ‘hoorah of vulnerability’ and then head back to adult and hide in normal life not the emotional mess that is my inner world. It’s an interesting dance and it’s hard because I think Elle generally responds to what I put in front of her.
When I am clear about what I am feeling and needing she never fails to respond how I need. The issue comes, then, where I reach out with something fucking random and innocuous like a meme and expect her to know that I am not really ok. I do get this is something I need to work on and clue her into…and I will.
So, what next? Well, that weekend was fucking awesome as I got a sick bug and was absolutely wiped out. Fortunately, by Tuesday (the last session before the break) I was well enough to go see Elle but also just totally on empty. She came to get me and I hugged her immediately in the corridor, she commented on how washed out and knackered I looked, we sat down in the room and I just snuggled into her in a kind of floppy heap. She asked me if I’d like to read a story that I had brought in previously but we hadn’t read yet and I said actually I would like to read a different book instead so that’s what we did.
I was so exhausted and done in that we didn’t really get on to talking about the blog or the struggle between sessions or any of the big stuff but what we did do was a tonne of containment and holding. We read some stories and Elle brought up my dreams (something I had mentioned in the blog) and how I have been struggling with the ones I have where she is horrid to me or pushes me away or gets angry. She said she’d seen something about dream completion, which is something where if you keep getting stuck in loops of horrible dreams that you can try and rewrite the ending so it feels better and maybe we could do that together?
I was cuddled into her and the reminder of the sort of dreams I have set me off and I just started crying. I think I was also really aware that I would be leaving the room and her in about twenty minutes and just didn’t want to be out in the world for two weeks. So, Elle just talked to me in a really soft, soothing voice, and told me what she would say to me if we were continuing the dreams and honestly, I just cried and cried. It was so lovely and so reparative (even though she’s not actually done anything to hurt me!) and made me realise just how many of these conversations I have needed with my mother over the years…but will never have.
As well as this, we made a plan for how to get through the break and how we would check in every couple of days…and we have. The break hasn’t felt great because…it’s a break…but it’s not felt horrendous either. We’ve had a lot of ‘light touch’ contact – I’ve sent her photos, linked her to Monty’s page and shown her what he’s been up to, and had general ‘hi’ type messages – but then on Friday when I got home, I crashed. Totally out of energy. I’ve got a stinking cold. And the wheels came off…but I think I actually have done pretty well given how much crap has been swirling lately to get nearly through the break in one piece!
I sent Elle a message saying ‘it feels very very Friday today and Brian is wreaking havoc’ with a picture from a page I follow and asked for a vibe check. She sent back another totally perfect reply and it’s carried me through the weekend…
Crikey, this is soooo long so I’ll leave it here for now…there is a lot to get through and process…if I can ever get my brain to fucking work.
One more sleep! I really hope I don’t go in and be a distant weirdo tomorrow…which is very possible! x
(I do totally get these two were having an affair btw – and it’s NOT meant this way for me with Elle!)
Oh my god…this was meant to be a single post but once I got going I was up at 5000 words and had to split it into two posts – so it’s a bit slow going with this first bit… sorry!
Do you know what? I just don’t know how to label what it’s like in my head at the moment other than ‘bleurgh’. I feel so completely lacking in energy and oomph that I don’t know whether it’s an ongoing depressive episode, burnout, illness (I’ve just got a nasty cold and been in bed for three days but this is merely the cherry on top of things!), generally just being shit at life, or what?
I have been thinking about writing here for a while but it’s taken me nearly all weekend with the laptop sat open beside me for me to now, at 5pm on Sunday, start typing anything. I’ve been doom scrolling social media, watching the day sort of disappear from my bed, and having absolutely zero will or motivation to do anything outside of attending to my kids. I haven’t even showered today…or got dressed! This is so far removed from how I usually am…but I have got NOTHING TO GIVE.
To be fair to myself I have had an utterly bonkers week away from home and have crashed and burned as a result of too much peopling and visits and location changes and juggling the needs of everyone else AND being unable to sleep … sounds dreamy doesn’t it?! Of course, all of this overstimulating away from home ‘vacation’ (?!) stuff has also meant that I had a dreaded THERAPY BREAK. But I’ll talk about how I haven’t (!) managed that a bit later.
Lately, I find myself more and more in the worst kind of procrastination – not just with the blog, but with pretty much everything…even really simple tasks feel absolutely impossible – even things that will make my life EASIER feel beyond me. A prime example of this is work admin. I need to make a spreadsheet for payments – and I just can’t – it’s honestly a ten-minute job but I feel like I am running at a concrete wall – I just can’t get through it. So instead, I am juggling twenty students in my head rather than having it easily on a screen. FFS RB!
Another ridiculous thing just like this, was the new laptop I bought last December but only took out the box and set up in September. Nine months! Wtaf? And the only reason I got to it in September was because I absolutely had to before the new term began as it the old one was crashing left and right…AND Elle had pretty much coached me through it the session before I did it.
I can’t tell you how many times Elle and I spoke about what I needed to do in order to get it sorted though– like lots of times over that nine months – she even suggested taking my old laptop and new one to someone who would transfer everything over and set it up for me- but I simply couldn’t bring myself to do anything with it. It’s not that I didn’t want a laptop that was reliable, didn’t overheat, or have keys that would work consistently. It just all felt totally overwhelming even thinking about it and so I went into a ridiculous freeze and watched the monthly direct debit leave my account paying for something I wasn’t even using.
AND IT IS A REALLY GREAT LAPTOP…and I love it for work now, even if I find it hard to use for anything other than work.
I wonder a bit if I have some now conscious (but until literally thirty seconds ago unconscious) associations with my laptop. I work completely online these days and whilst I like my teaching job, I find it exhausting and draining. I give a lot to my students and working 1:1 day-in day-out on Zoom is hard. I wonder if there is a little part of me that wanted to push the laptop to the point of extinction so I had a legitimate reason to not work for a day or two? Like I just wanted something to happen to ease my pressures a bit.
Probably.
I wonder, too, whether I am now finding it hard to get on the laptop and blog because it symbolises work, I spent twenty hours a week on Zoom and then goodness knows how long around my actual contact time farting around planning lessons and making resources etc… but also there has been so much pain written and explored here it’s not only about work?
As much as writing and the connections I have made here have been absolute lifelines, it’s hard seeing so much hurt in post after post and to know that most of you guys who regularly comment have survived longer than my therapists! There are a handful of you who have been here from the very beginning and sometimes I wonder what keeps you following along when all I seem to do is lurch from one crisis to another. Like I am not exactly a great advert for therapy… more of a stark warning of the pitfalls of therapy and all that can go wrong!
I recently screenshot the last few years of blog titles and sent them to Elle…and you know what, it’s tough. It’s hard seeing and knowing how much struggle there has been. It’s hard seeing how much I invested into therapies and seeing where I am now. I tallied up how much I spent on therapy just with Em and Anita the other day and it was a staggering £37,000 …
Deep breaths into a paper bag RB!!
I would have ZERO credit card debt, or car loans, AND would have some savings in the bank had I not gone to therapy with them. In fact, had I found someone who could have done the work with me and stayed the course, I might not even be in therapy at all now!
That’s really hard to take in and metabolise. I suspect there are a few of you, too, who would wince at how much you have spent on your therapy, how much you have sacrificed or gone without in order to attend sessions, only to end up dumped and hurt and damaged.
It’s hideous.
I am a big believer in attending to our mental health, but you know what? I am not sure the ‘investment’ was worth it. I went into therapy with Em and Anita with past Trauma and came out additionally retraumatised TWICE over.
This is never right, is it?
Like in what other situation would you go and spend significant amounts of money only to come out worse? If you bought a faulty product you’d get a refund; or if the product you bought exploded and damaged you then you’d get compensation…not with therapy. We just have to suck it up, pretend like it never happened, and try and make the best of a bad situation. Harm in therapy is really a big deal, it’s widespread…and nothing ever seems to happen unless it’s something to do with inappropriate sexual conduct because that’s easier to prove…I guess.
So, here I am in therapy with Elle, working at a painstakingly slow pace just trying to recover from past ‘therapy’…we don’t really even go anywhere near the trauma I went to therapy for in the first place! I mean we do, because let’s be real – lots of it is relational trauma and the mother wound – but there’s a lot of stuff from my past I need to talk about but we are constantly trying to bail out my boat from the massive amount of water that’s flooded in due to the shit tonne of bullet holes that the hull has been peppered with over the last four years…well longer – I started seeing Em again in 2016 and it wasn’t great from the beginning, was it?!
I probably sound bitter. I’m not. I am just sad. I am sad for all of me. I am sad for the little parts that trusted and loved and got so badly hurt. I am sad for the protectors who stood down despite feeling it was a bad idea because Adult Me insisted that it was safe and believed Anita’s promises of love, and care, and staying for the ‘entirety of the journey’. I am sad for my family who have not had the things they could have had: holidays, treats…no debt!! It’s gutting on so many levels.
And here I am. Still trying. But out of energy, now. As I say, the effect of living with the battery light flashing red for such a long time now is that I feel like this is just how it is to live. I have no idea how to get enough charge to start functioning more effectively because it feels like existing just takes way more than ever gets put back in. I do get that I am sick right now, too, so have hit a really low ebb – but honestly, I cannot remember the last time I felt really well, energised, and happy. That sucks.
It’s really hard to explain just how eroding the experiences/endings with Em and Anita have been – although I have given it a damned good go here on the blog! It’s actually hard feeling into it because the pain is so all-encompassing. But what I can see very clearly, even if there aren’t words, is how all this crap has impacted my day-to-day functionality…or should I say lack of functionality.
I am not a lazy person at all but I am really struggling to move through my weeks and do what I am supposed to. I am not even sure procrastination really fits what is going on for me a lot of the time. I am honestly in a complete freeze or dissociated…or in survival really. That’s really more reflective of the current state of things. I absolutely am pushing myself up hill and just can’t seem to make much forward progress.
So yeah…it’s not great.
Happy gloom-day RB! I bet you are all really glad I decided to start tapping away today like a suicidal Eeyore!…1800 words in and I actually wanted to talk a bit about the therapy break and the rocky road into it… cut to the chase eh?! —
I’ll break this here, and I promise that the next part is actually somewhat more interesting and about my therapy and break with Elle and not just me whining on about how fucking tired I am – I’ll try and pop it up tomorrow – although if I shut this laptop down it could take me a week to be able to turn it back on and get back to this – GROAN!! x
Can I start yet another blog post with, ‘well fuck’? Because WELL, FUCK!… FUCK ME!… You just can’t make this shit up. I’d love to say that this blog was a fictionalised version of an imagined experience of therapy with serious levels of embellishment to make it all the more appealing to the reader…but it’s not. It’s just the sodding truth of what ‘therapy’ can look like and an insight into how some therapists ‘work’ and the untold damage that they can do. *Not Elle, she’s great (thank goodness).
At this point I feel like Anita is the equivalent of a drunk driver in charge of an ambulance. She’s ‘driving’ whilst on her phone or half-asleep, not paying attention, and is veering all over the shop. The rear doors keep opening and closing at intervals and people keep tumbling out onto the road, sustaining further injuries, but she doesn’t care or even notice. Instead, she continues speeding along the road totally oblivious to the carnage she’s left in her wake, believing all the while that she’s doing a sterling job.
There’s a reason that paramedics work in teams (for the safety of the patient!), but Anita is seemingly operating as a one-man band and her co-pilot is actually a magic fairy that lives up in the Shetland Isles! I imagine her co-pilot fairy has little idea what kind of driver Anita actually is because for all intents and purposes she appears to have a clean license. “I’ve never had an accident” she’d say and I’m sure the co-pilot would take Anita at her word because why would you doubt someone that waxes lyrical about the importance of ethical behaviour and safe driving?
There are quite a few bodies lying injured in the road now, though… it’s not just me, apparently, because it turns out other ‘paramedics’ are picking up the pieces of Anita’s mistakes, and talking to each other. Anita is getting a bit of reputation in our area which is both validating and absolutely fucking terrifying…because even though people know what she’s doing/done there seems to be no effective mechanism to deal with these rogue paramedics unless the injured person goes through the long and arduous act of reporting to the governing body that actually seems to be completely on the side of the paramedic and dismisses the injuries of the patient – maybe even suggesting that they threw themselves out the ambulance on purpose and are overplaying their injuries.
It might be different if all the injured patients could get together and take on a class action but sadly, none of us know who each other are, and this is why these people like Anita (and all the other people you guys tell me about) keep getting away with what they are doing.
Ok let’s stop with this metaphor shall we?
We all know she’s not a paramedic (thank god, can you even imagine that?!) but it seems that Anita is now getting a name in therapist circles.
She’s hurt a lot of people.
It’s shit.
Fuck her.
Still, I am not here to talk about that because I don’t know them, but I do feel for them…because I know what she’s done to me and how much damage it’s done and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
I’ve been thrown through a few loops again this last month or so with all this ‘stuff’, ‘shit’, ‘disaster bollocks’…but the good thing is I am, at least, safely supported by Elle. She is helping me loads. We’re bandaging the wounds and waiting for the broken bones to heal and gently sitting with it all. Elle’s really looking after me and when I am not triggered out my brain I can see it so clearly. I feel really lucky that I have someone like her to help me manage whatever fallout there is with Anita and I feel like the steady work we’ve been putting in over the last year, or so, is really starting to pay off now. It’s been slow-going on my part but I’ve needed that time to build trust and safety with Elle – it couldn’t have been rushed.
Anita can’t do me too much damage now, the worst has already happened, but there is lots of processing to be done. Our sparse interactions pretty much always feel upsetting in some way, but it’ll be over soon because there is movement with it all (finally!)…I am just mad that this ‘end but not’ hash-up as dragged out for as long as it has. I wish that when we hit the three-month mark back in September 2023, she’d have met with me as we had agreed, to end properly, rather than saying she wasn’t “in a good enough place”.
Chasing her on and off for the next six months and being fobbed off or totally ignored until I mentioned bringing in her supervisor or a colleague made things much harder than it needed to be. It’s been such a long, drawn-out process simply trying to get her to even agree to meet with me that it’s felt exhausting and upsetting and it should never have been this way. Like terminating is bad enough but ending without a proper end is awful! Surely, this isn’t how you treat a long-term trauma client that you’ve been seeing twice a week for three-and-a-half years…? But apparently you do if you’re Anita…and sadly, it looks like I am not the only one who’s suffered her…what’s the word?… Carelessness?
The whole thing sort of ebbs and flows so far as my coping goes around this stuff. It’s been a fucking mess these last few weeks again, and it’s totally impacted how I have experienced my relationship with Elle outside the sessions. I have been so anxious and fearful — and it’s ALL because of Anita and nothing to do with Elle at all…and I can completely see that now.
It’s nice to be writing from a reasonably calm place today rather than from deep in the hole or spiralling through anxiety like my last post. It’s Friday today, and I haven’t yet hit the panic of ‘disappearing Elle’ … at the moment she still exists in my mind, I just miss her a bit. She reminded me on Tuesday (a huge erecting of scaffold around me and shoring up my foundations sort of a session) that the bracelet she gave me that I wear all the time is “evidence” that she “exists” and I can literally see that…and Monty, too, like I just need to use my eyes sometimes. We all know it’s not quite as simple as that, though, don’t we?!
It’s been hard being really massively triggered lately, and I feel really sad that my brain (Brian) hasn’t been able to differentiate between real life threats from Elle (there aren’t any), and the fears that feel massive but are not rooted in the here and now about Elle hurting me in some way. I am terrified of being abandoned and rejected and it’s because all the feelings of being abandoned and rejected have been reactivated by my recent interactions with A – like I say none of this is anything to do with Elle.
So, what’s caused the utter chaos in my system this time? – You know, aside from my being fucking mental?!
Well, turns out I really don’t do well with the feeling I am being lied to.
You might remember I had my own health stuff going on earlier in the year just as I had been in the process of trying to negotiate a meeting to end (remember Anita’s ‘walk and talk’ suggestion?!) but as it happened, I got shoved onto the rapid pathway referral for cancer investigations (all clear – phew!) and had all the blood tests and hospital stuff to do instead, so told her I’d be in touch to arrange to meet once things were more settled and my work had settled down after the crazy exam period in May/June. Then of course my son got very very sick and has been basically in and out of hospital since May and that has been an enormous amount to hold and cope with.
The summer just evaporated into medical appointments and caring for my little boy and then somehow, I found myself in mid-September, term had started again, and I realised that I still hadn’t got in touch with Anita to end but also realised that I was in no place to deal with her/us/this with so much stress in my daily life. I would have to be feeling pretty robust to see her and also have a degree of confidence that she wouldn’t make a total balls-up of any meeting which would actually set me further back.
I’m now basically 90% sure that I am just going to arrange to get my stuff back and not bother with a meeting at all because I have zero faith that she can end in a way that honours the work we did or our relationship but it’s taken this last few weeks of shit and also talking with Elle for that to really crystallise…so how did I get here?…
On the 15th September I sent Anita a message to say that I had been going through a lot of shit over the summer in one way or another and didn’t feel like I was able to meet with her just yet -this is the last bit of it:
None of this is really important but it’s just that I don’t really know what to do with meeting and getting my stuff back from you because I don’t feel like I have much capacity to hurt any more right now and actually that’s all there is. I feel so sad that all that we worked on over the years has been reduced to a sick feeling and another rejection added to the pile.
Like literally everywhere I look, it’s abandonment and rejection or just fucking horror and I think seeing you will only compound that right now. So, I don’t know what to do really. I feel like something has to shift because it feels like limbo and it’s painful but I am out of ideas on how not to make this feel any worse than it already does.
She replied a couple of days later with another of her stock feigning personal but actually pretty blank replies:
O my goodness, I am so sorry to read your message. I really do understand and will wait to hear from you to decide what would be the best way for you.Thinking of you with love and care, Anita x
When it came in, I didn’t really have much of a response internally. It is what it is. More of the same. I didn’t reply. What was the point?
So, lord knows what got into me on the 27th but I decided to check out her website – you know as an act of active self-harm it would seem.
Anita’s website hadn’t changed at all in the entire time I was working with her (since 2020) and low and behold it’s just undergone a MASSIVE overhaul. This would make sense seeing as she’s changed how she’s working wouldn’t it? It would make sense to update and remove any mention long-term work, or trauma work, or face-to-face sessions if you have stopped with long-term and complex clients, and are moving your practice online…so of course she’d need to do that, I’d say it’s well overdue 16 months after she dumped her long-term trauma clients.
Only this isn’t what’s happened to her site at all.
I suspect you might already have joined those dots and noticed a hint of sarcasm.
So, what’s the site like then?
Well, there’s lots of new/additional pictures of her looking really smiley and happy. There’s a fuck tonne more ‘glowing’ testimonials (I could fucking puke!). There’s an updated listings around her work etc. But absolutely no mention of her plan to move to online sessions only or the fact she won’t do long-term work or work with trauma anymore – in fact it’s the complete opposite.
I’d love to type up some of it here verbatim, but I know that could be searched in Google and despite everything I won’t compromise Anita’s confidentiality even though it is sorely tempting to at times.
To summarise, she waxed lyrical about being a member of the BACP governing body in the UK, her commitment to creating a “safe environment” and the importance of ethical working (warning clients about a local therapy organisation that has therapists practising who have been struck off from BACP). She mentions her ability to be flexible with appointments both face to face and online, even at weekends, as well as working on an “open-ended basis”. She then explained how “passionate” she is about her work and her commitment to providing a safe and caring space…
Ha!
It was particularly galling to see listed among the issues she works with:
Past and childhood issues
Abuse past or present
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Perhaps the most hard to swallow thing was a quote by Jung:
Know all the theories,
master all the techniques,
but as you touch a human soul,
be just another human soul.
Is she fucking serious?!
I swear at this point I was incandescent with rage.
The only soul Anita is right now is an arsehole.
Too much?
I told you I was mad!!
I basically lost my shit, and fortunately a good friend of mine who knows all about this saga was there to let me rant on Whatsapp. It was a lot! A useful bonus to this ‘unravel at speed’ and ‘rage’ was that it was all there ready to be screenshot!
Despite the big feelings and the embarrassment I felt about it (not with my friend, she totally gets it) we decided that it might be a good idea to let Elle see what I had written and how I had felt because it gave a really good ‘real time’ insight into what I was feeling and was a really good springboard into starting the conversations Elle and I have been having lately which have started to really metabolise this stuff.
Of course, reading Anita’s website made me feel so angry but also just really let down. Because all this time I have been patiently waiting for her to be ‘well enough’ to see me to end and then here she is with the time and energy to go into massive personal promotion, extolling how much she enjoys her work and what a privilege it is…and here I am in the fucking black pit of doom, battered and bruised.
So, well, umm, I decided to reply to her message:
I think the problem is there is no best way because however you look at it, this is not what I wanted or ever imagined would happen. All the years of work just feel like a joke and the words of love and care mean nothing because I don’t get how if you actually loved or cared about me we’d have ended up here.
The fallout and damage that’s been done is enormous and that’s especially the case because you didn’t just stop working because you were sick you stopped working with me and continued on with others. Even if I sometimes can get my head around needing to end so you could have space to recover, I’ll never recover from how big an abandonment and rejection this has been.
I’ve never been so emotionally upset for such a protracted period of time and it’s made me really ill. I’ll work through it but it’s been utterly awful and completely impacted my ability to trust in anyone but especially my therapist because I’m just waiting for the same to happen with her.
I know this is a big rant and I’m sorry. I just can’t believe that we ended up here.
I obviously didn’t mention her website or anything like that – there was no point- but after having been such a ‘good girl’ for so long I just felt like I had to say something. Because I feel like she’s pretty much washed her hands clean and feels like we are ok now – and we just aren’t.
I didn’t expect a reply. Anita has a habit of burying her head in the sand when I bring up anything remotely challenging.
And ten days went by and there was no response. Not that it really asks for a response. If there was going to be one it would have been nice to hear something like:
I know that our ending has really hurt you and I understand how much pain this has caused and I am sorry. I never would have wanted this for you but I accept that I have hurt you in a way that has tapped into your original wounding and I know that this is incredibly painful. I would like for us to come together and spend a proper period of time working this out so that we can move on from this with a degree of repair and get some proper closure. I have been thinking we could meet in my office for 1-3 sessions to enable us to properly tie our therapy up and to give you the space to collect your things.I know that this won’t be easy for either of us, but I want to honour the work and relationship we had, too, and feel in a place to be able to do that now.I know that this is not what you wanted and I understand that this we need to take this gently.
I mean that’d be hard but fine…
So, this is what came in last week just before my session with Elle literally a week and a half later:
I know it’s hard to believe but my life has not gone the way I planned. My practice has completely changed and, yes, I am still working as I can’t afford not to. I am in the process of moving to online only, and I don’t work with complex trauma anymore. I am unable to give my clients myself as much as that work requires and I can feel the protection of myself as a survival mechanism is very much there because it needs to be, whether I want it or not. My website is still the same as it gives me a platform to inform clients about the lack of regulation and [therapy practice] in an effort to try to keep clients safe even if it’s a very small way. So yes, I am still working but not in a way that you feel I am and I had to end with the deep emotional connecting work as I just can’t do it anymore.
This message came in a 4:50pm and I immediately sent it to Elle. When we were talking about it in our session this week, she said it had the feel of a 2am WhatsApp message not something written in the working day because it seems so defensive. I laughed. Defensive and reactive!…and yet again nothing at all to do with my experience of what’s happened.
I think it’s interesting that she made reference to her website, though – because as I say, I never have. I wonder if she was aware that it’s changed and that I may have seen it. But why lie about it? It’s not the same. It’s updated and yet also inaccurate.
Imagine finding Anita’s website, contacting her, and her saying something like “I only have online availability at the moment” but thinking you’d start like that and then hopefully move over when she freed up space – only to discover she doesn’t, in fact, work face-to-face. Or thinking you’d go and see how things go but with a view to there being long-term work and you’ll eventually get to your childhood trauma and PTSD once you’ve addressed some immediately pressing relationship issues and work stress if it feels safe to go there and then finding out actually that’s a no go zone.
I don’t for one minute think she’d end with those clients. I actually think she’d just a fucking massive liar.
It’s hard reading her message because as much as it isn’t personal – it is . I am ‘Complex Trauma’ and apparently, it’s that (me) that is triggering her need to protect herself as a “survival mechanism”. I know she would be horrified to think I would read it in that way, but that’s basically what she’s saying. And ending with “deep emotional connecting work” isn’t an abstract concept. She ended with me. She abandoned me when we were right in the thick of the work because she just couldn’t do it. All the words of “It’s not what either of us want” and “I love you so much but I have to get well” feel utterly ridiculous don’t they?
Anyway, that’s why I have been a colossal wreck for a few weeks. Elle has been steady and available and actually really just helpful. We’ve looked at this stuff quite a bit and that’s huge given how much I have shied away from bringing it to session over the last year.
Having had a lot of space to turn this over in my brain with Elle, and seeing how much it’s all upset me, I have pretty much decided that I am going to ask to get my things back and leave it at that for now.
As much as I would love to go and meet Anita and really lay out how badly this has all affected me, I have absolutely zero confidence in her ability to hear that and not somehow throw it back in my face. I don’t need her reacting defensively. I need for her to be able to hold the space.
A while back Elle suggested getting another therapist to hold the meeting with us and act as a facilitator. I think this might be a good idea but I can’t see Anita ever agreeing to it.
So, the next plan that Elle and I are figuring out at the moment is finding a way to get my things back. Again, Elle has suggested using someone as an intermediary – so she wouldn’t meet her. I am wondering if she might be thinking the person that shares her office on the days she’s not using it. To be honest, Anita works over the road on a Thursday and she could just drop a box of stuff in to the hall/reception and it could be taken in at some point during the day if they knew it was coming. Still, this is something to think about…
I’ve been struggling a lot with therapy, lately… Actually, no, that’s not quite right -therapy is fine, good, really good (when I am there!)… but what isn’t so good is the *time between sessions* and the shitstorm that can (and does) blow up in the gaps between seeing Elle.
My system seems to be perpetually activated these days, and I find it thoroughly exhausting and stressful navigating the nightmares (usually with Elle in), the intense panic, and the heightened fear of being left or abandoned that escalates in intensity as the week goes on.
There’s always the huge separation anxiety that builds and builds during the week before triggering the protectors at the weekend which sends me through a whole other set of loops. I don’t know what’s worse, the small parts sad, lost, and crying or the angry protectors wanting to burn everything to the ground.
Like today, Monday, I feel like I just want to quit therapy altogether because this emotional cycle feels so painful and too hard. I feel thoroughly disconnected from Elle and the idea of even going tomorrow feels impossible because my mind has convinced me that I am set for rejection and that there is no solid base or relationship and so I am wasting my time.
The sensible thing would be to reach out and tell her that this is happening but what’s the point? (Is that the teen? Probably).
I will go because I know that I need to, but pushing through the wall of protectors to even get there means that there will there will be consequences. I will struggle to sleep tonight, mind you my sleep is appalling anyway so I guess that’s nothing new. When it feels bad like this, there is always a total and absolute physical terror in my body. Sometimes it’s just on the day of the session, but today it’s really live, too, and I feel horrible.
To get to my session I have about a ten minute walk across town from where I park my car, and the whole time my heart races, I feel physically sick, and my mouth is dry even though parts of me are desperate to see Elle…it’s honestly fucking horrific. When I am waiting for Elle to come and get me, I feel completely terrified and like I will burst into tears and often my body trembles. It’s so hard. My entire system is in chaos at that point – and yet you’d never know. Externally I appear completely fine – but that comes from years of hiding how I am really feeling in order to survive in the world.
Let’s be clear, this hellscape isn’t because of anything that Elle is or isn’t doing – like there’s no suggestion that she’s suddenly going to end, or leave, or suddenly be horrible and attacking and do something to hurt me (I need to make a big sign with this on!) – it is simply because my system has been triggered off its tits after what happened with Anita and Em. Because of what’s happened with them I can’t get a sense of feeling safe or ok in myself at all – let alone safe with Elle when I am not with her – and of course I am not with her for quite a few days at a time. I know it’s only a week between sessions, but my system just doesn’t cope at all – it’s too long.
Part of the problem is that I struggle a lot with ‘forgetting’ Elle between sessions even though we have a reasonable amount of contact during the week. When I finally see her after a week it can feel like I don’t really know who she is, or whether she’s safe, or… basically it’s the object constancy stuff isn’t it?! Not only that, even if I can hold onto Elle as someone who is safe there is the constant worry that she might change…I think probably we need to do some work with the scared parts so they understand she isn’t Anita or Em…teens particularly just see her as ‘therapist’ and therapists cannot be trusted.
Because of all this, it can take me quite a while to settle into the session because I feel like I am doing my fifty-point check to assess where we are at. Thankfully, generally speaking, when I am actually with Elle it feels fine – especially now that she sits on the sofa beside me rather than in the chair across the room. This, at least, removes the need for any additional mental gymnastics about whether or not she feels disgusted by me and wants to keep her distance which of course are all part of the internal narrative that gets super loud during the week.
I am really glad that we do a ninety-minute session because it can take a good half an hour to relax into the space when I have got myself so worked up (I have no idea how I used to cope with 50 minute sessions with Em- oh of course, I didn’t cope at all!!!) .
It obviously takes a while to trust that the person in the room with me is the same one that I saw last week (and for the previous fourteen months) and that nothing has changed – because therapists do change and drop unexpected bombs (mentioning no names!). I guess to the protector parts it’s important not to remove my armour prematurely in case I get an unexpected grenade launched at me – you know the type that rolls and lands just under my ribcage and stops just where my heart lies – Boom! It’s happened before and I really hope it doesn’t happen again.
If False Adult doesn’t take my session, then it’s all good. At least in the session it feels safe and connected. But no matter who turns up to the session, I feel like when I leave, I almost instantly fall into a panic, not because anything is especially wrong in that immediate moment, but more because I know what’s coming. I only see Elle once a week despite us having a really decent length session (and I really know that I am so lucky to have that), by the time it gets to Friday it’s really not great inside. The wheels on my mini-bus have pretty much fallen off and all the littles have unclipped their seat belts and someone has to take charge – and that’s the dream team of protectors. It’s awful.
Basically, by Friday, my ability to hang it together feels massively reduced and the days until I next see Elle seem to stretch out endlessly. I feel like I am always stretching that bit too far between our sessions and so never really feel properly settled/safe. It feels a bit like a fuck tonne of water is building up behind the emotional dam but the release valve is never activated early enough and so there’s always going to be a flood – despite the high-tech flood management system I have in place.
I am really conscious of not being ‘too needy’ or ‘too much’ or ‘too dependent’ and I really don’t want to run the risk of burning Elle out or, probably more apt for this metaphor, drowning her! So, what do you do when the container isn’t big enough to hold everything from week to week?…or rather, what do I do when I seem to be too much for the container I’ve got?
I have no fucking idea.
It feels like an impossible bind. I don’t want to stop the therapy because actually what all this is telling me is that I need more therapy at the moment, not less…but making what there is ‘enough’ is a challenge especially when I am already exploiting every self-care strategy I have available to me. I don’t just sit and mope about in the week (well, perhaps I did a bit this weekend!) and still this stuff is activated in the biggest way.
I guess part of it is that it feels like there is never quite enough time to get through all the things that I need to talk about or that need space and attention. For example, it might be that we do some really great work on big important stuff. Last week we spoke at length about Anita (which stirred a lot up on its own), but because of this, the young parts that need a degree of reassurance and a different kind of interaction weren’t attended to (even though I was leaning against Elle the entire time and she held my hand…ugh…make my Brian function better please!) and that has unleashed carnage inside this week!
Whereas the week before last, I was in a right fucking mess and so we read a lovely story and had a really calm, nurturing session. It was absolutely what I needed, but then there was all sorts of adult stuff that didn’t get space that really could have done with some time, too. Neglecting adult is far less problematic than neglecting the little parts – and it’s not even neglecting, it’s simply time – but it all needs space and time and there just isn’t enough…even with ninety minutes (talk faster and get to the point sooner, eh?!).
So this is why there is always too much building up behind the dam wall… then throw in the hideous attachment shit on top and frankly, I’m fucked.
This would be a really useful conversation to have with Elle, wouldn’t it? But the problem is, I can’t see a solution to my problem. Elle only works face-to-face two days a week and is always busy. So, what I think would help (i.e another session) and what is actually possible just doesn’t align at the moment and so I have to keep trying to make this work as it is.
The feelings of shame are huge right now. I am so sick of being like this. I hate that I seem to need so much more fucking input and care than everyone else. Like, part of me gets there’s been a lot of trauma and then all the more recent shit on top with therapy going wrong really hasn’t helped…but still. Like why can’t I just be relatively fucking normal and behave like a fucking adult and be bloody fine on a session a week. Why do I seem to spend my life in the fucking hole? Like this week I feel like I have got my legs dangling over the edge of another trapdoor and rather than edging away from it, the protectors want me to jump in the next dark pit.
Ugh…
I used to see Em and Anita on Mondays and Fridays and that spacing felt really good. Like there was enough time between the sessions to process whatever was going on, but there wasn’t too much time until the next session for things to get too much or go too wrong.
I feel a bit like a toddler that’s learning to walk. I can do quite a few steps on my own but by Friday I need a hand to hold for a minute to stop me falling on my arse before I can carry on again. But there is no hand on Friday and so I find that I fall down and it is pretty painful over the weekends.
Every now and then when things are hard, I have asked about seeing Elle for an extra session on the Wednesday but she is always booked up. To be honest, Wednesday probably wouldn’t really help with this problem long-term, as it’s the longer time between sessions that is the issue and this would still leave a big gap the other side.
Elle has offered to so a Zoom session on a Friday before – but I have a feeling (given my online therapy track record) that this might actually make things worse. When I am struggling with distance and connection seeing Elle through a screen rather than in person would likely only intensify the feeling of being far apart and left and lost and all the other shit. Perhaps I need to suggest it here and there, though, because I don’t think I can do many more weeks like this one and perhaps I am only basing my expectations of what online sessions were like with Em and Anita.
This weekend has been terrible. I’ve felt so tired and overwhelmed but I couldn’t seem to rest or sleep because it’s felt like all the little parts of me are crying. There is no soothing that. And I have really tried. I get that this week has probably felt harder because Elle and I properly ventured into the Anita territory in the session and of course that would send seismic waves through my system because there is such a lot of pain there that needs to be looked at. The saga is ongoing with A and it’s just so upsetting.
It feels really difficult. Like I know when I avoid the ‘big’ stuff I am much better equipped to manage the week between sessions. The thing is, I am in therapy to work through this ‘big’ stuff and it feels really helpful to look at it with Elle. I can’t avoid it for much longer because it has a way of catching up with me, anyway. I don’t really know what to do though, because the moment we go there the whole fucking place is underwater as a result. I’m equipped to deal with high tide but this is a fucking tsunami heading my way.
I have no idea what to do. Maybe I should write more? Try and process more that way? Although that doesn’t solve any of the internal panic about Elle, does it? The more we look at Anita and Em the more wobbly I am going to feel about Elle.
I just don’t know. what to do.
What I do know is that this level of activation and upset is crazy-making and exhausting and scary because when this stuff isn’t contained enough I know that I am much harder work, more demanding, more likely to end up in rupture territory because everything is out of control inside…and you don’t have to go too far down the path to see where this can lead. I don’t want to be difficult or create a dynamic where Elle dreads seeing me… I just wish I had a different brain and the ability to make one session and a week between enough!
Right, that’s enough of that… I don’t think there’s much more I can say tbh. Does anyone have any ideas to help with symbolically increasing the capacity of my container??…Any ideas that don’t actually involve me having to bring this to Elle and see me die in a big pit of shame and embarrassment would be lovely! 😉
I get that at some point I am going to have to bring this up because I know the longer I don’t the worse it’s going to get… ffs! HELP!!
Well, fuck, I’ve got so far behind with this blog and everything again that it’s hard to know where to begin – such a lot has been going on, in various ways, and part of me just wants to bring you up to date by saying ‘same shit different day’ and be done with it! The ‘same shit’ being my impressive ability to live as an emotional kangaroo and trying to navigate all the mess that goes with bouncing around like that.
Things are still an absolute colossal steaming pile of shite in my everyday adult life and the last month or so has really been all about survival and wading through the general bollocks that is my existence! My son is still sick, it’s back in the full flow of term and teaching, and then last week my estranged grandmother died so it’s felt a lot just to keep my head above water.
Of course, alongside this there’s all the stuff that hides beneath the surface that’s always pulling at my ankles dragging me down – namely the crazy mental health stuff, the attachment stuff, and trying to move through all the pain from, well, all of it really…
I imagine a lot of us feel like this, but I find I am way more capable of managing my inner world when the day-to-day stuff in my actual adult life isn’t going down the toilet. If daily ‘life stress’ picks up and reaches a critical point then it starts to get super bumpy on the inside. The safety features in my internal mini-bus seem to be a bit hit and miss, and would certainly fail a MOT, when the road gets lumpy and full of pot holes. Like sometimes all the seatbelts just unclip all at the same time and then I’m completely and utterly deep in the emotional shit.
Usually, if one or two parts of my system are in a panic I can just about hold their hands, keep them safe, and remain broadly functional…but if everyone is unstrapped – including the driver (me!) then…yikes. I mean big YIKES!
Some things never change, eh?!
I guess, there are some positives to be had … maybe? I feel, these days, when my system gets triggered, I am far more able to move through it and get out the other side of the worst of it in a ‘reasonable’ time frame…whereas, back in the day I could get stuck for weeks and weeks in the emotional hell zone and be totally hijacked by my system. Now, it’s a bit like doing the hokey cokey – and having one foot in then one foot out on repeat!
I’d like to say that I know myself so well these days that I don’t get upset or triggered by ridiculous things, but that would be a total fallacy. Small things can still act like a massive wrecking ball and send me sideways. I think it’s probably this kind of thing that I struggle with most- knowing full well that whatever is upsetting me is tiny in the big scheme of things – but my system feels like it is enormous and runs off into catastrophe canyon. I still have an impressively speedy set of runners who bolt when things feel off.
Knowing my response is sometimes like that of a toddler having a big tantrum because they can’t get ice cream evokes feelings of shame and embarrassment but it is what it is and it is all information isn’t it? I suppose, now I am far more accepting of my system no matter how it is presenting in the moment. Like today I am really aware of the needy little ones who desperately want a cuddle and to connect with Elle…and that’s fine…just hard to feel because it’s so visceral.
So, where to begin with this catch up?
I guess I should mention the fact that Elle and I made it to a year working together back in August without any serious mishaps or ruptures (go us! … although it’s the three-year mark that things generally go to shit with my therapies so let’s watch and wait!) AND immediately after this birthday/anniversary we also got through another therapy break without me completely losing my shit (I only partially lost it – small triggers and big reactions again!).
I wish I was better at keeping up-to-date with the ins and outs of my sessions because the content of it all sort of melts away pretty quickly afterwards and then I can’t remember what happened when. I guess, this might be seen as a positive – like nothing really massive and disastrous is going on and my brain can let the sessions go rather than filing into my long-term memory bank alongside ‘like a tick’ and ‘too dependent’! However, it feels more like an unwanted amnesia tbh because I lose all sense of EVERYTHING.
Elle more or less falls out of my universe altogether when I can’t physically see her and it’s tough going. The object constancy stuff is just fucking dire. I feel sorry for Elle. I don’t imagine for one second that when she first met me, she would have thought the person she sees now was in there hidden away! I think at this point she must be wondering what the fuck is wrong with me. Like I leave a session, appear completely fine, and the next minute I am freaking out and texting her, asking her if we are ok or not. It’s horrible.
I hate that I need such a lot of reassurance…but I am not really surprised given how people (therapists!) go from being ‘ok’ to ‘not ok’ in the blink of an eye. As much as Elle gives me no reason to think she’d just fuck off one day without warning – my system doesn’t trust anymore after what’s happened to me, and because I am invested in the relationship and am attached to Elle now, all this crap has gone live… I hoped it wouldn’t but it has… with alarm bells on!
This round of therapy has my brain doing something that has never really happened too much before. I don’t know if it’s dissociation or what, but I find that not only do I forget the sessions and lose Elle to a degree – but even if I can hold onto the fact that she and I exist and have a relationship, I have zero recollection of the times when I have been really vulnerable/open/honest with Elle both in the room and outside it. So, I lose her, but I guess my brain thinks that she loses me too. It’s hard to explain this…
Like sometimes I’ll email her the unfiltered version of what’s going on in my brain and when I see her, I have no sense of that big stuff being in her field of vision at all. My brain likes me to think that she has only ever experienced the capable, together person …and that is SOOOO not the case!
I wonder if it’s a protective thing? My system somehow needs to feel in control and so hides the bits that make me feel exposed when I get to session? It’s frustrating, though, because I think I waste a lot of time edging my way closer to being how it really is underneath, tentatively peeking out from behind the sofa, and Elle already knows me and all this stuff. In the moment none of that is there, though.
Isn’t it amazing what our brains do to try and stop us from feeling unbearable feelings. I think I am so sensitive to rejection and abandonment that my system is doing all it can in person to prevent that happening and sadly, it must feel like the young parts of my system are a liability and need hiding away until we figure out what is happening on the day in the session.
I can’t lie, it is incredibly difficult doing therapy in the wake of what has happened with Em, Anita, and Hannah. I think my poor system was sent spiralling off into orbit last year. The string catastrophic fails in my therapeutic relationships on top of childhood trauma have done something terrible to my onboard circuitry. Elle and I are trying to do our therapy with a busted circuit board and wiring system and we’re desperately trying to rewire as we go but it’s a challenge. If we were just dealing with childhood trauma I think we’d be ok but things are so massively complicated by the shit that has happened with therapist…what shall we call it? Shithousery??!!
The problem is when lights should be green my system shines red…and the smoke alarm feature is constantly screaming because there’s a hair or cobweb over the sensor. I can’t differentiate between true danger and a malfunction now. Sometimes Elle feels like she’s a decent enough electrician and sometimes I worry she’s just another cowboy tradesperson (this isn’t because she’s done anything to suggest that though!) and I’m about to have my tentative renovation project demolished again.
Anyway, there have been some really lovely times with Elle – the problem is – I forget! So, instead of building on something great from week to week, I instead, seem to not notice that works have been carried out already. I seem to yo-yo between False Adult and days where my armour is off. Still, there have been quite a few ‘armour off’ days over the last couple of months and I guess these are important to recognise.
You might remember a while back I was brave and told Elle that I loved her in an email (!) which was a huge deal because I’ve been guarding my little broken heart very carefully this last year knowing that it doesn’t have much hope of withstanding very much more hurt and wounding. The problem is, I feel like the only way to really heal a broken heart is to let love in (and out) but if you’re always in hiding and armoured up how can you? I guess this is where my texts and emails have been doing some heavy lifting behind the scenes.
I’d been slowly gaining some momentum here and there in my sessions … you know, one step forward three steps back, four steps forward…and so on. But in one particular session I must’ve been feeling particularly safe and connected, or unguarded. I was cuddled into Elle’s body (I know I have said it SOOOOO many times over the years but physical touch sends a clear message to my system that things are safe – I don’t have to do any guesswork at all). and a very quiet, “I love you” crept out.
Fuck!
It’s one thing typing it into a screen and hitting send (and then wiping it from your consciousness and having several days until a session) and something altogether different saying it to someone when you are right there with them and being physically held by them. And even though parts of me know how Elle feels about me BECAUSE SHE’S TOLD ME ENOUGH TIMES in various ways, I nearly cried when she replied, “I love you too”.
Like…thank fuck. No rejection there. No bristling. No change in body language. No “I’m just your therapist”. It was all just really fine. Like yep, of course there is care between us – duh! I wish I could hold onto that better. Now that I have Monty I do have a constant reminder of Elle with me and that does help a bit, but there is a little part of me that fears that Elle will change how she feels towards me if she really ‘sees me’ and that is scary.
I think it was that session- I’d been in a bit of a state (although can’t remember why) and stuck in my own personal hell until I managed to ask for her to come sit with me and have hug. She’d been gently stroking my head and it was almost time to go when she asked me to give her my arm. She took the bracelet she was wearing off and tied it around my wrist. She said it needed to be on my left wrist as it was closest to my heart … honestly, it was such a lovely gesture and I wear it all the time (although in this picture Monty was wearing it as a necklace!).
So – I may have more evidence than ever that Elle is real and we are ok enough AND YET STILL I FUCKING HAVE TO ASK WHETHER OR NOT WE ARE OK!!! – but this is because people change (Anita) and one minute you’re safe with someone and they say they care about you and love you and the next they are completely gone.
I was quite excited about getting to a year with Elle because about a month beforehand I had stumbled across something I thought she would really like and was desperate to give it to her as a gift but it really was something that needed an occasion. I wouldn’t necessarily say that gift giving is one of my primary love languages but I think in this case it was a definite expression of love. I can’t really say what the thing was here because it is sooooo niche that it would be pretty identifying. She seemed to like it, though, if an excited “holy shit, you’re kidding me!” and “this might be the most impressive thing anyone has ever got me!” is anything to go by.
I think I have probably been so cagey this year that she couldn’t really miss that this was a huge expression of care and thanks. Like so much goes on in my head but I realise I’m like an iceberg and Elle only gets to see a bit of what I show her.
And then it was summer break.
Damn!
The break itself wasn’t desperately bad. I had a lot going on with my son and as much as I missed Elle, we did have some contact whilst she was away. The morning of our first session back I must’ve been on a roll with bravery because I had text Elle and asked her if she might spray Monty with her perfume when I saw her. I had pretty much figured out that that is what she had done when she gave him to me and so decided to ask. Elle didn’t bat an eyelid and at the end of our session sprayed Monty and me and that was that.
You’d think that would be proof enough that things were really ok between us and that the little parts were acknowledged and more than welcome too… but the age-old problem of physical distance had proximity cropped up the moment I saw her and it sent me spiralling.
Breaks are hard because they are a total severing of physical connection, so when I return to the room, I am looking for evidence of what might have changed or if things are still safe. Elle did nothing wrong by sitting in her chair (because that’s her fucking chair!) the first couple of sessions back – she, after all, at that point had no clue that I read so much into where she is in relation to me and how difficult I find it to ask for her to come closer to me – especially if there’s been a break. But for me, her being across the room and behind the coffee table sent the littles into a panic.
As a result, things in the bus were getting more and more dicey, seat belts were unclipped and the terrain was getting bumpy…and we were travelling much too fast. I think when I was leaving and hugged Elle at the end of the session (like always) I hung on for a reaalllly long time because I was devastated to have missed the chance to actually be how it was and connect in that physical way during the session. I’d done a tremendous job with False Adult and it was only at the end, when I was clinging on like a baby monkey, that I think she picked up that I wasn’t ok and said something about having a really long hug the next session.
I cried on the way home and ended up texting her when I got back because my system was in freefall. I think we can just about hold it together in breaks but it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on that first session back. If that session isn’t ‘enough’ then the water that has been building up behind the dam during the break floods out. I actually feel like sometimes I could do with two sessions the week following a break in order to ensure that I feel properly reconnected.
This is what played out that day:
I feel like I can’t find you at the moment and I’m lost. I know it’s a post-break thing – because I find them really hard and the disconnect feels like a total severing of connection. It feels really bad now and scary x
She replied almost immediately with a heart and:
I feel sad hearing that because you felt very connected to me before you left the room. Let’s think about how to use the time better next week. I wasn’t joking about the hour-long hug btw…
It was a quick message between her sessions to not leave me hanging and it was enough to open up the flood gates. Now came the ‘how it really felt’ message… brace positions everyone!:
I’m really a long way off my ok place at the moment. Like, yep, my life is a complete fucking shitshow on the outside so it’s understandable, but it’s much more than that. My internal world is in meltdown and week on week it’s getting worse. I feel as though I’ve been furiously spinning plates this last year and now, I’ve just reached a point where there are several crashing to the ground all at once as I don’t have energy or capacity to keep it all going and it feels like I’m watching everything go wrong in slow motion.
I feel really far away from you – or like I can’t find you – and I get that this is me and not you, but it doesn’t make it any easier to navigate even knowing what the problem is. It feels really terrifying being in this place and it’s not just emotional – it has a massive physical quality to it, too.
I find breaks really hard and actually I find the time between sessions hard on its own and so coming back off a break is always really hard for me. It feels like I’m starting from the very beginning and lose all sense of things being ok or safe or actually that you have any idea of who I am at all or that we have any kind of relationship- which is obviously really shit and I feel really dysregulated. I can’t really put into words how bad it feels.
I don’t suppose this is evident at all. I probably appear ok, calm, present – but I’m anything but. Inside I feel panicked and fearful and like I’m going to cry. I struggle a lot with feeling like you are far away in your chair – even though you’re not- and my brain tells me it’s because you don’t want to be near me and that it’s because I am too much and it just spirals.
Occasionally, I can find a way round it and ask you to come sit with me but I find this especially difficult if there’s a sense of being very disconnected and it will always feel like this if there’s been a break and so I need to find a way of quickly reconnecting after breaks- and actually, really, just week to week. 😞
I hate feeling like this because it totally derails me and then just getting through the usual life shit feels extra difficult. And I get that it’s a lot and it’s really hard to not get engulfed by shame. Lots of the time I am just about capable of outrunning this stuff … and then other times I get caught up and start to drown.
So, yeah… another one of ‘those’ messages that I wipe from my conscious mind.
Elle replied with some very holding messages that really soothed my system and that week we had quite a lot of contact as I limped my way through the week and into the next session where she sat with me from the very beginning and asked me if I wanted to hug.
Around that time, I wrote my last blog post about what a perfect therapy room would look like and I sent it to Elle. She seemed to like it and replied to the message and at the same time asked if it would be ok to share with her supervisees and people starting their own practice which is nice…what was less good was that she also told me that the bear I had seen in the room one day (that I had mentioned in the blog post) actually belonged to someone else and that it was still there in the room but put away – and I am guessing we don’t need to detail how that landed.
OH MY FUCKING GOD!
The runners were in full Usain Bolt mode. It was really fucking awful. Like of course I knew that’s what it would be – but ugh. Any mention of any other clients just sends my system into a full-blown meltdown. Adult me is fine (just about!) but eek – the littles just weren’t. I think it’s because I have found it sooooo hard to get anywhere near my young parts in the sessions with Elle and then I learn that actually the very things that would help she’s already doing with someone else.
Fuck my life!
I had just about gathered myself back together by the time I saw her, because of course there are other clients working out their own shit in a way that works for them and if I was a bit braver then I could too…and I swear to god, next week I am taking my bloody elephant out the fucking bag even if it kills me! (it won’t kill me).
The session after all that I walked in and she said, “I was thinking of moving the table but seeing as I’m going to sit right here with you, I haven’t, as it’s not in the way between us.” And the second clock was gone, too! And then she said she’d ordered a new couch for the room and was wanting to get a load more cushions! I don’t suppose the new couch was off the back of my blog but it felt nice that she had really listened to what I had said. She said she was really keen to get the space right for me and this felt … lovely. And the irony about that whole blog post really, is that the space doesn’t matter at all so long as I feel connected to Elle.
This is getting really long so I’ll end it here for now – but let’s just say, we’ve leapt forward quite a few steps… I guess, I just need to be myself in all my messy glory so Elle can respond to what’s there!
So… I’m stuck in a total procrastination dead zone again. The entire weekend last week passed in a big heap of ‘meh’ and ‘bleurgh’ and I did absolutely nothing except lie on my bed and beat myself up about not being able to do anything – I didn’t even watch crap to pass the time. It was a complete freeze. I hate that sooooo much. This weekend hasn’t been much better to be honest but I did at least take myself off to the beach walk a bit.
To be honest, I’m not surprised that I crashed and burned last weekend. The week leading into it was a massive week for both good and bad reasons – yay for a brilliant P!nk gig, boo for being put back on the two-week pathway for cancer care. I’m obviously trying to stay optimistic and hope that what’s going on with my body is some spanner in the perimenopause toolkit, but for now I am in that limbo zone and trying to not get too worked up whilst waiting to see the specialists next week.
It’s exhausting, though. I already feel like I am stuck in an endless emotional spin cycle so could well do without my body having a moment. It’s honestly been a ride this last year trying to get through the fallout of what’s happened with Anita and I feel like it’s caught up with me in a big way as I have navigated my way through these anniversaries.
There has a been a tremendous amount of heartache and pain…and disbelief…and it keeps unfolding and there seems to be something new each week – seriously I can’t make it up!! But there has also been some good, too so I don’t want to neglect that even thought the shit/upset seems to dominate.
So perhaps we’ll use this as a brief interlude before heading back to the Anita saga! – although so much of what happens or doesn’t happen with Elle is because of what’s happened with Anita… what a legacy!
I guess this last couple of months with Elle has seen me be a bit braver – perhaps – well, actually no… apparently, I tell her a lot of stuff in various ways, I just don’t fucking remember any of it – my dissociative skills are top notch- but there was a bit of HUGE moment fairly recently where I took the armour off and did vulnerability. I could almost hear Brene Brown cheering me on – after all vulnerability is the bridge to connection! (and heartbreak! But let’s not split hairs!)
I don’t think it’s any secret here that I really like Elle. I also don’t think it’s any secret that I have been super wary of letting myself feel too deeply…no…not that…wary of *expressing* how I feel too openly.
Some things have felt fine to tell her: the shit about breaks, the lack of object constancy, feelings of shame, and little by little more about what happened with A…but one thing I have been SOOOO conscious of is being too much, talking about how I experience her, and of course, tiptoeing carefully around the ‘L’ word – well basically keeping it totally off limits. After what’s happened with Anita loving feelings feel incredibly dangerous in therapy and I simply don’t want to fall headlong into an attachment where I lay my heart bare and then the therapist comes along and stamps on it with both feet.
It can sometimes feel like a slow dance back and forth with Elle. Like, I think sometimes she has been waiting for me to take steps towards her before saying whatever she might want to say. I guess, it’s tentative because I am so easily spooked, and she knows that the relationship and trust can’t be rushed. But actually, sometimes I just need clear reminders and expressions of care and then I’ll happily come forward.
So, a while back I was feeling, I dunno, particularly ‘warmly’ towards Elle I decided to buy her a book that had just come out. ‘The Oxherd Boy’ has been all over the internet for a couple of years with its lovely uplifting and heartfelt messages on life and relationships. It has lovely artwork, too. Finally the creator made a book and I thought it would be a nice thing to give Elle. I know she likes ‘Big Panda Tiny Dragon’ and this is in a similar vein.
She seemed to really like it when I gave it to her, and then one day she was replying to an email and asked me if she could put it in the waiting area so other people could see it because she thought it was so lovely.
My initial reaction wasn’t great. Like oh my god, all the feelings of abandonment and rejection and being inadequate flared up and I felt really hurt. I guess there was a part of me that wanted it to be something special between us, or her to not see it as something that’s just part of her work. The young parts were really triggered. Aren’t they always?! Thankfully I didn’t reply with a tantrum, I just simply said it was her book to do as she wanted with…which perhaps was bit petulant but there we are.
I think Elle is someone who is a really generous spirit and likes to share things with people- she’ll loan out books etc – and that’s really nice, but I think that gift, in that moment was my vulnerable self wanting to connect and instead it felt like ‘let’s share with all the clients’ and missed the importance of the gesture on my part… not ideal.
I get this is my stuff but it’s painful when it happens because it really comes from such a young place. However, Adult me does know that when you give someone something it is theirs and Elle really didn’t need to ask me whether I felt ok with her sharing the book – but she did. Although she must think I am way more fucking competent at expressing upset than I am, because I would need a fair wind behind me to say ‘no’ and my reasons why … because uh, hello, I’m a people pleaser!
I think probably when I am talking about my day-to-day life I must appear really forthright and confident – but we all know it’s a whole other kettle of fish when we are talking about our relationship to our therapist WITH our therapist in real time face-to-face. It’s a whole other dynamic! I will get better at it – but like I say, I am carrying a whole heap of shit from Em and Anita in my backpack and so it’s harder going.
I’ve not explained that episode brilliantly well, but let’s just say, every now and then the young parts of my system make me very aware of them – and I realise I still have a lot of work to do!
Elle replied:
I so appreciate it, and you.
A while later when the parts had settled down and gone for a nap, I replied:
I appreciate you, too.
In fact, I was away that weekend and wrote it in the sand – although I never sent the picture to her…although part of me wanted to.
It was a little step forward – but for me it’s more than appreciation. It is absolutely that of course it is – and a huge amount of gratitude. But for a long while now I have had the strong feeling of love for Elle. It’s not romantic and it’s not really parental either (phew)… it’s that really fucking annoying space of friend that can’t fucking be. I mean I get it’s totally a thing, ‘oh I wish my therapist was my friend’ but honestly, had I met her under different circumstances than therapy I think we absolutely would have been friends.
But, alas, no…therapist/client we are and will remain.
So, back to the ‘L’ word. My tentative little heart has been peeking out periodically trying to figure out what is ok and safe to say to Elle – AND DUH! – like yeah you can say whatever you like in therapy can’t you?! – but we all know that when you’ve been kicked so many times that the reply is important too. Sure, we don’t express loving feelings only to have them, hopefully, reciprocated but there is nothing fucking more cringe than opening up your heart to someone and them either pretending like you haven’t said it, or replying with ‘thank you’. I needed to be confident enough that my feelings would be received with compassion rather than disgust…thank you Em…the ‘tick’ still hurts.
However, in the lead up to May I had started to share a bit more with Elle about how shit everything had been feeling and she had responded so … helpfully… repeatedly that I just felt myself emotionally edge closer and closer to her. Then when I shared what I had sent to Anita alongside my big splurge about hugs and shame etc she just really couldn’t have been better. The big long hug being welcomed and my need for it understood galvanised the vulnerable parts a bit and I think made them really see that Elle is safe.
I know I have a really good poker face in sessions and can seem totally unfazed and I dunno – cold maybe?- that I realised that I really did want her to know how I felt. I mean I get she fucking knows because she’s since told me I’m not as opaque as I might think and that she really does see me.
In the wake of the absolute heartbreak and hurt with Anita there has been something good and so I rather bravely sent this at the end of the first big anniversary day, the day where A had told me she was ending work with long-term clients. It had been a sucker punch kind of emotional day but also a reflective one and what I alighted on was I felt a strong connection to Elle whether I wanted to admit it or not and thought, ‘Ah fuck it! Might as well say it rather than dancing round the edges’:
So I’ve almost survived the anniversary of the day life got spectacularly turned upside down… and I’m still just about in one piece even if it’s a bit (lot) wobbly. This whole month feels a bit like trying to juggle jelly, actually…and I hate jelly.
However, as much as I feel like I’ve been trying not to drown this last year and not always being brilliantly successful at it – there is something good to have come from the shit and that’s that I got to meet you which would never have happened had A not lost her mind…or H hadn’t breakdown about the blog…
People often ask me if A were to be back to her normal self and wanted to repair if I’d ever go back. The answer is no.
Sometimes it feels frustrating how protected I’ve become but then I’m not at all surprised. It’s weird feeling like so much goes on in my head and then hiding such a lot 🙈
I suspect you know this already, but I love you. And I guess I don’t need to qualify how, but it’s really a massive gratefulness for you X
(with these images attached beneath)
I hastily hit send and then went into a massive OMG RB WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???!!!
However it wasn’t long at all before this reply came:
Big warm smile reading that message, and a tender-sad ache in my heart for the well-protected heart that sent it.
I love and am grateful for you too, you courageous little pangolin.
And honestly, I just fucking melted. Adult me, little Mes, all of them…like RELIEF. Once again proof that Elle is not disgusted by me, she doesn’t see me as too much etc etc…and as much as she has NEVER given me any reason to think she might feel negatively towards me, far from it, the legacy of previous therapies has left deep wounds and some easily ripped open scars.
I spend a lot of time in my head (!) and I realise that I keep forgetting all the connecting moments we have had and almost feel like I need to print out our emails and put them in a binder to remind me because it’s like I suffer a huge amnesia. My brain is trying so hard to keep my safe that it’s keeping everything out – the good and bad. Not that there’s bad with Elle. I told her recently I feel like the Glitch Girl in ‘Wreck It Ralph’
Anyway, I keep moving forward with Elle, baby steps. Recently, again, I asked for a cuddle mid-session. It was the session that fell the same week of the anniversary of the last time I saw Anita and I was not in a brilliant place. After weeks of wanting to be closer to E I hurled myself over the edge and asked again – every time I feel like there’s a possibility things might have changed and it feels risky- it’s so sad – but every time I ask Elle responds positively… because she is not Em, or A, or even H – she is just Elle.
I can remember absolutely nothing about that session…other than being massively relieved to remove my armour when she came and sat with me on the couch and then about five minutes from the end saying, “I really don’t want you to hurt me” and Elle squeezing me more tightly and telling me that it wasn’t her intention and that she didn’t think she ever had hurt anyone (clients). Which is an impressively crap level of recollection for a 90 minute session – but this is where my head it at right now…flaky as fuck!
I get my experiences of therapy so far have been pretty fucking shite so far as harm and hurt go. I don’t for one minute think that Elle and I won’t hit the skids at some point, but I do have faith that she will be strong enough to work through ruptures with me and do the work required to ensure that we both remain safe in the therapy. I don’t think we will end up in a place where the therapy ends because she loses control of her own feelings and her ability to hold the frame. I fucking hope I am right with that assumption!
After that session, I sent Elle the link to one of my recent blogs too, another step into vulnerability and she replied as Elle does:
You do a really good job of describing your internal experience with this, and – believe it or not – I did get a lot of what you say here yesterday. I imagine you think you’re opaque to me and that all this stuff is well hidden, but I see more than just the corners of it I promise you.
I think I told you the first day we met that – as well as being really good at looking after myself – I am also very very patient. Which is to say I have no real agenda other than to be around for you until you feel safe to share, no matter how long that takes.
I don’t think I can convince you with words that nothing you can reveal to me will be horrifying or scary to me, or reassure you of something that you feel in your bones is a fundamental truth. I can only show up and offer love and curiosity and acceptance to anything you choose to bring me.
The tightest of tight compacting hugs until I see you again on Wednesday. I hope Pink delivers!!
Elle and I have lots of interaction now – just touching base- I send her photos from my walks…but those nothing, unemotional check ins give a sense of continuity and stability which means when my wheels fall of I can reach out with the heart stuff and she does know when it warrants something deeper.
I feel like bit by bit I am letting her see me, and bit by bit the trust is growing and it couldn’t be better times because there is plenty of shit that has been stirred up with Anita this last couple of weeks and I have needed the steady grounded approach Elle brings.
So I’ll post this up now and try and write about the latest upheaval and upset from A later this week. Like I said, though, I’m finding it hard to get out of my procrastination zone with this stuff right now…I want to write- I just feel so much pain going anywhere near the Anita stuff that I am having to push through a lot of internal resistance. I’ll get there in the end!
Hugs to you all and a heart from my weekend on the beach x
It’s been one hell of a year – and honestly the level of grief I have been dealing with (navigating my way through the dark!) has been huge and it’s intense at the moment with all the anniversary stuff happening now. It’s bad enough that Anita and I have ‘ended but not’ on such a weird footing but what’s made it all the more difficult is what this ‘end’ (abandonment) has tapped into.
The work Anita and I were doing in my therapy was so much about trying to make sense of and, hopefully, healing the mother wound and the physical and emotional abandonments from the past that have so massively impacted me.
It might seem hyperbolic but this deep wounding that happened so young and continued on as I grew up has formed so much of the fabric of how I see myself and how I operate in my life. I guess most of you that follow this blog probably relate to that in some way.
The anxiety, the hypervigilance, the never feeling ‘good enough’ whilst simultaneously feeling ‘too much’, trying to prove my worthiness through productivity, trying not to have any kind of need… the list goes on and on…really stems from the relationship with my mother. It’s not a secret to me or to anyone else here!
Sadly, my efforts at working through this mess with therapists has not gone brilliantly despite my best efforts. What happened with Em was completely devastating – I don’t think I’ll ever really get over being compared to a ‘tick’! But what has happened with Anita is soooo much worse. To be left in the way I have by someone who professed to love me deeply has triggered so much grief and pain.
I’ve lost Anita who was so much to me for so long seemingly for something that wasn’t even my fault but even knowing this, it doesn’t change anything – she still left me. I wasn’t ‘enough’ for her to stay. And that’s the kicker in relationships – even when we get our side more or less right, we can’t account for the other. And I do get it, Anita’s life got messy… very… but she is working…and this is the thing I can’t make right in my mind.
So despite there having been no rupture, no lack of love (ha- really?!), nothing actually wrong with me (apparently) I am still having to stare down this loss, as well as all the other hurts that have filled this well over the course of my life because Anita chose to leave me when she did. The work wasn’t done and so rather than feel healed I just feel additionally wounded. It’s another loss to work through on top of so many other losses.
I remember early on speaking with Anita about therapy and saying how obviously the goal is to leave one day but actually how important it feels to have a sort of open door policy. There’s a supportive relationship that we would build and could always be returned to at intervals if needed. There would be a period of intense need, dependency etc but the goal of the work was to basically let my young parts integrate, experience what it is to be held, to have some of their needs met and eventually the maturational process would take place and I would naturally individuate and need A less.
Like that’s the idea.
That was our plan.
A kind of gentle reparenting.
Only premature termination of this work didn’t help that at all. All it’s done is reinforce the original message that no one is safe and I am not worthy of love or care…or at least some parts feel that.
My adult self is stronger than it has ever been and is more able than it has ever been to communicate with those on the minibus inside and hold them to a degree. I was well on the way to the end point – but my god it’s painful being here right now.
Of course, I now see Elle, and as I have said, I really like her a lot. I can feel the attachment to her building and honestly it scares the fucking shit out of me. The push/pull inside is agony at times. I am so tired of having to hold all this and really desperately want to just collapse in a heap on the floor of the therapy room and remove all the armour and masks…I am getting there…
Anyway, one of the things I have been doing more recently is spending time at the beach walking on my own and just feeling into the feelings.
Yikes.
The feelings are big.
I cry a lot.
It doesn’t matter, the beach has been pretty much abandoned and I often go out early morning or towards sunset so no one sees me with tears streaming down my face.
One of the things I do is collect pebbles and interesting shells. I have always drawn hearts in the sand but lately I have been making hearts from beach material. It’s so cathartic wandering up and down the sand seeking out whatever colour or type of rock or shell I am looking for and spending some time creating something really simple but so meaningful to me.
It feels like an act of grief and act of love.
There has been nowhere for my grief to go this year with Anita. I’ve held it tightly inside – because actually all it is is love. So much of it. And so I make these hearts. Sometimes they’re for A. Sometimes for Em. Sometimes more hopefully, for Elle and a bridge to connection with her.
“It’ll be ok. I’m coming back. Nothing is going to change. I love you.”
Today is the anniversary of the last time I saw Anita as I ‘knew’ her. She was just about to head off on a two-week holiday and we parted on warm hugs and these words of reassurance and care.
With hindsight, these are not promises anyone can every truly make to us, even our family. We don’t know what’s ahead and even with our very best intentions the universe can throw us curve balls and change the trajectory of our lives in a heartbeat.
So, a therapist saying this, whilst absolutely well-intentioned, has actually proved to be massively damaging in the long run. Despite all the good will in the world, Anita has broken those promises and her attempts at reassurance to the youngest, most vulnerable parts of me, have now branded into my brain as individual soundbites of betrayal and lies because nothing was ‘ok’, she didn’t really ‘come back’, everything ‘changed’, and…’I love you’? Well, is what’s happened in the last twelve months the actions of someone who loved me? I wrestle with that a lot.
Adult me can understand this has been a complex situation, but the little ones inside?- not at all. It’s horrific for them. They can’t make sense of it. It’s another mother who has chosen to walk away when she promised she absolutely would stay because I was ‘worth it’ and have never deserved my previous treatment by others.
In the end, though, Anita made the choice to stop work with me (and all other long-term clients…apparently…although who really knows?) whilst still retaining some ‘easy’ clients. She needed to reduce the ‘stress in her life’ and I was part of that package.
I’ll be honest, after three and a half years of consistent love and care and meeting on such an intimate level, it wasn’t a choice I actually thought she’d ever make to dump me and keep going with other people. Despite my issues around trust and abandonment I genuinely believed her when she had said, ‘she’d always have space for me in her world’ and that even when she retired, she’d see me because she ‘couldn’t let me go’. Like I didn’t have a gun to her head to make her say those things, she offered them up freely. And the amount of kind, loving, reassurances that came from her sunk deep down into me. It was all so healing … until this happened.
Well, it turns out it was all lip service, and I was a fucking fool. She left me and has been working consistently since. In fact, she’s been actively advertising her availability for new clients. I understand that her work may look different to how it was. Her caseload has a different complexion but, still, it’s impossible not to see this as a complete and total rejection of me for being ‘too much’ hard work and causing too much ‘stress’.
But actually, truthfully, who wants a burnt-out therapist who declares themselves ‘broken’ but continues to work because they ‘can’t afford not to’? That’s never right…and part of me, at least, knows this. Part of me, knows too, that really none of this is about me at all, and more about Anita’s ability to manage (or not) her personal life.
The work we had been doing had so much been about feeling good enough, worthy enough, lovable enough, valuable…and when it came down to it I was none of those things. I couldn’t even manage to have someone I pay to spend time with me to stay…yet other people can. It’s hard not to allow that critical inner voice to take hold because it’s been so much of my internal narrative over the years – especially after what happened with Em.
I need a therapist who is steady and capable of holding the work. I need someone who can manage their own life without crashing and burning and taking out a vulnerable clients as collateral damage. And Elle, seems to be that. I am aware, though, that I am keeping parts of myself very well protected now.
After all this crap with Anita I am reluctant to let anyone that close to me ever again because, honestly, it’s broken me. Today I was walking out in the countryside and burst into tears because I allowed my mind to wander a bit and it alighted on Anita. This next month is going to be tough as it signals a year for all the hell that was the last few times I saw Anita but also a year where there has been no resolution, no termination session, no return of my books … just a limbo period. It’s A’s birthday and honestly, knowing this time last year I was giving her a gift and this year she’s not part of my world at all is hard.
Therapy is delicate work. As Elle said the other day, when something goes wrong with a therapist it’s like dealing with an engine. You cannot work on it whilst it’s still on, turning over. You have to turn it off, completely stop, and mend you cannot go ramming your hands into the engine when it’s going. What’s worse, she said, is that Anita has been poking her hands in other people’s engines whilst they’re on, too, and doing untold damage. It’s not ok.
And it so isn’t ok – I am not ok… although I am doing my very best to hold it together with my rubber bands and chewing gum.
Anyway, in that last long post I was jumping all over the place- and talked about a session with buttons and another with the lovely hug…and I will continue on from there soon but today, I’ve got derailed by all this sadness and grief about A…and so want to talk a bit about another connecting experience I had with Elle a few months ago.
I mentioned in my last blog about how I keep forgetting how much Elle actually knows about the vulnerable stuff because my mind seems to completely block that from my consciousness when I am with her. I somehow, in the moment face-to-face have no idea that I have sent several ‘exposing’ raw emails to her since we met last August and actually she probably sees me more than I think she does!
Anyway, I hit the skids again and sent this to her in February…I’d had more of those False Adult fronting sessions and was just driving myself fucking mad:
This is the note slid under the door…because frankly no one cares about how tidy (or not) my house is- and I am so fucking good at avoidance that next week I could talk to you about my lost marble collection (not a metaphor – although metaphorical lost marbles would be useful to speak about seeing as I feel like I’m going slowly mad).
I don’t really know where to begin with this because the overriding feeling I am experiencing at the moment is shame – and unlike like you who (weirdly!) seeks out opportunities to sit in shame to prove it’s not going to kill you – I try to avoid it where possible. Having said that, it’s stuck to me like my shadow so I can never truly outrun it. And I guess you’d say don’t run from it, explore it – and believe me I know what it’s all about but that doesn’t mean I want to be covered in its thick tar-like substance for any longer than is absolutely necessary.
I feel a bit like one of those sea birds that’s been caught in an oil slick like you’d see on the news when a tanker would run aground. I know that the only way out of this hell is to bubble up with a massive load of washing up liquid – a soapy shame remover if you like, but right now I am head-to-toe in black, and it feels like there is something terribly wrong with me and I can’t find the soap. There’s also a bit of a problem now because the shame remover I had found that seemed to work really well was connection – but actually a couple of bottles of connection had tar in and so now I don’t seem to trust that either.
Shame has been so present – in me/on me/both – over the years that I am surprised that I haven’t become less sensitive to it or adapted some kind of Teflon type skin – but nope. It’s still that horribly visceral all-consuming visit from a dementor and I feel sick.
You probably have no idea that I have spent the last (almost) six months trying very hard not to allow myself to feel very much at all in the relationship with you. It’s not really worked though. Therapy feels really dangerous – well, at least to some parts of me… and so I am really aware that the person who turns up to therapy is me – but that person is also a really excellent shield for all the hurt and vulnerable parts. I guess it’s a bit like that chicken analogy you used the other day – where the chicken tucks the chicks under their wings. And whilst that seems like a really sensible thing to do- it’s protective- it’s not much good if the chicks actually need the vet!
I read a book years ago by Patricia DeYoung about chronic shame and this bit really stuck out:
In brief and speaking from the perspective of a child’s regulated self, a regulating other is a person on whom I rely to respond to my emotions in ways that help me not to be overwhelmed by them, but rather to contain, accept, and integrate them into an emotional “me” I can feel comfortable being. A dysregulating other is also a person I want to trust – and should be able to trust – to help me manage my affect or emotion. But this person’s response to me, or lack of response to me, does exactly the opposite: it does not help me contain, accept, or integrate.
Then I become a self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other. This is what happens: as an infant, when I am in an affective state of distress, or as a child, when I am feeling a rush of emotion, the other’s response fails to help me manage what I’m feeling. Instead of feeling connected, I feel out of control. Instead of feeling energetically focused, I feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling that I’ll be ok, I feel like I am falling apart.
This kind of experience is the core experience of shame. All of it has something to do with needing something intensely from someone important, and something going wrong with the interaction between us. I feel, “I can’t make happen what I need from you”. If the sequence is repeated often enough in my development to become and expectable experience, I will have a core propensity to feel shame whenever I have strong feelings, need emotional connection, or feel something is wrong in an interpersonal interaction. In all of those situations, I will be likely to conclude, consciously or unconsciously, “There is something wrong with what I need- with my needy self”.
And that’s kind of how it feels now. It’s not quite the dysregulating other thing because I haven’t told you what’s going on or how I feel but that makes no difference to my inner experience because essentially there’s this really sad, vulnerable, part (several actually) that’s in pieces and feels shame because there’s so much need but it’s hidden and unseen and can’t regulate. And I get this prison is of my own making – which is so fucking annoying – but there is this bit of me that is absolutely fucking terrified of fucking things up, actually trusting you and being seen and then to be deemed unacceptable is a massive fear.
Like I hold myself together with rubber bands and chewing gum which is always a bit problematic at the best of times – they’re doing a lot of heavy lifting in lieu of super glue – but now I feel like I am disintegrating.
I keep circling this drain over and over.
I really can’t overstate how damaging what has happened with Anita is. The reason she gave me for ending seemed legitimate at the time. She was really unwell. But I am really struggling to understand how she can still be working and yet now say that she’s not in a good enough place to meet and to properly end as we had agreed. It all feels like lies now – and avoidance…and really unfair. And unfortunately, my brain’s default programming always lands on “It’s because you’re too much”. So I am having a really hard time because the person I really trusted with me – all of me – has become someone I don’t recognise at all and seems not to care in the least that they’ve hurt me…so that must make this a me problem.
And then of course my mum being … well… gone…feels like a me problem.
This is really not dealing with my adult self…which I guess is why I am seeing you in the first place but ugh…
So now I am really aware of how all this stuff is just swirling around inside and how scared I am of breaking you too.
I can’t make Brian (my nickname for my brain) make sense today. I guess – I like you a lot and there’s a pull to want to be closer to you but it’s terrifying on so many levels.
Anyway, I’ll go hide in my pit of shame and embarrassment now x
-GAHHHH – Fuck! – like, how do I manage to wipe this from my consciousness? I mean it’s clear my brain is wanting to stop me being too exposed or clamming up because I feel like I have been too vulnerable – but it’s so funny in a way. My best-friend had to remind me this week that Elle knows a lot, because she’s had all the letters!
Oh god!
Anyway, Elle replied with something nice and connecting and then in the next session I walked in feeling a bit sheepish and sat down.
She came over to me at the start of the session and told me to hold out my hands.
Errr. Ok??
And she poured a handful of marbles into them and told me that they were for me.
It was a lovely symbolic gesture in reference to the email I’d sent and opened up a really helpful conversation about my literal lost marble collection, but also the wobbly losing my metaphorical marbles.
It’s a slow gentle edging towards trust and safety…
Since then, I have taken one of the marbles with me wherever I go. It’s acting as a transitional object.
Recently, I was at the beach and decided to photograph the marble in different places…and something possessed me to send one of the pictures to Elle. She thought it was one I had found at the beach. I got that immediate squirmy shame feeling and figured I had to be honest and reply, and told her that, no, actually it was one of the ones she had given me.
Anyway, that’s just another example of some of the nice things that have happened in therapy, and I do have to consciously remind myself of them. It’s so hard sometimes to hold onto what’s good because I am so scared of losing it all but also convince myself that none of it is real. It’s very different from the work with Anita and it is hard not to perpetually compare backwards and feel like it’s not enough, or I am not seen or held or *whatever* but actually I think all things considered Elle and I are doing pretty well considering the state I came to her in.
This week, though, is going to be especially hard because I am feeling so vulnerable about the anniversary with Anita and feel acutely how painful this grief is. It’s absolutely live again. It makes me feel alone and isolated and terribly small…and I want to reach out for someone safe and there doesn’t feel like there is anyone. I could email Elle, I suppose, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to overburden her or be too much.
It’s so frustrating being in this place…but that’s the thing with loss and grief and attachment and trauma and all the things…the path isn’t linear. It’s a spiral. Sometimes I am at the top of the spiral and looking down and in reasonable control; other times I am spinning so fast I feel sick and giddy.
So, therapy with Elle has been ticking along for several months now. We get on well – I think- and have had some really lovely sessions when I have been brave enough to bring stuff to her. Unfortunately, a lot of the time I get spooked before I even get in the room and so frequently end up talking a lot about mind-numbing shit in my day-to-day life whilst I try and figure out if she’s safe or, rather, if I am safe with her. I think I am…but my system is going to take some convincing after recent therapies.
I feel like there’s a part of me that is constantly seeking out the really ‘deep’ connection with Elle (you know the stuff that’s the therapy equivalent of a class A drug – seriously addictive stuff) and so feel kind of bleurgh when we actually just have a really ‘fine’ time. It’s hard to explain. I guess part of me experiences such a lot of emotional intensity outside the room, and does such a lot of thinking, that it doesn’t know what to do with every day maintenance kind of sessions.
There’s nothing at all wrong with these sessions, they’re a world away from dissociation and painful hell that I used to experience with Em, but I guess, it just feels ‘not enough’ – particularly to the parts of me that long to be seen and held. Another part of me knows, though, that we are still really getting to know each other – it’s going to take time. Steady, consistent, ‘in my window of tolerance’ sessions are probably exactly what I need even if it feels like I have a dam on the verge of bursting behind my cool exterior.
Part of the problem is that I am really fucking good at only showing the parts of me that I think are palatable (and together)! But then, recently, I had a moment where I thought, ‘that’s really boring’ – and actually I suspect Elle would rather be let more fully into my inner world, to see its complexity, rather than be bored shitless listening to me moan about stuff that is actually boring the shit out of me when I say it, too.
Ooohhh…it’s funny – I’ve always feared being left/abandoned for being ‘too much’ but then I became really aware of maybe being left/abandoned for being ‘not enough’ (again!) – like I’ve become ‘Mrs Dull and Boring’. I don’t think that would happen (Elle ending because I’m boring her!) but I know what it’s like feeling like you’re watching paint dry with someone and I know I much rather be with someone down in the depths rather than paddling, barely getting my feet wet. I would like to think she’d feel the same.
However, what I will say, is that I am really aware that I can’t force this stuff with Elle – not because of her but because of me – all of the mes (I am so desperate to put an apostrophe on there for how it looks!). I am going to have to go at the pace that my system will allow – even if that means sometimes feeling frustrated or like parts of me are in hiding.
It makes total sense that it’s slow-going because I feel like I am just about holding myself together since the Anita catastrophe and need to be especially careful not to trigger any landmines and blow myself up. I am very aware of how precariously balanced my ‘coping’ is especially with the really active suicidal thoughts over Christmas. After what’s happened with the Em, Anita, and Hannah it’s easy to feel like the situations I have ended up in are a ‘me’ problem and I am super conscious of not wanting to be ‘too much’ for Elle. I need Elle right now so let’s not fuck that up RB.
For a long while I have been trying to figure out what Elle thinks and feels – as I say, trying to gauge what is safe to bring. She tells me what she’s feeling about me sometimes – usually if I ask. I am pretty sure she thinks that having told me that I am ‘delightful’ among other nice compliments and giving several reassurances, alongside being consistently ‘there’ and warm that I must KNOW, by now, that she likes me and that it is safe with her.
Ha! You’d think! But, sadly, not! This is me and my system…I’m the one who literally spends the beginning of every session like it’s our first. ‘Who is this woman (today)? Is it ok?‘ I just can’t hold onto Elle in my mind at all from week to week. Big whoop for my object permanence skills – not! It’s fucking tragic. But, actually, recently I realised that so much of how I view Elle in the room is filtering through the lens of where I am at. If I feel anxious and insecure I’ll be looking super hard for her seeming far away or disconnected… and I’ll convince myself that’s what’s happening – when actually she’s not either of those things.
I can’t always realise this in the moment but oftentimes after a session if I listen back, I hear things in a different way, and this is really helpful. Basically, things are never as disastrous as I might feel. In fact, it’s all pretty good. I just don’t feel it in the moment – and this is actually because so many parts aren’t allowed out. It’s those parts that are having a horrible time because they aren’t getting seen and so for them these sessions are completely disconnected and painful. I am starting to figure a way round this…again.
Still, one of the very good things about Elle (and there are plenty) is that she can read… and gets exactly what I am saying when I share something with her in writing. I realise, now, how much of a hindrance that was with Anita. I communicate best in writing – ha! – and so having a therapist that was so severely dyslexic that she couldn’t really read my stuff meant I either didn’t say what I wanted or had to record a voice note – ugh. It is actually really freeing to be able to have a bit of a meltdown and write and then share it with Elle knowing that even if I can’t bring stuff into the room right now it can at least be expressed and then make it in later – I can forewarn Elle about the state of things and give her a really clear heads up.
Elle and I have a reasonable amount of outside contact, and this goes some way to alleviating the anxiety I feel between sessions. I only see her once a week and it’s quite an adjustment going from two sessions that bookend the week with Anita to this. We do a ninety-minute session and, honestly, this is sooooo much better than an hour for me because … well… *waves hands desperately* this is how I am. But I still find Fridays pretty rough, and I think actually I might see if Elle and I can figure out some way of officially checking in then to make the panic a bit less.
I’ve sent a few ‘big’ emails over the time we’ve worked together outlining some of the huge stuff so haven’t kept her completely in the dark. I have found whenever I have given Elle the map she’s responded in a helpful and holding way – she writes really thoughtful replies and says what feels like the right thing in the room – as I say, it’s really just a case of my system being VERY reluctant to completely let go and trust given everything that’s happened in my previous therapies. It’s not surprising. It’s just kind of disappointing to be in this place after so many years of counselling – and actually so much of the damage being caused by therapists rather than my actual life events.
I’ve been seeing Elle since August – after it all went to shit with Hannah, after it all went to shit with Anita, after it all went to shit with Em! I feel like I have the therapist version of a Russian doll stack! Ha. It’s not funny, though.
I really like Elle, like really like her. I feel like she is actually really steady and safe. I feel like she is present and authentic. We seem to have a lot of similar interests which is nice – obviously it’s not essential, but after Em and her total closed book thing until the day she waxed lyrical about Brexit and outed herself as a tory it’s nice to know that Elle and I have these common interests and reference points.
Anyway, there are two sessions that felt like turning points in our therapy and as much I would like to write in detail about the last several months, I don’t have time – but these, I want to share over the next few posts.
Years ago, when my dad died I saw a therapist who was keen on activities – sand tray, drawing etc and actually sometimes I found doing things that didn’t revolve around me just sitting rigid and intellectualising my way through a session really helpful (because you know that’s what I do a lot of the time, right?). In all the years I worked with Em, she never once tried anything like that with me. She was firmly rooted in her seat and I sat in mine – like a good girl. Anything abstract or conceptual fell on deaf ears…oh my god the fucking pebble!!
With Anita it was different – we were more in touch, connected. We weren’t on opposite sides of the room once I mentioned how much I hated it. The physical touch stuff was really helpful. Reading stories was fab for the young parts. But we rarely did any of that abstract exploratory work – well never, actually. I’d kind of forgotten that there was this side of therapy tbh.
Anyway, in November there was a day where I was just feeling totally off. I still went to my session but I think it was maybe the first time I let my guard down a bit and didn’t perform the RB that Elle had gotten used to. Rather than fill the silence I just didn’t talk. I guess I let her see that maybe I wasn’t completely ok. I dunno.
Anyway, after about ten minutes Elle asked me if I would like to see her button tin. It pulled me from wherever I was, and so I said, ‘sure’.
Now, between Elle’s seat and mine is a low table with an edge – I actually hate that fucking table as it feels like a massive barrier between us but that day it was useful. Elle tipped out hundreds of buttons onto the table and spread them out in a circle around the outside. She told me the collection had come about over years and years and she could remember whose clothes the various buttons had come off as far back as her grandmother. The range of shapes and sizes and textures of buttons was impressive.
I moved from the sofa and sat on the floor and Elle did the same. I’m guessing a lot of you have done an activity like this before, Elle asked me to find a button that represented me. I finally found one after lots of rooting around. It was black and broken in half and so sharp that I said you could use it as a weapon. I then asked Elle which button might represent her? I think she was momentarily shocked, but she poked around in the pile and found a lovely silver embossed kind of bead/button. I commented on how our button selves change periodically, and she smiled. She said this one was definitely her today, but yes we do change.
Anyway, I think the general premise of this activity is to find different buttons that may represent parts of you, or maybe important people in your life/relationships and to talk them through. I didn’t do this. Instead, I found a range of beautiful buttons that all fell along a blue/turquoise/silver colour palette and placed them in a pile nearish to Elle’s button. My black, broken button stayed way over on my side of the table.
We talked about all sorts of stuff but mainly about the actual buttons. I would periodically hand really lovely ones to her, and she would take them to look at them. This was really the closest we had ever got to touching one another in the three months we’d been working together, and this activity felt really intimate and connected – I felt way less self-conscious in that session than I had done previously. Perhaps I showed a little more of the vulnerable self.
Anyway, it all felt so nice but then I clocked that our time was ending and, honestly, I just didn’t want to go and I think I dissociated a bit. Elle noticed. She said that in all the years she’s been a therapist that no one had ever invited her into their button circle, I think I probably blushed a bit – I couldn’t imagine not wanting my therapist to be alongside me in that, I needed to know who she was in order to show who I was. She thanked me for engaging with the task for so long and just as we were about to stop, I slid my black, broken button all the way across the table and put it next to hers.
I know that sounds like a nothing thing, but honestly that was an act of total courage and vulnerability on my part. A signal that I don’t want to be distant, and contained… I want to move closer. She said that I was a gift of a client and told me some stuff about how she experiences our time together and how she feels towards me. It felt like a completely different space to what we had inhabited up until this point. That session felt like it was about us, and our relationship, and our work together and it was so … exactly what I had needed.
We talked a bit more and as I stood up to leave, Mrs Brave came out of nowhere and asked if I could have a hug…
Elle said that of course I could have a hug, and honestly it was just lovely. She gives very good hugs, and she didn’t let go for ages, well actually I let go first, then pulled her back again and she giggled, in fact, she said something about a hug needing to be at least forty seconds to even work and so I didn’t feel like a needy, too much person…it just felt nice. And huge. And a turning point.
As I say, we’ve had some great moments on top of good moments and have been steadily creating something that feels solid. We laugh together a lot…which is nice…because I think I sometimes have a bit of a random sense of humour.
Anyway, it all went quite massively to shit almost immediately after the ‘buttons’ session – because of course it did. I guess the next session being back to ‘normal’ felt off but also, and fuck me, the six degrees of separation thing is just the absolute fucking pits, isn’t it? In that week between buttons and the next session a friend of mine had posted something up online of a performance they had done. Elle had told me she was doing something similar in that last session and low and behold, I could hear Elle laughing on the video my friend had posted. In fact, as I found out, it was Elle that had filmed my friend. I can’t even believe it. Like, why????
My instant reaction to the video was huge jealousy and sadness. Like how fucking unfair that my friend gets to spend time with Elle doing fun things… and I don’t. And, I totally get it, the intimacy in the therapy room is different and like gold at times, and she’s not my friend, but ugh… just ugh! So that set me off! I felt thoroughly shutdown in the next session – but I don’t think it was massively obvious until the end because False Adult is so good at taking the reins and creating a smoke screen!
I left that session and felt like utter shit, though. Like proper crumbling into pieces. I decided to message Elle and ask if she had any availability for another session – huge act of bravery – and her response just triggered the absolute shit out of me. Basically, she said that being like that in session was fine and something about how it’s learning to self-regulate and not to worry, and didn’t offer to see me– looking back at it it’s not terrible but for the part that had been so vulnerable in reaching out to get what felt like a body slam and rejection was just hideous. Ohhh yikes. Red rag to angry teen there. I replied with something to clarify and how bad disconnection feels and I got this back:
OK, so rather than trying to end the feeling of disconnect or the struggle, maybe think about if that has words or a specific fear attached to it. Is there an idea or story about what will happen if you stay disconnected?
I’m still going to be there – same place, same time, next week – and you can tell me anything you figured out then.
I just felt thoroughly let down. And, you know, it’s not even bad is it? But it just felt like she totally didn’t get it and that she just didn’t care…but then of course my short to the point messages don’t really show the extent of what’s underneath and so Elle is only working with what she sees – and up until that point I’ve been quite a closed book. She wouldn’t know what my system would do.
My whole system went wild…and out came the splurge self…and a fucking massive email!
BRACE POSITIONS!
I don’t think you’ll believe the response that triggered in me and I don’t even really know what to say. You don’t need to read this until Tuesday – it’s long – and probably makes no sense as it was written at 2am…couldn’t sleep. x
Sometimes I just need a person. Sometimes it gets so dysregulated inside that I can’t ground and instead dissociate. Yesterday, when I was with you, I was ramming my fingernail into my palm, and I couldn’t feel it at all. Sometimes I am present enough to ground – and have one foot in the shit and one foot in the here and now but sometimes it feels impossible, and I just disappear. And I get that it is ok – on a level- but actually being trapped in that is hideous. I feel disconnected from myself and you, and it just spirals really badly. The longer I am stuck in that space the more I feel like I am being left/abandoned even if that’s not what is happening.
I think you think that just sitting in it proves that it’s fine to be however it is in the moment and that you are there still regardless. However, sitting in that feels a bit like the still face exercise – internally it’s an absolute shit show and so it feels horrid because I need to know you’re actually with me and I can’t feel it at all. Checking in or soothing or telling me you are with me still – or whatever it is that you think is so bad and unhelpful would help me regulate – co-regulation when it’s like that is what I need. Although you probably think it’s what I want and not what I need. But self-regulation in that moment feels like you’re asking a toddler to do algebra when it’s only capable of counting to ten…with a few numbers missing along the way.
I think last week you wanted me to either map out some stuff about significant relationships in my life or let you see what my internal dynamics and relationship to different parts of myself is with the buttons – and I did a brilliant job of avoiding that because right now that isn’t what feels important – although I guess the inner system would be. You said that no one had ever asked you to be in their button circle and right now that’s what I am trying to figure out. I’m trying to understand what is going on between us. Like there’s a part of me that really wants to connect with you but the moment that comes up I feel myself start to disappear because it feels dangerous on a level but then feeling disconnected is equally as triggering. I can’t win but I absolutely do want to let you in and feel closer to you but that also feels exposing and risky because that opens up space for you to hurt me…and frankly I just don’t think I’d survive that right now.
Remaining disconnected and in the struggle like you’ve suggested, is fucking exhausting and triggers my nervous system. It literally makes me feel sick. I seem to spend a lot of the time trembling at the moment, and I know that this only happens when things are really bad. Not trying to end that feels like … self-harm, really. Not only that, it leaves space for the critical part of me to take root. My inner critic is a sadistic fucker. I know that ultimately it is the biggest protector I have and thinks it’s doing me a massive favour by relentlessly telling me that I am stupid, too much, unlovable, and that I must be a complete moron to even try to do therapy again. Like can’t I see the evidence that people leave because of me? I can’t believe I’m going to quote Taylor Swift (don’t judge!), but it feels like, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me” and that’s sort of stuck after recent events.
It’s like I have a minibus full of traumatised parts of various ages all kicking off in various ways and screaming. In those moments I don’t have an observer self and just get hijacked. This is what it’s been like. And it’s not even like there is a steady slip into that where I can do something to stop it happening or catch myself early. It’s like one minute I am here and the next I’m not and I can’t get out of that on my own – not really.
Over the years I’ve identified eight different parts of the system that sit outside my adult self (and even there, I suspect/know there are quite a few aspects to that self). At the moment, though, I keep dropping into this really desperately sad three-year-old part. It’s always the same, the scene never changes. She is standing in a grey wasteland with her back to me – it’s eerie and scary and cold and just really awful. Sometimes if I am able to remain in my observer self, I can see her but I can’t seem to bridge the gap between because it’s like I am stuck behind glass. There’s no hope of soothing that part because I can’t reach through to her. Other times, though, I feel like I am locked in that little body stranded and alone on the wasteland and I can’t get out of it – which is what happened yesterday.
I really need to feel/remain connected in the moment when I am with you because I struggle so much outside the sessions. My brain is super quick to lean into the narrative that you are pissed off with me, I’m too much, and that something bad is going to happen even when there isn’t evidence for it. Disorganised attachment is the gift that keeps on giving. I’m gutted because I really thought that this wasn’t a thing anymore because for such a long time I felt secure – or a secure as I have ever felt with A…and then it just collapsed, and I feel like I am back at square one trying again to find a way to not let this pattern dictate how I experience people/relationships but I guess it’s not surprising I feel like this now.
You asked if there is there a story and a fear around staying disconnected? Umm how many would you like to hear?… because there’s plenty, but perhaps the most relevant right now would be the ones related to therapeutic relationships going tits up. Ultimately, fear of the effect of disconnection is closely tied to feelings of rejection and abandonment because they’re all stops along the on the same track.
I think this feels so bad right now because I am not out the other side of what’s happened with Anita. It’s still live and so I am already nose deep in the shit of the reality of this story I tell myself. The impact the ‘disconnection’ but not ‘end’ I have experienced with Anita has completely derailed me. I feel like I am literally in survival all the time. The house is still on fire. [this is referencing a previous email] And there’s a part of me that feels like what’s happened there must be my fault because why else would she behave like this? And then I wonder if you’re perhaps consciously keeping your distance because you essentially think you’ve got a fucking disaster zone in front of you…and I get it. Part of me is trying to go with the narrative that this is about the container but mostly it just feels rejecting.
It’s six months this week since I saw A…and a month since she chose to ignore my message and ghost me. I can’t even… and I have no idea what to do about it now. Like I literally have no idea what to do about it. I really hoped there’d be some kind of resolution by now but I have to find a way of moving through it without her input.
Christmas break is imminent, too, and this time of year is never easy but it doesn’t feel safe because of what happened with Em. I guess maybe it’s exacerbated because I happen to be going abroad like I did the year it all disintegrated with her. And whilst that shouldn’t mean anything – I think my brain is terrified of the pattern repeating. I left feeling disconnected and dysregulated in December 2019 but told myself that I was being stupid and that of course it would be ok because why wouldn’t it after so many years?…and then boom – ending in January. So, the idea of remaining in this disconnected state now feels… horrific, actually.
And I get that both those relationships were long term and I barely know you so it seems crazy that any of this feels this massive or intense – but the smallest thing now is like lighting a touch paper into all that gone before because I am so sensitised to feeling like I’ll be left, abandoned or rejected…and all that stuff sits neatly on top of the core wound which is the stuff with my mum. Like I really knew that this wasn’t going to be easy but I didn’t think it would be this hard either.
And as much as I am really trying to fight against all that when I have so many different internal narratives at once it’s hard to hang onto any sense of being ok or safe because I actually don’t really know how you feel because you don’t tell me. Like I felt like last week was quite a big shift into something different and then yesterday it felt like we were a million miles apart and it felt like being held at arm’s length because that’s what I read into silence. And I think this is probably me and my wonky brain but … fuck, it’s so tiring.
There’s a part of me that just thinks, “Fuck it – just give up!” but I don’t want to because … I am hoping that this can actually work – but regulating my system feels like an impossible task.
November has always been a crap month emotionally. It always takes me by surprise and it’s only really afterwards that the dots join up and I figure out why I feel like I am flatlining. I think it’s been particularly hard this year, partly because everything seems to have so spectacularly disintegrated in the here and now as well – although not for the same reason… and so my brain has decided to serve me up a double dose of feeling isolated, unsafe, *more of the crap*. It’s all too familiar. Relationships feel dangerous.
The other week I was really conscious of feeling really just not ok – I mean it’s all on a continuum at the moment but I realised the timing of it tied into what happened when came out in November when I was seventeen having had a friendship end (you know the one where you have feelings for them so it’s way bigger than that). I had finally let this person know about some really vulnerable stuff around my eating disorder – which was huge after hiding it for two years. She decided it was too much, threatened to tell my parents, and then disappeared which was horrific, and I don’t think I ever really got over that acute feeling of being rejected for being *almost* completely myself and trusting her with something so vulnerable.
It’s not like she was a teen either, she was twenty-five. And then this reminded me of something that happened with Em when I told her about the extent of the problems I was having with eating and exercise – and she told me that we’d have to end if I didn’t go to the GP.
To add insult to injury, when I came out, I lost my friendship group all bar two people overnight. I used to walk into rooms at college and it would go silent, people would stare and then do that coughing a word/phrase thing “fucking dyke” or generally something else offensive and so it was really awful because I had been popular across lots of different groups – chameleon skills – although clearly not actually liked for who I was – even if my sexuality is only one part of my identity.
Not long after my best friend also ghosted me but not before writing me an ‘honest’ letter first. We’d been out clubbing on my eighteenth birthday, and I’d kissed a girl which was AMAZING. My friend wrote me a letter the next day and said she couldn’t be my friend anymore because now that she’d seen what it actually meant for me to be gay rather than just a concept, it made her feel physically sick and she would never see me in the same way. So that was pretty shit.
It’s all historical but I think that right now it almost like I’m experiencing multiple layers of disconnect simultaneously through different parts of my internal system – so my seventeen-year-old self is having a shit time but so are most of the young parts, in a different way, because of what’s happened with Anita.
And I really get the need to learn to self-regulate but historically self-regulating has looked liked shutting down, keeping everyone out, leaning into self-harm and an eating disorder and I know that none of that has never done me any good but is highly effective.
It feels like all the years I have been trying to recoil the spring in a different way and approach things differently has been totally wiped out and the spring wants to flip back to its original form because on a level it is safe and known – only it’s not really safe and I do know that. So, I’ve been swimming, and sleeping and breathing and all the self-care things but it hasn’t helped, really.
Reaching out instead of going inward yesterday was difficult because my instinct is to hide or run away instead. It felt vulnerable and exposing but sometimes when it feels like that, I know that actually I can’t do it all on my own and I need a person. It’s about co-regulation. And I think you think that doesn’t help, or reassurance is just fostering dependence or something. But to be told essentially to tough it out and think about what’s going on feels pretty crap when the landscape feels like it’s blowing up.
I already know what’s going on and why – and all the stories and fear behind being disconnected. And that’s why I reached out because sitting in this for any length of time feels utterly unbearable and it’s not like it serves me up any new understanding of what’s going on – because I get it already. But the knowledge of what’s playing out doesn’t seem to make it any easier to endure. I told you I had the Dead Sea Scrolls decoded – and I don’t doubt there are other bits I haven’t fully got the meaning of yet, but largely I understand the story.
Reaching out feels fucking dangerous because I already have the narrative of being left, abandoned, rejected because what I want/need is too much for the other and so getting that response feels like it confirms that. I know you wouldn’t ever want it to come over this way but to part of me, at least, it feels punitive and punishing. It feels like you’re asking me to do an exercise in stress tolerance…
I think I am so used to feeling a lack of care that part of me is always expecting it. And I really get that this, to you isn’t about a lack of care – it’s probably something about encouraging me to try and hold stuff for myself because I am strong enough to do that…or something like that. But this refusal feels like a rejection and also like you don’t really see me…or perhaps you do and that’s why and you want to keep your distance. And my brain has a wonderful capacity to switch into worst case scenarios – but then it’s not really surprising as worst case has happened quite a bit.
Disconnect, on a level, feels like annihilation – and I get for adult me it’s not. Like I will continue to limp through my life until I collapse. But how my system experiences it is so different and it’s so dysregulating. I was really struggling last week even before the absolute colossal shit show that was my weekend and there was a tonne of stuff that I wanted to talk to you about.
So, you might be there next week – and I get that is meant to be reassuring but it doesn’t feel it. Whether I will be there or not largely depends on how vocal and persuasive these protective parts get and, alongside that, how much shame and embarrassment rises up from having reached out and then it landing like this because I already want to crawl into a hole and die.
I get what you’re trying to do here, I think, and I also know what my protective parts are trying to do. Sometimes I can get these gate keepers to stand down and listen to me and other times I am locked in a fucking prison of my own making.
I don’t suppose any of this makes any sense because my brain is in a complete mess and I don’t really have the words – I just know how it feels…which is pretty fucking shit.
So, yeah, this was a nice ‘welcome to my world, Elle’ wasn’t it?
The next session was really great. Giving Elle insight into the behind-the-scenes version of me allowed her to really respond. She apologised for what had happened and said she had no idea that was what was going on. She said she wouldn’t want me to feel like that at all. And then later in the session was when she told me that she thinks I am ‘delightful’ which is really fucking nice. So, yeah, there’s been lots of good. And I feel kind of shit that this blog has fallen so far by the wayside as actually there’s such a lot I would have liked to have said.
Other than the very first session I had with Elle I have never brought up what’s happened with Anita. Although it’s come up in a few emails (of course). But largely there’s been a massive block from talking about it face-to-face. I think it’s to protect myself from feeling the pain of what’s happened which is enormous, and on another level to avoid judgement from Elle. She has never given me any indication that she would judge me negatively, but this is the legacy of what’s happened with Anita…and the other Russian dolls.
I think there’s been a part of me, too, that didn’t want to scare Elle off by being ‘too needy’ and telling her the finer details of what went on in the therapy with Anita just in case she panicked and ran! I think I wanted to establish the relationship between us first, and I guess sort of prove that I am not a total fruitcake before wading in and showing her the really vulnerable stuff.
I’ve sent Elle some blog posts about the ‘Anita Saga’ so it’s not like she doesn’t know about the cuddles and stories and elephant etc –I just feel like I keep what she does know in a particular compartment of my mind so that I can go see her and pretend like I am not some nutter with major attachment issues and a broken heart. It’s funny, though, because I compartmentalise all the vulnerable stuff that I have shared I really forget that Elle actually knows. And having just found that email to her…
Oh my god, she KNOWS it all!!!
She must be wondering what the hell is going on in sessions? Where is the person that sends emails about high anxiety and panic and attachment stuff and our relationship? Because she rarely shows up in the room!
Well, that all changed recently.
What with all that health shit, things have felt really precarious, and it’s triggered no end of anxiety – like a 13/10 rather than the usual 8/10 everyday level. Part of that has manifested in me having terrible nightmares with Elle or Anita in. That old chestnut! It’s been really upsetting, and whilst I know it’s just my brain feeling anxious it’s hard when you go to therapy to put that fear to one side especially when the therapy is relatively new…is 8 months new?!! I would so easily have been able to tell Anita that she had hurt me in a dream and yet I am still in the place where I feel a bit weird even telling Elle I’ve dreamt about her…because CRINGE.
I’m sorry that this is jumping around -there is so much to say!
Anyway, a few weeks ago I emailed Elle the night before the session telling her, what I thought was quite big stuff about how I was feeling – and she didn’t reply. Now, usually, if I send that kind of message, she responds with something really helpful and holding – because she gets me better now! With hindsight, I know that the way I phrased the start of the message didn’t make it clear that it was a ‘now’ problem and it really did seem like ‘for tomorrow’ in session and could wait. Of course, my system didn’t deal with the lack of reply very well and I felt really upset going to my session, in fact, I almost didn’t go.
I felt so bad when I arrived that I dissociated and couldn’t even talk for about ten minutes. This is not something that really happens with Elle, like maybe I’ll check out a bit here and there but it’s not common…so this was BIG. I felt like I was in freeze. However, despite my protectors doing their best to shut down, there was a little part that just would not let itself be hidden… this is new!!
Rather than being stuck, frozen in my isolated misery, I looked up, looked at Elle, made eye contact (whoa!) and asked Elle if I might have a hug. Now, this isn’t completely new, as I said we do tend to have a hug as I leave and that is lovely – but we all know that a goodbye hug is not the same as a hug hug when you don’t have to peel yourself away and leave immediately – and I already probably hang on for way longer than is normal then!
Elle got up from her chair and asked me whether I would like a stand up or sit-down hug. I shuffled over on the sofa and she sat beside me and folded me into the most lovely snuggle. My system relaxed for the first time in ages (like since Anita and I were ok which is nearly a year ago now) and I just didn’t move for 75 minutes (!). We talked about childhood memories, and she sang me a song that her mother used to sing her. It was just so fucking perfect and needed at that particular time. It felt like maybe my caginess has not been necessary, actually. Maybe Elle has been there the whole time and just waiting for me to come to her.
It was so nice to fully rest and be. No protectors, no rigidity, no fear. I just felt so completely safe and like I could finally breathe. Elle’s heartbeat was regular and steady, she smells lovely (although I already knew this), and the physical touch instantly regulated my completely dysregulated system. The sad thing is, I know exactly what I have been missing for all these months but until I was there in that moment, I didn’t realise just how heavy it has been carrying this weight for so long.
That little part that wanted the hug that day has been patiently watching and waiting since November, hoping that this would/could happen. There’s a lot of longing in that child part. But actually, adult me just really needed to be close too.
Anyway, it felt so nice that week between the sessions…I felt more settled than I have felt in a really long time – that is, until a couple of days before the next session when the panic kicked in:
What if it’s a one off?
What if she thinks I am weird?
What if I get the boundary talk?
It didn’t take long for me to start to unravel once I started turning that over in my head. So, of course, when I arrived at the session I was looking and hoping for some kind of sign or reassurance that the previous session hadn’t been weird for Elle, and that it was ok. Because, you know, SHAME is a fucking bastard. But it didn’t come. I think this is because Elle must think, ‘If I wasn’t ok with a hug I wouldn’t do it’ and so therefore it must be ok, right? But the thing is, I literally didn’t let go for 75 minutes – that is a massive cuddle by anyone’s standards…
I can’t remember what I spoke about that session but suffice to say I was back onto ‘Mrs Dull and Boring’. Or just a different me.
I left feeling quite unmoored even though we had ended with a hug.
I realise now, that I really need to bring this stuff up when possible, because when I finally did pluck up the courage to ask, it was clear that Elle was in no way weirded out by me. Like totally not at all.
This is super long – fuckkkkkk – sorry!! -so I’ll end her and then pick up the rest very soon!
I hope that everyone is hanging in there. Take good care of your gentle souls x
Musing on counselling-related issues in the UK. I am a counsellor/psychotherapist and a client too. As the blog title suggests, my counselling journey began in the client's seat. For information about my counselling and psychotherapy practice see my website: www.erinstevens.co.uk
holding it together as I journey through therapy - a personal account of what it's like to be in long-term psychotherapy navigating the healing of C-PTSD, childhood trauma and neglect, an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, as well as giving grief and cancer an occasional nod.
Rubber Bands and Chewing Gum 
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