Attachment trauma

Rupture Patched, Repair Ongoing.

rubberbandsandchewinggum9 Comments

It’ll come as no surprise to those of you that read this blog regularly that I am struggling…when am I not?! Since my last post where I learnt that my therapist, Elle, had lied to me it’s been really tough going and it’s completely caught up with me this weekend. It’s been a month now, and I still feel completely at sea and my system feels really dysregulated even though we have more or less repaired the rupture. This post is an absolutely wild ride of up and down and back to front emotions so…yeah…go me!

At the moment, I seem to swing violently between a flight and freeze response – there is very little sense of feeling safe or grounded, and I guess that’s no surprise because so many parts of my already wounded system have been impacted by Elle’s mistake. Honesty and trust are such important aspects of a therapeutic relationship – and I think this is especially so for those of us with complex trauma who really need to know where we stand, and so to have that side-swiped by an enormous wrecking ball is pretty disastrous, really.

Interestingly it’s usually us, the clients, that are told how important it is to ‘be honest’ and truthful in therapy. We are supposed to be vulnerable and brave and be willing to have the hard conversations and to expose the things we might feel shame or embarrassment about in order to get the work done… a therapist’s honesty is just a given, right? Well, you’d hope. I don’t mean that our therapists should tell us everything about themselves and be completely transparent in that way, all I mean is that they shouldn’t actively mislead us and tell us lies.

Anyway, after my enormous meltdown the other week when Elle told me that she had just been invited away for a last-minute long weekend and so couldn’t do our Friday check (despite my knowing she had something planned weeks in advance due to the shared calendar alerting me to the cancellation). It was time to go and see her face to face. Ugh. God. Just thinking back to that day makes me feel horrible in my stomach.

Having gone quiet and retreated deep into my shell over the course of the weekend while Elle was away – because I wasn’t about to start making a fuss and make Elle’s weekend difficult especially after what happened in May when I had contacted her and thought she was home when she was still away – the next contact we had was when I replied in the afternoon to Elle’s Monday morning ‘personalised session reminder’ in which she acknowledged how fragile trust now was for me and how frightened I probably felt.

I said:

I’m really struggling with all this and I’m trying really hard not to run away but I’ve convinced myself that something terrible is going to happen. I’ll try and be there tomorrow but I feel like I am working against a whole bunch of protectors that absolutely won’t let me. I feel lost and so sad.

And honestly, I was. This whole thing just shattered my trust in Elle, who I thought she was, and I guess most importantly, what I thought our relationship was and what we mean to one another. It’s been totally devastating and had completely derailed me.

Elle replied that she really understood how hard it was and tried to reassure me – she really was trying – and then said that she was on her way home and would be back in a couple of hours if I thought it would help, we could have a call when she got back around five. This was exactly what I needed but there was a part of me that had got into the headspace about being ‘too much’ and not being difficult and needy and demanding or taking up too much space so I replied “Just see how it goes. If you’re back, great. If not don’t worry.” But of course, I wanted to speak with her – needed to speak with her.

So, I moved some stuff around with students to be able to have to call and then shortly before five I got another message saying that whilst Elle was now home, she was tired and was trusting that if we didn’t talk that it would be ok and that we’d see each other the next day.

That felt like a huge sucker punch tbh.

Like I do totally get that my message to her was really open and would totally make her think that it was a take it or leave it sort of a situation. But it really really wasn’t. Having been holding onto all this stuff for six days at this point and not having had any kind of check in before she left what I really needed in that moment was a five-minute call and a tangible reassurance that this was fixable and that I did actually matter and was not just an afterthought or someone who is easily discarded and forgotten about and basically just a bit of an inconvenience.

So not having the call hurt as that’s exactly the messaging I was getting from her having forgotten to tell me about her break and the lie she told to cover it…

And I get she was tired. Had been travelling. All the things. And it was nothing at all about any of my insecurities. But I was also tired, emotionally strung out and hurting and it just seemed to completely replay so many messages from the past. My need isn’t important enough. I am easy to push back or postpone or forget and once again I was left and I just need to find ways to suck that up and cope.

I know it wasn’t lack of care from Elle. Or part of me does. But the young parts that have been so scared by all this just saw it as confirmation, once again, that even when adults hurt me and it’s not because of anything that I have done wrong, it’s still me that has to find a way of holding that for myself – Little Me has always had to find a way to self-soothe and make sense of why the people that are meant to take care of her just don’t, and will always prioritise their need first. And don’t get me wrong. I know what it is to have nothing in the tank at the end of the day, I just don’t understand why Elle even offered the call if she didn’t think she was up to it.

So yeah. That sucked.

With all that on top of the shit pile that was already there, it made even getting myself to go the session hellish. It felt like I wrestling an angry, overtired toddler who didn’t want to put its shoes on but also one who really needed picking up and holding close. The offer of a call had felt like an invitation back to the closeness and safety I had got so used to, and then to have it not happen…well…it felt abandoning on a level.

I felt sick with dread on Tuesday morning heading into the city and was so upset. The teen part of me was fucking angry that I had had to hold onto this stuff for a week, that Elle thought it was good enough to give a symbolic band aid via emails when this wounding had needed a proper bandage – like surely there must’ve been a fifteen-minute window for a phone call somewhere in that week to patch things up and stem the bleed?

Clearly not, or if there had been, I didn’t warrant the time and effort… and yet now I was having to go in and pay to fix a rupture that was not in the least bit of my making. Like fuck that! Don’t get me wrong – Elle does a LOAD for me and gives me a lot of her time, adult me totally sees that but my hurt teenager didn’t.

I ended up being a couple of minutes late to the session because just as I was about thirty seconds away from Elle’s building, I got an overwhelming feeling of nausea and had to stop and sit down on a wall and breathe so I wasn’t actually sick. So, I was pretty worked up by all accounts.

Typing this out now, almost a month on, is really hard because I am so fucking upset that any of this has even happened and that I am still trying to navigate my way through the aftermath of the storm even though the storm is seemingly long gone and to anyone looking in, the sun is out.

I don’t know if things can ever fully repair, some days I think it’s ok and then others I just feel so lost.

It’s like cosmetically the boat looks fine now, but underneath there’s a fucking great hole in the hull and I am really aware that I’m taking on water and slowly sinking – but because the hole is concealed, I think that Elle is blissfully unaware of the situation and I don’t know how to tell her because my confidence in the relationship is so damaged. More than anything I need her to understand where I am at so we can try and really fix this. We need to get the boat out the water and put it in a dry dock and seriously attend to the hole in the hull.

I did ought to be able to tell her. I know this. Two years of steady work and relationship building should mean I can bring this to her. And I want to. My god I’ve been doing therapy long enough to know that the only way out is through.. but …and it’s a huge BUT… I am so aware that it’s times exactly like these where I have pushed myself to talk about my experience of being upset and hurt by a therapist that they often double down rather than accept that they are at fault. They refuse to see how damaging their behaviour has been and because I can’t move on or let it go, it’s now framed as a me problem. It’s my overreaction. It’s my attachment disorder. It’s my not understanding that this is only a therapeutic relationship… and so I’m now braced for the retreat, and the “too dependent” comment or the “like a tick” comment when actually the only reason I ever get super needy and super clingy is due to fear of abandonment and ruptures and in this case I think it’s understandable that I am scared and dysregulated.

Anyway, back to the session.

When I walked into the building Elle was there and honestly, she looked relieved. She said she had been just about to text me and thought that I wasn’t coming. I guess two years of never having missed a session, or cancelled or having been late shows how my not being there on time is a big deal.

I had hoped that I would be able to go in and be open and start to process what had happened but I should know by now what deep hurt does to me. We sat down and Elle sat facing me on the couch and started to apologise. I immediately said, “I don’t want to talk to you”. I don’t know which part that was, maybe the teen again, but actually maybe in part my adult self who has felt so incredibly let down and felt as though I have really done my young parts and system a massive disservice by allowing myself to be so vulnerable and exposed with Elle. My guard has been so down for so long that it’s been really hard having this happen. Like I rely on my wise self to navigate relationships for all of my vulnerable parts and here I am again in pain because I haven’t read the room right…or something like that.

I was quiet for a long time but my heart was racing, and I was physically trembling, and it just felt unbearable. I really needed Elle to reach out for me or say something but I think I was giving off the biggest ‘stay the fuck away from me’ vibes because she checked in and asked if it was ok for her to be sitting next to me. In the end I managed to tell her, “I am so upset and angry with you”.

Elle said she knew.

We ended up having a long long talk about lies and the damage they do to my relationships – how when you lie you are deliberately stepping out of connection with someone and denying them an opportunity to respond to whatever the reality and truth is – and how I can’t trust without truth. Even though it was hard, I was able to express at least some of how I was feeling. I didn’t feel connected to Elle, though, and some of what she said made me feel really sad like it didn’t feel like we were quite hearing or meeting each other or perhaps she just wasn’t saying what I needed to hear in that moment. It’s hard for me to tell when it’s like that whether my protective bubble is working or whether it’s actually stopping me connecting.

Either way, I felt like I had listened to what she said and realised that somewhere along the line during these months and years had completely fucking misunderstood what was going on with us. I sat quietly for a bit, thought about getting up and leaving, and then said, “I feel really stupid”. She asked me why. And I said “I thought that this meant more than it does”. My heart felt completely broken in that moment because I have taken so much time and care to build this relationship with Elle and yet I must have been viewing it all through rose-tinted spectacles. Here I was again, so desperate to be loved that I’ll imagine something that just isn’t there.

Elle asked me to explain what I meant by that and I said, “It didn’t matter”. I wasn’t about to tell her how important the relationship is to me, and how I love her and how close and connected I feel to her at times and how much I value her… because what a fucking fool I have been to have believed that this wasn’t a completely one-sided interaction. What a fucking idiot for starting to believe that I actually mattered to her too, and had a space in her heart and that she wasn’t like all the others. I was not about to expose myself in that way.

So, instead Elle asked if she could tell me what it meant to her and that I could choose to believe what she said or not.

And wow.

Ok.

What came next.

That was the gold.

I could feel myself soften because what she was saying is what I had felt to be true…like this was my Elle – the one I had needed all week. I won’t repeat what she said here because it was such an honest and vulnerable moment that I think that stays with us.

But those are the moments I need. I really need the times when she is so explicit and clear with her words that I can be in no doubt what is felt on her side because clearly, I lose sight and hold of that when I am not with her because doubt and fear and shame fill the empty spaces like a thick fog that creeps into every crack and crevice of my being as well as the space between us.

And it’s so funny… I’ve felt so upset and angst filled writing this and then I remember those few minutes and it’s like the dial has been wound back round to low for a minute. Elle does care. She does love me. I do matter to her…a lot. Oh, I so wish I could make that stick.

Elle is truly sorry for hurting me and letting me down. She knew that she had caused a serious amount of damage and that it might not repair but I felt like that mattered to her. We talked a lot about what happened and why. And I really got it. Like it was a real and honest and open conversation and connecting even though it was hard. But, of course, there’s a lot of processing to be done still.

I am still obviously really activated and upset and triggered and all the things at intervals (especially today!) because I have a system that isn’t straightforward for healing and repair. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY PARTS needs to be able to hear what Elle said to me last month…or have some kind of reparative experience that is appropriate to them and not all of them have yet.

So, despite it being as good a repair as it could have been in the moment, I’ve been left feeling really lost and alone and disconnected at periods since. I feel like Elle’s stuff is taking up her time and energy (and I do understand why) and so I haven’t wanted to impose or be difficult even though my need has ramped right up due to the rupture. Because I feel more insecure, I need more from her at the moment and yet don’t feel like I can ask. I am not channeling my inner Brene Brown at all!!!

As a result of all this I find that read more into the silences and times we aren’t in touch because I am coming from a place of fear. I sense a distance between us (rightly or wrongly) and part of me worries she is choosing to retreat and pull back even if there is no evidence for it. It’s just that right now the space between us is too much. Friday check ins don’t feel anything like enough online and I feel too embarrassed to ask if we can meet face to face because…I don’t want to take up more space or get a no which would also feel rejecting.

Sadly, I need more of Elle right not, not less. And so, this has been desperately hard for me. We had got into such a good place before this rupture happened and I just cannot believe I am here now. But this is what happens. I have complex trauma. I have a structurally dissociated system. I have attachment issues. This was never going to be a magically repaired in a session because it has hit some of my deepest wounds and fears.

Of course, I don’t want to be doggedly hanging on to mistrust and fear but it’s almost like my survival instinct has been triggered. I can’t help but be hypervigilant. My system feels it’s in danger anytime I am away from Elle. This, I know, is not ideal! There a part of me that is also sort of mad. Here I am flailing around and sounding like an unhinged fucking nutjob and yet this mess wasn’t of my making. I didn’t cause the rupture and yet here I am trying really hard to figure it out without taking up too much space and time and energy.

The thing is, this needs space and time and energy to repair. Because I am freaking out about being abandoned or rejected or unseen, I actually need proof that I am not being abandoned or rejected or unseen.

Look, I know how dramatic that sounds. Elle made a mistake. She has apologised. I’m an adult. I can understand.

Only it’s not that simple, is it?

I wish it was.

Over the last month, our sessions have been ok enough – as in they look and sound fine…but because so much of me is hurting and in hiding at intervals the connection to Elle feels off. Even when she is holding me tightly, I feel far away because I drift so far away between the sessions. I can’t relax into being with her fully, or parts of me can’t. Elle says that she does she all the parts. I think her strategy is just to keep showing up and being there and hoping that at some point my system settles and believes it is safe to trust again. I think that could be a really long road.

I emailed her the other day and just asked “Are we ok?”

Elle replied with a holding message and acknowledged that she recognises that even when we are physically close, I can feel like the space between our hearts is a mile wide but that she doesn’t feel that way and assured me she is right there and that she feels close to me. She knows I feel lost but that I am not lost to her and she is right there.  And that helped…but I feel like at the moment I need that kind of very clear and direct reassurance every day because so much of me is unsettled now. Like we might calm down one part but then another rears its head with its fears and mistrust and it’s back to square one. I get that it’s not realistic and I would never ask Elle for that, and I will just tough this out and hope that eventually things settle.

I think one of the hardest things for me right now is that I feel so incredibly needy and whilst I am able to reach out some of the time and ask whether we are ok or for a metaphorical hand hold and give a flavour of what I need and what’s really going on for me, I probably only do this 50% of the time. The other messages I send don’t seem to need anything at all and yet I would say that right now ALL my communications are really about reassurance and connection seeking.

I totally get that I need to be more direct. I know that Elle is not a mind reader and will go on what she sees from me. BUT it’s not easy to be really and truly how it is in this moment when my fear is that she will burn out or I’ll hit the threshold of ‘too much’.

I hate how awful the disorganised attachment push/pull thing is. I feel so much the need to be close but there’s also the parts that are pulling away and shutting down. All the old stuff with shame feels really potent too. And I hate this so much because it shows me how default programming is hardwired. I’ve been working so hard for that earned secure attachment…but…I don’t honestly even know it that is possible.

So yeah.

It’s a mess.

It’s fixed…but it’s not…

And I can see how fucking screwed up I am right now because I can’t even maintain a consistent fucking feeling in a blog post. But this is how it is, my emotions are all over the shop this is why I am struggling. Ugh.

Dear Therapist: Please Don’t Lie To Me. Truth, Honesty, Integrity, Love And Connection In Therapy…And Why It Matters.

rubberbandsandchewinggum31 Comments

There’s a fucking cruel irony here, that today I am writing about lies and betrayal in therapy literally straight after posting up my last blog about not being able to fully appreciate safety in therapy even though I am safe, and the one before that writing about harm in therapy caused by other therapists but being so grateful to my therapist for being safe and consistent and all the good things…but I am beginning to think the universe hates me so why am I even surprised at this point?

What on earth am I talking about?

Have I lost mind?

Well, yes. Yes. I have…

Not again? Ha! Yep. Again.

I am so dysregulated at the moment that I barely know what to do or say but I need to get this out somewhere before I explode. I’ve been so … unwell…since Tuesday after my last session with Elle that I’ve been barely functional. I feel like I have had my legs taken out from beneath me. My stomach hurts. I feel jittery. I’ve had a consistent migraine and tension headache for four days now – and it’s only started to ease today. My back has seized up. Sleep is appalling. Nightmares are rife. I wake up in the middle of the night and just sob for hours.

Like it’s a mess.

What the hell has happened?

Has someone died or something?

Nope. But I am grieving.

I don’t think it’s really very easy to explain just how destabilising it is to have someone you love and trust betray your trust by lying to you…and how much grief that stirs up – especially if you have the sort of relational wounds that I do.

Of course, in this case the ‘someone that I love and trust’ is Elle.

I am devastated.

But I am also locked in an internal battle with myself. I don’t know if I am completely overreacting here or whether what I feel is justified?

Perhaps what’s happened isn’t all that big a deal… or maybe I am just incapable, these days, of noticing when I am standing right slap bang in the middle of a red flag factory until I am fully wrapped in them from head to toe. Do I just not see the colour red anymore? Or is it a washed out pink now, and I am trying to romanticise the flags as pretty blush-coloured bunting?

I feel like this is really cryptic. It’s not meant to be. But my brain is all over the place. My system is in chaos and disarray and I just feel really fucking sad that I hardly know what to say here.

Part of me wanted to write yet another email to Elle today rather than blog. But she’s away and my telling her what’s going on since the last message we exchanged isn’t going to help matters any. I don’t want to disturb her time away. The last break we had was fine (still not written about that) but May was a disaster (finding myself on the online therapist forum)…and frankly, I don’t want to go there EVER again.

Right now, I am not sure if I can even make it to session on Tuesday, though. My system is off its tits and because it’s free to go spiral off in any direction it wants to for the next few days I am struggling to hold tight to the sense that Elle is safe at all, or cares.

I guess I should just cut to the chase, here, but it might take a bit as I can only focus in short bursts and want to escape this emotional agony and so keep getting dragged into ASMR rug cleaning videos, or anything else that will distract from the fact that my heart is broken…over what is essentially a white lie.

The thing is, does it even matter what colour a lie is in therapy? Therapy is (supposed to be) built on trust and honesty – they are the cornerstones of the process – alongside unconditional positive regard…and yet here we are.

I can’t actually believe it.

Right, RB, stop fucking about, just spell it out. Deep breaths…here we go. Brace positions.

A few months ago, Elle set up an ongoing Zoom link for our Friday check in sessions rather than having to send me a new link each week – makes sense. When she did that it meant that all our sessions went into an online calendar that was shared with me. I can see months and months ahead that our time is blocked out. No problems there.

A couple of months ago I got a notification that my session on Friday 10th October was cancelled and it had a line through it on my calendar. Fine. I figured Elle had something on that day and it was no big deal. We’d always said Fridays might change here and there so it was no sweat.

When I next saw Elle in person, she didn’t mention the cancellation and I assumed that at some point down the line she would tell me about it as it was still a way off.  But I was certain she’d mention it, either just to confirm the skipped week, or perhaps we would reschedule the slot to some other time in the week.

The weeks have been rolling by and nothing has been said by Elle at all. Part of me wondered this last week if maybe the thing had changed again and perhaps the call was happening as there had been no discussion about it – although nothing had changed on the calendar to suggest that. And the Friday round Christmas got crossed out so I knew that Elle was actively doing things her end.

A week ago, on Friday, I was in session face-to-face with Elle. It was during that appalling week where I had lost the plot and basically felt borderline suicidal in my Tuesday session and had had a Thursday check in and then a Friday session too. It was a bad week! She said she was going away that weekend to see a friend and then mentioned seeing another friend this weekend…but no reference was made to the Friday being off or her being away in the week and so it confused me a bit as in that moment Elle must have been thinking about seeing this friend and knew when it was she’d be going. It was also a Friday morning that I was sitting with her in the room so it’s not like she could forget that we meet on Fridays.

She had to be avoiding talking to me about it – but maybe it was because I had had such a rotten week and the idea of telling me about it felt like it might be destabilising? I dunno. Either way, she kept quiet. Still, I just imagined she’d tell me on Tuesday that Friday was off – even if that felt a bit last minute and a bit crap given how hard things have been as it really didn’t give us much of an opportunity to put anything in place… not that I would have needed much. It’s only a check in and really a text message would have done instead.

Anyway, I went to my session on Tuesday and it was ok but something felt a little off. Perhaps I was just waiting to see if Elle was going to tell me about Friday. She didn’t. Nothing was said at all. At that point I wondered what the hell was going on and why she hadn’t said anything. Maybe she knew that our calendars were synced and I already knew?…but then surely, you’d always mention a break in person? Or at least via email or text?

Whenever I leave my session on a Tuesday Elle ALWAYS says, “See you on Friday”… like ALWAYS. Yet as I left on Tuesday she didn’t. So, I knew that Friday was off but she hadn’t told me herself.

Ugh.

Crap.

But I guess I already knew and had been bracing for it.

But why was she avoiding saying anything? I know breaks can be tricky, but our last one was fine and missing a check in isn’t the end of the world…

What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to receive a breezy email later that afternoon from Elle:

Hello lovely girl 💕🥰

I’ve just been invited away for a long weekend this week with a friend I hardly ever see, which means I won’t be able to make our usual call at 9 on Friday. 

Sorry to not give you more notice, or write you something that feels holding, and I hope that feels ok and not too jarring? Rest assured I will return on Monday morning, if not refreshed maybe a little perkier and less coldish.

Tightest of squishes, 

(and absolutely no Halloween gooeyness)

🎃👻🫂💕🍂

Elle xxxxx

To say my stomach fell through the floor is not an understatement. I was just about to go online and teach and as I read that I felt like I was going to be sick.

Because what was this?

She’d had all the time in the world to tell me about the cancelled check in, plenty of notice. She could have told me right that afternoon when I was sitting in the room with her as it was clearly on her mind given she consciously omitted her usual, “See you on Friday”. And there had been plenty of time to write something holding (not that that was at all necessary). We could have rearranged the call months back – like there were so many ways of navigating this. And if the message had have been the truth, yes it would have been a little jarring but nothing like the whiplash I was experiencing in that moment seeing that my therapist of two years who knows me so intimately, knows how important trust and honesty is to me, knows how badly harmed I have been by therapists and their lies, and how very difficult I have been finding things lately…had chosen to lie to me like this.

And not only that, but this was all coming from a therapist who says how important honesty is, and integrity, and trust…like wtaf was going on?

Please make it make sense.

And in the big scheme of things, I really get that it’s not a huge lie but my system can’t seem to differentiate between a whopper and a barely noticeable one because to the little parts of my system and the traumatised parts – a lie is a lie. And if she’ll lie about this what else has she said that isn’t true?

So, as I was just about to start work I fired off a quick reply:

I guess you don’t know that your Zoom calendar updates my end too for our stuff, and I’ve known that this Friday has been off the cards for weeks now. Please don’t lie to me. I can handle changes – because we always said Fridays would be moveable and not guaranteed. I’m less good at whatever this is. And I get you probably didn’t want to tell me because there never seems a good time when things are crap – but I’d rather know than you avoid telling me because you think I’ll react badly. I wouldn’t have. 

That’s all I could say in the moment – but it was at least better than running away and completely retreating from it – which is what I wanted to do.

And then I had to try and teach three lessons on the bounce as my internal scaffolding collapsed and I wanted to run away and curl up in a ball and cry.

I can’t explain how difficult it is to be present online 1:1 with a student when my emotional world is in meltdown. There is literally nowhere to hide.

Not long after I sent that message email flashed up another notification. Elle again:

I’m so sorry honey, you’re right that she didn’t just ask. I’m so sorry I lied and said that. I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten to tell you and for you to feel unimportant and like you don’t matter, But the truth is I had forgotten, and then tried to cover it up.

Will you forgive me for being cowardly? I feel as if I really fucked up.

Not long after this my phone rang and it was Elle but as I was teaching and I couldn’t answer and even if I could have I wasn’t sure if it was a deliberate call from her…or one of those accidental dials because she hadn’t text me, “Can I call you?” not that she’s ever called me unplanned before – and she didn’t leave a voicemail or follow it up with a text.

As it was, I was teaching until 8pm with no gaps and by the time I finished and would have been able to return the call I knew that she was off doing ‘the thing’ she does with my friend (groan) and wouldn’t have been available anyway. Not that I would ever call her ad-hoc even if I wanted to because ‘boundaries’ and ‘good client behaviour’ and all that stuff.

You can probably imagine, that by the time I got done with work I was in a right state so I just took myself off to bed. Sometimes there isn’t anything to be gained by messaging in an upset state and I also knew that I wouldn’t get a reply anyway as Elle wasn’t ‘there’ and that would have triggered me even more.

On Wednesday morning Elle emailed me again:

I’m so sorry I let you down lovely girl, and that I didn’t honour our trust.

Please know though that me lying was never about protecting myself from you or your reaction, it was (and is always) about me feeling like making mistakes or being less than perfectly caring means that I’m not enough. 

I’m always fighting that programming, and when my resistance is low, like it is right now, I fuck up. I lie to cover the fact that I’ve been careless or clumsy, because in my world that was the worst thing I could ever do.

I know that for you a lie could mean that everything I have said is now being called into question, and that your trust in me has potentially been broken irrevocably. But please know that I will not and will never avoid talking about these things with you, taking responsibility and doing my best to mend your trust. Because this is just as important for me as it is for you.

I really hope you want to see me on Tuesday.

Elle xxxx

I didn’t really know what to say in that moment. I was so upset still. It’s hard to explain what a sucker punch to the gut being lied to by the person I have trusted the most with my most vulnerable self felt like, and I was without words. I could register that that was an apology but somehow it didn’t land. I guess there were so many parts activated that it would take more than an email to mend.

I had hardly slept on Tuesday night and so once I got the kids off to school I took myself off to bed again, lay under my weighted blanket and cried myself to sleep.

That probably sounds really dramatic but there’s been a lot of tears this week and a lot of crying in bed. But I think those of you that have deep relational wounds and are deeply attached to your therapists will understand what it might feel like for this to happen. It just felt so much like the special thing that I thought we had built, that means so much to me, in reality means nothing much at all to her…because I would never choose to lie if it meant risking our relationship – and from her email she as clearly aware what this might mean for my trust in her and our relationship.

And I know it was only a small lie…and she’s clearly tried to reach out to put it right…but is that enough? I dunno. Not for some parts of me. I was so far gone by that point all that really would have reached through this mess would have been to properly talk and ideally see her in person…and that wasn’t on the cards. If there is a rupture I will never ask for contact like that even if it is what parts of me are screaming out for. If Elle doesn’t offer if then I am not going to ask especially if I am already feeling the very things she didn’t want me to feel, ‘unimportant’ and ‘like I don’t matter’.

When I fell asleep I ended up having a terrible dream about being in a train where the sliding doors wouldn’t close. The train started moving and it was windy and unsafe. I knew I needed to raise alarm but I couldn’t get the control panel to work to stop the train. No matter what button I pressed the system wouldn’t let me raise the alarm. I tried to manually shut the sliding doors even though it was really unsafe to do so and once I did it I held it together with a tiny sticker with a handwritten note on – ‘broken- unsafe- do not use’.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what that’s about. I didn’t feel able to reply properly to Elle’s emails or tell her how I was feeling but I sent her the dream and the Chat GPT analysis…because could it be any better of a metaphor?

Elle replied with something that felt sort of holding but also sort of scary…she told me that she wishes I could see into her heart and see what’s really there – which sounds fine – but then said that “I want to never let you down and to always be a safe person who you feel loved and seen by, but honestly I don’t know if that is possible” and all my alarms started going all at once.

Like total panic.

I had to teach again but I could hardly concentrate.

I felt sick.

All I wanted to do was reach out to Elle, to speak to her, to try and stop this going where my brain was going…and then I did the thing…and I didn’t realise that was what was happening at the time but I fell into the “Shit Shit SHIT she might leave, it sounds like she’s backing away, I need to not be too much and make this all ok before she gives up on me.”

How familiar are we with this pattern? Someone hurts us but if we so much as get a hint of their being wobbly we do all we can to make them feel better even if it means shelving our own hurt and pain. We must preserve the relationship at all costs even if that means denying our own need.

Ugh.

I thought I was being super adult at the time and untriggered (!) and actually all I was doing was fawning. My scared little girl part was doing everything she could to prevent herself from getting left and then went quietly away to her bedroom to cry on her own… again…

Like I don’t not believe what I said in that message, I do, but I didn’t give anything like enough space to the reality of what I was feeling, how much I was struggling, or what I NEEDED in that moment.

This is what I sent:

I think you set entirely too high expectations of yourself. As humans we are always going to make mistakes and let people down and forget things. Because that’s what happens… and when we’re tired and hormones are doing weird things on top it’s even harder. The thing is, all of this could have been so easily avoided by just saying, “RB I thought I’d told you this, and I’ve realised that I haven’t, but I’m not going to be here on Friday” and really what’s the worst that would have happened? Like I might have felt a bit sad about it but we would have talked it though and that would have been that. The world wouldn’t have ended. Instead, you thought it better to lie to me than tell me the simple truth. And I get why you did it. And I get that in some ways it’s not a big deal. But this whole thing is about trust and I have to believe that you don’t lie to me about stuff to stand a chance of believing that you are actually someone safe. Because how am I meant to believe anything you say if you’ll lie about something so minor? And I understand the thing about feeling not enough and having a reaction to feeling like you’ve not been perfect and so it probably feels big in the moment because of the old conditioning around that… but I’ve told you before and I’m saying it again now- I don’t need you to be perfect and I don’t expect it either – I just need you to be real and honest with me. However that looks. Because it’s hurt me that you haven’t trusted me with the truth. And of course it’s triggered all my stuff which I know is exactly the thing you were trying to avoid in the first place… so it’s a bit shit. In your message you said you hoped I would want to see you on Tuesday. And whilst part of me wants to run a million miles in the other direction because I’m hurt, of course I want to see you. Because this is the irritating thing about all this – I’d like to think by now it’s not so fragile that stuff can’t be worked through. But it feels sometimes when this stuff gets triggered – your ‘not enough’ stuff – that you retreat and everything feels different. Like you’re there but it’s not quite you. And I guess maybe there’s a little bit of you that’s hiding too. But I don’t say it lightly when I tell you that I love you and it’s not conditional. But I will have to force feed you soggy orange fondant if you lie to me again xxx 😘 

Elle didn’t reply to that on Wednesday so you can only imagine how that felt. Like here I was struggling to even function, crying, and feeling sick and yet trying to make it better her end, trying to fudge a repair and she didn’t even acknowledge it. I didn’t send it late either, 4pm, but apparently it was fine to leave it or leave me in it.

I got that horrible feeling that the thing they (therapists) all do was happening – you know? Where there’s a rupture and the therapist pulls back? They start only replying in office hours, and then in a way that isn’t consistent with their usual tone and manner? The next thing you know you’re in for a boundary talk and everything that had been so much a part of the therapy gets taken away…and not because of anything you even did. The moment they feel the container is leaking or the frame is wobbly they double down. I really hoped that this wasn’t going to happen but I was ready. Been there, done that, seen it all before, got several t-shirts.

The next day Elle replied and she explained some stuff that we’ve spoken about before and I think it was an attempt to justify what had happened. And it made sense. Like we’ve all told lies and we often do it because it’s hard to be seen as we are – especially if we feel like we’ve cocked up. Like we try and cover our tracks and hope that no one notices. I won’t put that here because it feels especially personal to Elle and doesn’t add anything but I think I felt just a bit unseen in the whole thing – like I needed something that acknowledged my pain, not why it happened.

I replied:

Well, I think maybe it’s better to tell the truth and deal with the consequences which are probably always going to be way less bad than you imagine (these days at least – or at least where you and me are concerned), than lie and have the fall out of that. I think most people can cope with people being fallible and making mistakes but struggle far more with being deceived even if it’s meant well. Or that’s how it is for me. I’ve been lied to such a lot in these seemingly benign ways and then what’s actually underneath has been so bad and so painful that it makes me really scared. I don’t want to feel like I’m now having to watch really carefully for patterns repeating but it’s my default. Like this all looks horribly familiar to Anita’s burnout trajectory… even if it’s not. It never starts with a huge thing, it’s always small stuff. So, I’m on high alert for the next thing – which is generally a subtle form of retreat. 

This week all just feels like a double whammy of ouch. Maybe I’m just more sensitive to what you see as shrinking in for a second because I feel it acutely as a pulling back. It’s like you disappear, or maybe you’re there but only in 2D and in black and white. And it feels really hard because when this stuff happens all I want to do is disappear and I know that doesn’t really help me so instead I try really hard not to, but also try really hard to not come at things from a really triggered place and ground a bit first…and when I do that and can’t find anything but the hollowed out version of you or feel you’re gone altogether it’s really bad because I feel like I am putting my really vulnerable self out there only to be met with distance. That’s how it feels anyway. I guess it’s probably because in that moment so much of my not enough and too much stuff is triggered that I’m fearing the very worst.

It feels a bit like trying to communicate down one of those telephones with two cups and bit of string and I can kind of see you off in the distance but not quite hear what’s coming down the line and you’re too far away to see your face. I just want to hold your hand and know that this didn’t all happen because of something I’ve done wrong or because you’ve had enough and just need a break from caring for me. 

😞

Elle replied and assured me that she wasn’t burning out and that what I feared was happening isn’t and that she’d be there on Tuesday.

But then if she isn’t burning out why did she choose to lie to me?

Knowing Elle was away now with her friend I didn’t bother to reply…and the great news about this not being fully resolved is that my system has had plenty of time to catastrophise about everything that has happened because Elle isn’t here, we haven’t spoken, and I am left hanging with this turning it over in my mind in a million different ways and looking at it through all the lenses of all my little parts like I am staring into a kaleidoscope of fear and heartbreak and turning the dial.

Tbh this all feels a bit like I’ve been in a hit and run and she’s gone, “I can see you might have a few broken bones there and it looks like you’re bleeding out from your chest, but just sit tight for a few days and we can get this patched up next Tuesday.”

And that isn’t great.

I guess from my emails it looks like I am largely fine, in my adult and can see this as a rupture that is perfectly navigable and survivable.

Only that’s not the whole story.

What’s written between the lines?

Oh my god, there’s a story.

The thing I keep circling back round to is that this relationship matters way more to me than it does to her. And I get it. That’s how therapy works. Like this is how it has always been. It’s us (clients) that get really attached and bring all our early wounds into the therapy and the therapist who becomes the stand-in parent. I am just one of Elle’s clients and I am her work. I know that. But to me she is such a lot. Like she is so important…and I usually feel ok about that. I usually feel like my feelings are ok, welcomed, not too much, and that they are reciprocated to a degree – but this week has just triggered the biggest amount of shame in me.

Like how do I find myself here again?

Why do I never learn?

Why have I opened my heart up to someone who clearly doesn’t appreciate what that actually means? I’ve always felt that Elle holds my heart and our relationship so carefully (and I really need to write about our 2 year anniversary and the break we had) but it felt like this week she had a choice to make: lean into and trust in the connection even if she did feel like it might cause a bit of upset or choose to disconnect altogether from me and the relationship in favour of a quick get out of jail free moment. And she chose the disconnect.

Clearly, I really struggle with lying (not just being lied to but even telling lies). It does things in my body. I feel physically uncomfortable. My stomach goes tight. My heart races. My mouth goes a bit dry. I feel a bit prickly behind my eyes. And I just don’t feel ok. Don’t get me wrong though. I am a good liar. Or I used to be, once upon a time. I used to lie like my survival depended on it. Especially when I was consumed by anorexia and was self-harming… I used to be able to look people dead in the eye and lie, because I told it like a truth.

I can’t do that now. Or I could. But I absolutely refuse to.

I have never once told a lie to Elle. I don’t deliberately withhold things from her. One of the things I have vowed to myself in my therapy is that even if the truth feels uncomfortable, it’s worth saying. It might feel scary or downright toe-curlingly shame inducing but I feel like if I tell the truth, and people stay then they are my people and there’s really nothing all that bad that I could ever say anyway. I truly believe that honesty and vulnerability are the only paths to true connection (ha, hello Brene Brown!)…and that’s what I want. I don’t want a half-formed ghost version of a connection. I want the real, warts and all one.

If I feel I have to lie or bend myself to preserve a relationship then I don’t really want it anyway because I’ve done that my whole life growing up. I did it so much with Em – I never lied but I held back a lot…until I didn’t… and the more I let Em see me, the more I told her my reality the less she could cope with me and my feelings. I could have saved myself a lot of pain and misery if I’d not taken years to build up to telling her how I felt. In the end she saw me as a tick but I had always been a tick hadn’t I, she just didn’t know! Certainly those feelings I had for her came about nine months after I met her and yet it took eight years for it to blow up and break the therapy because I hid so well. I won’t do that now.

When I saw Anita I went into it without my armour but as she started to lose her capacity I started to put it back on a piece at a time. I armoured up and withheld stuff in order to be ‘easier’ for her. I didn’t lie. I just didn’t always tell her what was going on because I didn’t want to push her away. I basically reverted to type. I made myself smaller. I hid my struggles and my needs to try and give her space to get through what was going on for her. It didn’t work though, did it? It just delayed the agony ultimately.

With Elle it’s been slow and steady work. I feel like it has been such an exercise in trust and bravery, especially given all that’s come before. I have opened up to her in a way I didn’t think I would be able to. And so to have her so easily lie to me feels like a kick in the teeth. I have tried so hard to connect in an authentic way…and I believed that she was doing the same. But now I just feel like ‘work’ and someone whom she can easily discard and disconnect from. And it hurts.

My most unkind protector – the Inner Critic is having an absolute field day spouting their most favourite lines “You absolute loser, you can’t even pay someone to be in a relationship with you and care. Can’t you see what this is? It’s a game that she plays with you for a couple of hours a week to make you think you matter but the reality is, you’re just money to her. You pay the bills. If you mattered to her she’d show you through the most basic behaviour. She wouldn’t like to you. We don’t lie to people that really matter.”

And it’s really really hard to disagree with that voice.

Part of me wants to think maybe it’s the very opposite that is true. Maybe Elle lied because I matter to her. Maybe she didn’t want to hurt me or make me feel any of this painful stuff. I don’t think the logic behind what she’s done is great but I can see why it could be the case.

Either way, this week has activated all my really painful stuff and I haven’t had anywhere at all to put it.

Part of me is really angry too – well isn’t Anger just Hurt’s bodyguard? Like, why did this have to happen? Why couldn’t this therapy just be what it said on the tin? What do I keep doing wrong to make it so that therapists treat me like this? Why can’t I just be safe and loved and matter enough to not have someone hurt me in this way?

It’s hard not to see Elle’s actions as coming from a place of just being completely bored of having to think about how to manage my attachment stuff. Like, her initial message said, she hadn’t had time to write something… and so in her mind any time she leaves I demand time and energy just to get a weekend away. So perhaps this is my fault. Maybe if I wasn’t so high need then she wouldn’t have felt the need to lie. She probably just told her other Friday appointments that she wasn’t available and that was that.

So, this all makes me feel rotten. I feel my usual wonderful combo of ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’. Too much need and too much work and not important enough for anyone to truly care or love me.

I don’t know what the answer is here.

It’s only Sunday. I feel broken…and it’s a long way til Tuesday. Of course, I have no sense of the Elle I know being out there at all now because this is what happens when there’s distance and a rupture. My brain is serving ‘danger’ and all the rest of it.

I soooooo want to believe that we will be ok.  I want to believe that if I tell her how hurt I am that she will do her best to repair this and take the time to work through it with me – even if it takes a really long time… I need her not to be defensive or reactive…but I have no idea what state she is in and whether she has the energy or capacity to go with me where I need to go. Because let’s be real, this has hit on a very deep wound and it’s going to take some healing. I feel like this is something that will be dredged up over and over again. I will be constantly looking for reassurance and testing.

I hate this.

Part of me is reluctant to post this blog up because I’m worried that if Elle comes across it – now, or later – she’ll see it as a criticism of her, or somehow see it as sharing too much of what’s gone on between us with the outside world. I imagine she’d feel fucked off that I’ve copied some of the messages she’s sent to me here but I honestly don’t know what to do or where to turn for support or reassurance at the moment.

If Elle and I do make it through this I don’t want her to stop messaging me because she thinks our communications will only end up on the blog because that isn’t how it is. I’ve always been so careful here to not really talk any detail about what she says to me – I’ve protected her/us in a way that I never did Em or Anita because I’ve felt so protective of our relationship and what we’ve created together. I value her and the relationship such a lot…and right now I just don’t know what to do.

I don’t know how we’ll come through this because I feel like there’s a massive part of me that will struggle to trust her ever again. How can I be sure of anything now?

Perhaps a white lie is no big deal. Maybe I am just too sensitive. Maybe my trauma makes me too reactive. All I know is that I feel completely at sea and completely alone. I wish Elle understood how in a simple bending of the truth she’s taken a machete to my trust in her and set fire to the deep connection we were weaving together.

I’m sure Elle is having a wonderful time away, though…lucky her.

I think this may be the longest post I have ever written – shoot me now.x

When Safety Feels Unsafe

rubberbandsandchewinggum4 Comments

Well, I can’t lie, it’s been a complete and utter disaster zone in my emotional world since I posted a couple of weeks back. What’s happened? Well, my righteous anger about harm in therapy that I channelled into the last blog, where I talked about how I had received an email from a reader about their hideous experience being terminated by a therapist that perhaps could have been Anita (but thankfully wasn’t) as well as harm in therapy more generally, quickly morphed into the biggest fear about being rejected and abandoned and activated all the ‘old’ stuff from Em and Anita but most horribly the absolute terror that something bad would happen with Elle went nuclear. Well of course that would happen, wouldn’t it?

Usually, I am absolutely fine when people share their stories with me about difficult stuff happening in their therapies but, strangely, not in this particular instance. It’s weird, though, because at the same time someone else I have known a while from the blog contacted me about some issues they were experiencing in therapy that also really closely mirrored some things that have happened to me in the past and it’s had no detrimental impact at all. I have received the messages in the way I usually do and responded as I always have…

So, what’s gone wrong then?

I don’t know. I wonder if it’s because what’s happened with this other person has taken place in my city, and so it just makes the therapy world feel all the more unsafe here – I’ve had three therapists who haven’t been up to par, and now there’s another wreaking havoc…not that I ever hope to need to see any therapist but Elle ever again.

Maybe, and more likely, it’s that their experience around termination has so many similar threads to what happened with Em and Anita and so it’s just tapped into the wound more than usual. Like it’s uncanny.

I haven’t been very well lately (physically) either, and I suspect part of it is that my capacity is low. Like I am holding it together very tenuously with my rubber bands and chewing gum right now. It’s not being helped any by the fact that my hormones are really out of whack and so on top of the usual struggles I feel like my emotions are swinging wildly… don’t they say perimenopause is like a second puberty? God help me!

I have been in a really good place with Elle lately and my system has been leaning into the feelings of safety and trust in a way that it hasn’t in a very very long time. Like part of my system had stood down a little bit because maybe I don’t need protectors on duty ALL THE TIME. But then this interaction with this poor therapy client was a reminder, once again, that therapists and therapies that are long-term, deeply connected, supportive, affectionate, and say ‘all the right things’ blow the fuck up in next to no time and it can come almost out of nowhere.

The therapists that we think we know, whom we love deeply, and have trusted with our most vulnerable selves become someone else entirely, unrecognisable, almost overnight and they throw us out the moving vehicle and leave us for dead as they carry on up the road as if nothing happened. And not only that, it seems that it’s perfectly reasonable to disappear without a trace – or at the very fucking least, an onward referral to another therapist!

My total lack of coping and absolute breakdown this last week – looking at what I’ve just said – is due to lots of things all coming together all at the same time. I haven’t been able to think too deeply about it until now because the thinking part of my brain just hasn’t been available to me.

So, yeah, I have been really badly triggered and ended up very very dysregulated this week. Fortunately, I had told Elle about the emails I’d received because I could feel like I hadn’t quite been able to process them in the way that I might usually. I think Elle understood what a big deal it was, because last weekend she sent me a message to please look after myself because … it’s a lot. I assured her that I was totally fine. And in that moment that part of me was. Adult Me was ok. And Adult Me is usually the one that reads the emails and responds and that’s that.

But beneath the coping exterior of my adult self, all the alarm bells were ringing in my system. Essentially, my mini bus was on fire, I’d lost two tires from a blow out, the brakes had stopped working (I keep dreaming that I am driving my car at the moment and my brakes won’t work) and I was heading down a steep and slippery slope at speed in the dark and perhaps most worryingly of all – all the seat belts for the little parts of me had come unclipped. No one was strapped in and a big crash was imminent. This is not a good place to be in.

Part of me knew Elle was there and that we were ok because she kept contact with me a lot last week/weekend because she’s always been there when I have needed her to be – and yet by the time it got to Monday, no matter what I did I just could not ‘find’ or ‘feel’ Elle or believe that things weren’t about to go belly up in the most catastrophic of ways.

I almost cancelled my session on Tuesday last week. My body hurt so much. The anxiety in my stomach was physically painful and I was finding it hard to differentiate between anxiety and hunger. It was like everything in my brain and body was in a total malfunction. I couldn’t eat because I felt sick with anxiety, and then by about three in the afternoon my stomach would hit another level of pain…which I thought was just me getting more and more worked up but in actual fact was that I needed to eat. My system was buzzing with that horrible electrical feeling, too. I couldn’t sleep. I was having nightmares. It was rough.

Part of me wanted to send Elle a text on Tuesday morning to tell her where I was at so that I didn’t end up crashing and burning when I arrived. But a protector part, the one who was already fearing that I/we had teetered into the territory of being too much and that Elle was reaching saturation point decided that it would be a bad move to bombard her any further and the best course of action was to turn up and be ‘fine’ and mask my way through the session.

That part of me is a fucking idiot.

Like for goodness’ sake – don’t do that. Never do that! But it really shows how dysregulated I was. I could not draw on any sense that things were going to be ok – that Elle was ok, that I was ok, that together we were ok. It was just a huge fucking mess.

I can’t remember much about the session now – but I do remember how awful I felt almost the moment I sat down. I was terrified. Of course, there was a part of me that desperately wanted to connect with Elle, be very close to her, and to try and let her in so that I could be reassured that whilst bad stuff might happen out in the world and has happened in my therapies in the the past, in our world right now, there is nothing wrong and I am not about to be unexpectedly dealing with her dropping a termination on me.

The thing is asking for that kind of reassurance when I feel like things aren’t safe feels like a lot, because let’s face it, it is all the ‘crazy’ and it’s ‘hard work’. And I when I feel like this there is a part that doesn’t want to take up any space at all. I don’t want to be seen struggling or behaving weirdly. Tbh, in that moment, if I couldn’t find my way into Elle’s arms I just wanted to curl up in a ball on the floor and hide.

It was agony.

Elle and I always sit together on the sofa. We’re not even sat apart, like we are always physically touching in some way even if it’s just legs touching. I remember that Elle reached for my hand really early on, as she always does, and I pushed it away.

FFS.

Anytime she tried to give me a signal that she was there or it was safe I just retreated further and further into myself because it felt like I was behind glass and I couldn’t allow myself to get what I so badly needed because in that moment I felt so ashamed of having any need of her at all.

Elle asked me if I wanted a hug and I said no – actually I think I just shook my head and continued to stonewall her. Ugh. This is an absolute nightmare kind of a situation for me. Because I know, or part of me does, that if I say no to physical touch then Elle absolutely will honour that. And yet… it’s the very last thing I want. Like that protective part that is working so hard to stop me getting hurt actually is wreaking fucking havoc because my system is screaming for contact and co-regulation. Elle ‘staying away’ (although remember she was sitting right beside me and we were touching) feels like a rejection even though it’s me doing the rejecting. It’s unbelievably painful.

I was completely frozen and then I disappeared altogether. My brain went wild and served me up the most horrible trauma memory soup.

I know I sat in silence for a long time, which I think was probably hard for Elle to know what to do because sometimes I am quiet and there is nothing wrong at all, and then times like these are unbearable, but externally I look the same.

I have no idea how long I was silent for, because I was lost. I kept looping round to Four and she was absolutely distraught. I felt so disconnected that after lots of back and forth in my brain, I told Elle that I wanted to go home.

Ugh.

I didn’t want to go home.

But in that moment the painful feelings of disconnect felt too much to bear. I moved forward on the couch and sat on the edge with my head in my hands. Elle shuffled closer to me and put her arm on my back and told me that she really didn’t want me to leave and that she was there. I didn’t leave. I stayed rooted to the spot for a while but slowly I started to take in Elle’s presence… she’d been there all along…

After a while, Elle asked me to look at her, I think maybe I had let myself reach for her hand by that point, but I just couldn’t look at her. I was so fearful of seeing something disapproving, or angry, or cold…or you know, basically anything negative…that I couldn’t do it. Elle assured me that all I would see if met her gaze would be someone who loved me. But still, I couldn’t do it. There was something, too, about feeling like if I looked at her and she saw what was in my eyes then I’d be really seen and exposed and if she truly got a glimpse of what was going on inside me then that would be too much… and that felt … scary as fuck.

Eye contact in therapy, man!!

I was crying silently. I just felt so lost and sooooo fucking messy and embarrassed about being such a colossal wreck. I think I remember something about Elle saying that she knows trust is really really hard, and something about me being brave…

I can’t remember how I came out of that fucking awful place. Like there’s just a complete blank space where the memory of the session should be but I do know at some point I found my way back to Elle. I don’t think I said anything to her – who knows? But I do know that I ended up snuggled into her for a long time and that felt so much better. Like my system just calmed right down and I was able to tap into the fact that I am safe with Elle. Elle is not Em, or Anita, or Hannah, or anyone else’s dangerous and traumatising therapists – she is Elle…and we are ok.  

It felt so frustrating though – because Elle had been there all along and I just couldn’t let myself believe that she was there for me, or that she wanted to be there with that version of me. It’s a no-win situation – I fear being too much because I am too needy and need to feel so connected all the time but I also know that my shut down is really really hard to be around.

Even though things were fine by the end of the session – I felt so desperately sad when I left. Like, I beat myself up that I had wasted my chance for things to feel ok. When things feel hard in my everyday world – which they really do at the minute – therapy is the one place in the week that feels safe to me. It feels like a refuge. It’s the space where the armour can be removed and I can just be… and yet I just couldn’t do it last week. Instead I left feeling like my opportunity to catch my breath, be safe in the life raft if you will, wasn’t maximised and so leaving the space felt like I was back out at sea drowning without having resourced myself to be able to stay afloat.

I mean it wasn’t completely desperate because I didn’t leave the room dysregulated and upset … I never have with Elle which is really something when I think about how pretty much every session with Em left me feeling distraught and unseen, and how many times I have literally run out the room with Anita.

Elle asked me to text her and let her know I was ok later in the day and I refused!! Ffs. There was still that loud voice going on about not being too much and taking up too much time and space. When I got home, I was checking my phone, and she’d text me and asked me to let her know I was safe and said that she felt sad that I felt so alone.

This felt connecting and reminded me that it is actually ok to take up space, and to ask for support when things feel difficult. And because Elle had shown me that I wasn’t too much in her eyes, I felt brave enough to ask if we might be able to have an check in before our check in on Friday. We fixed something up for Thursday and knowing that was in the diary was sustaining enough to get through.

So,clearly, Tuesday wasn’t great at all…but I think it probably put things in quite sharp focus for both me and for Elle. It shone a spotlight on the deep wounds and although it wasn’t at all comfortable it probably was important that it happened. I guess, also, on a level, it must say something about trust I now have in Elle, because I let her see that completely broken version of me that I keep so hidden from the rest of the world. That part of me sometimes reaches out in email but doesn’t make it into the room in that way very often.

After our extra zoom check on Thursday, I sent an email to Elle (of course!)… she’d said she wanted to know what was going on with me on Tuesday and that when the words eventually came and I felt able to tell her I could send them if I wanted, or talk it through – whatever workes.

Thursday’s Zoom was … I dunno…ok…but not enough. It’s Zoom. And it’s fine… but it’s not the same as being in the room. And whilst I would rather have Zoom than no contact at all, I do need to find a way to get more of what I need from those contact points. I find it so hard to connect when I have needy child parts activated because they tend to go into hiding and then feel unseen and unattended to which is really difficult to manage.

So whilst it was nice to see Elle, it was also kind of traumatic because I couldn’t physically reach through the screen and touch her and that’s what the little parts of me really need. Whenever I see Elle on screen there’s always some really young stuff that wants to come out but it feels sooooo embarrassing. Like I want to say, “I wish I could hold your hand” or “I wish there was a way of having a cuddle today” or “I miss you” or “I love you such a lot” or “do you want to see my teddy?”… I don’t think I could ever say all that on a zoom call. It’s much easier in an email…and sometimes if I take a running jump at it I can say some of that in person but mostly Elle will tell me she loves me as we end the call, and sometimes I will say it back but more often than not I just disconnect the call like I am too cool for school and then cry.

Elle asked if I wanted to still see her on Friday seeing as we were talking on Thursday. I said I didn’t know. Ugh. Once again, that part of me that doesn’t want to be seen as too demanding and needy was fronting but later on in the call Elle said that she would be in the office on Friday if I did decide I wanted to see her. Of course I wanted to see her but I didn’t say anything at the time.

Anyway, after the call on Thursday some words came but I was so filled with anxiety and embarrassment at the time that I couldn’t even proof-read the email, I just sent it. Here’s what I sent:

The words aren’t wording because Brian is fried…and I don’t want to read this over as I feel sick.

Can I come in tomorrow? – and bring drinks.

For the record I will always want to see you in person when I can. I don’t know why I feel like I disappear on zoom, because I don’t feel like that when I am at work at all… and you’d think having teenagers staring at me all day I would feel super self-conscious and want to shrink away and I just don’t. I guess maybe it’s something about knowing that I am good at what I do and I am really good at building relationships with my students…but teacher me is brave and knows stuff and knows what other people need…I think part of me hides when I see you and then I just feel really like I can’t really find you and that feels horrible – sometimes, at least.

Everything feels really disastrous right now and I feel like I am tumbling down in a big hole. I have to hope that at least some of this has to be down to my body giving up on me recently because if that can’t be 50% of the reason then I might as well give up because I am so sick of this cycle and spiral.

I think some of it has to have been triggered by those emails the other week but actually that stuff is always there to an extent anyway shoved into the back of a cupboard with the door wedged closed and me leaning my full body weight against the door so it doesn’t ping open unexpectedly. Only it has.

It’s a bit like that scene in Friends where Chandler discovers Monica’s cupboard and it’s completely full of shit and she’s horrified because everyone thought she was a neat freak and had everything under control and she doesn’t. I mean I’m not pretending the cupboard isn’t full of shit, or that it doesn’t exist… I just can do without everything piling out all at once when I have to actually function.

Tuesday was really awful…well, you know, you were there. It felt like I was cycling through so many memories or feelings where I have felt alone, or abandoned, or disregarded and it’s awful because it’s not like getting wedged in one awful thing from one time, it’s like a video montage. And the scary thing was, after a period of time my brain just couldn’t cope with it anymore and took me off to the cliffs. I find that really scary because there have been loads of times when things have felt really shit (I used to imagine driving my car into a wall when I’d just passed my driving test just to make it all stop) but generally speaking I have enough of a sense that things won’t feel terrible forever and that I should just go and hide in my bed and be safe that way even if it feels unbearable – I don’t have any thoughts about actually ending it all. And I really don’t want one of my favourite places in the world to escape to now feel like it’s almost dangerous.

I know I have been feeling burnt out and exhausted and all the day-to-day life stuff for a while and I think my capacity for holding the cupboard door closed has reached an all-time low – like maybe the thing has just come off its hinges this week.

And I don’t want to shut down or push you away but at the same time that whole thing about being too much/not enough is massive. I feel like I am just being really negative and boring and it’s just really crap because no one wants to be around that. And not connecting with you makes it feel a million times worse but the fear of being seen and then being sent away is real…and that’s what’s happened. I want to trust that it wouldn’t…but it’s hard to believe it. And then I just feel really pathetic and needy.

Then to top it all off there’s the crippling feeling of shame and embarrassment because by now I feel like I should do so much better than I do and not get side-swiped. But it’s like all the alarms go off all at once and I can’t seem to do anything about it. I guess maybe try and tell you…which is fine if there are words and I am half way present but impossible if I am stuck somewhere else entirely. I feel like I need a human version of a retractable dog lead so that when I disappear and feel lost I know that I’m not really. It’s a bit like the story with the invisible string… only that now makes me feel sick.

I love you x

Elle replied with a really holding message and asked me if I would like to do an hour long session instead of the thirty minutes – yep!

So, Friday felt way better. I wasn’t a complete fruit loop. I felt connected to Elle. In the week, I’d bought her a novelty gift based on something that has happened recently and she too had bought me something funny. It felt really nice to feel like all the anxiety and stuff from outside the room was left outside the room and we could just connect as we do. I could lean into the feeling of safety without then being triggered into, “this won’t last, you can’t trust it”. I so needed that.

I am really aware of that pattern lately, though. I can feel so safe and so connected and so calm and then all of a sudden, I feel like the wind changes inside me for no reason at all, and I feel massively anxious and triggered even though ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS HAPPENED OR CHANGED. It’s almost like my system wakes up and goes, “What the fuck is happening here? What is this feeling? This isn’t familiar – it must be dangerous!”

I think it’s going to take a while for my nervous system to see that safety can be trusted and that being exposed/vulnerable doesn’t necessarily mean something bad is imminently about to happen and that I need to get my shit together and brace for impact.

I think this experience is pretty common for those of us that have experienced trauma, especially attachment trauma whenever we start to experience a felt sense of safety after a lifetime of being unsafe. Until now our entire being has been constructed around adapting to others and the risk they pose to our safety- emotional or physical or both. So of course, sometimes the unknown- feeling safe, held, contained – feels really dangerous because all we’ve ever known is fear, or anxiety, or shame, or disconnect. We have no internal shelf to house safety…so it doesn’t belong.

And because of this, oddly sometimes feeling unsafe feels safer than actual safety because at least it’s familiar. We know it. We have entire rooms dedicated to the different ways we can experience and know lack of safety. It’s like an exquisitely curated library. We have strategies we are able employ to work with being unsafe and we know which shelf each one is on. We know to make ourselves small. We know to shut down. We are excellent at dissociation. We know how to people please and fawn. We know how to overextend ourselves. We know how to pretend we are fine…and on and on…And whilst this all feels pretty horrible, we know that we are protected – to an extent.

I’ll admit it, I feel a bit like I am fumbling around in the dark when I feel still, and safe, and content with Elle. Like what am I meant to do with that? Just enjoy it and be in the moment?! I guess, what I would like to do is build another room in my library dedicated to being safe rather than being unsafe and begin to fill it with all the different ways I know that I am safe – or safe with Elle at least.

I might start that catalogue this week, actually…and if I am brave maybe share it with her!

Anyway, this is enormous and I actually haven’t really delved quite into where I wanted to go – but this has been languishing in my laptop most of the weekend and if I don’t get it posted it will just wither in the depths for another few weeks.

xxx

I Was ‘The Good Girl’ In The Therapy Room And I Hurt All The Time

rubberbandsandchewinggum3 Comments

I’ve been in therapy for a long time.
Like, a really long time.
It’s been ten years solid this time around, albeit with four different therapists (not that I am counting!). I’m not sure how to explain how long that is in soul years, but it feels like a thousand.

I am no stranger to the therapy room. Even before this latest solid run of ‘trying to get my mind fixed’ (or should I say my nervous system recalibrated and the mother wound healed?) there have been some hopeful episodes in the ‘room’ over the last twenty-five or so years. But mostly, as is generally the case when you’re a student in college or university, these were relatively short-term therapies.

I went, then, because I was suffering with anxiety or depression or stress, or my eating disorder, or imposter syndrome or whatever (the list goes on and on). I knew deep down that something was very wrong and those sessions acted like sticking plasters for a wound that was far deeper than I ever could have imagined at the time. Little did I know that I needed far more attention than four or six sessions could ever hope to provide.

I remember feeling like I was fully losing the plot as it was coming up to Christmas when doing my MA. I was twenty-two and I realised that I needed to see someone having not been to a therapist since my A Levels. The university I was studying at had a counselling service and, fortunately, as most people had already left for the holidays there was some availability to see someone.

It was in that room that the dam broke. It was a tiny room in the back of an old Victorian red brick building not far from my seminar building. I started to let out ‘all the things’ and although I only had four sessions with that counsellor it was such a relief to finally have someone say to me that I wasn’t overreacting and that actually they thought I could really use some long-term therapy because ‘trauma’…and no, it wasn’t just the stress of deadlines and they didn’t try and ply me with strategies to get through the immediate stress rather just gave me a space to be heard and collapse a bit after trying to hold it together for such a long time.

I might have walked out of those short-term sessions feeling a bit bereft – like, it would have been so great to be able to spend a few months with that particular therapist as a bit of a scaffold around my crumbling self, but that wasn’t how the service worked…and where was the long-term therapy that a student with no money could afford? I certainly couldn’t access the kind of therapy I need/ed back then and so put everything back in the box on the top of the shelf and continued on with life until I couldn’t do it anymore.

One thing I will say, is that these episodes of short-term therapy never did me any harm. They may not have been long enough, but I didn’t leave those sessions in a worse state than when I started. But then perhaps these therapies were never quite long enough to activate my attachment system. I don’t know. But then, that doesn’t work, because I saw a therapist N, for two years after my dad died and it helped, I was attached to her- and we’re still in contact now seventeen years later – certainly no harm done there.

Harm in therapy didn’t become a reality for me until Em – the highly experienced Clinical Psychologist, the person I was led to believe I stood a really good chance of healing with, and so the person I trusted with my whole story and self. Gosh. What a mess it was.

I met Em thirteen and a half years ago, now. I feel so sad, looking back over my life, that I have been trying so hard for so long to feel ‘better’ and yet here I am still working on undoing damage not just from my childhood, my life, but actually my therapies. It’s tragic.

Em and I initially did sixteen months in the NHS — it was the kind of therapy where the clock ticks louder than your voice and the radiator only half-works and my god, those awful shiny yellow gloss-painter woodchipped walls were really something!… but finally getting a space to delve into my psyche with someone who (on paper at least) really had the skill to help was much-needed.

But like every therapy before – the time I had wasn’t long enough. NHS work, even when it’s extended (which mine was) is still time limited. There is only so many sessions you can have and then that’s it – there’s a huge waiting list (three years for me back then) and you can’t clog up the system forever even if you really need the therapy. And surely you should be grateful to get a long stint of therapy in the first place. It’s kind of laughable, because it took me a year to even get close to the work or for my system to activate. In reality a little over a year of once-a-week therapy is nothing for Complex Trauma and quite honestly, the NHS just isn’t at all equipped to help with these kinds of issues.

And my god, opening my version of Pandora’s Box and then being left with no therapy at all really really messed me up. The nightmares. The panic attacks. The eating disorder and self-harming behaviours were triggered again. My child parts (and my structurally dissociated system – not that I knew that that was what it was then) had a complete meltdown. The feelings of abandonment and rejection felt huge. And I didn’t cope at all. But I was completely and utterly alone and without any kind of support…because I’d used it up.

Em had agreed that we could see each other in her private practice when our sessions finished but the NHS had stipulated that there needed to be a three-month break between ending there and commencing with her again. At the time I accepted that as how things had to be – but knowing what I know now about my system I can see how very wrong it was to leave that work wide open and leave me essentially hanging. What I should have done then was reach out to Em and let her know what was going on, but of course, I didn’t know that was possible. I was just following the rules…because I have always followed the rules.

After two months on my own without therapy, my graphic nightmares finally stopped in their tracks and I didn’t even dream again for nearly three years– I basically shut off/dissociated my entire system and lived my life in ‘false adult’ I think. And so, I didn’t go back to Em for three years.

You could call it a ‘break’. I call it surviving without witness – but I think there was always a part of me, a child part or five, that I had exiled who was desperate to find my way back to Em. The little parts of me that had been so activated in her therapy room, and all the trauma too, needed a place to go.

And so when I finished my cancer treatment and all the wheels fell off – I went back to her…because… well…to parts of me she was mum, and a kind of safety, and I very badly needed someone because I was very much not ok.

In the intervening three years since I had sat with Em a lot had changed in my world – but underneath or inside I was just the same – all those little parts were frozen inside needing to be seen, held, and attended to. The trauma was there still, unresolved.

I remember the first day I walked back in the room and how hopeful I had been and how excited I had been to see Em again. And yet, it fell flat. I guess there was a part of me that wanted her to welcome me back with open arms or some kind of acknowledgement that it was good to see me again now that we weren’t in the sterile hospital. But she was ever the blank screen, and although my child parts came alive again the moment they saw her, they knew too that the rules were still the same.

And I am nothing if not the girl who follows the rules.

I came to my session/s every week.

I paid on time.

I was never rude.

I never cancelled on her until we were right at the end and broken (but then why would I, my sessions never felt enough and so I would never enact a break willingly).

And I tried so hard to do therapy ‘right’ – and stick within the confines of Em’s very very rigid boundaries (although occasionally failing and texting her – god forbid).

I tried so hard to be grateful for what was on offer. I tried to make it enough. I tried to be insightful and brave and DO THE WORK…and bring everything to the room even when I felt terrified and physically unwell.

I tried not to be too much.  

But man, I felt small and disempowered.

I was the good girl in the therapy room and I hurt all the time.

I could never understand why it felt so painful to be with her…and so painful to be away from her, too.

I guess I  thought I had to earn tenderness and care, and prove myself worthy of it because of course that’s been hard-wired into me from day dot.

I thought being easy to work with would make me lovable – or at least palatable.

It didn’t.

But then why would it?

That strategy had never worked with my mother so why on earth would it work in the therapy room? And yet here I was unconsciously repeating the same pattern with my therapist.

It seemed being the quiet good girl wasn’t ever enough.

So, I changed tack. It took a really long time for me to bring my pain about the relationship with Em into the room unwashed and unedited. Em had said she felt “blindfolded” with me and I thought this meant that my caution and hiding my feelings was stopping us being able to really connect. And man did I want to be connected to her and so I took a leap towards her around about the time I started this blog.

I wrote things down when I couldn’t say them out loud (because shame was so ever-present and dissociation never very far away). I folded pages of typed letters or blog posts inside my pocket like secret spells. Sometimes it would take weeks for me to build the courage to hand them over. Every time I did, I felt like I was giving her the map to the world inside me — it felt like I was screaming over and over, “Please, please just look. Please see what it’s like in here. Please help me not be lost anymore.” And perhaps in also written between the lines was, “Please love me”. But Em would sit and read my words never giving much away as I sat squirming opposite her and then carry on like she already knew the way and didn’t need my map.

And so, I walked alone over terrain that felt like barbed wire and cold rain and shame.

It felt in some ways like I was in the Truman Show – but no one told me what the point of it was, and the lights were much too bright, and whilst I could see Em she was always sitting behind her glass screen taking notes about what I was (or not doing) on her clipboard – she wasn’t in the scene with me. Every now and then she’d tell me where I was going wrong, “Like a tick”. It was as though she was some nasty film director coaching an actor who was absolutely doing their best to act the ‘right’ way but failing miserably time and again.

The thing is, I shouldn’t have ever had to have acted in that room. I should have been able to go and be me – exactly as I was and have that met with kindness, compassion, and curiosity. I should have been able to remove my various masks.

I wish.

I feel so sad when I look at how small I made myself in the room with Em – I don’t mean falling into my child parts small, I mean how little space I took up and how little I asked for from her and yet even that was made to feel like ‘too much’. I feel so sad that I tried to bend and fit to be the client she wanted me to be and it breaks my heart that for all those years my small parts couldn’t get anywhere close to what I needed. There was no we in that therapy- just me…flailing around and hurting.

I took big elephant with me in my bag for years but was never brave enough to take her out even when I had told Em about the many many child parts that were inside me and how they felt and we both knew how much hurt was inside. There was never an invitation from Em to be anything other than my very competent adult self…and that was really hard when my young parts were so very present. Part of me feels angry at my adult self for not doing more to protect my young parts – but I genuinely thought at the time going to therapy was me looking after myself.

I am not the same client I was back then. I have learnt such a lot about myself over the last decade and there is simply no way I would put up with what I did with Em now…or even Anita. And so although this growth and understanding has come at a heavy emotional (and financial cost)…I do at least know myself and have boundaries around how I will let myself be treated now.

But back then, I felt ashamed and embarrassed asking for anything from Em and her NOs to my very few requests cut so deep. Object constancy has always been a massive problem for me and I remember reading an article online by a therapist about how to stay connected to therapists on a break. They’d suggested a simple three dot text message in the week – like it’s bare minimum effort, no words to misunderstand, just a reminder that they are there. But no, she wouldn’t do it.

I remember asking for a simple transitional object – I wanted a short note written on a pebble that I had found on the beach near her house – and that became a torture project for well over six months. But in reality, I didn’t want a rock… I wanted a soft toy like Monty…only I never asked because I knew that was way out of the realms of acceptability for Em…and I was right. We couldn’t even get a few words on a pebble right, a toy for my young parts would have been simply outrageous!

I was made to feel like there was something desperately wrong with me because I wanted her to sit closer to me. I would dissociate so badly when I felt like she was far away but there was never concessions on Em’s part to make a move to adjust how we worked to make things better for me. I wrote in a letter once that I wished I could hug her. Somehow that was really inappropriate and uncomfortable and was addressed only once, “You know I don’t do that”. It felt like a sucker punch to the gut.

And heaven forbid we go anywhere near the ‘L’ word. Love was made to feel like a dirty word and I never once uttered it aloud…I only alluded to it in my maps/letters. And yet it is so much part of the work… talking through human emotions in all their forms is the work. And it shouldn’t matter if they are directed towards the therapist or anyone else. But also, I struggle hard to understand how if you spend years and years of your life with someone picking apart your most vulnerable stuff that love wouldn’t become part of the fabric of the therapy.

Ugh.

I’m not here to talk about her though – although I seem to have gone down the rabbit hole a bit today – I guess I am still reeling from the hurt… and we can totally skip over Anita, and Hannah because – well – I want to talk about now – 2025…

I want to talk about Elle…I want to talk about how I can be who I am, not who I think I need to be with her. I want to say how that the ‘good girl’ part of me has been allowed to rest a bit and that I no longer hurt in the way that I used to – but given this part alone is 2000 words I’ll break this post into two…and believe me, the next part is far more uplifting!…there’s even a picnic to tell you about!!

Some Real (Unfiltered!) Therapist Testimonials

rubberbandsandchewinggum23 Comments

Have you ever wished there was a space where you could see the real experiences that other clients have had with your next/potential therapist rather than relying solely on unverified ‘glowing’ testimonials that therapists place on their own websites to help you decide whether they’re the ‘one’?

Shopping for a new therapist isn’t easy. You can do all the due diligence in the world: research, ask questions about their practice, their modality, how they view the therapeutic relationship etc… but you’re rarely going to get a therapist admit to their previous mistakes, difficulties, or lack of competence in the early days (although it would be really great if they did!!).

Not very many therapists open themselves to Google reviews (unsurprisingly!) as they have no control over what’s posted and it’s almost impossible to get a Google review removed. The thing is, you’d think on balance if these ‘professionals’ are even half of what they promote themselves to be online then their ratings would even out over time. The odd unfavourable review pitted against a stream (tsunami) of gushing five star ones wouldn’t be enough to paint a wholly negative picture would it?

There surely can’t be all that many of us out there that have been so harmed in therapy that we want to give our honest zero star reviews and warn other clients off can there?

I think we know the answer to this question 😆.

So, given that ‘Trust Pilot For Therapists’ doesn’t actually exist, we’re left with no option but to try and trust and put faith in what we see online. Most unwitting clients take therapists at face value from the glossy bios on the BACP website, or other therapy advertising page, or a therapist’s own personal website (cue soft lighting, benevolent smile, a nice cardigan, or some outdoor woodland scene) and the likelihood of us ever finding out what might have happened in the past that might be – how shall I put it? – less than optimal remains concealed in the shadows.

I think it’s tricky, too, when we do take steps to book a session and go and meet someone new because although we might get a ‘gut feeling’ about someone from the off it can take a while to get a sense of whether someone might be a good fit or not. This is especially the case if we’ve been hurt in therapy before. Our antennas are looking for it feeling ‘wrong’ but there’s also a part where we think we should override doubts because it’s probably our defences.

Meeting with Elle for first time was hard. I’d just come out the long-term therapeutic relationship with Anita and then done eight sessions with Hannah that crashed and burned. Therapy wasn’t ever going to feel safe and part of me hated Elle because she wasn’t Anita and she didn’t know me.

Still. We made it through to where we are now- almost two years in.

Last night I decided I’d write my own therapist reviews for some of the ex-therapists I’ve had and let my claws out – it was more Wolverine than cute kitty. Can’t see these ever making it onto their testimonial pages, can you?!!

Enjoy. 😉

P.S – If anyone feels like they’d like to write their own (positive or negative) and ping them into the comments, I’d love to see them! You’ve got to laugh otherwise you’d cry…and man, I’m all too familiar with the crying.

*

EM:

As a highly trained and experienced clinical psychologist, I had high hopes for my therapy with Em. She said she specialised in trauma as well as many other of my presenting issues. It turned out that Em is frightened of entering into relationship with her clients and thinks that any move on the client’s part to try and discuss the therapeutic relationship or feelings that arise in the relationship is getting away from the therapy and is in fact ‘pushing the boundaries’. Em is unwilling to meet the client where they are at and operates from a one size fits all model (although she would call herself ‘integrative’). As a therapist, Em says that she is able to handle all the feelings a client might feel and welcomes them – only I wouldn’t recommend expressions of love or anger should you enter into therapy with her as these may trigger her into calling you an adhesive parasite as well as suggesting that you may secretly want to fuck her. If you have any feelings of compassion for those with mental health issues – she is not the therapist for you, as she believes that the majority of her NHS clients are ‘playing the system to get their PIP’ and if this isn’t enough to put you off- I found out much too late that she is a tory (as well as a class A cunt). 0/10

*

ANITA:

Anita presents herself as an ‘ethical’ therapist who takes great care and pride in her work. This could not be further from the truth. She is, in fact, more damaged than the clients she professes to help. Indeed, she is the equivalent of an emotional wrecking ball. Her avoidant personality means she is unable to take accountability for her actions and behaves very much like an ostrich. Anita is neither emotionally intelligent or competent enough to be working as a therapist and it is laughable that she believes her services are worth £60 an hour. My advice would be take your money and set fire to it. It’ll do less damage to you in the long run. Don’t be fooled by her website and the extensive list of glowing testimonials. The truth of the matter is that Anita has left a trail of devastation in her wake and justifies her serious failings by repeatedly citing her ill health and ‘situation’. Her situation is of her own making, and her health has been steady enough to get married as well as sustain her counselling business. If you are seeking a therapist with integrity and honesty – Anita is not the therapist for you. Steer well clear. 0/10

*

HANNAH:


Hannah is an inexperienced therapist who really should only focus on light work – she is certainly not equipped to deal with trauma. As with many therapists, her ego is far larger than her capability and she is prone to bite off more than she can chew. As much as suggestions of practising ‘yoga’ and going on a ‘retreat’ would maybe be welcome from a friend when sharing your struggles, it is hardly helpful advice from a therapist talking with a client who has been in therapy for many years who has a complex trauma history and recent trauma from therapy harm. This is straight out the playbook of CMHT suggesting a warm bath and cup of tea to people suffering suicidal ideation and self-harm. Chat GPT would dish out more helpful strategies than this at no cost and from the comfort of your own home and phone. Hannah does, however, have a nice set of colouring books and pens. 2/10 Give her five years and she might be worth a visit.

If (When) I Run Away – Please Come And Find Me.

rubberbandsandchewinggum4 Comments

Last year Elle and I were talking about when things have gone wrong in my therapies (there’s plenty of content there and we visit it regularly!) and situations where a client might choose to ‘end’ and not come back to therapy but it feels somehow unexpected or not the ‘natural end’. I was in one of those sensible adult places, not activated (!), and so able to express some of what goes on for me when the wheels feel like they are falling off in the therapeutic relationship and how panicked I get. I recognise that sometimes the reasons I bolt for the door (sometimes literally) are often not what appears to be happening on the surface in the moment.

What can seem like a very small trigger can send me totally spiralling…but then that’s hardly surprising when we look at this through a Complex Trauma lens, or the fact that I have tonne of parts who are all processing stuff in their own ways – many of which are not particularly sophisticated! Of course, my four-year-old self and teen parts don’t see things the same way my adult self does, nor have they the skills to manage things in the way that my adult does. You’d think I’d be ok, though, seeing as I have a really fucking competent adult self. The problem is, my system is complicated, has the capacity to hijack me, and I am really really good at dissociating. Adult self is rarely there when I need her when I am freaking out.

Let’s face it – what scares me (all of me) more than anything is broken connection, feeling like the attachment is severed, and that I am on the verge of being abandoned. This is not at all surprising given my history because there was a time when disconnection really was a life-or-death situation. My mother’s PND did nothing for my little baby self or my developing nervous system and I have spent so much of my life in survival because my caregivers have never been reliable.

It’s hardly surprising that when I feel like the relationship with Elle (or A or Em…) is headed towards a cliff edge I am the first to run away. I am the absolute queen of ‘leave before I get left’ which is why I absolutely need my therapist to know this pattern and make sure I don’t bolt and disappear when there is a rupture (even if from their side it might seem small, repairable, or can wait). Ruptures can feel catastrophic to my system these days because … well… there have been ruptures where I have been hurt really badly and basically been abandoned and rejected because of my responses. Think of Em. My reaction to being called a tick, calling her out on it, and running scared didn’t see her try hard to meet me in it, to apologise, to understand why I was terrified, she just saw it as a perfect opportunity to let me go.  

Anita was way better at handling ruptures… until her life collapsed around her ears and she couldn’t hold herself let alone anyone else. The damage from that ending is ongoing and painful. I feel so sad that in the two years since I last saw her, she hasn’t been able to step outside of her struggles and meet to end but that’s not what I am here to talk about today… although it definitely fed into the intensity of the panic I have felt with Elle during our recent rupture. 

So, what’s this post all about?

This is a pre-curser post to help understand a bit of what happened in the most recent rupture with Elle (i.e when I brought it to her attention). Because yes. I got myself in a mess. A big one. And I ended up sending her this message:

I don’t want to see you anymore.

You can only imagine what sort of a state I had got myself into to send that. Eek. Like, I am the person will ALL THE WORDS… not none!

I’m almost done writing that post – and it’ll be up soon. But suffice to say it’s been a wild ride.

I am glad, then, that over the time I have been working with Elle, I have given her pieces of the map of me so that she has been able to understand me better and figure out what I need.

Most of the time I probably appear pretty together when I see her despite the crap that keeps hitting my day-to-day life. I probably seem a bit wounded and in need of support for my little parts but also seem generally functional. Sometimes I am a bit closed off but I am present in the room rather than off in space dissociated. The completely derailed, panicked, reactive, scared stiff self hasn’t really made it to the room (she’s done some emailing though!) – or if she has, she’s not been triggered BY ELLE. Elle has been a witness to the struggle and in support role in the room, not the trigger. It’s only this last month that Elle has had to misfortune of meeting that part of me in person.

Anyway, back to last year. I was testing the water with Elle knowing that it was only ever going to be a matter of time before something triggered my runners and protectors and I needed to know how she would respond if I unexpectedly disappeared. We all know that there are those diehard therapists who will say “I respect client autonomy, and if they choose to leave that’s their choice and I will not contact them thereafter. It’s up to them to contact me should they want to resume therapy.”

Puke.

Honestly, this kind of therapist really annoys me more than anything. If that’s your stance as a therapist then you absolutely should not be working with C-PTSD or people with multi-part systems. This ‘in the service of the client’s autonomy’ is bullshit. I’m not for one minute saying to beg and plead for a client to come back, that’s not realistic. But so often when we start running and slamming doors behind us, it’s not because we want to leave – it’s because we are scared! And we need for the adult, regulated nervous system (therapist) to remind us that we can come back, that we are wanted (even if we are having a tantrum and full of shame), and that they are committed to working through EVERYTHING with us even if it is HARD. Letting a triggered client disappear out the door is abandonment… it’s not kind.

And so, that day I asked Elle if she had ever made a mistake with a client that led to termination and what she did, or what she would do differently. Elle told me the about the biggest regret of her career was a time when she wasn’t as sensitive as she could have been with a client who kept cancelling last minute. She reached the point where she enacted her cancellation policy after several missed sessions – i.e charging for the session by sending an email, and the client left as a result – never came back in. Elle said she had failed to recognise potential wounding around money and still feels terrible to this day.

Mistakes and missteps happen, but what I wanted to know was what she did when the client said they were not coming back. Was she a ‘respect client’s autonomy and let them go’ therapist, or did she do something different?

Elle assured me that she had reached out and suggested that they meet in person but that the client didn’t want to come back, that there were some back and forth communications but that the client ended.

[For the record there was nothing identifying or specific – merely Elle’s feeling that she fucked up and had learnt a lot from that.]

I told her that I would always want her to reach out to me because it made me think about all the times I ran out of Anita’s and how when I am upset I can pull the plug (or parts of me can) and how it is really important to me that my therapist recognises when I am truly wanting to end and when I feel backed into a corner and feel like I need to leave because I can’t tolerate the feelings of disconnect etc.

Even though Elle was clear that she would always contact me in a rupture situation – my brain was whirring after the session and so I wrote her this letter at the time:

I was thinking about what you said yesterday, about the client that never came back – because of course that’s what my brain does at 3am when I can’t sleep and the anxiety is doing its thing. I actually had a lot of thoughts, like I can think of hundreds of reasons of why that all happened, but I am sure there’s nothing you haven’t thought about over the years so it’s not relevant.

However, what it did make me really think about was what would happen if something similar happened with us. You’ve probably figured out by now that I am not someone who cancels last minute and, generally speaking, if I did it would be because something was out of my control with the kids or something. But, actually, there are times when I get completely hijacked by my system and the “I don’t want to go” (it’s much bigger and more complicated than that) is really hard to get around.

Tbh it’s rarely an “I don’t want to go” because there is lots of me that absolutely does but it’s sometimes more of a “things feel very wrong, something is up, I’m scared that it’s all going to blow up, I don’t feel safe, I feel hurt, abandoned, rejected, maybe even angry… [on and on and on]…and so I need to protect myself from that and stay away – and she doesn’t care anyway so what’s the point?! It’s better to leave before I get left…”

I mean I totally get what happens, where it comes from, what parts of me are involved, and yet when it’s happening it is not always easy to sidestep it. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic but I guess at least there’s a really clear trajectory on how it all runs which I guess at least I am aware of now. And I see it a lot. Clients, for whatever reason, find it difficult to go to their therapy, maybe don’t show up, and might seem to be ghosting but actually it’s not because they don’t want to be there it’s because there is some kind of a rupture (that maybe the therapist has absolutely no clue about) and they, for whatever reason, can’t bring it to the room.

So many of us are conflict avoidant and even though bringing ‘big feelings’ shouldn’t be a problem, I guess most of our experiences have been that when we have, we’ve been mocked, or shamed, or abandoned, or gaslit…you know the deal… and so we’d rather not risk that repeating. I think sometimes, too, part of us knows that our reaction to whatever has been triggered is MUCH BIGGER than it ‘should’ be and so there’s shame and embarrassment there too because we feel completely derailed and it’s not even that big a deal (only it is a massive deal!).

I think it can be all the more unsettling for people that don’t really spend much time contemplating the therapeutic relationship and so when something between the therapist and client happens it’s hard to know what to do with it. Like it’s much easier to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sick” rather than, “I feel really anxious and something you said has really upset me” when they thought they were there to talk about their work stress and all of a sudden all this other shit is stirred up.

Sometimes it feels like a toddler or a teenager having a tantrum but actually I think that’s exactly what is happening – whatever is being triggered isn’t necessarily conscious and, in that moment, the adult self isn’t available enough to navigate the situation and all we know is that it just feels huge and insurmountable and overwhelming and completely in our bodies – and so the instinct is to run away and hide.

In some ways I think this can be really hard to manage because whatever is happening to stop a person turning up to therapy feels massive to them, and acting out can bring on all the massive feelings of shame and embarrassment afterwards and basically like you just want to crawl into a hole and die. It takes a lot to feel brave enough to come back and talk it through, and there has to be a strong enough sense that the person opposite you isn’t going to confirm everything that you fear is happening. It really is like with toddlers and teens. They need an adult to help them out of their meltdowns sometimes and an invitation back to work things out.

It is really complicated (but also not). I think when people don’t show up, rather than being flaky or disrespectful (I mean I guess there must be some people like that), is about testing whether the therapeutic relationship is strong or not. Like do you care enough to come find me if I disappear or will you just let me go? And I really get that this is complicated because all the training is like, ‘therapists should respect client autonomy’ and all the shit about not creating a dynamic that encourages ‘game playing’… only that is really pathologising and really makes it seem like everything that happens is down to us. It’s not game playing, it’s trying to protect ourselves.

As I said, lots of us have been hurt over the years and haven’t had the experience of managing conflict in a way that doesn’t somehow burn the house down and so rather than face a situation that potentially will hurt us more on top of whatever hurt feelings we are already feeling, we disappear. I think, for me at least, if I experience something as being abandoning or rejecting then it absolutely triggers the need to run away.

I’m not explaining this brilliantly well, and this is looooonnnggg, but I guess what I am trying to say is, if I cancelled last minute, or didn’t show up it’s not because I am rude, or don’t respect boundaries or whatever else – it’s because something is really wrong (from my side) and it feels too hard to come. If you just let me go and never contacted me to find out what was up or didn’t reach out and invite me to come and try and figure out what’s going on with you in person, actually what it confirms to me is probably everything I was running away from in the first place which is the feeling that you don’t care…

I’d like to think that a situation like this would never happen – but I also live in my head and experience often enough my runner ducks bolting. Just usually I have enough time to gather them back together before I see you.

Having a therapy go south in this way is sooooo common and causes such a lot of hurt to those involved. I have way too many stories – not just my own! – and I was wondering whether after the event a therapist reaching out would make any difference. And I think it would. An opportunity to talk through what happened when it’s not live would probably be really helpful because I think we tend to carry this shit around for a long time. 

Anyway, that’s… a lot. I’ll try not to run away, but if I do, please come and find me. X

And so… I guess it was helpful that I sent that last year, because Elle did come and find me…and the session when we did get to meet was HUGE. I’ll get the ‘what happened next’ post up asap.

Dear A, It’s been Two Years…

rubberbandsandchewinggum15 Comments

Dear A,

It’s hard to believe that it’s two years since the Anita that I knew and loved was last properly in the room with me. It’s two years this weekend since you went off on your holiday for your birthday, full of reassurances, telling me that “nothing will change” and that you would be “coming back” and that you “love(d) me very much”. Little did I know, then, what would happen to us barely two weeks later. Little did I know you’d never properly come back to me. Had I have known you would pull the plug on us, on me, I would have made more of an effort to take in those last moments of feeling (relatively) safe and held.

I would have taken so many mental pictures of the room, and of you, and tried so much harder to commit the feelings of connection and safety to memory so that I could refer back to them and use them to soothe all the hurting parts of me later down the line. I would have breathed your familiar smell in, carefully listened for your slow, steady heartbeat all the while soaking up every last second of feeling safe in the moment because I can count on one hand the times that I have managed to settle my nervous system since we ended.

Having said that, I think it’s actually all the memories of the connected moments that now hurt me the most. I find it so difficult to sit in this place where I know what we had, how it felt, how you made me feel…and to now be here – it’s all gone… Of course, I have so much of ‘us’ evidenced in my writing and in voice recordings as ‘proof’ but I can’t bear to read back over my blogs or listen to our sessions anymore.

It hurts, too, that the tangible items that you gave me, gifts and transitional objects, now only bring me pain. On the one hand they serve as evidence that we really did exist for a moment in time, well three-and-a half years, but on the other hand that no matter how much “love and care” there was, it wasn’t enough to make you stay. We don’t exist in the here and now and it breaks my heart.

Sometimes I wonder if there was anything I could have said or done differently in those last sessions before your holiday? Could I have said something to pull at your heart enough so that you wouldn’t have ever considered leaving me in the first place? It’s hard to know. I spent months saying ‘less’ and hiding myself away, trying to give you space for fear of being too much because I knew that you weren’t well and things were hard in your personal life…as it was I ended up being “too much” and “not enough” all at the same time regardless of my best efforts to behave in the right way.

When you came back from your trip you were not the same Anita. From the moment I walked in the door I knew something was wrong and it took less than five minutes for you to say, “I’m going to have to bring the counselling with you to an end” and that you were ending with all your “long-term clients”. It’s funny. It’s so much easier to say “counselling” rather than “relationship” and for you to refer to me now as a “client” rather than “RB”. It’s easier to say “I need to cut the stress out of my life” rather than “I am cutting you from my life.”

For someone with the kind of wounding I have, and the issues around rejection and abandonment I struggle with, the way you handled our ending…or should I say ‘not ending’ (?!) couldn’t have been worse.

The day you told me we needed to end, you broke down, there was a complete role reversal, and you even said, “This is meant to be your session not mine.” And yet, I still paid you for it – and for all of those ridiculous sessions where my heart was basically being emotionally stomped all over in hobnail boots.

I focused on trying to save you (not for the first time), because if I could rescue you then it would mean I would be saved too. At the end of that first bomb-drop session, you shifted and said that we would, “find a way to connect” and that we would “figure something out.” I left devastated but somewhat hopeful because this back and forth with you wasn’t completely new territory for me.

Looking back over the last eight or so months of our time together, there was such a lot of push/pull and it wasn’t coming only from my end. I absolutely have a wonky brain, and things get messy, but there is generally a trigger. One minute I was “too dependent” and the next you’d tell me that you “love” me “such a lot.” It’s weird being someone’s “stress” but also being “so important” to them. It’s no wonder I got more and more panicked, and more and more clingy because things weren’t really safe, were they? – I wasn’t imagining it, even though you tried to tell me it was all in my head and that you “hadn’t changed”.

You said so many times in those weeks, “This isn’t what I want” but it was you who made this happen. You chose to cast me adrift and yet keep working with your other clients even if it was because you couldn’t “afford not to work”. I will never ever be ok with that. No matter how many angles I come at this from, and no matter how much benefit of the doubt I want to give you, I can’t let that go. You chose to sever our connection and chose to maintain others. It doesn’t make sense to me. I get that different clients demand different things from you but I just don’t understand how if anything you ever said to me was true that you would do this to me…and to others like me.

You wax lyrical about the importance of ethical practice but I am struggling hard to find anything ethical in how this all went down. At the very least, surely you would ensure that the clients that you were letting go were safe, and had someone else to go to. Like what on earth were you and your supervisor doing when all this was happening? You must have been speaking with her throughout this car crash time. Surely, there’s a fundamental understanding that you, as a therapist, safeguard your vulnerable clients – I mean you do understand complex trauma, don’t you?

And on a human level…well, on a human level you just do better.

Perhaps I am just too sensitive. Maybe I care too much. I have always worn my heart on my sleeve and this has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. But I sure as hell know that if I had hurt someone in the way that you have hurt me that I couldn’t just let it go. I couldn’t just bury my avoidant head in the sand and pray that when I came up for air that everything had gone away. I would have to try and make amends even if the other party didn’t want to hear it. Like how can you sit in your therapy room week in, week out and not be perpetually reminded of what you have done? Are you really able to just blank it all from your mind? – I just don’t know how you possibly could.

I think this is partly why, now, even two years later I am struggling to let the last bit of hope of you go. There’s a little bit of me that wonders if one day you’d try and repair because this isn’t how we treat people we love is it? Surely, somewhere in you there is a part that wants a proper resolution, a proper goodbye, to know that you have repaired some of the harm you’ve done…because that’s what I would want if it were me.

I know that is really only the hope of a little part that thinks you might come back, the one that trusts and always wants to see the best in people…and ultimately the one that always gets so very badly hurt. It’s certainly not my adult self, because there is no way on earth I’d let you near my poor vulnerable heart ever again. Even if you did muster up an apology that acknowledged and reflected the magnitude of the damage that you did to me, I could never trust you again and I think I would even struggle to accept an apology now. I no longer respect you. In fact, I think you are pretty dangerous.

I know too, that I cannot continue to judge your actions and behaviour by my standards. You are not me. And whilst I couldn’t do what you’ve done to me and your other poor clients…you clearly aren’t bothered by your conduct. You probably now just notch it up to having burnt out and “stress” so of course you weren’t at your best…but that doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for what you did and the harm you caused…it just gives you a sense of justification for it.

I have spent years and years waiting for people to change and do better – but the thing is, people rarely change. It’s a good thing then, that the majority of my system has, not exactly let you go, or moved on, but there’s some thick scar tissue forming where that open wound was. I’ve protected myself from what’s happened – to an extent. I don’t long for you anymore. I don’t look for you out in the world. In fact, if I were to come across you now, I imagine I would walk the other way and avoid meeting you because really, what is there to say?

It’s done now. You’ve moved so far past it and our relationship. You’re still working. You’re still advertising that you work with trauma and on a long-term basis. None of the things you said about moving to “couples work” or “online work only” and “no more trauma clients” are remotely true. And I think maybe that’s one of the hardest parts. The lies. Like why bother? It hasn’t protected me any. It hasn’t made it easier. All it’s done is make me question everything about what I thought to be true between you and me.

And where am I left in all this? Well, it’s two years on and I am still hurting – although not like I was. Anniversaries – or should I say ‘traumaversaries’ are rough. I hate the fact that once again I am super aware of dates and how they correspond to our relationship disintegrating.

I hate the fact that I have been a depressed, frozen, dissociative wreck all week.

I hate that once again I am left trying to process all this by writing you a letter that you will never see.

I hate that I will spend the next month struggling hard to keep my head above water as the various anniversaries of aspects of our final month together unfold.

I especially hate that the emotional upset is already making its way into my relationship with my therapist Elle. I am scared stiff that something bad is going to happen between us because I am hard-wired to look for problems and the slightest sense of something being ‘off’ feels completely catastrophic – and it’s not fair.

Elle is going to be away in May right at the time that it was all unravelling with me and you… it couldn’t be worse timing. She did ought to be able to go away without my wheels falling off… and yet there seems to be almost an inevitability that the shit will hit the fan this month. I get that I should be able to circumnavigate that, but when all my system is activated it’s so much harder to hang onto any sense of safety.

Part of me is so angry about all this. I am mad that two years down the line I am still trying to undo the damage that you have done. And I am mad that I’ve basically spent the last five years trying to heal from failed therapeutic relationships on top of the original traumas I came into therapy for.

So, happy birthday Anita, I’m sure you will have a wonderful time… I hope you choke on your cake and the candles set fire to the table cloth! See… I don’t even mean it. I really want to but the truth is, I still wish you nothing but love and happiness because as much as I wish I didn’t, I still love you. x

The Therapist, The T-shirt, And The Trigger: A Journey Of Doubt And Vulnerability…And A Massive Meltdown/Rupture

rubberbandsandchewinggum11 Comments

There’s a certain kind of raw vulnerability that comes with the territory when you’re in therapy – or at least that’s the case when the protectors aren’t running the show and shutting things down! I spend most of my time here writing about my therapy and the messy process of confronting and working with parts of myself- my minibus.

Currently, it’s a bit of a disaster on board the RB bus, and all the passengers/parts seem to be noisily vying for various kinds of care and attention. These parts of me have so many different wounds and so many different needs that it can be very hard to strike the balance of what is needed and whom to focus on in therapy – especially if several parts of different ages are activated all at the same time (like now – groan!).

When the conditions are just right, the alchemy that happens in the therapy room can feel amazing can’t it? Life changing, actually. And sessions can feel like a much-needed balm. Sadly, though, for those of you that have followed this blog a while, you’ll also know that it doesn’t always work out and it’s not always positive. I’ve spent a great deal of time talking about when therapy goes wrong and the damage that gets done time and again.

Therapy is (supposed to be) a safe space, a place where you can unpack your baggage and work through it without judgment, a place where all of you can be seen and held and understood – a place where you can metaphorically get out your favourite pair of rather faded, threadbare pants, the ones that don’t really fit anymore, hold them up the light and try figure out why you just can’t seem to let them go despite having many pairs of ‘good’ pants… and why despite having lost one of the socks in a pair some time ago, you daren’t part with the remaining one just in case the other should one day miraculously show up again…even though you probably did leave the other under a bed in a holiday apartment in Spain.

Throughout all this your therapist won’t flinch or mock you for your terrible underwear but stare at it alongside you and help you work out what’s really going on and what the pants and socks symbolise…or something like that. LOL!

So, yeah, it’s a safe space.

But, like with everything else in life, the boundaries between “safe” and “unsafe” aren’t always as clear as we think they should be. Sometimes, the things that trigger us don’t come in the form of some big, glaring issue: “like a tick” or “holy fuck RB – those pants are truly disgusting, how could you possibly still want them?”; sometimes they show up in the tiniest, most unexpected moments – wearing a slogan t-shirt, for example.

I guess I should back up and start from the beginning.

Last week, thanks to the wonders of the almighty ‘algorithm’, Instagram chose to hand me a fucking doozy: one my therapist Elle’s ‘open’ profiles – one that’s apparently been out in the magical internet universe for a good while, but because I don’t actively search Elle out (anymore!), I had no idea that it existed.

Typically, this all happened on a day where I was feeling disconnected and distant from Elle, a day where I had actually wanted to email her and reach out for reassurance, but had stopped myself. Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot of shame around my ‘need for Elle’ and have felt myself backing away a bit. I don’t think she’s got any idea that this is where I am at right now, but I feel the gap between us opening up week on week…or at least some part of me is experiencing our relationship in this way and it’s not great. I’d go so far as to say a good half of the passengers in the mini-bus aren’t strapped in and we’ve veered off-road.

Brace positions folks…we all know how this ends.

Of course, Elle’s personal Insta account is locked down (thank goodness…I think…) but this one isn’t. What showed up on my feed wasn’t some professional ‘therapist’ account; it was personal-ish – well without giving too much away, it’s a page that she’s made to showcase something she’s taken up relatively recently – a performance-based activity. This new ‘thing’ is something I’ve known about for a long time and something we’ve discussed on and off over the last eighteen months so I wasn’t completely surprised when I saw she had made a page for it.

This ‘thing’ has caused me some angst before- I think I mentioned it at the time. As bad luck would have it, one of my friends was also doing the ‘thing’ at the same time and had met Elle and become friends with her through this activity. That has been really hard for me to manage on lots of levels. I have wanted to go support my friend and watch her perform but have deliberately kept away from going to see her knowing that Elle would likely be there, too, and so instead I watch her from her online videos (my friend…not Elle!).

Our city is relatively small and so there is always going to be a chance of running into each other anyway- but I would never deliberately put myself in the same space that Elle might occupy because – ouch… it would physically hurt to have her ignore me…or of course, the Elle I meet in the outside world not be the person I see in the therapy room.

It’s been hard in other ways too. As time has gone on, I can’t help but feel more and more jealous that my friend gets to spend time with Elle – doesn’t have to pay to see her – isn’t on the clock and kicked out when the time is up – can send her WhatsApp messages and memes and basically have a ‘normal’ relationship/friendship with her…and, I’m not stupid, I get that Elle is my therapist and not my friend and I undoubtedly get a different kind of relationship with her – but ugh.

It’s not even like my friend is someone that only lives in my phone and I rarely see. I see this woman every single fucking day, our kids are in the same class at school FFS, we hang out and go on walks with my bloody dog…and yet there’s this unspoken thing between us. I told her the Elle is my therapist early on…but thereafter we’ve both ignored the fact but it sort of feels like an elephant in the room.

But that’s not the problem this week. It’s just there always in the background.

Back to the Insta page. Perhaps I should not have clicked on the page when it came up. But then, it’s not like it’s a secret Elle has kept from me – the thing she’s doing, I mean. And as I said, I felt disconnected from her that day and suddenly here she was in my phone. I had chance to see what Elle had been talking about all these months. I find it hard to hold her in mind at the best of times, and I was floundering last week and here were actual videos of Elle that I could watch and I was curious… and desperate to feel like she was still real…and so I started scrolling through the page.

Big error.

And, you could laugh…I probably should…but it wasn’t anything that she said or did that upset me. Nope. It was a t-shirt that’s fucked everything up…you can’t make it up, can you?

On one of the videos Elle was wearing a shirt with a phrase on it that hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. I’m not going to tell you exactly what the t-shirt said. That’s not the point. The point is that the words, the design, everything about it felt painful to me. It felt like Elle was wearing something that spoke directly to me – even if it wasn’t intended to. She knows a lot about me and she knows what my life is like and how it is set up. And here was a slogan that ripped into an aspect of that. Noone needs to see ‘Fuck your ______’ and a picture of that burning…and no one needs to see that on the body of their therapist on an online video.

I get it. It’s not meant to be personal. Elle would never in a million years think that I would see this. She probably didn’t think at all –  

But it’s hard not to wonder: is this a sign? Is it a cosmic nudge that the safe space I thought I had built around her is, in reality, much smaller than I thought? – or possibly totally non-existent? That in fact, she is not at all who I thought she was, or hoped her to be. The truth is, I’ve been struggling with a deep sense of doubt all week and really couldn’t connect this week in my session (although it wouldn’t have been apparent because I am SOOOOOO good at looking fine when I am anything but!).

I kept my most vulnerable parts firmly locked away and I felt as though something was wrong the whole time…but that’s because for me, or several parts of me, there is now something wrong. It wasn’t helped at all when, that was the first session in as long as I can remember that Elle didn’t reach for me. She didn’t hold my hand…and as I got up to leave, she opened the door. We usually hug at the end and it was as though she had forgotten…or maybe she just didn’t want to? I did ask for a hug but it all just landed really flat for me. This has added an extra dimension of fear around our relationship heading south even without the fucking t-shirt.

How do I even bring this to her?

How do you sit across, well next to, the person who’s been helping you heal and admit that you feel suddenly unsafe in the therapy? How do you tell them that you feel like they might just be humouring you or tolerating you because it’s their job to, and not because they genuinely care about you as a person? How do you say, “I see and recognise EVERYTHING that you do for me, but my brain can’t hang onto that in the face of a perceived abandonment or rejection and right now I feel like everything is an act and I want to run away before you hurt me any more. My little parts are terrified that you are going to leave too…and tell me I am too much.”

I know. I know. I need to say exactly that, don’t I?!

For those of us who have spent years, a life-time even, feeling like we don’t quite belong in the world, who have never felt quite good enough, feel as though we have to work doubly hard to be accepted and that love and connection comes with a catch…it’s hard to build trust and even harder to maintain it. This is especially the case after everything that happened with Em and Anita and Hannah.

It’s taken a good while for me to really feel safe with Elle, to trust that what she says is true, and that she is there for me. And my goodness, she demonstrates it in so many ways time and again…and so seeing this version of Elle online has basically felt like the universe is playing a cruel joke on me – AGAIN. Because I so want to believe that Elle is the person I have come to know over the last eighteen months and not the person my phone sent me last week…she is, of course, both…so what do I do with that?

I know I need to find a way to bring this up because literally just now – writing this post – the joy of the algorithm has done another two things to me – it’s shown me that my friend is going to be doing the ‘thing’ again next week with Elle (groan) and Facebook has also decided that Elle’s child may be on the list of ‘someone I know’ despite me not being friends with Elle online, us having only one mutual friend, and my NEVER having searched her child out… just no…no more of this cruel hell please!

I am so activated and upset and basically overwhelmed by this whole situation this last week and the longer I keep quiet about it the worse it gets. I can feel myself drifting away from Elle. There are a lot of competing voices inside, though – and it really isn’t helpful when some of them are saying to “shut the fuck up and keep your mouth shut”…because what if what I have to say doesn’t go down well? What if Elle feels like her privacy has been intruded upon. What happens if she gets defensive- or worse – reactive? I am imagine her first action would be to block me from seeing that account because I clearly can’t handle it and that would feel rejecting too.

I don’t want her to think that I’m some kind of stalker that’s sought her out on social media and then had a meltdown about what I’ve seen. Because that isn’t it AT ALL. And, then there’s the other bit -the self-doubting part of me that is so used to me being the problem that I tend to look inside and find fault with myself first. So, I am not even sure whether or not I am just overreacting to the whole thing in the first place and should just get over it and let it go? Maybe I am just being super sensitive and dramatic? I’m more or less over the ‘group email’ now and I never told Elle about what had happened maybe I can move through this alone, too, and not risk fucking things up with another therapist.

The thing is – it’s still in there somewhere, isn’t it? Like, it’s stored away as a nugget of doubt and this latest thing with the shirt feels like another added to the pile…and I don’t want there to be a pile building up because I’ve found that once you start to accumulate doubt nuggets they seem to grow exponentially and before you know it, you’re surrounded by doubts and can see little else.

And perhaps I need to be less judging of myself. Maybe I am overreacting – but what I know is this: the heavy feeling in my chest and the sick feeling in my stomach are real…and the sadness I feel is there regardless of the trigger. It’s not the same as Em calling me a tick, but it’s in the same zone… basically something about me is unlikeable and deficient in Elle’s eyes and that hurts because more than anything I want her to judge me as worthy.

The video was filmed back in November and honestly, since that time Elle and I have done some incredible work, we have got closer and closer to each other, and I have felt so safe and contained with her (just haven’t caught myself up from Christmas here yet have I?!)…and yet, it was a choice she made to wear that t-shirt that day…having already known me for 15 months at that point, told me that she loves me, and you know all the lovely things…

Ugh.

I get that life as a therapist is a bloody minefield – because Elle is a human and not just a therapist, isn’t she? She exists in the world outside the room as a person with all sorts of feelings and opinions that may not necessarily align with the clients she sees. Like of course, I know that. But there is always a chance a client may come across you in the wider world- or even actively seek you out…and…well…fuck it…all I can say is this t-shirt has really upset me and I don’t know what to do about it.

There’s a part of me—the protector part—that wants to quit therapy entirely. That part of me feels it would be easier to cut and run, and avoid having to squirm in discomfort about this whole thing. My track record for bringing difficult stuff to therapists and it working out positively hasn’t been exactly great and honestly, I don’t want to be in a situation where I feel ‘done to’ again when things don’t work out. Like I don’t want to feel the pain of rejection or abandonment again…although on a level I already feel this this week. I don’t want to lose Elle but also, I don’t want to be in therapy with someone who is just tolerating me and behind the scenes thinks badly of me.

Complex trauma really is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t it? I know that how I feel right now is being exacerbated by the fact that we are headed into May – and 2 years since Anita went away and never really came back. My safe person went away on holiday full of reassurances and returned a different person. Elle is going away in May too. Like, what happens if it all happens again? And the pattern repeats because once again I am being too much, having too many big feelings, and the hard work to be around me is simply not worth it?

So here I am, sitting with all of this discomfort, trying to figure out how to move forward. Trying not to let the Inner Critic get too loud. The fear is real. The uncertainty is paralyzing. But I know that if I don’t bring it up, if I don’t address it somehow, I’ll be stuck in this cycle of self-doubt and avoidance all the while losing connection with Elle and that is frankly terrifying.

So, here’s to the T-shirt, the trigger, and the uncomfortable journey ahead…2025 can, frankly, go do one!

C-PTSD Triggers – Episode 5723: Therapist’s Generic/Impersonal Group Emails

rubberbandsandchewinggum22 Comments

Oh lordy! I honestly feel like I am navigating a fucking gator-infested swamp of Complex Trauma Doom right now…Seriously, it’s like running through a minefield of endless triggers at the moment, and I seem to be setting them off with nearly every step I take. It’s starting to do my head in, frankly – and my entire system is taking a lot of hits! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was an off switch for all our sensitivities?…or a reset for trauma brain…

What’s the problem today you ask? – I mean there are several ongoing issues and upsets #breakdown but today’s bit of bollocks is that I have been once again upended by a seemingly innocuous email communication from my therapist Elle.

Oh, but of course this would happen today! –  the first day in a really long time where I have been able to carve out some space and time for myself in a place that I love- and then rather than be able to sink into safe and calm I have spent the day ruminating on the message! – let’s be clear, group mail outs trigger the shit out of me. FFS.

This is not the first time I have had a reaction to an impersonal email or communication from a therapist. Years ago I remember Anita handing me a printed sheet of paper at the end of a session with her holiday dates on and it signing off with something like ‘sorry for the inconvenience it may cause…best wishes…’ and it sent me into outer space because how could it possibly be that one minute I was snuggled into her body with her telling me that she loved me and the next minute I was being presented with cold admin related paperwork and sent on my merry way? This kind of thing jars my system so badly… because, yay for relational trauma and the fear of people turning cold and leaving.

Early on in my work with Elle a similar situation to today happened (a group email to all clients) and I went belly up then, too. It was the first time that my mask of coping slipped with Elle. I had read her message that began with, ‘Dear All, My apologies for the impersonal nature of this group email…’ and it landed really hard. At the time I felt like the group email was a backhanded way of her addressing something with me and feeling like I was getting rejected for something I didn’t know about – basically WhatsApp communication being a ‘no’. I absolutely crumbled. I was able to tell her in an email:

The email you sent on Friday made me cry. Like I actually fell apart. I felt like I’d pissed you off, and rather than tell me directly you’d done it in a ‘send to all’. The feeling of needing to run away and self-protect was massive and really highlights to me what a fucking massive mess I am in. Literally everything feels like a rejection or an abandonment or like I have done something wrong or that I’m fucking things up and my system just can’t cope.

Elle replied with a really holding/caring message to that and I think it was probably the start of me moving into trusting her a bit with ‘messy me’. At that point I wasn’t especially triggered by the fact I was receiving a mail out to all clients because I was still getting to know her and wasn’t all in – but that has certainly shifted today because crikey…it’s been a lot.

I just REALLY DON’T EVER want to be receiving a ‘Notice to all clients’.

When I feel attached to a therapist the last very fucking thing I want is the reminder that I am one of many clients that my therapist sees on her conveyor belt of losers each week, or that the carefully constructed relationship we have only exists in the room for the time I am there and is nothing more than an elaborate paid for pantomime full of smoke and mirrors. Elle is running a business (ugh she said that today in the email ‘rising costs of running a business’) and that is therapy. Anything beyond that is just wishful thinking on my part.

Being just a ‘client’ is hard enough but being reminded of the ‘others’ that I have to share Elle with triggers all kinds of sibling jealousy…I don’t want to be conscious of the fact that there will be other people Elle likes better than me, others who she would choose to see over me if there was a choice to make… it’s all just too painful. I do understand that this is ‘the work’ but sometimes when you have had a childhood of never being put first, never feeling important, never having someone’s undivided attention…then it’s not surprising that we might just want that in therapy (even though it can’t really ever happen – the fantasy of that is important).

Some of you might remember when I, idiotically, asked Anita about a box on the shelf in her room one day and she told me that a client who had anxiety and trust issues had given it to her and that inside there was a stone with the word ‘trust’ on it and I wanted to curl up and die and for the floor to open up and swallow me whole.

Recently, I wrote about what a perfect therapy room would look like and shared it with Elle. She emailed back to say she really liked it, that she’d like to share it with supervisees, and then commented that the soft toy I had seen in the room (that I had mentioned in the post) belonged to another client… Oh holy fucking hell. Like no. Please no. Just no. I can’t explain how having that confirmed triggered the shit out of me. Of course I know that there’ll be loads of people working on their inner child in therapy with Elle- like I’m not stupid…but I don’t need reminding that there are other people that Elle might cuddle, read stories to…basically, I don’t want to know that she’s probably replicating what she’s doing with me with others.

I didn’t tell Elle this because honestly, I don’t want to come over as a needy, selfish brat… but it is how it is.

So, umm what else can I say about all this stuff?? It’s not just group emails that are problematic, generic communications aren’t great for me – full stop. Recently the ‘automated session reminder texts’ stopped because I let Elle know that they trigger me and I find them upsetting – like, the day before a session when I have drifted off into panic and doom because it’s been soooo long since I have seen her the last thing I want is stone cold admin… and so Elle has been sending me personalised messages that are far more in keeping with how we communicate both inside and outside the sessions and I have found them so much better.

So, it’s hardly surprising that today’s email landed so painfully. It’s been a bit of a week with one thing and another, anyway, but I just about got to the weekend in one piece with a bit of slipping and sliding. The irony in all this is, Elle and I had a really lovely reconnecting session this week after my holiday – like it was just so great to see her, we laughed a lot, and she surprised me with a really beautiful, thoughtful, handmade present that was so personal to our work I just wanted to cry – like my heart was fit to burst and I just can’t even begin to explain how much it meant to me. We’ve remained in close touch most of the week and it’s felt so nice…until today and this email.

But this is Complex Trauma brain for you, isn’t it? One minute things are going great, are doable and the next moment everything feels like it’s complete shit, and not real, and basically the protectors go wild trying to stop us from getting hurt. Adult me can see that today’s email is just a fucking admin email – but try explaining that to the minibus inside who wonder where ‘our Elle’ is. Like where’s the Elle that calls us ‘sweetpea’ and ‘lambkin’ and ‘flower’…now we are ‘client’.

Ugh. It’s just ugh.

So, what was it all about then? Well, Elle is putting her fees up from April – which is…fine. I mean, I get it, this is how things are. I know that money in therapy can be a minefield in itself for some of the reasons I have listed above – i.e it making the relationship seem fake. Like it’s very clearly a transactional relationship and without that exchange of money the therapy ceases to exist but over the years I have managed, just about, to see that actually just because I pay for my therapist’s time it doesn’t necessarily follow that the care and love I experience from her isn’t real…at least I feel that’s the case most of the time!

However, seeing things today like:

I appreciate that, for some of you, this will mean you will have to consider whether to continue working with me, or perhaps decrease the number of sessions you attend per month. If this is the case, please let me know as soon as you can so we can discuss the best way forward.

Are a reminder/warning that maybe things aren’t as solid as I think. I would like to think that if I couldn’t manage the increased fee that Elle wouldn’t just ditch me, or I’d have to see her less… but who knows from that email? Fortunately, I can absorb this increase – well, right now I can…June-September is always tricky as my work pretty much disappears.

I think the hardest thing about therapy in general is that for me therapy isn’t a six month or year-long financial commitment that I am investing in but will end soon and so it’s a stretch now but fundamentally worth it…but there is an end point.

For me therapy is going to be long-term and so it’s literally like having taken on a mortgage term and equates to about 25% of my income over the course of a year. That’s a lot, isn’t it? Elle and I have a 90-minute session each week – and I’d love to say I could go down to an hour, but we all know that that wouldn’t work, that it takes me so long to ground and feel safe in the first place that an hour just isn’t enough – and that even as things are now I am in a state of perpetual struggle because there actually isn’t enough contact. I miss having two sessions a week like I did with Em and A and how containing that felt.

I am really aware of the need to have some kind of regular, agreed upon contact on a Friday with Elle– even if it’s just a fifteen-minute call … but it’s all money isn’t it? Especially now. And don’t get me wrong, my time with Elle is worth every penny and then some! I really really get that she gives me WAY MORE than she has to – she is so available to me outside the sessions … and I am so grateful to her. She demonstrates in so many ways that I matter to her – but my belief in that is so fucking fragile and today has left me feeling like I need some serious reassurance.

I feel like a fucking fool getting so upset about this that I will go hide in my hole until Tuesday and in the meantime the littles will get more and more worked up because how embarrassing is it to say, “I have been completely derailed by your group email today and the little parts of me wonder if all of what I think our relationship is is a lie – am I delusional?”

Sometimes it feels so unfair that those of us with Complex Trauma who badly need therapy to keep afloat are always having to juggle finances to make it possible to do the therapy just to help us recover from things that weren’t even our fault to begin with. Childhood and life trauma are bad enough, but it’s especially galling to think about this when you’ve also experienced harm in therapy – all those years with Em and Anita for what? Debt and more trauma lumped on top!

I already work more hours than I want to/feel able to in order that I can keep going to my sessions but that’s a choice I have made because the therapy is so necessary. My last evening teaching session of the day (7pm) wipes me out and by Friday I am dying, but what other option is there? In the ideal world I would reduce my hours and this would stop me feeling so fucking burnt out all the time… but if I don’t see Elle my emotional world unravels.

So yeah…bleurgh..! Receiving this message on a Saturday has totally bummed me out. I wish Elle had have joined some dots and realised that this kind of generic communication might not land brilliantly well. Even, if she’d just sent a quick message with it at the top – ‘hey sweetpea, I hope you’re having a good weekend. I know this is a formal looking email below, but please know it’s just admin and doesn’t change us but I do understand how the mechanics of money in therapy can feel triggering sometimes and  I really don’t want for you to feel like I am pushing you away’. I dunno – anything really but she clearly has no idea how this has landed and is probably having a wonderful weekend enjoying the sun and blue skies we’re finally getting here in the UK.

In true RB style I’ve been stuck in a ruminating brain loop all day and just feel really far away from Elle…let me just say this one last time: impersonal group emails are not for me! – ugh. I feel like they are a pushback… and adult me knows it’s just life…

But right now, just fuck my life! And fuck CPTSD.

x

I could really use a hug right now – and a new brain!

Not Doing Brilliantly Well: Breakdown And Burnout

rubberbandsandchewinggum11 Comments

So, it’s been a while since I have been here to update the blog…months in fact…

I guess it was inevitable, but I had a total breakdown in January, folks, and just couldn’t do anything with it or myself at all. I was barely functional let alone able to write. It’d been coming on steadily for months, well, let’s be real, since May 2023 when everything with Anita disintegrated before my very eyes. Something had to give sooner or later – and that something was me.

I have been muddling through, hanging it together with rubber bands and chewing gum for such a long time, but then, OOooofffffff  November was ROUGH, December was BRUTAL, Christmas was UGH, and January … well… FUCK ME!! …The crash was real!

Somehow, we are almost at the end of February now, and I’m more or less functional again but it’s VERY tentative – cue full blown anxiety attack earlier today and the realisation that I am probably less ok than I think. Yikes.

I am floundering around and trying to put one foot in front of the other and not fall flat on my face again because there just isn’t capacity for me not to be ok any longer. The reality is that work kicks back in tomorrow after half term break (and several weeks preceding this of cancelling lots of work) and people need me to be on my ‘A game’…or at least ‘present’. The GCSE and A Level exams are looming and I simply can’t get away with any more sick days. I need to be the calm and supportive person that my students need – but it takes a lot. Somehow or other I need to pull something out of the bag – even if the bag has a fucking great hole in it and its contents have long been lost.

When things went south last month, Elle and I were on a therapy break (what a surprise)! I wrote a bit then to try and process and make sense of what was going on for me, but then I shut the laptop and it’s been sitting there as an open tab of shame ever since.

So, I guess maybe, I’ll post that here now and then try and get back to filling in blanks of what’s been happening more generally in another post – i.e bring things up to speed and talk about what happened when Elle and I met face-to-face after Christmas and her being sick and all the stuff since…but I don’t have the brain for that right now.

However, I feel like if I don’t try and post something now despite being overwhelmed with ‘everything’ another month will roll by and I’ll lose sense of where I am at. So apologies that the chronology is off but I’ll get back on track eventually.

It’s so hard when my brain stops working properly writing is the one thing that just falls away. I just can’t do it. My attention span is minimal and my ability to hold anything in mind just goes. I feel like I have been stuck in procrastination and freeze for pretty much the last six weeks and it’s been hard. Everything has suffered…self-care…everything.

So… buckle up for what was in the laptop and written in the height of the meltdown.

This was mid-January and Elle was away, it was all kinds of tough with anniversaries and bleurgh – it’s not pretty but is exactly how it was in the moment – my poor poor brain, system, self:

The fast acceleration into the place that is super scary happened this last week again. I could feel the wheels starting to fall off, the nightmares were relentless, the feeling of intense panic and overwhelm were all consuming; my system activated so massively (including all the protectors) and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I couldn’t regulate AT ALL and the spiral down into total meltdown and collapse happened. It’s hardly surprising, though, what with all the ‘shitty’ anniversaries landing: five years since I met Anita (and she’s no longer part of my life) and therefore also five years since Em called me a ‘tick’ and my therapy with her blowing up. There is so much hurt and grief. Like I don’t think I will ever get over this… it’s too much and sometimes it just catches up with me.

I always feel so vulnerable around now, understandably, but it’s been made a million times worse by the fact the Elle has been on a break this last week, too. It’s been two weeks between sessions at a time where, in all honesty, I could have used two sessions each week AND check ins not her absence and physical disconnect.

Instead of a feeling of safety and connection, it’s been the complete opposite of the level of holding and containment I needed. I’ve felt so far away from her and, of course, that’s also further triggered my system around the abandonment and rejection stuff that is already so live at this time of year. I have been certain that something bad is coming on Tuesday when we meet again, and have been in a place where I was really and truly considering leaving before I get left (god I am so sick of this horrid process!). There’s no evidence to suggest anything is wrong between Elle and I, but my system doesn’t understand that, all the alarms are blaring and it’s full-scale panic. It’s a total system malfunction.

Truthfully, Elle being away for this particular week in the year could not have been worse timing. Like it just felt like an absolute sucker punch. I felt my heart sink when she told me she’d be away, but’s it’s been especially tough having this happen on top of all the bumping along and disruption with the therapy pattern around Christmas holidays. Not seeing her face-to-face as planned on Christmas Eve was hard, and finding out that she had this current break coming the same day she let me know I couldn’t see her on the 24th was really painful, and then there was the cancellation on the 31st because she was sick which really unsettled me. Like it’s been a lot…even though we did end up speaking on the phone on Christmas Eve and seeing each other on the 1st January which was so needed (I’ll come back to this ‘good’ stuff next time).

On paper it would seem like not a lot changed, then, like Elle has really done her very best to minimise the disruptions and accommodate me. The fact that she came in on New Year’s day whilst still clearly unwell because she knew how much I needed the session shows she cares and gets it. And sane and rational me really sees it and appreciates it such a lot… but the rollercoaster my system has been on around all this at a hard time of year has been insane.

I’ve been holding on so tightly to what is left of my sanity and coping for such a long time now that I guess it was inevitable that something would give sooner or later. And so, this break on top of all that has gone before has just been too much and the final thread that was holding me together just snapped on Saturday in the BIGGEST way.

I am usually able to keep what’s going on internally (even if it is horrific) fairly locked up inside and suffer my way through alone whilst appearing largely normal and ‘functional’ in my day-to-day life but as this week has gone on my filter between my inner world with the distress I am feeling and my outer presentation has totally crumbled.

My mask has slipped, not just slipped- shattered – and this weekend I just completely fell apart. My usual relative calm disappeared and the snappy, angry, hurting parts of me were on full show and then shortly after that I broke and just sobbed and sobbed for hours – ugly crying, snot, convulsive sobs…you know? Full mental collapse. This wasn’t a ‘healthy’ release of emotion. I was completely out of control.

It’s hard to really explain because I think most of the time, I seem to be pretty unhappy and struggling, don’t I? So how is this any different? The last time I was here I was at a pretty low ebb. I spend so much time writing out my feelings, trying to process, doing the self-care, doing the therapy, blah blah fucking blah tick box of survival strategies, but sometimes I get so sick of how hard everything feels. I try so hard to drag myself through and into a better place but I feel like I am dragging the weight of the world behind me. It’s exhausting.

Like at what point do I just stop and admit defeat? I honestly can’t keep going like this anymore. I do get that I am neck deep in a depressive episode at the moment, and that it’s winter, and that this is the very fucking worst week of my calendar year but ugh…just really, when will it get easier?

As I said to Elle the other day in a message, “surely life isn’t meant to be this hard” and it shouldn’t. To find myself back in a place where self-harm seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do and suicidal thoughts are coming through my mind like buses- it’s not good. Like it’s really fucking shit in fact. It all just feels desperately bad and I can’t seem to get out of it. I feel like I am screaming underwater.

I was meant to go away this weekend, alone, but I realised that this would be a very bad move and as much as being around people feels intolerable, I am at least safe.

So yeah, I’m having all the fun of the fair right now! I know if I wait it out things will get better. I just wish there was a magic wand I could wave to make all the hurt and distress stop and allow some space to breathe and settle. I feel like I just can’t land in my window of tolerance at all…or letterbox.

I was feeling fairly connected to Elle at the start of this break even if I was overwhelmed but the steady sense of disconnect started as the first weekend approached, the panic kicked in, and from Tuesday (the day of our usual session) onwards it’s felt like any connection we have has been completely severed.

I was so painfully aware of needing my session with Elle on Tuesday because so much was being activated around the old stuff with Anita and Em, so to not see her or even check in via a message felt really difficult. I could have reached out – I am sure she wouldn’t have minded – but then she’s on a holiday and look how many times things have gone to shit with therapists during or directly following a break. I don’t want to do anything that might make Elle get fed up with me and so I have backed right off. The fear of history repeating is huge.

Sadly, my mind can’t seem to differentiate that this disconnect from Elle has come purely from my side. All it knows is that disconnect feels terrifying and that if it goes on for long enough it’s hard to come back from it. This horrible feeling has got worse and worse through the course of this week. I have been steadily drifting away on the ocean in my little boat and now I can’t see the land at all and the seas are getting rougher and rougher and Elle has no idea.

The sadness of the little parts is big but there’s also some anger coming up from the protective parts who I think have just about had enough of feeling ‘left’. It’s hard enough getting through the regular week and only having a single session after so many years of two sessions a week with Anita and Em. It feels like I am always stretching just that little bit too far between sessions and it takes its toll. I wish that I could land in a space where I wasn’t hitting a panic on a Friday each week and then hanging on by the skin of my teeth to get to Tuesdays.

Holidays are very necessary, but my god they suck balls too! That probably makes me too needy or too dependent or whatever else – but it is how it is right now. Parts of me are so mad that it’s like this again but part of me really gets it. It’s all been a lot for too long and there is only so much I can hold on top of the demands of my exhausting day-to-day life.

I feel like I have mentioned this struggle between sessions in so many different ways over the last eighteen months but it feels really hard to ask for more from Elle. I think we need a Friday check in… I mean, I’d love to see her twice a week in person but I don’t think that’s on the cards. I get the sense that she is carefully managing what she can cope with and probably two sessions would feel a lot of me… and that’s hard isn’t it?

Thinking you’re only tolerable for a certain amount of time each week but any more than that risks burning them out is hard. Again, Elle hasn’t said this AT ALL and so it could be my projection given what’s happened before with other therapies but I am just not willing to reach out and ask for something and be told no. Elle has invited me so many times to ask her for what I need and has said she would try and give me what I need.

I just wish it felt easier to make requests but I know right now my reluctance is due to how live the memory of stuff with Em is. Like, all the times I braved asking for things: transitional object (ugh pebblegate), three dots in a text mid-week, sitting next to me, playing games, ANYTHING AT ALL REALLY, and getting no…it’s hard to feel like I want to brave more of getting that feeling of rejection and shame that arises.

Elle is not Em, or A…she’s really great…and I really want to trust Elle – I do trust her- but when I feel vulnerable, I just can’t get out of my shell or ask for help. I hide.

I have been especially conscious of all the soundbites that haunt me during this break, “adhesive like a tick”, “too dependent”, “you want more than I can give” etc and have been so terrified of being ‘too much’ so as I say, I have really backed away from contact with Elle despite needing it. I don’t want her to feel the need to escape my neediness. I really want her to be able to have a break … just not in January 😉.

I think it would have probably helped if when the wheels had started to fall off I’d have been able to reach out and ask for some reassurance that we were still ok…but I was set dead against it in my head. I just told myself to tough it out…get your shit together RB! I see now that that was an error because it’s much harder to get back on track from this point although I guess at some point I am going to have to make a choice – to either continue on in this misery or reach out and ask for support because this isn’t just a small wobble that I can handle on my own, this is a scary crisis point that I haven’t found myself in for several years.

I am trying to hang onto the good… because there is and has been such a lot of it. But it’s hard to remember that when your brain is working against you and all your body knows is terror. I honestly hate how when my system gets hijacked and adult me loses the capacity to hold it all that it gets so bleak so quickly. I guess this really is a reminder of a patterning that must have been forged early on in my childhood. This terror – it’s visceral – and so familiar.

It feels really bonkers to be here because even in the last session before the break, Elle demonstrated that she clearly had my littles in mind and was doing everything she could to settle them before she left. I had been waffling on in false adult moaning about some daily life shit and she stopped me when there was a natural pause. It was about half an hour before the end of the session and she asked me if I wanted a story and a cuddle…yep…

I think in the sessions before a break I am always preparing to be left and almost pretend like I am fine, and coping, and adult … but inside it’s a different story. I’m so glad she knows this about me now and reached for me rather than allowing me to run down the clock and then feel awful and unseen afterwards. I just need to remind myself of this when I feel like I have been abandoned.

After the story, Elle had asked if she could take Baby-Elly and Monty away with her on her break and send me photos of what they got up to, she thought it might be a nice thing for them to do. She then asked me if I would take Hare Bunny (that I gave her for Christmas) home with me so that he didn’t get lonely in the office whilst she was gone. Like that’s really lovely isn’t it? And I really really loved that she thought of that. It’s a world away from the no contact breaks with Elle, or even the texts from Anita.

Like how nice to take our transitional object away, and include the little elephant that’s been held hostage all these months with Anita. Adult me can see how hard Elle is working to keep my system in connection with her… it’s just a lot when I need a big cuddle, some reassurance, and to hear her voice.

Elle sent me a picture of Monty and Baby-Elly waiting to go on their holiday last week and on Monday one from their break. It made me smile. But then as the week went on it felt so so hard for me and I felt so far away and as much as I wanted to reach out and send a message ‘how is everyone enjoying their holiday?’ or ‘I miss you all’.

I didn’t. Because I can’t forget when Anita went on holiday, sent me messages, sent me photos, told me she was thinking of me….and I literally sent, ‘Looks lovely, I miss you’ back…that I was told that when she’d read the message she felt pressured and stressed and that this was probably part of what led her to end the therapy. I know this says more about her than me, and her mental state and how she’d allowed herself to burnout…but it was me that was taken out in the crossfire and it is me that is now terrified of a repeat.

I still wonder how I was supposed to glean from the messages from A that we were in serious trouble and that she was going to terminate. Before she left, she told me everything was fine, that we were going to be ok, that she would come back… and even the night before that hideous ‘I need to bring the counselling with you to an end’ session she sent me a message telling me she was looking forward to seeing me…. Looking forward to seeing me so she could end???? Like make it make sense!

So it’s little wonder that I am reluctant to reach out – because even when things look fine on the surface, the amount of times I have walked back into a problem is… staggering really.

On top of the absolute emotional hell I am navigating my way through during the day, I’ve been absolutely plagued by nightmares. They’re really something and don’t take a lot of unpicking. One particularly distressing one that apparently had me screaming in my sleep was me standing on a cliff near my house and the waves were ENORMOUS. It was grey and stormy and lashing it down with rain. Despite the cliffs being at least 100 feet high the waves were flooding over the top and the buildings were flooded and being completely attacked by the sea.

I commented to whoever I was with that “I have never ever seen it as bad as this before” and that’s when I heard screaming to the right of where I was standing. My attention had been so focused on the town and the buildings that I hadn’t noticed what was going on to the right of me. A child about four years old, was clinging on desperately to the rocks and crying. There was no way down to it and I saw it get washed off the rocks and into the sea. I reached for my phone in order to call the emergency services and no matter how I tried I couldn’t unlock my phone to make the call. No matter what I did it just wouldn’t work. All the while I could see this tiny kid being pummelled by the sea and hitting up against the rocks. I felt so completely powerless.

It’s hardly surprising I woke up screaming and crying and in a drenching sweat. I can still feel the complete panic I felt just typing that. As I said it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out but it is a real indicator of just how distressed I have felt.

The week has been lots of that sort of thing and by yesterday I had worked myself up into a right state. The protectors were so vocal and honestly, I just wanted to know that I wasn’t going fucking mad…because that’s what it’s felt like.

I just want to say, too, that I haven’t just been head in the sand this break letting the shit come at me, knowing Elle was away I booked in for a two hour massage, I have really careful to take proper breaks, eat well, sleep (!), and get out in nature…but you know, sometimes there is only so much you can do. My system is in freefall, it’s been flashback galore on top of regular therapy break shit… I just … well… didn’t have enough resource in the tank to get through it.

I ended up sending Elle an email yesterday:

I’ve got myself stuck in a deep hole and as much as I’m trying to claw my way out there’s some really vocal and aggressive bastards stamping on my hands. I’m sending this now because I think by Tuesday I might actually not turn up at all.

Elle usually responds with pretty holding and containing stuff and I hoped so much that she would send something like, “I am sorry that it’s so tough Sweetpea. Tell Brian and the bastards to behave themselves. I am looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday but until then the biggest of hugs to you.”

Or any variation on the kind of thing she usually sends.

But this came…and honestly I just felt so sad.

I really really hope you do. Elle xxx

Like, it’s not terrible is it? Not by any means, but I guess having not seen Elle for a while, or heard her voice, or any of the things that we usually do to connect, and my being in such a desperate headspace it just felt distant and triggered total panic.

Like, this is it then – she’s had enough hasn’t she?

And then because I felt so upset about it, the protectors have really stepped up their game – of course they would.

Sometimes if I have felt a response from Elle has missed the mark I will email her back and clarify how I am feeling and she generally replies with something holding. I held off this time and continued to suffer. This really tells me how scared I have been feeling. I had been messaging a friend all week and she encouraged me to reach out to Elle again and let her know exactly what was going on. On Sunday I did… I screenshot some of my conversation with my friend and sent it…and this is what came back almost immediately:

Oh my poor love, I’m so sorry you’ve been struggling so badly this week, and I feel very grateful that you trusted me enough to send me all this.

We are always ok, and I promise you with my hand on my heart, I would always talk to you if there was anything going on between us that I felt needed addressing. I see you struggling here with the idea that you can do the same, and you can, and I will do my best to offer you what you tell me you need in terms of reassurance and care, however that looks like for you. 

I’m imagine you feel asking me for specific things that would help you to feel more cared for feels unreasonable, and I would really love you to ask me for them, and let me decide if it feels like something I’d be willing to do. I know that probably feels like a very risky thing to do, and I want you to know you can ask and I will do my utmost to offer you what you need. You are loved and respected and giving you whatever you need to feel safe is my priority.

Please do come in on Tuesday, and we can try and talk through what might be helpful to you in future, or you can just snuggle up to me and cry for a full 90 minutes and be broken in complete safety.

And honestly, that’s the Elle I have been trying to find inside myself all this break.

I responded to her:

💜 thanks. 

I’ve just got really panicked because coming back from Christmas break and into this time now in 2019/20 was when it all went to shit with Em – sometimes I think it would be useful for you to see what happened back then but anytime I even think about going back to dec/jan posts to send you the links to what I wrote it has such a massive physical reaction just remembering that time and how bad it felt that I can’t do it… And as much as you might think it’s ok to ask for things it’s hard to really put into words what it feels like to ask for actually not much at all and get hard nos. There’s a lot of really shit stuff that’s happened over the years and my brain doesn’t let it go. 

And breaks are bad for lots of reasons – I mean it doesn’t help that after a few days there’s a panic that people are actually going to die on me – I’ve got my dad to thank for that one, dying three days into a holiday… and then there’s all the shit from my mum being away from Sunday-Friday when I was small and how insane and volatile she was when she came home…like those things have always been problematic… but breaks have certainly been exacerbated by the fact that three times I’ve been on a break and come back to discover that actually:

Em – Nothing is too big that we can’t work through it

A- I’m only going away for two weeks, nothing is wrong with us and I promise you nothing will change and I’m coming back 

H- I think it’s great that you write, I’ll take how I’m feeling to supervision and see you in a couple of weeks

Were all lies. 

And as much as things might look ok … apparently they weren’t. Like I don’t get how I was ever supposed to know that there was a problem, particularly with Anita. But apparently my saying I missed her felt overwhelming (see the screenshot)… but then literally the day before I saw her to be told she was ending she said “I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow”. I don’t really know how that works.

So it’s not easy navigating anything when my experience is that people say things that suggest one thing and then the reality is quite different… and not only that but it’s me that’s misread the situation or been too much despite CHECKING so as not to end up being a problem.

It’s all just a lot and so live right now and it’s hard because I try really hard to not get things wrong and somehow still manage to fuck things up. And it’s hard to not think it’s a me problem.

I could really use a big hug and a lobotomy 

X

And once again the Elle I know and love came back with such care and holding that my system just settled right down and I wondered how I had got myself in such a fucking mess again:

My lovely girl, will you believe me if I say I always have all of those things in my mind whenever we have a break? 

I think about how A gave you no clue about what was going on for her, and how Em reassured you, and how H wasn’t confident enough to say how she felt, and I think “what can I do differently?” And the only answer I ever come up with is to just be consistently me; honest about how I feel, open to hearing anything you believe will help and support you, and reassuring you that I am capable of telling you if I feel anything other than happy and calm about any of it.

And I am genuinely confident that – in time – you will trust that what I say is what I mean, but that earning that trust is going to be that much harder – both to build and maintain – due to all of that damage that was done. 

And enormous all-encompassing hugs are always available and in plentiful supply.

Lobotomies however, are only available on request every second Weds.

Elle xxx

PS I read the message you sent to [friend] about you finding the automated texts triggering, and so tomorrow…I will send you something just for you! 😀

And so, since then in January…I’ve had no more automated reminder texts about sessions and perfect personalised ones…and our sessions have been lovely (as always) and I’ve muddled along.

We’ve literally just been on ANOTHER BREAK now because I have been on holiday but I’ll get to that next time.

So yeah – big meltdown was had since I was last here. I am steadily finding my feet again…and ugh…life eh? Thank you for everyone that has messaged to check in and I am sorry I haven’t had the bandwidth to even reply. And amazing work if you got to the end of this – it’s almost the length of my undergrad dissertation!! xxx