holding it together as I journey through therapy – a personal account of what it's like to be in long-term psychotherapy navigating the healing of C-PTSD, childhood trauma and neglect, an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, as well as giving grief and cancer an occasional nod.
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 stressout of my life” rather than “I am cuttingyoufrom 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
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!
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!
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
When I was staring down this Christmas period at the start of December it looked like it might actually be one that would be almost doable – or at least one where therapy and the therapy break would not be complicating factors. Elle and I had a session together booked in the room for Christmas Eve (I was so excited about this) and then we’d be back in on New Year’s Eve…so really there was not even a break (yay!). This year, I’d only have to get through the Christmas stuff with family and all the mess that entails, plus the usual hell of the crap with Em and Anita being thrown into sharp focus…but otherwise it should be fine, right?!
Having had my therapy with Em blow up so spectacularly in December ‘19/January ‘20 I now suffer really bad anxiety about my therapy ending, or being rejected by my therapist after a break…this hasn’t been helped at all by Anita ending our therapy when she came back from a break, either… but despite all this, I felt like it would be ok this year because Elle and I are ok…I think. I was ready for what was inevitably coming, but confident that the scaffolding that was around me with the sessions with Elle would be strong enough so that I didn’t fall apart. Or that was the plan… only… you can so guess where this is going can’t you?
Elle wasn’t wrong when she referred to the Christmas period as “a memory-cake covered in the sparkly frosting of multiple crushing disappointments.” This insight came a few weeks back in response to the email I sent with the extended metaphor about the roundabout of death that I seem to be stuck spinning on. I have been struggling a lot after getting the box of things back from Anita and if I am honest, I’ve been hanging on by my fingertips for most of this year. I certainly can’t do another year like this one. I simply don’t have it in me.
I sent that message about my struggling to Elle the night before the news that we wouldn’t be able to see each other on Christmas Eve as planned. It was bad. Like what timing! I obviously had my massive meltdown when I found out I wouldn’t see Elle face-to-face (fuck me that was a rotten few days) but recovered a bit when we scheduled in the phone session for Christmas Eve instead. It’s obviously nowhere near the same as being together in the same space, but it was something at least…and of course we’d still have the final face-to-face on the 17th.
On the day I learnt that Christmas Eve was off I also got the added and unexpected news that Elle was going to be away in January – neatly coinciding with the time when it all went to shit with Em, “Like a tick”. Eek…never my best week and honestly, I can already feel a massive sense of dread being ‘alone’ that week. It’s hard to put into words the kind of response those words trigger in me even now but I find January really rough because it was such a horror show ending with Em. And what if Elle doesn’t come back?
I know that I am really bad with disruption and change, anyway, but I had no idea back in early December just how fucking many crushing disappointments would materialise in this window of glittery Christmas hell… but Elle’s words have continued to ring so ear-piercingly true it’s not even funny. Like really? Is the universe taking the fucking piss? Or do I just have a ridiculous amount on negative karma that I am working out in this lifetime because really, sometimes, it just feels so unfair.
It’s that bleurgh period between Christmas and New Year, the time where I traditionally fall into a bout of deep depression and freeze…and guess what? Yep. Here I am again. Same shit, different year. I’ve had the laptop beside me for a couple of days thinking that I would write…I’ve got plenty I could be working on (including my story for Elle) but nope. I’ve been completely stuck in overwhelm and instead of being productive or actually just being at (much-needed) peace – I’m doom scrolling and fitfully sleeping and generally beating myself up for yet again not making the most of my time off work. More than anything I really need proper rest and care – and I don’t mean more of the self-care, I actually just need taking care of. I could really use a week of mothering rather than being the one doing the mothering… that’s it.
I know I am not alone in finding this time of year tough. Christmas is a lot. And even though I actually managed to pull off a pretty decent Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I have both emotionally and physically crashed and burned since then. I am in the place where I want to be completely away from people – at the beach in my hideaway but know also that I can’t go and escape and run away because ‘it’s Christmas’. The only person I want to see right now is Elle…and I think that is because I have done such a lot of adulting that the parts of me that need a bit of nurture and attention are starting to get really restless….they’re desperately upset, in fact.
These last few days I have been riding massive waves of anxiety. It’s got so bad that I have dreams that I am being physically sick and throwing up and the experience is so visceral that it wakes me up and I am instantly aware of the sick feeling of high anxiety in my body. If I didn’t have an empty stomach, I most certainly would be sick at that point. Talk about somatic response to emotional upset. Ugh.
As much as I have tried to keep my mind away from the usual triggers, it’s nigh on impossible not to be reminded of what happened with Em or to drift into thinking about all that has happened with Anita at this time of year. I don’t miss Em in the least but I am still reeling from the hurt she caused. And Anita, well, I miss her but I have let her go now. This year I didn’t bother to text her over Christmas. Although I know she’d reply there’s no point in trying to keep any channel of communication open with her. Her behaviour towards me this last year tells me everything I need to know about her feelings towards me and I need to find a way of moving through the pain of it all.
Parts of me have wanted to reach out to Elle and forewarn her that I am not in a great place. I have been really conscious of wanting to see her the last few days, especially having not seen her in person last week, but there is also another part that’s really prominent and activated and is just full of shame and terrified of reaching out because what if something has changed?
I have been really conscious that when I see her, I could end up being totally shut down and avoidant and pretend like everything is ok when it really isn’t. I haven’t told her how it is, because it’s Christmas, it’s a break, and also…there’s that heightened awareness of everything that went wrong with Em playing out in my brain. I so badly don’t want to be perceived as ‘adhesive’ and ‘like a tick’, ‘pushing boundaries’, ‘trying to get inside her’ being ‘demanding’ and ‘intruding’ and make her feel like she can’t get away from me because my need for her is ‘all the time’ etc. And I know none of these are Elle’s words but they are branded into my brain…thanks Em! But maybe I am ‘too dependent’ (the words that Anita denies ever having left her lips) and so I have stayed quiet and suffering.
It feels like with all this being so live at the minute it would be a really good time to talk to Elle about it when I see her – because the feelings are right here on the surface rather than pushed down in the depths. Of course, Elle knows a bit of what happened with Em but largely we’ve been firefighting the Anita stuff. Part of me was almost tempted to share the blogs from the time when Em and I ended with Elle so she can really see exactly what went on…but I haven’t…because it’s a lot.
I had decided last night that when I woke up this morning I would send Elle a text after I got her reminder text about our session and let her know that I needed her to stay close tomorrow because things are hard. I’m sure she knows this already. I had a terrible night of nightmares and was up a lot through the night so didn’t end up waking up until 10:30 this morning. I looked at the clock and mentally felt the relief of knowing it was only just over twenty-four hours and then I’d see Elle. When I checked my phone Elle’s normal message wasn’t there. Instead, there was a message telling me she was sick and that she didn’t think she’d be ok for tomorrow.
You can only imagine how that landed.
Of course, I am really sorry that she is poorly and I more than anything hope she gets better soon because she’s not immune to how fucking hard this year has been either, and I think she desperately needed a break. There’s some horrible viruses going around at the minute and it’s not exactly restful being sick even if you are laid up in bed is it? It’s just like being pummelled. Adult me wishes there was something I could do to help her feel better. I hope there is someone looking after her but I get the impression she is the one who looks after everyone else.
Aside from my big feelings of care for Elle there is absolutely the hugest feelings of sadness and disappointment again. To have hung on so tightly to get to tomorrow to see her and for it be taken off the table at the last minute is just gutting – especially after what happened with Christmas Eve. I had just about got myself in a place to handle the January break thinking we at least had two sessions before that to reconnect and put something holding in place…and yet here we are… I feel like I am running on a track that keeps crumbling just ahead of me.
I just can’t.
I am really out of coping at the moment.
I wish I could say it wasn’t like this, but I’m devastated. I just want a cuddle.
And then of course I feel ashamed and embarrassed that this has affected me the way it has because I know that none of this is intentional. I know Elle can’t help being ill. It happens. But the little parts of me that so badly needed to see her on Christmas Eve are still hurting about that, and here we are again…another disappointment. The littles don’t understand the ‘reasons’ that they haven’t been able to see Elle they only feel what it is to be ‘left’. It feels abandoning and rejecting. AND I KNOW IT ISN’T but we’re not dealing with Adult Me, are we?
Elle even told me in her message this morning “please don’t see this as a sign of anything more than the worst kind of luck […] I know this is horrible timing”… like I know she will get how this has landed…or at least, she might have a bit of an idea…but it’s just so painful. This sort of thing taps deeply into the bit when I was a kid always waiting for my mum to come back. She was away Sunday through to Friday and I would always feel so disconnected and lonely in the week. And this is the same. I am always on a countdown to see Elle, and it’s hard, especially as I only see her once a week and that feels it’s too long as it is.
I just feel like I am stretched so far beyond my capacity right now…because Christmas did, of course, throw up shit. My wonderful mother failed to acknowledge me or my kids for the third year running, and didn’t even send a text to acknowledge the gift I had sent her. I just can’t even. What kind of person doesn’t even send a ‘thank you’? Or a ‘happy christmas’? Well, I know the answer to that, but it doesn’t stop it from hurting. The original wound was right there with the spotlight on it. My mum doesn’t care about me and … well what more is there to say? Well, plenty, actually, just not today.
Ugh.
So, this has all got a bit out of chronology, hasn’t it? I was meant to talk about the last face-to-face session and the phone call. What can I say. Feeling like I do right now? And please don’t read this as ‘spoiled brat’, it’s ‘desperately sad and hurt little parts’.
Actually, I don’t remember a whole lot about the last time I ‘saw’ Elle. I know that I was massively conscious that it would be the last time I would see her for a while and it triggered the smalls a lot which meant that False Adult was pretty present for a fair bit of it, I think.
In the few days leading into the session, I had finally begun writing the story I wanted for Elle but it was nowhere near finished or even edited by the time it got to Tuesday. Despite this, I printed it off and wrapped it with part of the gift I had bought Elle for Christmas. It was all in my bag but there was a part of me that feared giving Elle the present – yet again another throwback to Em when she rejected my gift of a snowflake and copy of ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’. Again, there was absolutely no reason to think that this would happen with Elle. I have given her all sorts of stuff over the last eighteen months but this time of year is so ridiculously triggering – ESPECIALLY after recent events with Anita.
It was quite a bit of time before I allowed myself to relax into being with Elle in the session. I always find it hard when there is going to be a break. Part of me longs for closeness and connection but part of me is so painfully aware that it/she is going to be taken away that I rarely ask for what I need before a break and pretend like I am fine. I think this is also a hangover from working with Em where my needs were never met and so I stopped asking.
Still, I did eventually cuddle into Elle and stop jabbering on about meaningless shit. I felt sad. And empty. And far away…even though I was now close to Elle. I could almost feel the clock running down and with every passing minute the deep sadness seemed to get bigger and bigger.
I hate breaks.
LOL.
After a period of quiet, Elle told me that she had something she wanted to give me, a present to open on Christmas Eve when we would have our call. She said that the thing she had given me is very special to her and that she really liked the idea of my having it and that she also really wanted to talk to me on Christmas Eve to check that I was ok.
I could feel tears coming in my eyes but pushed them away. I don’t think I said anything to Elle. She must think I am really rude sometimes. Like she had been so thoughtful and taken a step towards me and there I was silent. If anything, I was completely overwhelmed. There is always such a lot I want to say but I can feel myself pulling back…afraid of being ‘too much’.
Can you all see how much the young parts are struggling right now?
After a while I told Elle I had something for her and that she could open part of it then. I felt really exposed and stupid handing over the present – which is really really sad. I suddenly felt really idiotic having tried to write Elle a story and embarrassed giving her the soft toy that went with it. I gave myself a really hard time all the next week about it.
There wasn’t time for Elle to read the story in what was left of the session and she asked if she could read it at her leisure. Of course. I didn’t hear anything all the last week about it in the few interactions we had but it wasn’t surprising, that week was like groundhog week and I think everyone was hanging on by a thread. It didn’t stop the inner critic having a good old taunt, though. The erosive power of that part of me is so strong and it takes away anything good.
I had really badly wanted to write the story – and it got fucked by my wonky brain having a meltdown over the change to Christmas Eve, then what I did finally write was ‘ok ish’ but not ‘good enough’…and so my brain decided to really go to town on me. Elle’s silence seemed to confirm that I was a fucking moron for trying. I am trying to think where all this comes from but all I can think is that there must’ve been times when I have tried to do something like paint a picture, or write something, and it’s been disregarded. Highly likely tbh.
So yeah, that week leading into the call was a bit rough.
Because everyone was at home and sound travels in my house, I couldn’t do my session at home. The ideal would have been to have been alone in the house, snuggled up in bed. Instead, I made up a little den in the backseat of my car with pillow and blankets and Monty and my soft dog toy and took the car across to the park to where there is a reasonable mobile signal. Sadly, the signal isn’t really strong enough for a video call – or at least I didn’t want to ty that and it not work, so opted for a voice call.
It was ok- certainly better than not talking at all that’s for sure. Elle mentioned a couple of times how it was not to be able to see each other…and it was hard because I really would have liked to have seen her face (and hold her hand!). Although, tbh there’s a chance I might have dissociated. I work 100% online in my job and video calls are all that I do, and yet I think seeing Elle over a screen might have made me feel even further away. I don’t know. I don’t exactly have a good track record with Em and Anita but then I don’t know how it would feel with Elle and maybe I need to try.
Again, I don’t really remember much of the call. Elle said that she liked the story – I think – although don’t really know what she said. I think I may have said something dismissive or shut the conversation down. I think I was probably embarrassed to talk about it – especially as I had convinced myself that it was utter shit and that she hated it in the week since I had given it to her.
I think I told her a bit about how sick I have been feeling and the anxiety stuff. I think there was mention of my mum… and some past Christmases but honestly, I don’t know. I know there was a huge part of me who was trying very hard to stay present but kept wandering away. There was a part of me that felt very very sad. I think November and December have just been really hard and I so badly wanted to be near Elle…and whilst she was trying really hard to be there…it’s just not the same is it? I have spent so many years on the phone as a kid trying to connect with my mum on a Wednesday when she’d call home but never being really given space to express how it felt. I was ‘fine’…. But I wasn’t.
Anyway, there’s a lot stirred up and going on BUT I was really glad to have spoken to Elle because even though it wasn’t the same as face-to-face, it was still contact, I could still hear her voice, and know on a level that she was still there even if I couldn’t see her and it made me think that this is an option for the future for sessions if they need to be moved or maybe just check ins. I actually think if we could talk on the phone in the week just for ten or fifteen minutes it would make things feel a whole lot easier than they have been.
Near the end of the call, I opened the present that Elle had given me and it was just lovely. It was a beautifully bound folio copy of her favourite childhood book…and really it was just one of the most special things anyone has given me. This was especially the case this year where Christmas was the usual of me arranging my own presents – and this year even wrapping them. It felt really lovely that Elle would share something that felt so meaningful and important to her with me. She directed me towards her favourite chapters and I read them on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day which felt really connecting.
It was surprising how fast the ninety minutes went and I could feel a massive pang of sadness come as I realised it was time to hang up. Elle told me she would message me on Christmas Day when she had opened the other things I had given her and that she was looking forward to seeing my face next week…
It was lovely to receive a really warm connecting message on Christmas morning, then. She seemed genuinely to really appreciate what I had given her and so that felt nice.
I am trying really hard to hang on to all of how this lovely connecting stuff has felt today and am really trying not to let the sad take hold…but it’s hard. Tomorrow is going to be hard.
I won’t get to post again before the new year (relief!)…but I guess I will just round off with the Counting Crows lyrics that always resonate so much at this time of year:
A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last. I can’t remember, the last thing that you said as you were leaving, now the days go by so fast.
A couple of years ago I left a therapy session with Anita and as I walked towards the gate, her son had his head in the bonnet of the car on the driveway. He was fixing something for A. Fortunately, he didn’t look up and I was able to leave without being seen. I didn’t feel much about it at the time, and I have literally only just remembered that this had even happened as I lead into the main bit of this post! Isn’t it weird, then, that a chance viewing of one of Anita’s children had absolutely no impact on me at all…and yet seeing the other (her daughter) set all kinds of shit off?! Hmmmm, I wonder why that might be?!
Let’s be clear, Anita is not a blank screen in my therapy AT ALL. Indeed, she is the complete antithesis to Em who revealed absolutely nothing about herself during the time we worked together. I know Anita has two adult kids and some grandkids – she mentions this on her website and occasionally mentions them in session. Most of the time that’s fine…ish (!). It really depends how I am feeling in myself and in the relationship with Anita in the moment.
If I feel settled and secure, then it really doesn’t bother me for her to reference her kids or something she might have done with them but other times (when the young parts are feeling vulnerable) it feels like she’s pouring salt directly into the mother wound. This feeling has got significantly worse in recent months, in part, due to the fact that her adult daughter has moved back in with her so she’s there nearly all the time working from home when I am having my sessions.
As I said in a recent post, sometimes I can hear her daughter moving around the house and it can feel … I can’t really explain it… awkward, I guess. There’s a kind of jealousy, perhaps, too. I feel jealous that I get so little of Anita’s time and attention these days, and so I really don’t need to be reminded of her daughter being there. I think I also feel a bit weird if Anita is reading me a story and I then hear daughter moving around. Because let’s face it, whilst we are working with my child parts in those sessions – it must sound a bit fucking weird hearing your mum reading kids’ stories to an adult.
Anyway, it is what is and I don’t let this get in the way of me getting what I need in the sessions – I just wish she wasn’t there (read into that what you will!). I try not to bristle when A says something about her family. Her family are clearly really important to her – as they should be. I guess, for lots of us though, when we know our therapists are close with their family, and involved with their kids and grandkids, it can feel like another reminder of exactly what we don’t have.
Like, “Look what you could have won… but didn’t.”
Therapy, at times, can feel like a brief escape into a fantasy world of what it might have been like had things been different (what we needed) when we were kids. Having someone who actually pays attention to us, listens, sees, and responds to us and meets some of our needs, is in so many ways the basics of interaction and caring for a child, but when it’s been missing our whole lives it feels like a magic balm receiving it as an adult! Having an attuned therapist has done such a lot for me…even if I am, yet again, whining about something that’s happened!!
Of course, therapy isn’t just playing at getting the mum we wanted. Well…it’s not only this (LOL!), there’s tonnes of work and pain to sift through as well. Often, it’s the fantasy relationship that triggers the sore points in us so that are then ready to be worked through and with (so long as the therapist is open to that and can cope with attachment stuff). I mean mine and Anita’s relationship is real, not just in my head, not only fantasy, but the child parts definitely see her as a mother figure. Adult me knows she’s my therapist but that’s an important role too and that client therapist relationship is valuable.
I am phrasing this really badly– wandering as usual! – but basically because Anita and I laid some pretty robust foundations at the beginning of my therapy, when the child parts and attachment stuff finally went live in summer 2020, we were well placed to deal with it. All the work we’d done at the beginning when I went to her when Em and I were hitting the skids and then terminated really left a clear map of what was likely to come up eventually between A and I. Anita’s absolute calm, care, and empathy hearing the absolute state of it when we first met meant that I knew that there was space for whatever might come AND THERE HAS BEEN A LOT!
I think this is really different to when I worked with Em and the aching need and attachment stuff came up and I had no idea what was going on, or why, or how to even deal with it. I was just drowning in shame week in week out. But Anita could see from the get-go that I had gone headlong down the hole with Em and triggered all my wounding in the relationship with her. Transference 101.
Anyway, get to the point RB…
So, we all know that my relationship with Anita is…deep? Yeah. It is. It’s close. It’s human and it’s fucking MESSY at times. We work through stuff in the room and it’s very specific to me and my need and my trauma. As we also know, a significant amount of my trauma stems from my mother wound…which leads to fun times! The bits that hurt the most are the bits where the young parts are triggered and feel unseen, unloved, inadequate, ‘less than’ – [insert endless negative feelings list here]…
Sooooo, a few weeks back it was absolutely pissing rain and I arrived at therapy at my usual time. I never arrive early – always bang on 10am – because I know what it’s like when students rock up early and I am still doing something else. Also, I figure if I arrive on time then Anita should be ready for me. So, that particular morning I had driven to therapy feeling a lot of feelings. It was right smack in that time when Anita’s wheels were falling off and my child parts were going wild inside but I had been keeping it to myself for fear of sending her over the edge. I had intended to go to that session and try and articulate what was happening for me because I was out of coping – I was in the zone and ready to go.
So, imagine my shock when I was head down trying to keep dry, little parts on the surface, and I walked through the gate, looked up, and there was Anita’s daughter coming out the front door.
Fuck.
I mean what a fucking fuck?! Of course we know these people exist. Of course I know she bloody lives there! But there’s something really different between having the knowledge of someone or hearing them moving about to being face-to-face with them unexpectedly. I instantly snapped into adult and pasted on a friendly smile and said “Hi”. A’s daughter smiled back and apologised for being there and then carried on out. All the while Anita was at the door – so she saw the whole thing.
Ummm.
Let’s be honest. This completely threw me. I got into the room and expected A to make some reference to it. It can’t just be me that thinks that’s a fairly big deal knowing exactly what we work on? I mean basically I saw the ‘sibling’. The favourite one. In the normal run of things I would have said something to Anita but given how it was then, and her total lack of capacity to hold anything I wasn’t about to bring the, “Seeing your daughter and talking to her felt really weird and it’s upset me a bit because the young parts want you to themselves and I feel like these days I get less and less of you”. Basically, it was the fantasy meeting harsh reality. And of course I know the reality – I guess I just didn’t want to be faced with it like this.
So, that was weird.
Really weird.
But then it happened again a few weeks later.
Are you fucking kidding me?!
This time we had a bit more of a conversation – nothing massive but she recognised me. She must be thinking, ‘There’s that client that’s here all the fucking time and never leaves my mum alone!’
So yeah. That was unexpected and uncomfortable. I mean, I guess sometimes parts of us would like to feel more included in parts of our therapist’s lives – but I can categorically say, that the part I am absolutely not wanting to know or come face-to-face with is her beloved children!
Anyway, I don’t have much more to say on that, I just thought I’d let you know as at this point I don’t think you can make it up! I mean I could unpick the psychology behind it but we know it don’t we? Ugh.
Anita is now away on holiday so it’s a three-week break – just marvellous. I’ve got another post swirling in my brain, so I’ll get to that sometime soon – suffice to say my internal mini bus isn’t in great shape.
What’s happening? Well, I suppose if I answer that completely honestly then the answer would be, ‘No effing idea – I’m just winging it, holding it together with rubber bands and chewing gum, and trying not to unravel before the holidays…and then, looking beyond next Friday evening (when holidays actually begin), I will be trying not to have a breakdown during the intervening period between then and January 3rd when my therapist is away/unavailable!’ Ha! Wish me luck!
I can’t believe that, yet again, another big chunk of time has elapsed and I have not managed to get anything posted here on the blog… no change there, then! 2019 really has basically been a complete whirlwind of a year (not in a good way) and I simply haven’t had anything like enough time to write. I’m not big on new year’s resolutions but I have put a few things in place that will mean next year there should be more windows of time for me, and in theory, time to write if I want to. Hoo-bloody-ray! It’s been a long time coming.
I’ve said before that this blog is really just a place for me to get stuff off my chest and document my healing journey…bit of a long bumpy ride so far isn’t it?! But I realise when there’s months between posts that I forget what’s happened and I’m not doing a very good job of logging what’s going on. The things that felt big one week (that I would previously have written about) vanish by the next and so it leaves gaps in the process.
I actually want to be able to be able to look back at this one day and see how far I have come – well, I mean I do that already, but I want to continue to be able to do this, rather than dipping into posts like these which basically moan about how fucking busy I am all the time!
It is useful to be able to notice patterns in what comes up in therapy now by being able to look back… recently I have noticed by looking at my writing, here and at other stuff I’ve written in my notebooks, that November can be the start of ‘The Winter Shit Show’… and this year is no different.
Brilliant. Don’t you just love this ‘most wonderful time of the year’?!
So what can I say? It’s feeling bad…and the irony is, that now I am actually here at the laptop, I can’t really remember anything of note to say, or if I am honest anything ‘not’ of note. It literally feels as though I am in some kind of vacuum of exhaustion and there’s just a gaping black hole where the events of the last month should be. Perhaps it’s a bit of dissociative amnesia…because that seems to be my ‘go to’ coping strategy!
Lately, when stuff has been live, I have really wished that I could find even half an hour just to write and process what has been going on – or not necessarily even process, maybe actually to just to get it out and free up a bit of space in my mind which is so rammed full! But when I say that I have been completely up against it lately I’m not exaggerating – it’s felt as though there’s barely been time to breathe let alone write!
My last post (which is a month ago!) was partly banging on about worrying about whether Em would have to cancel my Monday session because of possibly needing anaesthetic at an emergency dental appointment. Turns out she was completely fine to work… but guess what? The therapy sprites had other ideas about me getting to my session and when I went out to my car that Monday morning I found I had a puncture. Perfect. I mean, really fucking perfect. I was sooooo upset.
I had to do a Skype session instead. It’s been months and months since we’ve done one so it felt weird and not quite enough. It was a passable session, from what I remember, (which isn’t much!). I had got myself so unbelievably worked up over the weekend thinking I mightn’t see Em so to actually have that worry become a reality was really hard. For the young parts that were absolutely desperate to see her, it was a bit heart-breaking to be talking through a small iPhone screen.
I did manage to tell her some of it and then joked that at least my worry hadn’t been for nothing after all! It still surprises me just how bad things can feel around simple life things. Dentists happen, cars get punctures, but not being able to see Em can pull the rug right out from under my feet. You’d think by now I could hold her enough in mind to be able to cope with this sort of thing….but clearly not!
Em apologised for it having been so bad for me over the weekend – and said something about how she had debated about whether to tell me in my Friday session that she might not be there on Monday knowing how easily I am upset by disruption, or just see what happened on the day and cancel if it became necessary. I said that I was glad that she had told me and that it wasn’t her fault that I had reacted the way I had and that actually a last minute cancellation would definitely have felt worse for me. I said that it shows us where there is more work to be done in this area… no new news there!
Sigh.
There’s been stuff happening since then…adult life has been ridiculous (you can’t make it up) with some huge stresses and as a result most of my therapy has been firefighting the here and now rather than containing any of the other stuff. Basically, I could have done with a session every day of the week lately…or to have moved in with Em! Ha. Seriously, it’s been a complete nightmare.
In my session on Monday, I said to Em that right now I feel like I am swimming under the surface of a frozen lake. I keep coming up for air where there is a hole in the ice, but each time I do I can’t quite get enough of a breath before having to dive under again. Every time I am back beneath the ice I realise that I have to swim a greater distance than the last time to get a place to catch my breath, and it gets harder and harder to get to the next air hole. I’m very aware that I have an inadequate oxygen supply and am starting to feel more and more panicked and frightened as I go because I don’t know when this is going to end and I don’t know how much longer I can keep swimming. I feel like I am on the cusp of drowning.
Basically, then, it’s just been fucking awful and I am hanging on by the thinnest of margins on the inside whilst trying to give my best ‘performance’ to those on the side lines who seem to think I enjoy this extreme winter sporting activity. They have absolutely no idea that I am like the person in Stevie Smith’s fab poem and ‘Not Waving But Drowning’. Jeez.
To be fair, when I said about this underwater marathon to Em she said I couldn’t have put it any better and that she thought it perfectly encapsulated how hard and relentless it all is right now. It was nice for her to acknowledge just what a struggle I am going through and to make me feel like I am not mental or overreacting. Whilst I have rarely found space to let out the hardest stuff Em has been amazing at being attuned and sympathetic in my sessions.
Errr… so…
Going with another swimming analogy, a while back I drew a picture in my therapy notebook comparing myself to an out of control octopus (I don’t think I ever showed it to Em but think I posted it here!):
On Thursday, I was, again, reminded of this picture when my lovely, thoughtful best friend, sent me a gorgeous soft toy octopus through the post. It’s meant to be a Christmas gift but she let me open it early because she’s seen what a complete shit show it’s been lately and how I am doing my best in ‘octo mode’ but in reality there’s a lot of scared child parts who need a bit of a snuggly boost! And isn’t he lovely? I’ve decided to name him Ollie – because, you know, alliteration and all that…
Ollie came to my session on Friday but I left him in my bag. I so desperately wanted to pull him out and be able to stroke the softness and ground a bit. I am taking my toy octopus with me tomorrow and he is coming out of the bag. I don’t even care what Em thinks (well I do, but not enough to sit in agony for another session with screaming young parts who need something to soothe them). I hope he helps the child parts feel safe but also helps me find a way of telling Em just what’s going on inside. I mean you can’t really hide that fact that your inner children aren’t doing so well when you come in to session, as a 36 year old woman, holding a pale pink octopus plush toy can you?!!
I am so sick of those parts feeling like they need to be in hiding and so much of this year has felt like I have been peeking out from behind the sofa trying to see if I can trust her. I hate this process of feeling like things are good and then getting spooked and feeling like it’s back to square one. I know it isn’t. I know it’s just going round different parts of the spiral and seeing it from another angle but man…it’s tiring!
I know it sounds dramatic, but even doing my absolute best, with a task being done by every tentacle I feel like I have steadily been losing my grip on everything (emotionally) at the moment. Last Sunday I didn’t get to bed until nearly 2am as I was working on writing up assessments for an exam group. Utter fucking (unpaid) misery. The fallout from that was that I was so knackered when I got to therapy having had less 2.5 hours sleep (because you know what an overstimulated brain is like – WAKEY WAKEY NO SLEEPY!) that on Monday I told Em that I felt like everything was about to fall apart.
I can’t really explain any more than that other than the drowning under the ice thing I mentioned earlier. I feel like I am walking that line between trying to push on through and hoping to survive but also potentially knowing that pushing on through could end up with me having a complete breakdown. It feels precarious and I don’t feel especially grounded.
As I said a minute ago (or a few – this seems to be a long ramble), the really shite thing about being so unbelievably hectic with life and work over the last month is that life and work have dominated my sessions with Em. We’ve struggled to get to the ‘other stuff’ and by that, I mean ‘the work’ – aka all the attachment stuff. It’s creeping towards our last few sessions before the Christmas break and I can feel things escalating inside with the young parts.
A couple of weeks ago I had a weird, and unexpected slide into the ED behaviour again. Everything had been busy but I don’t remember any particular trigger other than perhaps Christmas therapy break creeping up. All I know is that one Tuesday I was eating lunch with one of my students at a nature reserve and then the next time I remembered to eat was Wednesday evening. I don’t know what happened in-between times. It just didn’t even occur to me that I hadn’t eaten. I didn’t feel hungry. I hadn’t been avoiding food. It literally hadn’t registered…and that is how disconnected I have felt from myself as I have been in survival mode just trying to get through the days.
The problem with my ED is that it’s old and crafty and just when I think I have it together it floors me. That Wednesday evening when the light went on about needing to eat something so did another voice. That fucking nasty, clever bastard, my Inner Critic. It was staggering how quickly it came online and how vicious it was from the off. I was quickly convinced that I shouldn’t bother eating anything, because I wasn’t hungry anyway, and that my body was in a fucking state and I would be going on holiday shortly and who wants to see that hot mess…. so I should do myself a favour and just go to bed and then get on the scales in the morning and see what state I was in.
UGHHHHHH!
I reached out to my best friend (poor woman, she gets it all) the moment I saw what was going on, and between us we made a plan to try and help me change course before things got desperate. We both put reminders in our phones and she’d text me and say, ‘have you eaten?’ and I’d reply ‘yes’. It feels ridiculous now to say this, but there were a few days where it was touch and go and I was just about managing to eat a meal each day. If it hadn’t been for digging my heels in and getting a nudge from my friend then it could have been really different. I can see how easily I could get trapped in this negative self-starving cycle again…but somehow or other I pulled myself back up over the edge before it got desperate and thankfully my head is screwed back on and I feel ok-ish again.
There would have been a time where an episode like that could have become a full blown ED disaster. Fortunately, I am getting much quicker at recognising what’s going on but I am also standing up to the critical part of me and trying to do what’s right for all of me. I understand why the Critic is there and what it’s trying to protect me from: the pain of being abandoned… aka the Christmas break. But the truth is, starving myself doesn’t make Em come back any quicker and doesn’t help me connect to her before she goes.
I had a really painful session with her when all this was going on. I desperately wanted to reach out to her and tell her the mess I had got myself into when I got to my session. I promised myself (and her) that when this stuff happens with eating that I would tell her so we could work together on it and stop it becoming a significant problem like it did in April 2018.
However, sometimes parts of me have other ideas about this! I can’t even begin to really explain the agony and internal conflict of that session. I felt gagged and bound and like I was fighting with myself to let Em in. The shame and embarrassment was huge and the voice that was telling me that I can’t trust her was raging. Meanwhile there were a whole bunch of younger parts crying, desperately wanting for Em to see them and help because the bully was so angry.
Give me fucking strength!
Given that I barely said anything at all that session I don’t know how Em worked out what was happening for me (not about the eating per se, but the amount of inner conflict and activated parts) – I guess we’ve been working together for so long now that she notices the things that others wouldn’t – my tone of voice, body language, lack of eye contact etc.
She started by explicitly talking to the whole system and then particularly the parts that felt threatened and like they would be got rid of and assured them that she wasn’t trying to get rid of any of my parts and that they were all part of me and all here for a reason. She asked the part that was stopping me from talking if it might just make some room for the others who might want to talk to her and that she knew it was doing its job really well but maybe it didn’t need to work so hard at protecting me with her. That’s a potted version of what she said but weirdly it really worked. I could feel the Critic take a bit of a backseat, and whilst there was no session time remaining by the time she’d got that part on side again I did feel better between sessions and didn’t continue to restrict what I was eating.
I actually feel connected to Em right now. I feel seen. She even said on Friday that she feels that I am allowing her to see more of me now…which I guess I am. I haven’t yet told her about what happened the other week with the eating but I plan to and that’s progress. The more I shine a light on the stuff that wants to lurk in the shadows wreaking havoc behind the scenes the less power it has.
Anyway, there’s other stuff about the other therapy (craniosacral) I have been doing but I’ll save that for another post….which actually might be a bit more interesting because frankly when I don’t have an proper therapy content my writing is just:
I realised earlier today that it has been almost a month since my last post here where I wrote about the knackered house and renovation project metaphor for me in therapy… and I know that I also never followed up on what happened after I threw all my toys out the pram and terminated therapy via text only to send a desperate message back to Em less than an hour later to undo it!!
I don’t think I have ever gone more than 10 or 11 days without blogging but lately I haven’t had much time or much to say, or perhaps I have had too much to say and don’t know where to begin because I have had so little time? I dunno.
I guess if I am being completely honest, every time I have thought about writing here there is a part of me that has felt huge resistance to doing so. This is a weird feeling for me because usually I find it really cathartic letting stuff out on the page. I think there’s a bit of embarrassment or shame about the mess I have got myself in over the last month and I feel a bit of a moron and don’t want to publish what’s happening?
There’s a lot of internal conflict going on right now. The Inner Critic has been running free lately. It’s been agony. I guess part of my inability to write boils down to a concern that I simply can’t be doing with any additional external criticism at the moment in addition to the shit I am piling on myself – not that that is what happens here, most people are unbelievably supportive, but I really don’t need to be told right now that perhaps my therapist isn’t right for me when there are enough of my own doubting parts shouting that! I don’t feel particularly resilient and so I think I’ve buried myself in a pit – it’s meant to be protective but actually is bloody miserable down here!
This blog has always been about me tracking/logging what’s going on in my therapy so that maybe one day I can (hopefully) look and go ‘wow look how far I’ve come!’ I don’t write here to entertain people. My hope is, perhaps, by writing about and sharing my experiences that it might help a few people who are feeling similar feelings to feel less alone but essentially this is my space to rant and moan, be bonkers and try and process the tangled mess that is my inner world… and so that’s what I am going to try and do…
So, rewind to the beginning of May and the meltdown. Yep. I went back to therapy. I mean of course I did. I felt embarrassed about my outburst but the world didn’t end. Em is still there (sitting in that chair that feels a million miles away), I am still in one piece (ok, maybe more of a mosaic of fragmented parts, but you know what I mean!) and the therapy is still ongoing…albeit limping along in a rather painful fashion.
I have been really struggling in my sessions lately. Everything has just felt so difficult. Honestly – I could run a master class in dissociation! The sessions have been largely excruciating as I have been unable to let Em in and I have been feeling utterly distraught both inside and outside of the therapy room. I’ve been doing a lot of writing and drawing in my therapy notebook. I have religiously been taking the book to the session and LEAVING IT IN MY BAG!!!
FFS!
It’s not even funny.
During the week, outside the sessions, and as I travel to session I am determined that I will mention that I want to share my writing with her and yet the moment I walk in the room something happens, a part steps up and says, ‘no fucking way!’ and instead I sit struggling to talk, feeling sick, and unable to connect with Em feeling the fifty minutes ebb away and feeling increasingly panicked that I am losing vital time.
I can barely look at her most of the time let alone make eye contact and it feels massively awkward and frustrating. I want to connect but am also terrified of letting her see me. It’s like one part of me is desperate to move forward and has a foot hard on the accelerator and another part has its foot to the floor on the brake. It’s not a pleasant sensation I can tell you … and I don’t think it can be doing the car much good either!
Still, because there are so many parts floating about right now it means I am experiencing a really mixed bag of feelings and I can feel like a hologram flitting sometimes. I know that this is the work and I need to ride it out but blooming heck, it’s not easy!
Despite barely looking at Em or talking to her, a few weeks ago I noticed that she wasn’t quite herself, she had a slight cough and looked really tired. She has never been ill/off sick in all the time I have been seeing her so I noticed even this subtle unwellness. I guess we have been programmed as kids to notice everything, subtle changes have, in the past, signalled danger I suppose.
As much as parts of me have been keeping her at arm’s length (giant monkey arms – that are really long) there are other parts that still want to be close and care deeply about this woman that has been sitting in that chair trying to help me get my shit together for the last few years. Ha.
I love her.
That’s no secret right?
So, one day after yet another painful session where I had failed to tell her that I was freaking out about being too much and worrying that I am ‘bombarding’ her I was in town after teaching my tutees and went into a crystal shop. I am a big fan of gem stones. I like the fact that they are beautiful in their own right but I also like that some people believe that certain gems perform particular roles or have certain healing properties. So far as I can work out it can’t do any harm to carry a few beautiful things around with you and perhaps them do a bit of good too even if it is all just in all in the mind? – lord knows I can do with some assistance with anxiety and communication!
I had gone to the shop with the idea of buying Em something. Gifts in therapy can be a complete minefield can’t they? Actually in all the years I have been seeing Em I have only given her one thing (aside from cards at Christmas and the therapy anniversary). Last year I gave her a small marble with a heart on which cost next to nothing. Similarly, the gem stones are not high value but rather meant to be symbolic, kind of, ‘I know it’s been complete dog shit lately but I care about you and hope these make you feel a bit better’.
Whenever I buy crystals for myself or for other people I choose them based on the colours I associate with them rather than reading all the information about what they are ‘meant to do’. Because Em lives by the sea and generally wears blues and pastel colours I tend to associate her with pale blues and turquoises. I saw these two stones, blue lace agate and amazonite and was instantly drawn to them:
When I got home I looked up the meanings and they are meant to be helpful for communication (which has been a fucking great problem in our relationship lately!) and soothing physical ailments and emotional issues as well as stresses in the workplace.
Bingo!
So, the next session I went with them in my bag….where they stayed!
The session after that I wore dungarees and put them in the chest pocket…where they stayed! I did make a bit of a move towards giving her them, ‘can I give you something’ with ten minutes to go and then completely dissociated and sat in silence for ten minutes completely gone and didn’t hand them over. I got completely overcome with fear. I was terrified that giving her the stones would let her know that I care about her (which duh was the point, right?!)…which feels scary because it could end up in her rejecting me in some way and quite frankly everything has been so fragile I just couldn’t risk it…even though clearly part of me wanted to.
By the third session Em was completely better and in no need of the crystals at all- ha! I sat pondering what to do. She obviously knew I had wanted to give her something in the last session but didn’t push me to talk about it. This session hadn’t been a complete disaster and with about 5 minutes to go we seemed to finally connect. Man that’d been a long time coming! I felt brave enough to ask her if I could give her the gift with two minutes remaining. She asked me what it was. I was like, ‘I’m not going to tell you what it is before I give it to you, that’s not really how it works!’
She took the gift, unwrapped it, and said she liked them very much. I explained the meaning behind them and she seemed genuinely surprised that I had noticed that she hadn’t been well. Then she did the therapisty bit about saying she thought it would be useful it we could have a conversation about them next time because she thought it would be helpful. I agreed…but before I left she just had enough time to put her foot in it:
‘When people give me gifts it can be really useful to talk about the meaning behind them. Then when the therapy is finishing I get the gift out again (because I don’t throw things away) and we discuss it again. Then people might take it back away with them as a symbol of the work we have done.’
Now. Perhaps it’s me…BUT… this made me bristle hugely for lots of reasons. To start, we had just gone through a month of hell in the therapy and this was, in part, me trying to get reconnected and show that whilst I might be resistant and difficult at times she does really matter to me and that I care about her and think about her when I am not with her. To be reminded at this point of ‘other people who give her gifts’ felt shit.
I mean I know I am ‘one of many’ but at the moment I didn’t need to be reminded of the clinical nature of the relationship. I’m under no illusions that this is a therapeutic alliance but it is our relationship – I don’t particularly want to hear about what she does with other people!
Then for her to say she doesn’t throw things away…I mean it hadn’t occurred to me that something I might give her would end up in the bin and whilst she was saying she doesn’t do that it seemed an odd thing to say.
Then finally, and this is the big one…I cannot imagine when my therapy comes to an end Em getting the things I have given her out, talking them through again and then saying I can take them all away with me would feel therapeutic AT ALL. In fact, right now, I think it would send me back into therapy!!
The idea that the things I would give her that have meaning could be given back so easily feels really rejecting. I can’t really explain what I mean but it’s something about me wanting her to have something that symbolises our relationship when I am gone and it feels like what she is saying is at the end she can wipe the slate clean ready for the next person to take the Monday 10:30 slot and the Friday 9:30 slot. Maybe I am just being oversensitive but it felt crap.
I went home and wrote in my book how I was feeling about what she had said and my feelings about it…and the words are still sitting on the page and she hasn’t seen them! By the time it was the next session and she brought up the gift again I had shut down and didn’t want to talk about it at all. She said something about them being about care or something but I can’t even remember now. I just felt angry and hurt. I dunno, something I wanted to be connecting just felt totally crap.
(Remember, I did say it’s been a really bad time lately!)
Then there were a few more hard sessions and then I had a holiday! Hurrah.
Tbh I was glad to get away. I really needed a break. It was glorious and I wish I was still there! I have been working really hard lately. Teaching loads of sessions (the joy of exam season and teaching both English Literature and English Language GCSE and A Level) which has meant six days a week and lots of late nights. No wonder I have been strung out and useless in therapy!
I have realised that therapy cannot be done effectively when running on empty. It just becomes an exercise in firefighting crisis feelings because my piddly letterbox of tolerance is wedged shut. I am sure that things have felt as bad as they have because my day-to-day life has left me exhausted and overwrought. I just haven’t had capacity to hold all my pieces together properly and so when I have got to my sessions the wheels have fallen off because it’s been the only safe place in the week for that to happen. Pushing Em away has felt like the only thing I can do because if I really say how things are I might actually completely disintegrate.
Anyway, a week in the sun was just what the doctor ordered….actually this is true. At my last cancer follow up it was discovered I am deficient in vitamin D so a bit of sun was perfect (alongside my supplements!).
But of course the holiday also meant THERAPY BREAK – boo hiss – and do you know what made it even worse? She was not on holiday at the same time this year. So parts of me felt really sad that I was missing out on my sessions.
Honestly, this attachment stuff is kicking me in the ass right now!
Whilst the holiday was absolutely fantastic the return to therapy didn’t go brilliantly. What a surprise. The first session back, as I have said a million times before, is rarely easy and this last week was no different. Knowing I had a lot to say but also knowing that I have sat on stuff for six weeks I made the fatal error of sending a text on Sunday night asking Em to go through my writing in the notebooks with me and explaining that she has suggested that maybe I need to take a leap of faith in therapy and that this felt really risky but I was willing to try. I was so desperate to move things forward.
When I arrived Em immediately said that she’d seen I had sent her a text but that she hadn’t read it. FFS. I hate this. Straight away it set the protector parts on guard and I felt instantly like she simply doesn’t give a fuck about me so why on earth would I make a leap towards her when she simply isn’t in the least bit interested in me? Em tried to help me back into the room but I was upset and shut down. I asked her to read the text. She acknowledged how breaks stir things up but that also things had been really hard even before the break blah blah blah.
Then, whoop whoop, another great moment.
A lecture about communications outside the room and how she doesn’t want me to text or email her but wants to get to understand what makes me want to communicate with her when she is not available to me because I can’t seem to let her in when she is there. She used a feeding analogy. She’s done this before. She likens me to a hungry baby that for whatever reason cannot feed when mother is there and available to me and yet when she’s gone I realise just how starving I am and start desperately trying to feed and get increasingly upset. I know why this happens but trying to explain this feels too hard when my adult is unavailable because when the youngest parts are active the words aren’t.
I had been sitting swimming in the room, struggling to stay present, unable to really talk…I could see Em was frustrated and I said, ‘I feel like you are really frustrated with me’. She owned her frustration and said that she’s aware that it’s been awful for me lately and that she wonders if I think what we are doing is ‘good enough’ for me and if ‘she can help me’.
FUCK.
We all know what I heard at that point: she’s given up; my silences and dissociation have finally pushed her away; she doesn’t want to work with me.
She said that she wasn’t saying that the work was over or that she didn’t want to work with me but that she sees how painful it’s been for me. Try telling my brain that! It can’t hear you!!
Ugh.
I did manage to talk a bit and let some stuff out at this point. I think it was a panicked response to feeling like I might get terminated if I didn’t get my start talking soon. I can’t remember what I said now, though! But whatever it was it was vulnerable and open enough that Em said something about how the frustration had gone and that we can work through this together. She said that she thinks we need to work very explicitly with the parts, especially the ones that are resistant and gagging all the others.
This is good.
I think this is what I think needs to happen too.
She suggested maybe when things feel really blocked in session that perhaps I could write or draw…I like this idea but often when I am in a really bad spot there simply aren’t any words or pictures I’m just in a black pit of hell. However, there are times when I am not away in dissociative hell but struggling to speak that I think it might work really well.
Despite all the positives once we connected, I left Monday’s session feeling rock bottom. Everything felt wrong inside. I know I have a tendency to latch onto the one ‘bad thing’ I hear and then fixate on it rather than notice all the evidence of what is good in a session. I felt so far away from Em that my default coping mechanisms kicked in this week…or rather the Inner Critic stepped up to try and get some kind of control over the shit that was consuming me. Step one – incessant self-attacking voice:
‘You’re fucking pathetic. Look at you. Even your therapist can’t fucking stand you. She’s been so patient but you’ve managed to wear her out too. I don’t know why you would think she cares about you – she doesn’t…you’re wasting your time.’
It never takes very long for that incessant nagging to turn its attention to my body and eating. This week saw a rapid descent into being super critical of my figure. I felt like wanted to cut fat off my body. I started restricting what I was eating and got my trainers out after a year and went on a six mile run and then started on the outdoor gym across the road three days on the bounce…and between Tuesday and Saturday lost 3lb.
It’s not brilliant.
I can feel how things have switched in my head.
I knew, on Friday, that I had to tell Em what’s happening.
This, in itself, is a sign of progress, I think. The thing with my eating disorder is that I have always kept it secret when it is active. I have never talked about it in therapy (and it’s been there for twenty years soooo!) until last year when things got really bad and I was barely functioning. It started off ok, talking, and then it turned into nightmare and resulted in Em giving me an ultimatum after a few sessions. One session I came in and she was stony faced and serious. She told me that she wanted me to see my GP or we’d have to work towards an ending. In fairness to her I can see she was acting out of care and worry about my physical health, I had lost heaps of weight really radpidly and it was having an impact on my ability to function but it felt like I had been run over by a bus hearing her tell me that we would be done if things continued as they are.
That session was painful and we did manage to have a really productive conversation in the end and things got much better with me and I got a handle on my ED….however, that threat of an ending has stayed with me and fills me with fear when I think about what might happen in the future if things get bad.
On Friday, therefore I took a bravery pill and towards the end of the session told her things were sliding and that as a result I was worried about ‘losing her’. She responded really well. There was no time left but we have put this discussion on the table for today and I hope that it’ll go ok. I hope she will see that I have brought it into the room (even though it feels dangerous to do so) because that’s what I promised last year. I said to her that if things started to slip I would let her know before it had chance to become a big problem.
I can’t say I am not nervous. I am. But actually, at this point, there is so much work that I have been avoiding since Easter that I just need to dive in and see what happens….like my out of control octopus in my notebook!
Throughout all this, Em has tried to reach me. Parts of me can hear it….it’s just there’s a couple of really noisy parts that are screaming right now about not trusting her and undermining the therapy. Basically, the house renovation has encountered a few snags lately! But I’m in this for the long haul so I will get things sorted…eventually!
So…that’s about it…up to speed in a very very long post! There’s obviously been a lot more said than all of that but after nearly 4000 words I think I’ll stop.
The fact that I am fragmented and have parts is not new news to me or my therapist, or, I guess, anyone that reads this blog. I noticed/became aware of distinct parts of myself split into different ages in the Christmas therapy break of 2016. As we all know by now, I don’t do especially well with therapy breaks and basically the system came online for me then as the feelings of attachment were activated and simultaneously the ache of feeling abandoned and sort of rejected sent me over the edge. Fun times!
All the young parts suffered massive separation anxiety and had a huge meltdown that holiday because they couldn’t see my therapist (shudder, the shame!). My teen part really struggled and after a couple of weeks of little ones literally screaming in her ear (that’s what happens, I can hear the screaming of a small child inside) and at the same time the ageless dementing mother-fucker the Inner Critic systematically sucking anything good from her and replacing it with fear and feelings of inadequacy, she had asked for a double session with Em when the break ended.
We learnt, then, that Em doesn’t do double sessions and that was enough to tip my teen part over the edge. She has asked for help from professionals before and been sent away, her pain not taken seriously, and this ‘no’ from someone who she was just about feeling like she could trust was enough to send her into hiding and instead resort to her well-worn paths and coping strategies: cutting and burning herself and not eating.
It was a really difficult break for sure and confusing as hell for me. I felt fully bonkers. Like, really, WTAF is all this about?!
I returned from the break feeling shattered and scared. It took a few weeks to talk to my therapist about anything much and there was A LOT of silence before I could begin to trust her again and let her in. I realise now, but didn’t then, that it takes time for the various parts to feel safe enough to talk to her and sometimes if one is holding out, often the teen, who is under duress from the Inner Critic to ‘keep quiet you fucking loser, she doesn’t care and you’re embarrassing yourself’ or words to that effect it can shut the whole system down.
I have written quite bit over the last few months about how regularly I dissociate both in and out of my therapy sessions. It’s been a big, not problem exactly, but issue in the last year or so. I’ve felt frustrated and sad that my mind and body so readily do a runner from my feelings and my therapist when big emotions start coming up.
My friend and I joke about our letterbox sized ‘windows of tolerance’ in therapy. Sometimes I’m ok for a bit when my adult turns up and can talk, catch up on the day-to-day stuff and then once I settle down into the space and the young parts come to the front lately it has felt like a switch flicks inside and off I go, sucked into a vacuum, dark tunnel, huge grey space…the list goes on and on.
Anyway, I think I have written about it a bit before but can’t remember, which is kind of ironic because this next bit is actually talking about memory – or rather amnesia. I have noticed that recently there are periods in my sessions where I cannot even remember what I have just said. I have to check in with my therapist and frequently say things like ‘did I just say that a minute ago?’ to which she responds no and has to give me a brief recap of where we have got to because I literally haven’t got a fucking clue about what’s been going on! It’s not great!
My therapist commented the other day about how it feels like we almost have to start afresh every session and build up trust and safety – it doesn’t seem to carry over from session to session. I’ve said this before, that sometimes it feels like I lose all the good stuff during the week and have to work out if she is safe over and over again. It’s not really surprising, there’s some massively hypervigilant parts inside and an epic gatekeeper that needing convincing that she’s safe, but it’s more than that, it’s almost like I can’t remember that she even knows me, that I have shared big stuff with her, that I have told her about the parts, that I have told her that I love her….you know all that embarrassing stuff. So every time a young part comes online there is a fear of being rejected….they don’t remember that she’s never yet shamed me and she knows who they are!
It’s bloody hard work, for us both. She earns her money, for sure!
So, anyway, it goes without saying that there has been a bit of a block for the last few months in sessions. I have been struggling. It’s been frustrating. I have even considered leaving therapy and starting again with a new therapist. I haven’t wanted to and I am glad I haven’t given up. I am glad that I am a doggedly persistent person. I know that a lot of what has kept me going back to session week in week out to often only come away feeling like shit and then struggling all week is my very strong attachment to my therapist – the love basically. I am glad that there has been enough of a belief that things can and will improve and that whatever has been happening is ‘part of the work’. I am pleased that I didn’t cut and run because things have massively freed up and the therapy feels energised if not a little fucking terrifying again. Basically the block and stagnation has finally shifted and we are back in the zone.
Vulnerability is on and eeek…
What has caused this shift? I don’t know. Things always shift in the end, I suppose given enough time. We’ve been working together for such a long time now that I have confidence that these things blow out in the end. There was something though, that made a difference the other day. I’ve mentioned that I haven’t had much time to blog lately. I am so busy all the time that I just don’t get time to write (hence this 6am writing now) but the other night I wanted to write and got out the laptop. I’ve been having problems with WordPress lately and so rather than typing into the page direct I decided I would type the post in my old Word document where I used to write a kind of journal after my therapy sessions and then copy and paste what I had written into here.
I was really tired and soon realised that I didn’t have the energy to write anything but something caught my eye on the page: 246 pages – 171804 words. …. fuck… my therapy journal was long. I decided to scroll back to the top and start reading. Oh my fucking god. CRINGE. It was basically an unfiltered version of this kind of stuff but written as though I was talking to my therapist. Oh god!
As I was reading I couldn’t actually believe what was there. So much stuff. SO MANY FEELINGS…and not only that SO MUCH STUFF THAT I HAVE TAKEN TO THERAPY AND READ OUT!!! I hadn’t forgotten….but I kind of had. Like, shit a brick, this woman knows all this about me. FUUCCCKKK. She’s been with me through all kinds of embarrassing stuff – why can’t I remember that???
It’s not like I haven’t been vulnerable, written stuff, shared it or whatever more recently – I’ve sent a fair few emails and pictures this year (!). But this old stuff was a bit different. It had a different quality to it. I think part of it, the change from then to now was that I was feeling all these things and it was killing me outside session, and I was bringing it to session, but kind of going ‘look this is what’s happening for me’ from my adult state but not able to talk properly about it. I could tell her what was going on but I couldn’t allow myself to feel it in the room and unpick it. I guess it was a bit like giving a presentation but not then answering any questions from the floor afterwards.
What’s been happening more lately is I haven’t had the words, the sign posts, the content but I have been feeling everything in the room with her. I’ve let the emotion in. I have got in touch with my body: the shaking, the numbness, the dizziness, the buzzing, the fear, the ache, the nausea, the headaches…all of that stuff. I’ve let her see me without armour even if the words haven’t been there to help (or deflect). There, in a weird way, has been more trust and connection in allowing her to see me like that than by taking in 2000 words of pain on the page to simply show her.
Anyway, having read all this stuff last weekend, I went into session on Monday and felt incredibly exposed. It was as though the lights had gone on in the room and I felt naked. Obviously from her side, nothing at all had changed but for me, well, I wanted to hide. I eventually managed to tell Em how I felt and how utterly mortified I felt remembering that she knows as much as she does.
She was incredibly validating and caring. She spoke about the parts, to the parts, and how she sees things and how she feels like it’s probably time to work explicitly with the parts more again and keep them front of mind – that they all have a place in therapy. That she has felt the shift into something different too and that all this takes time. That when you have had trauma from day one it’s not surprising that it takes a long time to heal.
Yes.
Great.
I love her.
Ha.
Anyway, there is lots more to write about this week in therapy, but for now, I am going to attach below one part of what I read last weekend that sent me over the edge…a time I brought more explicitly the parts to therapy in a massive letter.
How on earth had I forgotten this??!! Hyperventilate:
I’ve been feeling really anxious these last few days. I’ve been struggling with sleep (although when I do manage to sleep I am having really vivid dreams). I can’t concentrate, I’m cold, and my body aches. I feel so sad, insecure and overwhelmed. This emotional and physical response following the session on Monday has really surprised me – I didn’t expect to feel this way at all.
Given how hard I struggle with therapy breaks (you do know about that right?!), I think it would be natural to assume that being told I didn’t have to manage another one right off the back of the break we’ve just had would be positive. Little Me was absolutely delighted to hear that we would get to see you again in a week rather than two and I think, in the moment, The Teen was probably happy too, although she would never let on if she was. So to feel so unsettled right now is confusing for me.
This coming bank holiday session was an unexpected gift and Adult Me naïvely assumed, therefore, that this week was going to be a breeze. I thought that the younger parts of myself that so often get disruptive between sessions and on breaks would feel secureenough to simply shut the fuck up and give me some peace for a bit because, frankly, I have enough on my mind without them acting out at the moment! I believed that things would be easier to manage and time would fly by in comparison to how the last month has been. How wrong I was! All of my preparations and coping strategies for the breaks over April and May haven’t held firm at all, they have completely disintegrated, even just a few days into this ‘normal’ week.
I don’t know exactly what’s happening right now. I’m still trying to get my head round it properly as I begin to come out of the fog of feeling like the only safe place to be is under the duvet. I suppose the one thing I have always been conscious of, and the thing that often gets in the way of the therapy, is feeling distanced and disconnected from you and me shutting down as a result. I have really wanted to change that but it’s meant a complete shift in my approach and attitude. It felt risky and was hugely anxiety-provoking to bring the card into session and start to talk about how I felt about the break and our relationship last week. It was a risk that paid off, though, because it turned out to be largely positive session and went a great deal better than I had imagined.
Being honest and vulnerable with you last Monday provided an opportunity for a far more connecting experience than I could have anticipated. This is good, a definite step in the right direction, but it’s also thrown in a curve ball. I guess because I feel more connected, what’s happened is that I miss you more- or rather Little Me. does. The Teen is sulking somewhere because she thinks it’s all too good to be true. Adult Me doesn’t really know how I feel yet.
Since the dream in February (which I still haven’t talked about but I suppose we ought to at some point) The Teen had steadily been unpicking threads from the rope that we’ve been making together in session. Whatever positive work we had done since that dream, and there was plenty, was not actually adding any additional strength to the rope because she had been dismantling it when we weren’t looking. Note to self: it’s a really really bad idea to sabotage your own rope when there is a good chance that you might be left hanging off a ledge and need it to hold you.
Before last week’s session I had been worried. I really thought that it would take weeks and weeks to repair the damage that I’d done to my sense of connection and trust in you in the weeks leading into, and during, the break. I wasn’t even really sure that I wanted to make repairs – there were certainly occasions over Easter where I was pretty convinced that I was done with therapy or, at least, The Teen was shouting loudly enough to have some impact.
The relief I felt seeing you on Monday and how good it felt to reconnect after the break has, unfortunately, triggered a massive sense of panic (rather than security) in those younger parts of me. Each one is reacting very differently to the situation and so there is a huge amount of inner conflict going on right now. Little Me is inconsolable and screaming: ‘Please please PLEASE come back – please don’t leave me again – where are you? I miss you. I love you. I am frightened’. Well, she would be saying that if she could actually speak, but she is so little that she doesn’t have the words yet. I know that is what she feels, though, and the anxiety about how she feels is locked in her body. She is terrified that you’ve gone for good this time and have left her because she was finally too much for you.
Adult Me keeps telling Little Me that it’s not long until Monday and that it’s going to be ok (although I know I am not convincing, or in any way reassuring, because I am not sure I really believe what I am saying). She is so sad. She won’t listen to me. She doesn’t believe that you are coming back or that you’d ever want to return now. Part of the problem is that she doesn’t understand time: one week might as well be a year as far as she is concerned. All she knows is you’re not here. If she can’t see you then you don’t exist other than to fuel her feelings of loss and abandonment. I don’t know how to prove you’re not gone when you aren’t around but I need to figure out something because it’s really hard navigating this.
Little Me absolutely wants to be close to you. She doesn’t understand why she can’t hug you or why you won’t hold her when she is in so much distress. I keep explaining that therapy doesn’t work like that and it doesn’t mean that you don’t care or recognise how hard things are for her. The thing is, she’s only little and all she sees is another mother who won’t touch her. She can’t work out what she keeps doing that makes people reject her. She thinks that the therapeutic relationship confirms that there is something wrong with her and that she is ultimately untouchable, unlovable, and forgettable. That hurts her- all of us – and is a theme that keeps coming into my dreams.
The Teen, on the other hand, is furious at what I did last week. I think she likes you, but is still really wary of you. She hates feeling things because her experience is that feelings lead to pain that she can’t cope with. She is absolutely raging that I have let my guard down with you because she thinks by opening up I am not protecting her anymore and have abandoned her.
Apparently, somewhere along the line, I promised her that I would never put her in a position where she could be hurt again. She is pissed off with me because I might have done something that will eventually devastate her. She is absolutely adamant that it’s all going to blow up in our face and so her contribution to this week is voicing an incredibly strong urge to self-harm. She really wants to punish me. Fortunately, for once, I recognise that this is not coming from Adult Me. I absolutely don’t want to injure myself and am currently just about holding onto the fact that I have a choice about whether or not I allow myself to be dictated to by The Teen.
Sometimes The Teen hates Little Me because she is so needy and vocal about how she feels and takes my attention a lot of the time. I think deep down she knows that it’s not really Little Me’s fault because she’s only very small. The Teenager despises Adult Me, though, because I can’t seem to soothe Little Me and The Teen remembers what it was like to be Little Me. before she learned to shut everything off. She knows exactly how lost and sad Little Me feels when she is crying out for someone to love her and there is no one there to hear her.
I am meant to be the adult now, the parent in all of this and make it better for both of them but I don’t seem to have a clue how to parent either one of them. The Teenager feels let down. She feels like I don’t look after her or try hard enough to understand her, and she thinks it’s only when I run out of energy and patience that she gets heard. What she doesn’t realise though, is that she is always present in me just in the way that Little Me. is. I do understand her but she is so damaging that sometimes I just don’t want to listen.
Adult Me is really tired, fed up, and overwhelmed right now. I just wish, for once, that things would be a bit easier and that I didn’t have to be so strong all the time – or at least ‘pretend’ that I am strong. I am beginning to feel a bit more compassionate towards Little Me and The Teenager – or maybe I realise they just aren’t going to go away unless I do something. So perhaps now is the time to let them out in therapy rather than disowning them both.
I think part of the reason the weeks are so tough between sessions is – because I am mental – because these parts of myself are frequently incensed because they know I have been silencing them and denying their existence when actually it is their ‘stuff’ that has caused most of the problems, their ‘stuff’ that needs to be heard and worked through. I’m not completely sure what all their ‘stuff’ is but I suppose I won’t really find out if I don’t ask them.
Please know that I feel a huge amount of anxiety as I consciously bring these other parts of me, that for so long I have gagged, into therapy now. I’m pretty sure that Little Me and The Teenager have been sitting on my shoulders in full view (at least from where you are sitting) for a long time, but I was convinced they were hidden away. Adult Me is making the choice to let you in now against the desperate pleas of The Teenager to reconsider, because I think it’s time to try something new.
So – that’s really how it feels at the moment and as embarrassing MORTIFYING as it is, I think it’s good to have properly connected with some of those feelings and where/who exactly they are coming from. I guess the challenge now is to feel the feelings when they come up rather than ignore or intellectualise them.
*Saturday morning.
I woke up today and realised that there was another part of me waiting for me to acknowledge her. It was Eleven. ‘Why have you forgotten to tell her about me?’ she asked quietly. I didn’t know what to say but I felt bad that I had neglected to mention her here. Eleven is easy to forget, though, I suppose because she is such a good girl and she doesn’t cause me any real trouble. I think she is essentially the foundation of my core operating system and so maybe it’s not so much that she is forgotten but that she is so big a part of me that I don’t even notice her anymore. Sometimes she feels completely invisible.
Eleven is exactly that, she is eleven years old and she has been through lots of changes. Eleven spent a long time silently watching events unfold, trying to not get in the way, not to cause any bother to anyone, to be helpful- all in the hope that if she was good and tried hard enough then maybe everything would be ok, things would settle down and the fighting would stop. She doesn’t understand that no matter how brilliantly she behaves, or how well she does at school, she can’t change what’s going on with her parents. She loves them, though, so she keeps trying to be the best she can be because maybe that’ll be enough to hold everyone together.
Eleven hates conflict. It scares her and so she avoids it at all costs. She spends a lot of time hiding under her bed in the dark being very quiet and hoping that the fighting will stop soon. Sometimes she finds she can’t avoid conflict and that she’s stuck right in the firing line. One day everything got too much for her. She couldn’t bear the screaming and the violence any longer. She was frightened, really terrified when mum starting physically attacking dad in the car while he was driving home from a day out. She’d been screaming at him for a good while first before she started hitting him. She broke his tooth that day. Had mum forgotten she was there too? Dad kept begging her to stop. Eleven felt trapped and powerless. The moment the car stopped she got out and she ran away as fast as she could. Dad tried to chase after her but she was quick and disappeared. That’s the day everything changed. Dad finally left mum. He wasn’t prepared to keep hurting Eleven or himself any longer.
Eleven moved lots that year: three houses with dad and two with mum. She was literally all over the place but kept going as if nothing significant had happened. Kids are resilient, or at least that’s what people say. I think they are wrong. I think they bury things until they have the tools to be able to cope – and maybe that day never comes. Eleven had to leave all her friends and moved school twice. No one knew how disrupted she was because she always manages so well. She never showed that she was sad about that fact that her family had fallen apart, and that everything was changing, partly because she didn’t really feel in touch with emotions anymore, which was fine by her. She hated feeling sick all the time but at least there was no more shouting, for a while, until it got re-directed at her later – but then I don’t suppose that was aimed at Eleven, that was where The Teenager came in.
Life for Eleven was just something that ‘happened to her’, she didn’t really have a choice in what happened or where she was from one day to the next and just accepted it. I think that’s where I finally lost sight of what my own needs were and lost touch with my emotions – of course this disconnect didn’t happen overnight, it had been steadily happening for years. It seemed that what was important to be able function effectively was to create as little resistance as possible. It was being a perfectionist and doing everything well whilst at the same time staying under the radar at home and trying to keep everyone else happy.
Fortunately,bright and does really well in school without very much effort (she puts a lot of pressure on herself though and never feels good enough), she is athletic and is on every sports team, people seem to really like her and she is popular. There’s a problem, though, she’s beginning to feel like an outsider, and doesn’t know why. From other people’s perspective she is a confident little girl who is ‘so grown up for her age – like a little adult’. She is self-reliant, amenable, and really easy to be around.
I don’t know really how Eleven feels about you. I think she is probably less concerned about how she feels about you and more concerned about how you see her, that is if you even see her at all, because as I said, she feels invisible most of the time and has merged with Adult Me.
*Sunday morning dream. Feels relevant after what I wrote yesterday.
I (Adult Me) am in Eleven’s bedroom in [place], sitting on the floor in the dark, hiding under the bed in the space between the wall and the wardrobe (It is a cabin bed). I feel ill, my heart is pounding and my chest is fluttering. My body is shaking, I can’t breathe and I feel like I am going to pass out. It feels like I am dying but maybe it’s a panic attack. I don’t know what to do. I feel like I can’t move from where I am. I decide to call you on the phone. When you answer you sound different. Distant. Annoyed, maybe. You ask me if I am ok and I say, ‘no, not really’. You ask me what’s wrong and I can’t speak. There is a long, awkward silence. Then you start talking but I can’t follow anything that you are saying because I am so overwhelmed by what is going on with my body. I am crying but you don’t know that. I hear you say that you’ll see me on Monday. I start to talk to you. I can’t remember anything that I was saying – but it felt significant. I expect you to say something when I finish but there is silence. I realise that you have actually already put the phone down and haven’t heard anything I’ve said. I’m not sure what to do and so I just stay under the bed crying and shaking with my knees curled into my chest.
* So yeah! That happened last year after Easter break. Since then there’s been a bunch more little ones/parts come up but I am still staggered that this is ‘out there’ and I didn’t ‘know’ until last weekend.
With just ten minutes of Monday’s therapy session remaining I finally said it. In words. In the room. To her face. Not written down. Not kind of implied and hoping she might read my mind. I actually said the sentence that has been persistently in my head for the last month (well, it’s always there) aloud. It may not have been very loud, it may have come from a young part, but it was loud enough for her to hear:
‘I don’t want you to go away’.
OMG what just happened?! Did I actually directly tell my therapist how I was feeling about the summer therapy break and show vulnerability and need even when several parts were screaming at me to keep my mouth shut? Looks like it, doesn’t it?
We all know by now that these feelings are always there in one way or another. Every time I have to leave my therapy I feel like my therapist is ‘gone’ and it’s a huge struggle for the youngest parts to just make it through the week…but therapy breaks, well, crikey, they are the absolute pits and no matter what I do, or how I try and prepare for them I always end up on my arse, in a heap, sooner or later.
Ok, so I did kind of have to throw myself over the metaphorical ledge to get the words out and take a forty minute running jump at it: sliding through dissociation, silence, and shaking just to reach the drop off, but I did it- and you know what? It was ok. She didn’t freak out (of course she didn’t) and it opened up a really useful conversation about breaks and the difficulties I have with maintaining connection with her.
It’s fair to say that therapy has been a bit weird lately. It’s my fault. I do want to kick myself sometimes. I’ve been struggling to really connect with my therapist/hiding from her for a variety of reasons. Some of it is definitely a hangover from last Easter break and how she reacted when I finally properly let her in and told her about the eating disorder stuff. I have struggled to trust her with the big things since then because I am worried that if I so much as allude to issues with my body or food she’s going to overreact and write to my GP or threaten to ‘work towards an ending’ again (shudder).
My rational adult knows that I can trust her and that we now have an agreement (that we worked out together) in place around what we do if I end up struggling with eating and she is concerned that things are bad but even so, the teen parts are still hurting after how things were handled and most of what I need to say to my therapist comes from these younger parts. As I have said many times my adult knows what she’s doing and has it together…it’s the others that let the side down! They’re the ones that need the therapy and if they don’t feel like they can trust Em then we’re all screwed.
In addition to stuff around the ED I have been struggling to reach out or let her in because I’ve felt pushed away – and that bombshell about needing ‘to work towards an ending’ if I didn’t go to my GP has just got stuck on loop. Fucking soundbite from hell. I feel wobbly at the best of times and parts of me are certain that she wants to get rid of me… Disorganised Attachment 101. I do know this is really very much about my skewed perception of things rather than it being the reality but I don’t require a lot of evidence of her supposed lack of care in order to shutdown and hide. It is a nightmare.
For example when I asked for a regular check in around the time when the ED was off the chart bad and she essentially said she had no time I couldn’t help but feel like the whole therapeutic relationship was just a huge pile of shite and that she did not care at all. It takes a lot for me to express any kind of need and so to do it and then get a no was just hideous. Add to that the hell that was the beginning of July (cancer follow up at the hospital neatly coinciding with the anniversary of my dad’s death) wanting to reach out to my therapist and knowing I couldn’t, or could but she wouldn’t reply sent me into a complicated rage and devastation cycle:
Why the fuck do I bother? She clearly doesn’t give a shit about me.
I wish she was there and could give me some reassurance. I miss her.
I’m done with this. I hate her.
What is wrong with me? Why doesn’t she care?
I hate myself.
It’s so hard constantly trying to juggle and manage utterly conflicting but intense emotions. I get that this is where the work is. On a good day I can completely see how my therapist is just a therapist and is doing her best to help me but other days it is so much more complicated than that. It drives me insane.
When the five week summer break started flashing persistently on the radar it added in another level of internal struggle. I absolutely want and need to be able to connect with Em before the break but the moment any kind of vulnerability or need starts to creep in the room I have dissociated. I am gone and it takes ages to try and get back to her. It’s been horrendous feeling like she is behind glass and I’m stuck in a long dark tunnel. This week was even worse than usual. There wasn’t even the ten minutes of adult small talk at the beginning before a plunge into young parts’ chaos and dissociation. Nope. I sat down, looked at her, and went numb.
AAAAAHHHHH FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!!!
It’s so annoying. I spend all week wanting so badly to be in that room in order to try and work on this stuff and yet my mind plays tricks on me. I can’t even really remember what we talked about in the session, now. I know that she was trying really hard to draw me out and connect. I really wanted to talk and yet there was a part inside freaking out ‘if I tell you how I feel you’re going to leave’ which is hilarious, really, because of course there is a therapy break coming up next week anyway, and she is leaving, so what’s the difference? I guess a therapy break isn’t forever, though, and yet to some of the young parts there is a real and genuine fear that I will get terminated for being too needy if I tell her how I really feel.
It’s that old chestnut: I am too much.
No matter how many times she tells me I am not too much and that she wants to hear everything I am feeling I still can’t trust in it fully. I really want to, though. I am trying. And I do get there eventually.
So often what happens is that as we creep towards the eleventh hour in therapy I am able to talk a bit. I guess I build up enough trust, or perhaps enough desperation to let some stuff out the bag. I sense the clock ticking down and I get a ‘now or never’ sort of motivation but also an ‘oh she is still a safe person’. This is a pattern I have noticed in my sessions – the last ten or fifteen minutes is where the work is really done. But this is also true as we head into a break. I conceal how I feel for at least a month leading into a holiday (‘what’s the point in telling her anything, it won’t change anything’) and then suddenly the break is almost here and I let it all out. I don’t know why exactly. Perhaps it’s about feeling like I can’t contain it on my own during a break, or maybe it’s about safety. If I let all the really vulnerable stuff out just as a break starts then I have time to recover from it, let the dust settle a bit, we can pretend like it never happened if it is totally mortifying… I dunno.
So anyway, when I said ‘I don’t want you to go away’ I felt like I’d had some kind of out of body experience. Who the fuck said that? It was a young part for sure but I have never allowed that stuff out in this way before. Sure some of you might be thinking, ‘seriously, you’re getting wound up about this??’ but it was huge. Em handled it really really well. She asked me what I was scared of and I said ‘that you won’t come back’ and we talked a lot about how massively traumatising this all felt especially in relation to my dad having gone away and died on holiday.
I always feel silly getting stressed about her going on her summer holiday. It certainly is the hardest therapy break in the year and not just because of its length. It just falls so soon after the annual sucker punch of my dad’s anniversary. I have experienced someone I love not coming back from a holiday, and I have had it front of mind for the whole of July, and then off she goes on holiday for a month in August. The timing sucks.
I wish I didn’t get so scared and anxious that she would respond negatively to something that is fairly normal and understandable. Like surely it would be more weird if I was completely unaffected by her going away for 5 weeks especially given the timing. But I do fear her rejecting me. It is a huge stumbling block for me. I wish that I could retain all these positive therapeutic experiences where she responds to me as I need her to. If I could hold onto her and her kindness and care I know it would enable to be more open and vulnerable but unfortunately I just cannot hang onto these connecting moments and file them away in my memory banks to give me some courage the next time I have stuff to let out (which is basically every session).
I know it’s a process…but god…it’s long isn’t it?!
Anyway, that’s kind of where I am at now. I have one more session on Monday and so that revelation in the last ten minutes of the session might have been the start of the emotional flood gates opening. I kind of hope so. I don’t really want to sit on all this attachment stuff over the holiday and feel alone, unseen, and unheard. I want to tell my therapist how it feels so that she can help me put things in place so that everything doesn’t disintegrate the moment I walk out the door.
She said we are going to work on building on the felt sense of connection between us in session next week…..god only knows what that’s going to entail but I’m telling you now if she gets me to imagine fucking angels or a sodding box to hold positive feelings in I will throw my pebble through her window!!
Musing on counselling-related issues in the UK. I am a counsellor/psychotherapist and a client too. As the blog title suggests, my counselling journey began in the client's seat. For information about my counselling and psychotherapy practice see my website: www.erinstevens.co.uk
holding it together as I journey through therapy - a personal account of what it's like to be in long-term psychotherapy navigating the healing of C-PTSD, childhood trauma and neglect, an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, as well as giving grief and cancer an occasional nod.
Throughout all this, Em has tried to reach me. Parts of me can hear it….it’s just there’s a couple of really noisy parts that are screaming right now about not trusting her and undermining the therapy. Basically, the house renovation has encountered a few snags lately! But I’m in this for the long haul so I will get things sorted…eventually!
Rubber Bands and Chewing Gum 
You must be logged in to post a comment.