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.
Have you ever wished there was a space where you could see the real experiences that other clients have had with your next/potential therapist rather than relying solely on unverified ‘glowing’ testimonials that therapists place on their own websites to help you decide whether they’re the ‘one’?
Shopping for a new therapist isn’t easy. You can do all the due diligence in the world: research, ask questions about their practice, their modality, how they view the therapeutic relationship etc… but you’re rarely going to get a therapist admit to their previous mistakes, difficulties, or lack of competence in the early days (although it would be really great if they did!!).
Not very many therapists open themselves to Google reviews (unsurprisingly!) as they have no control over what’s posted and it’s almost impossible to get a Google review removed. The thing is, you’d think on balance if these ‘professionals’ are even half of what they promote themselves to be online then their ratings would even out over time. The odd unfavourable review pitted against a stream (tsunami) of gushing five star ones wouldn’t be enough to paint a wholly negative picture would it?
There surely can’t be all that many of us out there that have been so harmed in therapy that we want to give our honest zero star reviews and warn other clients off can there?
I think we know the answer to this question 😆.
So, given that ‘Trust Pilot For Therapists’ doesn’t actually exist, we’re left with no option but to try and trust and put faith in what we see online. Most unwitting clients take therapists at face value from the glossy bios on the BACP website, or other therapy advertising page, or a therapist’s own personal website (cue soft lighting, benevolent smile, a nice cardigan, or some outdoor woodland scene) and the likelihood of us ever finding out what might have happened in the past that might be – how shall I put it? – less than optimal remains concealed in the shadows.
I think it’s tricky, too, when we do take steps to book a session and go and meet someone new because although we might get a ‘gut feeling’ about someone from the off it can take a while to get a sense of whether someone might be a good fit or not. This is especially the case if we’ve been hurt in therapy before. Our antennas are looking for it feeling ‘wrong’ but there’s also a part where we think we should override doubts because it’s probably our defences.
Meeting with Elle for first time was hard. I’d just come out the long-term therapeutic relationship with Anita and then done eight sessions with Hannah that crashed and burned. Therapy wasn’t ever going to feel safe and part of me hated Elle because she wasn’t Anita and she didn’t know me.
Still. We made it through to where we are now- almost two years in.
Last night I decided I’d write my own therapist reviews for some of the ex-therapists I’ve had and let my claws out – it was more Wolverine than cute kitty. Can’t see these ever making it onto their testimonial pages, can you?!!
Enjoy. 😉
P.S – If anyone feels like they’d like to write their own (positive or negative) and ping them into the comments, I’d love to see them! You’ve got to laugh otherwise you’d cry…and man, I’m all too familiar with the crying.
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EM:
As a highly trained and experienced clinical psychologist, I had high hopes for my therapy with Em. She said she specialised in trauma as well as many other of my presenting issues. It turned out that Em is frightened of entering into relationship with her clients and thinks that any move on the client’s part to try and discuss the therapeutic relationship or feelings that arise in the relationship is getting away from the therapy and is in fact ‘pushing the boundaries’. Em is unwilling to meet the client where they are at and operates from a one size fits all model (although she would call herself ‘integrative’). As a therapist, Em says that she is able to handle all the feelings a client might feel and welcomes them – only I wouldn’t recommend expressions of love or anger should you enter into therapy with her as these may trigger her into calling you an adhesive parasite as well as suggesting that you may secretly want to fuck her. If you have any feelings of compassion for those with mental health issues – she is not the therapist for you, as she believes that the majority of her NHS clients are ‘playing the system to get their PIP’ and if this isn’t enough to put you off- I found out much too late that she is a tory (as well as a class A cunt). 0/10
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ANITA:
Anita presents herself as an ‘ethical’ therapist who takes great care and pride in her work. This could not be further from the truth. She is, in fact, more damaged than the clients she professes to help. Indeed, she is the equivalent of an emotional wrecking ball. Her avoidant personality means she is unable to take accountability for her actions and behaves very much like an ostrich. Anita is neither emotionally intelligent or competent enough to be working as a therapist and it is laughable that she believes her services are worth £60 an hour. My advice would be take your money and set fire to it. It’ll do less damage to you in the long run. Don’t be fooled by her website and the extensive list of glowing testimonials. The truth of the matter is that Anita has left a trail of devastation in her wake and justifies her serious failings by repeatedly citing her ill health and ‘situation’. Her situation is of her own making, and her health has been steady enough to get married as well as sustain her counselling business. If you are seeking a therapist with integrity and honesty – Anita is not the therapist for you. Steer well clear. 0/10
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HANNAH:
Hannah is an inexperienced therapist who really should only focus on light work – she is certainly not equipped to deal with trauma. As with many therapists, her ego is far larger than her capability and she is prone to bite off more than she can chew. As much as suggestions of practising ‘yoga’ and going on a ‘retreat’ would maybe be welcome from a friend when sharing your struggles, it is hardly helpful advice from a therapist talking with a client who has been in therapy for many years who has a complex trauma history and recent trauma from therapy harm. This is straight out the playbook of CMHT suggesting a warm bath and cup of tea to people suffering suicidal ideation and self-harm. Chat GPT would dish out more helpful strategies than this at no cost and from the comfort of your own home and phone. Hannah does, however, have a nice set of colouring books and pens. 2/10 Give her five years and she might be worth a visit.
Last year Elle and I were talking about when things have gone wrong in my therapies (there’s plenty of content there and we visit it regularly!) and situations where a client might choose to ‘end’ and not come back to therapy but it feels somehow unexpected or not the ‘natural end’. I was in one of those sensible adult places, not activated (!), and so able to express some of what goes on for me when the wheels feel like they are falling off in the therapeutic relationship and how panicked I get. I recognise that sometimes the reasons I bolt for the door (sometimes literally) are often not what appears to be happening on the surface in the moment.
What can seem like a very small trigger can send me totally spiralling…but then that’s hardly surprising when we look at this through a Complex Trauma lens, or the fact that I have tonne of parts who are all processing stuff in their own ways – many of which are not particularly sophisticated! Of course, my four-year-old self and teen parts don’t see things the same way my adult self does, nor have they the skills to manage things in the way that my adult does. You’d think I’d be ok, though, seeing as I have a really fucking competent adult self. The problem is, my system is complicated, has the capacity to hijack me, and I am really really good at dissociating. Adult self is rarely there when I need her when I am freaking out.
Let’s face it – what scares me (all of me) more than anything is broken connection, feeling like the attachment is severed, and that I am on the verge of being abandoned. This is not at all surprising given my history because there was a time when disconnection really was a life-or-death situation. My mother’s PND did nothing for my little baby self or my developing nervous system and I have spent so much of my life in survival because my caregivers have never been reliable.
It’s hardly surprising that when I feel like the relationship with Elle (or A or Em…) is headed towards a cliff edge I am the first to run away. I am the absolute queen of ‘leave before I get left’ which is why I absolutely need my therapist to know this pattern and make sure I don’t bolt and disappear when there is a rupture (even if from their side it might seem small, repairable, or can wait). Ruptures can feel catastrophic to my system these days because … well… there have been ruptures where I have been hurt really badly and basically been abandoned and rejected because of my responses. Think of Em. My reaction to being called a tick, calling her out on it, and running scared didn’t see her try hard to meet me in it, to apologise, to understand why I was terrified, she just saw it as a perfect opportunity to let me go.
Anita was way better at handling ruptures… until her life collapsed around her ears and she couldn’t hold herself let alone anyone else. The damage from that ending is ongoing and painful. I feel so sad that in the two years since I last saw her, she hasn’t been able to step outside of her struggles and meet to end but that’s not what I am here to talk about today… although it definitely fed into the intensity of the panic I have felt with Elle during our recent rupture.
So, what’s this post all about?
This is a pre-curser post to help understand a bit of what happened in the most recent rupture with Elle (i.e when I brought it to her attention). Because yes. I got myself in a mess. A big one. And I ended up sending her this message:
I don’t want to see you anymore.
You can only imagine what sort of a state I had got myself into to send that. Eek. Like, I am the person will ALL THE WORDS… not none!
I’m almost done writing that post – and it’ll be up soon. But suffice to say it’s been a wild ride.
I am glad, then, that over the time I have been working with Elle, I have given her pieces of the map of me so that she has been able to understand me better and figure out what I need.
Most of the time I probably appear pretty together when I see her despite the crap that keeps hitting my day-to-day life. I probably seem a bit wounded and in need of support for my little parts but also seem generally functional. Sometimes I am a bit closed off but I am present in the room rather than off in space dissociated. The completely derailed, panicked, reactive, scared stiff self hasn’t really made it to the room (she’s done some emailing though!) – or if she has, she’s not been triggered BY ELLE. Elle has been a witness to the struggle and in support role in the room, not the trigger. It’s only this last month that Elle has had to misfortune of meeting that part of me in person.
Anyway, back to last year. I was testing the water with Elle knowing that it was only ever going to be a matter of time before something triggered my runners and protectors and I needed to know how she would respond if I unexpectedly disappeared. We all know that there are those diehard therapists who will say “I respect client autonomy, and if they choose to leave that’s their choice and I will not contact them thereafter. It’s up to them to contact me should they want to resume therapy.”
Puke.
Honestly, this kind of therapist really annoys me more than anything. If that’s your stance as a therapist then you absolutely should not be working with C-PTSD or people with multi-part systems. This ‘in the service of the client’s autonomy’ is bullshit. I’m not for one minute saying to beg and plead for a client to come back, that’s not realistic. But so often when we start running and slamming doors behind us, it’s not because we want to leave – it’s because we are scared! And we need for the adult, regulated nervous system (therapist) to remind us that we can come back, that we are wanted (even if we are having a tantrum and full of shame), and that they are committed to working through EVERYTHING with us even if it is HARD. Letting a triggered client disappear out the door is abandonment… it’s not kind.
And so, that day I asked Elle if she had ever made a mistake with a client that led to termination and what she did, or what she would do differently. Elle told me the about the biggest regret of her career was a time when she wasn’t as sensitive as she could have been with a client who kept cancelling last minute. She reached the point where she enacted her cancellation policy after several missed sessions – i.e charging for the session by sending an email, and the client left as a result – never came back in. Elle said she had failed to recognise potential wounding around money and still feels terrible to this day.
Mistakes and missteps happen, but what I wanted to know was what she did when the client said they were not coming back. Was she a ‘respect client’s autonomy and let them go’ therapist, or did she do something different?
Elle assured me that she had reached out and suggested that they meet in person but that the client didn’t want to come back, that there were some back and forth communications but that the client ended.
[For the record there was nothing identifying or specific – merely Elle’s feeling that she fucked up and had learnt a lot from that.]
I told her that I would always want her to reach out to me because it made me think about all the times I ran out of Anita’s and how when I am upset I can pull the plug (or parts of me can) and how it is really important to me that my therapist recognises when I am truly wanting to end and when I feel backed into a corner and feel like I need to leave because I can’t tolerate the feelings of disconnect etc.
Even though Elle was clear that she would always contact me in a rupture situation – my brain was whirring after the session and so I wrote her this letter at the time:
I was thinking about what you said yesterday, about the client that never came back – because of course that’s what my brain does at 3am when I can’t sleep and the anxiety is doing its thing. I actually had a lot of thoughts, like I can think of hundreds of reasons of why that all happened, but I am sure there’s nothing you haven’t thought about over the years so it’s not relevant.
However, what it did make me really think about was what would happen if something similar happened with us. You’ve probably figured out by now that I am not someone who cancels last minute and, generally speaking, if I did it would be because something was out of my control with the kids or something. But, actually, there are times when I get completely hijacked by my system and the “I don’t want to go” (it’s much bigger and more complicated than that) is really hard to get around.
Tbh it’s rarely an “I don’t want to go” because there is lots of me that absolutely does but it’s sometimes more of a “things feel very wrong, something is up, I’m scared that it’s all going to blow up, I don’t feel safe, I feel hurt, abandoned, rejected, maybe even angry… [on and on and on]…and so I need to protect myself from that and stay away – and she doesn’t care anyway so what’s the point?! It’s better to leave before I get left…”
I mean I totally get what happens, where it comes from, what parts of me are involved, and yet when it’s happening it is not always easy to sidestep it. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic but I guess at least there’s a really clear trajectory on how it all runs which I guess at least I am aware of now. And I see it a lot. Clients, for whatever reason, find it difficult to go to their therapy, maybe don’t show up, and might seem to be ghosting but actually it’s not because they don’t want to be there it’s because there is some kind of a rupture (that maybe the therapist has absolutely no clue about) and they, for whatever reason, can’t bring it to the room.
So many of us are conflict avoidant and even though bringing ‘big feelings’ shouldn’t be a problem, I guess most of our experiences have been that when we have, we’ve been mocked, or shamed, or abandoned, or gaslit…you know the deal… and so we’d rather not risk that repeating. I think sometimes, too, part of us knows that our reaction to whatever has been triggered is MUCH BIGGER than it ‘should’ be and so there’s shame and embarrassment there too because we feel completely derailed and it’s not even that big a deal (only it is a massive deal!).
I think it can be all the more unsettling for people that don’t really spend much time contemplating the therapeutic relationship and so when something between the therapist and client happens it’s hard to know what to do with it. Like it’s much easier to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sick” rather than, “I feel really anxious and something you said has really upset me” when they thought they were there to talk about their work stress and all of a sudden all this other shit is stirred up.
Sometimes it feels like a toddler or a teenager having a tantrum but actually I think that’s exactly what is happening – whatever is being triggered isn’t necessarily conscious and, in that moment, the adult self isn’t available enough to navigate the situation and all we know is that it just feels huge and insurmountable and overwhelming and completely in our bodies – and so the instinct is to run away and hide.
In some ways I think this can be really hard to manage because whatever is happening to stop a person turning up to therapy feels massive to them, and acting out can bring on all the massive feelings of shame and embarrassment afterwards and basically like you just want to crawl into a hole and die. It takes a lot to feel brave enough to come back and talk it through, and there has to be a strong enough sense that the person opposite you isn’t going to confirm everything that you fear is happening. It really is like with toddlers and teens. They need an adult to help them out of their meltdowns sometimes and an invitation back to work things out.
It is really complicated (but also not). I think when people don’t show up, rather than being flaky or disrespectful (I mean I guess there must be some people like that), is about testing whether the therapeutic relationship is strong or not. Like do you care enough to come find me if I disappear or will you just let me go? And I really get that this is complicated because all the training is like, ‘therapists should respect client autonomy’ and all the shit about not creating a dynamic that encourages ‘game playing’… only that is really pathologising and really makes it seem like everything that happens is down to us. It’s not game playing, it’s trying to protect ourselves.
As I said, lots of us have been hurt over the years and haven’t had the experience of managing conflict in a way that doesn’t somehow burn the house down and so rather than face a situation that potentially will hurt us more on top of whatever hurt feelings we are already feeling, we disappear. I think, for me at least, if I experience something as being abandoning or rejecting then it absolutely triggers the need to run away.
I’m not explaining this brilliantly well, and this is looooonnnggg, but I guess what I am trying to say is, if I cancelled last minute, or didn’t show up it’s not because I am rude, or don’t respect boundaries or whatever else – it’s because something is really wrong (from my side) and it feels too hard to come. If you just let me go and never contacted me to find out what was up or didn’t reach out and invite me to come and try and figure out what’s going on with you in person, actually what it confirms to me is probably everything I was running away from in the first place which is the feeling that you don’t care…
I’d like to think that a situation like this would never happen – but I also live in my head and experience often enough my runner ducks bolting. Just usually I have enough time to gather them back together before I see you.
Having a therapy go south in this way is sooooo common and causes such a lot of hurt to those involved. I have way too many stories – not just my own! – and I was wondering whether after the event a therapist reaching out would make any difference. And I think it would. An opportunity to talk through what happened when it’s not live would probably be really helpful because I think we tend to carry this shit around for a long time.
Anyway, that’s… a lot. I’ll try not to run away, but if I do, please come and find me. X
And so… I guess it was helpful that I sent that last year, because Elle did come and find me…and the session when we did get to meet was HUGE. I’ll get the ‘what happened next’ post up asap.
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!
Where do I even start with this? Seriously, why oh why is my life so endlessly fucking challenging? I often wonder if I must’ve been a colossal asshole in a previous life because the unending piles of shit that land over and over seem just really too much. Surely, life isn’t meant to be an ongoing struggle that involves jumping hurdle after hurdle without ever having much time to recover and breathe before the next? But that’s how it feels.
It’s little wonder I am always so strung out – even when things seem to be going relatively well, I feel as though I am waiting for the next barrage of shit to hit…and it always always comes without fail. It might sound dramatic but I really feel like I have had more than my fair share of crap in this lifetime. Like living with an abusive parent, the death of the safe parent, and cancer at 31 was enough thank you very much… ugh.
So, it’s been a little (long) while since my last post where I was having a meltdown about the group email that Elle sent out about her fee increase in April. I honestly wish I could go back to that time and only be dealing with that level of shit in my life – you know, alongside having a chronically sick kid and all the other bits that I navigate on the daily…but I was just about head above water then even though it’s felt like I have been drowning emotionally for the best part of six months.
As it turned out, I never got round to telling Elle about the meltdown I had about being ‘one of many’ and her group email, because as life would have it, my life got turned upside down AGAIN and that seemed really insignificant in the big scheme of things . Ironically, the thing that wasn’t a worry at all in that message, i.e the fee increase has now become a real and present stress alongside the not wanting to share Elle. What’s happened you might wonder? Well, let’s just say, it doesn’t seem pay to speak up when things are wrong – or to care in this world.
My wife recently took on a new role in a new organisation in order to be able to work closer to home now that one of our kids has been diagnosed with a chronic lifelong condition. She’d been in post for a week when she had to escalate some serious findings to the CEO and rather than listen to what she had to say they got irate and told her to leave…basically they didn’t want to know. This was shocking… like honestly, mind-blowing…you just wouldn’t quite believe that companies run like this…especially when people’s lives are in the mix but it is all too common unfortunately.
So, what does that even mean? Well, this is the sixth week she’s been out of work and no money coming in. She has several ongoing interviews at the moment (at her level most jobs have a minimum of three interviews and some kind of presentation to the directorate), but these things take a loooonnnggg time and meanwhile our main earner isn’t earning.
Can you imagine the stress? For someone that has a bit of a scarcity complex it has really triggered me.
Of course, my system is in absolute meltdown about it. I am hardly sleeping, my back seized up the first week, then I came down with a stinking cold/flu which has lasted the best part of a month now and I have had to work through it when had I not been self-employed I’d have been in bed sick.
It’s not surprising I got pummelled with this though and just haven’t been able to bounce back, as alongside all of this we spent most of the first week post ‘no job’ in hospital with our son who is immune suppressed due to his medication regime and had developed an infection.
It’s been exhausting.
I am exhausted.
Burnout is real.
And it is nigh on impossible to hang it all together when so much feels so out of control and dangerous. This post has actually been half-started and languishing in my laptop for ages now, and really I thought about deleting it as it’s not even really about ‘therapy’ – but I want to post so that my next ‘therapy’ post will make some kind of sense…when I get round to writing it… because no surprise, I have hit huge skids with Elle this week (not that she knows it yet) and it has felt like the biggest rupture to my system.
My inner world is in turmoil and I think it must have at least something to do with my external world going tits up…but you can figure that out with me next time. Maybe I am overreacting or maybe Elle has just been unconsciously insensitive and maybe I am justified in feeling really hurt. I don’t know.
Still, back to the shitshow that is my day-to-day!
As we all know, life doesn’t happen for free… gotta love capitalism! lol. I have juggled some bits around for now – taken on some extra debt to cover the immediate expenses, but there is a real worry that this can’t go on for too long before I’ll have to make some hard choices about my therapy with Elle. And whilst it would be me putting things on pause for financial reasons, my system won’t understand that at all especially given the recent ‘rupture’ stuff that’s just been triggered.
The universe has been delivering a total avalanche of shit since my wife became unemployed… not only were me and my son ill… but the car got a puncture and needed a new tyre, the dishwasher blew up, the boiler broke and flooded the bedroom – because – why??? Then my car engine light came on last week and was an £800 fix…umm….HELP!! There’ve been a few more of these unexpected financial sucker punches but I can’t remember what they are…dissociation is such fun! But it’s meant the safety net I put in place to tide us over whilst my wife gets a new position is spring huge tears left and right.
Not seeing Elle would feel like an abandonment to my young parts who already struggle such a lot because of what’s happened in previous therapies. How many times have I heard that “I’m with you for the entire journey. No matter what.” Or “It’s not about money to me” or “I will keep showing up for you.” And then something happens and oh look, it’s Me, Myself and I figuring things out alone – it certainly doesn’t help that we are rapidly approaching May and two years since Anita went on holiday and then came back and ended the therapy…or you know, didn’t actually end or say goodbye…
FFS.
As much as I’d love to pretend that Elle and I have a relationship that is important and matters no matter what – the reality is, my time with her is a paid for slot and … well… if things don’t shift for the better in the next few weeks then… Elle and I don’t exist. And that is super painful and is sending me into freefall. It’s hard to imagine the person that has been so present and available and just plain loving and kind mightn’t be there for me for much longer – and I do wonder if I have latched on to this ‘rupture’ this week to make it easier for me to detach from her if I have to.
I’d like to think I was better at navigating ruptures now – but I think my ability to be able to bring hard things to the room depends largely on how solid and safe I feel – not only with Elle but in life…and frankly – safe isn’t a feeling I am tapping into right now. Ugh.
I won’t keep you hanging for months on end with the next bit…I just haven’t been well enough to write until now.
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
Do you remember the old roundabouts in kids’ play parks that were really super-fast and basically death traps? Everyone would grab the handle and run like hell round and round then jump on and hope not to fucking die as the force was so strong and could ping you off? There was always the potential risk of getting your foot trapped under it when it was getting going, too.
So… that’s one aspect of how it feels at the minute. Like nearly all the parts of me are stuck on this fucking roundabout and feel soooo sick. Some are screaming that they “want to get off!” and to “slow it down!” Some are on the verge of losing their grip on the handle and are soooo scared and crying…and then the Inner Critic keeps spinning the thing faster and faster because suffering is fun…apparently.
It’s disorientating and exhausting and I feel like I am expending a ridiculous amount of energy just trying to hang on and not puke…only it feels worse than that because it feels like it’s life or death in the moment. I am so fed up of feeling ill and overwrought.
I am wondering a bit, whether it would just be best to let go, tumble out, sustain a little bit more injury but at least be off it. Although, given I have to be more-or-less functional I don’t necessarily think that’s possible. Having said that, functionality is riding at about 50% at the moment and I can’t believe how much of my teaching timetable I have cancelled recently. I just can’t do it.
Everything just feels impossibly hard and I feel a little bit like I am splitting apart and don’t have an especially good handle on myself. I guess it’s not surprising everything feels catastrophic for a lot of me – the problem comes when I can’t hold it all, though, because when that happens everything feels unsafe…mixing metaphors really badly, it’s like the little rowing boat has somehow ended up in whitewater rapids. I always thought I’d enjoy rafting until I did it in Thailand and ripped my big toenail off. I still feel sick thinking about that. And so, it’s really not good at all.
So yeah – it’s a mess and because it’s a HUGE mess I feel like everything is about to explode or implode, maybe. It’s like all those alarms are going off again and as much as I’d like to think they’re malfunctioning – or I am – it doesn’t change how scary it all feels. And, it’s nearly Christmas and that’s terrifying in its own way too ☹ especially if this is the starting point.
Ummm so please stay close because it’s bad.
x
This was an email I sent to Elle after a recent session a couple of weeks back. The stuff with Anita and the box still felt really live (my god there’s sooooo much to process there) and I could feel myself edging closer and closer the to place where it gets very very bad.
I had wondered whether or not to even tell Elle how it was feeling, because really what could be done with only two more sessions until Christmas? The holidays were looming large on the horizon and therefore the dreaded therapy break too (the most wonderful time of the fucking grinchy year).
Although it wasn’t a lot of time, I decided I wanted to be able to try and get something in place to hold this…disaster… so that I didn’t combust or disintegrate or get pinged off the roundabout and sustain some nasty injury over Christmas, and the only way that could happen was if I was honest about how bad it was feeling.
I think I was pretty numbed out in session that came after the box and the elephant and Anita’s note and we didn’t really talk about it … but then that’s because I couldn’t see the box in the room and part of me, at least, felt embarrassed to bring it up.
Later on, in that session Elle said she’d had an idea about creating a nice new box for the stories to go in, but tbh I was pretty shut down at that point because I’d felt like she’d forgotten. She absolutely hadn’t. She was being led by me and when I avoided it she brought it up, safely, as I was cuddled into her. So I do get this is me not her – but it’s all VERY VERY sensitive and I feel as though I am edging my way round quicksand. Hence sending the roundabout of death email.
Elle replied kindly and said that she really understood how hard this time of year is calling it “a memory-cake covered in the sparkly frosting of multiple crushing disappointments” and said that she was ready and waiting with a blanket and reckons she can break my fall if I choose to let go of my grip on the roundabout.
It was around then that I had decided that it made sense to use one of the remaining sessions with Elle unpacking more of my box from Anita, and then use the last session on Christmas Eve to really try and connect with Elle, give her my Christmas gifts, settle the little parts, and create enough holding and containment to get through the Christmas week.
I woke up the next morning feeling really sad and little and out of sorts and took myself back to bed for a nap in an attempt try and snap myself into a better, more adult, place before a massive day of lessons. The nap didn’t really help and I felt really unmoored and upset having had some nightmares with Elle in – you know the usual stuff around abandonment and rejection… awesome.
I was just about to get up and shower but checked my phone first, and imagine my absolute horror when I saw and email from Elle telling me that we wouldn’t be able to meet on Christmas Eve having had a an email from the landlord of her building saying they were closing up for the whole of the Christmas week and that the space couldn’t be used. I literally couldn’t believe it. Although, of course, parts of me absolutely could… because this is my life, isn’t it?
The message felt really jarring. Elle basically said that our last session would now be the 17th and that she also would be away on the week of 14th January (I didn’t know about this until then, although the phrasing of her message made it seem like she thought I already knew.) and that she hoped it didn’t feel too “unsettling”.
It wasn’t just unsettling. It felt like a huge body blow and I basically crumbled in a heap and sobbed face down in my bed for half an hour. I left it until the very last minute before I had to teach to get out of bed, quickly washed my face, and tried to adjust my mask so I would be able to work. There were soooo many feelings. But hurt and disappointment felt like the big ones. The email from Elle wasn’t horrific but it wasn’t really holding either. I didn’t know what to say. Part of me had already cut and run and another part didn’t want to be too needy. So, I simply replied:
Ok. If you get a cancellation can I see you?
Because at this point there was still a week and a half until the office shutdown and perhaps this would give her enough of a head’s up that a single session wasn’t going to cut it.
I think I probably need to give Elle a bit of lesson on my communication style and let her know that if I go quiet for a period of time or hardly respond, THINGS ARE BAD… like VERY BAD.
Elle said that she would let me know if anyone cancelled – which is fine – it was the sort of reply my short email required. Only it wasn’t. I just needed a bit more warmth and a bit less admin at this point when I was totally losing my shit… but then I suppose she didn’t know I was losing my shit…but I would expect by now for her to have an inkling because I’ve done the crumple in a heap a few times now around contact/sessions/extra sessions.
So, when I say I fell apart at the news of no Christmas Eve session, it’s no exaggeration. I absolutely and totally crumbled inside. It all just landed so heavily at time when I absolutely don’t have enough coping to handle it. I was mad at myself for being so upset. I was angry that I had let myself get to a point that it mattered to me whether or not we would see each other. I was gutted that the little parts of me had been excited to see her so close to Christmas and that this year the break wouldn’t even really be a break as there wouldn’t be a missed session.
It wasn’t Elle’s fault we couldn’t meet on Christmas Eve but there was a part of me that was really sad that knowing how this might land Elle just seemed not to really care. Like – was there no work around?
To say that I felt totally abandoned would be an understatement and my system went into apocalypse setting. After all the stuff with Anita being so activated again, and it being December and the anniversary of the wheels falling off with Em all the alarms were switching on…plus there’s all the non-therapy trauma with my mum and wider family, the fact that I had an actual mental health breakdown that saw me off work for 17 months that was triggered at Christmas…well, the funnelling into doom was rapid. Like this time of year is not great for my mental health outside of therapy but adding in the complicating factors of failed relationships and then this…well… it was fucking awful.
There was just this horrible empty feeling and the sense of being ‘not good enough’ and ‘unimportant’ and we all know how bloody awful that is. Over the course of the day, I basically unravelled in the biggest way. It was hideous. My runners were running and my protectors were going all out. As I say, when I am in this kind of a place the last thing I do is reach out and say anything or tell the person I am upset, instead I spin in ever tighter spirals until I am so dizzy and sick that I fall off the roundabout.
I was so disappointed. I had genuinely been just a little bit hopeful this year, that despite everything, Christmas might not be quite the shitshow it has been in recent years. I realise too, that a lot of this is about how I struggle with change. Like, I do know that it wasn’t like Elle and I weren’t going to meet at all and she had at least given me the head’s up rather than telling me in the session the next week. It just meant my plan for how I wanted the run into Christmas to be was not going to happen…and…one session instead of two…was a sucker punch.
It was agony. I can’t really put into words how bad this stuff feels when it’s happening but I do understand that it feels so catastrophic because SOOOOOO MANY parts of me are in play. The entire mini-bus is in the mix- and the driver too.
I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place and there wasn’t a good option (in my wonky brain at least?!). What should I do? Turn up on the Tuesday and pretend like everything was fine so as to avoid a deeper rupture when there would be a two week break and then another two week break in January? Like, this has probably been the option I have leant towards in the past, but I also know that leaves a lot of my system feeling angry and resentful and hurting afterwards and then I am left in the doom loop.
Then there was a part of me that thought about going and saying how awful this had felt and how unseen and abandoned I felt but then I didn’t want the last session to be fraught and there not be enough time to make a repair… but also, I didn’t want her to know that I needed more than what she’d put on the table. I was already swimming in shame for getting myself in a place where I imagined this sort of thing wouldn’t happen between us.
It wasn’t so much the cancellation, rather that there was no alternative options given. I felt like I had been dealt a hard slap of reality of what our relationship was…and it wasn’t what I had thought. I didn’t want to go in and embarrass myself by showing her how much this had hurt me and for her to come back with something like, “I’m just your therapist.”
And so, then that really only left me with this option… and that was to not go back at all. Told you the protectors were activated! But it’s not surprising. There are only so many knock backs I can cope with and after Anita’s shit note in the box and sending back ‘The Rabbit Listened’ and all that has dragged up, I just wasn’t in a place to hold this, too.
I felt really really sad. I had been planning to write a story for Elle to give to her in our Christmas Eve session. We had talked about writing a story together a while back and she’d told me the animal she thought she’d be. I had ordered a plushie version of this animal and just needed to write the story – I thought I had two weeks to do it and had mostly mapped out the plot line and characters. Now this just felt stupid and my brain was in no place to write.
There were a few other bits I had ordered over recent months to give Elle this holiday that felt very specific to our work and the conversations that we had had. I had another card with buttons on, referencing back to the year before when we had done the session with the buttons and I had put her in my button circle. At this point I just felt fucking stupid – like really, why bother and what was the point? None of it is real…and of course I have evidence of just how not real even the therapeutic relationships that seem to be galvanised in love are.
There was part of me that had an idea to write the story and leave it with Monty outside the room with a note that said I was done and not coming back just before the session….but as loud as the teen part was, there were lots of littles crying and begging for that NOT to happen.
For fuck’s sake. Like it was seriously all kicking off. Part of me feels really embarrassed that it gets like this but these days there is a huge amount of compassion for all those parts – the reactions I have are only as big as the hurts I have endured over the years…and this with Elle was just poking a massive stick in the mother wound again.
So, I suffered out all of Wednesday and most of Thursday before being talked down by a friend who strongly encouraged me to reach out to Elle and let her know what was going on for me because she probably had no idea at all. She said that Elle always responds well when I let her know what is going on and that I should give her the opportunity to help.
The stubborn protectors didn’t want to contact her at all and were so angry when I sent on Thursday:
I’ve had a massive meltdown.
I couldn’t say more than that. But that really said it all didn’t it?
And thankfully the Elle that I think is Elle, that most of me knows to be Elle showed up. She sent the most holding email and it completely settled my system down – it was like switching my nervous system from complete overwhelm and panic and putting it into safe mode (I really hope she wouldn’t mind me posting this- but I think you can probably see why it was so effective):
Oh lambkin, I feel sad hearing that, and I hope you’re not feeling shame about it, because sometimes a meltdown is exactly the appropriate response.
There is so much happening right now, and this is historically the toughest time for you for so many reasons. I feel so sorry that there’s not more I can do for you, other than offer you my love and understanding, and a hand to hold and a body to lean on every week. And I feel really sorry that we won’t be able to meet on Christmas Eve as we’d planned, as that felt like such a holding thing to do and imagine would potentially have helped with the tricksiest week of the year.
And I wondered if maybe we could possibly have a phone call that day instead? I know you said you struggled with Zoom sessions in the past, but I wondered if it would feel different to maybe have a phonecall, maybe snuggled up in bed with the duvet over your head? Maybe we could try it at least and see how it feels? It might be a good solution for when things get tough or when it’s not an office day for me.
I hope you feel me holding your hand, even when I can’t physically be there to do it.
Elle x
So, I sent an email back with all kinds of fluff in but also saying that I would really like to talk to her.
My system was still in a state for quite a few days – the hangover from the mess I had got myself into, I think. I felt quite dissociated and just couldn’t really get my brain to work even though things felt tonnes better than they had. I must have read that email a million times last week and each time it had the same calming effect… because even if I don’t remember always, or don’t feel it, she does understand doesn’t she?
I badly wanted to write the story for Elle ready for our last session on Tuesday but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even get myself to go near my laptop until the Friday night because it felt like I was thinking through cotton wool. I have definitely found with my writing that when I am in the zone it just comes and when I am not… well… it’s like wading through treacle. My vocabulary isn’t there, my ability to hold the story in mind, the characters, speech, ALL OF IT feels nearly impossible and honestly, it’s given me a whole new level of compassion for my GCSE students who get 45 minutes to write a story on an unseen stimulus in their exams.
Anyway, I started to write the story but quickly realised I would not be able to finish it in time for Tuesday. I couldn’t even edit what I had done properly… and for someone who generally likes time for things to marinate and settle this felt shit…ESPECIALLY as it was something I wanted to give to Elle. I don’t feel this way with the blog because it’s just me wittering away in a stream of consciousness but a story, for someone whose opinion matters…like I at least wanted to give her something I was happy with and something that was FINISHED. ☹
I’ll write another post on our last face-to-face session (which I did go to!) in the next few days…and the phone call…whatever that ends up being like. Eek. I’m trying hard not to get worked up about it.
Tbh I am feeling a bit meh this weekend. The emotional nose dive is real folks. Christmas is catching up with me. The same old shit is rearing its head. I have retreated into myself and feel pretty fucking shit if I am honest. Once again, I am in that place where I know that if I hide it’ll be way worse than if I reach out…but reaching out feels too much and too scary especially when the Ghost of Christmas Past is sitting on my shoulder reminding me that everyone is tired at this time of year and capacity is at an all time low. And maybe had I not had an emotional meltdown this time five years ago, Em might not have given up.
Most of me knows that to not be true…but…at least some part of me is aware of not wanting to be a burden.
Deep breaths eh?
I imagine lots of you are feeling a similar kind of heaviness and … ugh… sadness…and grief…and ALL THE THINGS right now. So, sending out heaps of love of Christmas as you run the gauntlet of the holidays and corresponding therapy breaks. xx
Since last week when I opened the box with Elle and received the rather lack lustre apology from Anita my brain has been looping thinking about all the things she could have said, or should have said, or maybe more what I would have liked to have heard in the ideal world.
Over the years I have got pretty good at writing letters to my therapists when they won’t engage (honestly, it really feels like a me problem sometimes!) trying to process and get closure when they won’t help me with that. I think the one I wrote to Em ‘Kind Regards (And F*ck You)’ stands out in my mind!! lol. But actually, this time I need to give myself some words to move through the end with Anita when she very clearly won’t. I guess it’s a kind of written empty chair exercise.
So, Anita, this is what you could have said. Best wishes…or maybe…lukewarm regards RB x :
Dear RB,
I am sorry that I haven’t felt able to meet with you during the last eighteen months to give our work and the relationship we had the end it deserved and to return your things to you in person. I haven’t known how to deal with what’s happened with you and me, knowing how much I hurt you, and the more time that has passed the harder it has got to return to it and look at what went wrong. You know I am good at avoiding things that are uncomfortable!
I know that I have let you down and I should have done better. You placed your trust in me and I have shattered that trust – I am sorry. I can understand how being stuck in limbo for so long and my inability to properly engage with you will have caused you even more pain on top of what was already there from last year. No one comes to therapy to end up worse than they did when they started, and knowing what had already happened to you with Em I can only apologise for doing you more harm.
I know that May 2023 was terrible, and the couple of years leading into that if I am really honest. I fucked up. I lost control of your therapy and my feelings and things got really blurred between us. You should never have had to hold so much of what was going on for me just to be in the therapy with me – and I know that this is a total reenactment of how it was for you as a child.
I should have taken your advice and taken more supervision and gone into personal therapy when stuff started going wrong with my mum and wider family and I felt like I was burning out. Instead, I chose to walk down the path of denial ignoring all the warning signs that my life was blowing up around me and pretended for as long as I could that I was coping (in between my mini breakdowns with you).
I know you noticed that things weren’t right when I was in my ‘head in the sand’ periods and told me over and over – and rather than have to face the truth of what you were saying and feeling, I made out that it was you being too sensitive and wrong. I know I apologised for this when I last saw you, but I see now how my “you were right, you saw it before I did” wasn’t a good enough sorry when actually the last eight months of our time together was frequently an exercise in gaslighting. I am sorry that my avoidance of my own mess left you constantly second-guessing what was going on and endlessly triggering you. You were right. Things were different and I had changed.
I know that how I have behaved towards you will feel rejecting and abandoning… devastating… especially to the young parts of you whom I made so many promises. What has happened must feel very confusing for them. I am sorry that I couldn’t provide a space for you to be able to express these feelings and work through what ending meant to you. You deserved better than this – especially given the unexpected losses you have experienced in the past.
I have sent back your books today and I have included the ‘Rabbit Listened’ not because I don’t want it, but because it is a symbol of so much of the work we did together. Thank you for trusting me with you for all those years. I am sorry that you have been left holding so much as a result of my inability to handle my situation.
I know that you probably now wonder if any of our relationship was real given how it has been since we last saw one another. It was. My love and care were real. I just reached a point in my life where I couldn’t cope with anything or anyone outside of my immediate unavoidable life demands and actually, in truth, I’m not even handling those well even now.
You were the collateral damage as everything blew up around me and that should never have been the case. I should have stopped my therapeutic work months before I took the decision to end with you and other long-term clients. I was doing a disservice to you and others and not working ethically when I was hanging on by a thread. I see that now and I can only apologise.
I am also so so sorry that I left you with no support last year knowing how massively this was all going to impact you. Given the type of deep relational/attachment work we were doing together and the frequency of our sessions, as well as the sheer length of time that we had been working together, I absolutely should have ensured that you had someone to help you in the immediate aftermath given I was unable to hold an ending. I should have made sure there was a safety net to catch you.
It’s not an excuse, but I was so caught up in my own survival that I totally neglected to safeguard you. I am pleased to hear that you were able to source your own support but I am again sorry that I failed you so badly – I should have done better.
I know that you know that I am still working and I know how this feels painful to you especially as I have not met with you to end. I can really understand how it must feel abandoning and rejecting to see my advertising for clients and seemingly taking on work that is similar to ours. I can understand that this would be really upsetting and perhaps even make you feel angry.
The truth is, I am ashamed of what I did to you and I don’t feel competent or confident enough to handle the very delicate situation between us now. I think I will only make things worse and set you back and I really don’t want to cause any more harm than I already have.
You told me that it felt like I had cut my end of the invisible string. I didn’t mean to. I disconnected from myself first and then went wild with my scissors and very little of anything remains intact. I know it’s not much comfort but this was never about you. It wasn’t your fault. I know nothing can make this right but please know that I am truly sorry.I hope that one day you might be able to forgive me.
So, it’s 18 months since I last saw Anita and, as you know, in that time I have tried time and again to get some kind of ending/closure with her. I mean, after 3.5 years of twice weekly therapy, a proper ending session/s really is the least that should have happened ESPECIALLY given the sort of work we were doing around childhood trauma, abandonment, and rejection AND how terribly things ended with the therapy with Em.
There was such a lot riding on this therapy going well and ending right… but the therapy was cut short and there has been no closure – so that’s just fucking great! So often, Anita has said she’s either ‘not in a good enough place’ to do an ending or has basically avoided answering my messages at all – then of course there was the small glimmer of half-progress when I asked about meeting with her supervisor instead and she suggested that we meet for a walk and talk to end…errr…nope! That never happened, but that is actually a very good thing because I simply cannot imagine trying to walk and talk this mess out.
Elle and I have been back from therapy break since the start of November (I’ll write about me and her in another post because there’s plenty there to talk about). I’ve been super aware that Christmas is coming very soon (oh joy!) and that I really really don’t want this shit with Anita dragging into 2025 – it should have been left firmly in 2023 when we SHOULD have met again in the September to end given that Anita was no better, as we had agreed. But that never happened and I have been chasing her ever since. It’s farcical really. You’d think she’d want to put this to bed just as much as me.
Anyway, having spoken with Elle about this: Anita, my stuff, what I need/want – I was really conscious that I wanted to get my stuff back even if I didn’t end up meeting with A (which would probably be best, as I have little confidence in A’s ability to hold the space for the kind of meeting we need) but also that it needed to be in good time so that I wasn’t opening pandora’s box right on the eve of Christmas.
Christmas is hard for me for soooo many reasons but I really don’t need to be literally and symbolically unpacking the grief of what’s happened with Anita and specifically the grief of my little parts during the holiday that is all about kids. There was a time when Anita would be giving me Christmas gifts and we’d be nearly celebrating another year’s therapy anniversary at the start of January. So, yeah, there’s a lot that happens round now – not forgetting it’s when all the wheels fell off with Em.
So, I decided that I would bite the bullet and try again to get this shit sewn up once and for all. I saw Elle for my session on the 12th November and when I got home, I sent a WhatsApp message to A:
A, are you around at all, soonish, to see each other and get my things back? I’d rather do it not right upon Christmas as I don’t think I’ll cope very well. Or if this doesn’t work right now, can we maybe arrange to post my things for now and maybe meet when it’s better? X
I felt that it gave her options, she could use the ‘get out of jail free card’ and say that now isn’t a good time for her to meet but agree to return my stuff. She could continue on in her avoidance but at least I’d get my things back and could start to process that with Elle.
But there was no reply.
Ummm.
I don’t know why I hadn’t expected that, it’s pretty true to form at this point, but I just hadn’t anticipated radio silence on such a simple request.
By the following Monday I was upset because I could feel time slipping away for my processing before Christmas internal deadline – and honestly, I just think it’s fucking rude, too, especially as I could imagine that she’s replying to potential new clients in a timely fashion whom she has no relationship with. I just feel like I’ve got so lost in all of this. Anita has put me somewhere in her mind that she can forget about – and that would be fine if she wasn’t in possession of my stuff, or if she wasn’t actually working and advertising her services…but she is.
So, I set up a new email address and posed as a new client – look, I’ve been fucked about for 18 months – something had to give (and it looks like it was my sanity!).
So, here’s what I sent. A very thinly veiled RB if we’re honest:
Hi Anita, I’ve found your profile/s here and on Psychology Today.
I was wondering if you have any availability for face-to-face counselling? I’m fairly flexible with times/days as am self-employed and work from home.
I am struggling with the breakdown of a relationship. It’s been a while now but I find that I am not able to move on from it because there hasn’t really been any proper closure and I wasn’t expecting the breakup. They’ve moved on and I am stuck.
It’s brought up a lot around rejection and abandonment which I think probably plays into some childhood issues/trauma and I notice that I am reluctant to trust anyone and am second guessing all my important relationships.
This time of year is hard for me – I don’t like the dark and it seems to make everything a million times worse for my anxiety and depression. And, of course, Christmas is always tough when you are alone. I am no contact with my mother so there’s a lot, really.
I have been in counselling before but it was only short-term so I think it probably didn’t really go deep enough. I think I am in a place now where I want to do the deeper work and make some serious changes.
Best wishes,
Stevie
So, reading between the lines, Stevie isn’t going to be a short-term client, she wants to do depth work… depth work takes plenty of time and a decent relationship and Stevie has already said trust is a problem. Stevie has also alluded to childhood trauma, rejection and abandonment issues, as well as a MOTHER WOUND…Stevie has the ingredients for Complex Trauma, doesn’t she? All of these SHOULD be big NO NOs for Anita given she no longer is able to ‘work in that way’ and has had to let go all of her trauma clients and completely change the way she works (or so she says).
But guess what guys? In less than 48 hours Stevie got a reply:
Dear Stevie,
Thank you for your email.
Unfortunately, I am currently at full capacity. You are more than welcome to be added to my waiting list although it maybe a few weeks before a space becomes available.
I also need to let you know I will be semi retiring at the beginning of April 2025 and moving all of my clients to online therapy only. If you prefer to see an alternative therapist, there are links at the bottom of my home page [website link] one of the best websites is The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy www.bacp.co.uk
Whoever you choose do make sure they are on the Professional Standards Register, I have attached an image of the logo to this email.
Many people are unaware that our profession is unregulated meaning unqualified or struck off therapist and agencies such as [two places locally that have practising therapists who have been removed from BACP register for misconduct] can continue to practice unethically.
Please do contact me again if you would like to be added to my waiting list.
I am so sorry I can’t see you sooner.
With warm regards, Anita
I guess at least she is now being clear that she is moving to online working but she said she was doing this over a year ago (another reason we couldn’t come back to our work – alongside the fact she’d moved to COUPLES work which is more “head than heart”…) and it still hasn’t happened and Stevie isn’t a couple, either.
It is kind of funny that she’s warning about unethical practice, though.
The fact that Anita is ‘so sorry’ that she can’t seen Stevie ‘sooner’ is an absolute kick in the teeth because she sure as shit hasn’t been ‘sorry’ to not make an hour available for us to meet, sit together and process a goodbye, in the last 18 months.
So. Yeah. Ouch.
I just honestly wish A had the balls to meet with me and just say:
“You know RB, I am sorry. I fucked up. I lost control of your therapy and my feelings and things got really blurred. I should have taken more supervision and gone into personal therapy when stuff started going wrong with my mum and I felt like I was burning out. I am sorry that I haven’t known how to deal with what’s happened with you and me, I know that this has caused you more pain. I have been working with a new supervisor and although I have taken on clients with similar issues to yours, I am very conscious of how I am working now. I am sorry that I have hurt you and I understand how painful this must be.”
But it’s just lies upon lies. I surely deserve the truth.
I decided it was probably worth being honest with Elle about what I had done and sent her a copy of my WhatsApp from the 12th and the email from Stevie and Anita’s reply.
She replied:
Maybe try saying a specific day/time (or suggest a couple) that you could meet for collection, and ask her to choose one? Sometimes a simple ‘this one or that one’ choice is the thing that unsticks someone incapable of making a decision.
Sending her enquiries feels painfully like trying to catch her in a lie though, and I want you to know that you don’t need to prove that she’s deceived you in order to feel justified in feeling angry and hurt.
You have every right to feel angry and hurt and sad, and whatever else you feel.
I am here for all of it.
Elle xx
My initial reaction to that was that I felt judged for sending the email to Anita – but actually it’s probably because part of me was judging myself for having done that, and actually part of me knows that Elle is right – I don’t need extra evidence to prove how shit it’s all been…but part of me did need to have it in black and white.
I replied:
It’s not really about catching her in a lie – I know she’s lied in so many different ways. It was more about seeing how quickly she is able to respond to something and then continue to ignore my request. She’d say something like she’s been busy or away…and it’s not true. It’s just avoidance. I don’t want to meet her. I’ll just ask her to mail the stuff and deal with however that lands. I am so over everything right now.
So whilst Stevie was being offered to go on the waiting list, there’d still been no reply to my WhatsApp from 8 days before and so I decided to send Anita an email:
Hi Anita,
I don’t know if you got my message last Tuesday on Whatsapp:
[copied the previous message here]
I’m guessing that now is a bad time, or you’re busy, or you just don’t want to see me. So can you please send my stuff to my friend’s address but addressed to me please and let me know how much the postage is. [details of where to send it to]
In the meantime, I was texting my friend and was telling her what I had said to Elle and the sort of excuses I’d expect from A for needing to chase again, and then low and behold this came in:
That’s no problem, I was away from my diary last week and since have been trying to figure out a time to meet as it’s very full on at home at the moment.
I will send your things to your friend probably via Evri.
With very best wishes, Anita x
Soooooo…. that was as expected, I should have made an Anita bingo card and ticked off the phrases. It’s sad, but also my friend reminded me that this is a bullshit excuse because even if Anita was away from her diary there was absolutely nothing preventing her from saying, “Hi RB, I haven’t got my diary with me at the moment but I will be in touch when I have” rather than just ignoring it for over a week until pressed her again.
It’s all just so utterly disappointing.
So, where are we now then? Well, this all happened on the 20th….and today is the 30th and I have just had a delivery notification and picture showing that the box is now at my friend’s house.
I didn’t expect a picture of a box to make me burst into tears – but it did. So, who knows what opening the box is going to be like? I can’t imagine it being easy.
I’ve been messaging Elle about it here and there over the weekend and she has been so lovely:
Here’s hoping it arrived intact and we can spend some time repatriating/re-consecrating everything.
And when I told her I had cried and felt sick when I saw the picture:
oh lambkin 😦 never was a box so anticipated and so dreaded in equal measure.
Maybe sit with it a while when you get it
and think about how you want to handle the insides.
I’m thinking very slowly and very carefully
As befits such a box.
Tightest of hugs to you.
Elle xx
So, I know she gets it. She really does. I just don’t know if she’s ready for how I am going to be when I turn up on Tuesday with this box of who knows what? I have cried small tears with Elle a couple of times but I have never sobbed or completely given into the big feelings with her – part of me is terrified of the little parts just crumbling and sobbing uncontrollably and having a complete meltdown. This doesn’t fit with the RB I try and present most of the time. But it’s all in there.
After Anita replied I asked her if she still had baby elephant and if she could please send him home in the box too. She said that she would and signed her email off, ‘with love and care xx’ which felt less cold than ‘with very best wishes’ but again, there’s not been much evidence of love or care in the way that this has dragged out.
So, I know elephant is coming back, and I know my books are coming back… I just seriously hope that she hasn’t put ‘The Rabbit Listened’ in or any of the other books I actually bought for her as gifts like ‘The Hug’ or ‘Big Panda, Tiny Dragon’. ‘The Rabbit Listened’ actually has a note in the front of it from me to her on our first year anniversary of working together.
I also don’t know what to expect. Will it just be a box of my things – and only my things? Might she have forgotten what is actually mine and what I have given her? That room has so much stuff from me in it. Might Anita put a note in the box? I don’t know what would be worse – nothing at all, or a note that says, ‘with best wishes, Anita’.
Part of me would like to think in having to physically handle these items when she boxed them up to send them that she’d be reminded of what it was like with me once upon a time and have taken a moment to feel something, too. I’d like to believe that she would have wanted to write something meaningful to me and put it in the box. She absolutely won’t have done that, though, because that version of Anita doesn’t exist for me anymore. It’s just all very sad isn’t it?
All I know is, realistically whatever is or isn’t in that box on Tuesday is still going to hurt like fucking hell. It’s the reality for the little parts that Anita is well and truly gone. If Anita doesn’t have the books anymore then Anita can never read them a story again can she? Adult me KNOWS all this. Of course I do. But the young parts that have been so tied up in all this have got a sucker punch coming to the gut the moment that box opens, because these aren’t just my books, they’re ‘our’ books, they’re ‘mine and Anita’s’ special stories.
I can’t see Anita agreeing to meet with me down the line to end because if I now have my stuff there’s not much reason to meet is there? – even though an end would have been nice…months back!
So yeah. A bit of a weird update today.
I’ll let you know how Elle and I get on. x
Also – I’m not posting here massively regularly because ‘time’! But Monty is pretty active over on Insta and you can see what we are getting up to:
Right – so – part 2 – ummm so this actually ended up being 4500 words on its own and I don’t have the mental wherewithal to break it further… so…yeah…maybe grab a coffee or something?! Here’s the stuff about what’s been going on recently with therapy as we headed into a bastard therapy break…which ends today…PRAISE THE LORD! Phew. Man am I ready to see Elle…anyway, let’s fill in the gaps!
*I went into a freeze hole with with the US election so this is a bit delayed posting.
A little while ago I was writing about how I was struggling with the therapy container with Elle not feeling big enough – or me basically ‘being too much’ and having ‘too much to process’ and not enough time and space in which to do it (same old same old! I was actually thinking of getting myself a t-shirt made with ‘same shit different day’ on). I can’t lie, I have been in an absolutely horrible place with it all. And it’s not Elle – it’s ALL of it. EVERYTHING has flooded all at once and there is just TOO FUCKING MUCH TO COPE WITH.
The last month heading into this therapy break (me being away not Elle – pray that she isn’t going to spring a break on me anytime soon, please!) I really did start to unravel and it was bloody awful. I mean I literally was sliding downhill on my arse, at speed, and it was fucking painful despite sessions with Elle having been really good. Like really good and holding…. and just lovely, actually.
I mean it’s really brilliant that we aren’t lurching from one shitty rupture and misattunement to another and that sessions feel safe and calm and useful – but it’s really hard when therapy is really going well that things outside the room feel so fucking hard. Complex trauma – as I have said soooo many times – really is the gift that keeps on giving.
Elle and I seem to have connected in a really deep way (or at least it feels that way to me) and it feels very safe and just nice when we are together…but the problem with that is that it’s really brought the young parts up to the surface and when they’re here it’s a LOT. There is so much need (and grief) and as I keep saying, the week between our sessions is tough going.
I think part of it, is that it’s almost like everything with this young stuff has been on hold for the last year-and-a-half since everything went south with Anita and it is only now that the trust is really there and the solid foundation has been built with Elle that my system is prepared to let it all be seen again. Until relatively recently much of this stuff has been in hiding or protected (and understandably so!).
So, whilst it’s starting to feel a bit like an emotional rollercoaster inside again, I do understand why. I’m finally letting the lid off a pressure cooker that’s been madly boiling away for too long a time and it’s not surprising the contents are a bit hard to handle. Elle seems to have a good solid set of oven gloves so I don’t appear to be burning her in the process which is really good, and I do, at least, feel like my sessions are useful and not fucking traumatising or triggering which is great!
Sitting together on the new and bigger sofa all the time has been a game changer in how I allow myself to be – or who I let be- in the room with Elle…it’s so much better than her being in a chair across from me. I know all I needed to do was say, because any time I have asked for her to come closer to me she has, but it’s been a real slow and steady process after everything that has happened before with Anita and Em, and I haven’t always felt able to ask express what I need. There’s always been that very real fear of not wanting to be ‘too much’ or come over as ‘too needy’. Elle assures me that I am fine however I am, but of course it’s not only her voice I have rattling round in my mind, is it?
It’s very hard having a need for someone who ‘appears safe’, now, because I thought Anita was safe and it turns out she absolutely wasn’t – or she was, and then she wasn’t. It really is like doing tiny baby steps with Elle – thankfully she is a very patient person and she meets me where I am at and doesn’t push me too hard, but is right there ready alongside me when I want to go to the hard places…I think it’s really clear to her that this is delicate work and I am very fragile after all that has happened. We aren’t in any great rush and I am determined that this time I do not end up worse off than I went in.
I mean basically this is like exposure therapy, isn’t it? I’ve been bitten by three separate dogs in the last four years and here I am, in a room, with another dog. Fortunately, this latest one is a golden retriever trained as an assistance dog and will just sit beside me calmly for as long as I want them to. Well, that’s the impression I’ve been given. I can’t see Elle suddenly becoming vicious or running off…
I wonder what breeds Em, Anita, and Hannah would be? Em?…are there any dogs that just genuinely hate people and savage them for even wanting to pet them? Anita?… something that looks soft and cuddly but in actual fact is nippy and has a tendency to bolt- but when you find them they’ve snuggled up to new people and pretend they don’t know who you are? – some kind of terrier perhaps? And Hannah?…ummm… maybe a dog that isn’t very used to humans yet and is flighty and doesn’t trust?!
Anyway…back to the story-
My system settles so much quicker at the start of sessions than it did because of the physical proximity I now have with Elle and I am not bothered by the fucking table between us because it isn’t between us! I still do the internal safety checking at the start but it’s nothing like as bad as it was. I don’t think that will ever go away with a history like mine. I am always going to need to scan for danger before letting my guard down because the reality is people change, people drop bombs on your heart, and I would be foolish to not be cautious.
A key difference being beside rather than across from Elle is that I am less likely to let False Adult front the show. In fact, that hasn’t happened at all since we’ve changed things up. When Elle was in her seat I could sometimes find it hard to figure out where we were at and so talk endlessly about stuff (that was relevant but didn’t leave space for the vulnerable parts to connect) and this would sometimes mean that I would head into dissociation (very well disguised and still carry on like nothing is wrong) because I’d feel like I wouldn’t get what I needed until we said goodbye and could feel the session slipping away.
Goodbye hugs are not really enough and would often leave me feeling bereft that I didn’t get more of what I needed in the session (even though we would have talked about useful stuff for at least some parts of my system) and now had to wait until the next week to try again. This really is one of the crappy things about one session a week. It seems to put a lot of pressure on the session being ‘enough’ whereas two sessions means that if things don’t feel quite connected enough that there isn’t an age until the next contact which means there’s less time to catastrophise and for Brian to go wild.
I like that now, instead, I will come in, sit on the sofa and already be close to Elle… The other day I was having a bit of a freeze and shut down (anticipatory dread for the upcoming break that was still a couple of weeks away). Elle had got the playdoh out that I had brought with me and left with her at the end of the previous session. She had it all set up when I got in the room which should have delighted me but instead I was just sat still, I didn’t even reach for the play doh but did discuss colours and textures and was generally chatting so hiding the extent of the hell I was feeling inside – like it wasn’t obvious I was having a hard time.
Why was I upset? Because it was a day where I just wanted to come in and cuddle into her and sob. I had been totally overwhelmed and in a panic, and I didn’t want to play at all – or not right then, anyway. I think Elle sensed something was up even though I was doing a good job of hiding because as she was making a frog she moved her leg over a bit and rested it against mine so we were touching so that I could feel that she was there.
This was enough for me to come out of wherever I had gone and made me realise (again) that I am safe and Elle doesn’t mind me being close and that we are connected. I really need that almost continual reminder that I am not unpalatable and disgusting at the start of each session because that’s the message so many parts of me now carry. They feel that I am easy to discard and it must be because there is something wrong with me…like I have always felt that from the beginning but it has been heavily reinforced by Em, Anita, and Hannah and it’s hard.
So, being next to one another, I can edge my way closer to Elle as and when I want to. I can reach out and hold her hand, or shuffle over for a hug, or I can just lean up against her and be in physical contact whilst we talk. It REALLY helps…and makes me realise how bloody awful it was all that time with Em when she refused to come anywhere near me… it was sooooo terrible for me and my nervous system. It’s bizarre to think that in all the years we worked together we never touched once, not even a handshake. For someone that struggles with feeling unlovable and untouchable it did a whole load of damage – especially as there was no emotional holding either. Crikey.
Elle and I talk in a way that I haven’t been able to with any of my other therapists. She is smart and insightful and funny and kind and makes it very easy to just be me with my jump around brain that is always changing direction. Sometimes I talk a lot and other times I say little, or nothing at all – and not because I am being withholding, just because it’s nice being with her and feeling my system rest a bit.
So therapy with Elle feels really comforting and connected but also like I am wading through all kinds of stuff in a very safe way. It’s different to with time with Anita – although it probably sounds exactly the same. I feel like Elle has a much better sense ‘the work’ and me, like, she’s not just phoning it in and having an easy time if I choose to ask for stories or cuddles or whatever. I get a sense that she is thoughtfully in the space with me. I think Anita really used to be at the beginning, but I think towards the end when she was on her slow spiral into burnout and breakdown, she was just grateful if I turned up and didn’t want anything from her but a hug because she could zone out and I wasn’t being challenging or difficult.
I would sometimes ask Anita what she was thinking when we were having a quiet time, imagining that she’d say something like “I was just thinking about when you said x or y” but often her brain was on things like taking the dogs to vet, or what she had to do later that day or… empty and nothing at all. And this always felt a bit shit. Like I get our minds wander but I think when we are paying someone to be in our experience with us, you’d think they’d be tuned into us and what was going on for us…not mentally making their shopping lists. Again, this was not how Anita was at the start – she couldn’t have been more attuned in that first 18 months or so.
Still, back to me and Elle because fuck me – what else can I really say about Anita? (Loads I am sure, but fuck it for today!). A really lovely thing that has happened in the last couple of months (basically after I shared the post I had written about what a perfect therapy room would be like with Elle) is that she seems to have really taken it on board. One day she came in with new packs of colouring pens and asked if I wanted to draw a version of something I had sent her in an email. She has also brought in story books she thinks I would like, that she liked as a child, and has read them to me so there’s been some lovely sharing of things we’ve liked back and forth. Elle is really good at reading too – and does such good voices – and the little parts of me really love this.
I think after how it all ended with A I didn’t imagine that I would ever be in a position to be safe with someone in this way again. I am now really hopeful that when I eventually get my stuff back from Anita that Elle and I will be able to do some work with the stories and maybe move that all on for the little parts of me. I know there will be a lot of tears if Elle reads me ‘No Matter What’ or any of the books, actually – but I think it’ll be a safe grieving process and something that really needs to happen. I need those little parts to be able to reclaim those lovely messages and have them held with Elle because right now it all just feels really upsetting.
Sooo…the break? Shall we venture into that shithole territory?! Well, it was fast approaching and there was just a lot of stuff coming up especially after Anita’s most recent message about how her life hadn’t been as she’d imagined and how she was now working that came around the time I noticed her website had changed. Talking through that was really helpful but stirred up a whole world of pain.
Then the next week I had left a session that was soooo lovely (the same one with the playdoh) but also really opened up a lot of deep emotional stuff – we’d read a new book ‘Following The Moon’ by James Norbury and both of us cried at the end of it. It is really moving. I had told Elle how much I hated my brain because I had been so anxious about coming to the session and had feared something bad was going to happen (the only bad thing was the upcoming break but my brain was having a meltdown).
I asked Elle if she was real and she had said that she absolutely was and reminded me of the bracelet on my wrist that she had given me. She said that I could message her to check she was real anytime I liked and said she might get another bracelet to remind herself that she was real too – or that I am real – but then corrected herself and said, actually she has no problem remembering me at all. It was all very connecting but I was immediately aware that I was going to experience a fucking huge therapy hangover from the session You know when it’s so raw and vulnerable that it is hard to put yourself back together afterwards because part of you needs that stuff to be exposed but safely in the room and shoving it all back down and carrying on with everyday life feels impossible?
When I got home, I sent an email and asked Elle if she got a cancellation if I could see her. She said she would let me know but if there was going to be a cancellation it would most likely be Friday…because apparently, she’s now working Friday mornings too.
For some reason, that week I didn’t check in with her like I would usually. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was trying to prove to myself that I could do without her and that as a break was coming, I needed to be less needy… I don’t know. So because I had disconnected (despite absolutely needing to remain connected) I was already not in a brilliant place by the end of the week and so when I didn’t hear from Elle until late afternoon on Friday I was pretty awful. Obviously, no space had opened up to see her and honestly, I felt like utter shit. I don’t ask for extra sessions if there isn’t a reason for it and even though it wasn’t Elle’s fault, I felt like I just wasn’t seen and it felt abandoning to the parts that needed her.
Elle messaged me saying she was sorry that no space had opened up and attached picture of the Russian doll set from the room – apparently the little one had been returned (months back she’d realised it was missing but didn’t know where) as an outgoing client had left that day.
This was absolutely a million percent not the right kind of message to have sent me. I am so fucking sensitive to ‘other clients’ but that day in particular it just felt like Elle totally didn’t get it at all. But then why would she – for the first time in months I had not reached out in any way at all. I was probably fine, right?!
Nope.
As I stared at the picture and the lack of anything that felt personal to me and her I just felt at a complete loss and I replied. “I don’t even know what to say to this. I am million miles away from ok. See you Tuesday”
She clearly clicked that shit was hitting the fan… (it totally was) because I am not really a three short sentence type of a communicator – lol – and replied:
I’m so sorry to hear that flower. I hate to think of you feeling so far away from safety and warmth.
I wish I could hold your hand right know, and tell you how loved and important you are, but please know that I’m thinking it.
Elle x
When Elle sends me messages that use affectionate terms like ‘flower’, or ‘sweetpea’, or my best favourite – ‘lambkin’ it cuts through to the places that really need to be seen and heard and everything that feels very wrong sort of just melts away. I want to tell her this at some point but it just feels a bit cringey!
Of course, the disconnect had felt fucking awful that week alongside my panic about the break and so I bloody did a running bomb and decided to be brave and send her the post I had written about the container and asked her to read it.
Shiiiittttt. Go big or go home RB!!:
🥹😭❤️🩹
Can you read this because it’s got much worse even since I wrote it. I feel like a snow globe that’s been shaken so violently that even the scene inside has come unstuck and is tumbling inside the glass. I’m going to bed because I’m sick of myself x big hug 🤗
So, I took myself off to bed and tried to sleep…in the morning when I woke up, I had such a thoughtful and holding reply – I don’t think Elle would mind me posting this here and actually it’s one of those things that would be useful to have here so I can find it quickly in the future when I am wobbling because it was exactly what I needed in that moment – she is soooo good at these kinds of messages when I let her know how I am actually feeling rather than hiding behind random memes:
Oh lambkin. My heart proper hurts after reading all that.
And the first thing I want to say – to maybe give you even a tiny corner of reassurance – is you cannot burn me out.
I never say things I don’t mean, and burnout is not something you need to worry about with me. I did burnout on a grand scale about 12 years ago, learned some very hard lessons from it, and will ever allow myself to approach burnout ever again. I take very good care of myself, and part of that care is making sure I never work harder or give more to people – friends, family and clients alike – than I know I have to give.
People who burn out do so because they try to give more than they can, usually because they feel they have something to prove to themselves (or the world), and I have nothing left to prove to anyone. I know who I am, inside and out, and I’m enough as I am.
You carry this story that you’re so very much, so messy and overwhelming to deal with, but all I see is this lovely human with many many facets.
I don’t see confusing jagged ugly parts and separate fun sunny delightful parts, I just see RB, in all her beautiful complexity. And I think she is amazing and brave and smart and vulnerable and sweet, and sometimes she’s terrified and frozen and shutdown and hiding inside herself, and all of that is equally beautiful to me. Because it’s all you.
So you can tell your followers that you let me read that entry, and I said it was wonderful, and that I am super proud of you for putting all your confused thoughts into such eloquent words and then being brave enough to tell me to read it.
And I feel like some of the suggestions they gave you in comments were great, but let’s talk about what else might be great when I see you on Tuesday.
Tightest of all possible hugs and the biggest of all loves to you beautiful girl.
I hope you sleep well. Elle x
And honestly, that just settled the shit inside right down. It felt like a massive cuddle in an email and every time I read it is has had the same settling effect.
I replied to this when I woke up and we exchanged a few messages over the weekend about other things. I tend to do the big ‘hoorah of vulnerability’ and then head back to adult and hide in normal life not the emotional mess that is my inner world. It’s an interesting dance and it’s hard because I think Elle generally responds to what I put in front of her.
When I am clear about what I am feeling and needing she never fails to respond how I need. The issue comes, then, where I reach out with something fucking random and innocuous like a meme and expect her to know that I am not really ok. I do get this is something I need to work on and clue her into…and I will.
So, what next? Well, that weekend was fucking awesome as I got a sick bug and was absolutely wiped out. Fortunately, by Tuesday (the last session before the break) I was well enough to go see Elle but also just totally on empty. She came to get me and I hugged her immediately in the corridor, she commented on how washed out and knackered I looked, we sat down in the room and I just snuggled into her in a kind of floppy heap. She asked me if I’d like to read a story that I had brought in previously but we hadn’t read yet and I said actually I would like to read a different book instead so that’s what we did.
I was so exhausted and done in that we didn’t really get on to talking about the blog or the struggle between sessions or any of the big stuff but what we did do was a tonne of containment and holding. We read some stories and Elle brought up my dreams (something I had mentioned in the blog) and how I have been struggling with the ones I have where she is horrid to me or pushes me away or gets angry. She said she’d seen something about dream completion, which is something where if you keep getting stuck in loops of horrible dreams that you can try and rewrite the ending so it feels better and maybe we could do that together?
I was cuddled into her and the reminder of the sort of dreams I have set me off and I just started crying. I think I was also really aware that I would be leaving the room and her in about twenty minutes and just didn’t want to be out in the world for two weeks. So, Elle just talked to me in a really soft, soothing voice, and told me what she would say to me if we were continuing the dreams and honestly, I just cried and cried. It was so lovely and so reparative (even though she’s not actually done anything to hurt me!) and made me realise just how many of these conversations I have needed with my mother over the years…but will never have.
As well as this, we made a plan for how to get through the break and how we would check in every couple of days…and we have. The break hasn’t felt great because…it’s a break…but it’s not felt horrendous either. We’ve had a lot of ‘light touch’ contact – I’ve sent her photos, linked her to Monty’s page and shown her what he’s been up to, and had general ‘hi’ type messages – but then on Friday when I got home, I crashed. Totally out of energy. I’ve got a stinking cold. And the wheels came off…but I think I actually have done pretty well given how much crap has been swirling lately to get nearly through the break in one piece!
I sent Elle a message saying ‘it feels very very Friday today and Brian is wreaking havoc’ with a picture from a page I follow and asked for a vibe check. She sent back another totally perfect reply and it’s carried me through the weekend…
Crikey, this is soooo long so I’ll leave it here for now…there is a lot to get through and process…if I can ever get my brain to fucking work.
One more sleep! I really hope I don’t go in and be a distant weirdo tomorrow…which is very possible! x
(I do totally get these two were having an affair btw – and it’s NOT meant this way for me with Elle!)
Musing on counselling-related issues in the UK. I am a counsellor/psychotherapist and a client too. As the blog title suggests, my counselling journey began in the client's seat. For information about my counselling and psychotherapy practice see my website: www.erinstevens.co.uk
holding it together as I journey through therapy - a personal account of what it's like to be in long-term psychotherapy navigating the healing of C-PTSD, childhood trauma and neglect, an eating disorder, self-harming behaviours, as well as giving grief and cancer an occasional nod.
Rubber Bands and Chewing Gum 
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