Bombshell

At around midday yesterday, unit staff announced the decision to reintroduce two much dreaded 'high energy' supplements into my meal plan.

The room around me blurred and whitened as my mind whirled into the shadow flecked vortex of spinning panic and dissociation.

Today I sit in relative calm.

The pain and the panic whirl around me but not within.

I discharged myself from the unit.

I'm not entirely sure how I will manage

but

failure is even less of an option that it was last week or the week before.

So:

The work of rebuilding continues.

A lot tougher and a little lonelier, but it continues nonetheless.

At the moment I am shuffling through rubble, feeling little more than dazed as I survey the extent of the wreckage and try to keep breathing through the swirling fusion of chalky dust and stone.

Disappearing Acts

Sharp, scagged fingernails of feeling trace swirling spirals through the inner fog. I feel the nails drag and pierce as they move across old, unseen wounds and I stare, in search of clarity, or discovery. But even as I look, the lines begin to blur and bulge, just like the clean cut of an aeroplane's path across the blue.
And it blurs and spreads into unfeeling mist.

I so often have the sensation of not being able to see something as soon as I look at it directly.
I remember in the early 1990s when 3 dimensional optical illusion posters were all the rage. Teenagers' bedroom walls would be covered with large bits of glossy paper covered in very repetitive, computer generated, patterns made up of tiny strokes of colour.
The pattern (called a Stereogram) was cleverly designed so that it contained an image which could only be seen when focused on in a particular way. Sort of modern man's answer to impressionism. Van Gogh meets Mac.

I used to find that in order to see the hidden images, I had to train my eyes to be looking beyond the poster; I almost had to DEfocus on the image.
The minute I mastered the 'defocusing' technique (actually known as 'parallel viewing'), the hidden delights of the poster were revealed. However, the minute I tried to sustain the image and look at it more clearly, it would disintegrate into a million, seemingly random, coloured particles again.

That's me in therapy.

I so often have the sense that, in order to glimpse something through the fog of dissociation and disintegration, I have to be glancing at it from an unusual angle. A sidelong look from the very outer edge of a very defocused eye.
The minute I try to keep what I've glimpsed, it slides into the mist of unfeeling and 'unremembering'.

That happened a few times in therapy today.

What also happened is very hard to write about.
I suppose because it requires a greater degree of honesty, explanation (and therefore energy) and recall than I feel able to muster.
Even as I type, it's somehow on the very tip of my memory but I can't quite catch it.

Whatever. As I left the little house in the woods, I hit my steering wheel enough to bruise the heel of my palm.
I wanted to shout.
In the room I had wanted to put my fingers in my ears. I spent the entire session with my hands on front of my face.
I didn't want to be seen.

We now have a two week therapy break.
That too has slipped into the unfeeling fog.

What hasn't is the fact that I have put on weight and I have eaten bits of chocolate almost all day long.
It would be nigh on impossible for me to explain the horror I feel at submitting to the cravings when I haven't done my exercise and I weigh more than I have for quite a while.

The levels of desperation and despair are way beyond anything words could contain.

I have replied to comments on my last post if you feel like having a look.

Is It All In My Head? Dissociation v Reality

Dissociation, like depression, has a wardrobe full of different outfits.

It can appear smoothly, draped in a fine mist of white muslin, allowing a hazy, overexposed world to blur before your eyes.

Other times it can rock up dressed in an altogether more jazzy little number, a more textured material with large purpley grey blotches which grow and intensify as you look at them.

Occasionally it can make quite a dramatic entrance wearing a dark, kaleidoscopic cloak which wraps around the edges of your eyes, warping distance, making things zoom in and out. Making the world a computer game. Those cars racing you... they're not real... Nothing is really real.

Sometimes dissociation involves sound... an indistinct blurring of a voice with the silence of the space it falls into... The words take a sudden dive before they reach your ears... Sometimes the letter blends that make up the words don't even get to you in the right order. Syllables stretch into each other, yawning languidly into each others' beginnings and endings and beginnings until there are no gaps in sound, just distant, fluctuating tones.

And then there are things that I fail to understand.

I ALWAYS thought I had an atrocious memory. I remember so very little about being young. Whole trips, events, months, years don't exist in my mind. Somewhere in me lies a terror filled conviction that I am in the early stages of Alzheimer's... Early onset... It seems an inescapable fate, given that it's both my long and short term memory that is an issue.

I often run upstairs to get something and by the time I'm up there, it's gone... I have conversations and stop mid sentence, unable to complete what I've been saying.

I go to ask my boss something, tap on the door, say hello and then.... then nothing. (And NO, I'm not anxious around my boss. We're good friends).

Recently, my family recalled a trip to a cousin's christening. We'd stayed the night before in a pub and I had apparently become hysterical with fear upon entering the place. Something about some drunk men in the bar...

"You must remember! You were about eleven! I was only six and I remember it!"

The nerves in my leg have all gone dead and though I watch the skin dent under their fingertips, I can't feel them pressing down on it.

That's what listening to stories of my childhood is sometimes like.

According to the woman, and to others who seem to know, my memory loss is dissociation. It's indicative of 'something'. It 'says a lot'. Really? I can't believe this. It's sounding too strange and I know, after all, that I just have a terrible memory compared to my sisters.

But I don't remember a lot of sessions either. Whole therapy sessions aren't there the next day. Someone pointed out that I pay too much to be forgetting everything. Hence my new resolve to write, despite resistance.

This post is too long but I wanted to include a song by a man I'm sure I could love (if only for his voice).

It's called In My Head and it's a question that tortures me.

Something sometimes happens in therapy where I find myself asking if anything I feel really exists... I suddenly doubt that the pain and the desperation is real... I doubt that I am even telling he truth... I don't know whether anything I feel exists in reality. I beg the woman to consider that I might be making it up... that it might all be in my head. I don't want to waste her time. I don't want her to believe me if my feelings aren't even real.

I'll leave Mr Sean Mullins to explain the rest.

Saying the Unsayable

Although it seems absurd for someone of my age to behave in such a way, whenever my anxiety becomes unbearable, I crouch against the radiator in my room, and play game after game of Bejeweled or Word Scramble on my itouch.

It's a way of not thinking.

I have been crouched there for the last two hours.

My therapy session is responsible for tonight's retreat into a world of random letters on nine squared grids.

"Tell me about your week", the woman asked, when I explained that I had struggled with a huge loss of control with my eating since Wednesday.

So I do.

I tell her about the ferocity of my four day workouts, I tell her about the pressures of GCSE coursework, I tell her about the curriculum inset I have been on. I tell her about the anxiety I have felt.

She asks if I feel the impact of the kids' anxiety. (The children I work with / teach).

And so I begin to tell her about a particular kid, one in my group, who is in the middle of a case where her secret history of sexual abuse has come to light.

I tell her about this poor girl, who I want to wrap up and hold safe until it's all over. I tell her about how much I want to protect her, how frustrated I am with child mental health services lack of input, how I want to shred the red tape that is binding professional services from helping her for the next few weeks.

I tell her about how much she reminds me of me at that age... Her anxiety... the phobias she has...

I recall the fear that wraps itself around her at night...

And the woman utters the omnipotent, 'yes' and adds that she was just thinking that.

Why? I ask her.

She doesn't know the girl. How can she know that we're similar?

The woman's response is a blank (in my memory) except for the fact that she compared us in terms of dissociation.

So she knows. She knows about the extent of the dissociation. How does she know that it's that bad?

(Note the twisted irony in the fact that my mind has gone blank somewhere around this)

We talked more about the girl, until the woman said that what was important, in terms of our work, was that I tried to remember the fact that I had noticed similarities between this girl and myself.

More blanks

until

we discussed something my mum had said the other night when talking about my

sister's seventeen year long illness.

Mum: I've often wondered why... Why, when she has grown up in this family... With all this love... How....?

Me: Maybe love isn't always enough.

Mum: Of course love is enough... being loved...

The woman says it's an interesting and that she takes it that my parents only recognise 'abuse' as something very violent or sexual...

She says something about emotional abuse and I say,

"My sister wasn't emotionally abused"

" I was thinking of you actually"

That's hurt my stomach. Can I tell her that? Can I tell her that what she just said hurts in my tummy? No. I can't. That sounds pathetic. It is silly and it doesn't make sense.

And I'm dazed and a little way off and I am beginning to pick up the cynic's shield because somewhere it's aching but somewhere else it's feeling like a deliberate game, playing with my emotions, kicking the ball at me when I wasn't looking...

"Huh? What is emotional abuse anyway?"

There's no such thing. It's another bloody therapy buzz word. They get paid to turn us all into victims.

"Emotional abuse is being repeatedly hit... a little girl being thrashed in the middle of the night when she's anxious... blank blank blank

Blasted by an ice blow torch. Instantly frozen.

What? What's she saying? No more. Don't say anymore. please stop. Did I just say that bit aloud? Don't cry. Don't cry. You're ok. You're ok. Don't cry.

........"that wasn't to help you... that was out of anger... It was out of control..."

Stay calm... It's ok... What do I do with this? What am I meant to do with this?

I hear a small, strangled groan that might be a sob

Shit. Did that come from me? Did she hear? Please don't let her have heard

I want to cough to cover the sound up.

No, a cough'll just make it worse. Maybe she didn't hear.

Sudden tears on my face

No. No no no no no. Don't cry. Come on. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. why am I crying? What am I crying for? It isn't anything. I don't even feel anything. Why are you crying you silly girl?

"....... and we're a couple of minutes over and I realise this is a bad place to have to break... just take a few minutes...."

What do I DO with this?

She's saying something about saying the unsayable

"There are some tissues......."

She knows I'm crying.

Of course she knows I'm crying... I'm trying to wipe my face... What the hell am I crying for?

She's asking what my weekend is like....

I'm telling her I don't know. That it's ok. That I'm ok. That I'm sorry.

And it's a blank how I get out of the room.

Looking At The Remains - A Ravaged Landscape

A few summers ago (when I was less of an agoraphobe/freak) a great friend and I, armed with a rather cumbersome, green tent, drove down through the stunning French Pyrannees into the arid, desert landscape of Northern Spain.

As we wound on roads cut through the rock and on to the lower mountain roads, it was obvious that there had been an enormous fire which had swept uncontrollably across vast areas of landscape; ravaging the hillsides, melting and twisting any road signs and killing all the vegetation and wildlife for miles.

A striking experience, to realise the power of the element solely through being witness to the complete devastation that it has wreaked upon the land.

My own landscape looks a lot like the one I have described. If I was to paint a picture of how I imagine ‘the inside’ to look, it would be a picture of something charred and shrivelled. (Though of course, if I WAS to attempt such a thing, the outcome would be little more than a brown and black puddle on a page).
I cannot remember most of the time when I burned and yet, the evidence is everywhere on my blackened landscape. I know the hundreds of tiny deaths. I see and even, in some places, FEEL burns of various intensities, but I cannot really, accurately, recall being alight.


I think I must have cried my way through the night, or rather, howled. I woke up half a dozen times making a hell of a noise.

Bloody therapy. It does that.

In one (of the many) ‘snapshot’ dreams last night, I had an image of a little plastic mould of a human being. Plaster Paris (remember that stuff?) was being poured into it. The liquid was filling the sides of the mould, just as smoothly and beautifully as a heavy, winter Stout fills a pint glass, but the centre of the mould remained empty.
A hollow human figure.

Somehow, this links to the fire but I can't think about it enough to articulate it cos my brain “slides” if I try. Trying to hold things steady in my mind sometimes is an impossible feat.

At this juncture, it is perhaps worth saying that the all these analogies may seem to point to all sorts of terrible things in the mind of readers who may identify with some of the feelings or images. However, I want, and indeed, need to make it very clear that I have NOT suffered physical or sexual abuse (as so many others who are in therapy have).
I can’t explain the whys. Firstly because there are possibly too many and they are too difficult and secondly because getting to the point has never really been my thing. (Actually, more truthfully, getting to the point in this instance feels painful and impossible).

Cumulative trauma is what my therapist keeps saying.
It’s hard to acknowledge that after years of trying to squash it, and then subsequent years spent trying to make sure that it was always ‘less than’ someone else’s pain.

Blurring The Edges - The Mind Thing

The mind thing.

That's what I called it before I heard the terms 'fragmentation' or 'dissociation'.

For a long time I have been aware of the mind thing. It happens sometimes when my anxiety levels get really high begin to tip over into panic. Sadly, it doesn't hang around when a full blown panic attack strikes. Instead it usually appears at the most inconvenient time, usually when I am in a situation where I am engaged in conversation with someone and cannot possibly indicate that there is anything even slightly wrong.

Picture me, driving up a dual carriageway, with one of our more 'interesting' students in my car (minbus overflow - educational trip - kid not to be trusted in large groups).
Of course I have been stressed. ALL trips out raise my (normally too-moderate-to-be-comfortable) anxiety levels, but it's not as if I am panicking or anything... At least, I don't think so, until the zooming begins and the swooping darkness and the sense of that I am losing my grip on reality. It is as though my mind has suddenly begun to push against itself to create a little dented fontanelle, space enough to fold inwards.
I am battling the growing sense of what I can only describe as 'being corridored'. My mind is becoming a breath stealingly narrow passage lit by low energy bulbs which won't warm up.
And all the time, the disaffected student is talking and I am trying to focus on the words and respond at the same time as forcing my eyes to blink hard and believe that the road and traffic ahead is actually real. It is not a computer game. I am 'in' this.
My steering wheel feels part of my hands and when we arrive, I fall into the disquieted aftermath.

The warning often precedes a panic attack which doesn't always come, but if it does, can be a sweeping tornado which wreaks havoc on my inner landscape.
Panic attacks are really a post all of their own but I give them some mention here because, although not always, they are often linked to 'the mind thing'.

Another of the strangest and most disturbing things that I experience when I am zoning out is that the person who I am trying to focus on ("act normal for goodness sakes, act normal!") begins to blur around the edges and then, as though I have starred at the sun for a long time and looked away, the grey patches appear and start to swim around them and over them.
Disorientating to say the least. To say more would be to describe the nausea and the dizziness that swells and washes in crested waves through my head and gut.
I'll leave it there for fear of drowning!

The mind thing happened in therapy. It often does to some extent.
Last session she zoomed in and out and was almost overwhelmed by the monsterous steel grey amoebic blobs which looked as though they were trying to blot her out completely.
Today I knew when it was going to start because the volume went down and I hardly dared look at her. When she asked if she was zooming in and out I explained that she was blurry, as though looking at a photo taken with a soft focus lens. She thought that my mind needed to blur her. It's a protection thing. Psychobabble?
I'm not sure.

I would be interested to know if anyone else experiences this, fragmenting of their mind when they try to talk or anything similar.