Update

To my addled, heavy - saddled mind, the increasing pressure to write a blog post has borne a wormish hole through my head and I can't sleep properly until I have, at least, been here and written some words.

I don't even think it matters what they are any more; just so long as I break the silence.

What follows is a week's worth of situations I have seen myself in:

 

I've been scooped and planed and smeared with gel for an ultrasound on my liver, which continues to register stupidly high ALTS in a determined display of disapproval.

I attended a weigh in appointment at the unit, which revealed another small drop in my weight. Again, I was told I was unable to 'do' this and that I needed to be back in the treatment centre. 

Again I refused, knowing that they have no real grounds for threats whilst my weight is above 31.7kg / 5 stone / 69 lb... Today it stands at 34.0kg. I am incredulous (again and again and again) at the way this illness can CONVINCE me that I have put on at least 3 pounds every week. I can even SEE it.

Or not.

I saw The Woman, having completely forgotten to attend last week's session.

She has noted that lately I seem unable to allow myself a 'whole' of anything. I can't allow a whole packet of cereal, a whole apple, a whole sweet, and (judging by a regular pattern of totally unintentional lateness) a 'whole' session of therapy. (She doesn't appear to 'DO' "unintentional". Apparently (assume cynical tone) apparently its all to do with the unconscious mind.

Needless to say, my failure to even show up for a session was duly interpreted in the light of such analytical theory rather than the more truthful fact that I'm fairly malnourished and my brain isn't quite functioning as it should be.

The Woman has continued to be my place of safety.

Today we discussed Something Very Difficult (very briefly). I let it slide across me rather than through me.

We both know it was enough for now.

Tomorrow I am going away for the weekend with two friends.

We've rented a little cottage very cheaply and though I have questioned whether I can possibly enjoy a break from my safe but painful routine, I am now quite excited by the idea that I am doing something 'normal', with normal people, in a normal situation.

Normality is an underrated state, in my opinion.

Words being available, I will make some attempt at relaying just how successful I am in my attempt to join this fleeting dance with something outside of my world of body and battle.

Wish me luck.

The Difficulty Of Getting Something Down...

... is partly due to my inability to find words apt enough to describe the way I feel. This is compounded and made considerably more difficult by the fact that the feelings surrounding the food issues which occupy my mind much of the time, are not only in constant conflict with one another, but also shift precariously from a mode of total freeze over, to a frenetic clamoring of overwhelming proportions and volume.

Add to this the tide of lethargy that ebbs away at the desire to even attempt to find a voice, and the contrasting sense of compulsion to never sit still (thus burning calories almost constantly) and you have the ingredients for a pretty hit and miss blog.

Due to a binge session which my body won't allow me to purge, no matter how far my fingers get down my throat, I am battling the urge to just tear my stomach open and pull the food out by some twisted, self performed C-section type thing...

Nice.

I am, as of next week, beginning a program of re-feeding at a new Eating Disorders Unit.

The terror I feel is pretty much indescribable, but the backlash against the inevitable weight gain has been drastic.

I never knew my weight could drop so fast once past a certain weight.

I now fall into the "critical" category with a BMI that puts me at very high risk.

With a body that is so weak and painful, I find it almost unbelievable that I STILL fear gaining weight... I don't know if I will ever understand how on earth my thinking has become SO WARPED, so disillusioned, that death seems to be the ever-so-slightly preferable option over watching the numbers on the scales increase.

At this point though, understanding hardly matters and in reality, the agony of my family is my greatest concern.

A part of me is looking for recovery, still trying to cling to hope, desperate for balance and normality.

I've bought SELF HELP books on eating disorders for goodness sakes.

I'm not a self help book person. In fact, generally, the trite, over simplified advice given in them, kills me... that or the fact that an equal number of books which profess to improve you, your life, relationships, memory, income, confidence, whatever, are written by people who learned to write alliterative lists of rehashed proverbs.

Moving on.

Reflecting today, I realised that this blog is less and less 'A Journey Through Therapy' and has (excuse the pun) been devoured by my eating disorder.

It seems that, for the time being, it will now centre around the struggles of 'recovery' (albeit, merely a notional reality for me).

With all this in mind, I apologise to anyone who has been misled with regards to the content herein.

I have considered starting another, more appropriately titled space, but realised one blog was hard enough to manage. The Woman still wants to see me weekly, if this is possible and so I will still be charting aspects of what goes on in The Little House In The Woods.

I guess in some ways, I will be examining the effects of both CBT and psychoanalytic therapy and just how effective and useful they are for me, and perhaps, for others in similar situations.

Free Up Your Mind. Then Let Me Know How You Did It.

It's (not very much) like having the jaw of a steel toothed trap clamped on my bare foot.

It's nightfall in the jungle and I'm faced with the decision to either stay still in the hope that help will come; or to wrench my foot out of the trap (thereby risk bleeding to death) and try to find my own way to help.

Either way I'll probably lose my foot.

Is it more painful to suffer the slings and arrows of my wretched attempts to express some of the incomprehensible stuff I am feeling right now, or is it better to just carry it in silence.

Either way it feels like hell.

I've been lost since the session on Monday.

Faced with her, somewhat glib sounding, recommendation that I "change", I eventually found that I couldn't even be bothered to speak.

What I had been TRYING to do in response to the 'change' suggestion, was to establish HOW exactly, i should go about doing such a thing when, I feel little more than total despair.

"It's not despair", she states. "People in despair don't have the energy to argue"

"Right", I say, simultaneously wondering if I am 'all people' and also thinking (wryly)that she clearly doesn't know that she is talking to someone who can do two and a half hour long cardio workout at the end of a working day, on 4 small tomatoes and some lettuce.

Don't tell me about energy and despair.

So. What do I do, I ask.

How can I change.

"It's not something that you DO"

(and I roll my inner eyes because this is beginning to sound like I'm asking a rather pretentious self styled mytic to tell me what I should do to find a pot of gold)

"It's about freeing up your mind"

Oh GREAT. I AM talking to one of the above. Excuse me? Did you see where my therapist went..?

So.

Freeing up my mind.

That's what I need to do.

Free it from the rigid reign of control.

Who would have thought it were that easy?

Being a teacher, you fast learn the need to be a little creative with your questioning in order to appeal to the understanding of such a range of pupils.

In the hope of getting a more practical, directive type of response I ask,

"If I were you and you were me, what's the first thing you'd do after the session?"

(Please note, in order to "change")

Her helpful response?

"Scream".

Throughout the latter part of the session, that's just what I thought I might do (albeit involuntarily)if I could manage to crawl to my car, but when I did, everything felt a bit unreal and big.

I drove most of the way home, pulled up in a layby, and played a word scramble game on my phone. That's what I do if things get too much.

Chilled to the bone and blank in the pending darkness, I played game after game, absorbed in the obsessive need to beat my point score each time.

I didn't move untiil two hours later.

I'm dreading Friday.

I don't want to go back but I don't want her to think I'm being childish.

Pride probably isn't a great reason to go to therapy.

I've been desperate again today.

Alone in the house again tonight, I ate a small amount and then expelled as much as my gag reflex would allow.

In the last few hours though, I've gone and stuffed it up by eating sweets.

I can't change until I manage to change the desire to be thinner.

HOW do you change a desire THAT strong?

Answers on a postcard...

Writing About Therapy.

Aside from the obvious prerequisite that one can actually recall something about a therapy session, I've discovered that writing about therapy makes at least two demands on a person.
The first is that the victim (did I just say 'victim'? Obviously, I meant 'client') is able to find words for what he or she is experiencing or has, in the past, experienced, and the second is that he or she has the guts to engage with some of the things that are being looked at.
Suffice to say, I've not really had much of either lately. More to the point, as a previous post explained, dissociation has made the act of recalling sessions somewhat impossible.

Today I was grateful not to be continuing in the same vein as last Monday's session, which, predictably (some might even say, conveniently) , my little chicken mind can't remember at this very moment in time.
We did however, end up talking about school days and white knuckle bus journeys and terror and little girls who cried in the mirror because they held so much hatred for the image that stared back at them.

We've been talking lately about the parts and, she has also thrown in the term, 'splits'.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of 'splits' (gleaned from a friend and a little bit of surf power) is that they are very similar to parts except that they are formed at a younger age and have to do with the inability to recognise that good and bad can exist alongside each other. So for instance, in my case, I may glorify someone, unable to see the 'bad' that they may have done because a part of me that contains memories of anyhing negative about the person is split off.
I might be SO wrong here. In all honesty, the woman may have explained but I can't remember, let alone get my head around the concept so...

Sometimes I wonder whether therapy is actually unhealthy...

I remember the days when a "split" was a spliced banana draped in velvet chocolate with sprinkles that were bad for my eczema; when "parts" were things like arms and legs and ears, and "dissociation" meant 'to quit hanging about with'... or... actually, a word that wouldn't even have been in my vocabulary.

Okay. I know I would still have been terrified that the mind thing is early onset Alzheimer's, and I know that I would still have been in pain... I know it's not a simple as all that... But still...

Still.

Words Outside My Vocabulary - Need #2

Maslow is kind of the King of Needs and so it seems only right that he should get a mention.

In the interests of keeping this post fairly brief, I'm going to assume that anyone reading is already familiar with his concept of a hierarchy of needs possessed by each human being, and if not, then there are a million websites given to explaining this diagram.

As a teacher, we have this framework drilled into us fairly early on in our training.
(And yes, I know, it seems unbelievable that I am capable of being both the illogical mess you hear in this place, and the reliable, "together", professional, who somehow manages to gain the respect of pretty tough *problem* teenagers).

Anyway, I have always considered it to be a fairly accurate representation of our needs, but that's not my issue.

The real reason that I refer to Maslow here is that when I was writing my last post, I realised that I was generalising to a considerable extent when I wrote that I am repulsed by the notion of 'having needs'.

In fact, I don't mind admitting to some of the physiological needs on the bottom 'rung'.

Even the second arena doesn't pose too much of a threat to me.

It's the Love / Belonging part that presents problems.

I don't want to NEED any of the things in that part. In fact, "I don't want" is far too passive a way of putting it.

Ideally I would destroy anything in me that pertains to the NEED of those things.

I don't mind having them. I certainly don't mind giving them. But NEEDING them?

That I can't take.



And...

... intimacy?


Another word outside my vocabulary.

There seem to be quite a few, given that English is supposed to be my specialism.

Words Outside My Vocabulary - Need

Need
1. A condition or situation in which something
is required or wanted: crops in need of water; a need for affection.
2.
Something required or wanted; a requisite:
3. Necessity; obligation: There is no need for
you to go.
4. A condition of poverty or misfortune: The family is in dire
need.
v. need·ed, need·ing, needs

Such a small word and yet I can barely bring myself to use it for the weight that it carries.

Since being in therapy, I have realised that I have an almost pathological fear of 'need'.
It's not something I can even bring myself to talk to The Woman about. (Note: dispassionate terminology for 'my therapist'... I have occasionally been tempted to refer to her as She Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken thus likening her in some way to Voldemort (anyone who has read Harry Potter will understand) but that feels a little harsh, even by my standards.

The word "need' is guaranteed to make me want to run a thousand miles. Not because of a desperate desire for weight loss (though there is that) and not because I am passionate about long distance running, but because the concept of need terrifies me beyond all reason.

I've started this post about eight times over the past few months and I've never made it past the third line.
Now I have, my head is a swamp and I know I can't possibly negotiate my way through in one go.
Bear with me. I have problems sticking with these things.

So... Casting my mind into the lifeless swamp of depression that nearly killed me about ten years ago, I have an image of me curled on my bed, hands over my ears chanting, "I won't need anybody or anything. Nothing can touch me".
A strange thing to say admittedly, but at the time, my eyes were unused to having to see in a darkness as black as this one and I had yet to master the art of decompression as I plummeted into depths I had never visited.
Somewhere in this distress, a determination never to need was consolidated.

I learned to hate need, and I learned that if I couldn't completely destroy it, then the most important thing I could do was to pretend that it wasn't there at all.

Need became shameful.
It became something I despised.
It became a cause for utter hopelessness.

A few months into therapy, I became quite desperately worried that therapy was breeding a need in me.
I was terrified of her. Terrified that I was losing control. Terrified that kindness was blunting my spikes. Spikes which were protecting me from needing anyone.

I recall one session a few months ago where The Woman suggested that I might miss therapy / her during a break.
I told her that I wouldn't ever need her, and the minute that I started to, I'd run a mile.

Today she mentioned her upcoming holiday.
And I wondered if it was time to leave or if it's all just in my head.

I don't want to need anyone or anything.
The idea simultaneously repulses, terrifies and enrages me.

There is so so so much more to this, but as I pointed out, I really will be swamped by the swamp if I wade too far out all in one go.

Difficulty and Disgust

Even a master of understatement would struggle to say that therapy had been anything less than "extremely difficult" this week.

Difficult.

Difficult to find words to write about it.
Difficult to find anything concrete to hang the words on.
Difficult to be in my body right now.
Difficult to feel anything other than utter disgust for myself.

On Friday night I sat in her room and tried my best to stay still as my insides curled and contorted and twisted at the touch of her words.

It's hard to remember what she said.
My despair was so great and she pounded on with her search for meaning... the whys. The effing whys.
My only why is often, 'why does it matter?'
Why does it matter why my parents transfer things onto me?
Why does it matter if Dad's doing this or that ?
Why does it matter if .........

At times, her questions and her wondering lead me to a place where I no longer exist. Where nothing matters and I doubt that anything I have ever felt is real.

On Friday, she told me I had been silently furious in the previous session.
I think she may have been right but I can't recall feeling anything at all.
She had 'threatened' to call my doctor.
I told her she wouldn't see me for dust if she ever did that.
And I mean it.

I was angry on Friday too.
She didn't understand how hard it is for a single person (who doesn't even know whether or not "the future" is a possibility) to buy a house and live with the pressure of being solely responsible for mortgage repayments.
To be fair, she did admit that she hadn't really thought about how hard it might be.

I felt she was disgusted by me.
I heard her mind screaming at me underneath her carefully restrained words.

"Pathetic.
Weak.
Pull yourself together.
Stop being so lame.
Don't be such a wuss.
For fucks sake, get over it.
You are wasting my time.
Grow up.
I want to slap you.
You disgust me.
You're revolting.
You pathetic little victim.
Stop your whining.
I can't deal with your ridiculous feelings.
You are irrational and absurd.
Stop being so complicated.
Don' be so negative.
I could wring your neck.
You need a good smack."

That's what I heard.

I asked her if she was disgusted.

No. She SAID.
Quite categorically.
No.
(But then she would wouldn't she)
Instead she reeled off some disgusting, pity laden bull about how I was wretched and suffering. She took advantage of my choked inability to argue to tell me that no matter how much I didn't want to know it, my parents had not "cloaked me" enough (go figure).
And I cried out of the sheer anger at her, the utter exhaustion and pointlessness of it all.

So what?

So what if this happened, or that didn't happen? So what?
It still leaves me where I am now.
I need to change that.
Not look at why or how or when.

My middle sister is in hospital again and my youngest sister doesn't want to be anywhere near me because she can't bear to see me losing weight.

I feel like I have somehow lost everyone.

My skin screams that it is almost unbearable.

Therapy

If you like to read careful, well thought out, balanced thoughts, penned by the dim glow of understanding and hindsight which therapy allegedly affords us, please look away now.
In fact, look away anyway.

My therapy session...

I don't even think I can find words.
I haven't been able to think about any words she said.

She spoke about "mentalising".
(Don't ask me, never heard of it)

Apparently, according to her with the giant therapeutic crystal ball, my parents were unable to do this with my / our feelings.

So nobody heard them and nobody bore them.

Woe is me, I cry in mock distress.

What does she want me to do?
Throw a pity party for myself? The much loved, much encouraged, much adored eldest child who, by comparison to most of the population on earth, barely knows what it IS to suffer?
Does she want me to be upset because my parents, in their love and their desperation to bring us u to be moral and responsible members of society, deemed it okay to smack us sometimes?
Does she want me, in my comfortable Western world lifestyle, to weep and wail because things didn't work out quite the way they would have done in an ideal world?

I disgust myself and today, she disgusted me too.

I walked in today and she just pointed a gun at me and fired repeatedly until I told her that I couldn't take it anymore and I wanted to leave.

She stopped firing but somewhere, something had curled u during the shoot, hands over ears, feet drawn in tightly.
I don't even know what I felt, or if I felt at all.

I'm a mass of contradictions, she says.
I nod.
I'm caught in absolute extremes, she says.
I nod.
My parts are totally opposite extremes, she says.
Haven't you already said that? I nod.

It's because nobody could hear the feelings.
I stop nodding.
Nobody could bear them or make them manageable.

I don't believe this.

Okay, look at the evidence.
So I do.
And yes, it seems to be there, but I CAN'T reconcile it. Not with what I know about how loved we are.
I can't.

I'm not even touching the throbbing pain I have in my chest.
It sickens me as it pulses.
I breathe through my nose as nausea beats in waves, my mouth shut tightly.

Today her kindness made me want to snap myself into small, sharp pieces.
I hate her for it.
I don't want it. It will make me ill.
She will take it away and I will be left, a small, curled skeleton in the back of an hollow shell.

Black Holes

Why do we travel?
Why do we go on journeys?

To get somewhere, right?

Yeah.

Most journeys we go on, we have a pretty good idea where we're headed and what it might look like when we get there. At least, we have some idea inasmuch as we have impressions of the world which allow us preconceived ideas, pre empt, imagine.

But the inner journey isn't like that.

For starters, speaking for myself, I have no idea where I'm heading, or if a destination even exists.
I can't even tell at the moment, whether I am suspended or falling, such is the density of the darkness and the numbness of my skin.
I have no assurance that gravity is still operating in this space. I don't know if there is any ground.
I need ground.
Ever been in a lift when you don't know if it is moving or not?
I just don't know.

It's all too much of nothing at all.

Those blueprints we have of how things might look when we reach the place we are journeying too..?
They're not there and I've lost the only image I had that I was sure of.

Another thing is that everything is in shadow. It's black or grey and every shade in between, but things are more indistinct than ever.

It's so dark and so disorientating that I don't understand how I will ever know where I am, let alone where to go.

I am even doubting the existence of myself at points.

After A Therapy Break

Puzzled, slightly distressed and completely confused by the way I felt as I sat in my therapist's room on a Monday after a two week break, I desperately searched the web for explanations as to why I felt so angry and yet so empty; why I was overwhelmed by the pointlessness of the journey I have apparently, embarked upon.

Note: I say "apparently" because much of the time, I feel as though I am either going round in ever widening circles, further and further away from myself or her, or I am crouched close to the ground with my arms over my head trying to protect myself from whatever it is that I think I probably went into therapy to find.


Monday's session was a proper Ikea session.



For anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of being acquainted with the Swedish Store, allow me to explain that before you start out, you browse your dog eared edition of last season's Ikea catalogue, which has been sitting in your bathroom for a while now, and draw indecisive circles around various images and measurements, asterisking various Wooden Finishes at the bottom of the page.

On arrival, you circle the building, attempting to park in the closest non disabled space in the car park, you have a list of specific items that you are looking for. You are not intending to be in there for a long time, and have no intention of getting trapped in The Marketplace looking at funky striped tumblers and plastic gadgets which open your beer when you can't be bothered to use your fingernail.

The overwhelming yellowness is positively dazzling as you step inside the open plan monstrosity, and as you pick up your mailbag style carrier, you cannot help but feel the brightness of possibility and the hope of a better future (which, obviously, lies in that new set of drawers (6 drawer Tall Boy, pine).

On paths bearing some resemblance to the yellow brick road, determined to go straight to the section you need, you follow the polished laminate aisles through a dense forest of plastic, something like metal but not quite (is there a name for that?) and MDF.

After twenty minutes, having been distracted first by the cheap rugs and then by novelty lighting, you become aware that somewhere in you chest, there is a ball of weariness, impatience and exasperation at the fact you seem to have arrived back at the entrance twice and still haven't found what you are looking for.

You continue to search, with increasing desperation, and eventually, following what feels like the death of all the good things you had ever carried within you, you see something that may be vaguely close to what you wanted when you left your house (but may well not be).

When you get home with your TV (I did say it may well not be related) you pull it out of its box and having lugged it and pushed it and pulled it and edged it into the small space you have designated, you take the annoying little black twisty thing off the lead and plug it in.

Or you would plug it in.
If the plug would reach the bloody socket.
But it doesn't because it's bloody well from Ikea.

At which point, you may do a variety of things (the most sensible of which would be to move closer to the socket).

In my own, rather pathetic case, I leave the room, continue to function as though I haven't even heard of Ikea and then, at some point later that night, I lie in bed unable to stop crying.


So.
Metaphors aside, this week I desperately searched the internet for a reason as to why I felt like never going back to therapy after the break.

What follows is an extract from a Google book that I found, which I suppose I am posting here
primarily because at some point or other, some other Ikea victim may come looking for some reassurance that they are not alone in their experience of therapy after a break...
The extract is taken from a book by Maria Luca called, "The Therapeutic Frame In The Clinical Context: Integrative Perspectives.

I'm not entirely sure whether it's ok to quote here or not... But I'll take the risk and hope for the best.


It explains a little... or enough... to have made me feel just slightly reassured that at least breaks are a little bit important.

I'm not mad for feeling strange after one.

"Why does the practitioner want it to be acknowledged that the breaks might
become upsetting for the patient?It is because growing feelings of dependence upon the therapist arc in danger of being exposed around the holidays so that the
therapist will be most at risk of losing patients at break times. It is surprising how patients who deny the importance of the break might miss the last appointment before a holiday or the first session back after it. This makes them the`leaver' and not the `left', and lessens the impact of painful feelings of being abandoned by the therapist during the vacation. It is my experience that after a vacation my patients seem to be all over the place, and I often feel like Little Bo Peep who has lost her
sheep! An average entry in my diary at this time
would be:

It's the middle of the first working week after my summer holiday. I've had two 'no-shows', with no telephone calls of explanation, a couple of moved appointments and two calls to check that it is indeed this week that we return. Three people have returned saying that they feel they have managed the break so well that they no longer feel the need to continue the therapy."

Now. I'm not saying any of this relates to me... I'm sure as hell that I don't feel 'dependent' or anything like it...

But I have come back feeling as though it's pointless and I don't need it.

I've said more than enough but, if you made it to the end, I wanted to say a huge thank you to those who have written to reassure me.

Hearing your own experiences and your wisdom really helped m this week.

Thank you.

Therapy Break Over

In the instant that I reached for the unreachable branch, my arms shuddered and muscles tore down the blades.
Knives seared through my neck and my shoulders and I let go and fell to the black sea.
The unbending branch, stark against the whitened cliff edge, continued to point spindle fingers West, as if reaching for the orange sun favouring the far horizon.

Generally people seem to be upset when therapy breaks appear and I can understand that.
I can understand the feeling of isolation. The dread at having to face things alone. The thought that, even if you do talk, you won't be heard for the duration of the break.
I understand all those things though I haven't really felt them over the past fortnight.
Neither have I experienced the profound sense of relief that a minority of people express at the idea of having a break.
In fact, I didn't really think about it too much.
Not very much.

I suppose it is in keeping with most things in my life.
I feel the aftermath more than the event.
As I sat outside her house this afternoon, I didn't want to go in.

Fifty minutes.
What do you say after two weeks? There's nothing at all there.
It felt... pointless.
Empty, but ironically because it felt so full of nothingness.
Inexplicably angry.


I wanted to kick out as I left.

"Yes... an OK holiday"
"No, I didn't feel much about my sister".
"Yes I spent a lot of time at the gym".
"No people at work didn't make any more comments about my weight today".
"Yes New Year's Eve was positive"

I lost my voice today. More, there just didn't seem any point in using it.

All wires and no plug.

She was positive about a part of the holiday I'd managed well.
It felt as though she only wanted to hear good things.
I only gave her good things.

It's a waste of time.
I can't even be honest with myself here, let alone with her there.
I feel like giving up.
I am unreasonably angry that she couldn't see what I couldn't show.
I'm too scared to even begin to think what it is that i couldn't show.

In that room, there was nothing in me today that could be expressed with words.

Is this normal after a therapy break?

I'm Not Alone?

Lots of things to write but I'll go with what the blog is meant to be about.

Therapy

It felt like I had been swallowing liquefied lead when I crawled into the little house in the woods yesterday evening. Hot lead that cooled in my chest and solidified in my gut. Heavy and cold.


Her words were bars of golden light that I allowed to my hands to touch, even to hold and bring to my lips.
And in that trembling daring, the light I think, sort of met me in a deeper place and in my chest at least, has dissipated some of the darkness.

I dared.
I must remember that when I dare, it pays off.

I wanted to leave some of the gold here. A reminder of what it could be if I can just lower the fence a little. And it occurs to me as I type, perhaps I don't even need to take the fence down. Maybe I just need to hop over it for very small amounts of time.
Kind of like the process of desensitising.

I can't remember big chunks of what was said in the session but what I do remember is her saying that I was a battleground and that it wasn't my fault.
Music.
Is it really not?
I challenged her. "I must be choosing this. I must be".
The parts of you are not communicating as they should be.
You have become the punitive adult. It has become you.

How do I stop it?

We are working with that now.
WE are.
WE will do this together.

I can't really remember ever feeling anything but alone. Not because my parents didn't try to calm my fears. Not because I couldn't ever tell anyone how frightened I was. Just because I have always felt that nobody can ever really be there or understand.
I have never thought that 'we' was... Well... 'We' has never been. Not for any dramatic reason. Just because nobody could be there.

I gave her the What Ifs.
I told her she would never be there.
I was thinking of the nights in pain, the moments where I hold the blade, the lonely, head curling times where I am frozen.

I dared to tell her she would never be enough.
I think I thought she would back away.

She told me she would be there. Even if it meant more sessions during the week. She said she wouldn't leave me and would try, to the best of her ability, not to let me down.
But, she said, it relies a lot on trusting me.

I'm not good with trust.

No. You're not but that's because for whatever reason, nobody has been able to be there and cope with the pain.

Oh.

Last night I struggled with her. Not in her house but in my head. Hmm... Yes. Crazy indeed.
I continued arguing long after I left.
But I was fighting with golden light which had already, somehow, seeped in.


This morning, for the first time ever, I feel like perhaps, if I was going to take a risk... maybe it would be WE and not just I.

I feel scared by what I just typed. Scared that I have allowed words to fall out and when I 'come round' to logic, I'll want to stuff them back in.

But.

I'm trying to take some risks.
Staying safe hasn't been working out too well.

The Child Part

Alright.
Now.
Bear with me.

I need to issue some kind of disclaimer which states that the information that follows and the fact that the concept has been mentioned at all, does not in any way imply that the author accepts or acknowledges the existence of such a thing.

Then, in one completely paradoxical swoop, I will contradict my own disclaimer by saying that I know perfectly well that this is a part of me somehow... I am just terrified by the disgust that I feel it may be met with.

Get on with it right?

Sorry.
Fear gets in the way.

So.
My therapist in all her glorious wisdom reminds me over and over again that I have a number of very seperate and very distinct 'selves'.
I am beginning to see how this is really quite true. The filing cabinet seems to have more than two drawers, or there are, at least, sub sections in each drawer.

This post is itself a child, tentatively and stumblingly clinging to the walker as it steps on soft, unused feet.
The ideas we talked about in therapy this week are little prisms, just about an arms length away from me and I tremble as I reach to just brush one with the very tips of my fingernails; hoping that the infintisimal fraction of contact will be just enough to edge the prism into a line of sunlight.

The title of the post acknowledges the topic I am not daring to comment on.
I'll come back to it if I can reach...

Cottage In The Woods

Yes. It's quite true!
My therapist lives in a cottage in the woods.
It really is like something out of a Hans Christian Anderson tale!

I suppose it could be symbolic, although I have never thought it to be before writng it here.

By six o'clock on these evenings, the grey dark has already been draped around the woods and the blackened trees tower, sinister, hoodless figures of forboding. The smell of damp, rotten leaves and lichen is comforting in the cold, and as I step out of the car a heavy, woody, quiet muffles in my ears.

The lines of the cottage have the blurred glow of the aura on the edge of a flame. Pumpkin light seeps from therapy room window.



There is space here for metaphors to bound like excited kids on an autumn forest walk but, I have to say, the golden light that draws a part of me into that room often feels like a trap and, once inside, I am frequently faced with a darkness and fear much greater than a night alone in a cold fingered forest.

That's the story of the little cottage in the woods.

And yes. There is a magic about it somehow, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) the plunging fear that accompanies and enshrouds the place.

Back To The Matter In Hand...

Therapy.

Well.

My session today was markedly more positive than the previous sessions...
It's not that a great beam of light shone into my disordered and chaotic cabinet.

No.

More that I allowed myself
to dare
to try
to be
just a tiny
little
bit
less
well defended than I have at other times.
(Yes - that sentence was intentionally convoluted... Somehow I want it to demonstrate just a fraction of the fear I feel at daring to get close to anything that might lie beneath the barbed wire spiral in which I have wrapped myself).

Anyway, it's about time that I bought a little light to the darkness that has been my blog over the last however many ("too many!", you cry) posts.

I drove away from her little cottage in the woods thinking that I must remember this session as one where I gave her something to work with, rather than waiting for her to wave a wand over my unspoken pain.
I thought that it would feel very risky to allow myself to do that too much.
But that I must remember the time that I did.

The word "allow" is one of the most frightening words outside of my vocabulary.

Filing

To what does my therapist repeatedly liken me?
A mysterious, multi faceted prism bending and reflecting light? A valuable, finely tuned instrument?
Um...
No.
Apparently I'm a filing cabinet...
One of those rather grim, storm grey, functional filing cabinets that squats inoffensively in a corner under a desk.

My bottom drawer (or is it the top?) is in perfect order. Little coloured, plastic tabs labelling each and every category and subsection. Each tab written in perfect, calligraphic, black font. Efficient, competent, quick minded and organised.
Put me in a situation and watch me compute actions and actions; reach into the tidy compartment and pull out the appropriate 'file'.
In stark contrast, my top drawer has all the marks of a desperate thief rifling through papers whilst footsteps approach the darkened office.
My therapist explained that it was as though all the papers in this drawer had been strewn on the floor. Moreover, the papers had been ripped into pieces and we may pick up a middle piece and find it has an end but no beginning... Or find an end but not be able to find the two upper pieces.

I wanted to explain that my last post came from my top drawer.
The 'secret' drawer that nobody really gets to see.

It's a chaotic drawer and I'm not sure that some of the fragments even exist anymore.
It's a drawer that has been locked for a long time and the rusted runners won't allow it to open easily, let alone fully.

I was in half a mind to 'disable comments' on this blog. It has been a battle to leave my honesty and my expression of the top drawer chaos. It is unfamiliar ground to allow the drawer to open even a fraction and when I began this blog, I didn't realise that blogging was such a 'relational' thing. I had no idea that people would be the least bit interested in a grey filing cabinet.

When I expressed the difficulty I had with allowing comments to my lovely blogfriend Gail, she wrote that she thought most of the comments I got here were very kind and caring... I don't know that she realised that this very truth is precisely why I find it so excruciating at times.

Kindness kills.
Careful.

Projection

Feeling as I do right now, it is neither wise nor advisable to be writing here. However, I need to say something in order to puncture my own silence and thus make it a little easier to come back when my words are going to come out bearing some semblance of order.

Sometimes it feels as though I am surrounded by a force field that will only allow people to get within a certain radius. Any closer, and they become a risk. One which I find so frightening.

Yet, it's not others who are the risk... It is me. It is the way I will feel or react. It is the terrible prospect that I will accept something that should be unacceptable.

My therapist (unaffectionately referred to as 'the woman') feels miles and miles away from me, particuarly when we are sitting in the same room.
Today somebody told me that it is not she who is far away, it's me.

Projection - The name of this phenomenon.
I feel something so strongly that I imagine that the therapist is feeling that way. (Please correct me if I'm wrong)
So, because I am bent double with the frustration at my own attitude ad behvoiurs, I assume that it is in fact HER feeling the frustration and anger.

If I feel that she can't ever help me and that she feels at a loss as to what to do with me, then, the theory of projection propounds that it is in fact, ME who is feeling those things about myself, not her.

So.

I'm in a difficult situation.

Does projection rule out the possibility that perhaps she really DOESN'T know how to help me? Does it mean that there is no longer such a thing as an objective reality?

I am ovewhelmed by both my options.

1. To keep going to see her.

2. To give up.

Both seems to lead to the same barren place.

The End.

I dont think I will ever see my therapist again.

I feel utterly hopeless and just cannot see any point in anything.

This is not what people want to read. I'm aware of that.
In one sense, I'm angry with myself for appearing to be so lame. In another, I'm furious with the world for wanting me to live behind such a convincing act, wearing the mask with the fixed grin when the insides pulse with black and bloody clots.

Behind the mask, I'm on the offensive. I'm reactive.
If someone seems frustrated or angry with me, despite the fact that logic tells me that it may just be my perception, I will turn to the blade for punishment.
Why?
Because I will hurt me more than you could ever hurt me.
And
I am the only person who has the right to abuse me.
My mantra from days when i was a lot more ill than I am now.
Tonight I want to wear my skin as red gingham.
Claw at the silent, unfeeling flesh until it screams in long red streaks and white subcutaneous fat.

Platitudes, positive mental attitides, slogans, cliches, cognitive challenges, kindness, gentle words, listening, empathy...
They amount to nothing.

In the face of their own hopelessness, people meet despair. In the face of another's, people find anger and disgust.

My walls, bejewelled wth cut glass, crowned with razor wire, offer poor protection against the ghosts of shame and disgust who swoop to whisper that nobody knows and nobody will ever know.

The Joys Of Disorganised Attachment.

A few weeks ago my therapist noted that I had a very disorganised attachment pattern.
At the time, I wasn’t the least interested in what she was saying and put it down to just the usual psycho mumbo jumbo that abounds in that particular sphere.
I have blogged about this before. It’s the second or third time she has mentioned it in passing. I’d love to have the ... whatever it takes...(guts perhaps?) to have asked her what she meant but at the moment, for reasons that are, quite churlishly, sticking their fingers up whilst urinating up the wall of the logical corner of my brain, I feel as though her kindness is a poisonous solution being drip fed into me. Hence, no questioning the therapist.
However, alone I crumble. And so again, I knelt at the font of Google in search of answers.
What IS a disorganised attachment? And for that matter, what the hell IS attachment? (I saw dozens of brand new Dysons being showcased and demonstrated by men with very white teeth (not sure where that came from) each displaying a technologically ingenious array of attachments).
Anyway. Turned out it has nothing to do with hoovers.
In brief, and I’m not remotely up on psychological theories so, if you know better, feel free to correct me...
There are all different types of attachment but they all concern the relationship between a child and its caregiver (often the mother).
A secure attachment appears to be th 'ideal'. The child's world is hunky dory because the mother is attentive to her baby's needs therefore allowing the child to build a healthy dependency, sense of security and protection.
With me?
Ok. In all honesty...? How many people get that.

The following is information I found on a Canadian website called AboutKidsHealth

Disorganized/disoriented attachment
There is a group of children (15-20%) who do not fit into Ainsworth’s original three-category scheme. Mary Main, another influential attachment researcher, added a fourth category to include these children.
Whereas children in the 3 primary attachment groups have organized strategies for dealing with arousal, disorganized children either lack an organized pattern to their behavior or have strategies that repeatedly break down. When stressed, in the presence of their caregiver, these children appear disorganized or disoriented displaying unusual behaviors such as approaching the caregiver with their head averted, trance-like freezing, or strange postures. These behaviors have been interpreted as evidence of fear or confusion with respect to the caregiver. Disorganization is considered an extreme form of insecurity.
Many children who fall into the disorganized category have experienced some form of maltreatment or have a parent who has been traumatized by severe loss. Other stressful situations involving reorganization of the family such as family moves or the birth of another child may also temporarily disorganize attachment patterns in a child.
The unusual behavior of the disorganized child is more difficult to understand even when considered from the child’s perspective. Many children with disorganized attachment patterns have been subjected to highly stressful, chaotic, and frightening environments.

So basically, pretty much anything could create a disorganised attachment. What interested me though was this...
...

Disorganized attachment sometimes occurs following extreme loss on the part of a parent. Researchers speculate that parents who are unable to recover from tragic losses (e.g. death of their own parent, abuse by a parent) subtly communicate a sense of anxiety and fearfulness to their child. This situation is highly disorganizing to the infant because the person who is supposed to be a source of comfort is also a source of fright and anxiety. Faced with this impossible situation, the child’s attempts at an organized strategy break down.

My mother lost her mum as a young child. Sent away to a boarding school within a year, she never got over the loss.
As a very small child, I remember her father as a stern but formidable old man who wore beige cardigans and smelled of cigars. The unresolved loss of her mother must have near killed her when he died.
Then, her most treasured sister died.
I was about 5.
I have an unaturally bad memory. 1 gig at most. I jest but I have considered the possibility of early onset dementia. You laugh, but you don't know just how much of a black hole so much of my mind is.

Children who show disorganized patterns of attachment in the Strange Situation Paradigm at one year of age have the greatest risk of aggressive behaviour, conduct disorder, and dissociative behaviours later in life. Dissociative behaviours involve a breakdown in a person’s perception of his or her surroundings, memory, identity, or consciousness.

The point I was making (before I rudely interrupted myself with a quote) was that although I remmeber nothing, my younger sister remembers my mum crying every day for a long, long time.
Grief?
I don't know.
But.
This disorganised pattern begins to look... Well... I won't say convincing because my layers of cynicism are not THAT easily pierced, but.

I could go on but I won't. It'll be another post.
Given that I have been attempting to articulate this post for over a week now, it is fair to say that I am finding it a real battle to allow myself to make anything too concrete or 'real'.
This whole journey is proving to be a lot harder than I thought, and for different reasons.
When I started out, I never figured that I would be my biggest obstacle.

Hopelessness, My Disease.

I'd been psyching myself up to write something positive, or at the very least, poetic, but tonight I am faced with the profoundly disquieting aftermath of a Friday evening therapy session and it feels a though a storm has raged through my being and left me for dead.

I wish I had words to describe the despair that lies on the inside.
The depths of it are indescribable.
Hopelessness. And it is absolute.

My therapist sat and talked and the more she spoke the further I away I moved.
In the end, her words became a meaningless blur of sound.
I sat in pitch darkness, frozen, staring at the wall and counting.
It felt as if I was counting to save my life; to save myself from shattering; to save something from falling so far that it would never be able to get up again.

Inside of me is a death that is too old and too tired to be turned to life.

Depressing? Yes. Perhaps that is what this is.
I think depression has become such a part of me in the last fifteen years, that I no longer recognise it as being a seperate entity.
Depression is like a tree which grows INTO and incorporates any immoveable object in the path of its growth. It is entwined in me and it is so numb and so normal that I can no longer identify it.