Tag Archives: psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Daring To Trust

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Creativity, Drawing, Expressing Emotion, Expression Through Art, Flashbacks, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, Psychotherapy with P, Sexual Abuse, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

Today I did something that scared me, something that made me feel, something that needed me to be braver than I have ever been before. I shared something that I had never ever shared with anyone before.

*

I have now been seeing P. for just over a month. Ten sessions to be precise. And it has been, well, quite a big change for me. It is hard to not constantly compare the work I am doing with her to the work I did with A. It isn’t so much that I keep thinking that one is decidedly better than the other, but I am struck, over and over, by how different it is to be in therapy with P. The relationship we are tentatively building has a whole different feel to it, there is an added dimension to it, a quality that is hard to paint in words, but which is so real I can almost feel it physically.

That said, I miss A. I do. I really miss her. I miss the way I would spend time in session self-analysing and contemplating different angles to things, turning things round and round and having the luxury of going through all the ins and outs of my thoughts, with A. every now and then reflecting back to me what she heard me say.

I find myself, sometimes, making statements that I feel would have fitted well in A.’s therapy room, but which don’t quite work in the space I share with P. I find that doing my ‘getting into therapy mode’ routine, which I have been doing for nearly five years with A., feels awkward and out of place with P. I still do it, because it is simply the way I kick into gear, but I always feel very aware that P. is there, waiting for me to look at her and greet her properly.

So, there’s a lot to get used to. I find it so scary, the way P. meets me at the door, always with a big, warm and welcoming smile, and the way she seeks to make eye contact with me. I find her invitation to form a real relationship with her absolutely terrifying. There are alarm bells going off all over the place, simply because they have been tuned to mistrust that kind of openness and warmth, has been trained to automatically look for the ulterior motive behind any random act of kindness.

But, I am determined to not allow myself to use that fear as an excuse not to dig deeper. I am determined to find a way to ‘dare to trust’, to challenge my own hardwired concept of the world, of others being out to cause me harm. So, I’ve been pushing on with P. I’ve used my sessions to talk and talk and talk and talk about this fear of attaching, this extreme inability to trust – I’ve talked very openly about it all and she, in turn, has responded to it. And I think that that is where some of the healing may lay; in having those fears heard, having that reluctance be understood and accepted. Because – paradoxically – that is what may ultimately allow me to let my guard down, to allow P. in for real.

And today I took a leap of faith. I brought my journal with me, and I shared a drawing I made this morning of something that happened to me, something I had relived in the form of a flashback earlier today, and which I have never ever shared with anyone before.

It was incredibly scary to do, and before I did it, before I even opened up my journal, we spent time talking about what I was feeling, what the fear really was. I explained that there was something about P.’s presence that made me feel more scared than I would be, if I were on my own with the drawing. That something about her being there made me feel more exposed, more vulnerable, because I didn’t know how I would react to looking at the drawing in front of her, and I also didn’t know how she would react. The metaphor I used to explain it to P. was that it’s like standing in front of the mirror, naked, and then doing the same thing, but with someone next to you. The first is hard enough to do, the second all the more frightening.

At first I just sat with the journal in my lap, looking at the drawing I had made, without sharing it with P. Just to see what that would feel like, to test the waters. I found it difficult, had to actually use my hand to cover up the parts of my drawing that felt too difficult to look at. And then, in the middle of doing this – in the middle of shielding myself from my own drawing – it occurred to me that I didn’t need to be the one who was stuck with the drawing. I didn’t need to shield myself from it. I could give it to P., and she could protect me from the full force of the raw horror that the drawing contained. So, I handed it over to her, barely daring to look at her.

But I did. Look at her. And, yes, there was a reaction to what I had drawn, an obvious emotional response to what she was seeing splashed across her face, and it made me feel very afraid, anxious that maybe I had pushed her too hard, too soon. But then P. spoke, first about how what I had shared in the drawing was something no child should have to experience, and later, about how she felt about me having shared it with her. And it made me feel better.

In the session before this one, I also shared something, in words rather than through a drawing that time, and towards the end of the session P. asked me how I felt about what I had shared. So I talked about it. And then – the thing that made me really feel that there might be a possibility that I could trust her to take good care of me – she asked if maybe I needed to also know how she was feeling, having listened to me. So, I nodded and said that I thought that would be good, feeling so immensely grateful that she had understood how enormous my fear of breaking others with my story is.

And that – her honesty in sharing exactly how listening to me affected her – is what made it possible for me to take this huge step in today’s session. Because, something about that – about P. not holding back on her own response, is what makes me feel safe, makes me feel that she knows her own limitations, and that – because of this – she wouldn’t allow either one of us to go further than we could cope with.

xx

“It’s time we made a place
Where people’s souls may be seen and made safe
Be careful with each other
These fragile flames..
For innocence can’t be lost
It just needs to be maintained..”

JK

 

Innocence Maintained  © 1998 Jewel Kilcher

Surviving An Ending: Starting Over

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Attachment, Coping Strategies, Family, Loss & Mourning, Personal Growth, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy Breaks, Psychotherapy with A, Sadness, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Finishing with A. was always going to be immensely painful and would inevitably leave me with a whole host of scary feelings, and nowhere to put them. So, in a bid to keep myself from harm’s way I decided to give myself a time-out immediately after The Ending.

Chickening out of allowing any kind of time or space for those Scary Feelings to rear their ugly heads, I made sure to book a seat on the first morning flight available after The Ending – and – looking back, I think that was a wise choice, indeed; getting through even just an afternoon and evening after my final session with A. was a momentous task, and didn’t feel like something I could have coped with safely for any length of time at all, to be perfectly honest. Far safer to spend time with sisters and nephews and brothers-in-law, all of whom provide sufficient distraction, and help me find some balance between being hit at full force by the painful loss of my relationship with A. and shutting down altogether. In short, I made a conscious choice to be around people who I knew I would feel OK to not be OK around, if that makes sense.

But, now I’m back. And – fearing that reality is about to strike – I have purposely thrown myself into all things Olympic in order to buy myself some more time and shelter myself from the whirlwind of emotion which is sure to soon come sweeping across my soul.

*

I had my first two sessions with The New Therapist this week, and that was both absolutely emotionally draining and a huge relief. The New Therapist – who I have decided to call P. [as that was the letter that immediately came to me the very first time I met her, at the initial consultation], is very different to A. Although she is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, just as A. is, she is also attachment-based. And that is a whole new ballgame for me. It’s all very relational, very direct and very open. Even at our first meeting I noticed that she actively wants to make eye-contact with me, and seeks to engage in a completely different way. And that will take some getting used to. As much as I have often found myself frustrated with what I have experienced as a certain lack of closeness or intimacy with A., now that it is being served to me in this way, it is quite a scary thing, because in that slight distance between A. and I, there was also safety: for better or for worse I could opt to hide in that space if I needed to, and I have a feeling that is something that will be a whole lot harder to do with P. There is something about this open invitation to attach that leaves me feeling vulnerable and somewhat exposed. And allowing myself to enter into a relationship in that way feels strange and more than just a little scary.

I will say that, instinctively, I rather like P., and I think that – once I get more used to this new way of relating to The Therapist, this could be quite fruitful. But, at the same time, I do have a lot of ambivalence: I find myself going back and forth between ‘Go on, dare to trust. Everything you have seen of P. so far points towards you being in safe hands. Try to not hold back so much’ and ‘Don’t do it. Don’t let her in. You’ve been wrong about people in the past, and ultimately you’ll be let down, and you’ll end up being hurt’.

*

As I am writing this post, I suddenly feel very aware that with every difference I note between A. and P., the realisation that I won’t be seeing A. anymore knocks on the door – makes my eyes tear up – and I am also struck by the feeling that I am somehow being disloyal to A. in writing about anything even remotely hopeful about P.  Almost as if I am cheating on her with another therapist. I remember feeling something very similar when I started seeing A., having learnt so much from my work with D., and worrying that in one way or another moving on to a new therapist meant that I didn’t value what D. had offered or the hard work she had done with me. I know that these feelings will eventually subside, and I also know that in some ways I had outgrown A. – or perhaps we had both outgrown our relationship – and the time to part ways had come. But for now, each reminder that things have come to an end in my relationship with A. hurts. Because I really miss her.

I suppose that in a way, ending with A. – and the fact that I really won’t be seeing her again – is a bit like dealing with a death, and I suspect that over the next several months I will be going through all the different stages of grief.

But, hopefully, I won’t be doing it on my own.

xx

Ps. To those of you who know about my trip to Sweden: I know that I am missing out two absolutely massive things about my time there, both of which deserve some proper analysing; I will return to those things in a later post, but for now, I am choosing to leave it out. *hangs the STILL PROCESSING sign on the door*

Trauma Focused Counselling, Psychoanalytic Therapy & Bridging The Gap

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Abandonment Issues, Attachment, Counselling with Z, Expressing Emotion, Personal Growth, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, Sef-Awareness, Sexual Abuse, Suicide, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By now I have had nine sessions with Z. Only, it’s turned out very different to what I had thought it would be. Two sessions ago Z. said that she felt concerned about us doing deep trauma-focused work, said that she wasn’t sure it would ultimately be to my benefit if we started unpacking memories that would undoubtedly cause a lot of pain, when we have so very few sessions together and might not have enough time to get any closure. She also said that she was unsure if we should do all sixteen sessions as planned, or if we should perhaps instead spend a few sessions thinking about how the work we have been doing so far could be brought back into A.’s consulting room. Or, Z. added, maybe what we need to do is look at sorting out a referral to someone else, someone who specialises in trauma-treatment, but who – unlike herself – could offer long-term therapy?

All this came as a bit of a shock to me, because, after all, Z. had been handed my referral and would have known the extent of trauma I have suffered, and she also knew the premises we were working on from the outset: sixteen sessions, no more, no less, unless I decided to cut counselling short. Of course, intellectually I can appreciate the concerns voiced by Z., but it was still a tough one to take in. Also – perhaps more importantly – I know myself fairly well, and I could see right away that no matter how much intellectual sense this proposal made, it would only be a matter of time before those deep seated, fear infused questions started popping up in my head and heart: Was that really the reason why Z. wanted to cut counselling short? Maybe this was just what she was saying, because she didn’t want to tell me that I had once again become ‘too much’? What if the real reason was that the stuff I had shared already was more than she could cope with? Needless to say my internal Here-We-Go-Again alarm bells were going off like crazy.

Of course, the rational part of me knows that it is unlikely that Z. would lie to me, or that – given that working with trauma is What She Does – the bits and pieces of trauma I had let her in on would be too much to cope with, but as we have seen time and time again, intellectual understanding and emotional response rarely go neatly hand in hand in perfect harmony. As I said to Z.; in many ways it doesn’t even matter what the real reasons for not doing the full sixteen sessions actually are: ultimately it will almost certainly become cemented in my mind as further proof that I’m ‘too much’. Or, even, that I’m not really worth the hard work that is involved, because, after all – everyone else gets their sixteen sessions, and they’re all trauma clients, too. So, this must be something specific to me.

I told Z. that, although I’m nowhere near as invested in my relationship with her as I am in my relationship with A. [yet], an experienced rejection of this kind would still bring all these fears to the surface in a way that I don’t think would be particularly helpful for me, as it would only serve to reinforce the idea that no one can truly cope with me. That no one wants to hear my story.

I feel quite pleased with myself that I managed to share these thoughts with Z., that I didn’t do what I would have done a few years ago: bury all feelings as deeply as I possibly could, right at the very edge of my conscious mind, and just accept Z.’s suggestion to end counselling early – with a bright smile plastered across my face to hide the invisible tears, to boot. I’m glad that I instead decided to ‘fight back’.  [Especially as Z. told me in today’s session that we have another seven to go, which means we will be doing the full course.]

The two sessions since Z. suggested stopping short we have spent, in part, at least, exploring what this proposition of Z.’s has done to me and how it has made me feel about Z. I’ve also explained that I am not looking to find a new therapist; I think it is crucial that I somehow find a way to bring the work I have started with Z. back to my sessions with A., both to allow me an opportunity to discover that I can overcome my fear of breaking people [and perhaps even of breaking myself], and for A. to rise to the challenge and earn my trust back, so that I dare once more take a chance and share some of the truly awful things that happened to me. To, in a sense, come full circle.

A.’s and my story began a little over four and a half years ago. It took me a good year of testing A. in a million different ways to make sure that she was for real before I even considered talking about anything much at all. After that another two years were spent slowly slowly building a genuine relationship. I began trusting her, tried to open up even when I was terrified to do so. And then in year five of therapy – boom – something went quite badly wrong. Both A. and I hit a wall, full speed, from opposite sides, and whatever trust there was got seriously dented as a result. And that’s where we are at now: we are both still in recovery mode.

What I would like to add to our story is a final phase where I get to experience that mutual trust can be rebuilt. Both that I can start trusting A. to ‘hold’ me again, to feel safe with her, to know that she can cope hearing about the things that happened to me, but also that she can regain her trust in me. It would be unrealistic and unfair to suggest that the breakdown and subsequent dent in trust was experienced only at my end; I can absolutely see that the act of nearly killing myself earlier this year, put a dent in A.’s trust in me, too.

This is the main reason why I don’t want to look for another long-term therapist, even if she happened to be specialised in trauma-focused work. I feel that the positive corrective emotional experience needs to happen in my relationship with A. The circle needs to be completed in a single relationship.

I do feel that the work I have been doing with Z. – both the trauma work and the work we have been doing in the last two sessions – has been helpful to me. It has made me try to, ever so gently, bring some of the feelings around the abuse into my sessions with A., to lower my guard that little bit more, and it has also helped me be a lot more direct in the way I communicate with A. about our relationship. I do a lot less tiptoeing around. I still feel that I want to complete all sixteen sessions with Z., because I think the time left could be well spent building bridges. I also think it’s been quite healthy for A. to see how I have responded to a very different type of therapist/counsellor, and I think it has made her reflect on the way she works with me, and what may or may not be useful in our work. I don’t mean that this has been a forced response to a threat of If you don’t do things MY way, I’ll find another therapist, because I don’t feel I have issued such a threat – the decision to do trauma-focused work outside of therapy was made before A. and I hit that wall, had been discussed in my sessions with A. – but that it’s happened naturally, on a genuine feeling level.

There is still a long way to go, for both of us, but I think we will get there in the end.

xx

PS. Following my last two posts I have (a bit surprisingly) had more than one email asking if Z.’s real name is Zoe Xxxxxxx, so I thought I’d state once and for all that NO, it isn’t. Z.’s name doesn’t even begin with Z, I just randomly picked it because her letter was already in use. As I’ve said before, I do always take as much care as I possibly can to mask other people’s real identity, and this includes the identities of my counsellors and psychotherapists. :)

The Beginning Of A Parallel Journey

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Counselling with Z, Expressing Emotion, Flashbacks, Personal Growth, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, PTSD/Extreme Emotional Stress Disorder, Sef-Awareness, Sexual Abuse and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
My most beloved transitional object

My most beloved transitional object

 

You may remember that a few posts ago I wrote about deciding to go ahead and do some short term specialised trauma-focused counselling, parallel to the psychoanalytic therapy I am already doing with A.

I set out on this journey four weeks ago and it’s been quite a ride thus far, but before I begin writing about said journey, let me introduce you to a new character: Z., my counsellor. I have to admit that when I met her the first time I wasn’t entirely sure about her. My impression was mostly positive, and I absolutely felt that she was someone I could work with, but there was also a little bit of fear that she might not be quite strong enough to resist my habit of luring therapists and counsellors alike down side paths and blind alleys. What I mean by that is that, in the past, back when therapy was something I was doing because someone else wanted me to do it [parents, doctors, psychiatrists], I was very very good at finding ways of showing up for session each week, skilfully avoiding doing any actual therapy.

What I did was to go in and talk about something entirely unrelated [I spent an entire year talking about ice-hockey and the LA Lakers with my first therapist], then dazzling them by intellectually linking whatever I had decided to talk about with psychotherapeutic theory. I realise, of course, that this was something I did because I simply wasn’t ready to engage in therapy, so in one way this behaviour is hardly surprising. But, at the same time, there was always a part of me that was deeply disappointed that none of my first three therapists ever pulled me up on my fairly obvious attempts at outsmarting them, and that they were instead, session after session, drawn into complex discussions about attachment theory, projective identification etc etc. I think what I was really craving was a therapist who would step into that pseudo-parental role, different to my own parents, steering a clear path in showing me that they were more interested in me than in my ability to spin intricate and dazzling webs.

It wasn’t until many many years later in my very first session with D. that a counsellor finally told me that ‘Although your knowledge is very impressive, it’s not why we’re here.’ Felt like hitting a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour and then being told that it’s pretty silly to go running at a wall, when there was a perfectly good opportunity here to learn to use the ladder that was leaning against said wall. I’m not saying that D. was necessarily the first counsellor or therapist to see through this game I was playing, or to understand the reasons for why I was playing it, but she was the first person to properly make me feel that she understood that I was absolutely terrified and that rather than allowing me to carry on defending against this fear by using intellectualisation she cared enough about me to want to help me step onto the ladder and do something different. There was no pressure to make it to the top of the wall in the time we had, but instead there was a lot of focus on acknowledging the achievement of making it onto the first step. Any subsequent steps would be a bonus.

So, knowing that I was about to begin a completely new type of counselling with Z., one which focused solely on the sexual abuse I suffered, one where talking about my parents, or being adopted, or the million other things that are part of my life and who I am, would play very little part, I was completely and utterly petrified. Thus, meeting Z. for the first time was a big deal. Naturally, meeting a counsellor or therapist always is, but I was very aware of the need to find a counsellor who wouldn’t gobble up deliciously smoked red herrings thrown their way, and so there was a lot on the line in that first meeting.

Coming out of that meeting, my general impression of Z. was – as I said earlier – mainly positive, there was still a part of me that felt concerned that her statement that she ‘wouldn’t push me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go’, might potentially indicate that she was someone who, if I wanted to, I could easily string along in an attempt to not only avoid having to go to painful places, but to avoid challenging myself to move forward at all. Like I said to my sisters after the first session: ‘Z. is someone I would have had for lunch 10 years ago’.

But the four and a half years of doing therapy with A., along with the counselling I did with D. prior to that, has made me realise how much there is to gain from doing my utmost to stop myself from going down that route. To, in a sense, stay on that ladder and keep climbing it. So, I knew that even if I was somewhat unsure of Z., I knew that I was different, as were my reasons for going into this counselling. Of course, as much as I try to consciously stop myself from hopping off the ladder, there may still be a fair amount of unconscious [or subconscious, if you’re so inclined] motivation for leading myself astray, hence, needing to feel sure that Z. would be able to spot this when I can’t.

In my second meeting with Z., many of my initial fears were laid to rest. She came to the second session with a very clear view of what she would like us to work on and helped guide me through it. This is very new to me; I’m used to doing psychoanalytic therapy, where I’m pretty much always in the driver’s seat, and it’s a real challenge to now, suddenly, let someone else co-pilot. There were some things Z. had wanted to do in the second session, which she soon realised weren’t quite right for me, as they were things I had already worked out and implemented for myself, and she swiftly adapted to this, changing course to suit my trajectory. This lead to something I would never in a million years have thought possible: already in session three I took a plunge and showed her a drawing of one of the abuse situations and talked about it. It was scary as anything, but was much helped by discussing – prior to me handing the drawing over to Z. – what I wanted her to do with it so as to not have a repeat of that session with A. where I interpreted her immediate return of a drawing as a sign that she couldn’t quite bear looking at the reality of the abuse. Instead, this time, we made the agreement that Z. would hold on to my drawing until I indicated that I would like to have it back. Z. also showed some initiative when she felt I was getting into my normal way of racing ahead through a story, as though I’m talking about someone else, with complete emotional disconnect, by stopping me for a while and asking me to reconnect and to tell her what talking about this made me feel. This is very new to me. Naturally, A. is also very interested in what I’m feeling, and often tags a ‘Can you say more?’ [one of my absolute favourite questions] or ‘Can you unpack that?’ onto something I have said, in order to coax more out of me. But, I’m not used to being actually stopped in order to reconnect several times during a session.

I had brought my beloved Doth with me to session. Doth, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her, is a porcelain doll I’ve had since I was a child. She was made by my best friend’s mother and she was the only person who knew about the abuse while it was going on; I used to sit with Doth, whisper in her ear the things my brother and M. made me do. So, needless to say, she is very very precious to me, and as childish as it may seem, I thought having Doth with me in session might make it easier for me to talk about the abuse, because, in a way, she has already heard it all. I felt regressing to that childhood ritual of talking to Doth about the awful things that were happening might help me overcome my fear of talking about the abuse for fear of breaking the listener.

I think this parallel work with A. and Z. has the potential to be a very good thing. I had worried that I might be spreading myself too thin, or that it would become too confusing working with two people at the same time, but for now it seems to work quite well. Also, the work I am doing with Z. is very short term, only sixteen sessions in all, and is by its very nature a lot more intense than the therapy I’m doing with A., and I am hoping to use my sessions with A. to ensure that I remain safe while I’m doing this very painful work. I have already noticed that I am again having more flashbacks than the norm, but this is something I had expected. As I told a friend of mine: ‘Doing this was always going to be a totally rubbish time’, but I am hopeful that it will ultimately help reduce the amount of flashbacks I have, and also, that it will help me go further with A.

Sixteen sessions, even if structured, is not a lot of time, especially given that I suffered abuse from more than one person, and that the abuse went on for as long as it did, so I am hoping that doing this with Z. will open the door to carrying on talking about the abuse with A. once counselling comes to an end, much in the same way that the counselling with D. set me up for actively trying to avoid throwing red herrings at A., and subsequently, Z.

 

In other words: onwards and upwards, one rung at the time.

 

Be kind to your Selves,

xx

 

Where Do We Go From Here?

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Anger, Anxiety, Expressing Emotion, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have been meaning to upload this post for a few days now, have kept telling people that I was going to post an update in the next few days, but, for whatever reason, I just needed a little more time to think before writing it. As I wrote in a previous post, it hasn’t been my intention to turn this little therapy drama into any sort of cliff-hanger, I just simply wasn’t quite ready to write the update until just now, hence the delay. Nothing more to it.

*

A. replied very briefly to my email, acknowledging that she had received it and confirming that she was expecting me to come for session the following Wednesday. This was good; I wouldn’t have wanted her to respond to my email at length, I just wanted her to have read it and to have had some time to think about the things I was saying, so that we could talk about it in the next session.

I began that next session with a simple ‘So where do we go from here?’ thinking that that was open enough to invite some sort of mutual discussion. Instead my question was met with silence, and I felt instantly annoyed, because I had really hoped that A. would recognise the need to respond to me openly and directly, to engage in a dialogue with me, rather than to hang back and wait for me to say something for her to analyse. So, naturally, the next thing that came out of my mouth was dripping with frustration: ‘You know, it would be quite helpful if we could have an actual two-way conversation about this.’

We did have something of a conversation, eventually. Thankfully. Because, I think I would have walked out once and for all, had that not happened. My anxiety was sky high coming into that session, not knowing whether or not this would be the session where A. would tell me that she definitely couldn’t carry on working with me, regardless of whether or not I promised to not get suicidal again, because I was simply too much for her. And, also, there was tremendous fear that what I had written in the email would have a negative effect, or would be misunderstood, would have tipped things in the opposite direction of what I had hoped for. So, I really needed to be able to have a conversation with her about where we stood, what was going to happen, what the deal was going to be. I couldn’t have handled the not-knowing, the guessing, the excruciating uncertainty regarding the future of our therapeutic relationship.

A. brought something up which I had mentioned in the previous session, namely the idea that if I did go along with her request that would almost certainly mean that talking about suicidal feelings would become taboo. She told me that there were no taboos, that I was free to explore absolutely anything I wanted to in session – but – that I was not free to act.

I sat with this for a moment, because to me, this seemed quite different to what I felt she had said in the previous session. There is no way for me to know if this was what she had meant to convey in the previous session but had just expressed it in a somewhat clumsy way, resulting in me hearing something quite different, or if she had taken in what I had written in my email, and realised that what she had demanded initially was an impossible ask. All I know is that this felt different to the ultimatum-like choice she had presented me with the last time we met. So, that’s what I told her. A., of course, wanted to know in what way it felt different, and I said that this felt more doable, that while there is no way I – or anyone for that matter – can promise never to become suicidal, I can choose not to act.

I can’t say that I feel that we managed to talk it all out in that session, or even that we have in subsequent sessions. I couldn’t honestly say that this issue has been resolved. It still feels like it’s sitting there, an invisible but definite stumbling block between us. Whilst I acknowledged that I can make a choice not to act, I never made any sort of promise to A. that I won’t, nor has she pressed me for one. In some ways you could say that we have both just let it drop, allowed it to fall into that silent space between us, lost in the red pile of the Persian rug at our feet. I can’t help but feel that we are both working very hard at pretending that everything is back to normal, even though we both know that that isn’t the case at all.

As far as taboos go, do I believe what A. says, that there are no taboos? I suppose you could say that I do, or – perhaps more accurately – I believe that A. genuinely wants me to feel free to talk about absolutely anything, no matter how hard, no matter how sensitive. Have I talked about how I really feel since this happened? Have I been able to talk about suicidal feelings? About urges to act out? No. I am far too scared that I will say one thing too many and that consequently therapy will stop. In some ways I feel that all of a sudden I am doing therapy under the threat of termination.

Sharp-eared readers will have noticed that none of the discussions between A. and I have addressed the issue which felt most pressing as this whole drama unravelled; my deep-seated fear that I always end up being too much for people, and that I had pushed A. to the point where she couldn’t cope anymore. There is good reason for why I’ve not written about this; we haven’t addressed this at all. Neither my fear, nor any possible validity in my feeling that A. can’t quite cope has been talked about.

I have had a lot of comments and particularly emails about the last two posts, all of which I am grateful for, as they have offered many different angles from which to view what has been going on between A. and I. A number of readers have expressed a fair amount of anger at A.’s way of handling the situation, and as anger sadly isn’t a talent I have mastered, it has in many ways felt good to see others reacting in this way. And, at the same time, because I am a Worrier, it’s made me scrutinise what I have written, to try to ascertain if I may have unfairly painted A. in a darker shade of gray than was necessary. I would like to think that I have been reasonably fair in what I have written, yet at the same time I think it is important to remember that this blog is a stage which I share with no one, and as such only my voice gets heard, only my version of events gets told. A. has had no opportunity to put her understanding of what has been going on between us forward. Also, as I highlighted in my email to A., it is entirely possible that my assumptions about what has been going on for her are altogether incorrect.

One reader very helpfully pointed out that it may well have been that what A. was saying about not being able to work under the threat of suicide was less to do with not being able to cope with me, and more to do with the fact that a client’s suicidality can make therapeutic progress very difficult. This is something I agree with; a client’s suicidality, especially if acute, can doubtlessly make the therapeutic process suffer, may even make it impossible. I also agree that it is fair for a therapist to be clear about not finding a client’s acting out acceptable. However, I also feel that the way A. initially presented the issue to me, ie “I can’t work under the threat of suicide” suggested that it wasn’t so much that she felt that my suicidal impulses or acting out was a hindrance to the therapeutic process, as much as it was a case of her not being able to work under these circumstances, and this is what lead me to interpret her statement as indicative of her not being able to cope. She wasn’t saying that ‘The constant threat of you acting out makes it impossible for this therapy to happen, because it means your energy is focused more on the idea of being dead, than on being here with me and genuinely engaging with this process’, she was saying that she couldn’t work when things were this way.

But, of course it is very possible that I was taking her words a little too literally, maybe expecting too much of her in terms of expressing exactly what she meant in a “perfect” way, and – as I wrote in the email – there is a difference between her actual words and what I heard, and of course the things I read into those words come largely from my imagination, rather than from actual, factual knowledge or confirmation from A.

There is so much more to say about this, and I think this whole thing will take a long time to be fully resolved. But for now, this is where I will leave it.

For the time being I am still seeing A. Although, as I said earlier, there is still much left for A. and I to talk about, we have had some very good sessions lately. No, it hasn’t been addressing the stuff that is going on between the two of us, but they have still been very useful sessions.

I want to once again say thank you to everyone who has taken the time to email or comment on the last two posts. I am sorry that I haven’t been able to respond to all of you, but rest assured that I have read what you’ve written, and I very much appreciate getting your points of view. Whatever they may be.

Be kind to your Selves.

xx

In the next episode of What It Takes To Be Me: I embark on a new journey as I dive head first into the world of intensive, short term trauma-focused counselling. Stay tuned!

By the way, we’ve just passed the 55,000 hits milestone since this blog was relaunched!
So THANKS to all!

Long-Term Psychoanalytic Therapy & Short-Term Trauma Focused Counselling

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Family Dynamics, Flashbacks, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, PTSD/Extreme Emotional Stress Disorder, Sef-Awareness, Sexual Abuse, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have been meaning to update my blog for a long time now, but blogging has had to take a step back in the midst of coping with what has felt like an ever-increasing onslaught of flashbacks. Still, here I am now, neatly posed in front [well, technically, behind] my computer and though I will more than likely have to make many stops to work my way out of flashbacks, I still wanted to write a little, just to keep you all in the loop as it were.

Firstly, I would like to apologise – or perhaps not so much apologise as acknowledge that my previous post was of a rather difficult-to-read nature. I know that some people found it a little too hard to cope with. And, at the same time, I have also had emails from people saying that they found it helpful in one way or another, and I suppose, at the end of the day, this blog, it is – as it states on the tin – an honesty focused blog, and does come with an explicit warning that it sometimes deals with difficult issues.

Now, moving on from that, you will be pleased to know that this post will be perhaps a little less difficult to stomach. I can’t guarantee that it will necessarily be joyful, but it won’t be leaving you with any particularly nasty mental images, I shouldn’t think.

So, what’s been going on in my life? Well, as mentioned above, there have been the flashbacks, and sometimes it really feels like that is ALL that there is, but, really, that’s not true, and I am hoping that – eventually, with plenty of hard work – I will get to a place where those will take a back seat.

As regular readers will know I am currently in twice weekly psychoanalytic therapy, and have been for nearly four years [thrice weekly, a lot of the time]. In fact, A.’s and my four year anniversary is coming up later this month. Perhaps time to crack open the champagne, or share a celebratory cigar ála Freud? But more than anything, I think, time to reflect.

People often ask me if my therapy helps, and what does A. say about all these flashbacks that I’m having, about self-harm, about feeling suicidal? And I find myself forever explaining that it’s not that type of therapy. It’s not the type of therapy in which A. and I sit and practice grounding techniques or where she advices me on what I should and shouldn’t do. It just isn’t. Psychoanalytic therapy isn’t a short term crisis action plan. But that is not the same as saying that my therapy isn’t helping. No, it doesn’t immediately offer relief from flashbacks or other psychological ills, but it helps in different ways. It helps me see things from different perspectives, it helps me develop self-awareness, it helps me understand why I sometimes react very differently to other people, it helps me see patterns in both my behaviour and in my way of thinking and relating. It helps me in a very broad way. This is not trauma focused therapy. We look at a lot more than ‘just’ the sexual abuse I experienced, we look at all different aspects of my life. It’s colour photography, as opposed to black and white, and I feel that it offers a bigger and more stable platform to stand on, when looking at all the various angles of being alive and being human. So, yes, therapy absolutely does help. It’s just that it is rather more complex than a plaster cast on a broken arm.

That said, the one thing that impacts my day-to-day life more than anything else is without a shadow of a doubt the flashbacks, the horrible experience of being made to relive the abuse again and again without warning. It’s a painful and uncontrollable mental bombardment which severely alters the way I live my life. Apart from, of course, being extremely emotionally exhausting (both the actual flashbacks and the aftermath of them – it’s simply not a case of OK, I’m out of the flashback, everything is fine now..) they also impact on a very practical level. Firstly, the unpredictability of when they [the flashbacks] are going to happen, means that it is very hard to relax. I don’t have easily identifiable triggers which give me warning that I might soon have a flashback, so, even when things are good, when I’m only having perhaps six or ten flashbacks in a day, I don’t know when they are going to happen, and so have to always be on the ready to deal with them. Secondly, when things are bad – like at the moment when I’m having anything between sixty and eighty flashbacks in a day – it leaves little time or energy to spare for doing other things. I can’t read, I can’t watch telly, because I’m constantly being interrupted by these flashbacks, and by the time I’ve come out of them and calmed down, I’ve forgotten what I was reading or what the storyline was. Also, having so many flashbacks makes venturing outside something to be avoided. It’s simply too hazardous, as I won’t notice traffic lights changing, I’ll keep walking while having them ending up getting lost, I’ll miss my stop on the tube etc etc. Even something so simple as making myself a cup of tea can become quite dangerous, as I discovered the other week; I was pouring out the water, had a flashback but kept pouring.. as a consequence the boiling water spilled onto my lap, and I got a burn on my thigh. So, even though the flashbacks are not psychotic; I do know where I am, it is like being in two places at once, it’s an altered state of awareness which affects daily life a lot more than people realise. I have to do a million different work-arounds just to get by, like being on the phone with someone whenever I’m out walking (so the person can help me notice if I have a flashback and tell me to stop walking), ask bus drivers and tube staff to make sure I get off at the right stop, meet friends in places that are easy for me to get to and generally meet at the station rather than at the cafe or restaurant we’re going to, to minimise the potential for getting lost on the way. Etc etc etc.

Because of this, I have decided that on top of my normal therapy with A. I am going to do some short-term specialised trauma-focused counselling, aimed at trying to reduce the number of flashbacks I have. I’ve talked to A. about it, and although it’s not the norm to see more than one therapist at any one time, it is something I really want to do. And I think that doing it this way, while I am still seeing A. will help me cope better with what can’t be anything but very painful trauma work. It’s one of those I don’t think it is meant to be easy, I think it’s meant to be WORTH it sort of things. Because, if it helped reduce the frequency of the flashbacks even just a little, it would improve my life enormously.

So, although there is much to discuss, not least of all the reasons why I am chosing to do this work with someone other than A. [is it to protect her? is it to protect me? maybe fear of ruining our relationship? etc etc], for now, I am waiting with some trepidation to start this new (additional) type of counselling. So do stay tuned. Updates will be forthcoming once I actually start.

All the very best,

xx

Being The Perfect Therapy Client

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Abandonment Issues, Attachment, Coping Strategies, Expressing Emotion, Flashbacks, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, Psychotherapy with B, PTSD/Extreme Emotional Stress Disorder, Rejection, Sef-Awareness, Sexual Abuse, Suicidal Ideation, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I know this is a bit like the London double-deckers; for a long time there’s not a single bus, and then there are five all at once. The Heinz Ketchup effect.. But, you see, one of my readers commented on the post I uploaded last night, and in responding to his comment I realised that it could well be turned into a blog post in its own right, so here I am again, updating my blog merely hours after my last offering. You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot and all that.. I hope you don’t mind.

Anyhow..
The comment was in reference to my mentioning that five years ago, following an initial psychological assessment, I was deemed to be too high risk and unsuitable for psychotherapy, and the commenter said that “From the posts I’ve read by you, you certainly seem like the sort of patient that therapists are delighted to have.” My initial reaction was to feel flattered by this comment, and I instantly thought that I rather agree, biased as I am; I do think I make a good client. I have a bit of a chequered past, quite a few things in my baggage – obvious material to work with so to speak – and I am also reasonably self-aware, rather analytically minded and fairly articulate. Not a bad prospect for a psychotherapist.

Then again, I am no different to any other psychotherapy client; I think we all want to see ourselves as good clients – interesting, intelligent people – who therapists are happy to work with. And we all wish to be the favourite client, the one our therapist is really looking forward to seeing, because we challenge them just the right amount without being burdensome or draining. [If you’re in therapy yourself, I’m sure you will know what I mean.]

Yet, having been turned down by the NHS for therapy I really struggled to find someone who was willing to take me on. Naturally I had to give up on the idea of getting free therapy on the NHS, but I figured that outside of The Service there had to be plenty of privately practicing therapists who would want to work with me.

In reality it took me quite a few months to find a therapist. I had to go to many ‘first appointments’ and found myself being repeatedly rejected. Many of the therapists I saw, said exactly what the NHS assessor had said; that I was simply too high risk, what with my recent serious suicide attempt and my habit of using self-harm as a coping strategy. And I can understand that. I imagine it can be quite challenging – scary even – to work with, and in a sense – be responsible for – a client who may well choose to down a litre of anti-freeze rather than turn up to session. Naturally, not everyone will be up for that. But, at the same time, the way I always saw it – and I would always make this clear at assessments – I’ve always seen therapy as the way forward for me, the thing which will eventually help me manage my past in a more positive way, and also – while I have many times become depressed while in therapy, I’ve never made an attempt to end my life when I’ve been in therapy or had counselling. That has only ever happened when I’ve not had a place to take my thoughts and emotions, when I’ve felt I’ve not been able to share what’s going on for me.

The other reason given to me, when therapists declined taking me on, was that they felt they simply didn’t have the experience they needed to be able to work with someone with such a complex background. There are quite a few aspects – issues, if you will – to work on; I was adopted, so a high potential for major attachment and abandonment issues and possible identity crises. I was sexually abused and suffer from intense flashbacks of this, and so more than one therapist said that I should probably look for someone who specialised in this area, perhaps a therapist trained in EMDR or TF-CBT. I have one parent who is gay, I have another parent who has struggled a lot with the rollercoaster that is bi-polar disorder. So lots of different things to work on in therapy, perhaps too many, for some.

I also suspect, although I don’t know this for sure, that I probably came across as someone who might be a bit of a handful to manage in session, because I happen to be ridiculously well read on the theory of psychotherapy, particularly psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy, which was also what I wanted to do. I am not someone who will hold back on commenting if I feel that the therapist is ‘text booking’ me. And also, there is a definite barrier to get through; the fact that I often, knowingly or unknowingly, intellectualise and theorise in order to not have to deal with actual emotions. Hiding behind my theoretic understanding of things, so as to not really have to deal with anything. I don’t do it so much anymore – in fact, these days I tell myself off if I notice that I am slipping back into this pattern – but five years ago, that was certainly something I did a lot.

In the end, having tried for a good few months to find myself a therapist and failed, I asked the house therapists in the therapeutic community I had recently moved in to, to set me up with one of their trainees, because I felt I would never be able to get anyone to take me on on my own.

Long-term readers of this blog with remember that this turned out to not have been a great idea, as the person who was ‘assigned to me’ wasn’t a particularly good match for me and the chemistry just wasn’t there. Having thought it through, I ultimately decided to terminate with her, as I felt that I could probably carry on seeing her for years and still never get what I wanted from our work together. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly, but, I always felt it was the right decision for me. I’m sure B. – my previous therapist – is a great therapist; she just wasn’t the right one for me.

As it turned out, I actually managed to find a therapist that seemed a good fit for me before I had even let B. know for sure that I was going to move on. Almost as if by magic, I had completely by chance contacted two different therapy organisations, both of which A. happened to be affiliated with, and already the first time I spoke to her on the phone, I felt she could be the right person for me to be doing this very important work with. Going for my first initial appointment with her I was nervous, but also felt decidedly positive. I had a good feeling about it.

I have since asked A. how come she decided to take me on – thinking about the many people who had turned me down – and, although she slightly dodged the question in her funny little way, she did say that she never considered not taking me on. I am still not entirely sure why that was, but maybe she saw it somewhat similarly to how I saw it; I seemed like someone she could work well enough with me to give me a chance.

We’ve certainly had our moments over the years, A. and I, and I know that I can definitely be more than just a little challenging at times, and not always in a nice way, but I do think that we speak similar enough languages to be able to communicate well and to work things through. I also know that A. can stand up to me, and that she won’t be cornered or pushed around by my intellectualisations or red herrings, something I really appreciate. In fact, only the other session, she was challenging me and I commented that she’s asking very difficult questions, to which she responded Good! and we exchanged a quick smile across the room.
And I think that illustrates our relationship quite well.

I don’t know if I really am that magic Favourite Client, and by now that doesn’t even seem all that important anymore, but I do feel that we have a decent enough relationship that I could be.

And that’s enough.

xx

Bulletpointing My Life

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Acceptance, Anxiety, Coping Strategies, Depression, Diagnosis, Family Dynamics, Flashbacks, Identity, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, PTSD/Extreme Emotional Stress Disorder, Self-Harm, Sexual Abuse, Suicidal Ideation and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I had to go see a clinical psychologist for an assessment not very long ago; I needed a statement to say something about my mental health. It’s a long and rather convoluted story why I couldn’t simply get A. to write this statement, but in short: it was An NHS Thing and for whatever reason psychotherapists simply don’t rank very highly within the NHS. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been seeing them or how well they know you, it doesn’t even matter if they are both UKCP and BACP accredited, the only letters that matter within the NHS are N, H – and you guessed it – S.

So, in the end I was given a number to call in order to book an appointment with an NHS affiliated clinical psychologist, who would clearly possess almost magical levels of insight, as she would apparently be able to conduct a full assess of my mental health in thirty minutes flat, having never met me before and knowing absolutely nothing about me, my background or my mental health history.

I had resolved to stay calm, but the second I was given the address to the place where the assessment was to happen, I realised it was where I had gone for an assessment five years earlier, where they ultimately deemed me too high risk and unsuitable to be in therapy.. [Being rejected by the NHS is the reason why I had to go private; while I agree that I was very high risk, there was no way I was going to accept that I wasn’t suited to be in therapy..]

Either way, I rolled up at the place with plenty of time to spare, giving my anxiety abundant opportunity to hit the roof and then proceed through it. This wasn’t helped by the fact that Dr NHS Clinical Psychologist was an hour [yes, an hour!] late.

But – eventually – I did get to go in for my assessment and as it turned out Dr NHS Clinical Psychologist really wasn’t too bad. It’s just that, when you meet someone for the first time and you have thirty minutes to talk about yourself, your background and your mental health history, well, what do you say? where do you start?

We covered the usual ground: I was adopted, I was sexually abused by my oldest brother for twelve years and for a year by a second person, I have a complicated relationship with my whole family, my parents are separated, my father lives with his male partner, my mother is bi-polar, etc etc etc. We then moved on to more recent times, talking about previous suicide attempts, self-harm as a coping strategy, the flashbacks, the recurrent depressions and so on. I have to give Dr NHS Clinical Psychologist some credit here, because she also allowed some space to talk about the more positive aspects of my life; my relationship with my sisters, my amazing friends, my studies, my volunteering, but, coming out of the meeting, while I felt that she had listened to all I had said, I really wasn’t sure what she would actually write in her statement.

It’s a strange thing when you are asked to summarize your whole life and your entire being in a very short space of time; it really highlights something, forces you to really think. And it’s exhausting.

So, the next session I had with A, was spent debriefing. It’s quite hard to look at the different parts of your life in this very concise way. It’s almost a bit of a shock to the system to go through it all like that. I mean, none of these aspects of my life are things I haven’t spent hours in therapy thinking and talking about, but there is something quite extraordinary when you have all these life stories mentally bullet pointed before you.

There is one part of me that thinks that considering all the things I’ve been through, all the unorthodox aspects of my life, I’ve actually done quite well to not be completely broken by it. And at the same time, there is another part that chokes and goes “It’s going to take a looooong time to make some sort of peace with all of this..”

But, thankfully, in spite of that assessment five years ago, I am in therapy and I will continue to give it my best shot to somehow make sense of it all.

xx

One Step Closer To The Edge [..And I’m About To Break..?]

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Abandonment Issues, Attachment, Flashbacks, Music, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy Breaks, Psychotherapy with A, PTSD/Extreme Emotional Stress Disorder, Self-Harm, The Therapeutic Relationship, Video and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Four sessions to go until A. goes on maternity leave. At the most. These last few weeks since our Christmukah break I’ve been living with the worry of suddenly having a message that A. has gone into premature labour and thus leaving me to fend for myself without even getting to have the Final Session. Very stressful, indeed.

I am feeling on edge, wondering how in the world I will be able to get through these coming months without therapy. Feels like there is no way I’ll be able to cope. I am scared that I’ll go into another of those never-ending periods of flashbacks, because if that happens, I don’t think it will end well.. I am, of course, trying my very best to hold it together, to look ahead, to not assume my worst case scenario will come true. But it’s hard. Especially as over the last few weeks I have been having more flashbacks and nightmares than the norm. The other day I once again found myself looking like Harry Potter. Also, on one occasion, I tripped up and used a white hot screw head to creatively burn myself with. And this is before A.’s leave has even started.. Not great.

The last few weeks have been very intense, therapywise, almost as if my psyche has kicked into overdrive in anticipation of A.’s leave. The sense of running out of time is immense. In some ways I guess you could say that this therapy break has pushed me to delve into things I may otherwise have found a way to not get into. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

My GP, who is the best GP in the world [possibly the universe], has been really good, and has taken my freak-outs very seriously, sorting out various referrals etc etc etc, trying to make sure that I have as much stability as possible during what promises to be a bumpy ride. And I really appreciate that.

People keep asking me what my therapist has put in place for me during her absence, and it’s hard to explain to someone who has never been in therapy that, actually, she’s not put anything in place, that there is no one covering for her. What I’m doing with A. is long-term psychoanalytic therapy, meaning that immediate symptom relief isn’t necessarily the goal, and that, also, it would make little sense for me to be referred to someone else while she is off, as that would in essence mean starting again, attaching to another person, only to have to break that up when A. is back. As a case study that could be quite an interesting little experiment, but in reality, it would involve unnecessary complication, and even if that was an option, I doubt it I would be up for it. It took me a really long time to let A. in; we’re talking years rather than months, and although people sometimes find it shocking that I’ve been seeing A. for nearly three years, to me, it feels like we’re only now getting below the surface. Like I said to A. in a recent session; while I may be a fast learner intellectually, emotionally I am exceedingly slow. And trust, well, that’s a big’un. There has been a lot of testing both A. and of the strength of our therapeutic relationship to get to the place we are now, where I am slowly, slowly allowing myself to let my guard down a little.

Which, of course, makes this break all the harder..

xx

Below are two videos; one which has nothing at all to do with what I’ve just written about.. and one from which I nicked the title for this post. Both are well worth checking out!

Long-term therapy vs. short-term crisis resolution

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Attachment, Creativity, Depression, Drawing, Expressing Emotion, Expression Through Art, Flashbacks, Illness, Medication, Psychotherapy with A, PTSD/Extreme Emotional Stress Disorder, Self-Harm, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been thinking about how to update my blog the last few days, but I’ve not felt able to do it. Partly because all my energy has been channelled towards fighting my way out of a flashback. Again and again and again. Times a million. It really has been kind of never-ending – and the only way that has worked to give me any kind of longer break has been to either make myself black out or to cut, neither of which is particularly healthy.

To say that it’s been a difficult few weeks would be a severe understatement. It’s been pretty relentless, and at times I’ve really just wanted it all to end, because there is only so much a person can cope with. The crisis team have been quite good (well, the nurses more so than the pill pushing doctors) – but it’s also been hard to find myself back in this system. Also, I’ve felt that the crisis team has been quite critical of the therapy I’m doing with A,, and they have frequently asked me if it’s really helpful to have this kind of therapy when it’s made me have such terrible flashbacks. Also, my relationship with A. has been questioned. More than once have they asked me if I’m not a little bit too attached to my therapist. My answer throughout has been that it’s not the therapy which is causing these flashbacks, it’s a combination of going home and then returning a week before therapy resumed, in conjunction with a number of other factors.

I’ve defend both my choice of therapy and the relationship I’ve worked so hard to form with A. on numerous occasions, but it’s tricky when you’re talking to people who see medication and CBT as the cure for all ills. It’s not so easy to explain that the whole point of therapy is that you form a close relationship with your therapist, and that it allows you to look at other relationships and see how they may be played out as little echoes within the therapeutic relationship. That in my veiw CBT is a bit of a band-aid, masking deep-rooted problems, and wouldn’t be at all appropriate for the kind of issues I’m dealing with. That, yes – this is really hard work, and yes it does bring difficult things up, but that it’s my feeling that the only way for me to be able to find some sort of peace within my past is to dare look at all those difficult things and realise that I can in fact survive the pain. And that’s what the work I do with A. is all about.

Despite this difference of opinion, having the involvement of the crisis team has also been of value – I’ve felt held by the fact that I’ve been seeing them on the weekends, when I don’t see A., and that they’re available to talk to on the telephone 24/7. It does help. But, that does in no way mean that I’m any less committed to the work I’m doing with A. I see it more as a crutch between sessions – for the time being – so that I can carry on with what I do in therapy.

Following yesterday’s adventures at A&E when I had my cuts stitched and SteriStripped – with a tetanus shot thrown in for good measure – R. from the crisis team came down to have a chat with me, and she said that she felt that my self-harming behaviour was going in the wrong direction, that it was escalating rather than subsiding, and that she felt I needed more support than what the crisis team can offer, and she suggested she make a referral to Drayton Park Women’s Crisis Centre.

I’ve stayed there in the past – years ago – and it has been helpful, so I agreed to R. making the referral. I think Drayton Park could be a safe option while I’m in the middle of this crisis. To me it seems like a happy medium – I’ll still be able to see A., but rather than going home to a lonely room battling flashbacks and urges to self-harm, I’d be going back to Drayton Park, where I’d be able to talk to someone about my urges to self-harm. Also, I know that they will be a lot more encouraging in terms of doing the type of work I do with A. han the crisis team has been.
Fair enough, I’ve never actually been at Drayton Park when I’ve been in therapy, but I have several friends who’ve stayed there and have felt that the Drayton Park staff have been very much in favour of them carrying on seeing their therapists while they’re staying at Drayton Park. Essentially what they say is that your therapist is your long-term support and who will help you with long-term goals, and Drayton Park is a place to feel safe while being in the middle of a crisis. It’s a short-term add-on support system, not a replacement for your long-term aims and goals.

Anyway, I’m meeting with one of the workers at Drayton Park tomorrow for an assessment, and it still remains to be seen if they’ll deem it appropriate to offer me a place for the week.

Think it’s time to hit the hay now – hopefully I’ll be able to sleep a little more than I have been in the last few nights..

Be kind to yourselves.

xx

Little S At Six Months

Little S At Six Months