Tag Archives: trust issues

Reconnecting

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Abandonment Issues, Anxiety, Attachment, Family Dynamics, Flashbacks, Friends, Inner Conflict, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy Breaks, Psychotherapy with P, PTSD/Extreme Emotional Stress Disorder, Separation-Anxiety, The Therapeutic Relationship and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been writing this update in my head for about a month, only I’ve not got down to typing it up. I am struggling to remember where I was at, emotionally, when I posted my last update, but I know that it wasn’t a very nice place.

Things sort of spun out of control for a bit. I went into the worst period of constant flashbacks I have ever experienced and ended up, once again, at Drayton Park. The whole first two weeks of staying there I more or less only ventured outside of my room to see P. for therapy. I didn’t eat, didn’t sleep and didn’t socialise with any of the other women who were staying there, so this stay was very different to many of my previous stays at Drayton Park. I simply found it too much to be around others when I was being thrust back into the past again and again and again, in an endless waking nightmare of relentless flashbacks.

Something very serious happened while I was at the crisis house, something I still don’t feel I have properly processed or understood, and I may come back to that another time, but for the time being I won’t go into it. I need more time to think about it.

In my third and final week at Drayton Park the frequency of flashbacks began to decrease and I was able to be my usual self a bit more. I had a few really good conversations with some of the other women staying at the project, feeling privileged to be allowed hear their stories and to get to know them a little. It is always a very special thing when someone decides to trust you enough to share of themselves.

I saw D., my ex-counsellor, in passing a few times during my stay [since she is based at Drayton Park one day a week] and we had some good, honest banter over lunch one day. In fact, it must have been really good, even to others listening in, because after D. left one of the residents asked me if D. was my mother, because we had such a ‘natural and easy way with one another’. How anyone could associate ‘natural and easy’ with a mother-daughter relationship is beyond me, it certainly doesn’t fit with any experience of a mother-daughter relationship I’ve ever had, but it was a very nice thing to hear, nonetheless.

Good banter aside, as D. and I were ending one of our little mini-conversations she told me to take good care of myself. Force of habit I shot a semi-automatic “I always do” coupled with a bright smile in her direction. Only, this being D. on the receiving end, she didn’t just let that statement slide, but immediately lobbed a “No, you don’t” back at me. She then paused, looked me right in the eye and slowly repeated “No. You don’t.” And there was so much feeling in those words. There was an unspoken – but clearly received – message of ‘I so wish that you did take good care of yourself. Because you really, really matter.’  And that meant a lot to me.

 

*

 

It has now been four weeks since I left Drayton Park, and there have been both ups and downs. The frequency of flashbacks seems to be back to normal, more or less. It is in no way easy to deal with the flashbacks, regardless of the less intense frequency, but it is a lot better than what it was. As I explained to a friend of mine; it’s a bit like my breathing. While my breathing is never really all that good, immediately after a bad asthma attack the ‘not so good’ still feels like a relief, by comparison.

Therapy with P. is going well and we are continuing to build our relationship, making sure to take plenty of time to do so, so that all of the different parts of me – especially Little S., who is so terribly afraid of anything that resembles trust and care and attachment – feels both seen and heard. Little S. gets scared, because she learned very early on that all of those things will inevitably lead to pain and hurt, and as much as Adult Me wants to challenge that fear, wants to show her that this relationship with P. can be safe and won’t necessarily lead to pain, it takes time and patience to get there. It takes a lot of work to truly alleviate fears that are that deeply rooted.

We are coming up to our first therapy summer break by the end of this week and as a consequence anxiety has been running high both for Little S. and for Adult Me. Regular readers of this blog will know that psychotherapy breaks is a topic I have written about a lot over the years, because it brings to the fore all of my fears about being abandoned and forgotten. It is also one of those things that people who haven’t been in therapy never seem to fully understand or appreciate. And, to me, that is also part of what makes breaks in therapy difficult; the sense that others don’t understand how hard they really are. Whenever I mention to ‘non-therapy’ friends that I feel really anxious about an upcoming break, I always get the feeling that they are thinking that I am worrying over nothing. And if I, during the actual break, say something along the lines of finding it hard that my therapist is away, the immediate response is invariably ‘When will she be back?’ followed by an equally predictable ‘Well, it’s only X weeks left’. This, of course, feels terribly invalidating, since a therapy break isn’t really about length of time at all, but about strength of emotions and how to cope with them in the absence of a safe place to explore them.

P. and I have been talking about this upcoming break and how I will be able to manage while she is away. P. had a few different suggestions of things we could do and I felt incredibly touched by them. I know that it probably seems a little silly, but it had never even entered my mind that she would have spent time thinking of ways to make this easier. I am so used to doing all my thinking and coping on my own, and I feel simultaneously grateful and overwhelmed by the care she has shown me leading up to this break.

 

I think I will end this update here.
Hopefully it won’t be quite so long before I post another one.
[I always seem to be saying that, these days].

Just before I leave you for this time: Thank you all so very much for the many moving and kind words posted in the form of comments and emails during this past blog hiatus. I am sorry that I haven’t been able to respond to all of you, but please know that I do read every single email and comment, and they really do mean a huge deal to me.

Namaste.

 

xx

 

 

 

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

Opening Up – Picking Physical & Emotional Locks

Posted by What It Takes To Be Me in Abandonment Issues, Anxiety, Home, Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy with A, Sef-Awareness, The Therapeutic Relationship, Video and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s been quite a difficult week, with three major things happening, none of which I can share on here, as they involve other people, but they have all had a big effect on my mood. I’m trying to not dip too deep, but to allow myself to reassess my own situation rather than just blindly reacting.

I’m glad that A. is back, but at the same time find that, too, difficult. I’m struggling with only seeing her once a week, which I’m aware may seem like a luxury problem, as for many people in therapy, this would be the norm. But, as you know, I can only talk about how things are for me, and for me, this is something I find very challenging. The last two sessions I have left with a feeling not altogether different to that which I had prior to A. going on maternity leave; I can’t cope with this, having so many emotions swimming around, and not having a safe place to put them. As minor as it may seem – after all it is only a week between sessions – what I think this demonstrates quite clearly is that our psyche and our feelings don’t have a concept of time. They remain in the childlike state where, when we experience fear, anxiety or sadness, a week, a month and a year are all the same. Especially when immediate relief is not provided.

At the same time, in session, I am still finding my way, not feeling sure how much I am able to share with A., still dealing with those trust issues I was worried I would be faced with. I open the door a little and then hesitate. I want to take the plunge, but seem unable to do so. I do try very hard to not allow myself to hold back too much, to not allow those trust issues free reins, but I also appreciate that this is a very real reaction the feeling of having been I abandoned by someone who is supposed to be there for me, and I believe that there is some value in allowing myself to own that reaction, rather than to simply burying it.

Last night I did something that metaphorically describes quite well what is going on in my relationship with A.; I decided to see if I would be able to pick a lock using only bobby pins (like they do in films). Initially I was pleasantly surprised to find that, even with these very rudimentary tools, I was able to do it without much effort. But then the implications of this began to sink in; if I can so easily achieve this, it means that the locks which serve to protect me, may not be quite so secure as I have tricked myself into believing, and in fact, it means that it would be quite easy for someone else to gain entry to my home, should they wish to do so. I didn’t recognise the symbolism in this in the moment, didn’t immediately see the parallel between this – opening a physical lock in my home – and opening an emotional lock to A. in therapy, but later on, when my sister asked how come I had thought to try this little project, it became quite obvious to me. Sitting with this for a little longer, I eventually also came to recognise that although my initial understanding of this discovery had left me feeling quite frightened, the bare knowledge of this security risk doesn’t actually increase the odds of someone breaking in, any more than my acute awareness that opening up in therapy leaves me vulnerable increases the likelihood of A. taking advantage of this. Both remain entirely unchanged, despite my own anxieties, and if anything it gives me an excellent opportunity to look at ways to manage my fears.

And like the wannabe MacGyver / SAS that I am, I’ll keep telling myself: he who dares, wins

I will carry on trying to open up to A., because, ultimately, as vulnerable as it leaves me feeling, there is much to gain from doing so.

I leave you with a little video of me opening a padlock. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you wish to take a look at the reality of these ‘locks’.

All the very best and plenty more,

xx

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As some of you have emailed me about my nails following the above video..

About my nails:

I don’t actually have my nails done anywhere, so can’t recommend a good nail bar, I just do them myself. It’s another one of my self-soothing techniques. The flowers are not stickers, but made using regular nail varnish. I don’t use any particularly fancy nail varnish, just whatever is cheep and cheerful. The blingy bits at the centre of the petals are Swarowsky Aurora Borealis crystals. I use a good top coat sealer to make them last, and re-use them as many times as possible. (Yes, I am desperately trying to justify this very eco-unfriendly hobby of mine..)

And, finally: YES, this is totally something you could do yourself. If you can dip the tip of a biro into a blob of nail varnish and then make a dot on your nail, you can do this. Just takes patience! :)