How to Mechanistically Lose Friends and Alienate People – C: Week 53

I suppose I was in a strange mood last Thursday morning. What has been the case of late is that I don’t sleep well on Wednesday nights – ooh, surprise sur-bloody-prise – so when I arise the next morning, I pour an overdose of caffeine into my bloodstream, in the form of both coffee and Pro Plus tablets. Normally I don’t finish the coffee, so am not exactly jumping off the walls. Last week I drank every last droplet. Per chance not the best idea in the history of evolution/creation/The Matrix/The Sims/the life span of the universe/I think I’ve stretched this far enough/whatever.

So off I went to C, in this sort of weird, caffeine-induced disposition of much oddness. I wouldn’t call it hypomania exactly; I wasn’t in the throes of overwhelming, deliriously beautiful ecstasy, nor anything much approaching it. It was a bizarre cross of, perhaps, minor hypomania, wry- and snideness, let’s-play-games-with-C-ness and mini-fuck-you-ness. Is there a word for that? I don’t know. I can’t think of it. So let’s stick with ‘wry’.

Initially, this ‘wryness’ didn’t really manifest in my interactions with C, unless you consider the silence at the start of the session, now of clockwork predictability, to be game-playing. I don’t think it is; I just never know how to open a session, and he rarely lets me off the hook. Advice, fellow mentalists. What is the decorum in this circumstance? You’d think after knowing C for over a year that I might’ve worked it out, but apparently not. Perhaps the difficulty lies in the material addressed in therapy of late. Coming in, cheerfully intoning the words, “Hi C! Let’s talk about the day when I was six when my uncle stuck his cock in my mouth!” is not something that seems to flow naturally after an initial greeting.

Eventually the silence led to a desultory conversation on how bizarre it is to simply “switch on” for 50 minutes a week. I’ve probably done this to death, but seriously – what an intrinsically false, freakish sort of social situation therapy really is. It’s not at all easy to just vulnerable-ise yourself at the figurative flick of the switch, and yet I berate myself endlessly for my consistent failure to manage it.

In order to kickstart me, I presume, C eventually asked had anything much happened since our last session. In a sense, it had; the meeting with NewVCB the preceding day was something vaguely worthy of note. I told him that, due to my low mood of late, that she had prescribed me a higher dose of the dreaded Venlafaxine and then, indeed, the ‘kickstart’ mechanism swung into gear, and I confessed to him that NewVCB had essentially forbidden me from seeing Paedo.

“Forbidden..?!” he queried suspiciously, as if I had just told him that NewVCB had ordered me to sacrifice fluffy puppies to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for medicinal benefit.

“Well, it certainly sounded like it,” I said, slightly defiantly. “She shook her head vigourously at the suggestion and said that I ‘can’t’ see him because it would be ‘damaging’.” As I quoted her, I used that absurdly ugly gesture with my index and middle fingers that denotes the words are those of someone other than the current speaker. I despise it when other people do that, and have spent many a happy hour fantasising about breaking those supercilious fingers. Why, then, am I allowed to do it myself? I am a walking double standard of hypocrisy.

Anyway, he then asked why it was likely that I would see Paedo anyway. I sneeringly pointed out that Paedo is my ‘closest’ uncle, a fact of which he is well aware.

Pre-empting any response to this, I continued by advising C that my mother had been desirous of a visitation to Paedo and Maisie’s the previous day. I said that I had managed to get out of it, but that I felt as if I was in a very difficult position.

“How did this proposition [ie. visiting their house] make you feel?” C asked.

I um-ed and ah-ed a little; the truth was that I had actually taken with me a print-out of this post on my reactions to the suggestion and my dilemma about whether to go or not. My attitude to the notion of reading the material to him was not at all what I might have expected; it felt supremely weird, and it felt supremely wrong. This is something I’m going to have to write more about in due course, but in brief (disregarding all the competing sides of me in my head), it’s almost as if I am two different people these days (and please no DID references – I’ve dealt with too many recently already!). I have this identity – Pandora, the writer, the online persona, the primary mentalist ‘Me’ on Twitter and Fuckbook – and then you have the ‘real’ one. The boring, ordinary me, who just happens to have a string of psychiatric issues. I am increasingly finding transitioning between the two to be a strange, sometimes difficult, task.

I told him so. “If I read this to you, it’s really like these two worlds – these twains that are never meant to meet – are colliding. It’s making me feel deeply uncomfortable.”

He stared at me unhelpfully. In fairness, I don’t suppose it is possible that he can empathise with something of this nature.

“Well, should I read it or not?” I finally asked, slightly irritably.

He shrugged. “I suppose you have it here, the words are already articulated, so…”

I mulled it over again for a minute or two then took a deep breath and went ahead and read the thing.

I don’t remember exactly how he responded, but for some reason or another I found myself ranting not about Paedo, but about the women connected with the house (to which I shall hencefore refer as Hotel California).

“I hate their tactility, their enthusiasm for non-sensical feminine pursuits,” I spat. “I hate their constant emotional outbursts, whether those are positive or negative. They make me sick.” I shivered at the very thought of it. I went on to tell him about when my not-quite-step-Dad dropped dead suddenly when I was 11 – Maisie and Paedo came to stay at Mum’s (hmm), and I have this overriding memory of Maisie all but begging me to shed tears. I can still feel that sense of bafflement; I feel it so strongly that I could reach out and touch it. Yes, he was dead, and that was very deeply regrettable – but what good was bawling my eyes out going to do? And even if it did serve some purpose, what in the living fuck would be the point of demonstrating my capacity for tears and sadness to others?!

“So…” C began, when I had finally concluded my little anecdote. “It is because of the women, rather than your uncle, that you don’t want to go to {Hotel California}?”

“No. Well, yes. But…well, it’s both, isn’t ‘both’ allowed? And yet…and yet…hmm.” I left the sentence trailing in mid-air, pregnant with a palpable desire to be completed.

He subtly (but obviously, if you understand) probed me to finish what I had started.

“And yet…” I eventually went on, “…well, part of me doesn’t not want to go. Not entirely anyway.”

I hung my head in horror and shame at this admission, but raised my eyes just in time to see him sit forward contemplatively, his brow furrowed.

“Why’s that?” he inevitably asked me.

“Because…because…[almost whispering] because of the children…”

This instantaneously led to the launch of yet another self-directed vituperation of epic proportions.

“I hate children,” I shrieked, “I fucking hate them! I hate the sounds they make, I hate the way their alien-looking little faces srunch up like a deflated football when they scream, I hate the way some parents revere their offspring to the point of an utter lack of consideration for all other human beings in existence. Why the fuck do I concern myself about these ones?”

“You’re angry with yourself for expressing an emotion,” C claimed.

“No I’m not,” I protested, genuinely I think. “I’m angry with myself because I’ve just betrayed everything I’ve ever felt about this particular demographic.”

“I actually don’t think you have,” he said rather definitely. “You’ve not necessarily reviewed your attitude to children, even though I know you’re…um…not un-fond [wry glance at me] of {Marcus}. You’ve consistently told me of your worries that {Paedo} would harm {Marcus} and now his younger brother. I think that concern – that fear of harm coming to either or both of them – drives this.”

“Maybe. But what difference would my presence make anyway?”

He eyed me suspiciously.

“OK, C. What’s that look for?” I asked dryly.

“You want to protect them, perhaps. Even if your visits are infrequent, perhaps some small part of you thinks that you can at least keep an eye on them.”

We considered that in silence for a few minutes.

Then, “Fuck it, no! I don’t want to go to the fucking bastardhole and the children aren’t really at risk and I don’t want to have them yapping around my fucking ankles.”

To my astonishment, a broad grin grew across his face. He didn’t even bother trying to hide it; in fact, to my considerable perplexity, he started to laugh.

I gawped at him in confused disgust. “What could you possibly find funny about this?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Your direct contradiction of yourself,” he replied, still seemingly amused. “A minute ago, ‘I want to see the children’…now, ‘sod the children, sod the entire place’.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to see the children. I said that I didn’t not want to go. Different!”

With the smile still smugly etched across his face, he raised his eyebrows cynically at me.

I didn’t think I was going to win this, my argument being as it was a pedantic point of mere semantics. Instead, I decided to be moderately sensible for once, ergo chosing to steer the conversation back to the issue of ‘Ways to Avoid Hotel California’.

Thankfully his face fell back to its serious, considerate expression. To my surprise, he then espoused a similar tactic to the one initially advocated by NewVCB.

“I know your mother doesn’t believe you,” he said, “but could you say to her that there are…issues with your uncle?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’d ask what they are, of course!”

“How much did you tell her about what he did to you?”

“When I was about 14, I told her about some of the more ‘minor’ stuff – [uncomfortably] the touching, you know. More recently, I told her that he raped me, though I only told her of one such incident.”

“Sorry, when did you tell her that?”

I thought about it for a minute, and concluded that (as it was about the time I saw Edith, the hypnotherapist) it must have been in my earlier 20s.

“Still several years ago, then,” noted Dr Mathematical Genius.

“Yes. What’s your point?”

“I’m wondering,” he said, “that since some time has passed, could you not maybe broach the subject with her again? I mean, not necessarily tell her the extent of what happened, nor even use the words ‘rape’ or ‘sexual abuse’, but something like, ‘A few years ago, I told you some of what this man did to me. I know you don’t believe me, but nevertheless I cannot see him at this time.’ Something like that?”

Again: “No.”

Again: “Why not?”

“She didn’t believe me then, she won’t believe me now. So it’ll only lead to conflict, and I don’t like conflict.”

He once again took me aback when he said, “but you so often seem to find yourself in it, don’t you?”

Cheeky fucking cunt. I demanded that he exemplify.

Unfortunately that was not a difficult ask of him. “Well,” he said, slowly and deliberately. “With work. With the Trust. [Dramatic pause] With me.”

I defended myself vehemently regarding the Trust. They are the ones at fault here – they are the ones that have always been at fault, pushing me from pillar to post to nowhere back to pillar back to post back to nowhere and so on – and I think it is completely reasonable for me to challenge them for being incompetent and not patient-, but target-driven. Fuck them. Any assertiveness on my part in this regard is absolutely more than justified and I find myself offended that C – who fucking encouraged me to speak up in the first place – now wanks on about how I invite conflict. Tosser.

“Of course, it will not have escaped your notice that my ‘conflict‘ [said with heavy derogatory emphasis] with your Trust has all been by written correspondence. You may also remember in discussions you and I had about my work that when I was writing to {the Horse}, I was assertive and articulate. When I actually met her and my boss, I was a complete and utter mess, who could hardly say fucking anything. And as for you, if anything you should feel complimented that I bitch at you, just as I am presently doing. I wouldn’t be doing so were I not comfortable in your company. Remember when I first met you? It was all very nice, all very polite – all very conscripted and hence ultimately pointless. But that is no more, C. Surely that is good.”

I watched as he recoiled slightly, in a vaguely self-defensive fashion. The wryness with which I had approached the session began to replace the irritability and venom that had characterised the first half hour or so. I suppressed a slightly satisfied smile.

“OK,” he began again eventually. “So it’s interpersonal relationships in which you avoid conflict…with some exceptions, where you feel comfortable.”

“In essence.”

“You become panicky when conflict arises when you’re not completely comfortable with the person. Emotional, even.”

“Um…’panicky’ worked perfectly well on its own,” I corrected him, with a slight knowing grin.

He smiled in return. This interpersonal conflict was over. For now.

“But seriously though,” he persisted, eventually. “You try to deny any hint of emotion in yourself, but that’s just not true. Yes, you have this rational, intellectual, assertive side, but that’s not all there is to it.”

“But there is no function of this emotional bullshit. It doesn’t do anything, does it? It’s the domain of whiny, middle-aged woman who have no fight nor life left in them and have nothing better to do. Assertiveness, abrasiveness, intellectualising – these things can get results, they can achieve things. Emotion doesn’t do that. Not unless you’re an actor, I suppose…”

“You think you’re a ‘whiny, middle-aged woman’?” he laughed, slightly cynically.

I smiled apologetically. “Perhaps that was over the top. You know what I mean, though. I just don’t want a part of that.”

He said, “but the thing is, and I know that you know this really, emotions are integral to our personalities, to how we interact with the world. They’re not big, bad things to be brushed under the carpet. That leads to alienation, and further difficulties in one’s life. This is still one of your biggest issues, Pandora. You fight so hard to suppress how you’re feeling, and the thing is you need to feel it – and you need to express it.”

I shuddered. “But the thing is it doesn’t fulfil anything…” I started again, rather repetitively.

He interrupted me mid-sentence with possibly my favourite line from the whole 53 weeks (2,650 minutes – 2,680 if you consider the time a few sessions have run over – which is 44 hours and 40 minutes or one day, 20 hours and 40 minutes, or 160,800 seconds. I think). He said, his face wrinkled in thought, “everything with you has to be so…mechanistic.”

I was overcome with joy and amusement. What an absolutely fabulous way to be described. Mechanistic. Mechanistic. I love it!

(I’m not sure it was meant to be a compliment, but still – I thought it was spectacular. Just wonderful.).

I laughed heartily as he attempted to continue. “Yes, mechanistic,” he went on, pretending to ignore my laughter. “It’s like you input everything in your life into a big machine and expect every single thing to produce a clear result at the other end.”

“Well…I sort of do,” I responded, still laughing.

“But isn’t there another way of looking at it?” he pressed. Gah!!! It really pisses me off when C asks this eternally fuckwitted question. There’s another way of looking at everything, for fuck’s sake; there’s nearly seven billion people on this planet, how could there not be?! It doesn’t mean that is, or can ever be, my view. Stick you pathetic attempts at pathetic CBT right up your pathetic, boney arse, C.

So I responded by saying that there wasn’t, not from my personal perspective anyhow, which curiously seemed to prompt him to go on the offensive.

He said, almost challengingly, “well, you were emotional here last week.”

True. I shrugged, reluctantly.

“In fact,” he continued, with a slight air of triumphalism I thought (though I am quite possibly reading too much into it), “you confessed about the sense of loss you feel about this therapy ending. [Avoid his gaze, Pan, avoid it at all costs!] You said it was ‘tragic’.”

“I did not!” I exclaimed, horrified he had got it into his head that it was that big a deal to me. (It is, but I don’t want him to know that!). “What I actually said was that it was tragic that so many people probably end up dead because of health service inadequacies [this is true, despite his protestations to the contrary]. I did admit to a sense of loss, yes, and that is very, very bad indeed – but your recollection is not completely accurate.”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Well, I think it is. [Fucker]. But why is that admission ‘very bad indeed’?”

I went into a self-hating rant about how being so vulnerable, so pathetically demonstrative of my feelings, so impassioned and hysterical, was dreadful. I am supposed to be an intelligent, articulate, self-assured woman (ha! As if!). Such fits of histrionics are not permissible. No. No way.

He sighed and looked down, knowing the end of the allocated 50 minutes was nigh upon us, and that there was no way he could make any further points on this in the few seconds remaining. After about 30 seconds of silence, the inevitable “the session is over” mantra was intoned.

I was in surprisingly good form as I left him, despite some of the difficult or somewhat confrontational moments in the session. Aside from the caffeine induced ‘wryness’, I was still amused by the quite brilliant ‘mechanistic’ remark. A week later, I continue to be.

However, paradoxically, an ‘anti-mechanistic’ comment also gave me great pleasure this week. Nick Hewling, reading on Facebook that C had levied this particular accusation at me’, said, “that’s proof that he hasn’t read your blog. No one could say that about your writing.”

*blushes* Thank you, Nick. Thank you with mechanistic bells on top.