I have two therapy sessions to catch up on and, since I probably won’t write about them before tomorrow morning, a third will probably join them.  I remember the interactions pretty clearly, as I usually do – one pièce de résistance was asking C if therapy was really meant to make you feel worse, which hit a nerve ;) – but I just can’t find any motivation to record them in writing here (or anywhere else for that matter).  I think, letters to MPs notwithstanding, that as things draw to a close I’m increasingly finding our meetings to be utterly futile and to that end, perhaps, I can’t face writing about them.  To do so would maybe be to acknowledge that, this time next month, psychotherapy – my only hope of a recovery of sorts from my perpetual anguish – will in all likelihood be over.  That’s a thought that is both sobering and chilling.  CPN/SW or not, good family and friends or not, I’m not at all convinced that I can keep myself safe from the end of next month onwards.

To go from making what was really rather good progress in therapy to regressing into this barren Purgatory-like wasteland is frustrating to put it mildly.  I don’t know how to articulate my current feelings on the matter beyond that.  Grieving, hurt, depressed, anxious, angry, I suppose – but all of these with a certain degree of measured stoicism; perhaps I am simply resigned to his abandonment of me now.  Overall I feel straightforward but profound sadness and regret.  Sadness for the fact that I will miss him greatly, I suppose, and regret for what could have and should have been – a relationship that had the power, if given the requisite resources, to greatly improve my quality of life.

Even if I had the will to write up the last two sessions – even if I had it right now – I wonder to some extent what the actual point would be, because as I say our sessions are feeling increasingly pointless.  I don’t really blame him, and I don’t really blame me.  It feels inevitable that things would just sort of ‘trail off’ mid-sentence, mid-air, as D-Day approaches.  Just the nature of the beast, methinks.  Pointless, futile, dancing around things and dodging others.  Still, I suppose the reason I started writing such detailed posts on therapy in the first place was for a record…for reasons of mere posterity.  Empty discussion or not, surely it is equally important to discuss the final sessions of this process if that has been my aim.  So I should – and therefore, I have now decided, will – review them, but I can’t say when.

Because the problem is that my current apathy is not just about examining psychotherapeutic matters.  I am finding it excessively difficult to write about anything (perhaps not unlike how I felt two weeks ago and indeed a week before that).  In part (probably in large part) that’s because I have absolutely no life whatsoever.  Yeah, I sometimes go out for a drink with A or to a shop with my mother – but so what?  What’s that got to do with anything?  Who’d be interested in that?  Certainly not me, and since this blog (despite having quite a few lovely followers these days) is primarily my record of these dark times, I’m not going to blather on about stuff that bores me to death (death is more peacefully achieved by other means, thanks very much).

This failure of expression and engagement with life extends to contact with the outside world at large.  I’ve been ignoring Twitter, emails, text messages – everything.  I refuse to return my mother’s unanswered calls, and the only person I speak to is A.    I do go through phases of doing this every so often, but this feels deeper, like it’s likely to go on longer.  I’m in a rut, both in terms of social communication and in terms of the one form of communication I’ve always held so dear – writing.

I thought about taking a brief break from blogging – say a month or something – but as I stated here, my concern, justified or otherwise, is that even the most short-lived of interludes would lead to a situation where I never felt able to once more lift my metaphorical pen.  And ergo you get stupid little filler posts like this one, designed to at least be something, but which are pointless and vacuous in their story-telling and exasperating in what catalysed them.

But that’s not this blog’s fault.  I don’t hate this blog.  I do, however, despise its author.

I knew the time would come when I had no choice but to face him; even though I am now in the fortunate position of no longer having to see him and that side of the family with the frequency that I did as a child, not ever going to their house would raise many, many eyebrows. In all probability, the extended family would simply think I was either a selfish bitch, or that I was in the throes of a mercilessly long depression or something, but whatever the case, the power of one’s mother is very strong, and to that end I knew I’d have to face it eventually. I wanted this, however, to be entirely at a time of my choosing, and on my terms.

As if! I should have known that I was shockingly naive to even think that a possibility.

I went to my mother’s house on Monday this week, as I was seeing C (who had swapped his days from his usual Thursday) on Tuesday morning (I usually stay with my mother the night before C). I was sitting there in her living room at one point minding my own business when the phone rang; it became apparent as soon as my mother picked it up that the caller was my cousin Sarah, Maisie and Paedo’s still-resident-in-Paedo’s-house-despite-being-well-into-her-40s daughter. There was nothing unusual in the call itself – Sarah is a chatterbox who rings my mother with some frequency to harp endlessly on Very Little Indeed.

However, a few seconds into the conversation, my mother started abruptly, and put the phone under her arm.

“Shit, I forgot – I meant to ask you before now, Pandora,” she whispered urgently, “but are you OK to go to their house tomorrow?”

My face fell. I didn’t say anything for a few seconds, I just looked at her in a sort of disgusted desperation.

She either failed to notice my horror or she chose to ignore it. “Well?” she pressed, irritably.

“Um…I have to see C in the morning,” I replied, clutching at straws, whilst simultaneously trying to think of a better excuse to avoid the proposed sojourn.

“Yes, yes, I know, we’re not going that early. It’s OK to go after that, I take it?”

My mind failed me and went completely blank. Defeated, I nodded meekly.

She returned the phone to her ear. “Oh, yes yes Sarah, that’s fine!” she cooed sycophantically. “We’ll see you about 11.30am tomorrow.”

My first reaction had been of horror, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt anger. She claimed to have forgotten to ask me in advance, and in her defence that’s entirely possible, but my cynicism did wonder if she had deliberately taken me off-guard to prevent me from having time to think of a decent excuse to get out of it. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this were the case. Either way, being put on the spot is not something I appreciate in any but the most extreme of circumstances, and I was annoyed in the extreme. I went on a mental rant on Twitter.

The consensus from my Twitter support group was simple and clear: DO NOT GO. Everyone was right, of course, and I decided to concoct a story for my mother along the lines of how I would be so “emotionally distraught” as a result of the session with C that I would be unable to face anyone (as it turned out,this wasn’t that far from the truth, but that post will come).

In the end, though, I caved in. I started to protest to my mother when I got back from C’s, and she become predictably hostile, and I figured I would rather be persecuted for weeks by ‘They’ that be persecuted by her – at the end of the day, at least I hate ‘They’ so I don’t mind being in conflict with them (even if it does one day result in my suicide). I did manage one minor win against my mother though, which was to use Disraeli (my car) as our transportation, rather than The Box (her’s). I figured this put control of when we left Paedo/Maisie’s house (Hotel California) in my hands, and furthermore that if I went really mad, that at least I would have an escape route.

Of course, this was an imperfect plan. My driving was berated the whole circa 30 miles from her house to theirs – either I was speeding (when I wasn’t), I was taking corners in too high a gear (second or third? Really, mother?) or I didn’t look over my shoulder when changing lanes on the motorway (even though I did). And so on. When I told her to leave me alone, she accused me of “having an attitude,” and that that was why she had tried to persuade me to take her car.

The hypocrisy of her little diatribe both irritated and amused me. She is an utterly crap driver these days, whereas I really think that I am relatively OK for the most part. Yet if I open my mouth in her boxy piece of shit, I get what she would describe as “the rounds of the kitchen” (a Northern Ireland rural colloquialism for a Northern Ireland urban colloquialism – “slabbering”. She grew up in the middle of nowhere, whereas I was raised on the outskirts of a city. In proper English, they each mean something akin to “harsh criticism”).

Anyhow, eventually we arrived, without me having deliberately driven us both into a wall at 100mph in a fit of pique. I turned into the gate of Hotel California and noticed Paedo was gardening. He looked up and saw us, but made little attempt to desist from his activity. This was excellent.

Even more encouraging was the fact that, when we went inside, only Maisie and Sarah were there. Normally everyone in the entire Northern hemisphere that shares a trace of genetics with Maisie is perpetually packed into her house, which even if Paedo was not guilty of anything would freak me out nearly as much. So, win number II.

Of course, the presence of a mere small number of personnel wasn’t to last. Eventually Sarah’s daughter, Suzanne, turned up with her two young children – Marcus, the two-year-old, and the four-month old that is named after Paedo. I had been lamenting this fact to C earlier that morning (as I have lamented on many other occasions). I was scared of how I would react to the baby given its name, even though of course it is not his fault. I mean, of course it is not its fault!

Both children were asleep as we had lunch so my reactions to the baby temporarily remained to be seen, but at this point of course Paedo came in from his horticultural tasks in order to get fed. He sat directly opposite me. I was interested to note that he consistently avoided eye contact with me.

Emboldened by this apparent deference, I decided to talk to him. At first I just gabbled about inane, everyday stuff, but eventually I became so confidently snide that I started making oblique references to his behaviour around children. Nothing which would have been decipherable by the various assembled members of the clan, of course, but possibly to him. Then again, him decoding its cryptic nature assumes that he has an IQ of over five, and I really doubt that he does. Very few that have any connection to Hotel California do, even those that are on the mere fringes of the place, never mind those right in the centre of it.

My party piece came later when, when a discussion about cancer somehow arose, I was able to tell my dining companions that (according to Heal My PTSD) victims of child sexual abuse are eight times more likely to develop adult cancers than the general population.

The comment was specifically addressed at Suzanne who had been musing about the possible causes of the Big C, but I shot a surreptitious glance at Paedo to gauge his reaction to my hint at him. I was disappointed to note no discernible guilt or shock on his face, but I was nevertheless pleased at having the balls I did to make such a direct statement.

Eventually the baby started crying, and Suzanne went to address whatever need it was expressing. I absent-mindedly commented that I had not ‘met’ it yet, and was instructed by She Who Thinks I Am A Five Year Old to go and engage with it. Mainly because I was fed up sitting opposite Paedo, I acquiesced.

Suzanne had her back to me as I walked into the room, and the baby’s head was resting on her shoulder, facing me. I looked at it and nervously said ‘hello’ in that ridiculous tone that is always employed by adults when speaking to babies. To my astonishment, its fat little face seemed to light up, and it smiled a massive smile at me. Suzanne passed it to me without prompting and it sat in my arms for a long time, laughing innocently and playing with my florescent hair.

I’m not going to sit here and lie: I wasn’t overcome by some overwhelming love and spiritual awakening by holding the baby like some people claim to be, but – just as with Marcus – I didn’t dislike it, despite my general contempt for kids. I probably wouldn’t have expected to have actively been repulsed by it but for the fact it was named after Paedo, but I am pleased to note that that issue didn’t really impact upon how I felt about it.

I don’t know what to call it here [muses for some time]. OK, I think I will call it Sean. That will pretty much guarantee that if my family ever find this blog they won’t know that I’m writing about them, as they would never call one of their offspring an Irish name (some of them are sectarian bigots, on top of everything else). Yes. Sean. Marcus and his little brother Sean.

The rest of the clan began to arrive in dribs and drabs. StudentMcF, who had just graduated with a First in Psychology, turned up with her mother. Student talked about her plans to undertake a doctorate in Educational Psychology – and, perhaps surprisingly, this was the worst part of the whole day. My blood was infused with a pulsating, jealous rage and, even though she is actually quite a nice girl, I wanted reach across the table and break her neck to prevent her becoming Dr McFaul.

Mentalism has ruined my fucking life. I didn’t even get to finish my Masters degree because of it. If I hadn’t been mental, I would have been the first one to get a doctorate. I always wanted – I always intended – to do a PhD. I was fairly lazy at school and university I admit, and I recognise that that’s not terribly conducive to becoming a doctor in one’s chosen subject, but lazy or not, I’ve always done well academically because I’m intelligent. I find fault with myself daily in a million different ways, but my intellect and capacity for retaining knowledge is never, ever one of them.

I’m the smart one out of Student and me. Student is not stupid, not at all (which is a remarkable achievement given that she comes from the dubious auspices of Hotel California), but what she is first and foremost is an intensely hard worker, rather than a brainbox.

Here I am, sitting on a sofa all day, existing. The issue of identifying with my mental illnesses has been hovering about quite a bit recently, and whilst I feel that I have some sort of self-definition through that, as I tried to state the other day, that’s only part of how I see myself. My stronger life narrative is that of my intellect. I should not be existing in this sad, pathetic bubble of blankness. I should be working in Downing Street, or researching at a decent university within the area in which I am educated, or forming policy on same, or something. I should not have been sitting in a few glorified admin jobs and then sitting on a soft instead because I don’t know where the next fake fucking voice is coming from. FUCK.

*throws toys out of pram*

Anyhow, this is not meant to be one of those ranty posts about my wasted life – it’s meant to be about my day yesterday. At one point, a curious thing happened. Marcus wanted to go outside and play, so I took him – but to my considerable distaste, Paedo followed. I felt the sting of hypervigilance pervade my body and mind, and perhaps I chewed at my lip a little too much.

Paedo and Marcus started paying football (soccer to Americans), whilst I hovered about trying to figure out how I should proceed. Marcus made the decision for me, however, by insinuating that he wanted me to be the goalkeeper in this hugely life-changing, World Cup standard, epic match. So I ended up playing fucking football with the man who raped me throughout my childhood, and his great-grandson about whose welfare I had become obsessively worried.

I was acutely aware of the surrealism of this bizarre circumstance as I stood there, deliberately letting in Marcus’ goals (and saving all of Paedo’s – hahaha). As I reflect on it now, as well as that sense of strangeness, I also feel some mild self-disgust. Have I sold out to something or someone by behaving so nonchalantly around Paedo? Shouldn’t I be threatening him with justice or something? Shouldn’t I be telling him that if he so much as looks at those two children in the wrong way that I’ll personally cut off his sorry bollocks with a rusty scalpel and feed them to his beloved fucking ducks? Shouldn’t I be doing something less normal than playing football with him? Shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, what if, why didn’t, blah blah blah, subjunctive musings ad infinitum.

Most of the rest of the day was a write-off in terms of my engagement with members of McFaul dynasty. I spend most of it in the toilet being sick or in agony with IBS. Although these issues can be psychosomatic, in this case I don’t think they were. I didn’t eat that much by Hotel California standards, but one of A’s favourite McF-similes is that Maisie is like Mrs Doyle from Father Ted. “Oh, you’ll have a wee bun, Pandora. You will. You will, you will, you will!” If you attempt to refuse, she looks appalled and eventually, physically or hypnotically, manages to force your concession. In this case, it was not so much the amount of stuff forced down my throat that sent me running so frequently to the bog, but the amount of fucking wank in which it was cooked. It’s no wonder that Maisie literally makes Jabba the Hutt look thin.

We eventually left around seven, which was a lot later than I had intended, but it hadn’t been quite the unbearable experience that I’d been predicting. Let me make this clear – I’m certainly not in any rush to go back, despite Maisie’s continual begging that A and I “get up a weekend soon”. But at least now I know I can do it, even if my social anxiety has to deal with 12 people in one room (as indeed there were at one point) on top of dealing with the nefarious demons of the past.

All that being said, a combination of the McF visit and the session with C left me in a pretty poor frame of mind after I’d left my mother off last night. I flew down the motorway back to the city at close to 100mph, just to see if I could. How reckless and borderline of me. I then sat here pointlessly doing nothing at all for a few hours, before knocking out 700 words of a blog post trying to enunciate how I felt. Because, you know, you’re supposed to put words to these alien things they call ‘emotions’. It was navel-gazing but pretentious bullshit and anyway, most of it relates to C rather than the visit to Paedo, so I’ll not share it here.

So here I am: alive, not yet psychotic and not in the best frame of mind…but surviving. It’s not ideal, but then very little in my life at present is ideal. Every cloud and all that. At least it’s not the polar worst it could be.

(NB. I know some new followers of this blog have queried how my mother could even consider taking me to see my childhood abuser. The reason is simply that she doesn’t believe – or, rather, that she has chosen not to believe – that he is guilty of any of the things of which I ‘accused’ him. Most of the story is detailed here, here and here, but feel free to ask if you need any more clarification).

What triggered it?  It’s stupid, really.  All that happened was that A decided he would clear out two big boxes in which I throw things – either for hoarding purposes, or because I can’t be arsed dealing with them.  What a preposterous, utterly ridiculous thing to induce a panic attack.

I feel dreadful.  I feel better than I did 10 minutes ago, but I still feel dreadful.  My head is fuzzy; nothing seems real – not me, not the world.  Ah, depersonalisation and derealisation, my old friends.  Welcome back.  Not.  You have not been missed.  (NB. These states are not induced by the Diazepam; I felt this way before I took it).

My chest is still heavily constricted, and I find myself forced to take long, slow breaths in order to obtain any at all.

I have a vile, flat, metallic-y sort of taste in my mouth.  Slightly salty, a little watery.  Tingly.  It wasn’t there before this attack, but it is a sensation I know intimately from other occasions.  There’s something at the back of my throat; it’s as if something is trapped, like I want to gag.*

The hypervigilance that characterises some of my C-PTSD symptoms is here in droves that are comparable to armies.  The TV, my medication alarm, even the distant sound of one of the cats stirring quietly in its sleep is sending me into cosmic levels of freak-out.

I feel a repugnant nausea to my core and my nerve endings are alert to the point where my skin is actually sore to the touch.  It’s compounded by a sense of inner restlessness that is essentially and atrociously unquantifiable (although I suppose it slightly reminds me of akathisia).

I’m horribly irritable, shrieking mindlessly at things for no reason and banging around the place like some sort of bloody barbarian.

Oh yeah, and there’s the whirlwind that my thoughts and cognitive processes presently are.  I am trying to work out what has triggered this batshitiness.  Paedo and his depravity keep entering my mind, but that makes no sense.  Something as inane as this has nothing to do with Paedo.  A spring clean [I cut off here mid-sentence when that phrase suddenly resonated in my head.  I was going to write 'a spring clean has nothing to do with any of what he did to me'.]

No, wait!  ’A spring clean’.  A spring clean.  That rings a bell; that most ordinary of phrases for this most ordinary of acts rings a bell about something deeper, something darker.  I can’t work it out completely, but there are hazy images somewhere in here of my aunt talking about ‘spring cleaning’ and of her husband’s wrinkled, grey, perhaps even expectant face hovering about at the edge of my peripheral vision.  I don’t remember anymore.  But there’s something there, oh yes.  Something.

Fuck.  FUCK THIS!  FUCK IT TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH AND FUCKING BACK AGAIN AND THEN FUCK IT SOME MORE.

I hate that I still don’t remember all of this stuff, I hate that I dissociated so much of it away.  I feel like I have no control of triggers, of life events – fuck, of life itself - if I have no conscious recall.

The attack also acutely reminded me that this is far from the first time I have reacted in a similar fashion to simple, everyday clear-outs and clean-ups.  I recoil in horror when my mother asks me to examine my remaining possessions at her house.  I have vague memories from when I was growing up of being constrained by overwhelming and indescribable disquiets every time she asked me to clear out my wardrobes, under the bed, the toy cupboards or whatever.

Indeed, the two boxes that A was clearing out tonight have sat in the kitchen looking at me and demanding my attention for the past week, and I have quite deliberately avoided dealing with them.  As I always do.  Always.

I had never realised before this day, this hour, how much of a pattern this avoidant behaviour is.  Even if I had, I suppose that I probably would have thought little of it beyond my self-confessed laziness.

But…can this really be about child abuse?  Seriously?!  I mean, that’s…well, it’s insane.  Hazy memories or otherwise of some afternoon in Hotel California** aside, I can’t see the connection.  It’s silly.  Occasionally clearing things out of one’s abode is a normal part of life, unless you are some sort of minimalist (which I most certainly am not).  Why do I make everything about my being mental?

I remember the mixed states I used to have before I started taking Seroquel (which, perhaps ironically, were similar to the akathisia that Seroquel ((mercifully temporarily)) induced!).  They were similar to this.  God.  Eugh.  How awful.  I had forgotten just how utterly unbearable these sort of sensations are.  If I never experience a mixed state or anxiety attack again it’ll be far too soon.

Things from the boxes adorned the seat to both my left and right.  I gathered them up and put them in a bag and hid them, which is exactly what I was meant not to do.  But I just couldn’t look at them.

Fuck it, I’m too away with it to continue this post.  Now I want to cry and hide under the bed and be away from everything – not exactly pleasant ways to be, but it’s better than the restless, overpowering anxiety of before.  I apologise for rambling and whinging and probably making damn all sense, but at least the composition of this post seems to have given me some sense of perspective on why this unpleasantness occurred, daft and all as that reason may have been.

* Based on this description, perhaps my eventual conclusions about this being sexual abuse-related are hardly surprising.  Hmm.
** Hotel California is what I call Maisie and Paedo’s house, if you don’t already know.  This is because you can check out but you can never leave.  Google it if you’re too young to get the reference

This is not some sort of hyperbole indicating that I find telephonic communication to be a mild irritant or inconvenience.  I’m honestly, truly terrified of it.

I decided to write this post after a discussion developed on my Facebook page between a few of us that regard the act of ‘being on the phone’ with genuine horror.  The most rudimentary of Google searches suggests that we are not at all alone.  I can’t speak for others, obviously, but my phone phobia perplexes me entirely as, certain parameters of social anxiety aside, I am not too bad with people in person.

Let me qualify that; I freak out around new people, unless I am surrounded by people I know very well.  I refuse to go out without people I know intimately, and I’m very uncomfortable around mere acquaintances, not that you’d always know it.  However, if you catch me in the right mood, and I am with the right people, you’d be stunned to know I have any mental health issues at all.  My in-laws, for example, are constantly amazed that there’s anything wrong with me, as I give the appearance of being a social animal in front of them and in front of a number of others – sometimes it’s a mask, but occasionally it’s real (hypomania?  Who knows).

The phone changes everything.  I will usually answer if A phones me, because although he doesn’t actually have the full-blown phobia that I do, he hates the device too.  Anything, therefore, that he has to say via the bloody thing is either (a) quick or (b) urgent.

I only answer to my mother about 25% of the time, and everyone else thereafter becomes pro-(or re-)gressively more likely to be ignored.  This includes my close friends such as Daniel.  If they warn me that they’re going to phone, and give me some indication as to what it is they want to discuss, I’ll usually reluctantly give in – but not always.

There is 0% chance of me answering to a number that is either unfamiliar to me or is withheld.  It just will not happen.  As far as the land-line goes, I never answer it at all as I have no way of knowing who’s on the other end.  If it’s anyone that even has half a chance of speaking to me, they’ll get me on the mobile anyway.

When I hear the accursed thing vibrating (I almost never have the sound on) for any more than the second it takes to denote a text message or an email, or when I hear the infuriatingly cheerful but simultaneously ominous sound of the land-line, I begin to feel desperately uncomfortable.  It’s hard to say exactly how things progress, but let me attempt to dissect it.

It starts with a horrible ‘butterfly’ like feeling in the pit of the stomach, progressing to a sense of heightened physical alertness in which it feels like one is aware of every cell in one’s body.  It produces goosebumps.  The struggle for breath begins, the eyes widen.  One’s heart beats so desperately that one feels it will surely explode from one’s chest.

It reminds me of what I’ve heard of the mammalian ‘fight or flight’ instinct, except in this case things definitely fall on the side of ‘flight’.  Run away.  Hide under the bed, where you can’t hear it or see it taunting you.  Be gone, phone!

In short, I suppose I am essentially describing a panic attack.  Because of a fucking phone call. It is, when you think about it, absolutely preposterous.  What’s the worst that can happen, seriously?  You answer; if the person is a tosser, you hang up.  BIG DEAL.

Making a phone call tends to be less of an issue simply because, with the rare exception of my mother and A, I almost never do it.  Phoning those two individuals is always done through my choice and is on my terms, so whilst I don’t especially relish the prospect of communicating in that way, I don’t completely dread it.  I only call other people that I know when something very urgent arises, and as for calling people I don’t know – hahaha!  No.

There has been the odd time when I’ve had no choice but to do it – for example, when I changed my name, some companies with whom I deal refused to accept emailed or written confirmation of this (which seems rather unusual to me, but anyway).  This takes several hours of preparation on my part…sometimes more if the people concerned – eg. credit card companies – have proven themselves historically to be bastards.

How to prepare?  Well, the CBT-like approach of rationalising the probable simplicity of the impending conversation does not of course work, so I have to attempt to find means to make myself calm (*cough* Diazepam *cough*).  In such circumstances, I merely hope to convey facts to the other party, but although I usually get there eventually, even with the help of my little yellow friends I end up embarrassing myself wholly in the process.  Compare this to when I went into the bank with my deed poll to change my name with them in person.  Admittedly I had to take my mother (otherwise that would’ve been a fail too, no doubt), but I nonetheless communicated effectively and succinctly when dealing with the personnel directly.  Hmm.

Reverting to the issue of phoning people I don’t know, an alternative to the ‘calm’ approach is, on extremely rare occasions, to be really angry.  I mean, real, absolute, ‘I’m-seeing-fucking-red-here’, total anger, not just ‘I’m pissed off with these wankers’.  This leads to a very dominant me, blinded by rage, demanding answers and results.  This has happened maybe twice in my life – both times when I was regularly overcharged by packs of twats who consistently ignored other communications.

Compare the Mr Director-Person letters.  Am I angry in those?  Well, yes, I am – but not with that all-consuming, overpowering rage of which I speak.  Yet I can articulate myself coherently and intelligently, if rather arrogantly, on paper.  I cannot do this on the phone.  I’m either furious beyond furious, in which case woe betide whoever answers, or I faff and babble and make a complete tit of myself, thus ensuring the very opposite of what I’d like – an even longer bloody call.

I’m trying to pinpoint a time when this started.  When I was at school, I had a rather blasé relationship with the phone; I didn’t usually go out of my way to use it, but neither did I avoid it with the determination that I now do.  Daniel would ring me quite a lot, as would a few others to whom I was then close, and I was fairly OK with that.  A certain friend – Louise – and I even used to have a very childish (potentially cruel, I now see) laugh now and then phoning those stupid chatlines (they were free for women for some reason) to wind people up.

I would always have used email in preference to the telephone where possible, but my first memories of really being troubled by using it were when I was working in a firm of solicitors just before I started my postgraduate degree…so, what?  At the age of 21, maybe?  I remember phoning in sick a few times, and being terrified that my employers would doubt the authenticity of my illness, so to avoid accusations and 20 questions, I would ring before the office opened and leave answering machine messages for them rather than speak to anyone.

In my most recent job, it began to become a real bugbear.  Again, I used email where possible anyway, not particularly concerning myself about the phone, and my first boss had enough faith in me to get the job done in whatever manner that she let me get on with doing things in my own autonomous way.  When she retired and a colleague took over, things changed.  My new boss – a lovely woman, but dreadful boss – she was hell-bent on micro-managing everything, and as a techno-phobe she decided that email was a facility akin to Guantanamo Bay, and she all but banned the use of it in favour of the bastarding phone.  The nature of my work meant that I almost always took the entire department’s flack, even when the fault was mine maybe at most 5% of the time.  I felt that I could deal with this in writing, because any letter or email that was critical of me would be very easily trumped by anything that I could write in response.  Constantly having a bunch of stupid fuckers screeching in your ear about how useless and dreadful you were, however, was not quite so easy to contend with.

When I was embroiled in a pseudo-row with the office during the absence that ultimately led to my unemployment, I told them that I accepted the need to use the phone on many occasions, but contended that under the DDA it was a reasonable adjustment for them to allow my primary means of communication to be email.  They did not agree.

However, it would be easy to blame my last workplace, but my discomfort did not entirely emanate from there; it was merely worsened.  I cannot work out exactly where or how the discomfort, then the fear, then the abject terror first came about, and I cannot work out how I will deal with the issue in the long-term.  I hate the fucking phone.  I absolutely hate it.  I don’t ever expect to like it, but I would really rather it didn’t send me running to hide under the bed every time its use becomes necessary.

In this hugely electronic world that we have come to inhabit, perhaps ultimately the phone will end up being redundant and forgotten, consigned to unread, dusty pages of technological history books.  But that state of affairs is not at all imminent, not even vaguely so, so I must hope to find a solution to this most irrational, but frankly pathological, of fears.

And yeah, for those of you that have been paying attention over the last 13 months, I do have an iPhone  That might be a bit of a ‘go figure’ moment for some of you, but trust me – the phone facility is by far the least used one on what is otherwise an amazing device.

So I’m weird.  Surprise surprise.  That is all.

So.  Wednesday morning.  NewVCB.  She kept me waiting for 15 minutes, after I had rushed like blazes and broken the speed limit on a number of occasions to get there in time, believing I was going to be late.  I had dithered and procrastinated and wasted time for far too long before leaving the house ages late; all that was because I didn’t want to go.

Why do I always get worked up over psychiatric appointments?  I mean, they’re generally not that bad (or at least they’re not that long), especially since NewVCB took over the reins.  But of course, despite rationalisation of this description, I was a wreck anyway.  It’s the whole thing, isn’t it, that the thought of whatever it is is actually much worse than the reality of it.  Still, psychiatrists are an occupational hazard when one is as batshit as I am.  They have it within their power to section you, and I’m still bitterly terrified of that.  I assume that’s what always leads to the fear – I consciously or unconsciously convince myself that I’m imminently going to be sent to the bin, and I lose the plot even more.

As it happens, I still believe that the last time I saw NewVCB she made what I considered a thinly veiled reference to hospitalisation.  I don’t think the OldVCB would have done that.  I think, strange as it seems, that because NewVCB is nicer, because she actually appears to give a fuck, she is much more of a worry to me than her predecessor.  OldVCB would never have sectioned me (or recommended a voluntary admission), I’m fairly sure – she just didn’t care that much.  NewVCB wants to act in my rational best interests, and that is dangerous.

Anyway, when she finally came to get me, she led me to her room and I sat down close to her, as I always do.  She began with, “OK, how…no, sorry, I can’t not mention it.  I love your hair!”

It was a better reaction to my new pink hair than the one C had given – she happily acknowledged it, but didn’t make some banal, pointless statement telling me what I already know.

I couldn’t believe that a consultant fucking psychiatrist was complimenting me on my new hair colour.  I asked her if she was serious.

“Yes, absolutely,” she enthused.  ”It’s really nice.”  Her tone appeared to be genuine, so I thanked her.  She wore a sort of surprised but pleased smile, the function of which I couldn’t entirely decipher.  Maybe she read the fact that I’d bothered to do something like this as evidence of psychological improvement (which it’s not particularly, to my mind).  Maybe she’s simply one of those people that takes an interest in others’ hair colours.  Ho hum.

Anyhow, the appointment didn’t go on for that long (despite this being a fairly typical 2,000+ word post!), as there wasn’t a great deal for me to tell her I suppose.  The crux of it was that (a) the hallucinations are markedly reduced (not eliminated, but a hell of a lot better), (b) my mood has been quite low, to the extent where my suicidal ideation is quite considerably heightened again and (c) as detailed the other day, I am freaking out about how to face or avoid Paedo.

We agreed that Quetiapine had been a wonder drug and whilst things are not exactly fabulous, they are very much better than before I was first prescribed it in January (just after I tried to do myself in again).  She again emphasised that psychological therapy was key (someone apparently needs to tell the Trust and Mr Director-Person about that), but that medication did appear to be helping me deal with that sort of work.  She expressed concern about my suicidal thinking and low mood, and asked if I would object to her increasing my dose of Venlafaxine.

I’m not even sure that Venlafaxine makes any difference – it’s really been Quetiapine that’s helped me, in my estimation – and even if it does, I remember really horribly well adjusting to taking it in the first place – and then to an increased dosage thereof.  It is very, very much not in the least fun.  I must have given my reticence away, because she continued by advising me that for the most severely chronically depressed (like me, apparently) her personal observations were that higher doses of the drug made significant differences.

“I suppose it sounds obvious,” she said, “but the reality is that quite often moderate doses of anti-depressants make major differences.  In this case, however – in the worst cases anyway – I think higher doses are generally more helpful.”

I suppressed a self-satisfied smile, thinking back to Dickhead GP’s contentions that, at 150mg, I was already on a “really high” dosage of Venlafaxine.

I told NewVCB that I was scared about adjusting to a higher dose, given what had happened previously, but she actually felt that that was good: “you know that you are to expect that, that it isn’t your normal behaviour, and that it will pass.  Not everyone has that insight, even if I try to provide it.”

“But,” I said, pessimistically, “what if I want to come off it at some point?”

“Don’t ever do that!” she exclaimed, looking up urgently from writing the prescription.  ”Do.  Not.  Do.  That.  If we decide in the future to take you off it, I’ll be bringing the dose down by 37.5mg each week at most.”

She went on to tell me about another patient that had usually been relatively stable that came to see her one day literally clawing at his face, as if trying to peel it off.

“It turned out he’d not been taking his Effexor for three days,” she revealed.

Well, that’s tremendously encouraging.  I’m going to be taking the cunting, evil stuff for the rest of my life, aren’t I?  Shit.

Anyhow, I slightly reluctantly agreed to let her increase the dosage of Venlafaxine to 225mg, with a view to considering 300mg in future.

This should be interesting.

Leaning forward towards me, she looked conspiratorially me straight in the eye and said, “I have to ask.  [Almost whispering] Just how strong is your suicidal ideation at present?”

I admitted that I frequent pro-suicide newsgroups and that I ergo know what would be most likely to kill me and what wouldn’t.  ”I keep thinking about overdosing, and I am very well aware that unless you have exactly the right ingredients and you plan it very well, ODs are very unlikely to work.  I don’t have the energy to plan something like that, so an overdose would be an impulsive act and therefore probably non-lethal.  Plus I don’t have the figurative balls to jump off a building and I won’t deliberately crash Disraeli, my car, because I love him too much.  In short – I don’t think I’m in any imminent danger of offing myself.”

“OK,” she replied, seemingly relieved, though I’m not sure if relief is the appropriate response to the admission that I can’t guarantee I won’t take an overdose.  ”Because you’ll be aware,  I’m sure, that starting to take Effexor – and, indeed, increasing the dose thereof – can lead to increased suicidality in the short-term.”

I’ve always loved this irony about anti-depressants.  I know that that risk is, generally, only temporary in nature – unless you actually do top yourself, and then it’s kind of permanent – but I find it amusing that the very thing that is meant to alleviate depressive and suicidal thinking can increase it.  Bizarre indeed.

I confirmed that I was thus aware and reiterated that I did not feel in real danger.  I don’t know that I completely agree with that assertion, but I’m not going to give her any more ammunition to throw me in the bin.

She said, “I don’t think you can expect your suicidal thoughts to go away any time soon, given your long history of illness and the intensity of therapy, but hopefully, after the initial few weeks, medication can at least ease the strength of them.”

I laughed.  ”I don’t expect to ever be rid of suicidal thoughts.  There has not been one single day that has gone by in – oh?  At least 20 years? – that I have not thought about killing myself [see this post].  It’s simply a matter of the degree of strength that those thoughts have.”

She accepted that, and agreed that if this line of thinking could be reduced in (a) frequency and (b) intensity, that would be good progress.

For some reason the bloody child abuse topic surfaced, as it usually does.  It never came up with OldVCB, except perhaps briefly in the assessment session that I had with her and her SHO, Dr N.  Again, this disparity seems to be because NewVCB gives a shit.

Anyway, I don’t remember the intricacies of the conversation, but at one point I know that I whined about how I didn’t know how to cope with seeing Paedo.

She interrupted me mid-sentence, shaking her head violently.  ”You can’t see him,” she said simply and definitely, making a ‘no’ gesture with her arms.  ”It would be damaging, given the strength of your reactions to at Christmas and indeed to discussing matters in therapy.  No.  You can’t see him.”

I pointed out how difficult not seeing him would be to execute, given that my mother doesn’t believe me about the sex abuse and loves her family almost to the point of reverence.

NewVCB said, “can you say to her something like, ‘I know you don’t accept what I told you about this man, but nevertheless I cannot see him – not at this point, anyway.’  Would that work?”

I admitted that I had never really considered bringing the topic back up with my Mum, and that I was petrified of doing so.  ”It’s a right can of worms to be opening up,” I sighed.  ”I don’t know if I can do it.”

We pondered on whether or not I could blame my social anxiety issues, given that Maisie and Paedo’s house always seems to be full, always seems to be loud, always seems to be a situation in which I cannot cope, irrespective of Paedo’s presence.  I agreed to give this lie excuse a go.

[As it happens, A has actually come up with a very good short-term excuse to avoid Paedo and friends.  Because the increased dosage of Venlafaxine will, in all probability, fuck with my head for a few weeks, he suggests telling Mummy Dearest that for, say, four weeks or so I need absolute routine without any deviations whatsoever.  I think this could work quite well in my quest to avoid Paedo.  My mother will object, of course, but I can say that I am under medical orders.  Which, if you bend the truth slightly, is not a complete lie, because I am under NewVCB's orders not to see Paedo.]

In any event, NewVCB then announced that she she would be off for four weeks in July, adding, “would you like to see someone else or wait for me to come back?”

I asked would the alternative someone be a consultant – ie. someone who can muck about with the medication if required, rather than an SHO on rota to his/her GP training – and she confirmed my suspicions that it would not be.

I advised that I would therefore wait until her return, remembering the pathetic debable of incompetence that took place when I last saw an SHO.  If something major happens during the period of NewVCB’s absence, I suppose Lovely GP has some knowledge of psychiatry and can try to help.

All in all, I suppose it was a relatively successful encounter, though I am worried about the increased Venlafaxine dosage, particularly when she’ll not be about to monitor it.  Still, as she pointed out, it is considered one of the most effective anti-depressants, and if I need a higher dose to get the full value from it that I need, then so be it.

If nothing else, losing my mind yet again for a few weeks could lead to some interesting blog entries..!

My mother rang me about 11am this morning, but I was suffering from a (fairly infrequent of late) Seroquel hangover, so I ignored her call, with the intention of calling back as soon as I was feeling a little less out of it. Unable to wait for me to contact here, however, she left a voice message advising that she was calling to determine whether or not I would care to be in attendance with her at the McFaul residence tomorrow.

Hearing the words asking that question struck a familiar, yet nonetheless steadfastly awful, terror through me. I felt a cold sweat on the back of my neck, my pulse quicken, my body freeze. I struggled to breathe. All as a result of a few little words. Would you like to go to Maisie’s tomorrow? Such a benign, innocuous sounding question. A normal familial pursuit, an everyday occurrence of simplicity and sheer ordinariness.

Except that it really, truly isn’t – not for me. I still haven’t met (insofar as you can ‘meet’ a baby) Marcus’ baby brother, which I suppose was in part the rationale for the proposed sojourn, but given that the poor kid is called after Paedo I am not sure I know how I will react to him. I know it’s not the baby’s fault. I mean, of course it is not the poor baby’s fault – how could it be?! But he, entirely unwittingly on both his and his parents’ part, represents a history with which I would rather not deal. A dark, venomous period of wickedness levied against me, an evil that has insidiously but definitely rubbed itself off on me. The poor baby, with his Paedo-infected name, represents abuse, despair, abandonment, neglect, betrayal and lots and lots of pain, of every conceivable description.

But this navel-gazing is not about the baby per se, though there is a possibility (as the above attests) that there could be difficulties arising in my potential relationship with him. But no, I am wondering how I will ever deal with Paedo again.

The abuse probably finished when I was about 11 or 12. Since then, until my early 20s anyway, I still saw Paedo with fairly considerable frequency, and though I could have been accused of sexually taunting him at times [whore], and though I deliberately removed myself from what I felt were potentially ‘dangerous’ situations, I never much thought about all the rapes – not overtly. Presumably it was compartmentalised in my Pandora’s Box-esque bank of traumatic memories, but it was not there out in the open, not in general.

It is now though. It is very, very much out in the open indeed. Pandora’s Box of tricks is well and truly opened, and I have no control over the psychological consequences of same. I have hallucinated him. He has followed me – watching me, wanting me, needing me to suffer just as I suffered as a child. Rumination on what the real him actually did haunts every electron and neuron of conscious (and probably unconscious) thought that zaps through my brain. What he did, how he did it, why he did, what I did to encourage it.

Therapy is to blame (if ‘blame’ is a fair word, which it isn’t), as you – my darling readers – might well have surmised. It is not C’s fault; sooner or later all this stuff had to come to the fore. It has to be processed, to be resolved in whatever way such things can be. I do recognise that my long-term history of mental illness is directly correlated, at least in part, with this (though of course there are a gazillion other contributing factors also).

However, as endlessly detailed here, I do not believe that such psychological processing and resolution can take place in the few months I have remaining with C and I have started to shut down on the matter, presumably to protect myself from further perceived hurt and even more retraumatisation. I discussed this with C last week, something about which I will eventually write, so at least he is aware of things. The nature of this has left me – both now and probably in the future – in a very awkward position vis a vis Paedo and the family at large. How will I deal with them – how will I deal with him?

As you know, I went completely doolally at Christmas time when I last saw Paedo, and that was even before I told C any details about what Paedo had done. After having told C the specifics, and after having attempted to discuss my more visceral reactions to it, I went completely doolally all over again (it was arguably worse this time, as I started to see Paedo, and ‘They’ apparently reserved the right to demand I kill people, the fuckwits). So, if we combine those factors – ie {seeing (the real) Paedo [A]} + {discussing stuff in therapy [B]} (plus {how I reacted to my mother’s voice message on the subject [C]}) – what the sodding hell is the reaction going to be? I fear that all hell will break lose.

A + B + C = A familial apocalypse.

I can’t consistently refuse to go to Maisie’s house because I don’t have an adequate or believable lie excuse to get out of it with such frequency. After all, my mother does not believe (or at least refuses to accept) that Paedo sexually abused me in any way, so it’s not like the truth represents an escape route.

I’m fucked. I can’t not see him, because he’s part of a family that my mother so heartily values, and simultaneously I can’t see him, because I will once more end up a psychotic, wailing, collapsed mess.

What to do?

Anyway, here is the latest letter from Mr Director-Person, in response to my correspondence of 11 March.  I am very impressed with his wonderfully speedy return on this.

Dear Pandora

Re Accessing Mental Health Services

Thank you for your letter of 11 March 2010 and I apologise for the delay in replying.  As we have acknowledged previously you are correct in your interpretation of the NICE Guidelines in relation to personality disorders.  However NICE does not apply automatically in Northern Ireland.  Currently a Regional Personality Disorder Group, brought together by the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety is considering the Knowledge and Understanding Framework (KUF) as a way forward to developing better services in Northern Ireland.

Locally, a group run by <Mr Twathead>, Head of Mental Health Nursing in our Trust, is working on a plan to improve services for people with personality disorders.  This service will support the objectives of the Northern Ireland Strategy for Personality Disorder.  The Trust is also in the process of recruiting Personality Disorder Practitioners who will work with community teams to provide a more locally responsive service.

As a Trust we are committed [hahaha!] to user involvement in the planning, delivery and monitoring of our services so we would be grateful if you could get back to us with an expression of interest in helping us develop better services for people with personality disorders – please contact <BitchBrain>, Assistant Director Mental Health Services, <Big Bin>, <phone number blah blah>.

In relation to your own treatment and care, <C> has spoken to <NewVCB> about follow-up sessions.  It was agreed that there would be a seamless [*explodes laughing*] transition at that time [<pedantry>at what time?  What point of your letter are you referring back to?</pedantry>] to the provision of support from either a community psychiatric nurse or a social worker from the community mental health team.  The details of who this will be and the extent of the contact will be negotiated closer to the time of transfer.

Yours sincerely

Mr Asshole Director-Person Cunt.

One thing that really annoyed me that has no relation to that actual content of the letter was that he addressed me as ‘Mrs <my new surname>’, assuming that any female changing their name must be doing so owing to marriage.  My cunting bank did this as well, which send me into a spiralling fury of ranty anti-capitalist rage.  What a pile of outdated, presumptuous, misogynistic crap.

Anyhow, this is my proposed response.

Dear Mr Director-Person

Re: Accessing MH Services

Previous correspondence refers.  Thank you for your eventual response of 12 May 2010.

I note with interest your willingness to point out that NICE guidelines are not always applicable in this jurisdiction, and that a regional team is “considering” the application of the KUF.  I also have taken note of the information that a plan is being “worked on” to develop services in this Trust and that a NI Strategy for PD apparent exists.  However, you will recall that in my letter of 11 March, I specifically requested details on how the treatment of the very real challenges faced by Northern Ireland individuals with mental health difficulties (not just personality disorders) is being adequately governed and protected now.  I am disappointed to note that you have failed to provide this information.

You may be aware that <NewVCB>, whilst reluctant to continue the tradition inherent in the system of providing stigmatic diagnoses, felt that I am afflicted with a form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.  I would refer you to Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman and The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization by Onno van der Hart on this subject.  As I am sure you are aware, these sources (and many others) quite definitively feel that whilst psychotherapy is a vehicle to recovery, the inadequate provision of same can lead to re-traumatisation.  Given your apparent familiarity with my case, I believe that I can fairly reasonably conclude that you will be aware that I am thoroughly re-traumatised thanks to recent work with C.

To that end, I should be grateful if you could clarify the mandate of mental health services within your Trust.  Is it your actual goal to discourage healing and indeed bring about psychological damage to ill and traumatised individuals?

In particular, I must question the decision to refer me to a CPN or mental health social worker after my contact with C ceases.  I must confess to being amused at your contention that the transition from C to this person would be “seamless” – aside from the fact that it is impossible for you to predict the level of “seamlessness”, and the fact that I am well acquainted with C without any knowledge of his “successor” (and bearing in mind social anxiety is one of my many diagnoses), as yet no one has been able to tell me exactly what such individuals do other than to attempt to encourage their charges to complete day to day activities.  C-PTSD and BPD, as you know, require significant psychotherapy, not reminders to undertake simple tasks (which, I might add, are often impossible regardless of external encouragement).  Whilst there is arguably a place for such professionals as adjunctive workers involved in a person’s treatment, at present I utterly fail to see how assigning them as the primary contact can be of significant benefit, at least to someone someone such as myself.

On the other hand, I am also aware that certain individuals of these specialisms practice the supposedly panaceatic techniques of cognitive and dialectical behavioural therapy.  After my 12 years of being richocheted around your system – and of being forced into the private sector thanks to its failings – I have experience of these “therapies” and feel strongly that not only are they ineffective and patronising, they are indeed offensive.  Their practice is in keeping with the victim-blaming culture that seems inherent in psychiatry and allied professions in reference to BPD.

Whilst I accept that the above view is personal and not held by everyone, and that these techniques can have at least temporary usefulness for some sufferers of mental illness, it has been accepted by those involved in my own case that this would not be appropriate for me.  I would therefore hope and expect that it is not suggested.

I would, ergo, again enquire as to the relevance of a CPN or SW as opposed to a qualified psychotherapist as my primary case worker.

I would like to convey my sincere thanks to you for inviting me to express interest in your user involvement scheme.  I shall be writing to your AD, <BitchBrain>, with said expression forthwith, and look forward to hopefully making a worthwhile contribution to personality disorder services within our Trust.

Thank you for your time.

Regards

Pandora (Ms)

I whacked this response out on a secluded beach on the Turkish Mediterranean.  My God, what a sad, pointless life I lead!

I’m seeking advice on this one because, although I feel my letter is fairly good, it doesn’t ask many direct questions, meaning that Mr D-P can cleverly wriggle out of answers yet again.  To this end, I wonder if any of you would like to suggest amendments, additions or direct questions that I could use when writing back to him.  As with the last post, all views are most welcome.

Thanks again lovelies.  x

I am going on holiday this evening. Ergo, I will be (mostly) in absentia until at least 24 May.

Unlike the preceeding hours before the last time I went on holiday, I am not in a good mood. I am, in fact, muderously livid. C is to blame (surprise surprise), even though it’s not his fault.

So, the latest on the wanky questionnaires is that either I have DID or I’m exaggerating my dissociative symptoms. He tried to dress it up, but that’s what it comes down to whatever he says.

So typical of borderlines, yes? Neurotic, attention-seeking, self-obsessed, manipulative narcissists.

Beyond that the session was thouroughly pointless. It was just more of me slagging myself off endlessly. He didn’t even bother to defend me this time, like he has been known to do, because apparently I am trying to manipulate him into doing so or something.

Some gems:

I’m a five year old fantasist trapped in a womans’ body. A pretty smart five year old, but a five year old nonetheless.

I’m an immature, pathetic, stupid waste of space. Well…not stupid. But stupid all the same. Just not stupid-stupid. But the stupid kind of stupid. Except not actually stupid, just…stupid.

[On seeing Trust headed paper being used, as intended, for rough notes] You do realise that I’m internally raging, don’t you? That exemplifies your pathetic public sector inefficiency. No wonder the Trust has no money. Such wastage. [Genuinely seething inside - proper, murderous anger].

I’m sure there was more but I can’t recall it all and anyway, I’ll write about this session properly when I get back from my travels.

My mother had called me during the session so I called her back to see what she wanted when I left. Mr Director-Person had finally responded.

My analysis of the NICE guidelines etc is apparently quite correct, but – it now emerges – the NICE guidelines don’t automatically apply in Northern Ireland. Well, that’s brilliant, isn’t it? Great job. How eminently rea-fucking-surring to know that we are safeguarded in this country as well as the rest of the UK. OUT-FUCKING-STANDING.

Blah blah blah…we are developing a PD service…we welcome “service user” (I fucking hate that term) involvement…please register your interest with this tosser at this hospital…

Readers, I will. In fact, if they do indeed accept me on board, I will turn it into a personal crusade. I will twat the system from inside the bastarding system.

Blah de blah…[C] and [NewVCB] have agreed to put you under the care of either a CPN or a mental health social worker…details to be worked out closer to the time…

Go and fuck yourselves. What is some CPN going to fucking do? Remind me it might be a good idea if I fucking washed occasionally? Attempt to patronise me with CBfuckingT?! No. No. I need psychotherapy. If I am not to receive psychotherapy, then you can all just go and die, you supercilious, self-interested bunch of despicable cunts from hell.

So that, dearest readers, is the latest. I am sure I’ll calm down a bit – but probably only when we finally reach our apartments tonight, as hanging around airports is supremely frustrating, and flying is supremely boring.

I have got a data abroad package on my phone so will probably be about occasionally on Twitter – I might even post here if you’re (un)lucky. Otherwise, thank you all for reading and thank you for your unwavering support and friendship.

Much love

Pandora x

—

Please note – I began writing this post about a week ago, but malaise and, later, agitation over the stupid election (something on which I should comment, though Z’s observations and my own comments on this Mental Nurse post, as well as my conclusion to the election special series, may provide enough of the comment required), so forgive me if the post is disjointed and rambling. It’s also worth bearing in mind that this session was not my most recent session with C – this post relates to Thursday 29 April. 6 May’s instalment will hopefully be delivered in the next day or two.

—

Starting with the session that followed the one detailed here, I had a total of 10 psychotherapeutic sessions remaining – and that includes four to deal with the severance of the relationship (as if that’s going to be enough!), meaning only six weeks of actual therapy remained. Fuck-a-doodle-fucking-do.

As if that were not bad enough in and of itself, how do you think I responded in the session in question? By wasting the entire fucking session. Yay, Pandora, well done, girl! Way to go! Or, in other words – what an epic, epic fail.

It started, as far as C believes anyway, when he was late. He arrived in the building at 9.30am, which is the time I’m due to start seeing him – he stopped by me in the waiting room and apologised, saying he would just be a few minutes. That really didn’t bother me that much, so long as those extra minutes were added on at the end, but C seems convinced that he unsettled me by being late. I don’t think he did, but what do I know about my own subconscious? (For the record, that comment is semi-serious, not merely facetious. My subconscious is a mystery to me).

Anyhow, when we finally settled in the room together, he apologised again and said the traffic had been heavier than normal. I told him that I used to be late for everything and had become so neurotic about it that I was in fact now always early. He pointed out that I’d never been late for a session with him, and I said that that was my point; I’m always 20 minutes early now (which is actually probably a good thing, given my parking OCD ((Disraeli, the car, has to be exactly lined up in the middle of a parking space, on all dimensions – front, back, left, right – and I have been known to take a tape measure to ensure this)) which can take a lot of time to sate).

He then asked me how I was for time, and would I be happy just to add the 10 lost minutes onto the end of the session. Of course I was thus happy. That means there’s no bastard coming in straight after me, YAY! I had understood that the reason for psychotherapy sessions being 50 minutes long was to give the therapist 10 minute’s grace in the hour to prepare for the next client. With C this is clearly not the case, and it’s not the first time we’ve gone beyond the 10.20 limit. YAY. C is all mine.

Anyway. Silence. What a bloody surprise. He gazed off towards the bookcase, I stared at his blank computer monitor.

He broke it by mentioning he’d received the dissociation questionnaires on Monday, but he said he wanted to leave discussion of them until next week as, although he had scored them, he hadn’t a chance to look at them in considerable detail.

I told him about my concerns about how the questionnaires failed to articulate their frame of reference vis a vis the frequency of symptoms, and he admitted that he hadn’t considered that before he’d received my responses. I proceeded, then, to confront him on some of the points that had annoyed me, namely those questions that enquired as to whether or not you had faked or exaggerated symptoms in order to get attention.

Taking my lead from an astute comment left by Wounded Genius, I asked C, “is the questionnaire designed to incorporate BPD tendencies? You know, given that we’re all so hideously manipulative and all.”

He kind of winced a little but then admitted that this was indeed the case, in part anyway, and that there were also a number of PTSD strands to it.

I protested my innocence. “I’ve played up some medical problems, I’ll admit that,” I told him. “But only to ensure I have been given the treatment required, as opposed to doing it to seek attention. And I’ve never done it regarding my psychological problems.”

C looked at me shiftily. He said, eventually, “but wouldn’t you agree that there are maybe times when you don’t think your mental health issues are being taken seriously, and that you feel you need to scream at the top of your lungs for someone to pay attention?”

I pretended to think about this for a minute, and then denied it. Which felt sincere at the time but now sounds like a complete fabrication. I asked him to exemplify his perceived position.

“There was an incident after Christmas,” he recalled, “wherein you said something like, ‘what do I have to do to get you bloody people to take notice of the seriousness of this illness?’ Do you remember that?”

I did. Fuck. Caught-out. That was only a week or two before I tried (and sadly failed miserably) to top myself, which whilst done in the midst of a very serious depressive episode was also partly catalysed by his apparent determination to abandon me.

I think I said something to the effect of that having indeed taken place, but that it hadn’t meant I had made up or hyperbolised anything.

He did seem to accept this point in fairness to him, and went on to say that part of the reason for these awkward questions was to form a ‘validity scale’ – ie. to catch out people who just randomly circle high figures because they want sympathy and attention. He basically refuted the idea that he felt that was applicable to me.

“Your dissociation scores are raised,” he continued (well, isn’t that a surprise). “But I want to explore them in detail before we discuss them. So are you OK to discuss this next week?”

I responded in the affirmative, and that conversation desisted. The silence returned.

It was C that once again interrupted it, by advising me that despite NewVCB‘s assertions that she wanted to talk to him, she hadn’t yet phoned him. He wanted to know if I knew what it was that NewVCB had specifically wanted to ask him about.

[I had written an entire 900-word rant here about C cutting the therapy short; this was catalysed because I'd had a similar discussion with NewVCB when I saw here in the aforelinked appointment. But the rant is just a repetition of many rants I've had here and just takes up space on this post. I've saved it but there's no point in including it here. Essentially, when asked about what NewVCB wanted, I said that I didn't know, which was largely true, as she wanted to ask C about the flashbacks and psychoses, of which she was already aware.]

I went on to tell C that NewVCB had increased my daily dose of Quetiapine by 100mg (to a total of 400mg). To my considerable bewilderment, he seemed to be surprised by this.

“Why did she do that?” he asked, his brow furrowed slightly.

Christ on a fucking stick, C. I wouldn’t have detailed my trauma-induced hallucinations to you last week or anything, would I?

Through irritated gritted teeth, I explained NewVCB’s (surely rather obvious) rationale: that although she reckoned that the work that I need(ed) to do was primarily psychological, that she was concerned that I’d become floridly psychotic and/or distressed to the point where I’d be unable to work in that way with C. She has always insisted that my ability to do so is key to my prognosis, and such bothersome symptoms as I was having would, if left untreated, inevitably affect my ability to engage in active psychotherapy.

This explanation assuaged C’s inexplicable-to-me concerns and he nodded, which led to a lull in the conversation.

And so it began. Again. A long, meaningless, drivelsome silence. He once more gazes towards the bookcase, I choose to stare blankly at the noticeboard behind him this time. All cogs of both minds almost palpably whir, and whir speedily at that, but nobody verbalises those cognitive processes, those deeply considered thoughts.

In my case, it rather predictably led to the boringly typical internal battle of Me vs Me:

Speak. Speak to him, damn you, speak!
But what do I say?!
Just something tangible about why you#re in therapy in the first place You need to engage with him.
*cowers whines and whimpers*

Etc etc, blah blah blah. The usual pointlessly stupid bollocks in which two sides of my mind constantly engage. I kept thinking that I should be using this time to discuss Paedo, or my miserable years at school, or at least something about my mentalism, rather than getting into the usual navel-gazing therapy-about-therapy-as-seen-through-silence wankery. But I just couldn’t open my mouth to utter anything constructive whatsoever.

I believe that it was he that broke the silence, with the not-exactly-surprising “what’s going through your head?” question. A question that I’ve heard 350 million times before, on these frustrating occasions in which I seem all but helpless but to engage in this idiotic pursuit of uncharacteristic-in-every-other-walk-of-my-existence laconism.

I responded to C’s enquiry by laying into myself with a tonne’s weight of venom. I protested (deja vu, anyone?) by accusing myself of wasting both his time and mine. I was a useless, denomic bitch of Satan, I was moronic, stupid, idiotic, horrible, hateful – yadda yadda yadda.

C said, “what is it about silence here that terrifies you so?”

I said that I was not terrified but angry. With myself. And that I would metaphorically (and, quite possibly, literally) beat myself about the head for the next week for being such a time-wasting bitch.

“Why? And is there nothing we can take from that – from your silences, from your anger?” he persisted.

Oh here we go. The inevitable ‘what does the silence and self-berating actually reveal?’ bullshit.

He continued in this vein by saying that the silence was insightful, but I’m not so sure. What I didn’t reveal was that I would be notably less furious with myself if we didn’t have the stupid timeframe against us. I wouldn’t be happy, not at all, but at least I could accept that I was not under the pressure to resolve some of my difficulties that I actually am.

I don’t remember what I said to him. I certainly didn’t tell him the above, because the whole “you’re angry about the ending” thing was a dead horse that we flogged, flogged again and the flogged some fucking more around Christmas time, and it was a colossal waste of time. I did not want to go back there.

However I responded, I was interested to hear C then start blaming himself for unsettling me by being late. It certainly hadn’t consciously crossed my mind.

He went on, “and then I started rattling on about…um…business-y?…matters.”

“Housekeeping,” I corrected.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Housekeeping. Between being late and matters of housekeeping, I probably didn’t put you in the best frame of mind to commence this session.”

There followed a discussion about the inherent weirdness of the therapeutic setting. I pointed out that, when you really think about it, the notion of sitting down like clockwork one morning a week and pouring your heart out as if on some sort of cue was pretty preposterous.

“It’s alright for you,” I sighed. “This is what you do, you sit over there and you psychologise people [notwithstanding the fact that I am his only client. *clears throat* No one else but me. *whistles into fantasyland*]. But from the client’s situation, it really is bizarre to suddenly have to turn everything on, and 50 minutes later, turn it all off again.”

He ever so astutely observed that I evidently put great pressure on myself to talk in psychotherapy. Oh really, C? I had NO IDEA! You clever psychologist, you!!!

This reminded me of the old adage that rears its perennial head in job interview settings that stress and pressure are not always bad things. You know the situation I mean…

Interviewer: So, Pandora. You do know that this is a very demanding and busy role. Can you tell me how you would deal with the stress and pressure that you will inevitably encounter?

Pandora: Why, yes, Interviewer, I most certainly can. My view is that working under pressure can actually be a highly positive thing. Pressure drives people, it spurs them on. It enables you to get the absolutely best results that you can achieve, but also within a demanding timeframe.

Blah de blah. I quoted this example at C, calling it a “crap” situation (due to its intrinsic falsity)

He said, half-smiling, half-grimacing (or so I thought), “does that make me the crap interviewer then?”

That had not been what I had intended to imply at all. I had merely been trying to suggest that shit and all as the example had been, the idea that pressure could drive results had validity – and that that could be aptly applied to my interactions with C.

Instead of rationally pointing this out, I worked myself into a frenzied panic that I had offended him and started apologising like a ridiculously apologetic thing. “That’s not what I meant at all, I’m sorry!” I whined at him.

He said it was OK and seemed to dismiss it, but I was convinced that he thought I hated him and that he therefore hated me, so after trying to get over it for a few minutes, I started blathering again.

“I feel really bad about that, C, I’m sorry, that’s not what I think, not at all.” (Pa-thet-ic).

By this point he seemed slightly bemused by my reaction. He said, decisively, “Pandora, it’s alright. It was just a comment; I didn’t interpret it as some [waves his hands for dramatic effect] big transferential thing!” [laughs a little to show me it's no big deal].

Transference. Oh, transference. If only you knew, C. If only you knew a quarter of it.

Actually, who am I trying to kid? Two characteristics that are at the heart of C’s person (at least the persona that I know) are intelligence and, crucially, tremendous insight. He probably knows more about the nature of my transference issues that I do. He’s brought the issue up a few times in the past, quite subtly for the most part (although I too am intelligent and insightful, so I know what he’s doing), and there is no real problem from either side in the ensuing discussions, but of late we have been tackling such profoundly core stuff that (in part at my behest) we’ve avoided the whole him-and-me thing. That’s troubling in the sense that it’s going to be unresolved before therapy ends, but then what choice do I have? It’s that, or it’s the issues for which I am in therapy in the first place. I choose the latter.

Anyway, after some more silence, C said that he was aware that I was going on holiday after the following session and would be “on leave” as he initially erroneously put it for two weeks (as it happens, I’m now only going to miss one week – I am going on Thursday after all – but I’ll discuss that in the post about the next session). He said that he thought it might be useful for us to have some discussion in the following week about the abuse, but that he was concerned that I would have that left hanging over me whilst I was away, and that he didn’t want to put me through conversation about the topic in question if I did not feel that I could handle it.

I mused about this for a few moments, eventually concluding (mentally) that yes, I’d probably be OK, largely thanks to my increased dosage of Quetiapine. But then of course this led to worry too: I feel that if I say that medication has helped me that I am indirectly insulting him, and the last thing I wish to do is upset him or make him feel inadequate.

For once I was completely honest with him and admitted to that concern, and he was actually quite good about it. I can’t remember the exact words, but he said something to the effect that just because I found medication helpful didn’t mean that I (or indeed he) felt that psychotherapy was ergo totally sidelined and useless. If anything, he seemed to find my concern mildly amusing. Some people would find the fact that he occasionally expresses amusement at incidents like this quite irritating or patronising. I, on the contrary, find it reassuring. I have absolutely no idea why that is.

And thus arrived the end of the session. He said, “we’ll try and discuss some of that stuff next week then, if you feel comfortable with it, and we’ll add – I don’t know – 10 minutes on at the end to look at the dissociation questionnaires. Is that OK?”

*scoffs* “Is that OK”? Is That OK? Hahaha. A mere extra second of your time is a valued, longed-for second. So yes, C, it very definitely is ‘OK’.

He showed me to the door, opened it for me [nice touch, that], and told me that I wasn’t to be too hard on myself (re: my self-directed vituperations vis a vis my perceived time-wasting).

It’s hard not to do so – so desperately hard. I’m horribly acutely aware of the 10 (now nine) remaining sessions. It permeates the core of my being, every atom of my body, every neuron of my mind. And it’s fucking unbearable.

The Blog-and-life-inertia-itis is compounded by the fact that I’ve completely blocked out most of this session from my conscious memory. I remember how things started, and I remember how they ended. What happened in the ‘middle’ portion of the meeting is frankly anyone’s guess; it’s almost like the chunk of my brain where the recollective (yes it is a word) neurons pertaining to those 30 or 40 minutes were stored has been cut out with a sharp knife. Well, así es la vida. On the bright side, I’ve always wanted a lobotomy.

As far as this session went, with the exception of a few minutes at the end, I’m not sure how much it really added to what had happened in the last meeting and the one before that – how could I be thus sure, however, when I don’t remember what the sodding hell happened. We started with the usual crap of silence – he asks where to begin – I say I don’t know – silence, which in fact has almost become the subject a parody between us now.

C was the first one to cave in. I’d noticed a couple of sheets sitting on the coffee table that sits between us (where the hateful, cheap tissues are housed for when mentals ((or rather, ‘mental’ – singular – because of course I am his only patient *cough*)) start bawling their eyes out), and was interested to see him gesture towards them.

He explained that he had obtained dissociation scales to measure just how extreme my ‘general’ episodes of dissociation, derealisation and depersonalisation were, as well to determine the seriousness of the dissociative psychoses. He had two such survey things; one is a standard dissociation scale, the second a much more in-depth questionnaire. He had apparently initially hoped I could fill them in during or at the end of the session, but given the length of the longer one (218 questions or something), he’d decided it was best if I filled them in at home then just posted them back to him.

He then mused about when he might receive them back, supposing it would be Tuesday (tomorrow). I was surprised to learn that he does not work ‘there’ on Tuesdays or Wednesdays; I missed the opportunity to ask what, if anything, he does on those days, but if I had to guess, I would say those are research days as I am aware that he has been involved in research in the past at least.

At any rate, he advised me not to sell myself short in the questionnaires; he feared I’d downplay the severity of my symptoms.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “you obviously don’t want to exaggerate them either, so…”

“So go with my first instinct,” I finished, to which he nodded. “I’ve always been advised when completing psychiatric questionnaires that I should basically go with the first rating that my mind thinks is appropriate.”

He agreed with this and asked if I had any questions regarding why he wanted me to fill these in.

Of course, I did. “Are you going to use these to bin me?” I enquired.

For some reason he initially smiled at this but, seeing from my facial expression that my question was serious, he desisted from that with very quick effect. “Not at all,” he replied.

I asked what, then, he hoped to achieve through the exploration of my answers to the questions, and he said something about it being able to inform deeply the way we work together. Apparently it could give him great insight.

I filled in the two questionnaires that afternoon, but found mysef to be somehwat irritated by the way in which they scale dissociation. Both ask what percentage of the time you have symptom x; for example:

Some people have the experience of finding themselves in a place and have no idea how they got there. [Thanks for not patronising me there, questionnaire, thanks very much ineed].

Circle a number to show what percentage of the time this happens to you

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100%

(Source)

When it says “what percentage of the time” what exactly does that mean? All the time? Times when you’re unwell? In the above example, how can that possibly be 100% of the time – surely that’s impossible. If you didn’t know why you were somewhere every time you were somewhere, which is a state of permanence, then…no, fuck it, it’s too late in the evening to try to articulate what I mean properly. Just…it’s odd. I would have liked some proper context to these questions, and it wasn’t there. So I added a note for C stating that, and advising that in the absence of such information, I was answering the questions at face value – ie. assuming that “percentage of the time” meant all the time. In all probability, having done so may well end up minimising my levels of dissociation as far as these scales go, but all I could do was be honest within the framework I was given.

Two things concerned me about the longer test (the MID) in particular. Firstly, a cursory search online suggested that the MID is used to diagnose Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Even though I’m all but certain this diagnosis is not at all applicable to me, I worked myself into a panic and convinced myself that C thought I had it. Not that there would be anything wrong with having it, obviously, but given how much I don’t think it applies, it would create an incongruence between C and I if that were his opinion. Fortunately, I now see that the scale is used more widely than just in relation to DID; it’s also applied to measure borderline and PTSD dissociation, which of course is me right off to a tee. So hopefully C is on my wavelength after all.

The second thing to annoy me was that there are several questions that ask about how much you exaggerate your symptoms – either physical or psychological – in order to get attention (or variants thereon). I know C didn’t write the MID, but I nevertheless took this as a personal insult. Does he really think I am faking all of this?! On a more logistical note, even if I were, am I really going to own up to that to him, the very person in front of whom I would be faking (at least psychic) symptoms?! Now, in fairness, I’ve been known to exaggerate some physical issues, but never ‘for attention’ – at least, not in the traditional sense. I’ve done it only when I know a completely honest description of the problem would not garner the treatment required, as is quite typical throughout the NHS (at least in my experience). To the best of my recollection, I’ve never done it in relation to my psychological health – if anything, the polar opposite is more likely to be the case.

C had thought we wouldn’t get to discuss the questionnaires this week as he reckoned they’d have arrived tomorrow (Tuesday) and he wouldn’t be back in that office until Thursday (at which point I am the first person, other than his secretary I assume, that he sees), but I ended up posting them in time that they may well have gotten there today, thus affording him the opportunity to study them in advance of this week’s session should he wish to do so. We shall see if indeed that comes to pass.

Anyway. I’ve diverged from a discussion about the session to a discussion of dissociative scales, so let’s move back to where we were meant to be.

Eventually, for reasons I can’t particularly fathom because it wasn’t relevant to anything we’ve been discussing in-session recently, I mentioned briefly to C that I had been out the evening before with A, as it had been the anniversary of my meeting him.

C asked me how things were with A, which was a curious question I thought; I don’t believe I’ve ever led him to believe that things were anything other than good between us. Of course, as I was typing that last sentence I remembered that of course I’ve told C about what a cunt I’ve been to A at times (for example, here) so I suppose it wasn’t such an odd question after all. Anyway, I said that things were good and that “A takes care of me.”

Unfortunately, I literally said that “A takes care of me.” Not his real name, but A. I corrected myself and continued, thinking of it as nothing more than simple absent-mindedness, but C interrupted me and asked what I had meant by ‘A’.

“Oh, that’s what I call him on my blog,” I said dismissively. “I suppose it shows what a big part of my life it is.”

I was ready to move on and discuss something that might actually have been vaguely useful, but C started harping on my apparent allegation that “the blog had taken over my life.” He looked suspicious, which disturbed me considerably. My paranoid mind is now convinced – especially in light of the exaggeration questions in the MID – that he thinks I make stuff up, or that I exaggerate and embellish to a significant degree, to make things sound interesting here. I don’t think that’s true. Is it? I know I’m guilty of paraphrasing and perhaps not always describing things exactly as they happened, but isn’t that the nature of any subjective human experience? Am I fucking things up?

And here we hit the brick wall of nothingness. I don’t remember the next half hour to 40 minutes at all. I could understand it if I just forgot little bits and pieces or nuances, but I literally remember nothing. My supposition is that this is because – hurrah, you’ve guessed it – I dissociated it. I’m almost certain that I didn’t reveal any specifics to him as regards our ongoing subject matter of child sexual abuse, because I remember having a discussion dodging that later. But I don’t know what I did say. I intend to ask him on Thursday, because I can’t tolerate this blankness, longed-for-lobotomy or not.

The next thing I recall was telling him that I hadn’t really discussed the flashbacks I’d been experiencing with him the previous week, owing simply to the fact that we hadn’t had time (as the session was almost entirely spent discussing the hallucinations). There was a bit of (largely un-recalled) probing from him, and a lot of humming-and-haing from me, though I think I admitted that the flashbacks occur as if they were my ‘present’ and not my past. I’m sure he asked me something on that point, but – wahey – I don’t remember what it was. Well done, P.

Eventually, I admitted to the somatic symptoms that accompany my flashbacks and, indeed, that often stay put quite independently of them – the almost constant physical pain that has plagued me as part of this whole nightmare for the past few weeks. I think he may have asked me similar questions to those he posed in this session – namely, were the somatic symptoms in my genital region – but I don’t remember fully.

What I do recall is that eventually I told him my back hurt like blazes all the time, and that it’s especially pronounced during a particular recurring flashback. He asked in what way it hurt, and I responded by telling him that I had been forced to sort of stand against a wall and that that was what had caused me pain in that area.

Cue a lot of investigation from him as to exactly how I was standing and a lot of attempted avoidance from me. In short, this flashback is one wherein I was pinned to the (outside of) the garage wall, my knees bent forward considerably so that I was at the ‘right’ height and angle to suck Paedo’s cock. The pain emanates from the pebble-dashing of the wall pressing into my back, as well as being pushed against the wall with some force during each hideous thrust.

I managed to get out of telling C what went on, but he couldn’t understand what way I was standing during the incident in question, leading to much confusion. I was about to act it out for him, but found that I couldn’t bring myself to do so, and told him as much.

He said, “could you draw it for me?”, pushing a pen and a bit of the bland Trust-headed note-paper towards me.

I was surprised at the request, and ever so slightly horrified, but made some gesture of reluctant acquiesence, and drew a stick-figure me contorted against a wall in the aforementioned grotesque fashion. To my immense revulsion, C then went to the wall and physically depicted the stance I’d drawn myself in. “Like this?” he asked.

I nodded, and looked away, suddenly ‘back there’ for a minute or two.

Fortunately – or otherwise, depending on your perspective – this was at the tail end of the session and he couldn’t probe me deeper any further. He said that his supposition was that this particular incident was a forced incident of oral sex (no shit).

“But,” he added thoughtfully, stroking his chin. “I don’t think calling it ‘oral sex’ is an accurate term. It’s not sex; the word ‘sex’ implies consent, not to mention the ability to consent.”

I stared at him blankly, determined to give nothing away.

And that’s suddenly reminded me of one thing that happened in the ‘lost’ half hour: I remember repeating over and over again that “shagging one’s uncle at the age of five is disgusting,” and C reminding me that a five year old can’t consent, and my counter-protesting that I knew that, but that didn’t change my view on how disgusting I was/am and that no amount of evidence or rationalisation ever would.

Indeed, I now remember that I repeated the word ‘disgusting’ in relation to myself and what happened over and over and over and over again, then went into a self-vituperation of epic proportions for failing to employ synonyms of ‘disgusting’ in my speech, thus in turn failing to utilise the English language in a more creative fashion. Very rational and helpful, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Anyhow, discussion of the forced-fellatio-flashback completed (that even sounds like a dubious sexual practice), I was feeling physically ill and as if I were about to explode with a doom-filled internal energy. I joked to C that I was going to throw up all over him, and he joked back that he would dodge the vomit and catch it in the bin. For some reason the gentle banter calmed me slightly – but I was still in full-on crazy-mode.

As a consequence, I held out my hand in front of me, in order that I could measure how much it was shaking. This harks back to an incident when I was 15. The day after I’d found out about my ex’s colossal betrayal – an incident about which I must write one of these days – I was sitting in school, literally shaking from head to toe. At one point I noticed my extended right hand shaking up and down, like the Golden Gate Bridge shaking in an earthquake. Ever since, I have used that as a benchmark to determine my levels of overt anxiety.

It was shaking a fair bit on Thursday, but not unmanageably so. “That’s OK,” I muttered thankfully, mainly to myself.

I noticed C’s raised eyebrow, and explained what I was doing. I was delighted when he said that he’d seen me doing it before. I know he’d seen me doing it before, but it was the fact that he remembered such a small, meaningless thing about me that was so pathetically important.

I was further delighted when he described my facing up to the fellatio flashback with him as ‘brave’. He’d also said I was ‘brave’ in the last session, and I have to say, the fact that he thinks this makes my heart and mind sing like something out of The Sound of fucking Music.

Clearly, though, C does not know that his endorsement (if that’s the right word) has such a positive effect on me. He said, “you probably don’t like me calling you ‘brave’, do you?”

I nonchalantly responded that I “didn’t mind” the use of the adjective in reference to me. Oh, what a belier of truth I am!

I went on and told him that although I appreciated him saying that, that it really didn’t “fit” with what I felt about myself.

“I’m not brave in my mind,” I murmured quietly.

“Well,” he responded, rather definitely and slightly authoritatively. “I think you are brave.”

And for the second week running, I got an “all the best” as I left, which always makes my week. I’m still desperate for him to actually like me, which I know rationally is probably a silly pipedream. But his present extension of an arm of kindness comforts and reassures me, and I’ll continue to bask in its loveliness for some time to come.

On Friday night I collapsed in the middle of the street in a tearful dysphoric panic, as fake-Paedo wouldn’t leave me and at least in part owing to his ‘presence’, I couldn’t stop reliving what he did to me.  A scooped me up and took me home, bless him, and Saturday was mostly fine (about which I was very surprised, but also immeasurably grateful).  In fact, the problems didn’t start again until early on Sunday morning – about 2 or 3am – when I was unable to sleep.

Certain things always seem notably amplified during nights of insomnia.  Things that one can just about deal with during the day are things that one is utterly incapable of fighting during the darkest recesses of night, and to that end the flashbacks and voices threatened to overwhelm me completely.  What’s more, my mood plummeted into the depths of a metaphorical abyss too; throughout all the madness of the last few weeks, I had still managed to remain in a passably alright mood, at least during the flashbacks’ and hallucinations’ temporary remissions – but this episode saw a very distinct and definite end to that.  I’m still in a very deep depression, with no interest in anything nor any concentration.  All I have done, and want to do, is sit here and stuff my face with rubbish.  These 300 words have taken me, on and off, about four hours to write, which is unspeakably pathetic.

I’ve been thinking of doing myself in again.  I won’t actually do it, in all probability, mainly because I don’t want to put A through it – but it’s certainly on my mind a lot.  It’s liberating to know that I can stop it all – the depression, the voices and visions, the panics, the delusions, the anxiety and agitation.  All it takes is a bit of careful planning – then I could be free of it permanently.  But then, on the other hand, I’m a bloody wuss too, because although I don’t believe in an afterlife, it would be just my luck if there was one, and it was populated by ‘They’, Paedo, and any other number of as-yet-unknown nebulous nasties.

‘They’ like it when I contemplate suicide.  They haven’t as yet considered the reality that it would probably be an escape for me, and therefore a Good Thing; no, they believe instead that it would be the ultimate act of self-punishment that I deserve for being a whore, a liar, an insidious, disgusting, hateful being.  They’d like me to do it painfully, of course – no clever cocktails from The Peaceful Pill Handbook or similar for me, oh no.  ‘They’ want me to drown myself, or alternatively to douse myself in petrol and self-immolate – two of my greatest, Room 101-esque fears.

I won’t do it, worry not.  To be fair to ‘They’ (how ridiculous that clause sounds!), they haven’t been babbling on about me killing myself in an unsolicited way – they only address the subject when I have been contemplating it myself.  So for now at least, I can resist them.  The rest of the time, they just shout at me and remind me how much I deserved to be raped and tortured, whether they do it directly in my head or whether it’s in a more vicarious way (Nick Clegg and Noel Edmonds are two of their latest ‘hosts’, though frankly it serves me right for bothering to watch the electoral debate and, worse again, Deal or No Deal).

Someone keeps phoning me over and over.  It’s some old sales bollocks, I know, and to that end I wouldn’t answer the calls anyway – but my irrational mind is simultaneously convinced that it’ll be ‘They’ at the end of the line, seeking another avenue to abuse me.  So I’ve put my mobile to send all calls directly to the answering machine, supposing that anyone legitimate can leave a message – though knowing my luck, someone legitimate will phone and ‘host’ ‘They’ anyway.

*** TRIGGER WARNING ***

But, as I said, the worst of the lot is the flashbacks.  They’re almost like a psychosis, in that they’re entirely sensual experiences; it’s as if it is all completely real, and happening right now.  I can hear his breath in my ear and feel him inside me, harshly thrusting into me, causing me indescribable agony.  I can see his sweat drip from his hideous chest hairs on to my own exposed (flat, as it then was) chest, I can hear his grunts.  I can feel him choking me when he forced me into fellatio and I can feel his vile, disgusting tongue flicking around my own genitals.

I feel it all physically, mentally and e-fucking-motionally (and in any other possible way, for that matter).  And I feel nauseous to my physical core, not to mention despairing and lost with every neuron that fires through and every chemical that imbalances in my traitorous brain.

I will be OK, I’m sure.  I don’t know how to get through this in the next 36ish hours until I see NewVCB, my psychiatrist, but I’ve managed it for a week without any self-harm or a suicide attempt – and even though it’s getting progressively (regressively?) worse, I’m sure I’ll manage (whatever ‘manage’ means).

It’s just so hatefully exhausting, so overwhelmingly depressing and painful in every way conceivable.  I don’t know how to get out of this vicious little mess, and I therefore I wish I could turn myself off,  even if only for a little while.  There is no ‘off’ switch visible to me, though, which fills me with dread and foreboding.

I rather think I win. You – in conjunction with your unwitting co-conspirators of my father, my bullies, my ex et al – may have made me mental. Nevertheless, I still win.

I may be mental, but then so are you. At least I am young enough to have a fair prognosis, even if I have been bandied about the system unproductively for over a decade. How long do you have left to recover? What years you do have left aren’t exactly destined for great things, are they?

I don’t assume that you have a conscience, but in the improbable event that you do, those remaining years are years during which you will have to continue to live with the knowledge of what you have done, of the heinous acts of which you are guilty. Moreover, what kind of existence can you expect in social and familial terms? You have a wife that hates you, four children that are either indifferent or resentful towards you and a string of grandchildren that will mourn your passing but not do much to enrich your existence during the (most likely short) period through which it will continue. You may have a great-grandkid named after you now, but you’re old and ill and won’t live to see him and his older brother grow up. Unnatural circumstances expected, I will. Hahaha!

I’m the one with the IQ of 148 and 8 / 12 (depending on whether or not you include the ‘Hons’ bit) letters after my name. That is compared to your IQ of…hmm, circa 80? And your sum total of no qualifications whatsoever. I may not have worked for a year, but I have the intellect, capability and hopefully in future the opportunities to develop a successful working life for myself. You never achieved that, did you? What’s more, you never had the capacity to do so. And now you never will

I don’t profess to be the world’s most popular person, but I have a loving, satisfying relationship with my partner – something that you can hardly say about your dealings with your wife – and I have good and close friends that give a shit about my welfare and with whom I have had, and will have, many many laughs. Do you? No, thought not.

I may not be capable of doing much at the minute, but I have interests and will have opportunities to enjoy myself. Your existence consists of sitting about mournfully in your oppressive, Hotel California-esque* domicile and acting as an unpaid taxi driver to ungrateful, demanding offspring – though with your health as it is, you will soon lose your driving licence, meaning you’ll hardly ever leave the house. Oh well. My heart hardly bleeds.

What you maybe don’t realise is that I have the power to fuck up your miserable life even more. The chances of me doing it aren’t high, but I have that within my capability all the same. It doesn’t matter whether or not I prosecute you, not really. As your granddaughter recently observed in relation to similar allegations, mud sticks, Paedo. I now know so much more about what you have done than I formerly did, and I can completely twat you with that knowledge. One word from me and your inoffensive reputation is totally down the shitter. Hahaha!

On a similar note, although they don’t know your specific identity, many, many people sit in awareness of your paedophilia. I have the quiet satisfaction of knowing that every time I look at you

Above all, Paedo, what kind of sad, miserable bastard gets his sexual kicks from fucking children? It is truly a terrible thing to think that your life was so devoid of any sense of love, purpose and empathy that you felt that the violation of the most vulnerable known to you was an acceptable way to excite and prove yourself. How utterly, utterly pathetic you are.

Anyway, I’m an adult now and you can no longer touch me; I think you know that would be a very bad idea, that would land you in a lot of trouble. Boohoo! I may be overweight, severely mentally ill and live on the verge of social sequestration, but I have one thing you really, completely and utterly don’t – some semblance of hope. I’m intelligent, at times interesting, occasionally witty, relatively attractive and nigh on always determined. Though you may be in part responsible for the bad in my life, you are not at all responsible for conceiving the positive therein. All you have done in that regard is to act as a catalyst for me to begin to discover strength that I have always had, strength that your actions towards me most assuredly did not create.

You are nothing. Nothing. Just an all-but-lifeless, useless, sad old man. So I win, Paedo. I win. Fuck you very much indeed

Best

Pandora

* Remember The Eagles’ song, Hotel California?  There’s a line that says You can check out, but you can never leave. That’s exactly the environment in which Paedo lives.

My ineptitude left me in a pretty awful frame of mind post-therapy.  One minute, I’d be quite happily getting along with whatever; the next, I’d just burst into tears.  I cried so much at one point on Thursday night that when I lifted my head, everything around me was covered in blood – the force of my tears had induced a major nose bleed (the worst I’ve had in years).  I also ended up driving home (and beyond) that evening in an unforgivably reckless fashion, in what I suppose was an attempt to weed out my frustrations.  I was in tears throughout most of the drive and at one point realised I was doing over 100mph.  Not good at all, for my car and for other road users.  It didn’t matter about my life, of course.

Anyway.  Enough of the “woe is me”.

Because Mr Director-Person hadn’t had the courtesy to copy C in on the letter he’d sent me, I took C a copy of it.  I told him that although it hadn’t been my intention in session the previous week, that I was now going to reply.

The discussion around this stupidly went on for maybe 15 or 20 minutes.  I admitted that my key motivation was to piss off Mr Director-Person and friends, and C kept asking me why I wanted to act in a manner as “destructive” as that.  There was the usual rant from me that if the bloody NHS had acted properly rather than throwing Fluoxetine in my face when I was 14, then maybe I wouldn’t have even needed to meet C (as my mentalness might have been adequately dealt with when I was a teenager, thus negating at least some of the need for therapy now).  There was a load of Trust-defensive rhetoric from him, plus a pile of questions designed to investigate my “true” motivation in replying.  He contended that I must want something other than to annoy Mr D-P.  He also seemed incredulous at my reaction to Mr D-P’s letter; what was it that I actually wanted from him?!

What I actually wanted was Mr D-P to take my case seriously and agree that longer-term psychotherapy was required, but what I told C was what I had wanted was something that actually fucking meant something, which is also true.  Mr D-P’s letter did not say anything in its 700 odd words.  It just threw a few dates at me and expected that to satisfy me.  Preposterous.

There was no animosity between C and I during this discussion, but I was pretty assertive and didn’t hold back.  I called Mr D-P “stupid” and accused him of “patronising” me.  I told C that “everyone but [him]” agreed with my decision to respond.  He was actually slightly amused by the fact that he was so outnumbered.

He eventually made the wise decision to cut that topic short, presumably with a view to continuing our discussion of the sexual abuse.  However, I butted in and started going on about my appointment with the psychiatrist the previous day.  I babbled on for a bit about the medication issues then told him that NewVCB agreed with my assertion that I am afflicted with C-PTSD.

C was a bit annoying over this.  He pointed out that C-PTSD is not included in the DSM or the ICD nor is it going to be in at least the DSM’s next incarnation (facts that I knew), and that all the research he’d read on borderline suggested that people with that diagnosis had been abused as children.  He must have been reading different research from me, because whilst child abuse is common in those with BPD, it is not universal.  Anyway, the implication was that I had no need to seek a diagnosis of C-PTSD as BPD was perfectly adequate.

I protested saying yes, some people diagnosed with BPD were badly abused as kids, but that it was still the disorder that everyone loved to hate (he agreed that it “doesn’t have a very good rep”), and I went on to point out that at least having recognition of some form of PTSD was important to me as it shifted the focus to trauma, rather than personality.

“You mentioned trauma,” he said after a few minutes.

“Oh, here we go,” I whispered, rolling my eyes slightly.  A few minutes later I was aware of the physical stance that I’d taken; arms folded across my chest, head bowed, shoulders tense.  He commented on it, saying that it was in marked contrast to the assertive me of a few minutes previously.

We discussed the conversation we’d had the week before, and I told him – still omitting specific details – more about the flashbacks.  I quietly admitted that I’d been highly disturbed by the visions of what happened beside the old kennel particularly, as it had gone by the time I was five or six.  My conscious perceptions had always been that this stuff happened only much later in my childhood.

I’m not sure exactly how things progressed, but whatever the case he eventually asked if I would find it less difficult to start describing some of the more ‘minor’ incidents.  I reckoned it would, so I agreed.

Wrong!  I kept thinking in detail about numerous times that Paedo had stroked my thighs in what I think he though was an alluring fashion (!), but I couldn’t even articulate that to C.  Fucking pathetic me.  Stupid bitch.  Every time I went to speak of it, something held the information in my throat.

“It’s almost like it’s somatic,” I told him eventually.  “I can feel a blockage in my throat that’s preventing me from telling you about it.  I feel like every nerve in my body is on end.”

“You can get up and walk about if you like,” he offered, which struck me as unusual as any time I’ve so much as stood up in the past, he has questioned me on my motivations for doing so.  At any rate, I shrugged and told him I’d be fine.

More silence ensued, and eventually C asked me what was going through my head.  Not that I could manage to tell him about the thigh-stroking bullshit, of course, but my mind was also engaging in its usual internal dichotomy of Me-That-is-Irritated-by-Me versus Pathetic-Child-Me.

“One side is saying, ‘it’s only words you stupid bitch, just tell him,’” I said.  “The other is whining, [cue childish voice] ‘noooo, I can’t!’”

“What if…” he began, standing up.  My eyes followed him in a kind of confused curiosity.

He pulled the chair from his desk away and put it in the middle of the room, then removed his bag from the spare chair next to me and pulled it towards the other.  There were now four chairs, including his and mine, in a nice little circle together.

He sat back down on his chair, and I raised an eyebrow at him.  The empty chair technique?  Gestalt therapy?!  When did this become part of our work together?

He asked me to imagine that Child Me was on the chair closest to me, and that the more Punitive Me was in the remaining empty chair.

“What would you say to them?” he asked.

I ignored the two empty chairs and said, to him, “I’d tell them both to wise the fuck up.”

C threw back his head and laughed.  It was the first time I noticed what nice teeth he has.

“Don’t worry,” I continued.  “The inherent irony in that statement is not lost on me.  I’m being punitive towards both of them, when I’m supposed to stop one being so punitive.”

“Can you think of another way to talk to them?” he enquired.  “And can you talk to them – not me?”

I faced the two chairs and eventually made some trite statement that the bully should see how difficult things are for the child, but that the child should see that maybe the bully had a point, even if she had an undesirable way of expressing it.

The two faceless chairs freaked me out.  That sounds ridiculous; they are chairs.  But somehow C had succeeded in getting me to project aspects of my personality onto them.  It was incredibly disconcerting, and I told him so.

“Why?” he pressed.

“They’re watching me.”

“And what are they saying or thinking?”

“They hate me.”  And I really felt that they did; the malevolence emanating from these two inanimate objects was, to me, hideously and suffocatingly palpable.

By this point, it was near the end of the session, and in fact C later pointed out that we’d overran (this delighted me as it meant he didn’t have another patient coming in straight after me.  I can thus maintain my wretched illusion of him being exclusive to me).

He said that he knew I found the empty chairs unsettling, but he asked how I felt about it as a useful aid to the therapy.

I didn’t like it, obviously.  However, I thought – as I’m sure so did he – that the exercise had been telling, even if only subtly so.  I therefore told him that I thought it had some merit.

He nodded, so perhaps that is something to look into again in the next few weeks.  He then turned the subject back to housekeeping-esque issues, telling me that whilst he knew it was important to me, he wondered if we could maybe focus less on the crap with the Trust in the next session.

“Sorry,” I replied mournfully.

As stated, he immediately leapt to my defence, reminding me – correctly, in fairness – that he’d fully engaged in that conversation too.

Whatever the case, he wants to use the next session (tomorrow) to go on about this sex abuse stuff.  Fuck.  I am horrified in two ways – one, it is my instinct to avoid this and two, tomorrow is week 45.  To negate the effects of one, I have printed out extracts from my post about the session a fortnight ago, in which I detailed the flashbacks of severe elements of the abuse.  I’d told him in this session that I’d considered bringing him such written information, but advised that I had decided against it as I thought he’d want me to verbalise the stuff.  He does, apparently, but thought working around written stuff would at least be a start.  Good.

As for point two, there is no way to combat it, excepting miracles from Mr D-P or someone.  I only have 59 weeks in total, and look how much time I wasted this session.  I was so raging with myself for doing that, but that rage pales into insignificance against the the dread I feel regarding the end of the relationship – a dread that threatens to completely and utterly overwhelm me.  I was telling one of my online friends during the week that thinking about the end of things with C is akin to contemplating the death of a loved one.  C will effectively be dead to me after week 59.  I will, in all probability, never see him again after it.

It’s too much.  I cannot cope with it.

I was fully expecting that NewVCB would keep me waiting for 23 light years before she emerged to escort me to my for-today fate, but to my astonishment she actually came to get me shortly before the appointed time.  That was quite impressive; OldVCB was never on time, never mind early.  I was also pleased to note that my file seemed to have been fully updated to reflect my name change.

She showed me into her office as usual and gestured for me to sit opposite her, before quite amicably asking me how things had been.  I was honest and told her that Quetiapine has, in general, made my life better.  I said that I had come from a point of being severely depressed when I first met her to being, now, perhaps only moderately so.  I said that whilst not perfect, this was clearly a significant improvement.  I also said that there probably wasn’t the same mad variation in my moods that there had been around Christmas and the months surrounding it.

She agreed that this was encouraging, but said she was also wondering about the status of the voices.  I said that Quetiapine had not completely eliminated them, which it hasn’t, but that they were (a) less frequently in evidence and (b) much less overwhelming.  I pointed out, with some regret, that the benevolent one (Tom) has disappeared entirely (though admittedly Olanzapine, my previous anti-psychotic, seemed to have been his murderer).

NewVCB asked me to describe the status of ‘They‘ relative to the unfortunate incident on Christmas Day, the details of which she was aware from our previous meeting.  I said that a comparison was impossible because the horror and overwhelming nature of that particular incident was almost unique.  “They have tried to get me to kill myself before,” I told her, “but since on most of those occasions suicide has been in the forefront of my mind anyway, those occasions did not seem so serious.  Christmas did, but they don’t have that hold over me at the minute.”

She nodded, apparently encouraged, and we discussed a bit more about the frequency of the hallucinations (no set pattern, but perhaps once a week on average) and how I can now…not ignore them, but tolerate the levels of their malevolence.

“Regarding Christmas,” I started, uncertainly.  “The baby involved, doing you remember me telling you about him?”

She responded in the affirmative.

“His baby brother was born yesterday.  They’re naming him after my child abuser.”

NewVCB was visibly horrified by this information.  She gasped, threw her hand over her mouth and winced.

“Oh, Pandora,” she sort of sighed, through gritted teeth, shaking her head rather despairingly.  “That must be dreadful…”

I nodded.  “It’s not the parents’ fault; they don’t know about the abuse.  And of course it’s not the baby’s fault.  But I feel irrationally angry all the same, as well as…not hurt, it’s deeper than that.  I’m horrified to the pit of my stomach.”

We discussed the fact that I have been covering really difficult material with C recently, though at this stage I didn’t specifically tell her that it was in relation to Paedo.  I said that although it was hard stuff, I nevertheless thought it was productive work, and the fact that I hadn’t completely lost my marbles as a result of it was a testament to the wonder of Quetiapine.

We moved back to talking about ithe drug, in particular with reference to the dosage.  For now, NewVCB wants to keep me on 300mg, as – according to her – that’s presently thought to be the most effective dose for those presenting with mainly depressive symptoms.

She said, “doses above 700mg or thereabouts tend, according to the recent research, to be most effective for schizophrenia or full-blown mania – and you don’t have either of those.  So for now I want you to remain at the present dose.  How do you feel about that?”

“That’s grand.  I suppose my thinking had been to maybe increase it in the long-run, but I’m happy enough to maintain the status quo for now.”

“In all probability we will have to increase it as time goes on,” she admitted.  “600mg is a future possibility, though as I said I’d be dubious about raising it much higher than that.  For now, though, I want to monitor just how much this dose helps you over a sustained period, rather than just a few months.  Thereafter, if you still feel that your depression is within the ‘moderate’ zone or the voices are still there, then yes, we can think about an increase.

“At the end of the day,” she continued, “the most important aspect of your treatment is psychological.  All medication will ever do is take the edge of your distress until you’ve worked through things psychologically.  Traumas, depression, whatever – certainly, they do change the physiology of the brain, and we can deal with that from within the medical model.  But it’s only one part of treatment in a case like yours.”

Of course, I was very well aware of that, but I didn’t press it.  Her point was valid: leave the Quetiapine as it is until it has had several months to work its magic, just as she had planned from my introduction to the drug in January.  (Interestingly, and gratifyingly from my point of view, she didn’t mention Venlafaxine at all.  In the previous meeting she’d expressed the desire to wean me off it, which I don’t want her to do.  I admit that my reluctance is partly to do with the horrendous potential discontinuation syndrome, but it’s mainly because the current cocktail is making a difference, and I don’t want to interfere with that).

We discussed concentration and focus, and I said that it was still abominable.  “I pick up a book and find myself reading the same sentence 20 different times,” I told her, “which is incredibly frustrating, as I’ve always loved reading and have a thirst for knowledge.”

New VCB asked me to describe a typical day.

“I get up late, go to the sofa, watch TV.  I don’t make food beyond Pot Noodles.  I just sit there.  And I hate that, because I’m actually quite an intelligent person who is capable of so much more.”

She nodded in agreement (yay) and said that she did honestly understand my frustrations, but that concentration was one of the last things to return in the ‘recovery process’, so I therefore shouldn’t feel too discouraged.

She suggested that I make a pact with A to once a day do something other than sit in the living room – a walk, a coffee, whatever.  “It’s easier to be motivated when someone else is doing it with you,” she said.  “And if you start doing something like that in the evenings with your partner, after a while you can start setting yourself small goals to do such things yourself during the day.”

Eventually she asked if there was anything else I wanted to discuss with her, and I said I had read up on and discussed PTSD with a number of others, with many thinking the diagnosis was more apt for me than BPD.

She asked why I felt that my symptomatology was consistent with that diagnosis so I told her about what happened with C last week, then gave her a brief run-down of the other symptoms, a la the other day’s BPD v C-PTSD post. However, I purposely refrained from mentioning complex-PTSD in order to see if she would bring it up unsolicited.

She did not disappoint.  She said, “well, PTSD tends to be most applicable after a single traumatic event – an earthquake, a bombing, those sorts of things.  When there is repeated trauma, things become more complicated, and we call that complex-PTSD.  I think it actually goes without saying that you have C-PTSD – how could you not after the traumas you’ve gone through?”

I felt smugly pleased at the success of my latest self-diagnosis (the original, in which I correctly diagnosed myself with BPD and bipolar disorder, is here).

“Having said that,” NewVCB went on, “your case is not a simple one.  You’re not really classically borderline.  You’re not classically bipolar.  You aren’t entirely a classical example of C-PTSD, and your psychotic features don’t classically fit any specific psychotic disorder.  I could diagnose you with this, with that, with the other – but you’re a mix of all of these things.  They all apply, but in a convoluted mishmash.”

I said that I understood and agreed with that, but I had – in part at least – been seeking recognition of C-PTSD as unlike borderline, it emphasised trauma, thus contesting my default “it was all my fault” position.

“It is helps you to deal with things, then yes absolutely, that’s great.  You can’t not have it anyway, at least to some extent,” she said.

She remarked that I’d mentioned experiencing flashbacks in session with C and asked me how things had been with him, noting that last time she’d seen me I was very concerned about the cessation of psychotherapy.

“Well, I still am,” I confessed, “but we’ve agreed to sort of put discussion of that on hold for now and tackle this sex abuse stuff, which I think is important.  I think the key thing to report is that, although this material is difficult and triggering, C and I are working very well together at the minute.”

“Good,” she said, again pointing out that limited as it may be, psychotherapy is still the crux of my treatment.  “And I think that hits on an important point.  I feel that your prognosis is quite encouraging, because (a) you’re bright, and your ability towards insight and your hunger to learn about your conditions make a huge difference and (b) you can work psychologically.  Not everyone has even one of those, never mind both.  Having said all that, you’re not ‘uncommon’ either, in the sense that you cross diagnostic criteria, so please be reassured by that.”

I’m not particularly, as I quite like being unique.  Nevertheless, I suppose I should be glad that my prognosis is apparently quite positive.  Since I don’t believe in cures I’m dubious, but I suppose a prognosis suggestive of an ability to manage my mentalness is quite a good thing.

As I left, she said that she did actually notice a change in me from the last time she’d seen me, echoing A’s sentiments on my recent mood.  I don’t for half a second expect it to continue indefinitely, but it’s nice not to have to fight the urge to throw myself under a bus at every single opportunity.  Let’s just see how much upcoming therapy sessions will conspire against me in that regard.

(PS.  No ‘Article of the Week’ this week, for which my apologies.  I simply haven’t come across much that I found worth sharing.  Normal service will hopefully be resumed next week).

The discussion commenced, perhaps unsurprisingly, with C picking up where we’d left off the previous week with reference to the dodgy Diazepam that I’ve (hopefully) purchased.  Under the caveat that he of course doesn’t approve of the purchase at all, he wanted to talk about ways that I could protect myself from taking the whole dose if I go mental some time, whilst at the same time taking responsibility for their ownership and the fact that I made the decision to buy them.

Writing it back now, it sounds very DBT-ish, but at the time it didn’t seem particularly condescending; if anything, I felt that he gave enough of a toss that he didn’t want me to do myself in (that it wasn’t just about covering his arse), but that simultaneously he didn’t want to patronise me by telling me I had to bin them all or give them all away.

A discussion ensued about putting a few of them in my care, and giving guardianship of the rest of them to A.  As long as I have access to some of them at any given time, I honestly don’t give a toss about someone else having them, but C didn’t seem to really think that all of me was content with it.  I admitted that because I was in a relatively stable frame of mind that I couldn’t see what other ‘parts’ of me might think, but I did concede that I have a rebellious streak that may manifest at some point and take offence at not being allowed to have all of the tablets in my possession.

C said, “what would you say to that side to persuade her that this is a sensible course of action?”

“Nothing,” I replied.  “I’d just tell her to fuck off.”

He laughed, and said that he didn’t think the rebellious streak would feel particularly validated or disciplined by that.  I nodded, accepting that such a confrontational stance may only wind ‘her’ up further, and make her more determined to claim ownership of the Valium.

The conversation advanced in an unexpected way.  C said, “Imagine I’m you and you’re the therapist, trying to persuade me that putting the Dizaepam in someone else’s temporary care is a good idea.  What would you say?”

“Well, I’d probably say something like…”

“No no no,” he interrupted.  “I don’t want you to just tell me what you’d say…I want you to actually say it, as if you’re me.”

“Like a role-play?” I checked, aghast.

He nodded.

I didn’t really fancy this idea, but I took a deep breath and decided to play along.

I don’t remember what I said, but I got to the point where C – as ‘me’ – was about to reply, when I bottled it.

“OK, C, sorry – this is just too weird,” I interjected, waving my hands embarrassedly.

He smiled and said that he had no wish to make me uncomfortable, but after dithering a bit he asked if I would be willing to try the exercise again.  I heard myself agreeing to this.

He started.

C:  They’re my tablets, I’ll do what I want with them.

SI: But I’m not proposing that you get rid of them entirely, just that you take some of them out of your hands for a bit.

C:  [waving hand dismissively] Nah.  Why should I?

SI:  Because it’s for your own good.  [wincing] Think of it like this – it’s kind of like the tablets are under lock and key, as they would be in a pharmacy or something.  You don’t have immeadiate access to the key, but access becomes yours as your own small stash depletes.

C:  [pauses, apparently ruminating on what I said]  OK, so what you’re saying is this stuff is still mine, but access to it can only be granted in bursts.

SI: [incredulous] Obviously, yes…

C:  But why shouldn’t I just take them all anyway?  I hate my life.

SI: I can’t let you do that…it would be unprofessional…

C:  Why can’t you?  You don’t care about me!

SI: No, but I have a professional responsibility to stop you.

He laughed at my “no, I don’t care about you,” and signaled that we could desist from continuing in this vein.  He said, “I really liked your lock and key analogy, that was very good.”

I was astonished.  “That was patronising bollocks,” I declared.

“I don’t think it was.  Parts of you may think so, but I also think it’s a simple but effective way of communicating to those ‘rebellious’ parts that they are being protected whilst at the same time being afforded some responsibility.”

He paused for a moment, then continued by saying, “I know you have that book on schema therapy in BPD.  Do you recall that, according to it, there’s a detached protector, and several child parts?”

I nodded.

“Perhaps the detached protector, the healthy adult even – they may find something like what you’ve just said ‘patronising’ – but don’t you think it’s really the angry or frightened children that most need to be protected?  And if so, then this is clear, effective language that they can understand.”

I fought the urge to protest that I had been a precocious child.  I had been, and these ‘child parts’ still are, but even I wouldn’t have been able to come up with a decent immediate comeback to my stupid ‘lock and key’ analogy.

I finally said that I would keep 25 of the tablets and give the remaining lot to A, to act as my dispensing pharmacist as and when the 25 were depleted.  C furrowed his brow.

“What strength are the tablets?” he asked.

“10mg each.”

He winced, causing me to protest that 25 of the things couldn’t kill you.  “One gram, the whole lot, wouldn’t kill you unless you were very (un)lucky.  I’ve researched this.”  (My research consists of reading a pro-choice suicide newsgroup, a seemingly dubious source, but actually, the members thereof are very well informed.)

He continued to look concerned.  “I know you’re well informed about this, but do these types of medications not slow the heart rate?  Surely ‘even’ 250mg could induce heart failure?”

I don’t think so, but I was not against the idea of meeting him half way, so I advised that if it would ease his mind, I would retain ownership of only ten tablets.

He was unhappy with that too, of course, believing that I believed that he had invalidated my sense of responsibility and coerced me into retaining the lower amount.

“Look, C, it’s fine.  Honestly.  I am not displeased with the idea of only keeping 10 of them.  I don’t use them frequently anyway, and even as I do, I have no doubt that A will give me the next ten when necessary.  I don’t feel treated like a kid or anything like that.  Really.”

The entire discussion may be moot anyway, since the bastarding things have not arrived yet.  C did acknowledge the possibility, as do I, that the whole transaction might be a scam.  I hope not though, because my GP’s surgery is being difficult regarding the prescription of Valium, which is the only thing that calms me down in certain circumstances.

This led C to talk about his silly breathing exercises.  I told him that I didn’t think they were totally useless, but stole a quote from W, and said that they were akin to throwing a bottle of water on a massive Australian bush fire – ie, something that may help in a minuscule way which is totally inadquate.

To my surprise, C’s first reaction was to say that he saw my point; however, he then went on that even if that bottle of water is totally inadequate at putting out the entire fire, it might enable a little bit of the fire to dissapate, in turn enabling further work to be done to put out the rest of the fire.

I hadn’t thought of it like that, although I’m smart enough that I probably should have done.  I do genuinely think that the breathing exercises in and of themselves are mostly wank, especially when one is going really mental.  Nevertheless, for mild anxiety attacks, I suppose they have something of a place before taking actual, tangible measures of self-protection, such as removing yourself from the anxious situation.

There was a lull in the discussion then, a contemplative silence which I eventually broke by admitting to C that I had found the last few weeks in therapy really challenging and frustrating.  I told him that I had found him defensive and un-empathetic, though I acknowledged openly that I hadn’t been much use myself.

I don’t recall his phraseology, but he admitted to his defensiveness, though carefully suggested that it was a mutual thing.  I agreed and said things in my world had been really difficult since Christmas / New Year, so he had gotten to see me at my most mental.

I lamented this further by saying that I wished I had been referred to the psychiatrist before seeing him, as I felt that becoming more stable thanks to medication could have helped me to use therapy in a more productive manner.

He reflected on this, and for the first time in the whole year or so that I’ve known him made (an admittedly oblique) reference to the fact that he sees more people in his line of work than just me.  “I think you’ve made an important point,” he told me, “and in future I’ll consider that, maybe telling GPs that in some cases psychiatric referrals would be better in the first instance than referrals to me.  However, here we are – I hope we have nevertheless been and will be able to do something valuable together.”

I nodded, and told him that just because I felt the referrals were the wrong way round did not mean that I believed our relationship had been valueless.

“And if you’re thinking of the frustrations of last week,” he continued, “I think our discussion hitherto has followed on from that – to that end I don’t think it was actually a wasted session at all.”

I suppose, horrible as it had been, that it had indeed provided some impetus for this session.  Furthermore, as I told him, it is probably a good thing that he sees me in all my moods, even the most mental thereof.

Another brief lull ensued.  Eventually C reminded me that we had, a few weeks ago, discussed the fact that I was reading a self-help book.  He asked how I was getting on with it.

I said that I hadn’t finished it (read: haven’t read any more), but gave him a brief overview of it.  “There’s plenty of wank in it, but the parts that it does well, it does very well.”

He asked again what it was called and I said that its name was Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children.

“Obviously it’s designed for victims of real abuse,” I mused, “but I can make it apply to myself in some ways.”

I regretted these thoughtless words as soon as they were out of my mouth.  At least, I did at a visceral level; I didn’t want him to defend me on the grounds that my ‘abuse’ was real.  Not only would that mean facing that stuff, it would mean having to confront my default position that it was of my own doing.  Intellectually, of course, I know this needs to be addressed.

C said, “you don’t think your abuse was real?  But there was sexual abuse by…”

This was the first and only thing that annoyed me in this session.  He said, “…there was sexual abuse by your…grandfather?  Uncle?”

So you remember that I have the book on fucking schema therapy but you don’t remember the identity of my rapist?  Thanks C.  Thanks very fucking much.

I confirmed that it was the latter.

He asked me how I felt about going into greater detail about this subject over future weeks.  I told him that to say I wanted to do so would be absolutely untrue, but I did say that I believed it was a possible necessity.

He said that it isn’t always necessary to explore such matters down to their very minutiae, the implication being that the memories in some people’s minds are not always unprocessed and unresolved.  “But,” he went on, “I think your instinct is that this is something important, and to that end we probably should look at it more.”

I winced.  I don’t want to do that.  The images haunt my consciousness on a fairly frequent basis as it is.  Detailing it with him, actually going into specifics, is bound to make that worse, even though the idea is to make the memories less vivid and cumbersome in the long-term.  But I’m not stupid; I know I shoudn’t avoid it, much as the temptation to do so is strong.  I told C that I wanted to go ahead with it.

So that is something that will presumably come up tomorrow, especially in light of my little outburst of self-blaming sluttery at the weekend.

I’m not sure to what extent I have conveyed it by detailing the dialogue, but I did get a sense of respect and care from C in this session, something that I had desperately needed from him in the last few weeks.  On the other side of the coin, I did not, for once, enter the session in a confrontational frame of mind, but instead was also extending an olive branch of respect and, insofar as it is possible in the therapeutic sense, friendship.  Our mutual stances paid dividends, I think, and I can only hope that that will continue.

I drove back to my mother’s, as I usually do after seeing C, to find a cross-generational gaggle of McFs (MMcF, Sarah, Suzanne and Marcus) inhabiting the living room.  Occasionally they come to see my mother during the week, as Suzanne (the only driver amongst the females of that dynasty) only works three days a week, and in any case is now on maternity leave as her second kid’s birth is due to take place in the next few weeks.  I am never glad to see them, of course, but I prefer these occasions much more than having to end up in their house, bored out of my fucking skull and having to rely on Paedo of all people for some slightly-better-than-completely-desultory conversation.

Anyway, the interaction went as non-shitly as these things tend to do – for a while.  Eventually one of the McFs brought up the fact that their neighbour is regularly leaving his insolent five year old daughter at the McF’s house, whilst he fucks off to the pub or the gym or something.  Apparently Paedo keeps acquiescing to this, then dumps the kid on Sarah, MrsCMcF or whatever human of the female persuasion happens to be about that day.  Which I suppose is a good thing because it means he’s not fucking raping the child.

Apparently on one day that this happened the wee girl had disobeyed the McFs and went to one of the bedrooms and started jumping on the bed.  S was concerned not just for the child’s welfare had she fallen, but for that of the McFs.  She claims that social services have been involved in the child’s life at times, and was worried that if the girl had fallen and sustained injuries, that the McFs would be assumed to be beating her up or something and get done.

It was my mother that said it.  My mother, who knows – or has chosen not to know – about my history with Paedo.  Fucking bitch.  She said, “you’ll have to stop this practice [the girl coming round to be babysat] altogether.  As well as her hurting herself, what if she starts making stories up about Paedo…you know…?”  I am convinced she shot a sideways glance at me as she said this.  She did not need to complete her sentence to be understood.

Suzanne nodded.  “And mud sticks,” she sighed.

Oh fucking does it really.  Apparently not with my mother.  I told her he raped me.  I told her he regularly touched me in inappropriate ways.  I told her, and she refused to believe me.  So actually yeah, maybe the mud does stick – but it sticks in the sense that she still believes I’m a malicious fucking liar.

Who lies about being sexually abused as a child?!  Who does that?  How fucking dare she not only not believe me and accuse me of lying, but then make unsubtle digs showing me that she hasn’t forgotten my alleged ‘lies’?  How.  Dare.  She?!!!

Yesterday she dragged me to the other aunt still residing in Northern Ireland, the Aunt of Boredom, Maureen.  I was zombified by anti-psychotics, and even if I hadn’t been, the conversation centred around whether or not you should have a fence or a hedge at the perimeter of your property, and thus was insurmountably boring.  After lunch, Maureen was heard to say to my mother than I was being very quiet.  Well, I wonder why that might be, Auntie Dearest.  It is because I couldn’t give a sideways fuck about fences or hedges.  However, my mother was then heard to respond not by saying that I was bored, but instead that she was “very worried” about me.  The two old biddies subsequently closed the kitchen door and started discussing my mentalism in hushed tones.  And then Maureen was allowed to cross-examine me on the finer points of my madness.  I felt like somebody’s lab rat.

Can I just say that my mother’s behaviour of late has been un-fucking-acceptable.  Since before my BPD diagnosis in June, I’ve done a lot of reading on the possible causes of the illness.  I now believe that it was not just the abandonment of me by my father nor the sex abuse that brought the hibernating insanity out in me.  It was, surely, my mother’s frequent invalidation of me too, not to mention some of the borderline-abusive behaviour to which she subjected me during my teens.  She too has obviously been traumatised, in her case by her relationship with my father (as C has recognised).  It seems to me that that has led to difficulty in her interactions with me.  Or so says SI the armchair psychologist.

No parents are perfect, and we are probably all mental in our own idiosyncratic ways.  My mother is a good and decent woman who has had a horrible life.  But I still deserve better than this from her.

I’m not really sure what to say about this session.  I was completely mental in it.  I tried to tell him exactly how I was feeling, but my ability with language epically failed me, and the necessary words failed to flow.  I did keep trying to convey to him that I was experiencing what I thought was akathisia – however, not at any point did I use that word.  Stupid, yes?  Why not just tell the man that I suspected I was afflicted with this phenomenon?

C is not a psychiatrist, so I cannot expect him to be an expert in the finer points of side-effects of psychotropic medication.  Nevertheless, as a mental health professional, I was expecting him to be familiar with this particular thing.  I wanted to hear him say the word ‘akathisia’ of his own accord, and he never did.  I was testing him, I suppose.  In my (rational-ish) view, this is completely preposterous; he may be an insightful psychologist, but he is not a mind-reader, and akathisia is notoriously hard to identify even by psychiatric experts.  However, C himself has defended my tendency to test him in the past.  He seemed to think it acceptable to test him for six months before finally opening up to him about some of my many issues.

And therein lies another thing that has been bugging me.  I say something I consider to be stupid.  I go into a self-hating rant about my perceived stupidity.  C listens, then eventually starts defending me.

The flip side: I say something that I believe to be perfectly reasonable.  C listens, then eventually dismisses what I have said.

Obviously this is a gross generalisation.  Not all strands of conversation result in this kind of reaction, as previous entries on my therapy sessions will attest.  But it is certainly not unknown.

Anyway.  C told me that I have to “take responsibility” for myself.  Hmm.  Does that mean that it was my irresponsibility that led to my complete doolallniess on Thursday?  Surely that is terribly unfair.  I don’t go around consciously choosing to go off my head, do I?  I talked about my desire to kill myself a lot, and said that I genuinely didn’t know if I could continue to control myself in that regard.  Obviously he thinks I can, because clearly he fucking knows what it’s like to exist in my head.

He exemplified by saying that I always turn up to therapy on time, and that when I tried to do myself in a few weeks ago, that I took myself to hospital (though he failed to acknowledge that I only did that when it became apparent that my suicide attempt was not going to be successful).  To that end, he believes that I am perfectly capable of controlling myself.  Oh yes, I may get overwhelmed “from time to time” (!), but I am still in control, or at least I can be if I take some fucking responsibility for myself.

I turn up to therapy every week on time because I am forced out of bloody bed by A or my mother each Thursday morning.  It is a struggle each week, and I can only manage it with others’ help, and I want their help because I had thought – up until recently – that this process was a vehicle full of promise of some semblance of recovery.  Being there is not about whether I am “in control” or “responsible”; it is simply something I have to do.  A bit like eating.  I don’t always want to do it, but something within me compels me regularly towards it, meaning that with help, it can be achieved.  And believe me, in the last few weeks even such simple, everyday things actually do feel like an achievement.

I admitted to C that I didn’t trust myself because I’ve done something pretty daft – bought 100 Diazepam from some dodgy online retailer (yes, it is indeed probably rat poison.  I don’t care, so don’t bother to point it out).  He kept asking me if I was intending to overdose on it.  I said that Diazepam ODs don’t kill people, but he protested that that wasn’t what he’d asked.  I said that no, I was not intending to overdose.  He asked me to guarantee that, and I said I couldn’t guarantee anything – for example, I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be blown to South Africa by a hurricane the next day, but that my perception was that on the balance of probability it wasn’t likely.

Why bother with this line of questioning?  They don’t put borderline freaks in the bin in the UK anyway, probably because they opine that we’re all going to do ourselves in eventually anyway.  I suppose he has to be seen to have asked all this wank so that if I eventually succeed in catching the bus, there will be no culpability at his door.  Oh well.  I suppose one must be grateful for small mercies; the psychiatrist basically told me it was good that my suicidal ideation was so strong.  Means I’m feeling things, apparently.  Yay.

Anyhow, C told me that “his stance” was that I should throw the Diazepam out when they arrive so that I am not tempted to take them all.  I laughed in his face.

“I spent $80 dollars on them,” I sneered.  “That’s what?  Fifty, fifty-five quid?  As if I’m going to bin something that valuable.”

“I know it’s a lot of money,” he started, “but compared to the value of your life…”

Something inside me snapped.  How dare he comment on the value of my life?  How very dare he?  He may know some of my dirty little secrets, and he may know whatever elements of my personality that are portrayed for a measly fifty minutes a week, but that doesn’t mean he knows me, not really.  He doesn’t know what I’m like socially, at home, how I was in work – none of that.  He hardly knows me at all in many ways.  Yet he thinks he can comment on how valuable or otherwise my life is?  No way, mate.

Well-intentioned?  Yes, maybe.  Indeed, probably.  But if he existed in my head, if he were around me like A is, then he would know that as a general rule my life is meaningless and empty…completely worthless.  Ergo, any supposition of its supposed worth from him was always going to serve to irritate.

I shouted at him that he knew nothing of the value of my life.  I don’t remember how exactly he responded but I think he tried to press the point, leading to more incredulity from me.

He said at one point that I had to decide “what I wanted” from this therapy, thereby implying that he feels it is meandering along with no real point, just like I do – but on top of that, the question was loaded with connotations of me failing to pull my weight in the process.  That annoyed me, because I think that despite my difficulties in motivating myself to attend every week, I have managed to do so, as he himself had noted.  Does that not suggest commitment to the therapy?  It was an exasperated question on his part, which did not have any point to my mind.  He, as a trained and, I assume, experienced, psychotherapist, ought to have the answers himself, especially as this was something we have discussed several times.  I want to be able to have as normal a life as possible and not go mental every few fucking seconds.  Does it take a brain surgeon with a secondary qualification in rocket science to understand that?

I find it really rather sad to write such a negative entry about C.  My instinct about him has always been very positive, even when the therapeutic path ahead has seemed foggy and indistinct.  Even when commentators here or people in my offline have been critical of him, I’ve been resolute in my belief that he has been and is the right psychotherapist for me.  I think I still think that, but things have been so murky in the last few weeks that part of me is beginning to question it.  Everything was fine, more or less, until about Christmas.  Is that because I’ve been really mental since Christmas?  Why can’t he deal with that?  Or is it because it was just before Christmas that he announced the end of the therapy?  Why won’t he explain that?

Maybe I do need to take responsibility for myself, but to be quite frank, my inability to do so is one of the many reasons that I’m in therapy in the first place.  So that’s an issue.  Another one is that I am not the only one that should be taking responsibility for me.  I am under NHS care for that reason, and yet none of them want to take that upon themselves, not really.  The only one that I really believe gives half of a damn is my GP, who has consistently been a tower of strength and support.

According to my psychiatrist, I am meant to be grateful that C is willing to treat me at all, because I have personality disorder.  Um…sorry, no.  C is doing what he is fucking paid to do.  I met him several months before I had received a diagnosis anyway, and if my Trust doesn’t have the specialist facilities for PDs, then that is not my problem.  They should provide treatment in line with the philosophy on which the health service was built with the resources they have, and I find it insulting that I am meant to consider myself privileged that they are only half doing so.

And as for what I want out of therapy…well, there’s the obvious general point stated above, and I suppose there must be specifics thereof, about which I’ll have to think presumably, though I’d like to do this in conjunction with him.  But I’d be grateful for your thoughts on this, readers.  What exactly is the point of psychotherapy?  What is it for, what is it meant to achieve? And does it even actually work?

Your comments, as ever, are most welcome and encouraged.  I’m sorry that I’ve been lax in replying to them on other posts of late.  I will try to change that as from this post.

The reason it doesn’t merit a post is not so much because it was a useless session – though in some ways it was – but more because I was dissociated through most of it, as I was stressed, agitated and strongly suicidal.  The whole session, insofar as I remember it, essentially consisted of me repeating, repeating and repeating some more that I wanted to die, that I didn’t care about anything except bringing about my own death and that I took no pleasure in anything in my existence whatsoever.  Another clichéd expression was, “I don’t have a life; I have a mere existence.”

We talked briefly about my name change, which has now taken place (w00t!), and he asked me how life as [my new name] was.  I said, “it’ll take a while to get used to being called that.  As for the life thing, well – that’s not going so well.”

I decided to be honest and just tell him that I wanted to die.  Generally I’m careful about being so direct about it, as I know he can contact a psychiatrist or my GP if he feels a suicide attempt is imminent.  But I was so desperate and miserable that I just admitted to the strength of my suicidal thinking.

I said, “at the minute it’s very much a case of when, not if, I do something.”

He came off with some blather about how some people try to conceive of things after death – a contradiction in terms to someone like me, who doesn’t believe in an afterlife.  He therefore suggested that I didn’t really want to die, because I could apparently still imagine the relief that might come from death.

This annoyed me.  Does he really think I don’t know this crap?  How stupid would you have to be to not understand the distinction between death and thinking about death?  Fuck’s sake.

“That’s exactly the point,” I protested.  “I want that nothing, that permanent unconsciousness.  I don’t want to conceive or perceive anything.  I.  Want.  To.  Not.  Exist.”

I exemplified my point by telling him about an operation a few years back when I was under general anaesthetic.  At one point I was panicking like fuck because I was petrified of being awake during the procedure — then the next thing I knew, I was crying in recovery with a nurse sitting beside me, informing me the operation had gone without incident.

“There was nothing in between,” I said to C.  “That is what I want.  Permanently.”

“But you awoke from that nothing,” he went on.

So?  The point is I want the nothing to be permanent.  Having been through that experience, I now know the nothing, or rather I don’t, because it isn’t anything.  That’s the beauty of it.  I would genuinely welcome it.

I berated myself for not having had the balls to properly attempt suicide as yet.  I reminded him that I was a frequent visitor to a pro-choice suicide newsgroup, and to that end, that I knew exactly how to complete the act.  I said I kept imagine my body flying off some of the highrise flats near where A and I live.  I even suggested I had images of me with a bag over my head, a connection to helium tank being hooked up to it.

At one point I must have gone really mental, because he kept authoritatively calling my name to try and break into my consciousness.  I remember sitting with my hands around my head, then pulling my hair to try and reorientate myself.  C asked me to join him in some breathing exercises; for the most part I think these are shit, but I didn’t have the will to protest.

He asked if I ever tried these exercises at home.  I lied and said that I did, but added – truthfully, I believe – that the scalpel was much more effective at ‘grounding’ me.  I think he responded about the usual crap – about how that was true, but that it was self-destructive – but I don’t remember clearly.

It became apparent to me at one point that he was under the impression that I wanted him to do something about my being actively suicidal.  I can’t remember what it was that he said, but he must have made some inference to this effect.  I therefore responded by yelling at him that I didn’t want anything from him, I just wanted to be dead.

C said, “but you do want something from me – you want me to help you and not to abandon you…”

“I don’t care!  I don’t care anymore!  I just want to die.  I don’t have the energy to fight that battle.”

“It’s not a battle,” he alleged.

Oh really?  Why did I have to write to two advocacy groups and your Chief Executive, then?  Why are you still telling me my psychotherapy is definitely ending in a few months?  Why is the psychiatrist going around telling me to get some perspective?  Sounds like a battle of wills to me.

Eventually, he said to me, “I can’t be with you all the time [oh really?!  After 40 odd weeks of seeing you for only 50 minutes once a week, I would never have worked that out, C.], so you have to take care of yourself between these sessions.  Do you remember we discussed ways that you can care of yourself?”

“I don’t want to take care of myself, C, I want to die.”

“No,” he said.  “Who will you contact if you feel you are in danger?”

“Not the Samaritans nor Lifeline, as you have previously encouraged.  Aside from the fact that they’re not much help, however well-intentioned they may be, I’m absolutely petrified of using the phone.”

“OK.  But you need to contact someone, or get yourself out of danger.”

“By sitting in casualty for another 12 hours?” I cried, incredulously.

“Yes!” he said, raising his voice slightly and taking an authoritative tone.

This pissed me off, and I heard myself exclaiming, “fuck that!  That’s an advertisement for suicide, if ever I saw one!”

He had no response to that.  Hahaha.

When I knew it was near the end of the session, I went into my usual self-critical mode.  I said something like, “grow up, you stupid fucking brat,” in reference to myself.

C opined that this exemplified my thinking in extremes (more splitting); either I am very “concerned” for myself [not sure about that], or I am very angry with myself.  Well done, C.  You are truly the most insightful human being I’ve ever known, my friend.  (Actually, quite often he is.  But this was not one of his most outstanding moments).

I explained to him that that wasn’t necessarily the case.  “I feel that I have to convince you that I’m not going to walk out of here and top myself,” I told him.

I realise, on reflection, that this statement was pregnant with ambiguity.  I had not intended it that way; what I meant was I wanted to convince him of something that I believed to be untrue, so as (a) he didn’t phone the bin and (b) he didn’t worry about me (as if he fucking would anyway).

However, what I now think he understood from the comment was that I genuinely wasn’t going to walk out of his office and do myself in, and that I wanted him to know this.

Obviously as you can see I haven’t topped myself, but every second of this week has been a fight against the urge.  In part I’ve managed to resist it because A had to have a minor operation on his eye this week, which has needed a lot of follow-up care from me*.  But when he is recovered I am not sure for how much longer I can fight this.  As I say, it strongly feels like when, not if.

PS.  * This has just reminded me of another conversation between C and I in this session.  I told him that I was worried about A’s operation, as if they screwed it up, then he could possibly end up completely blind.  He has no sight at all in his left eye thanks to a botched operation when he was a baby (even though this recent procedure was on his left eye also, I managed to convince myself that they could easily fuck up the right one while they were at it).

I told C this.  He said, to my considerable chagrin, “do you think this treatment [ie. my psychotherapy] is botched?”

I said that I had been commenting on one of my boyfriend’s experiences of the NHS and that I could not see how that related to my own in the least.  I defended my use of the word ‘botched’ on the grounds that that was exactly what it was; the anaesthetist had been working for something like 18 hours and, exhausted, administered an overdose of anaesthetic to A’s eye.  The only way to save any of his sight was to sever his optic nerve to his left eye.  Sounds like a botched operation to me.

C said that I had every right to be angry and concerned about this in itself, but he wondered if that didn’t actually translate to my own necessary treatment.

For fuck’s sake.  Why does everything I happen to bring up have to come back to my relationship with C?  As I said to him, I understand the principles that underpin psychodynamic therapy, and am fine with that for the most part, but honestly – surely you can have some independent thoughts that are just there for their own sake?!  Thoughts that are not connected to the relationship, or transference, or your childhood experiences?  Surely that must be at least theoretically possible?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Fuck off, psychology

It is so difficult – impossible, I believe – to describe this thing of complete awfulness in any coherent or accessible way, but let me try.

I can’t stay still – I am experiencing severe anatomical discomfort, from the very core of my physical being.  I keep trying to move to combat it, but it never quite seems to work; the discomfort simply moves, or wasn’t where I thought it was.  Breathing is difficult, as if perpetually on the verge of a full-blown panic attack.  I am incredibly anxious and am almost completely consumed by a sense of terrified foreboding and/or danger.  Even that feels physical, which I know doesn’t make any sense, but I don’t know how else to put it.  Concentrating on this post (and anything else) is profoundly difficult.  My mind is racing – the pressure inside it again feels physical.  It literally feels like it is going to explode and on top of that, I keep feeling ‘zaps’ in my head (and elsewhere at times), a bit like if I had missed a dose of Venlafaxine, only much worse in severity.  I want to scream and shout and run around and bang my head off the wall and stab myself and cry.  Earlier I considered going to the petrol station, with a view to purchasing flammable liquid to set myself on fire.  Extreme perhaps (well…there’s no ‘perhaps’ about it, I suppose), but in a way I cannot explain, even the indescribable agony of burning (normally one of my room-101 style fears) seems preferable to the indescribable somethingness of this.

In a sense this could be described as a mixed episode with anxiety or something.  It is a bit like that, I suppose, except that it’s more.  So much horribly more.  It effects every conceivable part of me; mentally, physically, everything.  It burns through me, every vein, every nerve – it feels like much more than a mixed episode (as if they were not unpleasant enough), but in a way that has a very elusive and unobtainable description.

The aforelinked Wikipedia article on akathisia quotes some bloke called Jack Henry Abbot, who describes this horrific state much more eloquently than I have or can:

These drugs, in this family, do not calm or sedate the nerves. They attack. They attack from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain … The muscles of your jawbone go berserk, so that you bite the inside of your mouth and your jaw locks and the pain throbs. For hours every day this will occur. Your spinal column stiffens so that you can hardly move your head or your neck and sometimes your back bends like a bow and you cannot stand up. The pain grinds into your fiber … You ache with restlessness, so you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you; you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down you go in pain you cannot locate, in such wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed, because you cannot get relief even in breathing.

(c) Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast, 1981

That about sums it up, and yet it doesn’t, because it can’t be summed up.  There are no words of magnitude great enough to describe this, or so it presently feels to me.

I could stop taking the anti-psychotics, but what if ‘They’ start being all volatile again?  What if the gnome shows up and turns out to be some sort of manifestation of the evil ‘They’, or some equally belligerent being?  I am utterly terrified of what could happen if the hallucinations are allowed to continue to develop, and to that end I am fairly sure that I will just keep taking the tablets – though I may have to raid my stockpiles of Diazepam and Zopiclone to help me from completely losing the plot (as if it wasn’t lost enough!).

It is possible that it will pass (isn’t it?) – 300mg of Quetiapine, whilst not a terribly high dose overall, is quite high for a starting dose.  Maybe my body will inure itself to the drug.  I do hope so, because this is unbearable.

I’ve been incredibly whingy on this blog of late.  I’m sorry.  I suck.  On the bright side, I might have found myself a group of suitable psychoanalytic therapists to help to try and make me sane when C condemns me to my dubious fate in a few months.  But it’s hard to think beyond right now at the minute.  I’m sorry.

I had been dreading this session, being as it was the first meeting since my woefully failed suicide attempt. I had catastophised the whole thing to death, and was fully expecting to hear some shite about how trying to do myself in “broke the therapeutic contract” (not that he’s ever discussed suicide in that context) or that I was too unstable for him to treat, or some such nonsense. Luckily, I got none of that. If anything, he seemed almost understanding, if desirous of pressing some issues.

The first ten or so minutes were even more of a waste of time than they normally are. I was determined I was not going to be the one that brought up the tale of my foray to Accident and Emergency, and it seemed that C was similarly determined. I stared out the window; he stared at the floor. I knew he knew where this was going, and he knew I knew. What’s more, he knew I knew he knew, yet no one wanted to make the first move. What a silly, pointless little dance of idiosyncratic decorum.

But! Eventually he cracked. Hahaha! Hahahahahaha!!! He told me he’d received a call from Psychiatic Liasion Woman, which led to a few muttered but inconsequential words from both of us, and then he started quite firmly (but simultaneously gently, if that makes any sense) pressing me on what I had done and why I had done it. I’m not going to dwell on it too much, as it was mostly all discussed in the post where I detailed my suicide attempt.

One thing of interest was that I became slightly euphoric when asked to recall the sensation of watching the blood flowing from my wrist. I expected C to be kind of freaked out by this odd manifestation of delight, but he actually seemed to understand it. He appeared to ‘get’ the idea that I felt calmed and reassured by the temptation of death, which when I think about it I suppose makes sense, as I’ve heard of a lot of people react like this to having made the decision to die, and are they not the very people he is likely to encounter in his line of work? However, C was interested in my reaction to the blood and injury, but his main concern was for why I had done what I had done.

Although he didn’t say it explicitly, I reckoned he was trying to get me to say that the nightmare of the previous week’s session had led me to it, and in fact I ended up telling him not to “flatter himself”, a comment which I think mildly irritated him (excellent!). I tried to drive home the point that I’ve been in a downward spiral for a while (since before Christmas), and that my wrist-slitting was based on a cumulative effect of recent months’ depression. But he kept on and on about why it had happened on the Friday specifically.

Why did it? His complete wankery the previous day (get in touch if you’re interested in the password) was probably a trigger point, I will admit it – however, he really is flattering himself if he thinks it was the only factor. I just wanted to die. It all got too much, and it happened to be last Friday night. It’s as simple as that.

He said, “do you remember saying last week that you didn’t know what you had to do to make us [him, Psychiatry, other such cunts] realise how bad things were for you?”

Fuck. I had forgotten about that, but say it I did. So now I’ve been branded an attention-seeker, have I? I asked him.

Of course he refused to answer the question, instead turning it around into, “were you given the impression that you were thought to be a time-waster?”

I don’t know. Isn’t that what all the mental health professionals think of people with a diagnosis of BPD? C may go about saying it is me as opposed to BPD that comes into his office each Thursday, but does he really believe that?

The rest of the discussion ended up focusing on the previous week’s session, which sounds like it was a load of navel-gazing rubbish, but in reality I think it tackled and possibly even resolved some stuff that was festering. I was honest with him for once and told him that I had found him hostile and confrontational in the session in question, and that that was offensive to me.

To my surprise and gratification, C replied, “I can see how you could have thought that.” His tone was slightly regretful, I thought, as if he realised he’d fucked up a bit. This pseudo-admission of guilt is probably the closest I am likely to get to an apology from him.

Realising he was taking some responsibility for the preceding session’s abject failure, I ranted at him for accusing me of alienating people when I tried to assert myself. “I don’t think that’s fair at all,” I protested.

He nodded, apparently accepting this was something of a faux pas. “You think I’m guilty of a huge generalisation?” he asked.

“Yes. I don’t take well to people making unfounded blanket statements about me.”

Without missing a beat, Dr Smartarse said, “yet you’re the first one to make them about yourself.”

Bad-um-tish! 10 points to C. Quite right. I was uttery backed into a corner by this and didn’t have a half decent response, so instead of attempting to cultivate one, I ended up laughing, oddly impressed by his having caught me out.

“You’ve got me there,” I conceeded.

C said that he wasn’t trying to “outsmart” me, which I didn’t believe he was as it happens. He had simply achieved a state of outsmarting without any conscious effort to do so.

He said that I had left his room on the verge of tears the previous week, which I don’t remember particularly, but I didn’t argue with him. I said that I had been intensely frustrated by his insistence on harping on my reaction to his decision to end therapy after another 20ish weeks. I told him that I thought such repetitive discussion was largely pointless and just avoided all the issues for which I am in psychotherapy in the first place.

He insisted that the discussion in question wasn’t pointless, at which point I chimed back in saying that I accepted it was not completely without reason, but that I thought his “complete fixation” on the issue was unhelpful.

To my astonishment, C basically acknowledged that he could see why I perceived him as fixated with exploring this issue. However, he stated that he was still keen to explore it as whether I like it or not, it is an issue that has to be addressed.

I decided to make the most of the opportunity and tell him of another frustration. “I’m pissed off that you all seem convinced that my concerns surrounding the end of therapy are all about transference issues,” I sighed. “I’m not saying that’s not an issue – but it is certainly not the only one.”

“I don’t think I’ve implied that,” C replied. “I think there’s a lot more to it than that.”

“OK, well, I’m glad you do, but the psychiatrist apparently doesn’t think so,” I said, in reference to a discussion I’d had during my appointment with NewVCB the preceding day.

He tried to assure me that he does not think that. He agrees that transference is certainly something that is in play here, and that that needs to be explored, but that I had a number of completely rational reasons to be angry and frustrated. I’m glad someone fucking realises it, though of course his reticence to do anything about it is another reason to make me mad.

Noticing the time, C decided to change the subject, stating that this was an issue that we may have to come back to. He asked me how I’d gotten on with the new psychiatrist.

I responded by telling him about the medication change.

That was only part of what he was fishing for, of course. He wanted to know what I actually thought of the woman.

Rather than give him a straight answer, I said, “well, you’re obviously friends, so I could hardly slag her off if I didn’t like her, could I?”

He said, “you said you didn’t like VCB.”

As it happens, what I actually said was that I “wasn’t VCB’s biggest fan”, but I decided against splitting hairs.

“Yes,” I admitted, “but it was obvious to me that you didn’t know her especially well.” I wonder what he thinks of the fact that I have made these pathetic litte observations.

He nodded (I knew I was right), then I decided to give him what he wanted and admit that I thought my relationship with NewVCB was potentially “more workable” than that which I had shared with her predecessor. This sated him – or maybe it was the fact that the session was over and he could get rid of me for another week, as out came that old line of “we’ll have to leave things there”.

I got my bag together to leave, but he stopped me and said, “look, on this issue of ‘flogging a dead horse’ [which is what I had consistently called his fixation on the end of therapy]. I accept what you’re saying, but we can’t just ignore it you know.”

“I appreciate that,” I acknowledged. “I just don’t think it can be all we discuss for the next 20 weeks. All I’m asking is for you to meet me half-way. Please?”

He contorted his face in a gesture of acceptance, and finally nodded. And that was that for another precious, time-limited week.

Well, I’m sorry this was such a shite write-up of this session, but it’s the best I can do whilst writing from the metaphorical bottom of a pit.

I have had a fixation with death and dying from as far back as I can remember.  My mother was disturbed when as a four year old, I told her I wanted to be a forensic pathologist when I grew up (seriously).  Although I didn’t fulfill that dream, I did academically pursue what I thought would be a related discipline, the most interesting aspects of it being those that discussed death – including, indeed, a quite in-depth exploration of suicide in a sociology class.

I cannot say whether or not I actually wanted to die myself when I was four, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

It was certainly the case in my later childhood.  I first tried to kill myself when I was about nine or 10.  I have a very vivid memory of it; I tried to strangle myself behind the closed door of my bedroom.  Clearly this was a ludicrous attempt, but an attempt it was nevertheless, and I remember the despair and frustration I felt when it became evident that my actions would fail to bring about their intended result.  I was distraught at the prospect of my life continuing.

Since then, I’ve tried walking in front of vehicles, taken two overdoses (which saw me hospitalised), tried to slit my wrists*, ankles and elbows, hanging myself and suffocation.  I think that’s it.  (* Including, of course, the incident from Friday).

I know what you’re thinking.  Anyone who’s serious about committing suicide wouldn’t have such a number of silly attempts under their belt; they plan their death, and that’s that.  Fair enough.  I can only defend myself by saying that in most of the cases, the most serious ones at least, the desire to not exist felt serious.  The most serious attempt was a massive overdose when I was about 16, which did nearly kill me.  A couple of these attempts were gestures or based on circumstantial factors, I admit – but mostly they weren’t.

When I wasn’t actually actively trying to top myself, I was probably thinking about it.  I can honestly say that I’ve almost certainly fantasised and/or ‘planned’ my suicide for every day of my adult and adolescent life, and a lot of my late childhood too.  This even includes periods of mania and contentment.

In short, this is how I perceive normality – to all intents and purposes, I have never known anything else.  I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to imagine what it’s like to not feel suididal, and it’s just beyond the bounds of my imagination.

Well, there’s more proof – as if it were needed – that I’m a headbin

Tomorrow is my first appointment with NewVCB, about which I will blog as soon as I can.  I don’t know whether to be amused or incredulous by the fact that my first appointment with this woman will be in the wake of a suicide attempt.  And then I have to face C on Thursday, and that will not be fun in the least.  Alas.