Psychology vs Therapy, and Being Burgled (AGAIN)

 C, Life, Paul, Psychotherapy, Recovery, Traumatic Stuff, Triggers  24 Responses »
Jun 292011
 

It seems I have ignited a mini-debate (very, very mini) in the comments thread of my last post for apparently having been less than complimentary about C in the post pertaining to same (I wasn’t particularly nice about him, granted, but I didn’t think I’d said anything incendiary either). Anyway, this was intended to be a comment, but unsurprisingly it became rather long, and anyway, I have NEWS. So here is a post instead. Lucky you!

Right, it’s like this. I do not hate C (A does; I don’t). When compared to the woeful CBT that I went through, or my experiences of a couple of dreadful assessors and nurses and twatbags I saw prior to him, he was a therapeutic fucking genius. Even A acknowledged on a couple of occasions (most notably this. Perhaps this to some extent too?) that he (C) was obviously intelligent, and even dared to wonder briefly if “he actually [did] know what he [was] talking about”. Believe me, coming from A in relation to C, this is a compliment.

However, if you’ve read this blog for a long time, you’ll know that it wasn’t as simple as that.

Surely the contemptuous tone in which I frequently wrote about him cannot have gone unnoticed? I used to have this pathetic worry in terms of this blog than the only phrase I ever used in my session reviews was “I laughed in his face,” because really, I seemed to write it every other week. When C and I had a good session, I admitted that and indubitably felt smug and self-satisfied about it, which I’m sure came across in the narrative (check out this gushing, for example). When we had a bad one, most of the time I would vituperate against him – but simultaneously I acknowledged the role the transference was playing in my ire.

And this is the crux of everything really; not only did C allow the development of a very strong parental/fraternal transference, he encouraged and fostered it. OK, it was psychodynamic therapy; transference is an issue therein, and that is fine. I understand the process, and I’m OK with the reality that that one has to deal with these feelings. What C abjectly failed to do was do, though, and what is a fundamental imperative in analysis-derived therapy, was to deal with the phenomenon. Therapeutic literature is pretty clear on this issue: a lot can be learned from transferential feelings and behaviour, but the work cannot be considered completed until the issues resultant from this type of work are resolved.

You must surely also recall all the goings-round in circles, the sitting pointlessly looking at each other, saying nothing (which happened with Paul too, to be fair, but those silences seemed to have more ‘contained’ ((in the non-analytical sense)) in them), the constant repetitive remarks from both parties. Feel free to reread the posts if you think I’m mis-representing any of this.

What I only occasionally detailed was how I’d often spend Thursdays (a) in tears – not because of the content of a session, but because of what C had said or how he behaved; (b) waking up from a mini-dissociative fugue as a result of that morning’s therapy; (c) having a bitching session about C with A over coffee; or, most commonly, (d) some combination of all (a) to (c) inclusive.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Paul is a worshipful therapeutic guru to whom you need to bow or I’ll shoot you in the face, but I will tell you that none of that ever happened when he was treating me. Well, that’s a lie – there were occasional tears (this awfulness springs mind), but the disparity between him and C is ably demonstrated by the fact that those tears were almost exclusively because of the content that the appointment had brought up, not because of Paul doing something to hurt me or otherwise fuck me off.

I remember some of the comments I got from my readers when I wrote certain sessions. “Sorry, but ‘C’ stands for ‘cunt’,” stands out. “Just change his name to ‘Fucker’,” was also quite nice. I also had another therapist challenge his competence a couple of times (though in fairness, the said person and I disagree on the various models of therapy). Often I disagreed with everything that was said against him, and in many of the cases I still do. The point I’m making, though, is that my weariness of the man has not been something that new, not something sculpted by my relationship with Paul; there were always concerns there, and I wasn’t the only one to notice them either.

Of course, I was always encouraged by my interactions with him, even where they were negative ones. In a perverse sort of fashion, my willingness to scream abuse into his face was a sort of backhanded compliment; it meant I was comfortable showing my entire self with him (something I’ve still not done with Paul, though I have rarely felt the desire to). However, my optimism was based on my expectation that my treatment with C would last until it had yielded tangible results (and C’s lie in my discharge letter to NewVCB that “mindful breathing ha[d] had some impact” does most assuredly not count as a “tangible result”). And so that optimism was justifiably destroyed.

Someone said on the aforementioned mini-debate that my relationship with C only became toxic when the end of therapy was announced. This I agree with, despite my acknowledgement that the relationship was never properly ideal, and indeed herein lies my point about the hope that I’d formerly held vis a vis my relationship with him. The thing is, although I obviously never expected my time with him to be permanent (surely the point of therapy is to eventually not need therapy any more?!), I was given to believe that I would be treated until I was better – better, as far as I’m concerned, being defined as being functional in the real world (ie. with work, strangers, phones, leaving the house alone, yadda). The literature and even the relevant guidelines from the odious NICE are, again, clear on this. Given that I was at the time diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, the Northern Ireland PD Strategy (essentially a rip-off of NICE’s PD recommendations) also applied. None of this was adhered to.

Partly it wasn’t his fault. Indeed, mainly it wasn’t his fault. It’s the pathetic bureaucracy and evil postcode lottery that is seen so disgustingly frequently across NHS mental health services, piles of shite that they are. C, however, kept alternating between saying “I support your complaint” and then whinging that it actually was he, not Mr Director-Person nor any of his minions, that had decided on the ending point. Granted, C had to take a decision within a certain framework and context, but his position on that decision and on my indignant response to it alternated wildly between Point A and Point Z.

Another issue is that he never seemed to take serious my (in my view entirely legitimate) concerns about how the end of therapy was likely to affect me, psychologically speaking. Reading through my notes has been particularly insightful in this particular regard; for example, each time I used the word re-traumatisation in session, he put the term in scare quotes, as if to suggest that the premature cessation of the therapy could not possibly really result in further trauma. But believe me – it did.

On the point of trauma, when I told him that NewVCB agreed that I had Complex PTSD, C was highly critical of the diagnosis, proclaiming that it was “controversial” (see?! I can do scare quotes too!). Possibly so – it’s not included in either the ICD nor the DSM, after all. However, it is used by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and anyway – Zen Buddhist crusader C had already stated that he was not a slave to “labels”, so surely a less “label”-ly, more personally appropriate diagnosis is superior to that of “a high functioning borderline personality”. Oh, wait a minute. It was…!dun dun dun!…C that described me as having “a high functioning borderline personality”. (Incidentally, he was incorrect. Because I was incapable of functioning in society, my intellect should not have come into his judgement; in reality, I was pretty low functioning at the time. So there).

So. Am I guilty of revisionism? Am I wearing the opposite of rose-tinted glasses (shit-stained glasses, perhaps?)? I don’t particularly think so, though one thing I accept is that now having had the services of a truly excellent therapist, I might be more open to seeing where C was at fault. However, well before I met Paul, I noted on this blog that I was, in fact, “better off without” C. I think what the key difference in my transgression to “meh, screw you” has been is simply not being in a complete thrall to the man any more. I can clearly see where he made dubious judgements, but by the same token I can also acknowledge that he did do some good things for me.

Perhaps I’m being pedantic, but the long and the short of things is simply this. We did some good work, some times. The work with C did, in fairness, gave me some sort of meaningful foundation on which I could later build with a proper trauma therapist like Paul. C is an extremely insightful man, and he’s actually a wonderful psychologist. I’m just not overly convinced that he is a wonderful clinical psychologist [sponsored link] (ie. therapist). I’m not saying that he wasn’t better in that capacity than those I’d seen before, or that he isn’t better than many therapists who dine on a menu of tiresome, generic behavioural techniques. He was, and he is. But then, being hit in the face with a tennis ball would be better for me than any of that.

He’s a nice enough man. I believe that he generally wanted the best for me, and we certainly ‘gelled’ together; there were times of humour and there was usually some rapport. But, other than allow me to trust (and then distrust) him, thus giving me scope for further psychotherapeutic exploration, he didn’t actually do much. He didn’t do much other than hurt me, that is, surely the last thing that should be one’s enduring memory of a competent therapist.

—

OK, news. Yes. I was sitting minding my own business on Friday afternoon, when the menagerie in the kitchen starting behaving oddly. Mr Cat was so scared of something that he stopped eating his food. This is the domestic-tale equivalent of a super-massive blackhole sucking an entire universe into itself. It simply doesn’t happen more than once in a lifetime.

Ms Cat followed suit. This means that the super-massive blackhole had just sucked in a second entire universe (I’m a proponent of M Theory).

In genuine shock, I staggered to the kitchen. Nothing was out of the ordinary, though there were some weird noises in the back alleyway – something I thought nothing of, really, because there are a few things out the back that someone could have been working on. I went back to the living room and tried to coax the cowardly felines back to their dinner.

They refused to co-operate, which is much more in keeping with their general behaviour. I shrugged, and sat down to read something or other.

Something must have caught my attention out of the corner of my eye because I looked up without thinking, and there – looking in my fucking living room window – was some hoodied spide. Looking in. Talking on his fucking mobile, as if to relay the details of what he could see in my fucking house. He fled as soon as he saw me.

Rather than go after the cunt, I stared out the window in a sort of stupefied apprehension for a minute, then sent a message to A and asked him to come home. Then I went out the back, wondering perhaps if the cacophony that had scared the cats was perhaps connected. Our gate-door into the alley was open, so yeah. A correlation looked likely.

Fucking cunts. We were burgled in 2005 and lost quite a bit of stuff; as a result, and as a pre-requisite of a renewed insurance claim, we installed an expensive but sophisticated alarm system. These cheeky bastards were not only trying to break in despite this, they had the temerity not to check whether or not anyone was in!

Long story short (well, -ish), A came home, we secured things as best we could and eventually went out anyway. You can’t be a prisoner in your own home; we’d have to have gone out sooner or later, so why not make it sooner?

We went out for a bit on Saturday too. All was fine, and I wondered had I perhaps misinterpreted Friday’s events.

Cut to Sunday. A third universe was then destroyed by our friendly super-massive black hole because A and I decided to leave the house. This is almost unprecedented. A and I loathe Sundays so much that we almost always lock ourselves away in the house, trying to pretend that the rest of the world does not exist. This week, though, we decided to go out for a couple of pints and a meal. I think A was even more overwhelmed by Sunday-itis than normal, so yearned to ‘shake things up’ a bit. We left the house about 4.30pm.

At about 6.30pm, my mother called me on my mobile. Had I been in the house, I would almost certainly have ignored her, but something must have compelled me to answer on this occasion. She asked where I was; I told her, and asked why she cared.

“The alarm people called me,” she said. “They’ve been trying to get hold of you. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s a confirmed intruder.”

We got a taxi straight back, and found the cops awaiting our arrival. They were pleasant but useless. A SOC officer came out a bit later, and although he took prints, apparently the quality of them was utter shite. Not that I’d have expected to see the wee shites brought to justice, anyway.

The following was stolen:

  • A’s Mac Mini
  • My iPod
  • Several video games

Mercifully, the cunts had spotted neither the Kindle nor the satnav, and Friday’s occurences had scared me enough into hiding the two laptops. I will always be grateful for that, at least.

Of course, the theft is only a secondary issue. What sucks most about burglary is the breaking and entering element of it. Knowing that someone you didn’t invite has been in your private property. That they have, sometimes intimately, examined your things and made judgements on their material worth without a thought towards sentimental value. Simply that someone stood there, in your home, your safe place, looking.

And this is particularly exacerbated in this case because they had been watching us. They knew I normally left the house on Friday afternoons to meet A (I was running late the other day). Then they knew that we’d uncharacteristically gone out on Sunday. They were watching us.

It almost makes my ongoing sort-of delusion (legitimate belief) that GCHQ read this blog look tame. At least they’re not looking in my window at me (or maybe they are? Perhaps the spide was one of them. He donned a superlative disguise, if so).

Our living room door and the alley door-gate-thing need to be replaced, and frankly – since this is the second time in little over half-a-decade – we intend to move now. That, of course, will incur massive expenses, both in terms of doing our present house up to the extent where it won’t completely require potential buyers/renters to be fumigated afterwards and, of course, as regards getting and furnishing a new place.

All this when I am £950 overdrawn. Our plan had always been to move, but the plan was that this would take place when I was back at work. Now, we’re hoping to make it by the end of this year. I will help A with a new mortgage in whatever way I can, but it won’t be particularly significant until I have substantially more money coming in than I currently do. Still, I’m just grateful that this happened now, when at least I see working again as feasible in the medium-term, rather than, say, six months ago where it was distinctly a future-aspiration.

Practicalities aside, I have obviously been affected by this incident. On Sunday itself, A and I were both…I don’t know, numb with shock? Too confused and fed up to feel? For a while, it even seemed that it had hit A worse than me. My mood has been slowly dipping for about a week now, so I didn’t really notice any reactive change in it after the burglary…until, that is, last night.

A’s step-mother is a friend of a man who’s a very competent DIY maestro. A spoke to him yesterday evening about the replacement of the two doors, as well as improvements to the general look and maintenance of the house, and he is coming round on Friday morning.

A reports him to be “a lovely fella”, but as soon as I heard that I was to be his host, my body went mental at me. Shaking, breathlessness, nausea – you know the drill. Psychologically, my mind went into a spin of utter terror. This is entirely and completely ridiculous. I have met this man before, albeit briefly, and there is nothing to fear. Indeed, after greeting him, I can in all probability loll about upstairs reading A Song of Fire and Ice. But my bloody head won’t listen to its own rationalisations.

However, the worse was to come. In preparation for the DIY bloke, A started tidying the house. Long-term readers may recall how I reacted to similar before. Well, I reacted in the same fashion again. Poor A; as he rightly said, this needed to be done, but here I was – this stupid, childish, pathetic ball of quivering madness. Who in the name of all that is holy has a phobia of fucking tidying up, for fuck’s sake? Furthermore, who has a phobia of tidying up in the wake of a legitimate fear, namely burglary? I shock even myself.

But there’s something there. There are faint, peripheral stabs of familiarity in the fear. As with the last time this happened, I haven’t worked out exactly what they allude to as yet, and perhaps I never will. But it’s a ridiculous, completely impractical disability; I can’t go on living with it.

Every cloud, though. Although I took Zopiclone last night (as both of us had done in the immediate wake of the break-in on Sunday), otherwise I survived the panic attack without drugs. This, I think, is A Good Thing. Moreover, had the burglary happened in February or March when I was completely off my rocker, this set-back – and it is a set-back; I’m just not sure to what extent yet – would almost certainly have seen an express delivery of helium arriving at our door.

But for now, we’re OK. Both of us. We got through the last break-in, in which much more was stolen (though was, in a sense, less disturbing; we didn’t have the ‘protection’ of the alarm then), and we’ll get through this one too. If we do move as planned, the next six months will be some of the most stressful of my life, but I have the support of NewVCB and Christine, Paul again at some point, and – more importantly – my mother, our friends and of course the lovely A himself. I think my prognosis over the aforementioned timeframe is dubious to say the least, but it could certainly be a lot worse.

Christine tomorrow, though unless there’s anything outstandingly amazing about it, I shan’t write about it until another time (if at all). At least she can help deal with the fall-out of the burglary in some fashion…or such is my hope, anyhow.

Also, if you’re about tomorrow, don’t forget that I’m hosting this month’s Blog Carnival of Mental Health. See you there :D

Anyway. That was my news. You can go to bed now.

PS. Thank you so much to Counselor Careers for awarding Confessions, in common with several of my favourite mental health journals, a Top 50 Most Inspiring Mental Health Blog award! I still don’t get why this blog is deemed worthy of awards and recognitions, but I do sincerely appreciate that it is. So thank you, very much indeed.

Now, off to bed with you! :)

—

EDIT (Thursday 30 June): I corrected all the mistakes above, then the computer crashed on me and WordPress apparently failed to take an autosave. I cannot be arsed to go through this tripe again, so you’ll just have to live with the multitude of errors. Sorry.

marketing

Equality and The ‘Opposite’ of Narcissism – Paul: Week 15

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff, Triggers  31 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

This week is going to be the fullest mentalist-related week I’ve had since September 2009. Today, I saw Paul (week 18). Tomorrow, I will meet my newly allocated CPN Christine for the first time. On Wednesday, apparently, I have to see NewVCB. I should have booked Lovely GP in on Thursday to complete the fucking set.

Someone called my mobile at 10am today. I ignored it, as I always do, especially given that it was from an ‘unknown’ number. I waited for the caller to leave a voice message, but same was not forthcoming. When they (for I presumed it to be the same person) rang again about 11.30am, I once again ignored it. This time, however, a message was left.

It was a secretary from the CMHT. She didn’t say what she wanted – only that she would like me to call her back. Thinking the CPN was off with ebola or something, I was happy to do so for once in my sorry life. I think that, in theory, Christine ought to be useful, but I’m still terrified of meeting her.

Anyhow, no such luck. The call had nothing to do with Christine; it was a request for me to come and see NewVCB on Wednesday morning.

This is annoying in a couple of ways. Firstly, there’s enough professional madness this week to do me for about seven years, especially when coupled with the stress of someone new in the equation. Secondly, though, I am irritated by NewVCB’s general behaviour. When I last saw her, she wanted to see me again in a fortnight (which, given the circumstances of the time, seemed reasonable). Then I received the usual shite letter telling me my next appointment with her was on 6 April – about a month after our previous meeting. That was unacceptable, but nonetheless, I let it pass.

Now this. It’s as if she thinks she can just summon me whenever she gets a cancellation, or she remembers that I exist (fortunately for her, of course, though perhaps less fortunately for me, I do exist. If I had done myself in after her failure to see me as agreed, then she might have found herself in a spot of bother).

Anyway. I’ll live, more’s the pity (actually, I’m in a fair frame of mind at the minute, but you know what I mean). A’s boss, Trevor, has very kindly allowed him time off to come to the CPN meeting with me tomorrow, as I’m terrified of going alone to engage with this new, unfamiliar quantity of humanity. Ordinarily, I’d have taken my mother, but she’s fucked herself off on a continental golfing holiday until Saturday. Fortunately for me, Trevor has a son who is mental, so he understands the difficult position that A is in.

This post was not, however, intended to be a general rant/update. It was intended to be about Paul. I shall try to get to the point.

My intention is to employ (relative) brevity in this post. Bear in mind that brevity, for me, is 3,000 sodding words per therapy session. So if it seems long, then let’s just hope that it’s not really ;)

This session was characterised quite frequently by silence. I found this to be an unproductive use of both my time and Paul’s, and by the end of the session was apologising for it. To quote him, though, I was forcibly silent as a child, so apparently this is permissible. In any case, there was still a lot of relevant interaction.

Themes:

  • I told him about how unbearably, inexorably depressed I was, and had been. This session was in the wake of all that fuck with the Jobs and Benefits bellends, and shortly prior to my proposed dalliance with a helium canister.
  • I also told him briefly about my medical notes, and about how I allegedly have “very strong narcissistic traits”. Paul said that he felt that I was the opposite of a narcissist, an analysis with which I didn’t agree. I said that I was self-obsessed and fantastical, and that I basically told (Old)VCB that I had NPD. He responded by saying that she must simply have taken my word for it, because there is – in his mind – no evidence for it at all.
  • Apparently he is scared of personality disorder diagnoses, as they create pigeonholes for that which should be seen as perfectly normal in the context of historic abuse. I don’t entirely agree with this position, but I do think there is a certain merit in what he says. I admitted to being very frustrated to not have any official, written acknowledgement of a PTSD diagnosis,especially when BPD was splattered all over my fucking file. Once again, I found myself reminded of Seaneen‘s fitting comments: to paraphrase, the ‘good’ abuse survivor gets PTSD, the ‘bad’ gets BPD. I admitted to Paul that I felt like some mere ‘case’ or ‘number’ within NHS services, whereas I felt like a person with him at Nexus. He seemed pleased, and said that he enjoyed spending time with me. I don’t understand that particular plane of reality, but there you have it.
  • His view, predictably, is that there isn’t something wrong with me; I have very extreme coping and defence mechanisms as a result of very extreme experiences. He pointed out that people with NPD need to be worshipped all the time, whereas I actively and instinctively cower away at the first hint of a compliment. Paul said that Paedo made me ‘horrible’ and ‘evil’ (in my mind), and that was clearly not what narcissists think of themselves, at least at a conscious level. I accused myself of “inverted narcissism”; yes, I was (am) highly self-critical, but I don’t have any altruism in me at all. I’m selfish and, further, self-obsessed, even if I’m not desirous of being put on someone’s misguided pedestal. He said that that isn’t true: my perceptions of myself in this light are clouded by the toxicity that Paedo has planted in my head.
  • He asked why he had never seen my psychotic symptoms in session. I kept my gob shut for ages on that one, as I had loads of psychodynamic explanations therefore, but knew I’d be asked to stop turning the therapy into an academic debate if I voiced them. Eventually, I muttered something about it being “some sort of weird transferential shit,” a description that seemed to amuse him substantially. I continued by saying that I didn’t want to be seen as psychotic, but that in my very saying so I felt tremendously guilty, because no one should be ashamed of having a mental illness. “I want to be seen to be in control,” I concluded.
  • Paul said that my hallucinations are ‘contained’ (a word I loathe) in therapy, and that “the weird transferential shit” was indeed responsible for that. My transference towards him reflects my past needs, which is then of course met with his counter-transference. He postulated the position that I needed someone to essentially be nice to me, which he then did (‘nice’ being my word here, which grates on me, as it’s so fucking trite and inadequate. Nonetheless, I cannot think of something more descriptive and/or appropriate for that which I am trying to convey). My unconscious fear, therefore, would be that ‘They‘ wing themselves out of my mind and into my vocal chords, insulting and hating Paul, at which point he will no longer be nice to be. Of course, in reality Paul would have a fucking field day with ‘They’, and there is no danger of him abandoning or discharging me if they happen to show up. But that, I am told, is an adult reading of the situation. The child part of myself merely sees herself as being constantly rejected, and cannot fathom that she is safe from that happening again.
  • Somehow the meeting turned to a question of who I am really am. He said that I was certainly intelligent and analytical, characteristics that I seek to amplify, but that he felt that somewhere there was more to it. I responded by saying that anything other than intelligence and analysis was profoundly weak and of course he jumped on this straightaway; I do not (usually) cry or openly show fear, anger, etc etc because my abused child self realised very quickly that (a) it achieved the sum total of fuck all, and (b) that it was easier to just quietly ride out the storm of rape and degradation without complaint.
  • This led to a rudimentary analysis of my first (known) experience of penetrative rape, in which I was “instantly changed forever,” apparently. Paul alluded to the fact that my behaviour in its immediate aftermath – even something as simple as walking – should have been noted to have been strange by my care-givers, and that it wasn’t. I protested that this was not my mother’s fault, for it seemed to be primarily her he was on about (my father was probably drunk in some ditch somewhere, so he wasn’t exactly much use). Again, Paul told me that this was my adult head talking. The abused child just wanted her mother to comfort and protect her, he claimed.
  • I conceded the point, but then added that no one tells you when you’re a little kid that adults aren’t meant to have sex with you. You’re generally not meant to understand anything about sex (although I did have some vague knowledge of it), so you aren’t ever going to be party to that information. To that end, you don’t know that the paedophile’s behaviour is in any way wrong, and the whole situation becomes normalised.
  • I said that I couldn’t connect to the sadness that I should feel. Paul contends that this is because it would threaten to overwhelm me completely. On the occasions on which I begin to get close to it, I withdraw into my own world – I dissociate, I hallucinate and I self-harm, because anything is better than the enormity of the feeling.
  • He asked me how I felt our work was progressing, and I responded by saying that overall, I thought things were going well, but that I wished I could speed up myself up in terms of ‘feeling’. I talk much more openly to Paul about my abusive history than I ever did with C (though if I had not done what I did do with C, maybe I would not have been able to get to this point), but I still dance around things an awful lot. He knows this, of course. He said that he found working with me “challenging” because of my innate abilities to deflect any potentially threatening material, but added that he “enjoyed a challenge”. He wonders if I unconsciously protect him in some way (as I did with C in the early days of our relationship), and I think there is some truth to this hypothesis. Everything I can say to him will be something he’s heard before but perhaps he hasn’t heard it from such an evil bitch? Will my disgusting, fetid nature poison his mind? If so, he must be shielded from it. Yadda yadda. He said that whatever the case, he genuinely enjoyed my company.

Someone commented on the blog a few weeks ago that Paul’s willingness to compliment me at times was vaguely disturbing to her (amongst other things). Given his broadly dynamic/analytical standpoint, I can certainly see the rationale for holding that view. However, any time he does this, it is not done in an inappropriate or intense sort of fashion at all. I think the thing I didn’t realise about therapy until recently is that some therapists are just like some other people and that they’re not extraordinary, all-powerful alchemists or something – they’re actually just ordinary, and they’re just nice. They’re friendly. They put personality and client welfare before supposed best practice, at least within certain appropriate relationships. Such is the case with Paul.

It is such a different experience from the one I had with C. Through no fault of C’s particularly, things with him were inherently asymmetrical, and I sometimes wonder if it was that that allowed the breeding of my complete and probably desperately unhealthy obsession with him. I am not in any way obsessed with Paul, and I’m beginning to feel that that’s really quite beneficial (although I haven’t always thought so). We feel like equals – not as friends as such, but at least two people who can be honest and direct with each other. The only one-sidedness of it is that he is there to help me, and I can’t return the favour in any way, other than to donate £20 to his employers once a week.

I will review week 16 done as soon as possible. Of course, with this week being as ridiculously full of mentalness as it is, I will have a fuck of a lot to write about. Así es la vida, and anyway it’s my fault for being too fucking lazy to have written even this until now. I’ll write something tomorrow, regardless of which hopefully-maker-of-sanity-professional may be the subject…

Validation, Faces and My Purpose in Life – Paul: Weeks 13 and 14

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse  16 Responses »
Mar 102011
 

Yeah, I know, I know. I asked at the end of the last (random and lazy) post that you castigate me aggressively if this material was not published before midnight on…Tuesday? Wednesday? Meh. I failed. You failed too, readers. Only two or three of you had a go, and 227,000 of you have read these absurd writings from my perverted mind. (Admittedly that figure is over nearly two years rather than the last two days, but if you don’t care for my gross generalisations, then sue me and see if I care). Nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh!

Since I have four psychotherapy sessions to catch up on here, I have elected to write minimally (*chuckle* – as if I know the meaning of the word) and mash a few together. I hope that normal service will be resumed after next week’s meeting. That I feel capable of wading through this bollocks at all is testament to the fact that I must be feeling better than I did a few weeks back. I couldn’t have done this a fortnight ago.

I’ve often been asked how I retain memories of these sessions, and nowhere is such a question more pertinent than in this post, where one of the discussions was over a month ago (and the second not far behind it). This is the answer:

Scribble-Scrobble-Scrubble

As soon as I leave the Nexus building and get into the car, I scribble down everything I can remember. I used to type it all onto my iPhone, but to be honest I’ve found that random scrawls are quicker than two-fingered on-screen typing, so here we are. If I later remember something else – which is frequent – then I go back to the notes and scribble it on the side of the relevant area (or at the end if it’s unrelated to anything else I’ve noted). Not hi-tech, but certainly functional.

Anyway, enough procrastinating around the issue. ***Beware of child sex abuse and related triggers, as always. Some of the following is fairly graphic***.

Week 13

As is usually the case, this session opened with Paul asking me how I was, and my responding with “OK.” Apparently this was the wrong answer. He claims that I go in and proclaim myself to be fine most weeks, when I’m clearly more off my head than Charlie fucking Sheen (I wonder, will someone read this as an archived post in two years and wonder what I’m on about? Probably not, but just in case: clicky). I was told that I use the term “OK” as the easy option.

That may well be the case, but it seems thoroughly odd to me to sit down and scream, “everything is fucking shit!” As has always been the case in psychotherapy, I need prompting from the professional in the room.

This session was in the wake of the fuckery with the twatbags at the Jobs and Benefits office (Christ, that seems like millennia ago), and so I admitted to being highly pissed off, mainly in relation to that. Then, predictably, I launched into a full-scale attack on myself for being unable to work. Paul asked me why I couldn’t.

I remember mumbling some drivel about my pathetic concentration, complete inability to socially interact and my pathological fear of the phone. For some reason, he started banging on about what he called “ego strength” and my demonstrable lack of it.

He said, “I have ego strength. I’m self-assured, I feel confident in my abilities. I think you find it difficult to maintain that sort of thing.”

Slap me sideways with a dead fish. Revelatory stuff, Paul! 10/10 for observation!

I’m being unfair. It was obvious, yes, but of course he was using the point to lead elsewhere. In any case, I agreed with him, adding that whilst I was at least well aware that I have a moderately decent brain (ooh, listen to my ‘strongly narcissistic traits‘, ooh!) inside my skull, that possession seems kind of redundant when it’s rarely, if ever, put to any proper use.

He seemed to disagree with that, referencing briefly my perennial penchant for analysing and intellectualising matters that he feels should not be analysed nor intellectualised. Of which more later. He went on thus: “ego strength is based on our value as a child. When I was a youngster, I was – and, crucially, I felt – loved, cherished, protected and safe.” He cocked his head questioningly at me.

I responded in a rote, but honest, fashion. “Those words are alien to me,” I said, laughing nervously. I instantly felt guilty about this admission, though, and said that thinking that was grossly unfair to my mother, who had tried her best for me. And she did. None of this is her fault.

Paul accepted that point and nodded, but continued by saying that regardless of my mother’s love and good intentions, I still hadn’t been safe or protected.

“In your case,” he told me, “interpretations of a lack of worth seem to me to directly correlate with a lack of safety. Tell me – when did you last have any sense of self-worth?”

‘Strong narcissistic traits’ aside, I admitted truthfully that I could not ever recall such a state of being, at least internally (to an external observer, I was extremely self-assured and confident as a child. Not that that’s necessarily mutually exclusive with a lack of self-worth, mind you: I didn’t feel I had any worth, but I wasn’t un-confident nevertheless). I thought about this for a few seconds, and was reminded of something I mentioned briefly on this blog a few weeks ago: that Paedo had once raped me with some sort of pole (I retrospectively assume that it was the end of a mop or some such). I made the connection with this discussion because to rape someone with an inanimate object is to see them as someone not even worth fucking properly – I had no worth to him, just like I have very little to myself.

I started trying to tell Paul about this incident, but of course as ever the words stuck firmly in my throat. Cough, cough, splutter, splutter. Eventually I managed to say that “a pole [had been] used against me, if you know what I mean.” He did.

I gave him my analysis – ie. that in whatever twisted way, someone had to give a fuck about you in order to make the effort to rape you in the more conventional sense of the word (I was quite pleased that I managed to use the word ‘rape’, but of course this was my sitting back and reviewing the matter rather than talking directly about my experiences). For someone to rape you with a pole, they don’t have to give any sort of damn. It’s the ultimate in degrading, because it completely dehumanises the afflicted individual.

Paul agreed. “To put it crudely,” he said, “he couldn’t even be bothered to get a hard-on.”

“Exactly.”

“Which completely validates the idea of ‘worthlessness’ in your mind.”

“Quite.”

He paused for a bit, then asked me how long I’d be carrying that memory for. Had it just emerged, had it always been there, what?

I found this hard to answer. As you know, a lot of my memories of the abuse are skewed by the dissociation I invariably experienced at the time. This was one of those memories that had been on the periphery of my anamnestic consciousness – I’d sort of always ‘known’ it, but it was pushed away and compartmentalised. I estimated that the actual visual recall had solidified in my brain maybe about two months prior to this meeting, but it’s really hard to put a timeframe on this kind of thing. It sounds odd, but it just is sometimes.

There followed a discussion surrounding my recollections of the abuse. I complained that whilst I understood the science behind dissociation, the fact that certain memories just randomly appeared sometimes merely served to reinforce my long-held belief that I’d made the whole thing up. I have written on the notes that I said that it was “odd” to ‘forget’ things, then just remember them out of the blue 20 years later. From an academic perspective, it actually seems obvious – but from a I’m here, I feel it point of view, ‘odd’ is the understatement of this entire geological age.

Paul said, “it’s like you have a cupboard. It occasionally opens, and something falls out. What stops the rest emerging?”

Forgive my naivety, Paul, but I would have assumed that was rather obvious. As he himself has said in the past – why would I want to remember?

I reminded him that the previous week I’d told him about my hallucination of a fucking peccary (of all fucking things – how creative my subconscious is), and how terrified I’d been by it.

“This concerns me,” I told him. “That terror was so strong, so visceral…it was overwhelming. I wonder if that means I’m blocking something utterly horrific out of my mind. What more is there to discover?!”

“But of course the terror is immense,” Paul replied. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s reams more to it – terror is an entirely appropriate response to what you’ve already described to me. And in my view it makes perfect sense for your mind to externalise that in the form of a hallucination. It’s a massive internal cross to bear, so it translates itself into psychosis.”

He went on to opine that psychosis is also a “clever way” of me showing myself that what happened was, in fact, very real indeed. My mind constantly terrorises me like this. It’s trying to communicate something.

I looked out the window behind me and avoided his stare.

After a few moments, he said, “you’re uncomfortable now. This is too close for your liking.”

He was perfectly correct, of course, but I wondered how averting my gaze gave him so much information.

“Do I have tells?” I asked.

To my astonishment, he didn’t know what a ‘tell’ was. I explained that it was a poker term, denoting subtleties that gave away clues to a player’s hand.

“OK,” he said, playing Dr Freud on me by over-reading my use of a poker analogy, “do you feel that your hand is becoming exposed?”

“I want it to be exposed, but my mind never lets me co-operate.”

“You need to cut yourself some slack, girl,” he said (which sounds hideously patronising as I type it, but it wasn’t delivered that way). “You’re here, you’re talking to me – your mind co-operates as much as is possible.”

I was reminded briefly of my 63 sessions with C, and how I didn’t even admit the extent of the abuse until…*checks archives*…week 46 (I knew this blog was useful for something). Yet here I have been, in a mere 13 weeks, discussing the finer, horrible minutiae of it with Paul. Admittedly, I went to Nexus with that clear mandate, which was not the case when I met C – but still. This stuff is A Big Deal.

He asked me what kept me coming back each week. “I’m guessing it’s not my animal magnetism,” he joked, which made me chuckle. With every respect to him – no, it’s not ;)

I provided him with my old disclaimer about not believing in cures for psychiatric problems, but added that I felt that therapy was the only proper means to “get back on track. Or, rather, get on track in the first place.” I added that I felt the only promising path to resolution of the issues was to go there, face them, and ultimately process them.

Paul nodded, seemingly encouraged. “But the first part of that resolution process is acceptance – accepting that it really happened.

“I have another client,” he continued. “Her life has been ruined by mental health problems. There’s an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence for her abuse – but she can’t and won’t believe that it happened.”

“I empathise,” I muttered.

“I know.”

“Well, I don’t know about her – but rationally, logically, I can fully believe that this happened to me. But I just can’t always…feel it. So how does one accept it? You can’t just flick a switch, Paul.”

“But what’s the benefit in making it up?”

I hypothesised that I knew that something had happened (which he proclaimed to be a good start), and that my imagination had spiralled out of control since.

“Right,” he said, definitely. “I am certain that you were abused. It’s absolutely unequivocal in my mind. You doubt, but I accept. You criticise yourself, and I defend you.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry – I think you need me to.”

“Yes…I suppose so. It’s certainly nice to be validated. Thank you.”

“You needed validation then, and you didn’t get it, so you certainly need it now.”

True enough. I thought of my mother and her denials of what happened, and ended up banging on about this to Paul.

“She had one friend that went psychotic and had to be sectioned,” I explained. “During her psychotic phase, the woman alleged that she’d been abused by her mother, but later denied this. So whether that was true or not, my mother is of the view that anyone as mentally unstable as myself cannot legitimately make such claims, because we can’t tell fiction from reality.”

As you know, Paul does not adhere to the medical model of psychiatry. His view is that all mental illness somehow relates to trauma. That I disagree is temporarily irrelevant: his response to my anecdote was, predictably enough, that psychotic people are, in a sense at least, the most qualified to make such claims.

Of course, I hadn’t developed any psychotic symptoms when I told my mother about (some of) Paedo’s activities, but if I tried to tell her now – well, she’d be even more convinced that I was just “away in the head” and ergo incapable of reliably telling the truth.

“Well, I believe you,” Paul concluded. It is nice to hear it validated by someone not directly involved in it.

This saw the end of the session. His final comment before we said our goodbyes was that it was his challenge to help me see the certainty of what happened, and take ownership of that (or some such). I felt a passing draft of DBT in this statement, but I’m pretty sure it was just a turn of phrase and furthermore that he’d have been horrified if I’d likened him in any way to a DBT therapist. Paul is very much an analytical/dynamic practitioner, not at all a behavioural one, and I thank my lucky fucking stars all the time for that. Fuck behaviourism!

Week 14

Remember the depression rating scales? This week was in the wake of those. This time, I didn’t go in and tell Paul that I was OK. Instead, I told him that I was, apparently, extremely depressed.

“Apparently?” he queried.

I told him about the dichotomy of these apparently scientifically verifiable questionnaires versus my internal sense of utter normality. “Is it possible to get used to being severely depressed?” I asked, mostly rhetorically. “My blog readers seem to think so.”

Before he could formulate an answer, I trainwrecked my way forward to the rest of my week, telling him about how I’d burst into tears over the recollection of my old ragdoll, Mr Friendly. In doing so, I unwittingly strayed into one of Paul’s favourite areas of psychology: that of early attachment patterns, and how they affect the subconscious mind.

He banged on a bit about transitional objects and about how they serve as a means of healthy attachment. Whilst true of children who do have healthy relationships with their parents and/or other caregivers, he claims that their effect is especially amplified in abused kids: in such cases, the transitional objects are the only form of healthy attachment.

Which makes sense, but then – aside from Mr Friendly, as a child I mainly regarded cuddly toys and suchlike with complete derision. Now the fucking house is falling down with them. Am I trying to live a robbed childhood?

I told Paul that my first reaction when I started bawling about Mr Friendly was to consult Detective Inspector Google about obtaining a new version.

“Hmm,” he said. “You know it’s not about the doll, don’t you? You can’t search Google for a new parent.”

“Who knows these days?” I interjected, trying to be droll.

Paul laughed briefly, but then asked me why I had been crying.

I must have employed a lot of phrases such as “I was trying to work out…” and “I hypothesised that…” because he told me to stop it, and to just ‘feel’.

“At the first hint of emotion [would someone please ban that fucking word from the English language], you wrap everything up in intellectualising, in analysis. I can do that – but that’s because I’m not you.”

I defended myself on the grounds that going through therapy was pretty useless if I couldn’t make sense of the issues in my own mind.

“True,” he admitted, “but that has to come after. You have to feel first.”

I know this to be true, but it disgusts me nevertheless. I sat in silence for a very long time.

[Cue random memories of therapy with C (again). I used to sit silently every single week with him, and it was something I had fervently sought to avoid - mainly successfully hitherto - with Paul. I hate it; it feels like such a complete and utter waste of time...and, further, a waste of time that is hugely limited].

I apologised for my quietness, and he asked me if I disliked silence. I told him that as a general rule, I welcomed it – but not in this circumstance, where I am trying to do something productive. He admitted that “the pressure [was] on” to get things done in a measly 50 minutes.

I told him about my frustrations about my medical notes being delayed, and how raging I was with those responsible within the Trust for their continued incompetence. I also told him how a blog reader, Faith, had asked why my fury was directed at them – and not at Paedo.

Of course (as you’ll see if you follow the link) I responded with all the form bullshit – they are a public body breaking the law, they’re an arm of government who should comply with their responsibilities, yadda yadda, whereas Paedo is just some miserable individual git. I still hold to all that, I have to say, but on reflection Faith did make a fair point, and I should have acknowledged that in my reply to her.

I told Paul that I felt nothing other than indifference towards Paedo. This is absolutely true. A detests him and I can see why – but I simply don’t. He’s just sort of there.

“What did the little girl think of him?” Paul asked. [I really wish he'd stop calling her that].

I shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot of my memories are in the third person, so it’s hard to access my then-thinking. At other times – you know, those times where I was trying to sustain a continued existence on this plane, like when I felt I was choking to death etc – I was investing all my energies in just surviving it, so it’s impossible to tell what I thought about him.”

“Why not hate him? It’s not dangerous to do so – not now, at least. I think it’s because you transfer that hate to her [Aurora, or my younger self, whatever] – in some capacity at least, you feel that it was all her fault.”

I nodded. “That’s true – additionally, there’s the issue that I didn’t realise that it was somehow an abnormal way to live until I was a lot older. I mean, I had a rudimentary understanding of sex from the offset, but probably didn’t really realise that it’s not supposed to happen when you’re five.”

“It became normalised,” Paul confirmed. “Just like you were saying about your depression at the start of the session – it becomes a standard part of your life.

“So you have plenty of anger – not so much at the girl who was sexually abused, but towards the girl that had sex. Do you see the subtle distinction?”

I did. “It’s ridiculous,” I replied, referring to my objective view that blaming the abused child is an absurdity.

Of course, as is so typical, the word ‘ridiculous’ sent me off on a tangent.

“Last night, I told A that GCHQ were reading my blog,” I said. “I think he thinks that I’m delusional. But they are reading my blog, narcissistic as it sounds,” I protested. “Is that ridiculous?”

“No,” he assured me. “Nowhere is safe, is it? You didn’t have any safe place to turn to as a child. You have super-strength barriers up against all the dangers you perceive around you even now. Why should your blog be any different?”

It shouldn’t. Therefore: HELLO THERE, GCHQ! WELCOME TO MY LIFE! (Actually, would you mind giving me a job sometime when I’m feeling vaguely sane? I can do corruption with the best of them and I am good with codes. I was a master codebreaker as a child – at least when I wasn’t being a pretentious little fuck, or, indeed, being fucked).

He asked me what made me feel safe, and I responded by saying that I had to lock myself in the house with all the doors locked.

“And in here?”

“Metaphorically speaking, the same thing.”

“Exactly,” Paul said. “It’s the fact that everything is ‘locked’ in this room – we have boundaries, confidentiality, and everything’s enclosed. Believe me, if GCHQ are bugging this room, then I’m in deep shit!”

I laughed. Shame I can’t keep to the confidentiality bit given my reckless blabbering about everything here, meaning that GCHQ will find out about it all anyway.

He said, “psychiatry still describes psychotic people as ‘being out of touch with reality’. I say, ‘that’s crap; psychosis makes total sense to me’. If you were sitting here after all that happened to you and were happy or what society regards as ‘normal’, that would be out of touch with reality.”

We engaged in a short discussion about societal conformity and the nature of (in)sanity. Paul referred to the author or Going Sane – Adam Phillips – and how he contended that we are all born ‘insane’, but that convention dictates that as we grow, we learn to kowtow to certain prescribed behaviours and thought patterns. For my part, I ventured that when you considered the so-called bigger picture nothing was sane or insane: it just is what it is, and it all boils down to a pathetic case of moral relativism.

“So,” Paul concluded, “all those diagnoses you have – they’re time-structured, and constantly subject to re-evaluation. Therefore, the only real evaluation is that of your own experience.”

Paul and I don’t agree on the discipline of psychiatry, nor on the medical model. I don’t like psychiatry, but I do think it can have value. However, he’d got me on this point. Once before he’d exemplified by stating that homosexuality was once a DSM diagnosis, which of course it (quite rightly) is no longer. So whilst it’s unlikely in the short term, in time it’s quite conceivable that BPD will simply be regarded as a perfectly normal state of being – a reaction to something, rather than an illness.

Another silence ensued. I wanted to respond, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I sat there playing with my hair and chewing my lip absent-mindedly. Eventually, his voice broke into my thoughts.

“This is going to sound awful, but…was there any part of you that enjoyed it?”

It does seem like a horribly inappropriate and grossly insensitive question, but that was not how I took it. I saw (and see) it as perfectly valid. Sadly, I am aware of a few people who were abused as kids that did enjoy parts of it. Not because they’re bad people, never that, but because they reacted as they’re supposed to in a purely physiological sense.

I consider myself fortunate not to have felt such ‘enjoyment’ – or, if I did, that I don’t have any recollection of it whatsoever. I told Paul so.

“It’s just that it strikes me that – although you ‘disappeared’ a lot – maybe you had a bit of acting to do,” he suggested.

The honest answer to that is, again, that I don’t know. I don’t recall ‘acting’, but then I don’t recall a lot of stuff. It’s entirely possible. In a hideous but sensible sort of way, it holds a twisted logic; play the part, make him enjoy it, get it over more quickly.

On a related note, I admitted to Paul that I was “…doing…um…sexualised…er…things…” at quite a premature age (I made brief reference to it here ((back in the days where a Pandorian post could be less than 2,302,227 words long)), but I didn’t and won’t discuss the specifics). I thought about Paedo, and suddenly felt utterly nauseated.

Good? Feeling the disgust of it all there, Pan? No, not really – or at least, not in the sense one might expect.

I said, “it’s not because I hate him – it’s because having sex with someone who looks like that is abhorrent to me.” (Paedo is very ugly).

“Interesting choice of phraseology,” Paul observed. “‘To have sex’. Adults ‘have sex’. Children don’t ‘have sex’. Children get raped.”

I ignored him and continued. “I’ve told you several times that the occasions that were worst were those where I was choking and so on. In my never-ending quest to contradict myself, I might now say that that wasn’t so bad – I mean, at least I couldn’t see his face.”

“You’d rather choke than see his face.”

“Yes,” I confirmed, and he nodded acceptingly. “But now my mind is pervaded with disgusting images of his face contorted in orgasmic delight. It’s fucking repugnant.”

“How was your face?”

“Probably completely blank. Well – not the first time, I suppose. I was so bemused, so confused, that I probably looked appropriately mystified. But after that came resignation. Reluctant acquiescence. Simply a wait until it was finished.”

He again picked up on my terminology, blathering on about how I never ‘acquiesced’.

“‘Tolerated’, then,” I chanced. “The first time he touched me – as opposed to the more serious stuff – I tried to push him off. But after that I didn’t. I just let it happen.”

“You’ve fallen into a trap of thinking that ‘fighting is helpless’ equals ‘I have to let him’ equals ‘I do let him’,” Paul said.

“Yes, but I was meant to be intelligent, strong and decisive! I epically failed to use those tools.”

“As a five year old?” he said, witheringly.

I looked away and neglected to answer, but inside I was completely enraged. Yes, as a fucking five year old! I wasn’t like other five year olds. I was precocious, determined and stronger-willed than Maggie fucking Thatcher (who would have been at the height of her power at the time. Maybe she subconsciously influenced me). So yeah, of course I should have been able to do something about it. I don’t get why he doesn’t understand that. I don’t get why anyone doesn’t. I’m not saying that I deserved it, but I could have done a fuckload about it, and I didn’t. Not all – not even most – five years could (or should) have done, but I could (those pesky ‘strong narcissistic traits’ rear their ugly heads again, but I’m actually serious. I was a vicious little brat. I could have done so much, but instead I just lay there and took it).

“I was at a training course the other day,” Paul was saying. “One recurring theme was about how abused kids, by about the age of six, can become very good not only at actual sex, but at masturbation. It serves as a ‘tool’ to make them better at sex the next time their abuser wants to rape them.” He looked at me probingly.

How else can one respond to that but with abject disgust? It is unspeakably vile that someone so young should be in that position.

Evidently, my repulsion was palpable. “This is your world, Pandora,” he urged. “Of course it’s disgusting, but it’s not all about third parties. It’s about you!”

[Eyes down, lips curled, brow furrowed.]

“I have this lovely memory,” he went on, “of when I was a little boy. I can’t remember my age, but I was old enough to have been out walking alone, so I can’t have been that young. I was dandering up this road, and suddenly, from nowhere, I realised that boys and girls were different [biologically speaking. I don't think he's a raging closet misogynist or anything]. I remember that moment with such fondness – I had this gentle way about me – such a lovely childlike naivety.

“You didn’t have that, did you? And you were far younger than what I was at the time. You knew that men and women were different and you knew – or thought you knew – what you were for: your purpose in life was to have sex.”

This was deeply disturbing. Not the concept, but the way he phrased it. I had literally been within half a second of saying, “my purpose in life is to have sex.” Had he read my mind?

I stared at him goggle-eyed for a minute, then told him why. He hadn’t read my mind, he claimed – he just knew that that was what the circumstances dictated. Your purpose in life is to have sex. Yes.

So, knowing my purpose, I decided to deflect the apparent seriousness of the moment away by stating, again, that it wasn’t that bad. “I know of one woman whose mother prostituted her out to the highest bidder each time,” I said. “That poor girl was made to think her purpose in life was to have sex. So if it was mine – well, at least it was generally the same fucking person each time.”

“In a way, though,” Paul replied, “it’s almost worse – you had a pre-existing relationship with this man, you continued a relationship with him throughout, and you still have a relationship with him.”

We discussed the fact that I still have to see Paedo from time to time. I stoically grin and bear it; A sits and seethes and tries not to rip his cock off. I confessed to being terrified of getting into one of Maisie’s notorious and epic fights or getting pissed or something and blurting it all out.

“I don’t particularly care for my cousins,” I said, “but I wouldn’t wish this on them; they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s moot I suppose – they wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“That’s the thing with abuse,” Paul sighed. “It’s always the victim’s ‘dirty little secret’. It’s you that would destroy lives. It’s you they wouldn’t believe. It’s you that would be persecuted.

“But,” he added, nodding pointedly in my direction, “they’d still never look at him in the same light again.”

And on that note, things drew to a close for another week.

M. E. H.

I have absolutely no idea how to end this post, so I won’t try to develop some prosaic / pretentious / uplifting conclusion to it and shall instead just fuck off. Cheerio.

My Medical Notes: Initial Thoughts

 C, Fighting with the NHS, Mental Health Diagnoses, NewVCB, Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Traumatic Stuff, Triggers, VCB  24 Responses »
Feb 202011
 

Geezer, our new friend as discussed in this post, finally sent out (some of) my medical records this week. To be fair to him, he was very apologetic about the delay in supplying me with same, so I have elected not to hate him. Given that he works in the Trust, this is somewhat surprising. Fair play to him, I suppose – that’s no mean feat.

This will be a series of posts, given the magnitude of digestion and analysis required. I’m not sure why I’m even writing this one at all; I suppose I’m in a bit of a spin about the whole thing, and am hoping for some sense of catharsis, which is indubitably a tall order. Still, I’m awake at 5.35am, and I’ve flicked through the bastarding things. To this end, a brain dump seems completely worthwhile, even if it’s 0nly to shut my head up for the few minutes it takes to type this dirge.

Let’s start with…

The Very Vaguely Non-Shit Stuff

Well. Well..? Well, nothing much really. One less than hateful remark came when C, in referring me for psychiatric assessment at the CMHT, described me as “an intelligent and articulate lady.” He had made occasional similar remarks to me in session, but of course the verbal word is so much more informal in this kind of arena than the written one. For some reason, it made me smile, perhaps a little nostalgically. A sense of external validation, perhaps? Some residual transferential shite about him actually holding me in even vaguely positive regard? Who knows why it pleases me. But it does, slightly.

NewVCB seems to have been broadly supportive of me since she took over my psychiatric care in January 2010, and reading her predecessor’s comments made me realise just how lucky I was to have my “case” transferred to her. In the letter she wrote to Lovely GP in the wake of the cessation of my therapy with C, she made it quite abundantly clear that she was annoyed that the Trust had failed to even consult her about either my long-running complaint or on what she felt the best method of proceeding was. This letter alone provides me with a fair amount of fuel, which can only be aided by the admissions of my being “significantly let down” that C made in our final sessions. I have the last six meetings recorded, though I haven’t listened to them. I don’t really give a fuck how illicit or full of subterfuge such actions may have been; when you’re dealing with such a mess of bureaucratic self-servingness, compiling evidence seems wholly necessary and appropriate. So fuck them if they don’t like it.

NewVCB also described me as “a very disturbed young girl [young girl!!!], who does struggle day to day.” She also wrote that she felt that continuing therapy would be (have been?) of benefit to me.

I was also interested to note that C had written to Mr Director-Person (utter cunt) in the wake of my original complaint, and whilst he’d (C, though Mr D-P was perennially guilty of same too) engaged in his usual self-justifying bilgewank, he did observe that my letter had highlighted a number of deficiencies in the service, and that these should be considered in future service provision. (Which is nice and all, but if I end up dead then it all seems personally rather pointless. I’m not aiming to be a fucking martyr to this cause; I just want help).

Anyhow, onto the flip side of…

Bias, Lies, Embellishment, Stereotyping, Assumption, Blah Blah Blah

My favourite piece of nonsense in the notes is possibly the following quote from the Psychiatric Liaison Nurse from last January as quoted in her follow-up phone call to C:

She was almost boastful about cutting herself with a scalpel and about how she managed to obtain it on eBay. I have no concerns about her mental health but she will probably use self-harm to up the ante as your time together grows closer to its termination…blah blah blah…[some patronising arse about my 'using' my diagnosis of BPD or some such]

“Up the ante”! “No concerns about [my] mental health”! I’ve been the first to admit that the incident in question was the shittest suicide attempt in the whole of creation, but according to what I hear from normals and professionals alike, people aren’t generally supposed to self-harm or ruminate on suicide in the fucking first place. So how my mental ‘health’ can be considered something unworthy of concern to a serious so-called professional is beyond me.

What galls me about this one especially is that I had no idea until tonight (last night, whatever) that the woman in question was such a two-faced cunt. She played all nicey-nicey, wearing a convincing veneer of maternal warmth, to my face. In the next breath, she was advising C to be wary of my twisted modus operandi of manipulative evil. Fuck you, love. Fuck you very much indeed.

The second most entertaining comment came from a letter from OldVCB to Lovely GP after my initial assessments with her (here and here). It is her clinical opinion that I have borderline personality disorder, with a possible differential diagnosis of bipolar II disorder (the latter, interestingly, was something NewVCB also brought up, “particularly in light of [my] family history”). Fine. I knew well before I met any psychiatrist that I had BPD. What I accused myself of, though did not honestly think was seriously considered, was the possibility that I had narcissistic personality disorder. Apparently, I wasn’t so far from the truth: I have “strong narcissistic traits”! MWHAHAHAHAHAHA!

My eyes widened in horror when I first read that, but as I sit here now at 6am, I find it bizarrely amusing. It’s inversely self-validating, I suppose; I always wanked on and on and on to anyone that would listen about what a narcissistic heap of fuckery I am, and for once someone agreed. There’s a certain twisted but likeable logic in there somewhere.

There were a few minor but deeply frustrating inaccuracies in OldVCB’s report to Lovely GP; she got the names of both my schools wrong. She also got my ‘A’ Level results wrong. In and of itself it’s no big deal, but if the boney fucking bitch couldn’t even be arsed to listen to fundamentals like that, why would I suppose she would listen to anything else I had to say? She also prattled endlessly on about my “interpersonal difficulties” as evidenced in my relationships with “friends, teachers and parents.” Oh really?

I feel like directing her to this post about one of my teachers, and seeing what she thinks then. Clearly the dynamics of a profoundly turbulent relationship, oh yes. In reality, I only had a difficult relationship with one teacher, and whilst I do accept culpability for being an awkward pupil for him, to be fair it was as much about him being a knob as it was about my assholery. Oh and yes, I had ups and downs with my friends…like TEENAGERS FUCKING DO. OldVCB contended that she was “unable to get a sense of [my current] relationships with [A, Daniel and Brian]” but her tone was one of doubt and cynicism. She seemed genuinely confused by the fact that I’d been with A for (as it then was) six years. Nevermind, though. Just slap a “bah, patient was unresponsive about this so we can therefore be certain that she actually knocks the living fuck out of her partner and friends” on my face so as it fits neatly with your nice little bit of stigma-in-a-manual.

C’s discharge letter fucked me off, not because he was offensive per se, but because either he’s the one that’s in cloud-fucking-cuckoo land or he’s just trying pathetically to cover his own arse. A position arguing that both apply is certainly arguable too. I can’t remember all of it now, but the comment that most stood out was that he felt that I had “learned methods of affect regulation and non-destructive ways to deal with overwhelming feelings.” I’m glad to hear that’s the case, because hitherto I really had no idea. It’s reassuring to know that my reality is actually false and all that, oh yes indeedy. So, I ask myself…how had God C managed to achieve this miraculous wonder, so subtle and clever in its delivery that even I had not noticed it? Aha, good readers! How else but by teaching me “techniques of mindful-breathing [sic], which seem to have had some positive results”.

MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Really, C? Really?! Could that be the same mindful breathing that I so positively reacted to and analysed here? Good to see that we were singing from the same hymn sheet throughout our time together, my friend!

I haven’t perused his hand written post-session notes in great detail yet, mainly because – as is par for the course in the field of healthcare – they’re nearly fucking impossible to translate into something that begins to approximate English. A couple of asides I did note, however, were wanky references to “anger”, “acting out”, “defensiveness”, yadda yadda. He appears to be under the delusion that because of these ‘traits’ I epitomise borderline personality disorder (despite his one time comment that “…it is not borderline personality disorder that c0mes into this room; it’s Pandora.”) Unfortunately for historical accuracy, the reason I was “angry” and “defensive” was because he was refusing to fucking treat me at least until my condition became moderately self-manageable. Go and read through the archives of my posts on him. I was, by and large, unerringly nice (despicable word) to the man until Christmas 2009 when he told me that I had to fuck off.  Duh-de-DUH! Coincidence much?!

There was one particularly irritating and condescending piece of arse that he’d obviously written in the wake of a difficult session late in our time together. I must have seen him and/or therapy as a cunt/cuntish or something, and he noted that I was engaging in his favourite little game of psychological splitting (helpfully for him and the psychiatrists, a typical “borderline trait”). Waa, waa, waa. Apparently, though, he felt it “unhelpful to break Pandora’s projections towards me at this time by pointing this out to her…for now it is best to allow her to feel [whatever it was he alleged that I felt].”

There are two things in this world that I cannot abide. Being lied to (and that includes lies of omission, as observable here), and being FUCKING PATRONISED. What a supercilious fucking cock! He knew, he fucking absolutely knew, that I understood the dynamics of splitting, projection and transference. We spent about 98.3746563% of our time navel-gazing on such issues, for Jesus’ sake! But nah, let’s just let the little borderline freak act out on me rather than try to fucking work out why she’s doing so. Let her think that she’s really furious with me, when it’s actually her uncle or her fucking father or God or the fact that she hasn’t personally discovered a curse for cancer (given, after all, that she has such strong narcissistic traits!) that’s actually fucking frustrating her. Tosser.

Let me be rational momentarily (sorry to disappoint the rant lovers, but normal service will resume anon, worry not). I can see why C may think that if he reduced everything to splitting and transference and whatnot that (a) that would be intellectualising, something he fervently sought to avoid with me and (b) maybe he did genuinely think it would be useful for me to be angry with him in a transferential sort of way, if only temporarily. The problem is that he sat down, thought about it, then went ahead and consciously decided to try to deceive me (a comment which, if he were ever to read this, would no doubt be interpreted as “a paranoid persecution complex,” which came up once or twice in the notes), rather than exploring the psychodynamics of my frustrations. I thought that was the whole fucking point of that style of therapy?

Anyway, I’m analysing, rather than reporting, here. I should leave the detail for specific posts, but you know me – I can’t help myself. In closing, I’ll note one other thing that really annoyed me, not by its belittling stereotyping, nor even its inaccuracy, but by its very omission. Only at one solitary, passing juncture was PTSD ever mentioned, and that was by C, who does not have the requisite qualifications to make any form of diagnosis, at least beyond speculation. NewVCB sat with me last March and said to my face that I “…couldn’t not have PTSD…and in case of chronic trauma like your’s, we call that complex PTSD…”

Some of the foregoing made me angry, some made me laugh owing to its inherent ridiculousness and textbook anti-borderline bias, but this – this actually hurt me. I remember Seaneen once writing a really good piece about people with post-abuse mental health problems.

She said:

There’s the “good” abuse victim (hello, PTSD) and the “bad” abuse victim (hello, BPD).

Right here, right now, that statement resonates with me like never before. To me, in much the same way as Seaneen suggested, BPD blames the sufferer; PTSD blames the perpetrator/event/whatever.

So when all is said and done, for all her apparent support, I’m still just some attention-seeking, histrionic pain in the arse to NewVCB – not someone who was or is a victim/survivor/sufferer (depending on your preferred parlance), a belief that she has on occasion led me to believe she holds. I can shake my fist at OldVCB’s brusque manner and dogmatic stereotyping; I can laugh incredulously at C’s misinterpretations of matters or questionable decisions at any given time; I can astonish myself with the shocking hypocrisy of the Psychiatric Liaison bint.

But in the end, that’s somehow little more than rant material, at least for now. They don’t hurt, not really – not deeply, not rawly. Being just another case, another fucking number, rather than a person? That hurts. Being the one apparently to blame for all of this? That cuts me to the fucking core. It really, really does.

And that, for now at least, is that.

Ragdoll

 Important People in My Life, Life, Triggers  18 Responses »
Feb 152011
 

It’s a cliche, I know, but almost every child seems to have some form of ‘comfort blanket’. For some, it is literally that – a blanket, to which the kid snuggles up. For others, it may instead be a cuddly toy, piece of clothing, or whatever. You may know that in academic circles such comforts are known as ‘transitional objects‘, their purpose being to reassure the child whilst its mother is absent from its vision and to psychologically comfort it. The object in question effectively steps in and takes the mother’s place; it confirms to the child that she will return, but in the meantime, it has this source on which to rely.

As regular readers of this journal will appreciate, I was not a particularly typical child. Obviously I don’t remember being a baby, but I do remember that when other kids my age would have been expressing interest in cuddly and other types of toys, I regarded the whole thing with derision. The hilarious irony is that I love cuddly toys now. I suspect that I am unconsciously searching for a way to relive my ‘lost childhood’ (what a trite, nauseating phrase), but I do wonder why I would ever have considered such things with such an aversion. That I felt disgust then disgusts me now. Poor cuddly toys :( They never did anything to wrong me.

However, all rules are proven by their exceptions (though does the rule that rules are proven by exceptions include an exception? If so, does it not render itself a contradiction that cannot be trusted?). The exception to my general antipathy towards fluffy, cuddly things was a 1977 Fisher Price Cholly Ragdoll, whom I had named Mr Friendly (obviously I hadn’t really named him that. That’s the idiot choice of my so-called adult ((!)) mind. But I need to call him something here, and his actual name isn’t an option as it was fairly distinctive; I don’t want some familial prick Googling it on an off-chance and ending up here. So Mr Friendly it is). This is him (well, it’s not. It’s a picture of another doll from the same line; it isn’t the doll I had. But for now it’s the best I can do):

Mr Friendly

My version of the doll was such a permanent part of my physical being that by the time I stopped taking him everywhere, he was full of holes, his stuffing was long gone and he could dubiously boast a number of wear-and-tear style stains. The smile you see in the above picture was no longer there; someone had had to stitch him a new one at some point. The eyes were the originals, but had to be re-sewn every six months or so. The poor sod probably even smelt like a wet dog.

Mr Friendly’s over-worn status, though, proved my overwhelming and at the time unparalleled love for him. I remember the adults being both amused and bemused by the fact that I was, at best, ambivalent about other toys, but that this one had to be by my side wherever I went. I remember returning their perplexity with cynical sneers. They didn’t know how awesome, if I may use such a gruesome word, Mr Friendly actually was, because if Mr Friendly could speak, then he wouldn’t have wanted to give them the time of day.

I remember that he eventually disappeared from my life; this is one of the many parts of my childhood that is a total blank in my memory, so I don’t know how, or why. I think it must have been a gradual transition from having him there all the time to not doing so, because I don’t remember the biting sting of his loss the way I do when someone tried – however gently – to take him out of my hands. Whatever the case, a few years later, I was looking for something in one of the bedrooms, opened an ottoman, and saw his tatty but still-smiling face staring back at me.

My first reaction was one of being taken utterly aback. I should have been delighted, and most of me was – but it also felt even then that perhaps he peripherally marked something deeper about which I did not want to think. I hate saying and thinking that about him, but I have to: it’s the truth. Nevertheless, I was able to quickly push this befuddled surprise to the back of my mind, and regard him with the enduring and still hugely significant affection and love that he deserved.

He was a fixture – albeit a much more subtle one – of my life again for a while. I would say that he was within my easy reach (for example, on my bed, on the dressing table, or in an easily-accessible cupboard in my room) probably well into my teenage years, and it’s not impossible that this was the case even into my very early 20s. I don’t know what happened after this; part of me has a very vague memory of my mother asking if she could put him into the roofspace, but this could very well be phantom. Either way, I’m pretty sure he must indeed be in the roofspace (or other storage at Mum’s house), because there is almost certainly no way in hell that my mother would have binned him.

You know how things are in this life; it muddles on, you psychologically compartmentalise, think about Thing A and not Thing B, all the time letting existence distance you from certain things and/or certain people. Such have the last years been vis a vis Mr Friendly; I really haven’t thought about him much in a long time, and I feel tremendously guilty about that, because he – like other important figures in my life, be they technically alive or otherwise – deserves my steadfast remembrance. I now know how much comfort he must have provided me through some very troubling times. Even if I had not suffered any form of abuse, he was still of incredible importance to me. It’s not until you separate yourself from the compartmentalisation and look inside from the outside that you truly realise just how much you miss the thing/person/whatever. But I do. I do miss him.

On Sunday, Bippidee alluded to her oldest and most cherished protective/security toy, a teddy bear. I read her post and a passing memory of Mr Friendly fondly popped into my head. I wondered briefly where exactly he’d ended up, and recalled in smiling nostalgia my having found him in the ottoman that time. However, the reminiscence was brief, and rather than fixate upon it, I simply got on with the day (such as it was, sitting about on the sofa stuffing my face, but anyway).

Later that day, though, I got into a bizarre but interesting conversation on Facebook. The person with whom I was corresponding enquired as to whether or not I had any stuffed/cuddly toys, and of course I responded in the affirmative. I cautiously wondered if she was seeking cheap/free goods from me for her young son, but alas cynicism does not always prove necessary. Instead, her intention was to direct me to ToyVoyagers, a rather niche (to say the least) but nonetheless brilliant website that chronicles the travels of toys on holiday. Being the sap that I apparently am these days, I was instantly transfixed.

But there was something in it that once again reminded me acutely, and this time more dramatically, of Mr Friendly. Perhaps it was the description of one particular stuffed animal that noted that he was “rescued” from the charity of a window shop that set me off; this made me feel sorry for him, and reminded me that I felt sorry that Mr Friendly was and is no longer in my life. Maybe it was just the general importance in the site users’ lives of their stuffed animals and toys. Who knows.

I thought of Mr Friendly, and I felt a lump rise in my throat. Of course, I actively tried to suppress it, even though the only person here other than me was A, who is well aware of my idiosyncrasies in this regard. I remember that he was in the kitchen washing dishes or something; I went in, and mentioned this to him, trying to retain a light tone of voice. My mind did not want to co-operate, of course, and I felt my eyes fill with salty, stingy tears. I wiped them away and tried to do whatever it was that I’d gone into the kitchen to do, but it was a futile effort. I broke down slightly, initially saying to A that it was “ridiculous” that “I [had] tears in my eyes over this.”

‘Slightly’ soon turned to ‘ridiculously’, however. I returned to the living room, sat down, and absolutely cried my eyes out. You might even say that I wept, with long, hollow, presumably piteous sobs and moans of sorrow accompanying my unwelcome tears. (I think the last time I cried on something approximating this level was on this post-therapy, pre-NHS-discharge occasion, but it might even have been worse than that). Yet even as all this took place, the rational part of my mind urged me to analyse the situation; write about it now, it demanded, reasonably enough I felt – but of course my upset prevented me from doing so. OK, then; at least try to articulate what you’re feeling. I tried.

It’s not something I can easily respond to. I can only say that I was overcome with a visceral, profound sorrow. Perhaps grief? Whatever it was, it was deep and overwhelming, but rather than just experience that, of course I became incensed with myself for feeling whatever it was I was feeling over something so ostensibly silly (leading to this mini-rant on Twitter – thank you for all your replies, lovely people. You do mean a lot to me). The anger though, perhaps mercifully, didn’t trump the great sadness and longing that I felt. I just wanted my little blue and white ragdoll. I wanted to love him again, to protect and attend to him, to rescue him from whatever dark consignment he’s been relegated to. I wanted to make up for the years of neglect that he’s suffered and never let him go again.

I don’t know how long I cried for – maybe 10 or 15 minutes? A and I then had an analytical conversation in which we tried to ascertain what exactly what this fuss had been about. Was it about the doll per se? Probably not, we reckoned, though in my mind it certainly feels like it is. Was the memory of him a trigger? Perhaps indirectly; he himself bears absolutely no negative connotations whatsoever, but clearly he was ‘there for me’ during many great trials.

Whatever the case, it has become my desire and indeed this week’s project to get him back. I’m pretty sure he’s in Mum’s roofspace, as I said, but the difficulty is that it is not easily accesible; it would be all too easy to go up there, then fall through the floorboards and die. Well, as someone who knows how to do herself in, I can testify that you almost certainly would not die in such circumstances, but it would mostly likely lead to pain and injury. The darkly amusing irony of all this is that it was almost certainly Paedo that put Mr Friendly in the roofspace in the first place, as he is one of the very few people that my mother will/has allow(ed) up there. Her reasoning is that he is light and nimble (or, rather, he was) and knew where to stand to avoid injury.

The long and the short of that is that I’m scared to go into the roofspace, even though I will eventually attempt it come hell or high water; Mr Friendly is worth it. In the meantime, whilst I work out how to do it without breaking my back, I have been perusing the internet to get a stand-in: an exact replica of Mr friendly (or, more accurately, a precise reproduction of what he looked like before he incurred so much wear and tear). These dolls are not easy to come by: after all, their manufacture was in the ’70s, and they are long since out of production. Nevertheless, occasionally one does seem to come up – and on this occasion, I would for once appear to be in luck. To that end, I am happy to report that I am currently bidding for a Mr Friendly replica stand-in on eBay :)

I discussed this with Paul today (or yesterday, or whatever it actually was), and as you may imagine, he opined that my reaction yesterday/on Sunday was not really about the doll. Intellectually, of course, I know this to be true. In terms of pure feeling, though, I still completely see it as being about Mr Friendly. Either way, I’m going to get him back, I’m also going to get a second him, and I’m going to take damn good care of them both.

Mr Friendly helped me endure the macabre quagmire that was my childhood. It is now time to return the favour.

Obligatory 2010 in Review Post

 Blog News, Life, Random Mental Health Related Philosophising  16 Responses »
Dec 312010
 

So, I come to the end of another year as a mental health blogger – and, judging by the fact that I have not given up on the whole endeavour, as I expected I would, I must be doing something that is not quite as shit as the stuff that clings to the pipes leaving the toilet that deals with the majority of my IBS-ridden concerns. At least, I hope that is what it means; I still don’t think much of what I do here, and don’t really understand the moderate success this site.

Anyhow, there is almost fuck all other than this blog to show for another year of respiration, though I have a suspicion that my customary verbosity will disguise that fact admirably in the forthcoming prose. This time last year I wrote a review of the seven months I had then been blogging, and find myself amused that a period of nearly twice the length in question – ie. the 12 months of this year – is full of much less material of any meaningful worth. I may be able to count this blog as one thing that has been worthwhile in 2010 (and I do), but to be honest, there is almost damn all else.

I mean, 2009 was shit – but at least some stuff actually happened.  For instance, I lost my job in a mental health charity for being a mental health charity case. I received my first proper diagnoses, catapulting me to the ranks of a proper mental. I developed psychosis and watched myself sink into a spiral of dissociated mess. I was ordered to murder my baby cousin on Christmas Day. Fun? No.  Not at all. But at least it was vaguely interesting: shit actually took place.  This year, analysing it retrospectively, has been mind-numbingly, uneventfully, unwaveringly dull.

But, re-engaging my narcisssism gear, let me attempt to dissect something of it, in a fashion similar to that employed this time last year.

TEH BAD!!!1!!!!eleven!!!!11!!!!

In 2010, I hated, became frustrated with/annoyed by, and send poxes in the general direction of:

  • my abject failure to kill myself (pathetically, at that) at the start of the year. It wasn’t my finest moment, but it’s a sign of how desperate I was…well, obviously it was a sign of how desperate I was – people don’t tend to attempt suicide because they’re bored or think it will be funny or something. Anyhow, it was not so much the really woefully awful suicide attempt that was such a ‘bad’ thing; it was the infernal, hateful, despicable A&E extravaganza that became the attempt’s incidental and dubious side order. I don’t even think the relevant post captures the overwhelming feeling of one’s brain decaying before one’s very eyes (not literally, obviously. I mean, obviously! But it certainly felt that way on a metaphorical level). Certainly not one of my more enjoyable all-nighters.
  • the cessation of therapy with C. I can’t provide you with a link to a specific post (this takes you to a list of posts about him) because, despite the fact that I was booted out of his care in August, I have still been unable to bring myself to review the final sessions on this blog – or, even, in my own mind. I (audibly) recorded the final (I think) five meetings; my rationale for doing so was that I knew there would be material discussed therein that concerned my lengthy anti-discharge complaint (see below) – stuff that the Trust might well be inclined to deny. Evidence, in other words. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried to lie to me.  Anyway, a by-product of such aural subterfuge was that I had all the material to capably write-up the final sessions – but the thing is, I can’t bring myself to listen to any of it. I accidentally clicked on one file in iTunes the other week, and upon hearing C’s soft voice, to find how much I still reacted. It was a bizarre, indescribable combination of regret, disgust (at him and his employers), longing, bitterness, sadness, hypervigilance and bewilderment. And thus it all remains unwritten – for those of you that seem to derive some sort of vicarious enjoyment from my therapy session reviews, I apologise.  But hopefully the stuff with Paul (see below) suffices?
  • the endlessly circular and frustrating palaver with the Trust complaint and Mr Director-Person. Seriously, what utter, utter cunts. Every time I got a letter from the putridly elf-like Mr D-P I felt violent, primal urges which had hitherto been alien to me. What an unspeakable wanker. Seriously, what a twat! A fucker of the highest order. Bellended fucking cockhead. Bastarding, twatting…Sorry. I could rant all day. Moving on (…), the more he became a jargon-obsessed, targets-driven fuckstain of absolutely evil fuckery of cuntitude, the more tenacious and pissed off I became, to the point where they actually had to take him specifically out of the picture and instead involve Mr Chief Executive. I’m currently waiting on my medical notes detailing my entire psychiatric history and a meeting with an advocate (see below); thereafter, I am taking up an offer from Mr C E to meet the Head of Psychology and the Assistant Director of Mental Health to “discuss the way forward”. I fully intend to win this fight.
  • dealing with the realisations – or, more accurately, dealing with admitting the realisations – of my childhood abuse in therapy. See here, for example. However, I class confessing to C about the sheer extent of things as a positive development, so in that sense see below. The hallucinatory fallout from the admission wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, however.
  • the worry that my family had found this blog (which suddenly exploded all over again yesterday). That would have been a disaster of the like I have never experienced…but, through all the clouds of the associated drama, I saw one slither of silver shining through: I will not be silenced because of those arseholes. I’ve banned suspicious IPs from reading and will continue to do so as necessary. If the family are reading, if they don’t like what I write here…well. If they don’t like it then they can go to hell.
  • the fucking DLA changes and the comprehensive spending review. Nearly as effective a manual for suicide as that penned by Geo Stone in 2001.
  • the recollection of the gang rape. It’s always been something on the fringes of my awareness, and I suppose I was compartmentalising - something at which I am highly skilled – and hiding it away. In a sense it’s a good thing that I admitted it to myself (to Paul – see below for more on him), but although I know that intellectually, it was still very, very hard to ruminate on.
  • planning, and un-planning, to kill myself (again) at the start of October.  This is bad from all angles: if you are a nice anti-mentalist who for whatever fucked up reason thinks I am remotely less than shite, then you might be sorry that I so deeply planned this, and that I know exactly how to do it should the compulsion consume me once more. If you’re me then you see it as a bad thing too – I still can’t even end my life successfully.  Another moronic failure of a not-necessarily-difficult task. How much longer will this silly little dance continue?!
  • feeling the effects of the intensity of my new therapy with Paul was difficult. In the long-run, such intense work is a good thing, I’m certain – but in the short-term, it frankly fucking sucks.
  • going mental in Newcastle.  Actually, I look back on this with a certain amount of humour – I mean, an (admittedly, in the grand scheme of things, low level) experience similar to Cotard’s Delusion is quite amusing – but it was horrible at the time. I wrote that post whilst bizarrely feeling quite hypomanic, but shortly afterwards I was lying in a toilet somewhere retching and shaking like the local crack addict going cold turkey.  Not. Nice. At. All.
  • the usual perennial misery of Seasonal Affective Disorder, plus general late-year malaise and more side-effects of therapy.
  • meeting (and having A meet) my alter, a child that I’ve taken to calling Aurora. I hate her. I don’t know what else to say; her manifestation was – and is – an enormous development, but beyond expressing my abhorrence of her, I don’t know what I should discuss on the matter. She sucks.  The end.

TEH GOOD!!!1!!!!eleven!!!!11!!!!

But in 2010, I derived joy, pleasure, satisfaction or hope from:

  • changing my name via deed poll at the start of 2010 – in order that I may be dissociated from V, the human male responsible for a spermatozoa implanting itself into an ovum produced by my mother, and his kin, Georgie and Merv – and am still confident that my decision to do so was the correct one.  My mother hasn’t entirely come to terms with it, and perhaps she never will, but that’s her issue. It is amusing to watch the rest of the family try and almost perpetually fail to remember it. I find myself wondering if they would be so forgetful if I had changed my name through marriage. I suspect that the outdated cunts would not be thus disabled.
  • meeting NewVCB, my new consultant psychiatrist, in January of this year. That first meeting was perhaps slightly dubious, but in fairness it was just after I slit my wrists (see above), so it wasn’t the best time for the encounter to take place. In general, the relationship is a fairly good one, and I do think she wants the best for me.
  • Seroquel, as prescribed by the aforementioned NewVCB in the aforementioned first appointment. Life-saver. Stick your anti-psychiatry wank up your arse; this drug has not only saved me from probable section and possibly a descent into completely florid psychosis, it has also saved my very life. I don’t give a fuck if you think I should be “mindfully breathing” and not accepting “overly pathological” “labels” (a term I loathe with a passion) and the ”Big Pharma conspiratorial pushing” of these “mind controlling” drugs. I really could not give less of a fuck. Seroquel has made my life less shit. (Oooh, wah wah, it’s a placebo man, don’t you get it, haven’t you examined the real evidence [yes, that utterly non-biased body of 'work' - why, actually, yes - I have!], wah wah wah, gaaaah, mmmmmooooaaaaannnnnn – look: do fuck off, people. The record is stuck and it’s getting fucking boring now. Cheers).
  • another diagnosis: this time of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I get the impression that NewVCB isn’t entirely keen on the application of what she terms ”emotionally unstable personality disorder” (I much prefer the DSM’s ‘borderline’ myself, as in reference to my specific case at least I find it a more accurate description of the condition – not true of all those thus diagnosed, I know). It is, after all, the most stigmatised diagnosis in psychiatric history, for reasons that I still don’t entirely understand. Anyway, being diagnosed as having C-PTSD was a positive thing in the sense that I could perhaps start accepting that maybe the fault, if there indeed is any apportion-able blame, for my turning out as the unemployed and unemployable tosspot that I am lies elsewhere, and is not as internal as I often attempt to portray. (Hmm. That’s easy to say…).
  • lovely blog awards of joy. I don’t write this journal for such recognition, but it’s certainly an honour to have some sort of impact on others’ lives. Firstly I received a runner-up’s prize from Mental Nurse, later a ‘Top 25 PTSD’ Award from Medical Assistant Schools, then in early December a ‘Top Ten Health Blog‘ award from Blogger’s Choice Awards and finally, completing the circle, more from Mental Nurse in the form of first place for both the ”Personality Disorders” and “Psychotherapy” categories (there were a few others along the way, too). I can’t work out what I’ve done to deserve these, but I’m delighted and humbled nevertheless. In all sincerity - thank you.
  • admitting to C just how chronic and systematic my experiences of child sex abuse at the hands of my uncle had been. I mean, putting it into actual, verbal words. I had been completely incapable of saying what needed to be said for weeks (arguably months, arguably even years), and finally doing so felt like an achievement for some reason. It’s just a shame that when I was finally able to let him peel back all those nefarious layers that he kicked me out of therapy. Cheers, NHS!
  • this blog celebrating its first birthday in May. Yay! I’m still so glad started to write it.
  • a holiday! Yay yay :D
  • the Mad Up – a carnival wherein a range of UK mental health bloggers descended upon a London park and, later, a London pub, to meet the faces behind the writings. It was truly a privilege to meet such an amazingly courageous and charismatic group of people, and I enjoyed their company immensely.
  • PAUL!!!!! A similar yet somehow distinctly different type of therapist to C, Paul is very, very definitely A Good Thing. I knew that as soon as I first met him, and the consensus from my A, my friends and those of you that comment here seems to be universally in his favour. I consider myself very fortunate to have met him, especially when I had been so (unfairly) dubious about the Nexus Institute.
  • telling Paul that my abusers psychologically tortured me too. I had told A of this, but I had been drinking on that occasion – discussing it verbally in an entirely sober state was something of an achievement, I felt, even though I can’t quite work out why that is my view.
  • Twitter and the Madosophere, once again. This year I’d particularly like to thank bourach at Conversations With My Head, Phil Groom, the artist formerly known as Lola Snow, Autumn Delusions, Bippidee, Magic Plum, Useless CPN, Maybe Borderline, Seaneen, Karita, Zarathustra of Mental Nurse, Splintered Ones, Sanabitur Anima Mea, and Titflasher. <3 to all of you, andindeed to many more – I’ve felt particularly supported and/or entertained and/or understood by this lot, but it doesn’t mean that others haven’t been brilliant either.
  • My wonderful friends - Daniel, Brian, CVM, Annie, K, and A’s family and friends have all been brilliant this year, as they are every year. For those of you that read this – I think it’s about five of you – thank you from…no, not the bottom of my heart; I don’t want the arteries leaving said organ to squirt blood all over you, after all. Thank you from somewhere much more psychologically meaningful; the part of my brain that controls positive feelings and affection.
  • A and Mum. Mum has her moments in which she frustrates me, but generally our relationship is fairly good at present, and she has been mostly supportive throughout the year.  A, as ever, has managed to not kill me in his own quiet, unassuming way, and I am perennially grateful and touched for his love and support.

Site Info

I moved this blog from its previous home at http://serialinsomniac.wordpress.com to the self-hosted domain with which you are now familiar in January 2010.  I think it was about half-way through the month and at that stage the blog had about 17,000 hits, mainly from referrals from other blogs and sites that quoted or linked to my drivel.

As you can see from the relevant section of the right-sidebar, I now have over 200,000 hits. Some of the volume has been from being listed on blog aggregation sites and whatnot, but most of it now comes from searches. One advantage of self-hosted WordPress blogs is that it’s easy to install plug-ins that make relevant posts easily found by relevant Google searches.

In worldwide terms, 200,000 hits is what some blogs get in 10 minutes - but Confessions was never intended nor expected to reach such heady heights, and to that end I am grateful for what is for me a surprisingly high amount of visitation. Moreover, I am grateful to and platonically in love with all the personnel behind the statistics – I am now in the enviable position where I can class several of you as real life friends, and even where that is not the case, I care deeply about all of you that comment, read regularly, and engage via other media such as Twitter and Facebook. Thank you all.

The most frequent referrers to this site are StumbleUpon, Twitter, BlogSurfer, Bippidee and Mental Nurse.

The most read post by a substantial margin is Thoughts on the DLA Changes in the Budget, with over 5,000 unique hits. To my utter astonishment, the words ‘DLA changes’, a term that one would have expected to lead to a governmental outline of the modifications of the benefit, renders this post as the first result in some Google searches. Wow.

Other popular posts are:

The most read static pages are, probably unsurprisingly, About the Autho (2,300 hits) and The Alter Ego (900 hits). All of these figures are rounded up or down to the nearest 50.

The most popular search terms landing here are ‘(confessions of a) serial insomniac (blog)’, ‘dla changes [or many analogous terms]‘, ’c-ptsd‘, ’akathasia‘ and, rather amusingly, ’nadine dorries‘.

[EDIT: Over Mental Nurse, I've just noted some of my favourite random search terms that seem to have fuck all to do with most of what I write.  I thought I should include them here too.  They are: 'marsha linehan is a fucking bitch' (well said!), 'mum sex' (um...), 'psychodynamic masterbate [sic]‘ (oh yes, give me some Freudian lovin’), ‘already oppressive with his worthless refrains, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for his reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. if you think that that’s a frightening thought then consider‘ (OK, not really so random – the quote is on the sidebar.  Still loved that it got here, though) and ‘day of the triffids sexist‘ (yes, gender disenfranchisement was my first concern when giant carnivorous plants decided to take over the world and eat everyone and everything.  Politics is so important at such a time).  If you were one of the above searchers, thank you for entertaining me throughout the year! :D

EDIT II:  Just spotted these gems in the stats of recent days: ‘thefundingmentalists‘ (don’t know why but it made me laugh – I’m guessing it has something to do with the spending cuts, and is therefore wonderfully appropriate),’will she fuck someone else bpd‘ (yep, all we can do is whore about; there is literally nothing else in our lives ((*watches this blog vanish forthwith*))), ‘hate it blog‘ (yes, given my general nihilism, I probably hate it too), ‘illusion of child rape small xxxxx‘ (what the fuck?) and possibly the best: ‘how will i say goodbye after suicide?‘ (well, I suspect you’ll have to haunt your loved ones, because I don’t think your vocal chords are going to do it for you).]

People most often leave Confessions to head over to Conversations With My Head, Bippidee, Splintered Ones, Writing Myself Sane and Mentally Interesting (alas, the last two are no longer writing, at least for now. Love and hugs sent across the blogosphere to both Ophelia and Seaneen).

The most popular day to date on this blog was 23 June 2010, when there were 2,586 hits in total.

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish

No, no, no, fear not: I’m not quitting blogging just yet – I just felt like saying that. I’m just signing off from this post, and anyway, it’s a nice phrase (if a strange one for those not familiar with the reference). In the absence of this quote, the title for this conclusion would have been ‘Meh’ or ‘Blah’ or something, and I thought an Adams allusion, inappropriate or otherwise, would be slightly more interesting.

I’m not enough of an optimist to start wishing everyone who reads this blog a happy new year, as I know mental illness and related maladies don’t necessarily lend themselves well to such hopes.  Furthermore, I know that the new year can be intensely triggering for some people – myself included, though mercifully not quite to the same degree as some (my main trigger of winter is, of course, Christmas). Still, the whole thing reminds one rather acutely of the inherent pointlessness of life and, in my case, the pointlessness of my life.

But, in some nebulous way, there is always the small chink of light somewhere that dictates that maybe, just maybe, the next 12 months will be vaguely less bollocks than the previous 12. So if you’ve had a tolerable 2010, I wish you a tolerable 2011. If you haven’t, I wish you a much better cycle of existence this time round.

Either way, you all have much love, affection and virtual hugs from little old me.

P <3
xxx

I *Hate* Her – Paul: Week Five

 Uncategorized  12 Responses »
Nov 112010
 

I’ve been almost entirely abminuscule details of conversations in therapy. The answer is, generally speaking, really rather boring: I have simply been blessed with a very good memory. Which, when you think about it, for a serial dissociater (perhaps I should change the name of the blog to that?) is sort of ironic. Maybe remembering stupid things makes up for failing to remember others? Who knows. Anyhow, Nick wondered if perhaps I furiously scribble notes when I arrive back at my car – this is often the case indeed. Additionally, I’ll be sitting minding my own business, thinking of something else entirely, and then something will remind me of something said, and I’ll instantaneously whip out my iPhone to note my recollections.

That said, there are two qualifying points to that. As I note in the disclaimer section of this blog, I do often paraphrase or slightly embellish dialogue for the sake of (*ahem*) dramatic effect, and additionally, it is sometimes the case that maybe things didn’t necessarily take place in the order in which they are described. I’d like to iterate though that everything sad/described was said or did happen essentially as detailed – just in an even more desultory fashion. Secondly, there have been a few cases where I did record a session. If I recall correctly most of the relevant posts are protected, because I was paranoid that C may have found this blog and would be furious with me for my subterfuge. Now I don’t care if he knows, and even if I did, it’s not like any anger or irritation on his part is likely to affect me in any way now, is it?

** I really, really hate the word ‘survivor’ in this context. Apologies if that offends anyone – I certainly don’t mean it to. As ever, this applies to me, and not others. I don’t believe my life was ever in danger; therefore what the fuck was it that I survived? I once survived what could have been a serious car accident. I didn’t survive abuse because what else was I meant to have done? Just randomly died? Actually, Judith Stout in her book The Myth of Sanity argues that that very thing can happen, but I would be very surprised if it were a likelihood in cases like mine. Still, as she notes:

…[DID] seems to emerge spontaneously in situations of extreme early trauma, and is a highly effective self-protective strategy that may preserve the individual’s very life, by allowing him to think at all in circumstances that would otherwise be tetanizing [sic]. In situations that are too chronically terrifying for the self to deal with, the self may take advantage of its several ego states, may divide the stress, and cope as a group of specalized [sic] but interrelated selves. In this way, we survive. In this way, as in so many others, our resilient brains are much more brilliant than we know.

Thoughts?

—

So I see that I have failed in my attempt to keep this relatively short. I strode far too much into random introspection. Augh well. I should have learned by now that I can’t control my fingers when they touch the keyboard. Goodnight!

On Unmarried Harlotry and Misogynist-Feminism – Paul: Week Two

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff  10 Responses »
Oct 182010
 

My counselling session with Paul last Monday was so wide-ranging that I hardly know where to begin. As I noted in this post, it was like I condensed years of sexual abuse into a minuscule 50 minutes, which doesn’t make for a good written recollection of the session. I’ll therefore take it on a desultory point-by-point basis.

The Shutter

As I sat down with Paul at the start of the session, there must have been some ongoing amicable-enough conversation bouncing between us. When he’d first seen me downstairs in the waiting room, with my formerly-blue hair now jet black, he’d said, jokingly, “you’re trying to confuse me, aren’t you?” Maybe we were discussing that, but I don’t remember. The subject matter is unimportant in any event.

He asked where I wanted to start the discussion, and I didn’t have a clue (as had been so frequently the case with C, Paul’s predecessor). But somehow or other, we eventually got to the subject of the sex abuse (I mean…it is what I’m there for!) and in doing so, I instantaneously switched from this cheerful, fairly vivacious and easy-going young woman, to a verbally dried-up, suspicious, nervous, child-like…thing.

He asked me how I felt in that moment, but I failed to articulate myself particularly well and out tumbled some incoherent mutterings about it being an awkward subject to discuss. How wonderfully insightful of me; I bet he has never heard anything of the like before. Self-vituperations notwithstanding, I must have ‘relaxed’ into it eventually (insofar as that’s possible, anyway), because on our Let’s Talk About Sex (Abuse)! journey of fun and discovery we eventually arrived at the thrilling destination of…

The Power of Words

Ever since I began talking about my experiences of sexual abuse, I have been horrified by the use of the terminology that’s inevitably involved. I’m fairly OK in certain circles with using the supposedly vulgar swear words for those ‘proper’ terms that I still find wholly intolerable, but that’s about it.

I remember when I talked about one of the somatic symptoms of my various illnesses to C one day that his response – to my utter, utter horror – was, “is this feeling in your vagina?” Vile word. Disgusting. I hate hate hate it. I feel sick even typing it, never-mind hearing it, never-never-mind saying it. I nearly threw up all over poor C as a result of his verbal use of this term. Eugh. Yuk yuk yuk.

(As a related aside, I have made a discovery. Well, not a discovery, but I have come to a gradual and clear realisation. Paedo – and/or, apparently, his friends – must have been heavily pissed during many of their little anti-me enterprises. I’ve always experienced this kind of physical reaction ((a dull ache or sense of horrible and distinct pressure down there, or the tactile equivalent of an illusion that I need to micturate)) when confronted with overt drunkenness – stuff like hiccups, significant word-slurring etc. It’s particularly notable when it’s on the TV, though it happens in person too. Which is all a bit odd given that, staying ever patriotic to this island, I happily knock back booze with the best of ‘em. Strange).

Anyway, back on topic, one thing that stands out in my mind about this session with Paul was that, during the discussion of a vaginal (grr) rape that I recall well, I quite matter-of-factly said, “I remember looking down afterwards and seeing this horrible mixture of red, cream and pink liquid, which I now realise was a concoction of semen and blood.”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t shift my gaze from him as I said this either, and I don’t remember being particularly shamed using the words, though of course I harbour great shame in general. If I had ever been able to say that to C, it would have been through stuttered gasps, and from behind a protective mane of Uncle Fester-ised hair.

Not that I am criticising C, but I was desperate for him to like (love?) me, and I would not have readily put myself in a position where (in my erroneous but strongly held estimation) I looked like a shameful slag in front of him (at the very least, not until I was convinced that that wasn’t how he would have seen me). Maybe that shows a problem with the existence of attachment in psychotherapy, and maybe it doesn’t. It is just an observation.

“Bewilderment”

This was my eventual response to Paul when he asked me what I felt as I was being raped, or in the immediate aftermath of such an incident. The question produced something akin to a reliving-it-style-flashback, although I didn’t feel as much physical discomfort as one may have expected, thank fuck. I didn’t entirely have words for the sense of WTF? that Child Me / Adult-Me-Having-a-Flashback-in-the-Room-with-Paul felt, which indicates that I must have been very young as my vocabulary would have included words such as ‘confusion’ and ‘perplexity’ from a pretty young age (I’d guess seven-ish).

The WTF? of the moment was best summarised by me eventually, there in Paul’s counsellor-ly room in 2010, as ‘bewilderment’. He said that that was “a good place to start.”

Keeping Quiet

We spent quite a bit of time discussing why I never told anyone what was going on and how great the “emotional trauma” of that alone must have been. As he rightly noted, it is not in the normal psychology of a child to keep quiet about something that hurts or confuses him/her (certainly not to at this level), and to that end, he held, Paedo must have made some threat to or instilled in me some worry that made me keep my trap shut.

I have absolutely no recollection of anything like this whatsoever. After Paedo had done what he was doing, he would dress, tell me to do so, wait for me, then lead me back to the house (or wherever was applicable to the incident in question). I can’t remember if we exchanged words during these brief jaunts, but I am certain that there was no malice emanating from him (which sounds laughably improbable but, you know…relatively speaking).

Paul urged me to consider the issue deeply and I really, really did. He reiterated his position that something must have made me so terrified of repercussions to keep something of such magnitude to myself, but all I came up with was a big, fat blank. This remains the case a week on.

His view of this is that there was a fear running so deep somewhere that I was/am not ready to ‘recover’ it. My theory, in contrast, is a little less dramatic.

Pre-Marital Sex

My mother (who has mellowed out considerably since, praise be) loathed (or at least regarded with the utmost contempt) the idea of sex before marriage when I was a kid. I can’t imagine that she must have harped on about it specifically to me when I was at the age at which the abuse started (five-ish), as she only found out that I knew about sex (that I knew far more than she about sex!) when I was about eight, but still – I have recollections of her views on this anyway. One such memory is of her and my grandfather sitting in the living room, tutting moralistically when some unmarried woman on the TV was up the duff. I asked them what was so unspeakably heinous about this woman who should clearly have been burnt at the stake, whilst being doused with sulphuric acid whilst having her eyes gouged out with a rusty spoon. Rather than give any sort of reasoned or thoughtful response, they both look at me in aghast horror and advised that one day I would understand the nature of her offence. Patronising pricks.

So anyhow, my theory is that I thought that my mother and her family would have been so utterly ashamed and mortified that I had engaged in sexual acts before marriage – indeed, with someone already married – that they would have disowned me, or at the very least judgementally condemned and sneered at me.

I said so to Paul. He doesn’t think this accounts for my complete failure to reveal to someone in authority what was happening to me, but he did acknowledge that it could certainly have added to my senses of shame and complete defilement.

He sighed, and told me he’d read through the ‘how depressed are you’ questionnaire that he’d given me to complete the previous week.

“You ticked the box stating that you felt ‘very’ guilty and ashamed,” he said.

I nodded.

“Almost all of my clients tick that option,” he continued, shaking his head with gentle sadness. “What – what – have you got to feel guilty for?!”

I shrugged, and hypothesised that whilst I had nothing to feel guilty for really, that I had only developed that awareness as an adult. “I grew up thinking it was my fault, I think” I explained. “Rationality and logic are all very well, but even they can’t reverse 20 years of tunnel-vision thinking.”

Whoredom

Of course, for every utterance of “it’s not my fault,” comes about 17,000 “I’m a filthy whore!” declarations. I told Paul that I was a disgusting slag who seduced Paedo (I’ve just spent 20 minutes looking through the archives of this journal, because I had the following conversation with C too, and I know I wrote about it. Alas, I am missing it somewhere). I admitted to my sexualised behaviour around Paedo, a debauched behaviour on my part that occurred on two types of occasion: (1) when I knew he was incapable of touching me for whatever reasons (meaning I could satisfactorily watch his frustrated ‘suffering’); and (2) after I had become pubescent and Paedo was no longer interested in fucking me.

I saw this as my own mini version of revenge, but opined (and still do) that it exemplified my unadulterated (or, perhaps, adulterated? That also works) sluttery. Paul had a somewhat different view, which slightly echoed what had been C’s take on it (I still can’t find the relevant post, and it’s fucking doing my head in. If you’ve spotted this missing post, please contact the Missing Posts Unit at the Serial Insomniacal Headquarters…). The idea to both men was that dressing ‘seductively’ had given me some level of control over a situation in which I’d always been powerless. I don’t remember exactly what C had been getting at when we’d had the discussion, but with hindsight I can say with some confidence that it was probably a similar line of thinking to Paul’s.

Paul thinks that I was taken aback by the sudden or (more accurately) trailing off of the abuse, not understanding entirely why Paedo had ‘lost interest’ in me. He said that because no one had realised that anything was happening, and that it had gone on for so many years, it had become normalised in my head – and that when it stopped, although part of me was decidedly grateful, part of me felt rejected too. He wondered if my ‘seductive’ dressing was therefore some (admittedly unconscious) pseudo-attempt on my part to reignite Paedo’s interest in me. Better to have some attention than to be greeted with utter indifference.

I don’t know what I think of this. I don’t remember feeling ‘rejected’, but the implication is that even if I had done, it would have been as a psychological undercurrent and was not something of which I was aware. I do remember, again, a sense of WTF? when IT was no more – but quickly concluded that he simply wasn’t interested in anything other than pre-pubescent bodies, which is still my held position. But did that make me feel unloved? I suppose in a twisted way that it’s possible, though it doesn’t feel true.

“Acting Out”

Paul asked me if, either in my childhood or my adolescence, I’d had what would these days be termed “behavioural problems” by the psychiatric profession. My cynical laugh confirmed that this had, indeed, been the case (only as a teenager, mind you. I was a strange child, but not a nightmare one).

Paul spoke of his anger towards care-givers who are slapped around the face everyday with classic symptoms of child abuse in those of whom they are in charge, dismissing their ‘issues’ as teenage angst, being a spoiled brat or whatever. I nodded in agreement, but did point out that the dividing line between an ill-bred little cunt and a severely traumatised young person was blurred and hard to define.

He didn’t disagree, but said that most parents/guardians had it well within their power to do a little research into their kids’ behaviour, which would shed a lot of light on things, and possibly enable as-early-as-possible treatment for the abused youngster.

Was there an implicit attack on my mother here? I think so. I couldn’t disagree with him though – I still have a lot to tell here on that score. In short, aside from her denouncements on the information I gave her about Paedo (which, unsurprisingly, have “served to make [me] think that [I] was the one at fault” in the saga of Him and Me), she used to beat the living fuck out of me until I was ‘within an inch of my life’. My crime was being depressed.

But that’s a story for another day.

Paul said that when adults don’t notice the obvious signs of abuse – in my case walking strangely (obviously in the immediate aftermath of a certain type of incident), dramatic social withdrawal – that the child has to start leaving more cryptic-seeming hints all over the place. This leads to thinks like anger, regressed behaviours, theft and/or lies and generally disruptive behaviour. Although he accepted that the crossover between ‘bad’ and ‘traumatised’ was at times unclear, he said that the behaviour that I described from my late childhood/adolescence was classic mal-treated-kid behaviour.

Of course, my mother doesn’t believe in the lasting effects of trauma (despite the fact that she herself is very clearly suffering from some sort of PTSD), so I doubt she’d buy that, but it made me feel better about some of the shit things I’d done as an unruly brat. It doesn’t excuse them, but it does go some way to help explain them.

False Memory Syndrome – Again

It’s my last line of defence, apparently. I used the term “repressed memories” for some reason, then started lambasting myself because “repressed memories” were/are simply “false memories”.

“You know that’s not true, don’t you?” Paul queried, refusing to break eye contact.

I broke it, staring up at the skylight and pulling at my hair. Eventually I nodded regretfully.

I asked him had he seen Life on Mars. The philistine had not (I shall sack him as my therapist tomorrow ((today)) for this unforgivable atrocity), but he understood the premise, so I outlined its relevance to me (the first episode deals with the tiny things that the protagonist’s mind has ‘invented’, leading him to conclude that because there was no point in it making up such details, that his circumstances must be real).

Paul asked how I had felt during the experiencing of my small details – watching the rain water meandering down the garage wall, for example. I said that I had developed an odd fascination with such mundaneness at the time. Predictably, he saw this as a precursor to dissociation, and a coping mechanism to deal with the “unspeakable-ness” of what was being done at the time.

Birds and Blokes / Misogynist-Feminism / Feminism is Not Misandry, Not That That is What This is About, But Anyway

Way, way back many centurie(s-in-days) ago, not long after this blogging began, a blogpost lived in the land of Paaa-aahhnn, that identified her as a misogynist-feminist.

(If you understand what the deliberate cadence of the preceding paragraph was alluding to then you lead as sad a life as I do. Sorry).

Paul asked me how I felt about discussing the whole sorry thing with him, and I replied that it was odd talking about it with such candour to anyone. He accepted that, but was especially interested in whether or not having the conversation with “an older man” freaked me out.

I said that on the contrary, I preferred it. I told him that I had never particularly gotten on with women (though as I encounter more and more lovely ladies in the blogosophere, my flawed perspective on my own sex is finally being corrected – nevertheless, my older friends and acquaintances are still almost exclusively male, as was briefly discussed on the ‘About‘ page), and that I had actually become quite anxious about the possibility of seeing a woman rather than a man at Nexus before it was confirmed that I could see him. I said that my interests – heavy metal, science fiction, beer, poker, cars – were the much more frequent domain of blokes rather than women, and that things that women did generally seem interested in – babies, weddings, soaps etc – were strongly disliked by me. (Obviously this is a generalisation in terms of both genders, for which I apologise).

Paul thinks that it’s not as simple as that. Or rather, it is – I do harbour more traditionally masculine interests – but that it’s not been an accident of nature. This is where I think we’ll have to agree to disagree; I don’t believe in ‘innate’ gender roles. The fact that I do not have a penis (how odd, I can type that one without apparent difficulty) does not mean that I lack the interests more traditionally associated with those that do own such an appendage. Similarly, I deem it perfectly acceptable for blokes to be interested in fashion, kids, home furnishings, whatever – they’re not inherently not that way. I hold that we are first and foremost people, rather than members of groups that are specifically defined by our reproductive organs.

Paul, on the other hand, feels that I (unconsciously) developed my ‘masculine’ interests so as I could fit in better with men, thus (apparently) affording myself more protection than a female who was clearly ‘different’ in some ways from them. Psychology is a powerful thing, it must be noted, and I can see the argument that he posits. Nonetheless, I don’t like it, because it assumes that I intrinsically should have been different to the way I am, and I don’t feel comfortable with that idea at all. But then, what is there to feel comfortable about in this whole thing? He may be right. I don’t know.

As a counterargument, I postulated the idea that perhaps it was not about me becoming like males, but becoming unlike females. It was a male (males) that abused me, of course, but it was primarily females that sat idly by and ‘let’ it all happen. In that way, perhaps the development of a certain amount of disdain towards them was natural? I don’t know, and he admitted that neither did he, but it doesn’t seem totally unfathomable.

I also remember my eternal disgust for the public displays of emotion of Mum, Maisie, Georgie and to a much lesser extent Maureen, even from when I was very young. It used to grossly offend me to see an adult woman (or even one of the other girls) in tears – and I can’t say that led to an increase in my opinion of them. I suppose that I learnt early to be ‘hard’ and self-sufficient. I don’t know. I do know that Child Me cried a sum total of once in company greater than that of my mother, and that was when I had very severely twisted my ankle. I went about apologising to Maisie, Paedo (I was at their house) and their descendants for this gruesome iniquity in its immediate aftermath.

And Finally, On Transference (and Countertransference)

Paul and I had a brief discussion regarding the dynamics ongoing between us in the room at the time. One thing I really like about Paul so far is that he says what he fucking means. So for example where C would have endlessly asked, “what’s going on between us right now?” (a perennial mantra which, through no fault really of his, made me want to batter his face in), Paul asks, “what kind of transference are you feeling towards me at the minute, if any?” What’s even better is that he will then say, “…my transference is along the lines of x…”

C almost never alluded to countertransference, other than to sometimes (to be fair to him) admit to defensiveness or to remind me that the relationship was a co-construction. It would have been obvious to a dead fly that C reacted, at times quite strongly, to me, as I did to him – that was particularly noteworthy because, despite everything that happened, we did ‘click’ at a personal level. As I said before, Westminster’s loss is the NHS’s apparent gain. C was/is terribly good at avoiding and dodging questions are not traditionally the permitted territory of the analysand.

I have no idea whether or not Paul has such an ability towards avoidance, because he doesn’t bother to insult my intelligence by trying to employ it. He just comes out and says shit like it is.

Having said all that, don’t ask me what the countertransference to which he alluded actually was! I faintly recall an expression of sadness, but then that’s hardly surprising. It isn’t necessarily that I elicit that in him, I shouldn’t think – the material under the spotlight (no matter how hardened he is to same) can do that quite ably without any overt currents of psychological projection from me.

So, I don’t recall the nature of the transference/countertransference conversation, but – 3,800 words notwithstanding – my memory of this entire session is lacking. I knew as I sat there that I would be unable to detail it as accurately as I would have liked, and this instance is probably the best example of that. However, the very fact that he referenced the concepts with such openness was enough to continue to impress me.

So now it is Monday again, and I shall be seeing Paul in about 10 hours. I was going to write that I expected not to know where to begin – but that’s not entirely true, is it? I think he’ll have to be the first person other than A to have verbally been made aware of the unpleasantness of this – and, of course, my apparent return to being completely mental.

The latter I expected, even if I wasn’t fully prepared for it when it came. A gang rape? Well…not so much. Even though I sort of knew of it for a long time. Bloody brain and its nefarious dissociation.

Goodnight, lovely people. xxx

One Month On and Better Off Alone

 C, Medications  10 Responses »
Sep 262010
 

Today is the mensiversary of my last psychotherapeutic encounter with C.

What has struck me most acutely about the past month is how remarkably well I have coped with therapy ending despite my hugely significant attachment to C, and despite my righteous fury at how I was treated (and am being treated) by the Trust (and to some extent by C himself). The first few days after that final session were rough as fuck, and the first week in general was certainly not great, but overall I haven’t found myself the psychological heap of batshit insanity that I thought I would be.

I’m being told by various sources that my new position that I wasn’t abused in any way and my belief that I’m being watched are delusionals catalysed by therapy’s end. Thanks to the new Quetiapine dosage, I am starting to see things in what is in sane circles probably known as a ‘more rational’ fashion, and I accept that people probably aren’t watching me (unless they are shooting occasional, surreptitious glances at my blue hair). The sex abuse thing I remain conflicted about; I don’t believe it, but the ‘memories’/creations are pretty vivid, and my twisted sickness notwithstanding, I can’t really see why I would make it up. I told A yesterday that it was probably because I was bored, but apparently that is ludicrous. Looking at it from an entirely removed and objective viewpoint, I can agree with him – even if I don’t feel it.

Anyway, let’s assume for the sake of argument if nothing else that this denial/’paranoia’ is some sort of delusional psychosis. A and NewVCB (and some lovely readers) feel that it’s been brought about by the cessation of therapy, and is little more than a ridiculous form of defence mechanism. If so then, in the short-term at least, this reaction is better than the complete psychological breakdown that I had anticipated.

When my attention is somehow drawn directly to C, I confess that I do feel sparks of regret and sadness…perhaps even longing. There have been a few instances where this happened, the minutiae of which for various reasons I can’t really discuss here (not without a password, anyway). It’s why I haven’t attempted to write up the final six sessions with C yet; I haven’t forgotten, and I still intend to write them for at least the sake of narrative completion, but I need to be certain that I can cope with it, and not end up being driven into the messy situation that I predicted, but which has remained curiously (yet welcomingly) elusive to date. The onset of the madness could simply be delayed, and I wish not to invite it unnecessarily. Yet at a deep, visceral level, I think that when the time comes to record the last few weeks, I will be strong enough to do so.

Despite the potential trigger, I have had a necessarily brief but illuminating glance through some of the archives here about my sessions with C, and can reluctantly recognise that whilst he ultimately did more harm than good (his culpability in that being debatable), he did at least do something positive. I know more about myself now, and I know more about why I am and why I became mental – and I feel like I can start to face things in some sort of tangible fashion as a result. I should have been facing those things with him, but I’ve already sang from that song sheet 50 million times on this blog, so let’s not go there.

Last Thursday night, I ended up in a lay-by off a roundabout about 60 miles down the motorway from where I live. It’s the second time I ended up in that lay-by specifically. The difference between the two otherwise identical trips is simple: previously, I ‘woke up’ in such places, alarmed and confused, having suffered regular stress-induced fugues in the immediate wake of therapy sessions. Last week, I ended up there because I fucking wanted to end up there. I drove speedily and with symphonic metal blasting out of Disraeli, my car, because I wanted to. And I fucking loved every second. At one point on the trip I was struck by how much better I felt overall and, tellingly, had felt for a while. I still believe I’m seriously ill, but I have been given a reprieve for a wee bit of time anyway.

A believes that before therapy concluded, I was in a more positive frame of mind than I had been, say, a few months before that. That obviously wasn’t because therapy was ending, because of course I was petrified of that eventuality – and I still absolutely and completely refute any contention on the part of the shitty Trust that it was properly brought to a halt.

Anyway, I agree that things have been at their most stable in months, despite this catastrophic event haven befallen me. And that, dear readers, is because my medication fucking works.

It’s no miracle cure, and it’s not a substitute for proper, long-term therapy (that of the nature that I am apparently not allowed); having not resolved all my issues means that I am susceptible to regression and relapse at any point, and I do not consider myself well in the least. But I am surviving, I’m coping, and I’m not the vapid, catatonic non-entity nor the hallucinating, fearful, crouching-in-a-corner madwoman that I have in turns been. For as long as my mental health problems are unresolved, I will be those things again; I know that. But for now, I am managing in my own quiet, uninteresting way.

I can’t make up my mind on Venlafaxine, though I think that the current higher dose has possibly made a bit of a difference to my mood. Putting it specifically aside, though, I honestly believe that Quetiapine has saved my life more than once this year – much, much more so than over 60 sessions of psychotherapy ever did.

The Final Countdown: The Eve of the End of Therapy

 C, Fighting with the NHS, Important People in My Life, Moods, Psychotherapy  18 Responses »
Aug 252010
 

Plus Bye Mum! and The Obligatory ‘I Had an Appointment’ Post.

Let’s start with the first one.

Bye Mum!

One of two things has happened as regards my last post, in which I speculated that my mother was reading this infernal bollocks that I call Confessions of a Serial Insomniac.  Either I have been suffering from a paranoid psychosis (or, in less hyperbolic terms, just paranoia) regarding all the reasons that I thought she was reading it, or she has become shockingly technically savvy over the last few months.

I went to her house this morning after an appointment with Lovely GP and, when her attention was distracted, I searched her history, cookies and Temporary Internet Files on both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  There was no evidence of any visitations to this site at all, save for one single cookie which is probably from a time I wrote a post from her PC (as it had some references to an upload, to which, of course, she would not have had access.  For the record, I thought I had deleted all reference to that session, but meh).  When I say ‘searched’, I actually mean that; I used the built-in search boxes to search for terms such as ‘serial insomniac’ or ‘confessions’, rather than really rip the piss out of her privacy by wading through each single thing.

So seemingly I stand corrected on my earlier accusations.  Mother, I apologise.  Even though you aren’t reading this and don’t know about it.  Hmm.  Sorry anyway.

The Obligatory ‘I Had an Appointment’ (Part of the) Post

I saw LGP at the unGodly hour of 8.50am.  OK, so for a normal person, that’s not that bad, but I’m still registered at my mother’s old surgery, and since I live at A’s in the main, it involved a drive to the other side of town and then a hike up the motorway for a while.

I realised with horror last night that I had failed to fill in a form for the admin staff at the surgery.  Rather than do any work themselves when they receive DLA claims in from Social Security, they write out to the applicant asking them how their disability or illness affects them.  To be honest this suits me fine as they don’t really know how being mental affects me, and of course I do, but nonetheless I’d received the form the other week and had kept putting it completion of it off, despite their request to return it promptly.  I therefore sat in LGP’s car park immediately before my appointment and scribbled all the bollocks I could think of down – psychosis, dissociation, failure to engage in everyday tasks, severe anxiety, major depression, self-harm etc.  I hope I’ve covered everything.

Anyway, the main reason I went to see LGP was to scrounge Diazepam due to the now absolutely-imminent abandonment of me by C(unt).  LGP was sympathetic towards me given C/The Trust’s unprofessionalism, and seemed to understand that I have been completely retraumatised by the experience; however, the poor sod seemed unable to do anything about it.  He asked about NewVCB, and I said that she too was horrified about what C/The Trust are doing, but that she also seems uterly powerless to do anything about it (though she did try to dissuade C from cutting the process short, but the miserable git chose to refuse to listen to her).

The last time I saw LGP he had suggested going to see the Nexus Institute in the wake of the whole disaster that my therapy with C has become.  As I noted in the post in question, by psychological association I’ve developed an aversion to the Institute due to a really antiquated encounter with some NHS assessment bitch, but nonetheless I have been thinking about the suggestion and have perhaps warmed a little to it.  My concern now is that they offer, according to C anyway, a maximum of 24 sessions, which seems hideously inadequate to me.  When LGP raised the issue again this morning, I said so to him.  I pointed out that I felt that about 15 – 20 sessions was the minimum required to open up to a new person – and that was when the relationship was a good one.

He said that his experience of patients using the Institute’s services was that they had managed to actually achieve a lot in that timeframe, therefore opining that it was at least worth a shot.  He told me that they have a waiting list as they genuinely seem to be good at what they do.

Fair enough, but I bet they have never met a cynical, snide fuck like me before.

Anyway, it was left with me telling him I would, indeed, do as I was told for once and contact them for an appointment.  I am shitting myself at the mere thought of this, so how the fuck will I feel when I actually get round to the fucking meeting?!  And my concern is also this – my relationship (or, rather, the premature cessation thereof) with C has traumatised me so severely that that’s yet another thing for a new therapist to have to deal with.  It’s not all about the sexual abuse in the first place – it never was.  Now there’s just another layer of trauma-shite to add to:

  • the sex abuse
  • the bullying
  • the whole dreadful saga with my ex that I’ve still never written about here
  • the fact that I still weep for my grandfather nearly 12 years after his death
  • V’s abject cuntery towards me
  • V’s abject cuntery towards my mother
  • V’s relatives’ abject cuntery towards me and, to a lesser extent, my mother
  • an issue I’ve never discussed here pertaining to how my mother treated me when I first manifested severe depressive symptoms as a teenager
  • general life disillusionment that, unresolved, simply leads to further crippling depressions.

Can a therapist trained in helping people overcome sexual abuse deal with all that bollocks as well?  And do they have any expertise in treating people fucked up the arse by the NHS and being more of a mess as a result?  (Actually, they probably do; I’m sure my situation isn’t terribly uncommon).

Of course, the long-term plan is for me to enter analysis, but at least Nexus are free (donations notwithstanding), so I shall try them first.  I just hope that the limited timeframe afforded is not going to end up with a repeat of my current therapeutic disaster…more psychotherapy-induced trauma?  Oh yes please, world – give it to me, yeah!!!

Anyway, I risk never getting to the point if I don’t stop blathering about points made a zillion times before.  I led LGP to believe* that I was having a breakdown within a breakdown over the end of things with C and begged him for Diazepam.  ”The last time I had any was May!” I pleaded.  ”Please!”

It was truly pathetic.

He checked my notes and confirmed that May was the last time I was issued with a script for the beautiful, wonderful, amazing, fabulous tablets, and noted that I am “clearly not abusing them.”  No shit, mate.  He agreed to give me some more, though I was disgusted when I left the surgery and read the prescription that he had only issued 14!  I have seven left from the previous script, so there’s 21 – that’s only a fucking week’s worth!

To be fair, he said that if I was having a really hard time, that I was to ring him and he’d let me have some more.  You can be sure that I will be “having a really hard time”.  I feel that I need to hoard them, to have a proper size of a stash – just in case.  You never know when they’ll be needed, do you?  On that note, I observed with amusement that the back of the script paper now instructs you not to heard medication, as apparently that’s stealing money from the NHS or something.  This caused me much merriment – I hoard like fuck.  Too bad.  They failed to give me what I needed, so if I’m ‘stealing’ from the fuckers (such melodrama!) then I feel like a Robin Hood character, and am glad to be involved in screwing them.  Fuck them.

LGP asked the old rote question of whether or not I would overdose on the Diazepam.  I said that I wouldn’t, and then proceeded to tell him that I’d had my stomach pumped before and had no wish to relive the heinous experience.

“But are you having suicidal thoughts?” he asked.

I laughed in his face.  ”Of course I’m having suicidal thoughts,” I chuckled.  ”My entire life revolves around suicidal ideation.  But I won’t overdose, don’t worry.  I know how to do myself in and, unless you plan really carefully, that is not an outcome facilitated by overdoses.”

He raised his eyebrows, intrigued.  ”You’ve become something of an encyclopaedia about mental health issues,” he said, smiling.

“Well, I read a suicide newsgroup, so I know a bit about suicide methods,” I admitted.

He nodded.  ”But it’s not just that,” he went on, “you’re very self-aware, aware of what’s going on with you, and you’re extremely articulate about it all.”

I couldn’t help but blush.  That was nice.  I think.

He asked if my interpersonal relationships were of a satisfactory standard, and I responded that I had the support of A, a mass group of wondrous online friends, and a number of non-online friends that were supporting me unwaveringly.  I also told him that relations with my mother are at a reasonable point, though at the time I was still paranoid about what she was or wasn’t reading.

“It’s not that I think you should be grateful for the situation you’re in,” LGP said, “of course you shouldn’t.  But at least you do have a support network, it’s better than absolutely nothing.”

I suppose it is.  I asked if I could see him in a month as support additional to NewVCB and he said that of course I could.  He then mused for a second, and when asked what he had been considering, he told me that they also have counsellors that operate in the surgery.

“However,” he said, “I don’t think it would be appropriate for you.  Firstly, your issues are clearly very complex.  And secondly, you are clearly…” he searched for the words “…at a level above that sort of therapy.”

I regarded my lovely (but, alas, ginger) doctor with interest.  Was he implying that I am more intelligent than his almost-certainly-CBT-practising staff?

Mwhahaha!

He took my blood pressure, which he felt was pretty high.  He reckons that this is generally the usual PANIC PANIC that people get themselves into when in medical appointments, as well as stress over C.  ”I suppose I should also recommend losing some weight though,” he added, clearly uncomfortably.

I advised him that in the last year I have lost over four stone (yes, those of you that met me on Saturday – that does mean that I was even more the size of a mansion a year ago) and am continuing to lose pounds.  He was beside himself with joy (!) and kept congratulating me over and over, which was in hilarious stark contrast to the battering I took from his cunt of a colleague in December.

I left with the Diazepam script, a promise to him to contact Nexus and an agreement that we would meet again in about a month.  Ah.  Sighs.  I do like LGP.

I went to the chemist next door to get my medication, and whilst waiting looked around for other bollocks to spend money on.  I chose some Rescue Remedy, to aid the workings of the Diazepam, plus some anti-IBS stuff and Pro Plus.  Then I saw Seri-Strips, bandages etc – and I jumped on them.  I don’t feel like self-harming at the minute, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?  Better to be prepared, because it could go totally tits up after my final session with C(unt).

Which leads me to…

The Final Countdown: The Eve of the End of Therapy

So.  Here we finally are.  All my efforts to fix this dire situation have been a waste.  After 10.20am tomorrow, I will never see C again.

I look through my archives on this subject and actually find myself laughing at some of the histrionics displayed therein.  Wa wa, I can’t cope without him.  Wa wa, my life is over.  Wa wa, I’m so miserable, I can’t cope, please kill me someone please!  Tonight I feel…

…

…

…

…ambivalent.  Fine.  Asi es la vida.  I don’t care.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am still positively full of righteous anger and indignation at the appalling way I have been treated by the Trust, and I don’t intend to just lie back down under it and let the fuckers abuse me more.  However, as regards C as an individual specifically, I really don’t feel anything much about our soon-to-be-permanent-separation.  * In this sense, my “I’m having a breakdown within a breakdown” performance to LGP was perhaps slightly exaggerated in pursuit of drugs.  Maybe I should contact Narcotics Anonymous whilst I’m in the process of contacting new therapists?!

There are two probable reasons for this.

One: I have already done most of my grieving.  About a fortnight ago – after a session itself after an unpleasant meeting with NewVCB – I was in a particularly bad state, so much so that I caused a fuss on Twitter, apparently having implied I was going to do myself in.  That was a bad day, but it was one amongst many.  I have shed millions of tears over this and whined and bitched and moaned about it here so much that it will no doubt seem like another blog once I desist from such shittery.  My pain was so real, so deep, so astoundingly visceral – and now, it’s just not.  It has apparently played itself out.

Two:  a limited number of people know this, simply as I haven’t written about any of my sessions with C in five or six weeks, but in that time my view of him has shifted almost 180 degrees.  I know that the fault in this whole sorry mess is only partially his, but he has become the fall-person for my disdain and derision.  I used to respect him greatly and I was very fond of him, and that was on top of my issues of transference and attachment.  Now, I kind of feel like he’s…I don’t know…a fly or something.  He’s there and he’s actually rather irritating and frustrating, and you feel like swiping him – but, ultimately, he’s something of an irrelevance, his existence little more than a passing inconvenience.  And that existence, in terms of my life anyhow, will cease to be in 13 or so hours.

It should have been different.  Of course it should have been different.  There is a small part of me that feels sad that I have come to view him thus, and as stated I know that it’s mostly not his fault.  But this is the reality of things as they stand; he is the figurehead for every failure I’ve ever experienced thanks to his employers.  Poor C.  But not poor C too.  Who cares?

Is this a defence mechanism?  Probably.  And it could unravel completely in the morning and I might be a suicidal, dissociated, agitated mess.  For now, though, for this one important evening, I am OK.  Surprisingly but genuinely OK.

Now.  Who likes my new logo?!

Pan x

 Older Entries