The computer was responsive, hard-working and quick to process all tasks that it was assigned. Over time, however, with the large number of files it had in internal storage, the hard-drive became stretched to the limits. Neither did the computer have enough random access memory to adequately cope with the smooth running of normal day-to-day applications. The computer was markedly slowing down – and giving up.

The computer was taken to PC World where it was advised that its users should take it out into the “fresh air” before putting it into hibernation mode. An assurance was given that this would alleviate the computer’s problematic sluggishness. Alas, this was not to be.

The computer subsequently hired a number of consultants, one of whom advised the computer that its problems were not its problems per se, but the way it and its users thought about its problems. The consultant advised the computer that its internal pathways could easily be restored to their former position of normal functionality if the computer’s problems were merely viewed in a different light. Alas, it also was not to be.

Eventually, though, the computer was sent to a competent technician, who understood its particular types of issues well, having even done research in the field. The computer was most encouraged, though it recognised that inevitably the work done to it would be often slow, labourious and rather intricate.

In the course of the work, the technician discovered the files deeply hidden earlier in the computer’s life, and started to explore their contents. Unfortunately, these files contained viruses which, once released by the technician, spread throughout the computer’s hard-drive like wildfire. The technician attempted to install anti-virus software to kill the viruses, or at least mitigate the damage caused by them to the computer’s drive. However, the technician’s manager – and, later, the Director of the company – then dictated that the technician’s time with this particular computer was up.

Left to their own devices, the viruses, now running completely loose throughout the hard-drive, caused the computer’s operating system to behave even more erratically than it previously had, in some instances even causing it to act as though it were an entirely different operating system. The defragmentation program failed to work. Applications crashed or returned invalid data, and it became apparent that even hardware failure might become an issue.

Perhaps little more than a simple reboot would have once helped the computer to function at optimum level. Now, however, it needs a complete re-install of its operating system…and indeed, the kindest fate for it may be for it to finally display the Blue Screen of Death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In all seriousness I don’t really expect it to do any good, but you never know.  A friend of mine, through contacting her MP about the failures in her mental health care, did receive some very positive results, so it’s got to be worth a try.  At the very least, it’ll shake things up with C and Mr D-P

This will probably be a little repetitive if you’ve read my post on my history of therapy and if you’ve been following the Mr Director-Person series.

Dear Mr MP

Re:  Access to Mental Health Services, [My] Trust

I am writing to you as a constituent hoping that you will be able to assist me in accessing NHS services to which I am entitled for several serious mental health conditions. I am diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) with psychotic and dissociative features as well as clinical depression and social anxiety, and have been ricocheted around both the NHS and private systems since about 1998 when I was 14.

It is clear to me that the [My] Trust, in its approach to my mental health problems, is placing me at serious personal risk by refusing to offer me adequate treatment. In order to explain the situation, I feel that it is necessary to provide some background information and catalogue a series of NHS failures which have led to the dire situation in which I now find myself.

At about the age of 14, when I first experienced notable mental distress, I was referred to a counsellor whom I met only once. Some time later I was referred to a trainee (child) psychiatrist that I met several times; however, when she left to take another job, I was left without any support whatsoever. Several years later, after having severe difficulty pursuing my schooling, I was referred to [C's] Hospital for a psychological assessment, but was regarded by the assessor with open contempt and was not referred for any therapy or psychiatric care whatsoever.

However, with familial support I was able to somehow manage to go to university, during which time my mental health issues were relatively stable. Unfortunately, though, I had a major breakdown in 2007 during a Masters course, meaning that I had to leave my course with a diploma instead. Upon consultation with my GP, I was referred for an assessment at [Big Scary Bin]. Eventually I saw a psychiatric nurse who referred me for group Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), but given the lengthy waiting list for this, I saw both a psychologist and hypno-therapist in the private sector. Thanks in particular to the latter, I was able to return to a part-time job.

I was subsequently contacted by [Big Scary Bin] regarding the group CBT sessions, but unfortunately these clashed with my morning job. I asked the individual that had contacted me if it would be possible to arrange an alternative time, and he confirmed that afternoon sessions were available on a one-to-one basis, though the waiting list for this was much longer. I agreed to wait for these individual sessions; however, I was never again contacted by anybody in relation to this matter.

On 4 August 2008, after having battled against a major depression in my job (which had since become full-time), I broke down completely and had to go off work. I have been off work since. My condition was so bad that my GP sent out a Crisis Resolution Team (CRT) to my house, a referral only made in serious circumstances. Unfortunately I was patronised and all but openly derided by the CRT, who left claiming that they would, again, refer me to a CBT therapist.

Knowing how long the waiting lists for this were likely to be, in the interim period I consulted a CBT therapist in the private sector and saw her for several months. Although we had a good relationship, the cost of the treatment – for someone absent from work in particular – was prohibitive, and furthermore unfortunately CBT as a therapeutic modality simply did not help me at all. At this point it was considered that I was suffering from depression and anxiety ‘alone’, for which CBT is often an effective treatment. However, as was later determined, I also have BPD and C-PTSD, for which CBT is generally not empirically proven.

During a routine appointment with her Nurse Practitioner in late 2008, my mother found out that the CRT had not made any referral in my case as they had claimed they would. The Nurse Practitioner therefore referred me herself for an assessment at [C's] Hospital.

In January 2009, my GP also referred me to a psychiatrist.

On 29 February 2009, I first met [C], a clinical psychologist at [C's] Hospital. After three assessment sessions, [C] decided that an alternative approach to CBT would be appropriate and offered me the opportunity to keep seeing him specifically. I accepted this and, for the first time, I have found the relationship and the work conducted therein to have been of genuine benefit. As of the date of this letter, I have had 59 sessions with [C]; although since three of these were preparatory assessments and four are designed to facilitate the ending of the treatment, this amounts to a year’s therapy.

In May 2009, I was finally seen by a consultant psychiatrist (after a number of follow-up calls from my GP, and an additional referral from [C]). After assessment I was diagnosed with BPD (with a differential diagnosis of bipolar disorder, type II).

Research literature (and, indeed, my care team) is generally agreed that the treatment for BPD consists of long-term psychotherapy, of a minimum of 18 months – preferably twice a week (my therapy is once weekly). Medication can help manage certain symptoms such as depression and psychosis (in my case hallucinations), but therapy is considered the mainstay of treatment for this disorder. I personally know several individuals in other Trust areas that have received therapy for the same or similar ranging from two years up to over four.

Despite this, however, I was told by [C] in December 2009 (shortly after I lost my job due to my long-term absence) that he could only continue seeing me until August 2010. When I protested that longer-term therapy than what he was proposing was required, he agreed, stating that unfortunately certain constraints inhibited his ability to offer longer-term therapy, and said that he would support any complaint on my part. To that end, I wrote to the local mental health charity, Mindwise, and to the [My] Trust’s Director of Mental Health, [Mr Director-Person].

Unfortunately Mindwise dismissed my concerns, but [Mr Director-Person] did reply and I have been in correspondence with him since (copies enclosed). However, he has to date point-blank refused to allow my treatment to continue longer than the currently proposed timeframe, despite the inadequacy of the treatment the Trust is offering and the apparent postcode lottery that appears to permeate mental health care.

The Trust’s approach is in contravention of both personality disorder guidelines from the National Institute on Clinical Excellence, and the Northern Ireland Personality Disorder Strategy of June 2010. Although both recommend specific therapies for illnesses such as BPD (such as Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, Transference-Focused Therapy, and others) they also state that in the absence of facilities for same, more ‘generic’ therapy of the type I am presently receiving and finding useful should be provided.

In March 2010, my consultant psychiatrist (a different person from the one who diagnosed my BPD) felt that I was also afflicted with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) as a result of significant trauma in childhood. This illness is similar to but distinct from BPD, and psychosis and dissociation are common in both. Unfortunately, exploring the traumas in therapy – something I was only able to do properly in about March 2010 owing to considerable defence mechanisms and even amnesiac elements surrounding the issues – has left me thoroughly re-traumatised (as well as strongly suicidal, depressed and anxious). Whilst I accept that this is an inevitable part of therapy, the problem is that a matter of mere months is simply not adequate to help me to deal with and get over not only the original traumas, but this level of re-traumatisation. The re-traumatisation has caused even more severe flashbacks, serious hallucinations and considerable dissociation, including but not limited to my ‘waking up’ in places without awareness of how I got there.

[C] and my psychiatrist, [NewVCB], have proposed discharging me to a community psychiatric nurse or a social worker upon the cessation of therapy, but no one has been able to tell me what these individuals do, how they could help me in resolving and managing my current difficulties and traumas, and how this can be considered an adequate substitute for continued psychotherapy. It is my belief, supported by academic literature and research, that the best person to give me any chance of recovery is a qualified therapist such as [C].

The struggle with the Trust’s uncooperative and frankly negligent approach to my condition has in fact contributed to the worsening of my mental state, exacerbating feelings of worthlessness and despair. The Trust provided a good, functional relationship with a competent therapist but is now determined to terminate that relationship unreasonably whilst providing no adequate replacement treatment.

As this letter has detailed, it took me over 12 years to meet a therapist that I felt could genuinely help me, and I feel it is not unreasonable of me to wish to continue with this helpful work, particularly in light of the problems the health service has produced in the past. Furthermore, I am all but certain if I am discharged from therapy now, that I will merely be referred – perhaps more troubled and traumatised than ever – in the future, which will not do anything to save health service costs. Finally, as I am still unable to work, the public sector is not in any way saving money by discharging me prematurely from therapy; if my work with [C] were allowed to continue, I believe that I could return to work sooner than otherwise, thus saving public sector funds in the long-term.

I am convinced that a discharge from treatment when one is in a worse state than when that treatment commenced would not happen in the realm of physical health, where conditions are treated until they are either cured/remitted or can be adequately managed by the patient alone. The lack of resources of the [My] Trust should not be translated into inadequate care for the mentally ill. It should not be forgotten that approximately one in four people will suffer from some form of mental illness, whilst only 5% (source) of NHS funds are directed towards resolving these issues.

In conclusion, I am asking you as my political representative to assist me in accessing the psychological treatment that I desperately need, and to which under the various guidelines and indeed the very ethos of the NHS I am entitled. Should you require further information on how my illnesses impact upon my everyday life, I should be happy to provide same. I am sending you this letter both in your capacity as my MP and as an MLA for my area. I am also copying this correspondence to other [my constituency] MLAs and to Michael McGimpsey in his capacity as Health Minister.

I understand that after my mother (and registered carer), [her name], contacted you regarding the provision of mental health services, you were very helpful in the matter, about which I am greatly encouraged. I would be very grateful for your prompt attention in this matter, especially as I am due to be discharged from my treatment at the end of August.

Thank you very much in advance for your time and assistance.

Kind regards.

Yours sincerely

Me

Encs

I’ve been reading some of your comments, here, on Twitter and on Facebook about this matter and almost without exception you agree with me both in my right to be angry, and in that there is no way I should be discharged from therapy.  I was wondering if you would mind if I presented him with a collection of these comments.  I wouldn’t, of course, use any names, websites or any other identifying information unless you specifically requested that I do so.

I’m not stupid enough to suspect that he will take an tangible notice of any such comments, but I think it’s outrageous that he’s going around thinking I’m being unreasonable (especially when he tried to encourage me to fight the Trust back in December / January), and I want him to know that I have yet to meet anybody that would even remotely agree with his apparent position.

If anyone objects to their comment being used, please just comment here.  On the other hand, if you would like something to be included, I’m game!  Let me know.  x

BY POPULAR DEMAND, AND FOR ONE POST ONLY…

CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL INSOMNIAC BRINGS YOU...

THE
NEXT
THRILLING
INSTALMENT
OF

C

WEEK 57

CUE LA MUSICA DRAMATICA:

(Anyone that gets the aural reference gets a gold star.  I think I’m looking at you, Karita… )

This post follows on from the extraordinarily thrilling events detailed here.  The following may make no sense if you have not read them.  It may also may no sense if you have.  Then again, they were so tremendously exciting that if you read or have read them, you might die of a hedonism-induced heart attack, so proceed with caution.  Alternatively you might die of a boredom-induced heart attack so, again, proceed with caution.  If you really must read this pointless wank, be prepared to be blown away in amazement by my inspirational transcriptional crafting and the thrilling nature of the fabulous material contained herein.  Either that or expect to find a cure for chronic insomnia.

[The Scene:  C has just admitted to Pandora that it is inevitable that, as he has worked with her for some time, he cares for her in some way].

This should have set a fire of joy off in my heart; he was effectively telling me that he cared, in whatever way his profession allows, about me.  But I was too depressed, suicidal and fixated with his abandonment of me that I didn’t care.

Eyes firmly ensconced towards the floor, I made some noise of response suggesting that any response on his part was purely professional.

“Have these things been on your mind recently?” C queried.  I suppressed a laugh.  What a stupid fucking question to ask.  As if there’s ever anything else (other than suicide, I suppose) on my mind!

I shifted uncomfortably in the seat, and sat silently.  Eventually, whilst still avoiding his gaze completely, I nodded subtly.

“You’re frightened about how I’ll respond to what you want to say,” he said, proving once again his innate and remarkable aptitude for Stating the Fucking Obvious.

You know, at the time I didn’t make the connection.  Now, as I write this, the question seems slightly out of place with my refusal to admit to my suicidal ideation, and much more connected with my perceptions of what he felt about me.  Therefore, it seems he thought that the thing I wanted to say was that I am obsessed with him and want him to like and take care of me.  He’s bound to know that, is he not?  Why do I have to go through the affront of being forced to admit that verbally?  In this particular instance he was wrong.  I was considering telling him that I’m stockpiling medication.  Of course, whilst this is true, was my game-playing of telling/not telling him an avoidance technique to avoid telling him the rest?  Or was it, as I later denied, a “cry for help”?  Who knows.

Anyway, I told him that I didn’t want to discuss the matter with him, but he tried to point out that there were bound to have been things in the past that I had not wanted to address, but when I had, they were not as bad as I might have supposed.  Even though I couldn’t think of an example, I admitted that this had probably been the case at some point or another.

I listened intently to the progressively annoying rhythmic ticking of the clock throughout the ensuing silence.  At least the arseholes from the corridor had apparently been diffused (hopefully literally).

“It must be tricky to be in this position,” said C eventually, but I chose not to respond.  After a few minutes he went on a bit again about how I felt about him and what he thought about me, so he clearly thought – or, as he later proved, merely appeared to think – that everything I was hiding was related to this issue.

“So what if it’s tricky?” I asked mournfully, resenting the fact that he was making me more and more miserable – and, what’s more, visibly and verbally so – than I had been.

“I’m just putting that out there,” he replied.  I hate this fucking phrase of his.  Just say what the sodding hell it is that you want to say, C, please!  You’re the one that gets paid to have these fucking conversations, you need to do some of the fucking work here!

I ignored him, but was stunned – utterly stunned - when he said, “this goes back to what you said earlier about being homicidal or suicidal, doesn’t it?  Maybe you feel that you’re the cunt and that you may as well kill yourself.”

I looked up in a flash and gawked at him.  ”My God, you’re good,” I said, laughing in surprise.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: he doesn’t just look (a little bit) like Derren Brown.  He’s a fucking mindreader too.  Just when I thought he was felt that my thoughts were related to something completely different, he jumps in and works the dirty little enigma right out.

He appeared to be surprised that he had read my mind, and asked in what way.  I admitted, finally – and before I could change my mind – that I was stockpiling pills.  He asked which ones, and I said anything on which I could get my hands that I knew could be lethal in overdose.

Then I said, “have you ever seen a film called The Bridge?”  [I have become obsessed with watching this disturbing but very human masterpiece in the last fortnight or so, and would heartily recommend it to everyone].

“No, but it’s on my to-see list.  That’s the one where people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, right?”

“Yes.  Watch it.  It’s good.”

“You saw it recently?”

“Yes.  I was actually on the Golden Gate Bridge a few years ago,” I went on, sighing.  ”Unfortunately I was moderately sane at the time and didn’t consider jumping from it.  That was a mistake.”

He asked how long I’d been stockpiling for.  I wasn’t sure exactly but reckoned it was months.  I told him I’d become fixated with the film as I was fixated with suicide and that when I finally watched it, it was ‘beautiful’ (even if a jumper’s death itself is not the most pleasant).

Only 2% of jumpers have survived the leap from the Bridge.  C asked if any of them had been interviewed in the film, and as fortune would have it, one man with a severe form of bipolar disorder actually had been.  C was obviously hoping that this bloke would say he was glad that he was not killed.  As it happens, that’s exactly what he said, though I was cursory in my admissions of this to C.

In a later but related rant, I pointed out that stability in my life has been found on some occasions.  However, it’s only ever for a few months…maybe a few years if I’m exceptionally lucky.   The guy who lived to tell the tale of plunging into San Francisco Bay regretted jumping as soon as his hands left the railings, apparently, and was subsequently glad to have lived.  But…will he always be thus glad?  What happens if and when he’s back in the throes of the deepest, darkest, cruellest recesses of the human mind?  What happens if, for instance, his voices return, and order him to kill himself?  What happens, in general, if and when his stability is once again lost?

I wish him well, and hope that he doesn’t experience any suicidal ideation ever again, and I also hope he never has any reason to.  But in my own case, I don’t believe I can ever be cured, and indeed the whole ‘retraumatise-abandon’ issues of therapy’s closing weeks have led me to believe that I am going to be so badly traumatised all over again that a state where I can adequately manage my mentalism can never be attained.  Why bother, I philosophised to C, when it always comes back to this?  It’s a pointless, fruitless little dance of abject, round-the-fucking-mulberry-bush misery.  Why bother?

I went on to tell him about an interview in the film with the parents of a ‘successful’ jumper, the content of which mesmerised me.  The father said, his wife nodding quietly in agreement, that although they obviously missed their son very much and regretted that his life had been so marred by misery, they had a “who are we to challenge this?” attitude to his suicide.  They honestly felt that if his life was so unbearable, that it would have been selfish for them to have tried to keep him alive.  The father said, “some people talk of their body as a temple.  [Their son's] was a prison.”  Their mature selflessness, their humanity, brought me to silent tears.

“That’s an attitude that I think could be wisely fostered by many people,” I said.

“So, regarding you stockpiling these pills, you think I should just say, ‘OK, fair enough, kill yourself if you want to’, is that it?” he asked me.

“Maybe, but it wasn’t really you that came to mind when I regaled you with that story.  I’m more thinking about my mother.”  I exemplified by telling him about the third conversation detailed herein.

“Have you thoughts of actually taking these pills?” he questioned.

“Yes.  I am planning to do so, but not imminently.”

“You’ll be here next week?”

“Yes, unless something dramatic happens.”

“Where has this come from, Pandora?”

I considered the question briefly.  ”That fucking poison Venlafaxine doesn’t work,  this [therapy, a relevant gesture denoting his room] hasn’t work, isn’t being allowed time to work – I’m at least in the same mental position I was two years ago, and indeed it’s probably worse.”  At this juncture I went into the aforereferenced “what’s the point?  It always comes back to this” rant.

“This isn’t a life, this is an existence,” I declared (one of my favourite phrases, it seems).  ”That’s always been the case, but I had some tiny semblance of hope, quantum as it may often have been.  I don’t even feel that anymore.  Only a handful of people would miss me anyway, and what they don’t even realise is that they’d be better off without me.”

He asked how long my suicidal ideation had been building for, and I concluded it was since about April, which is when I started collecting prescriptions.

“If you take a massive overdose, you do realise you’ll be given your medication weekly,” he said.

“Of course, but that assumes that I awake from said overdose, which I have no intention of doing,” I responded in the blink of an eye.

“Are there times when you haven’t felt this way?  These thoughts seem especially strong of late.”

“I can honestly say that, in – oh? – the last 20 years, I think, there hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought about suicide to one extent or another.  I remember telling that to A once, and he said he couldn’t conceive of it.  I said that I couldn’t conceive of it not being the case.”

C annoyed me again by telling me that I am, he thinks, an expert in Not Killing Myself.

Right on, C.  What you don’t seem to realise, mate, despite my having already intimated the relevant information to you, is that I’m also an expert on not not killing myself.  There’s at least one newsgroup out there in the ether that details exact ways to do it (peacefully), and I am now intimately acquainted with the methods described therein.  In fact, there’s also at least three published books on the same issue – two get away with it by pretending they’re about euthanasia in the cases of terminal physical illness, but one is really open about having a pro-choice attitude towards topping yourself.  I have a copy of the latter.

(Actually, it’s a very interesting book to read even if you’re not intent on doing yourself in ((assuming you have some sort of interest in psychology, sociology, anthropology or any other -ology that takes an interest in the comings and goings of human beings)).  The first part of it, before the ‘methods’ section, includes quite a comprehensive consideration of suicide and suicidality as a societal phenomenon.  Much better than Emile Durkheim’s unbearable dirge on the same subject, though to be fair the whole approach is rather different and about 100 years more relevant).

Anyway, my feelings on suicide are meant to be for another post – one that is in the making, I promise.

I said, “it’s not through want of trying,” but the smug git instantaneously batted back with, “well, you don’t try to kill yourself every day.”

He cocked his head at me and said, “look, I take what you’re saying, I get that you feel this way.  I just think you must be fairly resilient as well.”

I laughed bitterly at him and proclaimed ‘resilient’ to be “not a word I would use to describe myself.”

And then….

Nothing.

Except…

Tick, tock…tick, tock….tick, tock.

I wanted to turn round, pull the offensive object off the wall and throw it out the window with a brute force seen only during absolute, unquantifiable rage.  Or maybe I could have considered throwing it at C’s face; that could have been an attractive option at points.  With the clock’s infuriating bloody tick tock mantra, I could hear my time with C ending, those few precious weeks disappearing down some cruel wormhole of time.  C rubs that finity in my face, NewVCB rubs it in my face, Mr fucking Director-Person rubs it in my face, and now even the bastarding clock thinks it is funny to rub it in my face (or, more specifically, eardrums).  Thanks, world.  Thanks so much, you fucking cunts!

After 17 super-eons (OK, there’s a considerable surfeit of casual cosmological terms in this post, what the fuck is that about?) he eventually said that perhaps I felt I was being left alone to deal with all this stuff.  I smiled cynically in response.

Wow, look at Einstein over there.  How insightful, C, that’s brilliant.  Well done.  Get out the champagne, my friend, because you have just come out with the psychological equivalent of the general theory of rela-fucking-tivity.  Or perhaps it’s something akin to the very first tentative bold but wise suggestions that the Earth was not, in fact, flat.  WELL. DONE. C.

“I’m used to that,” I whined.

I paused, then whinged for a few minutes more about how contemplating suicide was very comforting and liberating.  ”You know,” I said.  ”To know that you don’t have to put up with it any longer, to know that at any point you can just go, ‘fuck it, cheerio existence’.”

“Hmm, hmm,” he responded.

For some reason the ‘hmms’ enraged me, and I said, challengingly, “you don’t think I’m going to do it, do you?”

“That sounds like a dangerous mindset to get into,” he replied, furrowing his brow.  ”It’s like you think that for me to take how you feel seriously, you have to do something, such as taking an overdose, to make me believe…”

(Well, actually, asking for your help hasn’t fucking worked, so yeah, I could see how I might think this, as it happens.  STFU).

“I’m not trying to make a point to you,” I interrupted, shaking my head vigourously.  ”I just don’t think you think that I’m going to do it, and I am.”

He went off into a monologue in which he opined that he doesn’t think I have sat down and said, “right, let me make a point to C here…ha ha, I told you so,” but that I have, barely consciously, concluded that this is “the only way [I] can communicate how [I] feel”, and that the only way in which he will “actually understand” me is by my “showing it”.

“You see,” I sighed, again shaking my head at him, “you’re fixated on the idea that I want to communicate something.  I don’t want to communicate something.  I don’t want to exist.  That’s what I want.”  (Or rather don’t, I suppose).

Thinking that he was probably wondering why, then, I had bothered to communicate this information to him, I said that I was only telling him about it because he had already worked it out with his Derren Brown/Mysterion-like powers of mental deduction.  Which, although the matter had been floating around in my mind throughout the session, was sort of true.  Intellectually, I always knew I should tell him, but as already discussed, I really didn’t want to.

“What’s that like for you?  That you feel I’m not taking you seriously?” he asked.

“It doesn’t particularly surprise me,” I responded, in what might have been a slightly pompous, dismissive tone.  Just maybe and just slightly…hmm.  Then, “everybody thinks it’s a ‘cry wolf’ issue.”

He said, “so what did you think I was going to say?  Sort of brush it off and say, ‘oh never mind, she won’t do it’, or what..?”

I smiled cruelly and said,  ”I expected you to say, ‘maybe you should phone the Samaritans’.”  I laughed slightly at the idea, of which he had previously been a proponent.

This remark, to my considerable surprise, seemed to cut him to the bone, to the extent that, despite my palpable wryness at this juncture, I actually felt guilty.

C sighed and said, apparently very earnestly, “I hope I take you seriously – well, I do take you seriously…I hope you feel I take you seriously.”

“Is that a question?” I checked, and he nodded uncertainly.

Overcome with my own guilt, I said, “I do, yeah.”  Which is mostly the truth; I just get so frustrated at the difficult circumstances under which we presently find ourselves, and end up remembering every little thing he has done to piss me off.  In general, it is not my held position in the least that he patronises or dismisses me, and it was indeed cruel, by dent of my underhand Samaritans comment, to suggest otherwise.

“Look, I just wonder if the fact that I’ve actually bothered to tell you this means that you think it’s indicative of it being some silly cry for help, which it isn’t,” I told him, trying to be as nice as I could about it.

“That suggests that wanting help is silly, which I don’t think,” he told me.

“Let me rephrase, then.  What do they call people like me in general…manipulative?  Attention seeking?  Some other pejorative nasty referencing how annoying I am?”

He ignored the latter part of my statement and replied, with enraging reasonableness, that “I see it as that someone who is in distress quite justly wants or needs to be attended to”.

I looked away, unable to think of a clever comeback, and listened to the sodding, cunting, fucking, bastarding clock ticking away the last few seconds of my time with him that morning.

“We’re going to have to finish for today,” he predictably told me in due course.  ”But this is something for us to be looking at [oh, really?] and for me to be taking seriously with you.  I’ll be bringing this back up next week [oh really? x II].”

“OK,” I nodded, and I went to leave.

He stopped me from going however, which – as noted on the only other occasion that I remember him doing it, not that I can be arsed looking for the link right now – suggests that he is actually worried about my state of mind.  I suppose having had me just confess that I have a lethal amount of pills that I fully intend to ingest might just create such worry, to be fair.  Though it is only professional concern, I remain convinced.

“The most important thing for now,” he started, “is that that you’re saying that you don’t have any plans to enact this lethal act today, or in the immediate future.  You’re not going to do this now.  You will be here next week?”

“I have a date in mind which is not in the next week,” I confirmed.

He looked visibly relieved, though I suspect that is only in relative terms.  I tried to smile reassuringly, but I’m not sure I succeeded.

I was still alive for the next session, about which I hope to write soon, and during which I apologised for the laughable histrionics about which you have just read.  It sounds so pathetically childish and self-absorbed as I read it back, but then in thinking that I am betraying my own position on suicide, which is that it is not a per se selfish act.

For those of you convinced that I’ll be dead shortly, please don’t worry.  I told A on Friday night that I’ll try my best to remain alive until such times as a natural or accidental death is forthcoming, and that’s about as big a reassurance as I can give.

There’s very little of amusement on which I can end this.  So I’ll just take the finality of this post out of my hands  [Warning: do not view the embedded video if you are overly PC, offended easily, have a sense of humour that is not sick or twisted, yadda, blah, meh, gah, la, da, de, wah, etc]

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was bricking myself about this session with C, after his apparent transference-related realisations at the end of the last meeting.  I don’t want to tell him I want him to hold me, stroke my hair, soothingly kiss my forehead and softly whisper protective words in my ear.  I mean, who would want to reveal such intimate and one-sided desires?  I was totally dreading having to verbally enunciate such material, but in the end – although C made some references to the transference issues at points – I was successful in dodging much of it.  Result.  (Except that it’s not, of course, because presumably this is necessary discussion.  But, in the short-term, this worked very nicely for me).

However, we did end up having a protracted and painful discussion about something else – suicide.  Of course, we have certainly discussed this thoroughly in the past – but, shit suicide attempt in January excepted, this was the first time that I did more than just allude to it as a concept; I actually told him in depth that I had plans to do myself in.

First, however, I had house-keeping matters to deal with.  I was mortified to ask if he would provide me with a letter for the DLA people to confirm that I had been seeing him.  Now I’m mortified that I was mortified.  I should not be ashamed of being on state benefits, because I am claiming for genuine reasons – it’s not like I’m really some sort of shit dolescum twat.  Simultaneously, I hate being a claimant and find it an immensely degrading place in which to be, and it’s bad enough thinking about that myself, never mind having to remind someone that I all but revere of the fucking matter.  In fact, so disgusted was I about bringing it up that I was really quite disparaging about my claim.

I told him that the woman at the CAB had advised that, in light of my declaration of my C-PTSD diagnosis, C should note as part of the claim that I was seeing him, in part, to address trauma issues in the aftermath of child sexual abuse.  ”I don’t feel entirely comfortable with acknowledging that to the Social Security Agency,” I said, “but that’s what she advised.”  I shrugged, resignedly.

I went on to point out that acknowledgement of both psychoses and dissociation would also be helpful, then winced and said, “I don’t like having to ask you to do this.”  Read:  I don’t like you being reminded of the fact that I am a useless tax-scrounging cunt.  I want you to think of me as intelligent and articulate, but that’s not what you’re seeing.  So you must hate me.

He said, “I can certainly write them a letter, that’s no problem.  I can say you’ve been attending since February 2009 and we’re due to be concluding at the end of August 2010…”

Thanks C, rub it in.  Just what I need to hear at every fucking juncture.  Besides which, the people who work in the social security are not very bright.  They will assume that a cessation of therapy automatically denotes that I am now well.

“Can you not say that please?” I pleaded.  ”If they think you’re discharging me, they’ll think I’m well, which I’m certainly not.  They see things in very black and white terms in my experience.”

He agreed that he “would certainly not give that impression,” then asked me if I was really sure he wanted to reference child sex abuse.

I paused, considering it.  I mean, of course I don’t want that information floating about so evidently in the system.  But on the other hand, I need this claim to be renewed, otherwise I will not be able to survive and will have no choice but to catch the bus.  It is, aside from this, a mere option, but to be so financially fucked as a non-renewal would make me would very definitely make the decision for me.  I sighed, and told him to go ahead.

Rather than just agree to acknowledge the abuse very clearly, C proposed that he draft a letter, which I could then ‘OK’ or reject as applicable the following week, though he then went on to say that he had “mixed feelings” about being so forthright.  I agreed that if you have the symptoms, then you do – what has actually caused them is none of the SSA’s bloody business.

The session proceeded in a curious fashion.  There were several lengthy silences, which were then broken by C making some point about the claim and those assessing the claim.  He eventually asked was there some sort of “shake-up” in DLA, which I confirmed to be the case.

“I’m hoping it won’t affect me unduly,” I admitted, “because I hope to be back at work by then.  However, I expected to be back at work last time after a month or two, and here we are two years later.  So who the fuck knows.”

Time for C to try and annoy me.  It happens at least once every session, does it not?  I think they must be trained at Therapist University to make irritating points when engaging with clients.  It must be intended to force underlying tensions out of us or something.

“Have you ever considered returning now to some sort of work?” he asked.

“Nope,” I replied, straight off the bat.

He looked at me questioningly, so I explained that I can’t think beyond the next hour, never mind any more long-term than that.

He pressed on, asking what it was that I felt was so strongly preventing me from considering a return to work at the moment.

I said, scathingly, that being a risk of losing time, hallucinating and being overwhelmingly depressed and anxious did not present the best circumstances in which to rejoin the employment market, adding that having such an added stress before I was fully able to deal with it would be helpful to neither the potential employer nor me.

“But I suppose I’m thinking,” C replied, “that work doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing.”

“OK, but even a couple of hours here and there – I just cannot conceive of how that’s feasible.”

My irritation was compounded by the fact that some pack of cunts or other were heard to be engaging in conversation outside C’s door.  The room is meant to be deathly quiet, devoid of distractions.  I wanted to go into the corridor and smash the offenders’ faces off the relevant party wall until they begged for mercy.  There is a whole hospital campus, with an extensive outside area (not to mention a canteen), where these wankers could have gone to engage in their banal drivel.  Outside a psychologist’s door that clearly indicates he is in a meeting and not to be disturbed was not the best choice to start up a conversation on anything much.

And bloody C himself wouldn’t let up on the jobs front.  Seriously, what the fuck?  I can understand the desire to challenge my current lines of thinking – but only within reason.  I made it very clear to him that this was not an area in which I felt there was an alternative view.  I know I cannot cope with work in any meaningful fashion as things stand.  And I’m not the only one: A and my mother strongly agree.  Sometimes C will challenge me on something, and I’ll think, “well, there’s maybe a point there,” and I’ll tell him that – but this is one occasion in which I genuinely felt I was the best judge of the situation, and ergo his constant harping served merely to frustrate and annoy.

He claimed, when I showed myself to be visibly pissed off, that he had no vested interest in whether or not I worked; he was, apparently, simply curious as to why I felt that I couldn’t.  ”Although,” he added, demonstrating the reality of his desire to pursue this line of questioning, “I suppose I do think that if a person can work, that that can be a very positive thing, even if it’s only volunteering for a couple of hours a week.  It’s not because it’s work, but it’s about being with people.”

As if I am not aware of such an argument as a proponent of jobs.  Of course I am.  I just can’t deal with people.  I said so.  ”They make me both homicidal and suicidal, and should go away and leave me alone,” I spat.

There was a long silence, save for the unabated deliberations of shite in the corridor.  The presence of those conversing underlined my point that other people make me homicidal.  I sat daydreaming for a bit about how I would smash them all in if they were still there upon conclusion of my meeting with C.

Eventually I was asked if I had any opportunities to meet new people, to which I responded by saying that nearly all such “opportunities” were rejected by me, as I do not wish to meet or see people, except within very strict parameters set by me.

However, I proceeded to tell him about a planned “Mad Up” next month (a group of mental health bloggers including Lola, Karita, Little Feet, me and more are meeting up in London, though I hadn’t confirmed my attendance at the time).  ”I mean,” I started.  ”That’s different.  If there’s ever going to be people I want to meet, then it’s them.”

He started wanking on yet again about internet relationships being different; at the moment this lot are all ‘good’, and perhaps if I had ‘normal’ off-line relationships with them all, I would be scared that they would not always be ‘good’.  However, meeting them for one day only mitigates that risk.

“Are you therefore suggesting that I move to England for the sake of making sure I form so-called ‘proper’ relationships with these invididuals?” I asked, not even trying to hide my contempt.

“No,” he said.  ”I’m just saying it’s not the same – yet, anyway – as what we might think of as more typical friendships.  However, I’m not discouraging you – I think that sounds really positive.  It proves there’s a part of you that wants to leave the sofa, leave the house, get out there and engage with the world.”

“It’s a small part,” I replied dismissively.  ”After all, most people are cunts.  Just…this bunch aren’t.”

Apparently I sounded angry when I used the word ‘cunts’, which I didn’t think was an accurate representation of the issue – you have to spit the word ‘cunt’ out, don’t you, otherwise it just sounds silly.  ’Cunt’ is phonetically designed to sound harsh, even if you say it with the most saccharine sweetness imaginable.  Perhaps he should have studied linguistics as well as psychology.  It could have been insightful for him.

This gave him an opportunity to say that apparently I felt that he was angry with me, and therein lay his chance to explore the transference issues apparently revealed to him in the previous session.  I reminded him that what I had actually said was that I believed he hated me because he was always accusing me of being aggressive.

“Have you become quite…focused on this idea that I don’t like you, then?” C asked me.

My head was fried thinking about it and thinking about how much I withdraw from life, whether deliberately or otherwise.  As I sit here now of course I can quite easily say that yes, I ‘focus’ quite a bit on the idea that C hates me.  At the time, I couldn’t think straight, so I told him I didn’t know.

He let it pass and we sat in silence for a bit.  I was desperately trying to get my thoughts together – in particular, I was trying to fight all the suicidal thoughts that had been pervading my consciousness for weeks, not because I have any strong opinion on them, but because I didn’t want to reveal them to him.  I’m always scared he’ll ring the bin and I’ll find myself locked up, even if my rational mind realises that to be unlikely.

But when he asked me what was “going on for [me]” as we sat there, I admitted that I was thinking about things that I thought I should tell him, but was scared to.

“OK, maybe you can tell me what it is that you fear about telling me,” he suggested.

I fear you having me locked up.  Yeah, that doesn’t give the game away or anything.

“To do so would be to provide you with the information anyway.”

“Right…well, how might I respond to whatever it is?”

“In a not particularly attractive fashion.”

“What fashion?”

“You see, that’s the point, C: if I tell you that, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

He thought for a minute, then said, “but I think you can say that you reckon I’d be anxious, angry, concerned, worried, annoyed or something like that – I don’t think I’d be able to work out specifics from you saying that.”

This made me want to laugh out loud.  As if he would be any of those things.  It’s just a fucking job to him.

“Using any of those adjectives assumes an over-investment on your part,” I told him.

“In you?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought it might just be normal,” he said, making some hand gesture to supposedly support what he said.  ”You have thoughts and feelings about people you’re working with, and you and I have been working together for quite some time.  It would be a bit strange if I was just like a robot or something.  Of course you do know I have response to things.”

Ooooh!!!  Did you hear that, readers?!  Dun-dun-DUN!!!

Here, my loves, we leave our epic fly-on-the-wall voyeurism of Alice-like wonder and utter, indescribable joy.  Follow the amazing developments in Part II, coming soon to a PC/Mac/Linux or Unix OSed computer near you.

Has he complimented me?  Does he care?  Does he work the nature of the transference out?  Will I do myself in?  Will I do him in?  Will I get a life?  Will I care?  Will C get an iPhone 4?  Will his beard come back?  Will I transmogrify into a demon and attempt to possess him?

Find out all this and more meaningless bollocks in the next deeply un-thrilling instalment of C: Week 57…NEXT! [LA MUSICA DRAMATICA]

This meeting took place on Tuesday 29th June (C had swapped his days from Thursday), but should have been on Thursday 24th.  As stated and explained the other day, for the first time in our entire relationship, I cancelled the session on the 24th, so this was the first time I saw him in over a week.

Mutual agreement was that the session had ended up being a bit disjointed, but I think in some ways it was nevertheless useful – certainly much more so than the Thursday one would have been had I gone.

The conversation opened with a rant from me on how horrified I was that, straight after leaving C’s office, I would be forced to see Paedo, after my mother’s non-consultative decision to take me to Hotel California.  It feels a little odd writing about this now, as I have been and gone on this delightful little sojourn, and in the end it went as OK as such things can.  However, I was certainly not looking forward to it as I sat there with C, and must confess to being somewhat critical of my mother for some time.

I don’t remember exactly what was said, but there was one point at which he really annoyed me. He asked me if I was pissed off at having to see Paedo, or everybody else. I responded by telling him that both troubled me. He then went on to enquire as to whether there was “any value” in my mother encouraging me to see the non-Paedo members of the family.

I pointed out that I had nothing in common with them and could not see what benefit having some sort of relationship with any of them would have. “Of course,” I acknowledged, “whilst my view is that family is mere genetics, my mother’s is that blood is thicker than water.”

“I think that’s the point,” he said.

I’m sorry, but what the fuck? Even if there was value in the pursuit, even if there genuinely was, it’s fucking irrelevant because Paedo is there anyway.

I made some noise about not existing to keep my mother happy, and told him that the reality is that my mother is a hypocrite because she spends half her life slagging the McFauls off. I bitch about them here and to A, for example, but I generally avoid unsolicited criticism of them in front of my mother.

C responded by reminding me that my mother was also traumatised (due, of course, to her experiences of long-term domestic violence). So that makes it alright for her to force me to live through my traumas, or for her to be have hypocritically? How does that work?

To be fair to C, I’m paraphrasing considerably here because of my poor memory. I eventually conceded that although I fail to see the point of a relationship with most members of my family, I was willing to continue to have one of some description or another because it pleases my mother. “However,” I said, “I still don’t think it reasonable to have to face him.”

The stupid but inevitable question of whether I could see them without him was raised, but the answer is pretty definitively ‘no’.

I’m not sure what I had been looking for in discussing this with C. Was I looking for him to forbid me from going? So that the reinforcement of the earlier opinions that I should avoid Paedo due to the psychotic symptoms he has induced re-emphasised to me how dangerous it was.

Whatever the case, I also pointed out that this trip would see my first encounter with Sean, Marcus’ baby brother, who is named after Paedo. I told C that I was scared that I would react badly to the faultless child because he represents an honour bestowed upon Paedo. He, to my considerable irritation, proceeded to point out to me that I had not reacted badly to Marcus, despite my general dislike for children.

“Marcus isn’t named after the man who sexually abused me,” I seethed through gritted teeth.

“No, but you told me that the baby is known by a shortened form of your uncle’s name,” he pointed out [if Paedo is James, the baby is Jim]. “Isn’t that the case?”

This was correct, but I figured at the time that it would make no difference to my reaction. However, it turned out that C was pretty much right; I definitely saw the kid as being the diminutive of his name, rather than as his full, Paedo-related title. It’s funny how much difference a few little letters make, even if the symbolism is the same.

Anyhow, C enquired as to whether I would hold the kid. I told him that, if past experience was anything to go by, I’d have it pushed onto with or without my consent. I have to say this has always made me feel slightly uncomfortable, but it happens and you deal with it accordingly.

“So I’ll survive,” I shrugged.

He smiled wryly, and said, at which point I wanted to smash his face in, that I might enjoy holding the kid.

I told him that I did not share his apparent optimism, and decided that that angle of conversation needed to desist. I confessed to feeling guilty about slagging off my mother, and told him I had a little anecdote.

The previous evening I had been in the shower at my mother’s house and had seen a lot of little shower gels and whatnot that she’s picked up from hotels. This reminded me that she had collected a bunch of these things for me a few weeks previously, but then had accidentally left a bag full of them in a coffee shop whilst out with her friend. Upon realisation of this, my mother phoned the shop in question, got them to hold the bag for her, and went and retrieved it for me.

I was disgusted that regaling this tale to C make my voice break because, as I said, “it’s the little things that count.” I was advised that just because my mother has not always been the most validating figure in my life, it does not mean that she does not love me very much.

Hmm. So he reads my mother’s mind now too, does he? She who he has never even met? Before he had cause to irritate me – or, more accurately, before I actually fucking cried – I changed the subject.

Don’t ask me how but I ended up telling him how laziness had dictated that I’d been taking a reduced dose of Seroquel for about a week, and had only the night before resumed taking my normal dose of 400mg. When I started to space out shortly after this, he seemed slightly concerned initially but I protested that it was probably a drug hangover.

“Is that normal with this medication?” he asked, and I confirmed that it was.

He looked dubious, then admitted if there wasn’t more to my daze.

“Maybe my mind has decided to dissociate this whole sorry day. I do hope so.”

This led to discussion of dissociation in general, though it was kind of brief and the content is consigned to history as I don’t remember it. What did happen was that the topic naturally progressed to a discussion of identity and a revision of the bollocks of the previous week about (a) a possible over identification with mentalism on my part (something that I continue to dispute) and (b) a fear of intimacy on my part (something that I am willing to acknowledge).

He banged on for a bit again about how much investment I have in engaging with other mentalists online. “They’re very real, don’t get me wrong,” he told me, “but as I’ve said previously, it’s almost like you’re looking to have relationships that exist only at arms’ length. Real and meaningful, yes – but different.”

This made me laugh a bit, which confused him. I clarified by saying that I was laughing as some sort of stupid response to sadness because “even online relationships have the power to hurt you very greatly.”

“Why?” he queried, seemingly slightly concerned. “Has something happened?”

I told him of the circumstances that led to this post, and advised on how I responded to it.

I was astonished when he started – gently, in fairness, but still infuriatingly – questioning if I had been behaving in a fashion that reasonably precipitated this fallout.

I denied this most vehemently. So someone who’s opinion I had otherwise respected decided they think I’m a shit writer who’s self-obsessed. That’s unfortunate, but other people’s opinions of me are only things that I can control within reason. If I was being a complete bitch, that’s obviously something for which I am responsible. If I was merely doing the same things that I have always been doing, as in this case, someone’s changed view of me is not something I caused or can change.

I told him so, but wouldn’t let the fuck up. He went back to all the wank with Mr Director-Person, my former colleagues, la la la. I wanted to rearrange his face. What’s especially galling is that C fucking encouraged my original correspondence with Mr D-P, and now he goes about accusing me of fucking aggression?

Of course, my attempts to defend myself were seen as evidence of my aggression. I find this circumstance grossly unfair. Are there times when I’m aggressive? Yes, of course there are. That, I am all but certain, applies to us all at times. Am I more so than others? Possibly, yes, but I really don’t get his fixation with the issue. It’s not that bad, and generally there is at least some (and usually more than just ‘some’) justification for such a reaction. But C seems obsessed with it, insofar as any psychotherapist is ever obsessed with anything that applies to their clients. I just don’t get it.

Rather than continue defending myself and apparently prove his point in doing so, I shut the fuck up. I glanced about me, at his desk, his bookcase, filing cabinet, yadda yadda. Eventually my eyes returned to his desk, where I was interested to note the presence of his iPhone. I noted with smug satisfaction that it was a 3G or 3GS, whereas I now have an iPhone 4.

Silence ensued for a minute or two, when he broke into my thoughts.

“What’s going through your mind?” he asked. “You’re staring into space there.”

“No I’m not,” I stated grandiosely. “I’m looking at your iPhone and thinking, ‘fuck you, I’ve got an iPhone 4 now’. Hahaha!”

His face developed into an enigmatic sort of expression. Jealousy? Yes, I think so, but also bafflement. It was vaguely amusing to observe.

Eventually, he asked if I had really been thinking that.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “why wouldn’t I have been?”

“So, you have a sense of triumphalism – again – about this.”

Jesus fucking Christ.  I mean, JESUS CHRIST!!!!! Is there anything, anything at all, that does not have an ulterior psychological motive?! What the fuck?! Everyone who has got a fucking iPhone 4 is a smug, self-satisfied twat. Why am I such a fucking guinea pig-like example to him of supposedly flawed psychology, when the reality is that in some ways I am just as fucking ordinary as anybody fucking else?

I responded to his insult with a redacted and calmer version of the preceding paragraph.

“Again, were you really thinking that?” he pressed on. “During that pause you looked upset, not pleased or smug or anything like that.”

I shrugged and proceeded to ignore him, instigating yet another silence.

Eventually, I cautiously began to tell him that it seemed obvious to me from his continual harping on my alleged aggression that he thought I was a belligerent bitch of Satan and that he hated me. This was perhaps exacerbated by a newly acquired submissive, almost child-like stance on my part. Plus some evident upset at these possibilities. Just a little of that. Yeah. Right.

His reaction was extremely interesting to me. He seemed taken aback by my assertion that I believed that he hated me – though I am certain I have postulated the idea to him in the past – and he took a few minutes to think about it. Thanks for boosting my confidence there, C.

Eventually he entered into a rather epic soliloquy about the issue. He talked for quite a while, but the long and the short of it was that I have many, many different facets to me, of which assertiveness (as he had now renamed it) was only one. “If you were always like that, well yes – it would be very hard to like you. But you’re not, so…[here he clearly realised he was teetering on a dangerous line]…so, well, again – you have many more sides to you than just that. I don’t think that defines you by any means.”

“OK,” I responded, meekly and unconvinced.

He sat looking at me intently, his chin in his right hand, his index finger crossing his mouth at a diagonal angle. He always does this when he is considering something intensely. I wonder if he is even aware of this behaviour.

I avoided his gaze and stared at my shoes, but his eyes bored into me, and eventually he spoke.

He said, very slowly and very definitely, “there’s more to this, isn’t there?”

Such a simple statement, but so laden with deep connotations that someone outside the therapeutic dyad would surely struggle to understand.

I pretended to think about it, the operative word there being ‘pretended’. Of course there’s more to it, and really it surprises me that he’s only worked out the magnitude of it.

“Maybe,” I admitted, quietly.

And so the immortal line of, “we’re going to have to leave it there,” came to pass – but there was a second part to the quotation this time. “We’re going to have to look into this in much more detail. You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded and left, perhaps ostentatiously hurriedly. I sat in Disraeli, my car, for a long time, hugging the steering wheel. Thinking, contemplating, ruminating, musing.

This all sounds very cryptic, but of course there was an unspoken understanding between C and me. In essence, he’s worked out that issues of transference in our relationship are not just confined to attachment. It runs very much deeper than that. I’ve been fairly open on this blog on the issue in the past and I don’t want to repeat myself because it fucking hurts like hell to do so. I don’t want to face it either myself or with him. I want it TO GO AWAY.

It’s difficult because, despite some of the twatty things he says and my anger at same, overall I am glad to report that I have a good therapeutic relationship, and one that I think is effective. I also recognise transference as an inevitable side effect of that, demonstrative of the fact that the therapy is actually working to some extent. The difficulty in this case is that I am in the throes of this transferential obsession and being discharged, before we will ever be able to properly address the issue. Perhaps I am at fault because I never brought up the matter in terms of its intensity before, though the word ‘transference’ is bandied about quite a lot in our sessions. But, as any of you who’ve been there will appreciate, facing it head-on is a matter of profound difficulty.

On the issue of the end of therapy, and because I want to avoid discussing this even more, Mr Director-Person has still failed to respond to my most recent correspondence. I have therefore taken the liberty of writing back to him, a copy of the previous letter enclosed, asking for his response as a matter of urgency, though I was quite nice about it. I did, however, hear from his Assistant Director, as regards the personality disorder steering group that the Trust is developing. The letter was official but pleasant and stated that, whilst the development of their PD services are in their infancy at present, they would be glad to have my input and will be in touch again as things progress. If C thinks he’s seen my aggression, he can think again They don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for!

NB. Please forgive the probably-multifarious amount of spelling, syntax, formatting and grammar errors in this post. I’ve been writing it for about 40 years and am sick looking at it, so am just going to publish it without adequate – indeed, any – proof-reading.  Sorries.

What’s wrong with me?  This pathetic malaise has been permeating my existence for weeks now.  I always had it to some extent, in fairness, but my small levels of creativity were at least granted some outlet here, and now I am disallowed even that simple pleasure.

I used to have a life.  A shit one, perhaps, but at least I could derive pleasure from some things.  I may not be quite as severely depressed at the minute as I have been at a number of previous junctures, but there’s something new now and it is, in some ways, almost as bad.  Everything is not a completely opaque sea of blackness, but I now see and experience everything as if there’s a veil between me and it.  Not in the sense of depersonalisation or derealisation necessarily, but as if there’s a haze of fuzzy discolouration everywhere that keeps me from enjoying any of the things I am genuinely lucky to have in this world, or even wanting to enjoy any of them.

This is an existence, not a life.

The Post-CAB One

I will write about yesterday’s gruesome appointment with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau in due course.  All the context that is required for this post is that I have added ‘Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ as well as clinical depression, BPD, yadda yadda yadda to my DLA form.  I was asked why by the advisor (no, I don’t think that was an acceptable question), and sent my mother out of the room whilst I explained.

The Scene – Later, At Mother’s House

Mother:  So, this thing you don’t want me to know about, this C-PTSD {curiously, she said ‘C-PTSD’ with apparent confidence, as if she’s aware of the concept.  This concerns me, as there is not really any way she could have this knowledge unless she has somehow established that that is one of my diagnoses.  I haven’t told her it is, so…hmm.  Anyway}.

Pandora:  Yes…that thing I don’t want you to know about…

M:  Oh, well, I’m not asking you to tell me what it is.

P:  Good.

[Pause]

M:  It’s to do with me, isn’t it?!

P:  [Sighs] No.

M:  Oh thank God for that.

[Pause]

M:  [Anxiously] It’s Georgie and Merv, isn’t it? {Presumably in light of all the bollocks detailed in this, and therein linked, posts}.

P:  [Laughs] Is that a serious question?

M:  [Irritably] Yes, why wouldn’t it be?!

P:  It has nothing to do with Georgie and Merv, mother.  [Thinking:  Wrong Aunt and Uncle, Mum.  Try again!]

M:  OK.  [Walks away]

P:  [Thinking: WTF?]

The curious thing is, she asked if it was Georgie and Merv, but mentioned no other members of the family at all, other than herself.  Not even V.  Why did she not pursue the issue when I said it was neither her not Georgie?  Surely, even though she knows I won’t provide her with specifics, she is curious?  When I have told her in the past that I don’t want to tell her something, she has gone on and on and on about it until I either (a) give in and tell her or (b) lose the plot, scream at her, and leave the room with her yelling obscenities in my wake.

I have a theory.  I think she knows, deep down (if I may use such cliched phrases), that what I told her about Paedo was the truth.  I hypothesise that there are four possible reasons for her not to accept it in the forefront of her mind:

1. Guilt?  She ‘failed’ to protect me from him, and cannot face the enormity of such a situation.
2. She does not want to consciously acknowledge, even though she knows it really, that he – apparently an otherwise likeable, benign figure – is guilty of such heinous acts.
3. She thinks that if she accepts that what she has been told is the truth (and the tip of the iceberg at that), then she will feel forced to confront him/cut off his cock/slander (or rather, tell the truth about) him.  This would inevitably lead to the end of the familial unit as it is, and she fears that immensely.
4. In the composition of the above I have forgotten what ’4′ was.  If it returns to my consciousness at some point I shall endeavour to add it in the comments.

The One Even More Ridiculous Than the Above One

Scene – an hour later.  Pandora is utilising her laptop for some pointless endeavour or other.

M:  [Fidgets, keeps looking at me]

P:  [Without looking up]  Whatever it is that you want to say, please just say it.

M:  Nothing, nothing.

[Pause]

M:  [Semi-hysterical] You had an abortion, didn’t you?!!!

P:  [Stares at mother in some surprise]

M:  [Practically screaming in apparent horror]  Didn’t you?!!!

P:  [Incredulous laughter] Where did you get that idea from?!

M:  Just answer the fucking question!

P:  No.

M:  Look me in the eye, Pandora, and tell me you didn’t have an abortion.

P:  [Looks mother in the eye]  No, mother, I have not, at any juncture, had an abortion.  Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I ever been pregnant.

M:  [Sighs in apparent relief]  OK.  [Goes back to watching TV, quite contentedly].

P:  [Thinking:  WTF?]

For the sake of avoiding argument, I didn’t press this, but even if I had had an abortion, why is she so worked up about it?  I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that terminating a pregnancy is a horrendously difficult and traumatic thing for those who make the decision to do it.  From hearing the stories of others, I know that’s the case.  But if I had had an abortion, and had not involved or advised my my mother of it in any way, how could she have some sort of emotional investment in the issue?  (Of course, she would argue that she was (a) sad/upset/regretful/traumatised/whatever on my behalf and/or (b) outraged that I had neglected to tell her about it.  But I still don’t really ‘get’ it).

The One After Seeing the Traumatic TV Advertisement Against Drink-Driving

Specifically, this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Which ends with the question, “could you live with the shame?”

P:  [Flippantly, out of frustration at the damn thing having been on TV 17 times in one fucking hour]  Yes, I fucking could live with the shame!  Now fuck off!  {Of course, for the avoidance of doubt, I couldn’t really ‘live with the shame’, and would never, ever drink and drive, just like the ad advises.  But the perpetual repetition nevertheless serves to irritate considerably}.

M:  Could you really?  I certainly couldn’t.  I just couldn’t.

P:  Riiiight…..

M:  In fact, that’s the only circumstance in which I feel that I would have to kill myself.

P:  [Shrugs]  Fair enough [Returns to looking at laptop].

[Pause]

M:  Mind you, it’s easy to say that, isn’t it?

P:  Is it?

M:  The thing is, the instinct just to survive is so very strong {says the eminent philosophical biologist}.

P:  [Laughs cynically]  Really?  I don’t think so.  You’re speaking for yourself there, Mum.

M:  [Flies into rage]  Augh, don’t be so fucking stupid!  All this talk about suicide!  It’s so selfish!  Have you ever thought of me?  {Interesting and unwitting use of irony, there}.  Just get wise to yourself!  {This translates roughly as “I say, dear girl, that was a highly questionable comment you just made.  I would suggest that you reconsider your position forthwith and posit an alternative viewpoint with immeadiate effect, otherwise you may contract scabies or cholera and die in agony.”}.  [Storms out of room].

P:  [Thinking: WTF?]

She keeps my life interesting

Anyway, I don’t know why but I wanted to write something.  I suppose I worry constantly that if I allow myself to avoid posting for a few days, I’ll fall into a rut of utter insouciance towards writing.  I’ve invested so much time and effort into this blog*, and I only want to discontinue writing when I actively choose to do so – which will not, I hope, be for many years.  However, I am intimately acquainted with the tenacious lure and power of inertia, and I do fear giving myself even so much as a few days’ break from writing will lead to a de facto dead blog.  I’m probably over-reacting, but I fear it considerably, and the thought makes me tearful and desperately sad.  How can one be so attached to a website?!

[ * I worked out today that over the 181 one published posts (before this one, which is 182), I have written in the region of 700,000 words.  I'm trying to get a plug-in to measure the figure exactly, but as a rough guide, there you have it.]

So, bearing in mind my fear of an apathetic fall from whatever low level of grace I may or may not be occupying, I’m going to publish the following pile of wank, which I wrote last Tuesday evening in the wake of the C session.  I was trying to articulate the exact nature of my misery, and while it’s drivelsome bullshit, I think it does grasp that reasonably well.  To be honest, it probably describes my current mood quite well too.

Alas.

I am not in the frame of mind to write anything here, but maybe that’s exactly why I need to do so.  Perhaps I need to articulate these so-called feelings that pervade my sorry consciousness (oops, did/does that sound like wallowing? ) I’ve had a strange day.  I saw C this morning – specifics to follow – which has set me up for a weird week; as I normally see him on Thursdays, I’m going about thinking that tomorrow’s Friday, and that A will be there for the weekend.  Since it’s not, the rest of the week stretches out, seemingly infinite in its loneliness. C has, I think, hit upon something I have been trying desperately to hide from him.  I don’t want to discuss it right now because it’s a sensitive issue, and in any case I might be mistaken in my reading of what he thinks (I don’t think I am, but then I suppose I wouldn’t think it if I did think I was wrong, would I..?  Hmm).  I may or may not be more forthcoming in my review of this session, but whatever the case, the matter reminds me yet again of how imminent the separation is (as Tossface Mr D-P still hasn’t bothered to respond to my recent ramblings) and how invested in therapy – in C – I am.  I mean, I already know this – I have done for a very long time – but until relatively recently I could box it up and store it away in some far-flung, virtually inaccessible area of my brain.  That fails to work nowadays, with this severance looming in the air.

So.  I feel rejected.  I feel lonely, yet simultaneously I feel the need to hide away from the world.  I feel forgotten and I feel cheated.  I feel desolate, sad, and depressed.  Tears prick my dissenting, hateful eyeballs, and I feel my bottom lip quivering in a threatening, child-like fashion that I have not felt (at least with this strength) for quite some time…well, apart from the last time I saw C, that is. I still think ‘grief’ is a good word.  Pre-emptive grief, but grief nevertheless.  I do not pretend to understand the horror of what living with the impending death of a loved one with a terminal illness (and I hope I’m not disrespecting anyone in saying this – many apologies if so), but this feels like the closest I’ve ever been to that situation.

Friendships often taper off in my experience, and whilst you may look back on them and regret not making more of an effort to sustain them or whatever, you’re not generally faced with the abject grief that an instantaneous dissolution of your relationship would bring.  The ending of some romantic relationships may be more sudden and hurtful, I suppose, but I still find myself thinking that this feels to me more akin to losing someone important to death.  Perhaps it is because I am fixated with death.  Perhaps I am just a histrionic bitch.  I don’t know.

Anyway.  That was pointless.  I’m always told I should put my “emotions” into words, rather than uttering an allegedly meaningless sentence such as, “I’m pissed off,” but then everyone knows how I’m tortured over the forthcoming end of my relationship with C.  How many dozens of thousands of words have I written on it?  Enough, that’s for sure.

So, back to the week before then, the week before I became ill.  Regular readers may recall that the session I had the week before 17 June was a meeting characterised by (my) hostility and, in his words, acrimony.  Unsurprisingly, that informed at least part of what we talked about in this session.

C was running late again, but not so much that it ate in any way into our session, as it had once previously done.  I ran into him in the carpark and walked into the shithole building along with him.  The poor sod was bowed down by his briefcase, a coat, some other thingy-ma-bobber and his little packed lunch.  For some utterly ridiculous reason, I found this image (particularly of him clutching his lunch) to be rather sweet and charming, and I felt a sudden rush of maternalism for him, longing as I did to ruffle his fluffy (if receding) hair.

He left me briefly in the waiting room whilst he went to get himself together, but he was only gone a few minutes before he returned to escort me to his office.  As we sat down he started coughing, and was clearly a little hoarse.  He apologised – yes, C, because it’s your fault you’re sick – but to be honest it didn’t impact much on my ability to understand him.  Indeed, it further fuelled my pathetic pseudo-parentalism for him, and I wanted to wrap him in a blanket and take care of him.  I could see myself handing him hot, steaming mugs of Lemsip and gently spoon-feeding him a soothing concoction of honey, glycerine and lemon.*

What the sodding hell is this about?  How can I feel such silly maternal feelings for someone who is (admittedly not that much) older than me, especially when I don’t feel maternal feelings for others, particularly children?  I’m used to issues of attachment and transference in therapy – all too well, and all too hatefully – and I’m even used to the idea of wanting to protect C from certain things.  This whole mother-like behaviour is odd, though.

Anyhow, the brief salutations over, I took a deep breath and and reached into my handbag for something I had brought with me.  It wasn’t an extract of this blog or something of that ilk, like previous “I brought this to therapy” items have usually been.  It was a silly little gift I’d made for him.

Uh-oh!  Taking presents for the therapist is a dangerous sign of deep intensity, no?  And they’re not allowed to accept them, right?  I don’t know, but all it was was this:

It is a little white flag that I’d made out of a bit of paper and wire, with a sad face and the word ‘sorry’ ensconced across the front.  I waved it at him, briefly explained what it was (thus illustrating how crap it must have been), apologised for my behaviour the previous week and finally pushed it across the table to him.  I watched carefully for his reaction.

I was gratified and even quite touched to see his face break into a broad smile as he looked at the silly little thing.  He actually seemed a little speechless and taken aback, though apparently in a good way as he sat there doing not-very-much other smiling for a bit.  He has perfectly shaped teeth.  Not two fangs on each side like I do.

When he finally looked back at me, I returned his smile rather sheepishly and apologised once more for being a twat.

The inevitable question came up as to why I felt the construction of the ‘flag’ was necessary.  I told him that I felt bad for how I had behaved in the previous session and wanted to make amends.

“Not that some crappy thing like that compensates,” I said, “but I wanted to do something, something other than simply offering some bland apology.”

We discussed what had enraged me the previous week for a while.  It had mainly been due to the fact that he had said that I’d pronounced the almost-imminent cessation of our relationship to be ‘tragic’, which is not what I had said.  I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to have pointed this out to him, but slabbering and bitching and ranting at him for 50 minutes was a massive over-reaction.

I told him so, and he enquired as to how I had felt after the last session.  He is very well aware that I post-mortem things absolutely to death, and am wont to hang on to words he says in session, questioning their meaning and mentally debating the nature of our relationship.

The thing was, although I did feel guilty about how I’d behaved, it wasn’t as bad as it really should have been.  If someone had spoken to me the way I spoke to him, I would have created a death list with them in the top ten positions**, so I really should have been berating myself all week.  As it was, I felt more sorry for him than actively conscience-stricken.

“It’s all very well to rationalise things like these by saying that you chose this job, and that things like this inevitably come up,” I told him, shrugging,  ”and I know you’re trained to deal with clients’ anger and whatnot.  But even with all that said and understood, you’re still human – and I actually thought that you looked hurt at one point.  It wasn’t fair that I made that happen.  So I’m sorry.”

He thought for a minute, scrunching up his face in that idiosyncratic way that he always does whilst musing, then replied with something along the lines of there being a necessity for me to bring anger to therapy if, indeed, I was angry with him.  ”You’ve done it before,” he pointed out.

“Hmm.  I suppose last week wasn’t quite as bad as the time I called you a ‘sadistic headfucker‘.  I’m still sorry about that.”  I shifted uncomfortably at the recollection, particularly as he nodded to denote the fact that he too clearly remembered the incident in question.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “I checked my notes, and no – you didn’t use the word ‘tragic’ in the way that I said you did.”

“Maybe not, but I still completely over-reacted.”

He looked at me enigmatically.

“What I said was that it was ‘sad’, that the forthcoming severance of this relationship was ‘sad’,” I recalled.  ”And I think I may have also said that I felt a sense of loss.  That I feel a sense of loss.  That I think it is sad.  So there you go, I admit it.”

I do hate my treacherous fucking body sometimes; my voice broke and my lip quivered as I spoke the sorry words.  As he started to state the obvious by saying, “now you’re upset,” I waved my arms at him in a halting gesture and said, “no.  Please don’t go there, C.  Allow me to retain whatever small semblance of dignity I have left.”

“You don’t think crying or showing emotion is dignified,” he wistfully and completely pointlessly added.  However, he then smiled gently and sym-(or em-)pathetically, and was good enough to honour my request to desist from proceeding with that particular conversation.

Instead, he started talking about how I have a conflicted or ambiguous view of him at times.  I don’t remember all he said in this vein, but I tried to refute the idea that I sometimes regard him pretty negatively.  I mean, yes – I get irritated, even angry, with him at times, but as I said to him, that happens in all interpersonal relationships.  It doesn’t mean that the way in which I view him is not generally positive.

“Nevertheless,” he insisted, “those issues of anger, aggression – whether at me or whoever – they are very real, aren’t they?”

I made some noise questioning whether he thought I was always like that.

“Oh no, of course not,” he responded assuredly.  ”If you were normally angry or aggressive you wouldn’t be able to do this work at all, so that’s not the case.  On the flip side, when these issues arise between us, we need to examine them together, so of course it’s necessary that you bring them here.  But I do wonder if, when you feel you’re not being heard or whatever, you don’t maybe behave a little too assertively…which could possibly alienate you from people.”

“If you’re talking about Mr Director-Person,” I responded, raising an eyebrow, “then I believe that I have behaved in an exemplary fashion.”

He said that it wasn’t just Mr D-P of whom he had been thinking, but that he was one such example.  Another, to my considerable surprise, had been my engagement with my manager and the Horse regarding my absence from work.  Before I could contest that point, however, C queried as to why I felt that my correspondence with Mr D-P had been ‘exemplary’.  He (non-accusingly) asked if I felt that my protests were generally acceptable.  (I do, for what it’s worth).

I told him that this is an attitude that has been fostered in my character.  Apparently that was a cryptic remark (?!), so I proceeded to tell him that my mother, A, and a number of friends throughout my life have always spurred me on to defend myself to the hilt, particularly when I’ve been fucked over in some fashion, as with the NHbastardingS.

“With specific reference to Mr D-P,” I continued, “my mother doesn’t feel I’ve been harsh enough.  A helped me draft the most recent letter, so he clearly approves.  My friends seemed to think my correspondence has been reasonable.”

He seemed cynical at this, but let it be.  He asked of which friends I was speaking, and I confirmed that I was, generally, referring to those of you that I know from this blog and from Twitter.

“Your blog means a lot to you,” he stated.

“Yes,” I acknowledged, “it’s not some work of art, but it’s still my pride and joy.”

This led to a frustrating but ultimately intriguing conversation about intimacy.  C accepts that online friendships are fulfilling and meaningful and very much real, but he was very keen to point out that they’re ‘different’ to ones formed in “real” life.  The blog is of course wont to encourage contact online rather than in the physical world, especially as it’s primarily anonymous.

He said, “how often do you correspond with your ‘real life’ friends?”

I muttered something deliberately incoherent, but was forced upon his pressing of the issue to admit that my contact with them is pretty infrequent.  He then enquired as to how often I ‘speak’ to some of my online friends, and I told him that in many cases that contact was daily.

I went to justify this (as if I need to justify it!) on the grounds that my online friends understand what it’s like to be mental – in most (not all) cases, that’s how I’ve met them.  At this juncture I heard utterances about over-identification with my mental illnesses, which given this was perhaps somewhat timely.

I ignored the rather annoying accusation and told C that another issue was that because I can contact so many people through Twitter and Facebastard, it means easy, enjoyable, and ergo completely genuine correspondence with them.  Contacting  people like Daniel or Brian involves using the phone.  I shuddered at the thought and provided him with a redacted, auditory version of this post.

Much analysis ensured.  When I was unable to express myself why I am so bloody terrified of the phone, he proffered the view that this absolutely exemplified my fear of intimacy; typing on a computer screen is less interpersonal than actually speaking to someone, apparently (for what it’s worth, I do not concur).  I protested that I am not that bad with people in person, pointing out that I’ve met two people I know from Twitter in person and am due to meet a number more (you know who you are!).  I asked how, therefore, his contention could be accurate.

He responded by asking how much I go out and see people as a general rule.  How do I interact with people other than, say, A and my mother?  Can I interact with people other than A and my my mother, especially if one of those two is not present?

I looked at the floor, my silence confirming his suspicions that the answers to his questions were ‘hardly at all’, ‘badly’ and ‘no’ respectively (the latter is not universally true, but it is in the majority of cases.  Alas).

He talked on for a while more about my alleged fear of intimacy.  I have come, unwittingly, to equate it as a negative thing as a result of experiences with Paedo, V and all the others who have betrayed me over the years.  He accepted that I probably don’t consciously fear it, and said that I probably don’t mean to “keep people at arms length – or even to push them away at times”, and indeed he said that he thinks part of me actively yearns for intimate personal contact.  However, to completely paraphrase him, my reactions to intimate situations and relationships are maladaptive and ultimately self-defeating.

He even went on to remind me that I totally withdraw into myself for days on end, not contacting anyone I know (even my mother) in any way.  ”The only exceptions,” he noted, “are your friends on the internet.”  [He threw in a little joke here that I could apologise to anyone I'd failed to contact as I should have by sending them a white flag.  I laughed, but told him that he alone was to be the recipient of such a thing.]

I’m making him sound really, really dickish, but all this was conveyed much more sensitively than I have portrayed it here (though it still perturbed me somewhat, of which more in the next post).  He went on to briefly allude to the inherent intimacy of the therapeutic relationship, and said that whilst he felt that we did work together, that I was  holding him too at arms’ length.

“You’re usually so very careful to avoid showing vulnerability or emotion in front of me, though you have done it at times,” C said, looking me in the eye when I would allow him to do so.  ”You’re protecting yourself, no doubt, but in doing so issues are sometimes avoided, and you try to keep things more abstract or business-like than I think you really want them to be.”

The problem is, not that I said this to him, that things can never be what I want them to be – but, again, that is something to be further explored in a future post.

I don’t remember exactly what gave rise to it, but in some sort of response to all this crap, I eventually asked if he felt that my transferential issues towards him were represented more greatly by aggression or by fear of intimacy.

He said that he felt the two were intrinsically related, but added that his view of this was probably different to mine.

“How so?” I asked, deliberately staring him right in the face.

“I think that you perhaps understand transference [he pronounced it 'tras-fer-ENCE' rather than 'trans-FER-ence' as I do] in terms of, ‘I’m angry at my father or my uncle, so I project that onto C,’ would that be right?”

“Pretty much, I suppose, yes.”

“Well, I’m not saying those aren’t issues, but I see it more in terms of your anger towards yourself, and as far as these intimacy issues go, in terms of your inability to empathise with yourself.”

This was the end of the session, so I didn’t really get a chance to express my reaction to this hypothesis – I just sat there for the last minute or two reflecting upon what he had just said.  I’d never really considered things in that way before, but now that C had said it, it seemed absolutely blindingly obvious.  I mean – I think that some of the transferential reactions to him are related to others that are or have been (however tenuously) in my life – but yes, he’s the perfect way to punish and reject my own self without actually doing so, isn’t he?

Anyhow, again, I’ve made him sound like a twat in what I’ve written here, but really he wasn’t.  I felt that it was a productive, and co-operative session, and we parted on warm terms, with me advising him to get hold of some Lemsip.  I still wanted to mother him, you see.

[* Point of hilarity.  I originally mistyped this as nitro-glycerine.  Perhaps the week previous to this that would have been my preferred option!** ]
[** That was a joke, GCHQ / MI5 / Big Brother / whatever other thought police may be reading this.]

I’ve been fairly lethargic for quite a while now but otherwise, in terms of my mood, I thought things were on the up.  Even at times I felt that perhaps I was even a wee teensy bit hypomanic, which would have been a nice bloody change.  Bipolar disorder is certainly a hateful fucking illness, but hypomania is the rare upside to the regrettable affliction.

There’s no hypomania today, though.  Not even a euthymic or ‘alright’ mood.  The weekend was pretty shit too, but not as bad as today, as today has seen me in an utterly wretched and pathetic state of narcissistic, all-consuming depression.

I want to cry but I haven’t got the energy.  I want someone to hug and take care of me and love me [FAIL!!!], but I feel nothing but empty loneliness.  I want to have some understanding of what it is like to enjoy life, or at least not feel utter ambivalence towards it (because I don’t even have the fire to hate it at the minute).  Even at the most abstract conceptual level, though, these things seem alien and unlikely.

I think Quetiapine is (at least partly) to blame for my complete and utter inertia of the last few days, but it isn’t to blame for the Black Dog of the last day or two, because it has always helped me in that respect.  It has definitely made my life better since I started taking it in January.  Perhaps nothing caused it specifically – I mean, I am an individual with a long history of largely melancholic depression…and even if I wasn’t, we all have our bad days, don’t we?

Yet it is my nature to analyse things, to search for reasons especially when reasons do not present themselves clearly and obviously.  So notwithstanding the above, I think that maybe I’m having a bit of a delayed reaction to last Tuesday’s unwanted events, and of course I am still mentally embroiled in a horrified fixation about the impending and enforced end of therapy (and have failed to review the last two sessions of same, which is ridiculous when I consider how important doing so is to me).  Surprise surprise!

I keep seeing images of my body flying off some of the high-rise buildings in the relatively near vicinity, or sometimes over the motorway flyover.  I go to put my tablets for the week into the little pill box that I carry everywhere, and I want to ingest the entire bloody lot of them.  If I can even manage to force myself to make some sorry form of rudimentary meal, I look at the knives involved and I want to stab myself all over with them.  In particular I want to stab the parts of my body that nobody likes to talk about (something about which bourach recently courageously wrote, and something that I have never confronted here or anywhere else for that matter…and which I am going to continue to avoid today).  So maybe it is about last week’s encounters with Paedo, or ongoing retraumatisation from therapy – who knows?

All I know for certain is that this is a miserable existence, and one way or another I don’t want things to continue like this.  Death or some modicum of “recovery” is required.  I am still hopeful that it will be the latter, but the journey is a hard and long one, and falling into gaping potholes – some with a seemingly infinite depth – is a sad but apparently frequent inevitability as the road is travelled.

[/pointless whinging]

(NB.  Please don’t worry, if you are kind enough to worry.  I don’t think I’m actually likely to do anything; again, I simply don’t have the motivation or even physical strength).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*throws toys out of pram*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have never been, and will never be, an optimist nor anything other than passionately cynical, and whilst I make no apology for that, I can see that it may be seen as self-defeating and narcissistic – indeed, it may actually be self-defeating and narcissistic.  Still, I don’t think cynicism and pessimism are all that characterise my approaches to therapy, the psychological pain that I often find myself in and indeed the writing of this blog.

Although I’ve been in therapy for half my life, on and off, I believe that a strong relationship between client and therapist is the only way satisfactory results can be achieved from the process.  My current therapeutic relationship is the first one in which a proper rapport and a strong alliance has truly developed, and it is just about the best I could have asked for; whether it’s been in the past that I haven’t been ready to confront the realities of what’s led me to therapy, or whether it simply was about personalities alone, I don’t know.  Either way, it didn’t work until now.

Do I believe that therapy with C has helped me?  I do.  ’Only’ subtly perhaps, but yes, I do.  For one, although I still have strong self-harm urges at times, I haven’t acted on them since January.  I also think my outlook is perhaps less miserable than once it was (though as I say, it will never be wholly positive, nor would I want it to be) and I think that, very slowly, I am progressing to a point where I am able to develop some sort of sense of empathy for others, even if that’s still a little at arms length.  I even think there’s a tiny, tiny part of me that has started trying to empathise with myself, though of course I am still usually in some conflict about this.

Do I believe C can cure me?  Absolutely not.  I don’t believe that anyone can cure me.  Do I believe that C can help me?  Absolutely I do.  I believe that together we can confront the demons that pervade my mind, explore them, resolve them and ultimately learn to manage them through greater self-understanding.  Whilst therapy with C has been one of the most painful processes I’ve been through, it has also given me hope, and I do believe that such treatment can lead to some form of psychic healing.

Or rather it did give me hope, until we walked into the brick wall of the Trust putting a cap on the process come the end of August.  Thus the question becomes, “do I believe C could help me, were he allowed?”  Yes, I do – but he and I are being denied that opportunity.  Perhaps there are others out there that can do it too, but there are no certainties in this game and finding another psychologist with whom I click in a fashion even approximating this could take a very, very long time.

I think another thing that’s important when considering my ‘wallowing’ is that I am only just beginning to discover the extent of my history.  I was always sort of peripherally aware that there was more to my experiences of child sexual abuse, for example, than the one rape that I always clearly remembered, but it wasn’t something I ever allowed myself to think about that much – or at least, certainly not consciously.  That’s another way in which therapy has been a force for good; I’m aware of most things now, even if I can’t always recollect specifics, and can begin to piece together some of the ‘whys’ about how my mentalism has developed and persisted as it has.

These realisations and explorations, though, have only come in the last few months; to that end, retraumatisation and ergo further lows, episodes of utter madness and anxieties have become all but inevitable.  I don’t doubt for a second that with the right treatment these obstacles could be overcome, and if I am miserable about my relationship with C ending soon, then that is (at least partly) why.  I don’t know how to cope with being retraumatised – with facing unspeakable acts that I had pixelated out of my head for so many years – on my own, just like I didn’t know how to cope with the trauma when it happened on my own, other than to dissociate it (which is hardly a long-term solution).  I don’t know how to heal on my own.  I would love to, but I don’t know how.  I’d not be in the position I am if I did.

As for being diagnosis-obsessed, well – a defence of diagnoses is a whole other post, and I will get to that one of these days.  However, I’ll say here that I do not believe myself obsessed at all.  I do, having said that, consider that an accurate diagnosis can lead to the right treatment, and furthermore that it gives one a frame of reference in which to fit their symptoms; some nebulous ‘I have some symptoms of what you might call mental illness’ sort of thing just wouldn’t work for me.  Now don’t get me wrong; treatment of the symptoms is what matters in any disorder, physical, mental, or some hybrid of the two.  All I am saying is that conceptualising such symptoms into treatable, defined boxes does not seem to me to be the evil some others purport it to be.

Anyway.  I’m not really sure why I wrote this.  Am I unconsciously looking for affirmation, or am I just providing a self-defence?  Who knows.  At the end of the day I write Confessions for my own records and self-exploration, and I felt compelled to compose this, so there you have it.  I do feel sad that I am considered in such a negative light by some people, but at the end of the day, everyone is absolutely entitled to their views – and I have to be true to mine, too.

I’ve had a brief look through the archives for a contextual post to this, and cannot find one. The best I can do is the review of this session with C – in which an altercation arose over the group of Employment Support Allowance into which I had been placed – but it doesn’t really go into much detail about the overall issue.

Money Money Money

So: context. Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) is the replacement benefit for Incapacity Benefit (although as I understand it, those originally claiming IB still receive that instead). Full details on the nature of the benefit can be found on this site, but here’s a brief run-down anyway.

It’s awarded to people who cannot work due to illness or disability, so long as they no longer receive (or were not eligible to receive) Statutory Sick Pay, which one would get, usually, for the first six months of an absence from one’s job. After an initial 13 week assessment period, claimants are placed into one of two groups: the “work related activity group” or the “support group”. The former is where the majority of applicants are placed, and assumes that although their capacity to work is ‘limited’, there are certain things that they can possibly do to eventually move into employment. To this end, they make you go to tossy interviews and group meetings with Job Centre employees and other claimants to discuss what you can and can’t do. Great if you have social anxiety, obviously.

The support group of ESA does not require such interviews, though one can volunteer to participate in them should one wish to do so. I believe that eventually benefit reassessments to ensure one’s continued eligibility for this group are required, but I am not familiar with the specific timeframes.

Anyhow, the so-called doctor that I saw when assessed as to which ESA group I should be placed in decided that I had “bipolar disorder” that was apparently manageable, within reason. At that point I hadn’t really experienced more overt psychoses such as ‘They’, nor did I have the C-PTSD diagnosis, so obviously I didn’t declare those to him, but as well as having the BPD, bipolar II/clinical depression and anxiety diagnoses, I was having strong dissociative episodes which I did clearly mention.

He did not mention, at any juncture, BPD, major depression, social anxiety or dissociation in his pathetic report. I wrote to the Social Security Agency to complain, citing all of these issues, and requesting a revision of their decision. They wrote back and told me to fuck off. This was last August.

[Fuck. After saying I had no contextual posts above, I have just happened upon this post, which basically details what I've already written above. Well. I took the time to write the above, so it stays. It might save you reading the earlier rant anyway.]

Anyway, as I said, this was last August. I went to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau to discuss an appeal on the decision, and they prepared a letter to the Social Security Agency (SSA) for me, which was acknowledged a few weeks later. Then…nothing.

Hoping that they’d simply forgotten that I would have to eventually go to these daft work interviews, I didn’t chase it up. Occasionally, over the last 10 months, I mused on what might have become of my case – but I didn’t want to draw attention to things by kicking up a fuss about how slow and incompetent they were, so I continued to keep quiet.

The silence was finally broken by the SSA on Tuesday, when they remarkably and quite out of the blue called my mother (my registered carer). Thankfully they didn’t want to speak to me, but to her; their enquiries related to how often I need to be supervised to make sure I eat, don’t self-harm, don’t try to throw myself off a 40-storey building etc.

My mother responded by informing the caller that such supervision was a daily requirement due to the nature of my mentalism.

“Daily!” the man apparently enthused. “That was the key word missing in her original report!”

This is complete bollocks, according to the legislation under which I was assessed and, in particular, under the section of said legislation under which I was assessed. I can’t be arsed getting into the minutiae of it, but the relevant statute is here if you’re bored so much out of your skull that you’ve never had a skull in the first place. I was only assessed under Part 5, and should also have been assessed under Part 6, where there is a lot of wank about disconnection from reality in the case of mental illnesses. I should have raked up half a billion of their stupid points on this, but daily supervision does not seem to be as key an issue as Mum’s caller had suggested.

Anyway, the bloke told her that, as she had confirmed my need for daily surveillance supervision to ensure my continued existence, that in all probability my appeal would be successful. “In fact,” he continued, “there’s a possibility she won’t even need to go to appeal, what with this new evidence.”

‘Evidence’. If my mother’s testimony is considered ‘evidence‘ by these imbeciles, why didn’t they bloody well ask for it when I first queried the damn thing nearly a year ago? Do you have to have a PhD in Fuckwit to work for these people?

So, to today. A letter arrived for me which I had initially hoped was from Mr Director-Person, who – I note with snide interest – hasn’t bothered his bony backside to respond to my latest letter. He hasn’t even acknowledged it with a two-line paragraph as he has done with previous correspondences, and neither has his Assistant Director acknowledged my application to sit on the ‘service user’ personality disorder panel thingy-ma-bobber. Twats. But, alas, that rant is for another time; the letter was from neither Mr D-P nor his AD. It was from the SSA.

And…

I HAVE WON! Yes! I AM VICTORIOUS. Hahahahahaha! Mwhahaha!

They are not sending the matter to appeal because the decision has been changed in my favour: I have now been placed in the ESA support group instead of the stupid work group. Result! (Eventually).

Financially speaking, this means only £5 more per week in my bank account (plus a good bit of backpay for the year I’ve not received it) – but it was never about the money. It’s mainly been an issue of principle – why should seriously ill people be fucked over like this simply because there’s a few scroungers in the system? – though a secondary concern has always been that I wouldn’t be able to deal with the silly work-focused interview required in the work group, never mind work itself. This belated but satisfactory result also means that I don’t have to go through the inevitable trauma of a social security appeal, which I understand can be utterly gruelling and ghastly.

Apparently, I will still have to attend a medical, which of course is rather gruelling and ghastly in itself. But Tuesday’s Bloke appeared to suggest to my mother that this would be a mere formality, being as he is satisfied that I am actually mental. I will make sure she is with me this time, though, not to mention a hefty dose of Diazepam (though maybe not? Seeming vaguely sane might not be a good thing?).

It’s timely, given that I am about to try and renew my DLA claim and given the DLA proposals of Tuesday’s budgets. I also read on Tuesday that Kate from A Tangle of Weeds had been placed in the ESA support group, and whilst I was obviously pleased that her ESA ordeal was over, with what seems to have been the result she needed, I felt a wisp of regret that I had been denied that same thing, which I clearly need too. But no longer

However

As Kate noted in the afore-referenced post, there is a downside to all this. I mean, I’m glad of the result of course – grateful, indeed – but it must mean that I am really, really, really mental. I read somewhere recently that only about 10% of claimants are put into the support group.

Sometimes I think I’m one of the most fucked-up people alive. I write very candidly here, but there are things I haven’t, and probably never will, share(d). Dark things, disturbing things – stuff that I think could shock the un-shockable. On other days, whilst fully recognising that I struggle with mental illness, I think I’m just on the right side of cope – mad, certainly, but not necessarily at the most extreme end of the wellness-illness spectrum.

The support group decision supports the former view. Said view is my more default position, indeed, but knowing that other people agree really drives the point home.

Still, I shouldn’t – and from now on won’t – grumble on this point. I can now avoid having to worry about being forced back to work before I am ready for same, and have a quiet satisfaction in knowing that my point of principle has been upheld.

That’s nice. But how are you, Pan?

Not fucking good. Not fucking good at all. For the first time since I met him in February 2009, I cancelled a session with C today. Admittedly, I’m physically unwell (my yearly bout of hateful tonsillitis would appear to have finally arrived), but I’m in the worst frame of mind I have been since January / February (when, if you recall, things were beyond rock bottom, resulting in a pathetic suicide attempt). The cancellation is a measurement of my utter despair.

The visceral compulsion to self-harm is so strong that it alone is driving me into minor dissociative episodes, though amazingly I have managed to fight the urges nevertheless. I really, genuinely don’t know how I managed to pull that off. Visions of my scalpel dangle seductively in front of my eyes. It reminds me of Macbeth’s infamous line, Is this a dagger which I see before me? (Act II, Scene I, Line XXXIII). Not that Macbeth stabbed himself with the dagger, of course – but he saw it and kind of lusted after it, just like I do. I want it so much, and I want to watch my own dark krovvy spurt gracefully out of me, taking my entire self with it.

So yeah – you might ergo assume that I am strongly suicidal as things stand, and you’d be right. Don’t want to exist, don’t want to be here…just want nothing. Sweet, beautiful, empty nothing. Permanent delicious unconsciousness.

It’s almost as if I feel some sort of spiritual enlightenment as regards fixating upon death. It’s like when you look at a stunning piece of art, architecture or scenery; the apparently perfect crafting and overpowering beauty is so profound that you find yourself moved to silent tears of awe.

I (kind of) face death and so, overcome by how exquisite it seems, awe is what I feel. I hate the word ‘empowering’, but that’s what it is: knowing that none of this has to continue beyond a point of my choosing is hugely empowering. And, indeed, beautiful.

Time to deviate from such laughably ornate prose. I’m also having vicious, extreme nightmares – on the occasions on which I actually fucking sleep. I can’t bear the abject desolation of insomnia (see here), but I really don’t know if such epically troubled sleep as these nightmares produce is any better. They mainly relate to severe sexual abuse, though not at the hands of Paedo, nor anyone I know. This morning I got sectioned after a severely disturbing gang rape, wherein I’d been placed in an open coffin and forced to fellate four men, who then proceeded to pour acid over me. I was actually genuinely shocked when I awoke and found myself in my bedroom, and not in the psychiatric hospital of the dream (which was another vision of complete horror, though obviously in a different way to the rape). It was an intensely vivid, video-like little film of unconsciousness, with which I am sure Dr Freud would have had a field day.

I’m not particularly prone to nightmares in general, despite my unpleasant history. I have of course had them – haven’t we all – but they’re not normally that frequent. That I have had so many powerful ones this week indicates to me that this is part of my adjustment to my increased dose of Venlafaxine. It’s compounded, also, by an unintentional decrease in Quetiapine: I have loads of 300mg tablets from an old script, but have been unable for several days to collect one for my current dose of 400mg. My mother was meant to collect it today – but naturally forgot. Hmm. It’s my responsibility, I know, but then she did offer…

Anyway, ‘today’ is now ‘tomorrow’ and what was meant to be about 500 words is now over four times that, so I shall bid you adieu.

(Aside: I considered calling this ‘From Bleak to Batshit’, which I found pathetically amusing, but ‘Depressed to Doolally’ seemed slightly less obscure )

Q:

My symptoms, I think you’d agree, have gotten worse over – say – the last two years or so. There’s been overt psychosis, clear dissociation, significant self-harm, etc etc blah blah blah. As a result, you’ve seen stuff in that time that most ‘other halfs’ don’t see in a lifetime. Surely dealing with this stuff has been more difficult than dealing with someone who, three or four years ago, seemed ‘just’ depressed? But as noted previously, you were less tolerant and/or sympathetic then than now. Is it actually easier to deal with someone in the throes of a psychotic break than with a depressed person? If so, how is that? What has enabled you to tolerate all this stuff, when depression often drove us apart?

A:

Good question. To help you and indeed your readers understand this one, I need to refer you back to some of the ground I covered last week. My own journey towards a greater understanding of mental illness was quite long and, in its initial stages, I perceived that you had an amorphous condition known as ‘depression’ which, with time, would dissipate. At times my attitude was indeed unsympathetic, and this comes down to an view that I once had, and which I believe many of the uninformed share – that those experiencing depression ultimately still have some form of control, an ability to resist and to say “no” to the bleakness if only they could summon the willpower to do so. I label myself a hard worker, at least in the career context, and I expect others to struggle through adversity in the same way that I do. What I feel I didn’t realise was that this amorphous term “depression” referred to something very specific, requiring much more than willpower and self-control. It would not be possible to ‘pull yourself together’.

The stance I once took sounds very negative, and I’m not suggesting that I felt like this all the time, but I suppose a complete lack of understanding of your condition at times led me to think that you had more say in the direction your life took than you actually did.

I must confess to being a believer, to some extent at least, in the view that we create our own realities. I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but nothing is definitive; everything is perforce seen through the filters of our own perceptions. To take a very simple example, individuals can perceive the same photons entering their eyes, but their perception of what they are seeing is constructed through the lens of their life experiences. Everyday technology to me might be magic to someone else. If I show you a car and ask you what colour it is, we might agree that it is red; but do both of us use the abstraction “red” to mean exactly the same thing? I hope I’m making sense. Nobody really sees anything independently of their own perception. Following on from that, I take the view that it is possible, with effort, to change the way in which we perceive things, react to things, and so on. These are our perceptions and we can control them. You might call this a very CBT-ish approach, and perhaps it is. I understand your cynicism about this: if somebody said “You can change the way you feel if you just think about things differently,” I would be forced to laugh in their face (if feeling unkind) or hide my derision (if not). I do, however, believe that such change is possible with will and persistence. All this is a round-about way of saying that I thought it was possible for you, or anyone suffering from “depression”, to change things over time. I’m not saying I believed there was a magic bullet you could fire and fix everything overnight, but I did believe that time and persistence could be great healers. I still think that is not an unreasonable view.

There are several problems with this analysis in the context of your illness, though, not the least of which was my complete failure to understand what the umbrella term “depression” covered. A second problem is that I myself, while believing the above, have been completely unable to exercise such control over my own thought processes. Being mentally ‘healthy’, or fairly so, if I cannot do this myself, how can I expect others to do so, especially those suffering from conditions that I have never experienced? Self-change is possible, I don’t doubt, but I have concluded that it is very difficult without some form of external help (therapy, medication) or internal motivation (spiritual revelation, high motivation, etc).

I think another thing which perhaps drove us apart at times was my inability to understand what was wrong. My logical brain seeks an explanation for everything. If you are depressed, it figures, there must be a reason, and it is natural that I should wish to ascertain what that reason is, and to try to help in whatever way I can. Often, however, depression left you uncommunicative, leaving me with a sense of frustration, not knowing why you felt the way you did and being unable to do anything about it. At other times, you might cite some event many years ago, or some issue over which you had no control, as the reason for your low. In this case, my frustration would derive from that fact that I felt there was no point brooding excessively over something you were unable to change. Of course, that is easier said than done, but we’ve all had problems in our lives, and I wondered whether yours had been so much worse than those experienced by others. Of course, at this time, I was unaware of the full extent of some of the terrible things that actually did happen to you. You had spoken in general terms of the abuse, for example, but its long-term and systematic nature was something of which I was unaware. I think possibly you weren’t fully aware either.

So, I’ve not painted a particularly complimentary portrait of myself. So be it. We did have good times, and not every day focused on depression or related issues, so we generally got on with things, having the odd downward spiral in our relationship, but a range of good times as well. I don’t mean to suggest that I had no sympathy or made no attempts to understand, and I hope that isn’t how I came across. However, it is clear that the efforts I did make were not especially successful.

So why can I cope with much worse things now than the ‘mere’ depression of old?

I explained in my last post that my attitude changed as the concept of “depression” was happily (for me) dispelled in favour of a much clearer explanation of what you were suffering from and why you were suffering from it. Although you are much further ‘down’ than you ever were when you were ‘simply’ depressed, the fact that I now have some level of understanding is the crucial difference. Having an explanation makes it so much easier to empathise, and I’ve ceased telling myself “Well, if it was me, I would do x or y“, since I couldn’t possibly know what I would do – I’ve never been in your position. A clear diagnosis fulfils my need for a logical explanation of your state of mind. My understanding of where you are and why you are there mentally has been vastly enhanced since you entered therapy and started writing this blog. Now that I understand something of the conditions with which you are afflicted, I realise that the hole in which you find yourself is too steep-sided to climb out of on your own, or even with the assistance of those close to you. You need expert help. A sympathetic and well-meaning hand of personal friendship is not enough. A heavy duty problem requires a heavy duty solution – enter therapy and the dreaded (but seemingly essential) medication.

A second aspect of the current situation has made it easier for me. Now that you have diagnoses, I am able to see that there is scope for medically valid action plans providing a genuine ray of hope that you will eventually emerge from this in better shape. I am no longer naive enough to think that you will be ‘cured’. I may as well wish for my own permanent physical disability* to vanish. However, there are coping mechanisms, means of managing the condition and sharing your life with the demons stuck in your head.

In the end, it is the combination of increased understanding and hope with a logical basis that has enabled me to get closer to you despite the sometimes horrible situations in which you have found yourself (my least favourite of which was one night in Accident and Emergency after you had befriended a scalpel).

Easier to deal with someone in the throes of a psychotic breakdown than someone sitting on the sofa silently and broodingly?  Yes, it does seem a very strange thing to say.  I certainly do not find it at all a pleasant experience dealing with situations where you are dissociated, hallucinating, self-harming, and so on, but these are so far from being in any way associable with the common understanding of “depression” that I find it very difficult to compare the two.  I suspect the latter may be more readily faced by me because this is so clearly the outworking of a very serious medical condition.  Why that should give me some form of strength I am not sure.  Perhaps it is because I know I am not responsible for it, you are not responsible for it, neither of us have much control over it when it strikes, and we have to work together to overcome it in the long term, with the assistance of medical professionals.

I said it was difficult to compare the “depression” scenario with the psychosis one, but I will try.  In the former case, I think I have gone into some detail on that both earlier in this post and in my last one – in a word, my reaction was frustration.  In relation to psychotic episodes and the like, my reaction is one of fear, alarm, helplessness, adrenaline, confusion, worry, and other similar ‘flight’ type instincts.  Yet these conditions also force me to take some form of action.  I remember on that A&E visit, during your very long wait to be seen, you decided that you’d had enough and were going to walk out of the hospital and home.  You have told me you don’t remember this because you were in a dissociated state.  I have a very clear recollection, however.  I had to physically restrain you – block your exit from the building – for a minute or two before being able to persuade you that you must return to the waiting room.  There is a frightening adrenaline surge to events like this.  I don’t wish for it, but at least I am able to do something.  A similar occasion arose at Suzanne’s (Marcus’ mother’s) house over the Christmas period when, as your readers may recall, you went (to use your own terminology) ‘batshit mad’.  Again, a combination of my verbal and physical restraining, combined with the very last vestiges of your rational personality, prevented your condition from becoming evident to the whole gathered clan.  Once more, the need for action on my part was there.  I’m fundamentally not saying I like this – I abhor it – but perhaps there is more of a sense of satisfaction in being able to do something, however minor, than in being able to do the square root of nothing (in the case of depression).  I don’t want these situations to develop – ever – but they have been a fact of life and I’ve had to deal with them, as you have.  They are tangible in a way that ‘mere’ sofa blackness is not, and they are very clear manifestations of medical conditions, demonstrably so in a way that our old friend depression is not.

Does that explain things a little?

The above account doesn’t paint me in a particularly sympathetic light, and I don’t want to suggest that I speak for anyone else living with a ‘mental’, but it is my tuppence worth, and I hope it is at least of some interest.

* A is completely blind in one eye, and has only partial sight in the other.

I think one more thing to note is that generally my psychoses and dissociation are stress-induced and transient.  Not always, but normally.  Depressions can linger for months, with no clear end ever in sight.  I don’t know if this has any impact on A’s view of things, but I can see how it might.

For all his self-confessed cynicism, A does have a wee bit of idealism and hope inside him still  (I don’t, like, but I suppose it’s useful that one half does..!)

Next interview with A next week, all being well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a pile of utter wank.

On the other hand, what an opportune time to note that…

Or, rather, he was a fucking wanker, as he met his (rather regrettably late) demise in September 2007.  I wish it had been years sooner.

So, V, you raping, attempted-murdering, wife-beating, daughter-hating, piece of rotting worm-food shit, I hope you’re having a really, really crap death

See you in hell, cunt!

Me me me. I have this, I experience that. Me. I. Yours truly. Myself.

But it’s not just about me…is it?

For some time I’ve been thinking about ‘interviewing’ A on his experiences of living with a woman with mental illness. It’s of interest to me both intellectually and as a girlfriend, and I hope that it might be of interest to you, my dear readers, too – particularly if you are in, or are hoping to be in, a relationship. So I give you the first in a series I am going to call Perspectives from the Mentalist’s Partner (PMP): how through his relationship with me, A has developed a greater understanding of what mental ill health really is.

—

Q:

Let’s start at the very beginning. You knew I had a mental illness before we even met [I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression at the age of 14, and corresponded with A for nearly a year before we met when I was 19], but that didn’t completely manifest at first. When it did, you will recall that you viewed that mentalism fairly unsympathetically, though your mind has clearly been changed, as over the course of this present breakdown, you have been extremely supportive.

So I suppose I’m wondering – do you remember when you first saw evidence of my mental health problems, and how did/do you feel about that incident or period? Can you explain your reasoning for your evident lack of sympathy at the time – and what was it that modified your opinion into what it is today?

A:

It took me a very long time to realise what mental illness actually is. Sure, I was peripherally aware of depression as an issue, and you made it clear that you had suffered from it*. However, I probably wouldn’t have perceived it as a ‘mental illness’. I associated the term ‘mental illness’ with, well, very extreme conditions involving padded cells and the like. A very stereotypical view, for which I apologise to readers of this blog; however, I simply didn’t think much about it as it had not really affected me or others I knew. Granted, I’d experienced what I considered ‘depression’ at the age of 15-16, and I therefore assumed that what you suffered was some variant of that. Not at all a pleasant phenomenon, but something that would nevertheless gradually recede, with time. (In my teenage years, I think my own experience of ‘depression’ was one of those ‘growing up’ type problems, though I never have been and never will be a cheerful or optimistic type). Anyway, I am digressing.

When we first met, you seemed far from depressed. In a recent post [this], you talked of the dichotomy between Pandora and the ‘other’ you, the everyday person whose name I shall not utter here. The person I met was essentially Pandora; sociable; intellectually agile; opinionated (in a good way); lively; challenging; interesting – a person with aspirations and apparent self-confidence. Of course, we all package ourselves in similar ways, or try to, in order to impress those we wish to impress, especially in the first flower of a relationship. Sure, there may have been a bit of that, but it was certainly more than that, and indeed that part of you continues to exist now. When others meet that part of you in person, they are extremely taken aback to learn that you suffer from ‘depression’ (to use the generic term that most of us who are not informed might use).

As we got to know one another better, and the first flush of spring faded (it always does, as I know you agree), I started to see your occasional black moods. However, as I’ve said, I have not been a stranger to such in the past. ‘Depression’ was something that I felt, with time, one could ‘get over’. That will undoubtedly seem insulting to some, but it was how I felt.

I was also very much opposed to attempts to control depression through medication, believing that the solution lay in rethinking one’s approach to life (somewhat DBT-ish, you might say). I’ve never taken many pills myself, although I’ve been fortunate in my health for the most part. You’ll recall that I was no fan of you taking medication, and eventually made the drastic error of persuading you to come off Prozac**. Bad mistake. I suppose it was at that stage, several years into our relationship, as you really began to spiral downward, that it began to dawn on me that this was not something that would go away easily, without some form of concrete assistance.

My realisation grew as time passed and a pattern started to emerge. You were unable to hold down a job. You’d start one, seem to enjoy it at first, but gradually find it more and more difficult to cope, lying awake at night worrying about what might go wrong the next day or week. Of course, you were not helped in that by some of the horrendous managers you have had the misfortune to work for; still, even somebody as insensitive as I began to notice A Problem. Nonetheless, on my more cynical days I wondered whether it was just that you needed to find ‘the right’ job, and that you needed to foster a greater sense of ambition and commitment to achieving this. I have always been somewhat driven in the work sphere, if not elsewhere in life, and I suppose I expect the same in others. So, yes, at times I still thought less about illness and more about ‘what I would do’. Obviously, I couldn’t possibly know what I would do, given that I don’t suffer from mental illness. However, I didn’t always think like that at the time.

Really, then, although my realisation was dawning, I believe that it’s only in the past two years that I have really started to grasp what mental illness is, and the extent to which you are afflicted by it. Gone now is my illusion that you simply had ‘depression’ that you would ‘get over’, or that you could will yourself to cultivate a greater personal drive.

Just as an aside, thinking about my prior attitudes, I have come to believe that ‘depression’ is a horribly overused term, as in popular usage at least it can signify anything from a bad few weeks to serious clinical illness. I am not saying that those who actually understand mental health issues talk of depression in this way, but the word has become seriously devalued by its more general societal usage, whereby it can connote practically any bad feeling a person may have for a sustained period***.

Anyway, I suppose my first lesson in the seriousness of your illness, which came long before the realisations mentioned above, came from your occasional black moods. I remember in particular one Sunday evening where you did not really wish to speak or interact. You exuded a aura of bleakness, and no matter what I tried to do or say, there appeared to be nothing I could do about it. It left me wondering things like, “What have I done? Is this my fault? How can I fix this? Why is Pan behaving like this?” I didn’t know how to handle it. Your illness seems to have changed, and your black moods are subtly different now. I’m not sure I have figured out how to deal with them, from my own point of view, but I certainly know more about what to do and what not to do than I once did.

I might add that much of the understanding I have gained of your illness has come from you. As you have educated yourself about the issues, you have educated me. In that respect, Confessions of a Serial Insomniac has been a tremendous help. You write cogent, coherent, insightful and moving accounts here that you are often unable, due to the difficulty of talking about these issues, to express to me or anyone in person. I started writing ‘real life’ there for ‘in person’, falling into the dangerous delusion that the written form is somehow less real. Far from it. In fact, it allows one to be more revealing in some ways. I suspect that the closest you come to being able to communicate as you do on here, in verbal form, is when you meet C.

Anyway, next question please…

* Through our 10 months’ email correspondence prior to meeting face to face, I had shared a lot with A, including the fact that I had depression and that I took Fluoxetine (Prozac) to treat it it.
** This was during my postgraduate course – I would have been 21 or 22. I was taking, I think, 60mg daily, and initially cut it down, before I stopped taking it altogether. It was partly because I’d been feeling fairly good and fell into the trap of thinking I was ‘better’, and it was partly due to A’s encouragement. It – in part, at least – led to my second biggest psychological collapse (after the present one) to date.
*** One thing that A hasn’t mentioned here is that he has in the past said that he felt that my receiving a proper, psychiatric diagnosis was of great benefit. As I recall (and I welcome his correction(s) if I am misreporting him), he felt that saying, “I have borderline personality disorder” as opposed to “I’m depressed,” allowed one brought up with the views he had formerly held to note the presence of a real, tangible medical condition, rather than expressing their ‘having a few bad days’ erroneously. I would point out that I feel, have always felt, and that A now feels, that depression is a ‘real, tangible medical condition’. However, we are dealing with stigmatic stereotypical societal views here (how alliterative), and I would agree that most people probably do misuse and, indeed, misunderstand the term.

—

Next interview with A to follow soon…