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Insomnia.  It’s feckin’ bollocks.

Sleep.  It’s feckin’ great.

Right?

Wrong (again), apparently.  Yet again my body and mind conspire together in an effort to destroy the remaining vestiges of my sanity.  Thanks, me!

I’ve always dreamt a lot; OK, I suppose we all apparently do, but I mean in the sense that I would be able to at least recall that I had dreamt, even if the specifics were lost to amnesiac time-passing.  One phenomenon of which I have been, for the most part, mercifully spared is that of nightmares – and, knowing other people who have histories of sexual abuse etc yadda blah, I know that I am actually incredibly fortunate in that regard.

There have been two notable, and in the grand scheme of things recent, exceptions to this: firstly, when I first started taking #doubleplusungoodofevil Venlafaxine last summer, and secondly in April this year, when I was dealing with the acute after-affects of uncovering so many of my abuse issues in therapy, which resulted in some rather severe bouts of hallucinatory psychosis and despairingly gruesome flashbacks.  To that end, resultant nightmares were hardly surprising, I suppose, but I was pleased to note that they pretty much passed after the immediate awfulness of that period (even if I haven’t got rid of some of the other horrible difficulties entirely).

Anyway, the point if I would ever get to it is that, at the present time, I’m dealing with some really weird experiences during what should be my sleeping hours.  ’Nightmares’ is the wrong word, I feel.  I might say that they’re disturbing in places, but not exactly frightening (though, having said that, I suppose there is still a semantic debate as to what’s a ‘nightmare‘ and what’s a ‘night terror‘).

The thing is, I’m not sure whether all of these are actual dreams, or whether some of them are hallucinations; sometimes when particularly exhausted, or being between bouts of sleep, it’s hard to determine even if you are awake, or in some half-dozing state of pseudo-consciousness.  Ergo, whilst I believe most of these ‘visions’ are ‘just’ dreams, I’m confused as to whether they all are.

Saturday night was possibly the worst to date.  One incident saw me lying in bed, woozy, only to find that the walls started closing in on me, oozing some sort of weird foam/Amityville Horror-like goo as they did.  Did I dream it, or did I see it?  Either way, rather than wake A up, or get the fuck out of the room, I lay there, paralysed and horrified, though not struck down with the same dumb terror one might expect of the situation.  Perhaps ‘paralysed’ is a key word in that sentence – aren’t your muscles, by and large, prevented from movement during certain phases of sleep?  Then again, the paralysis of fear is certainly not an unknown concept.  Remember the old image of a deer in the headlights, and all that.

That’s only one example of a number of possible hallucinations, but there are other types of ‘visions’ too – ones that are clearly and definitely dreams.  They’re bothering me because of their incredible vividness and believability; they involve people with whom I regularly interact, or at the very least folks of whom I am quite well aware, and they are presented in very believable circumstances – the scenarios in question could very easily happen.  The specifics of all of these experiences are hazy in my memory now, and even if they weren’t they would probably sound fairly innocuous; however to me on waking, and even now on reflection, they are not innocuous at all.

It feels like when I close my eyes, on those normally-welcomed occasions on which I am permitted slumber.  I’m ‘living’ very real events from my own existence, but I am ‘living’ them in a very different way from ‘here’.  This is what I don’t like about it.  Dreams are meant to be dreams – influenced by your everyday existence, certainly, but not usually warpedly (not that that’s a word) mirroring it as if you’ve been sucked through a wormhole to one of the infinite number of lives we all could have under certain theories of astrophysics (M theory?  Certain types of quantum mechanics?  A real manifestation of the Schrödinger’s cat type of philosophy?  Sorry.  There’s no real need for this lofty tangent).

Speculation on physics aside, and I’m not discounting the billion possibilities therein, I obviously don’t believe that I have a parallel life that I’m being zapped into.  Of course I don’t.  But the idea hangs on the periphery of my consciousness and taps at it insidiously.  Who are you, Pandora?  Where are you, Pandora?  Have you any sanity left, Pandora?  NO! Fuck you! And the visions themselves are laced with something more than just a strangely distorted mirror image of my life.  There’s a sinister quality to them that I can’t really quantify – a presence, perhaps, in the background?  Or a feeling of foreboding, maybe?  Whilst in and of themselves the dreams are not per se frightening, there is a lurking sense therein that something unspeakably vile and petrifying beyond description will, without a second’s notice, overcome them (and me) at any time.

This sounds (reads as) incredibly histrionic and exaggerated even to my crazy ears (eyes) but there you go: this is the apparent power of the humble dream and/or humble(-ish) hallucination – they can, apparently, utterly confuse, vex and disturb the fine balance of the psyche.

Sleep is a subject that has always intrigued me intellectually.  Why do we need it at a biological level; why do we dream, and what are dreams ; what even is sleep and what does its nature mean for the features and reality of consciousness/sentience?  These questions and more are ones I have often asked and tried to research.  Now my own mind, yet again in a state of rebellion, wants to muddy the waters of these unanswered and highly speculative subjects even more.

I don’t know why this weirdness has started now.  One possibility is my pissing about with my Venlafaxine dosage (long story based solely on my own laziness – it will be rectified soon) and that would be quite credible a theory but for the fact that said pissing about has only been ongoing for a few days, not the fortnight or so during which I’ve had the dreams/hallucinations.  Another explanation is the presence of Zopiclone to aid sleep – many people have reported weird, vivid, even terrifying dreams whilst taking it.  However, that one fails too as (a) I certainly have not taken it on every night on which this has happened and (b) I’ve taken Zopiclone on and off for years, and it has never produced such effects in me before.  A third consideration is the possibility of my being fucked up by the bloody end of therapy the other week, which I suppose is a theoretically possible hypothesis, but (at least ostensibly) I feel better about that than I ever expected to, so we’d really be getting into Freudian sub-conscious territory if we went with that idea.

Maybe my mind is simply bored with my desultory, non-entity of an existence and wants ‘to go’ somewhere different when it can.  Perhaps it enjoys the adrenaline of hallucinating something potentially horrific or the expectation of the potential occurrence of something evil.

But I don’t.  It’s not fucking pleasant waking up or coming round from this bollocks, and if I were religious I would praying right now for it to go the fuck away.  Perhaps my brain needs to start reading again to mitigate these night-time examples of phantasmagoria.  If only said brain would do me the decency of affording me the focus and concentration to do so.

OK, I’m off to write my sleep-related horror novel now, and hope that it is less floridly ridiculous and rambling than this post was…

*sigh* I wonder what Dr T would do?

This is not a hugely significant entry, but since so many of you were so kind to comment on my review of my surprisingly positive assessment session with the Nexus Institute on Tuesday, I thought I would update you as to the current state of affairs with regards to them – or, at least, as regards to what I am hoping from them.  As advised by yourselves and A, I have written to the main administrator of the Institute asking to  be specifically seen by a male counsellor and, if at all possible, Paul himself.  I have not as yet received a response to this email, but in fairness I did only send it about 4.30pm on Friday 3 September, so it is reasonable that I will only hear from the nice woman in question on at least Monday 6th; obviously, whenever I do hear from her, you shall be informed

Hello NLTWFN

Thank you for contacting me during the week regarding an assessment session and for such a prompt arrangement of same; I greatly appreciated this.

I have been thinking about my upcoming counselling with Nexus and was wondering, even though it may make my waiting time longer, if I could possibly request to definitely see a man rather than being OK with seeing either a man or woman.  I apologise if this causes any inconvenience, but I am concerned that I would find it difficult to ‘click’ with a lady and to that end would not like to waste either her time nor mine and have to go back on a waiting list to see someone else.

I saw Paul for my assessment on Tuesday 31 August and felt that perhaps we could develop a rapport, particularly given his interest in mental health issues (of which I have many!).  I was wondering if it is possible to request to see Paul specifically for the counselling when appointments with him become available?  I would be willing to wait longer for this.  However, I do appreciate that the Institute may not be able to facilitate this given the resources available, and am sorry if this request seems churlish given the Institute’s much-appreciated willingness to help me.  I figured I had nothing to lose by asking!

Anyway, once again, thanks for all your help to date and I am sure I will talk to you soon.

Take care and best wishes

Pandora

I swear to living fuck that the Trust will not win this fight if I have breath in my body and blood in veins. I will battle them to the very death – literally, if needs be.

This is, of course, in response to yesterday’s received correspondence from Mr Director-Person. Your thoughts and comments on the letter are, of course, most welcome as always.

Dear Messers McGimpsey and [MP]

Re: Access to Mental Health Services

Thank you both very much for your recent kind assistance in communicating with the [my] Trust on my behalf. By now, you will have received the response from Mr Director-Person, the Director of Mental Health Services, dated 24 August 2010. I apologise if this letter crosses in the post with any communication from yourselves to me.

I remain very dissatisfied with the Trust’s response to my concerns for a number of reasons, and would hope that you could therefore kindly continue to assist me in this matter. I have not responded to Mr D-P directly, as such dialogue has, to date, proven to be an utterly fruitless pursuit. As you can appreciate, the Trust’s negligent and frankly dismissive stance on this matter has greatly added to my psychological distress.

I would make the following points in response to Mr D-P’s recent correspondence:

• It is contended that Mr D-P has been informed that I was advised “early on” about a “therapy end point”. This is factually incorrect. [C] and I first met in late February 2009, at which point we worked on rolling contracts of six to 12 weeks, although there was always an expectation that unless significant progress had been made, these would be extended (which they were). I was not advised of a “therapy end point” until December 2009. Eight months subsequent to the commencement of the process cannot accurately be described as “early on” therein.
• Mr D-P also alleges that my treatment programme with [C] was of a duration of 18 months. Technically, in a wide sense at least, this is correct – however, the impression given is misleading. I met [C] for exactly 63 weeks, which is obviously one year and 11 weeks – ie. just under 15 months. I point this out because I would not like the Trust to be allowed to overplay the sufficiency of their frankly inadequate service.
• The cessation of therapy was against the specific clinical opinion of my consultant psychiatrist, NewVCB (of [Relevant Hospital]), as acknowledged by both her and [C] on at least two separate occasions. I am astonished that consultative medical advice counts for so little within the [my] Trust. Furthermore, [C] admitted in our final session on 26 August that I had been significantly “let down” by the Trust.
• The aforementioned consultant psychiatrist, whilst acknowledging that I have a form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder due to significant childhood abuse, has stated to me on several occasions that she does not want to engage in diagnostic “labelling” of me, and instead wishes to treat my specific symptoms and circumstances in an individually appropriate way. The Trust’s attitude to my case would again appear to be in in opposition to her quite reasonable position; although I have never tried to hide or deny my earlier (ie. prior to NewVCB) diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, it seems clear to me from his letters that Mr D-P and his colleagues have chosen to fixate on this “label” specifically. Borderline personality disorder is probably the most stigmatised of all the psychiatric diagnoses and I must confess that I am coming to believe that I am being discriminated against considerably because this diagnosis has been applied to me.
• Chief Executive Mr Chief Executive’s acknowledgement letter in response to my original complaint to yourselves suggested that, as well as investigating my complaints with regard to my current situation, an investigation into the Trust’s failings in my mental health care for over a decade prior to same would take place. It is evident that this has not been the case; Mr D-P’s letter of 24 August focuses solely on my present circumstances. Only the most cursory of apologies was offered for the present inadequacies, and none whatsoever proffered for the many errors and misjudgements of the past.
• Perhaps most tellingly, Mr D-P claims in his letter of 24 August that “further support” would be “in place when [my] sessions with [C] come to a close” and that “…through close working between the psychological therapies service and the [Community Mental Health Team] it is planned that the work done with [C] will be incorporated into the ongoing support from the team.” This is categorically untrue. My sessions with [C] ceased on Thursday 26 August, and apart from my pre-existing relationship with my psychiatric consultant, I have absolutely no “further support” whatsoever, and in my latter sessions with [C] no such references were ever made. The matter of a referral to a community psychiatric nurse or a mental health social worker had previously been discussed; however, my psychiatrist and I were agreed that such a referral would probably be inappropriate in my case, at least as a sole support system. No such referral came to pass and I have not heard anything to suggest that any “further support” will come to fruition. It was certainlynot in place at the end of my psychotherapeutic treatment.

In light of the factually inaccurate statements made by the Trust, I feel that it is appropriate that you be made aware of the above to correct any misapprehensions that may have been created. I understandably feel let down by the Trust and am seeking your assistance to secure appropriate treatment.

I am aware that it is relatively common for the Trust to outsource psychotherapy to private sector third parties; indeed, I know of several individuals who have been treated in this way, and [C] advised me in our final session that it was certainly a possibility for me (we had discussed the possibility of my entering psychoanalysis in the private sector in particular). I am reliably informed by both professionals and other service users alike (within both this Trust and others) that, through your continued advocacy and support, this is something that would be obtainable for me. That being the case, I would ask that, as my political representatives, and in light of the Trust’s continued failings, you help secure assurance of this or an equivalent form of treatment for me.

I feel that I ought to note that I am the author of one of the most popular mental health blogs in the UK (currently written under an anonymous pseudonym and widely supported and read by both service users and mental health professionals) [let's not piss about with false modesty here, people - no arrogance intended, but, y'know - it kind of is], and that as a result of the deficiencies of my experiences within the [my] Trust my case has become something of a cause celebre across the aforesaid blog and various social networking internet sites. More formally, I write occasional freelance articles for a popular online magazine, and am giving very serious thought to specifically addressing this matter therein. I would certainly prefer to keep this issue private and anonymous, but if speaking out publicly about it will help me secure the care and treatment that I clearly need, I will not hesitate to draw wider attention to the matter.

I would like once again to thank you for the interest in my case that you have shown to date and would also wish to thank you in advance for your continued support. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any further information.

Kindest regards.

Yours sincerely

Pandora

In response to both my last letter to Mr Director-Person and my MP‘s intervention.

Dear Pandora

Further to my letter of 3 August 2010 [wherein he acknowledged his failure to reply to the letter first linked above, not replicated here], I am now in a position to respond to your detailed letter [ie. the one to my MP and friends] outlining the background to your situation and the treatment received from our Trust.  I am sorry that it has fallen short of your expectations and that you feel that the progress initially made with [C] has not been sustained.

As indicated in my letter of 12 May 2010* the provision of specialist services for people with personality disorder is at an early stage of development in Trusts across Northern Ireland.  The [my] Trust did receive some additional funding last year towards such services and we have appointed a dedicated practitioner**.  The major focus of our approach in using this practitioner is to provide training and support to generic services both in-patient and in the community to improve their capacity to support people with a personality disorder***.

Within the generic mental health services we make every attempt to match individual client need to an appropriate level of intervention within the resources that are available to us.  With regard to your situation, [C] made a clinical judgement that was endorsed by his clinical supervisor to offer a treatment package consisting of weekly appointments and I am advised**** that early on you were given information about session numbers and therapy end point.  This was to establish clear boundaries to treatment facilitate the working through of any concerns that ending therapy might arise, and prepare for any potential transfer to CMHT colleagues.  This has resulted in the delivery of a package of assessment and treatment over an 18 month period******.  During that time it was recognised that you could benefit from further support and this will be in place when your sessions with [C] come to a close*******.

Given these inputs from our services the Trust believes that it is appropriate that this phase of your treatment is brought to a conclusion.  However through close working between the psychological therapies service and the CMHT it is planned that the work done with [C] will be incorporated into, the ongoing support from the team******.

The Trust is continuing to work on developing services for people with personality disorders as resources become available.  Thank you for your offer to provide service user input to this service development, which we will be in contact with you about in the future, and we appreciate your support with this.

Yours sincerely

Mr Director-Person
For Mr Chief Executive

Copy to:  Michael McGimpsey [NI Health Minister] and my MP

I have tried to retain in the above replication the multifarious punctuation and grammatical errors, though I’m sure some have slipped past me.

—

* Yes, I know: I did receive your letter of 12 May, after all.  Why are you repeating your self?  I am mentally ill, not fucking braindead.

** Wow, a whole practitioner?!!!1!!11!!!!eleven!!!one!!!!three!!!26!!!!  He or she will indubitably serve thousands of people quite eminently fabulously by themselves!

*** Jargon designed to confuse, Mr D-P.  But what you are, in essence, saying is that your appointment of this individual is already failing, because generic mental health services are apparently fucking scared of people with ‘personality disorder’ and thus do not seem to want to bother to treat them.  C admitted to me in one of the sessions about which I have not written that I was at least in part being discharged because of my wanky diagnosis of borderline – “the service cant continue to fund personality disorders,” apparently.  This is clearly a fail.  What a surprise.

**** You were advised incorrectly in that case.  C and I always worked on rolling contracts – until Christmas anyway – so there was no way that I could have been advised “early on” even in a vague sort of way about treatment ending.

***** This is incorrect.  I had a total of, I think, 63 sessions with C.  That equates to just under 15 months.  One year and 11 weeks.

****** Who?  My sessions with C have already ‘come to a close’ and I am not in receipt of ‘further support’.  None at all.  Admittedly, NewVCB and I agreed that a CPN or mental health social worker was essentially pointless in a case like mine, but the point is that Mr D-P either doesn’t know or doesn’t care (or, in all likelihood, both) about the accuracy of his claims.  So he may say that ‘further support [would] be in place’ when things with C ended, and that ‘through close working between…psychological therapies…and the CMHT it is planned that work done…will be incorporated into ongoing support from the team’, but this would be (and is, obviously) absolutely untrue.  His blatant fallacies (or at least ignorance) are, of course, to my considerable advantage: he has been caught in the throes of an outright lie on paper

Other observations:

• I note with interest his failure to acknowledge that NewVCB, my consultant fucking psychiatrist, railed against the end of therapy at what she (and I) perceived to be such an early state.  C and his ‘clinical supervisor’ apparently therefore actively ignored direct, consultative medical advice, but of course Mr D-P wouldn’t like to admit to this.  Well, that’s OK with me.  His lie-by-omission will be openly highlighted in my response to my MP and Michael McGimpsey.  Mr D-P had better not say this is a borderline manipulation of the truth or something, because let’s just say that I have evidence that NewVCB’s disapproval of C’s actions is absolutely factual.
• As usual Mr D-P completely ignores my references to complex post-traumatic stress disorder and my retraumatisation at the hands of C.  ’Progress initially made…[having] not been sustained’ merely suggests I’m mildly annoyed – perhaps not much better, but not much worse either – and does not in any way, shape or form grasp the levels of trauma that psychotherapy at the shocking mercy of his Trust has put me through.
• What is really galling, what is really really fucking galling, is that he has completely ignored everything that I had written about my frankly appalling experiences within the health service prior to my meeting C.  About how I was pushed from pillar to post.  Regarded with open disdain.  Left in the lurch with no support by resigning members of staff.  Referrals not being made.  Referrals that were made then being ignored by those to whom they were made.  Over the course of 12 fucking years.  12 years!  So many of them formative ones at that!  No wonder I’m a complete fuck-up at the age of fucking 27!  He doesn’t care about any of it despite the possibility that (as pointed out to him), if I had received adequate treatment back then, I might have been reasonably well recovered by now, and functioning as a normal member of fucking society – ergo topping up his own bastard of a salary with 11% of my own earnings.  He doesn’t have to be altruistic about it; it would have been in his own best fucking interests.  Regardless, does he actually think that is acceptable?  Remotely acceptable?  Does he think that is an adequate response from the NHS to serious, life-threatening health concerns?
• There was something else about which I wanted to rant but in the course of the rage of the last point I’ve forgotten what it was.  I will add it in the comments later if I remember.

—

Now.  Is it time to craft my reply?  Or just relax and work on it with A tonight?  And is it too early for red wine?  Red wine and a Pot Noodle, methinks.  With extra burning hot chillis.  Oh yes.

Cunts.  One and all!

It – the impromptu counselling assessment session with the Nexus Institute on Tuesday 31 August – went well.  Thank you all very much for your lovely supportive comments, tweets and Facebastard messages.  It meant a lot knowing that my great online friends would be there to provide a figurative shoulder on which to cry, regardless of how the appointment went; your encouragement enabled me to face said meeting with more confidence than I might otherwise have expected myself to do.

To be honest there’s really quite a limited* story to tell; it was, after all, a mere assessment session.  What’s more, there is far from any guarantee that I will actually see the bloke I met yesterday in a capacity as my “counsellor” as opposed to simply my assessor.  The way it works is that you’re put on a list, which is dependent on the location in which you wish to be seen, and that when a therapist in said location becomes available, you are offered his or her first available appointment (within brackets that also suit you, of course).  I had told them several times that whilst I am theoretically tolerant of being allocated a woman on the off chance that I might be able to engage with her, I would really prefer a man.  However, I get the impression that either (a) they have more men working for them than women or (b) most of their clients request female counsellors, because they seemed not to worry too much about this and told me I would get seen quicker if I said either would do.  The point I’m making is that if these factors did not apply, I would have expected them to have given a lot more weight to my concerns about the therapist’s gender.

Unfortunately I’m now neurotic about this in the extreme.  I really don’t want to see a woman, whatever her skills or character may be.  Should I email them and ask them to note this more definitively?  I feel like a bit of a cock doing so; I am, after all, a woman myself and indeed a feminist (though perhaps something of a post-feminist feminist, but this is not a blog about theoretical political philosophy, so I’ll not get into that).  But on the other hand, even though you can change your counsellor after meeting them if you don’t ‘click’, why waste their time and mine if I can already predict now what may well be the case if a woman is allocated to my therapy?

Anyway, I’m getting off the point.  In terms of this blog, I had become sick of so impersonally referring to C as ‘C’, so now that he is apparently out of the picture (though a letter from the Trust of Evil is en route from my mother’s house to mine as I type…oooh-er), I’m going to abandon initials for new characters in this weird theatrical dance detailing my life, ergo calling the bloke I saw yesterday Paul.

In some subtle ways Paul was/is the polar opposite of C.  He was fat, cheerful and extroverted, as opposed to skinny C’s soft and gentle introspection (leading to a lot of smugness on my part on the occasions on which I actually made him laugh).  C’s probably about 34 or 35.  I’d guess that Paul is at least 10 years older.  He wore a loose (and therefore rather immense) blue shirt, untucked, which sagged at his navel, revealing his belly-button.  This disturbed and amused me in equal measure.

At first I was dubious, probably because he was not what I’d expected – though having said that, I didn’t expect anything in particular, because I know that that always leads to disappointment.  He led me up the stairs to a very pastel-ish, counsellor-ised but not-quite-as-offensively-so-as-I’d-expected room, making smalltalk about traffic and whatnot as we walked.

He sat down opposite me, and welcomed me to the Institute, giving me a quick lowdown on how the assessment session was likely to proceed.  To all intents and purposes the procedure was as you’d expect from any assessment that has even the vaguest relation to mentalism, which is generally a frustrating and upsetting thing – but something in his jovial manner managed to put me at my ease, and I felt able to talk to him with only a small amount of reserve.

Most of the questions Paul asked me were your standard-ish, predictable but necessary-for-this-kind-of-thing bollocks.  Name, address, GP, consultant, employment status, educational background, significant relationships, the specifics of your family tree, any medications (“ah, Seroquel?  Very popular these days…”).  He eventually got round to asking me about my physical health and then,  in an almost sheepish or embarrassed fashion, he made enquiries about my mental health.  The question’s rather abashed nature was caused, I think (well, I know) by a number of allusions I’d already made about being off school, university pr work due to depression and related issues.  I laughed out loud thinking about it, which he appeared to have expected.

I gave him the lowdown on how I was diagnosed with clinical depression as a young teenager and social anxiety as an older teenager.  ”More recently,” I went on, “I was told that I have complex PTSD.  And, of course, the dreaded borderline.”

*fanfare*

I shall now interrupt this broadcast with to bring you an “infomercial” on the evils of “BPD’s”, “Cluster B’s”, their primary enablers Mental Nurse, and my now seemingly infamous quote of I still haven’t taken my tablets.  Normal service will be resumed forthwith.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hello!  I’m back now.  So yes, anyway, Paul.  I added the reference to ‘borderline’ in referencing my not-inconsiderable collection of psychiatric diagnoses.  Paul was making notes of everything that I’d told him, but I noted with interest the sharp and disgusted intake of breath as I rolled out that particularly hideous word.  He continued writing for a minute, finished the section he was at, then put his pen down and looked up at me.

“‘Borderline’,” he repeated.  ”I hate that concept.”

I reckoned he was being supportive in his hatred – ie. I believed that he felt that BPD was a defiling, often unfair diagnosis rather than that he felt that people with the disorder, having as they do an inaccurate but traditional image of being manipulative, abusive bitches, were the ‘concept’ worthy of dislike (which of course abusive, manipulative people are, but it applies to many people without BPD, just as it doesn’t to many with the illness).

“Yes,” I started uncertainly, just in case my perception of his view was incorrect.  ”It’s not a very well-liked diagnosis, is it?”

“I don’t think it is a diagnosis,” Paul responded.  ”It’s just an insult.”

OK – a bit harsh, I though, but definitely on my side, so fair enough.  There followed a brief discussion on how so often BPD is thrown at young women who either (a) self-harm or (b) don’t take shit from nor lie down and universally accept everything said from psychiatrists.  I told him that I felt I certainly met the requisite five criteria for a fair diagnosis, but I knew that so often that wasn’t the way of things, and that in that regard I had been relatively lucky.  He agreed that so often it’s just slapped on someone’s forehead because a psychiatrist merely had a ‘difficult’ interaction with the patient, and then spent a few minutes complaining about how such “labelling” (a term that, in this sense, I despise) demoralises and stigmatises vulnerable people, and renders treatment from the NHS mental health system difficult because of its complete unwillingness to provide adequate therapy for such conditions.

Of course, my own story came into play at several points, and this was no exception.  I told Paul how although I had seen C since February last year, that we met only once weekly and that the whole thing amounted to just over a year’s therapy in real terms – in complete and utter contravention of the cocking NICE shitelines, of course.  I admitted that I had only relatively recently come to a point where I had began to trust C enough to share some really nasty, hardcore (no puns please) stuff with him but then, right in the midst of the resulting psychological whirlwind, I found myself inexplicably being chucked out of the sorry system like a bucket full of dirty dishwater.

He put down his pen again, and sighed, annoyed apparently.  ”I hate that,” he intoned, shaking his head disapprovingly.  ”I hate it.  It just leads to further difficulties, doesn’t it?”

Um…YES!  Thank you for seeing that independently of my pointing it out, unlike every pathetic overpaid cunt with whom I have dealt within the health ‘service’.  I confirmed my agreement by referring, yet again, to my retraumatisation issues resulting from how things with C ‘progressed’, ‘developed’ and ended.

In discussing my history of treatment, I mentioned the failed referrals I had had from the Crisis Team and some CPN or other for CBT, as well as my brief but deeply regrettable experience of it in the private sector.  I was surprised to note a cynical smile creep surreptitiously across Paul’s jovial face.

“I just don’t think there’s any way that CBT, even with the most skilled therapist, would work for you,” he told me.  ”I mean, that’s a big judgement to make on the basis of having known you for half an hour, but you really strike me as being…” –  he searched for some sort of half-formalised sort of term – “well, somewhat ahead of that.”

I suppressed a satisfied, vindicated smile.

He continued: “I don’t think that CBT solves everything in the way the government would like to portray it as doing.  It works for some people some times, but it’s not a blanket solution.”

“Indeed,” I concurred.  ”The only reason that it is touted as a fits-all mental health panacea is because of the health service’s obsession with targets and costs.”  He appeared to be impressed with this brief diatribe.

Eventually, given that Nexus is an organisation devoted to counselling those that have been sexually abused, he inevitably had to ask questions about that.  When I said something to the effect of, “I was raped from the age of five,” he sighed yet again and told me that although he had heard similar words spoken many times before, they “never stop affecting” him.  Of course, it is inevitable and necessary that therapists distance themselves from their work to some extent, but it’s also good to know that they (or at least he) still have some feeling about traumatic and difficult issues; I mean, how could they develop any sort of empathy otherwise?

I found two of his questions especially difficult.  The first one was why I was coming to see the Institute now, as opposed to five, ten, whatever years ago.  After umming-and-ahhing for a bit, I concluded that for all the trouble that my relationship with C had ultimately caused me, that in fairness he (C) had apparently brought me to a point where at least I knew and accepted the reality of my history, even if I had not been able to fully explore and resolve the difficulties and specifics thereof.

“To that end,” I said, “I now want to face up to it, to discuss it…even if it’s as hard as it will inevitably be.  Before now, I seemingly just dissociated or ignored or somehow otherwise mentally compartmentalised it, but of course burying stuff deep in that way only leads to intangible but at times almost unbearable surface suffering.  So, I want to fully address that now.”

The other awkward question that was asked was what I wanted to achieve in therapy with Nexus.  I’ve always hated questions like this because the answers are, almost by their very nature, amorphous and unquantifiable.  I want to be in therapy because I want to feel better - but how is that measured?  Is it by my ability to get out of bed in the morning?  By whether I can go out of the house alone occasionally?  By having enough of a concentration span to actually read a full chapter in a good book for once?  By going back to work?  And even if we can decide on the end measurement, where’s the demarcation line that separates ‘goal achieved’ from ‘goal failed’?

I bullshitted around the enquiry with something like I felt that I had reached a point in my life where I was ready to face things rather than hide from them (as previously noted), and that whilst I did not believe that Nexus could ‘cure’ me, I did feel that given the seemingly unanimous praise that they receive that they could at least help me deal with this one major issue, and that in so doing, I could begin to move forward in terms of recovery.

A nebulous answer to a nebulous question.

Paul felt obliged to remind me that as a voluntary sector body, time with Nexus is limited (to “about” 26 sessions, he said).  I accept that without question, in perhaps stark contrast to my experiences with the NHS, but perhaps if my time with C had only ever been agreed at a year or so, I would have felt differently about it.  Perhaps C has got a raw deal here too, because he’s the one that started to uncover all the abuse bullshit, then the poor sod was essentially forced to discharge me from his care, and now someone else is coming along to (hopefully) just pick up where he left off.  If it works, it is they – not C – that will get the credit for helping me.  I don’t know; maybe this is too much like optimism from me.  Whatever the case, although I am uncomfortable with another therapeutic time limit being imposed upon me, I do understand and accept this one.  I can have these services absolutely for free should I wish (as it happens, I will of course donate what I can, when I can).  The NHS pretends that its services are free, but of course they are not.

Anyway.  The long and the short of this very long post is that Paul is obliged to seek confirmation from NewVCB in her capacity as my consultant that the type of therapy offered by Nexus is appropriate for me.  He “see[s] no reason whatsoever why it wouldn’t be,” though, and that once they hear back from her, I will be allocated the first appointment mutually suitable.

There is, as I said somewhere above, no guarantee that the appointment nor the therapy would be with Paul; he was ‘only’ my assessor.  However, I felt that we kind of almost clicked, and I personally would be quite keen to work with him if I can.  He also told me as I was leaving that he has a particular interest in clients who, like myself, have specific mental health issues, and that he finds it hard after assessing someone to not then have them allocated to him for therapy.

So would he try and fit me in to his schedule?  Probably not specifically, because that’s not how these things work.  It is a charity after all, and for that reason I would not like to try and pressurise them into allowing me to see one specific individual as opposed to another.  Personally speaking, I’d be happy to wait a month or two for sessions with Paul to become available to me, but it seems horribly churlish to specifically request such an accommodation when they are trying their level best to get me seen as soon as they can.  Besides, their other therapists may be as or even more appropriate for me.  Though I still can’t shake off the worry of them being female.

Anyway, that was that really.  He saw me to the door, wished me all the best and smiled as he said goodbye.  I liked him, and if he is representative of the organisation in general, then I do think that there is at least the potential for positive work to be done with them.  As I said above, and as I’ve written elsewhere a million times, I don’t believe in cures to mental health problems.  Nexus won’t cure me.  They can’t even treat all of my issues, because their mere existence is predicated upon addressing one specific type of issue.  Nevertheless, that ‘one type of issue’ in my life was and is a significant one, and if someone specifically trained in the area can help me at least start to move on from the effects of it, well – that’s not a bad start in the wake of the NHS disaster that refused to provide this type of help.

—

* ‘Limited’?  After almost 3,100 words I can hardly describe my account of it as ‘limited’.

Points of interest that occurred to me after the composition of the main body of this post:

1. Paul said that after the individual counselling has to finish, clients can additionally go on to a waiting list for a weekly group session.  I told him the idea of group therapy terrified me, but he said – rather enigmatically I thought – that I would “be excellent in a group”.  A opines that it’s a bit like when I did my undergraduate degree; my fellow students would gaze vapidly at the lecturer (or wall, or door, or – more commonly – they would gaze animatedly at their mobile phones), whilst my indomitable narcissism would result in considerable (and, I have to say, generally worthwhile) discussion between the lecturer and me.  Of course, back then I had some confidence and was possibly in a prolonged period of hypomania.  Things are very different now, but then perhaps the side of myself that I projected to Paul was more like the outgoing, vivacious one that hides in the dark recesses of her own mind most of the time.
2. Unlike C, who thought I perhaps put too much emphasis on electronic friendships (and was thus, in his defence, very glad that I attended the recent Mad Up, thus making my online friends more ‘real’), Paul thinks that when you are already socially isolated as I largely am, online friendships (particularly with others who understand what living with a mental illness is like) are healthy and productive things for which to strive.  Regardless of who’s right or wrong on the issue – and I can see C’s point in this – I must say that I like Paul’s take on it better  Because me loves the Madosphere so much

Night night lovelies.  x

As I sat down to eat my first Pot Noodle of the day, I noticed two missed calls on my iPhone.  The number was a local one, but not one I recognised.  I suspected it might be my friends the Nexus Institute, but employed the services of DI Google just to make sure.  DI Google was for once very ineffective, however, and thus is not securing his promotion to DCI Google just yet.

I bit the bullet and rang the number back, a mere 15 minutes previous to the time of this writing.  An English bloke answer, with an opening salutation of, “Hello, Nexus?” this proving my suspicions to be correct.  I explained my missed calls and earlier discussion with NLTWFN and English Bloke went off to see what I was wanted for.

English Bloke was away from the accursed evil that is his telephonic device for approximately two minutes, and then returned telling me that an assessment appointment had been scheduled for me for 1.30pm today!  That’s in just over an hour!  I was taken aback by this, but after thinking for a few seconds I confirmed to English Bloke that I would be in attendance.

English Bloke said, “the appointment is actually with me.  You don’t mind talking to a man, do you?”

Um…NO!  This is a win, indeed.  I told him that I had no such difficulties.

“OK,” he replied.  My name is P.  I look forward to seeing you.”

“Likewise,” I said, and we exchanged goodbyes and rang off.

But seriously…fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkk!  Talk about shitting oneself.  I can’t imagine how I’ll even breathe on the way over there.  In fact, I had better leave soon to ensure that my parking neuroses have ample time with which to be dealt.  Oh God oh God oh God.  I have no one to hold my hand this time.  Fuck!

It is now 12.20pm.  I have an hour.  Wish me luck!

BEWARE: SELF-HARM TRIGGERS

EDIT TO ADD: Apparently this was originally written by a member of Recover Your Life. See here for more information. Thanks to Voluntary Madness for pointing this out in the comments section of this post. P.

—

I’ve ripped this off from The Exact Science of Manic Depression, but as he himself acknowledges, it’s been doing the rounds of the Madosphere for a long time, and no one really knows who’s ultimately responsible for these wise words. Ergo, the relevant copyrights are with those who own them and not me. But the message is an important one, so here it is.

Before you make that first cut remember. You will enjoy this. You will find the blood and pain release addictive. Even though you think you can make a few tiny cuts that aren’t deep and will heal easily, they will get deeper. They will scar. They will sometimes take months to heal. And years for the scars to fade. If you think you can limit the cutting to one area of your body think again. It will spread when you run out of skin.

Be prepared to withdraw from others and live in a constant state of shame. Even if you are the most honest person ever to live you will find yourself lying to the people you love. You will jerk back from your friends when they touch you as if their hands were dipped in poison. You will be terrified that they will feel something under the cloth of your shirt, or just because it just plain hurts so much to be touched.

Be prepared to get so out of control you fear your next cut because you don’t know how bad it will be. Just wait for 10 cuts to turn into 100… Be prepared for your entire life to revolve around cutting, and thinking about cutting, cutting and covering up cutting. And just wait until that first time you cut “too deep”. And you freak because the blood won’t stop, and you are gaping, and you feel yourself shaking all over. You are having a panic attack and you are terrified but you can’t tell anyone. So you sit there alone, praying it will be okay and swearing you’ll never let it go this far again. But you will; and further. Don’t worry, you will learn how to take care of your cuts so that you can go deeper and deeper and avoid A and E.

You will lie to yourself and justify it when you find yourself spending £10, £20, £30 every time you go into a chemist. You will feel the flutter of your heart beat every time you go to the counter. Butterfly strips, 3 or 4 kinds of dressings, wound tape, antibiotic cream, medical tape, and scar reducers. You will tap your foot impatiently hoping the queue will move on and that no one will stare at you or wonder why you need all these things. And at the same time secretly hope that someone will notice… someone who is standing in line with an armful of the same supplies. Someone who understands. But of course that never happens.

Medical supplies won’t be the only thing you spend all your money on. Be prepared to buy a new wardrobe. Long sleeve shirts in summer colours, bracelets, wristbands, boots, gloves the list goes on and on.

You will start looking at every one in a different way. Scanning their bodies for any signs of SI, just hoping that you might meet someone like you so you don’t feel so terribly alone. You won’t even think about it as you eyes scan their wrists, arms, hoping, just hoping that you might meet someone like you. But they are not. You will see their clean arms and feel terribly ashamed and alone.

You will start doing alot of things alone. You will always have to wash your laundry in private so that no one sees the blood stains on your clothes and towels. You will always be cleaning up the blood. Scrubbing your bathroom floor, wiping the blood off your keyboard.

You won’t be able to make it through a day without cutting. Next thing you know you’re locked in a toilet cubical somewhere breaking open a scar with a sewing needle you keep in your purse for emergencies. When you get really desperate anything can be a cutting tool. Scissors, car keys, needles, even a pen. It doesn’t really matter what if you need to cut bad enough you’ll find something.

Say goodbye to the things you took for granted. Like wearing shorts or sandals, pedicures and sleeveless tops. A normal summer day at the beach or the swimming pool will become a far off memory to you.

And remember to be ready to itch. Because you will itch and itch so much that “you look like you have fleas or a skin disease”.

You will become an expert on your own body as you destroy it carefully. You will dream about cutting. You will dream about being exposed. It will haunt you day and night and take over your life. You will wish you never made that first cut because you will absolutely hate cutting; but at the same time you love it and cannot live without it.

You have been warned…

It is all absolutely, 100% true. I promise you, readers. Pay heed. Proceed with caution. Self-harm is a drug from which it is hard to break free, especially in times of great stress.

Thank God for my/our primary enabler, Mental Nurse, and other members of the wonderful Madosphere.

Essentially, the sharing of images catalogued here has made what was an unspeakably bad day into a less unspeakably bad day. Now that I am coming to grips with using GIMP, I am finding some enjoyment (***shock!!! Horror!!!!***) in creating images therein, and the camaraderie involved in the sharing of these particular ones across the various websites and social networking sites really lift my indescribably despairing mood.

I’ve identified the two for which I am responsible in the link above, but here’s another one I’m going to start using as an avatar in certain places:

I am (for now) making no comment on this morning’s final session with C, other than that everyone who predicted that last night’s uncharacteristic indifference would not continue after, say, 10am today, would not have been completely mistaken.  I do not want to think about it so meh, let’s just ignore it.

So, therefore, here is something not-so-completely different.

As per Lovely GP’s advice in the afore-linked post, I contacted the Nexus Institute – a voluntary sector organisation offering ‘counselling’ to those who have been a history of sexual abuse, whether chronic or acute – last night.  Given my phone phobia, I emailed them with the following:

Dear Nice Lady That Works for Nexus (NLTWFN)

My GP suggested I get in touch with the Nexus Institute to discuss the possibility of receiving counselling with yourselves.

I am coming to an (enforced) end of psychodynamic therapy on the NHS, which only began to touch on my history of child sexual abuse. Unfortunately this therapy has left me re-traumatised as, despite long term mental health difficulties, I had not faced the issues before (partly due to dissociative symptoms, partly due to conscious ‘blocking out’), and to this end my GP felt that addressing these issues with yourselves specifically could be helpful for me.

I understand that there is a waiting list for your services but I would be very grateful if you could perhaps advise me if and when an appointment might be available. Perhaps you might also advise on how many sessions you are able to offer and provide any other information that you consider relevant.

I live in the [my area] area. Should you require any further information, please do not hesitate to email me; I check my email several times daily and it is the fastest way to get in touch with me.

I look forward to hearing from you and thank you in advance for your help.

Kind regards

Pandora Serial-Insomniac

That was about 7.30pm last night.  I was astonished when the woman wrote back with the following within 45 minutes.  In my last job I would religiously check and respond to my email at strange out-of-office hours, even in the middle of the night, but I thought that (twats like bankers aside) I was fairly uncommon in doing so.  So I was quite impressed with her quick response:

Dear Pandora

Thank you for your email. I think if you would email me a telephone contact number I could call you tomorrow and give you a bit more information about ourselves. We do have a waiting list but it varies on so many different things eg we offer outreach work in [blah]/[yadda]/[etc] areas and also the [la la la] area but if you are available and able to attend the [dum dum dum] office and don’t mind if you see a male or female counsellor the waiting time for ongoing therapy could be as little as 6 weeks. Again depending on how flexible you are with your time you should get an assessment within a week or two. I look forward to hearing from you.

Take care.

NLTWFN

As it happens, the [dum dum dum] office suits more than any of the rest that she mentioned, so that was something of a win, though I was horrified at the prospect of having to speak to her on the phone.  Even so:

Hi NLTWFN

Thanks very much for your quick response. I won’t be available tomorrow morning but you can contact me in the afternoon or on Friday if that suits better – the number is 666-666-666-666-666-666.

To be honest the [dum dum dum] office is probably the easiest office for me to get to so I would be more than happy with that. For some reason I think I’d prefer a male counsellor but that certainly isn’t set in stone and something I am happy to discuss.

Anyway, thanks again for getting back to me so promptly and I’ll talk to you shortly.

All the best

Pandora

I have been lying on the sofa under my duvet since I got home this morning and what with all the drugs in my system I was fortunate enough to doze off for a while in the early afternoon.  When I looked at my phone, there had been a missed call from a ‘Blocked’ number.  Why must organisations/companies/offices ‘block’ their fucking numbers?  Why don’t they just show outgoing calls as coming from their main switchboard as my former employers at least had the decency to do?  As if the phone wasn’t shit enough to have to fucking use.

Anyway, it rang again with a ‘Blocked’ number at twenty to three so, expecting it would be NLTWFN, I took a massively deep breath and answered the evil bastarding thing.  It was indeed NLTWFN.

Basically, the craic is this.  Because I am a dolescum and am therefore flexible on dates and times, can go to [dum dum dum] office, and am at least theoretically tolerant of a ‘counsellor’ of either gender,  she reckons I can get an initial assessment next week, from whence there is approximately a five or six waiting list for the actual therapy.  Apparently they receive loads of cancellation appointments each day and then seek to allocate them to other listed clients on a first-applied-first-served basis so all being well, she or her colleague will ring (damn) me in the next few days to give me mine.

I asked how much therapy they are willing/able to give, and she said that they usually work on six week rolling contracts, but that they can offer up to 26 weeks of therapy (six months, of course).  Whatever way she phrased it, she seemed to infer that although the therapy didn’t have to last six months, it usually did (or, at least, that it certainly wasn’t a problem for it to do so).  I didn’t ask her, but presumably they are well enough established that they can advise on other individuals for you to contact thereafter if needs be (not that jumping around from one therapist to another sounds like a lot of fun to me, but there you go).  She said that because I have been involved hitherto with a “third party” (C), they would have to contact him after the initial assessment to double check that he felt that this was a suitable follow-on from the ‘treatment’ he gave me, but she said that it almost always is considered thus, so that that shouldn’t be a problem.

So that was that really.  How strange to move so quickly from C(unt) – N(exus); I certainly wasn’t expecting that as a possibility.  Another issue – which unfortunately involves an unwanted allusion to C – is that my fighting with the Trust isn’t over, even if my engagement with their Psychological ‘Services’ is.  C said that it isn’t unknown for them to contract out therapy to the private sector, thus footing the client’s bill, and he wonders if that is a possibility for me (why the fuck not just pay those you already pay, you fuckwits?!).  ”They won’t fund traditional five-times-a-week psychoanalysis,” he told me (oh really, I’d never have guessed, thanks C), “but they may be willing to fund something.”

I’ll believe it when I see it, but for now we’ll see how things with Nexus proceed.  I’m a bit nervous about the possibility of the ‘counsellor’ – a word I hate, even though I know that ‘counselling’ is distinct from ‘psychotherapy’ and is thus the more correct term – being a female though.  I still can’t work out what my aversion to women is – though, as I have discovered (most notably on Saturday!), it certainly does not by any means apply to them all.

But that said, the thought of pouring my heart out to one terrifies me.  I remember when I met Margaret, my erstwhile CBT therapist.  I had booked the appointment without knowing the therapist’s name – something that I have very definitely learnt from – and simply expected that it would be a man.  I have no idea why really.  When Margaret greeted me that first time, I was horrified.  (As it happens she was actually a nice woman, quite intelligent too, but we never ‘clicked’ in the way I did with C, and even if we had, CBT simply wasn’t appropriate for me).

The reason that I told Nexus that I was flexible on this issue is that they are open to you changing your ‘counsellor’ if you don’t “click” with him or her.  Whilst I’d prefer a man, if I get the right woman, it could be OK.  Regardless of their sex, if I don’t form a decent rapport with them, then I can seemingly ‘change’ them anyway, even if it does mean going back onto a waiting list for a bit.

So, whilst I’m cynical about what counselling as opposed to intense psychotherapy can do for me, I suppose their willingness to see me so soon is something considerably to their credit, and it is worth giving them a chance.

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

Let’s start with the first one.

Bye Mum!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was truly pathetic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mwhahaha!

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

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

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

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

Which leads me to…

The Final Countdown: The Eve of the End of Therapy

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

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

…

…

…

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

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

There are two probable reasons for this.

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

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

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

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

Now.  Who likes my new logo?!

Pan x

*plays a welcoming Final Fantasy-esque fanfare*

How are you enjoying following my secret life on the internet, mother?  I’m sure it has been an epic journey for you; it certainly has been for me.  I have met some amazing people, I have received some amazing support and encouragement, and I have discovered some not-quite-so-amazing things about myself and my life hitherto as I have gone through the psychotherapeutic process, as recorded in spectacularly epic detail on this journal (well – until recently, anyhow*).

Have you found entertainment in my tales of how your saintly brother-in-law systematically abused me throughout my childhood?  Perhaps you preferred reading of my delighted response to your choice not to believe my allusions directly to you on this subject?  Maybe the (not 100%) full and frank accounts of my hidden self-harming have been your favourite narratives?  I suppose you could also have been compelled by my descriptions of the strength and viciousness of my hallucinations.  Oh, and let’s not forget my shockingly pathetic suicide attempt back in January – that one was fun!  I would genuinely love to know what you’ve enjoyed most; it will inform and shape my writing in the future (or, rather, it won’t), so please leave a comment and let me know!

Hello other readers.  I discussed with some of you on Saturday the fact that I believe that my mother is reading my blog, a belief that I hold for a number of reasons, most notably her nonchalance when I recently asked her outright if she read my blog (which wasn’t as dangerous an invitation as it sounds; Alter Ego also writes a blog under her real name, for stupid nonsense like TV reviews and political rants).  It may not sound like a big deal, but my mother is naturally curious and also a technical novice; she would have first replied by asking what exactly a blog even was, then what I wrote about, where she could read my smattering nonsense and other such questions.  However, in response to my query, she turned her head away from me and quietly and supposedly casually murmured a couple of instances of the word ‘no’ at me.

I am in my late 20s.  I lived with my mother full-time until my mid-20s, and still see her at least weekly as it stands.  I almost always know when she is acting and to that end, her apparently indifferent composure at the mention of the word ‘blog’ was, I am convinced, feigned.  I could be wrong, but especially in light of of all the things she now knows about my diagnoses, treatment and general behaviour, I have to say that I am ‘suspicious’ in the extreme.

But I don’t mind.  I don’t care like I did a few months back, at least in part because I was seriously considering telling her the sordid lot of it in the near future anyway, and if she is reading through Confessions then it saves me verbalising the horrid, sickening words.  And anyway, I write honestly here, so I don’t see anything for which to apologise nor do I perceive that there is any need to censor myself.  No doubt ‘airing my dirty laundry in public’ is something that I should consider prohibitive to my discussions here, but then I write under a pseudonym so there is no reason not to in my view.  If Mum or any other family members are lurking here, then that is because they consciously chose to find their way here.  That’s not my problem.

So, if indeed you are here, then hello, Mum!  Welcome to the party!  <3 xxx  (This all sounds overly sarcastic, but it’s only partly so.  I actually really don’t mind that terribly much if Mum is here, reading.  I’d like her to just admit to doing so, but other than that…well, it is what it is.  Life goes on).

—

* I have five sessions on C to write about, and it could well become six, as I have been advised by a number of my fellow mentalists to actually attend the final session.  Many of you seem interested in my going ahead with the composition of these posts, rather than just summarising them, and I do aim to please when people are as nice as you all are.  It’ll just take a bit of time, and a need to remember that of course the content (unless I maniacally rush-write the whole damn lot in the next two days) will be no longer normative nor contemporary to my situation.

What, pray tell, is a ‘Mad Up’?

A Mad Up is a social encounter wherein all the attendees are clinically mad (excluding, perhaps, the partners of the aforesaid attendees).  Mad Ups involve a group of individuals with social anxiety meeting a mass group of human beings that they have not met in their lives before.  However, Mad Ups – perhaps ironically – work to combat social anxiety and societal alienation by offering a forum in which participants can engage in open and free discussion of mentalism, something that is still, in the main, derided by society.

Mad Ups involve the consumption of alcohol, either in parks or in random pubs on Baker Street in London. Mad Ups involve people who are actually not called Pandora consuming too much of the afore-referenced alcoholic chemicals, and then behaving in what could be considered a slightly manic fashion.  Mad Ups involve over-excited encounters with people masquerading as Sherlock Holmes.  Mad Ups involve therapist and NHS-bashing, though Zarathustra of my primary enabling website Mental Nurse (and one other professional in attendance that I’ll not name for reasons of anonymity) is of course exempt from said bashing because Zarathustra of my primary enabling website Mental Nurse, whilst in attendance at a Mad Up, may buy people actually not called Pandora a pint.

Let me get, finally, to the point.  I’ve had a heavily congested but thoroughly enjoyable weekend in the world’s capital, Laaaahnndaaaahhhnn.

First Meet Up – CVM, an online friend of relative long-standing

On Friday night, over a year after first encountering her online, A and I finally met CVM, who has been a consistent and unwavering source of support and friendship to me since that (as I now see it) hilarious night when I recommenced self-harming after a 10-ish year gap (re-reading that post makes me cringe.  What a complete pile of dirge.  It’s shite even by my standards).  CVM was, as I fully expected she would be, thoroughly lovely.  She bought us some delicious biscuits and we chatted for several hours about mentalism, families, mutual friends on the internet and lots of other random but fun stuff.  It was over all too soon, as these things always are, but low-cost air travel* makes the world a small and accessible place, so it will be far from the last time we meet.  CVM reads this blog when she is able, and to that end I am sending lots of love to her, as well as many thanks for a great evening. <3

Second Meet Up – Daniel, my best mate

It always seems weird to describe a person that you see maybe twice a year at most as your best friend, but he is.  Nothing ever changes.  We may not speak to each other for months, but as soon as we are put back in a room together, things are the same as they always were.  We only saw Daniel for about an hour and a half, immediately before the Mad Up, but any time together is a good time together.  I think my favourite part of the encounter was reminiscing about the completely braindead and ridiculous (but immensely fun) shit we did as adolescents.  One was running down my mother’s road with her ancient brown cushions on our heads, swinging a curtain pole whilst squealing, “weeeeeee!  WEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

We were, indubitably, the absolute bastions of sanity.

Third Meet Up / First Mad Up – about 20 mental health bloggers/Twitterers/Facebooker-ers/partners of nutjobs/etc

I’m not sure how many people I can name, as I wouldn’t like to intrude upon anyone’s anonymity, but Zarathustra and Simone have already mentioned their attendance, so I will say that they were there.  My friend K, who I met for the first time in November, had also made her way to the event, and it’s always lovely to see her.

It was lovely to see everyone else as well, of course.  Some people I’d known online for months – perhaps over a year in a case or two – other people I barely knew at all, but no matter; everyone was great craic and intelligent company.  There is something so absolutely empowering (I hate that word) and freeing (I hate that word too) about being able to openly and with impunity discuss those dirty little mental health related subjects that society wants to brush under the carpet – self-harm, sectioning, psychosocial traumas, the bollocks that is NHS mental health ‘services’.  It’s really not your normal pub conversation, is it?  And yet ‘your normal pub conversation’ also existed in droves, because at the end of the day we’re not so much a group of mentally ill people, as a group of people who have mental illnesses.  I loathe the PC expression of that sentiment, but at the end of the day there is truth in it; it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re ordinary folks who have interests, idiosyncrasies and bodies just like everyone, rather than just uniquely fucked-up messes.

We had people with bipolar disorder, cyclothymia, eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, PTSD, psychosis, mentalism unspecified and even one who has I’ve spent over seven years being romantically entangled with (she who is actually not) Pandora, so despite failing to collect official diagnoses I must be mentally ill disorder.

We met in Regent’s Park but a dumb fucks – namely me – had forgotten to bring booze, so after an hour or so a breakaway contingent ran away to the nearest pub.  We were latterly joined by the remainder, and even more latterly than that some folks that couldn’t make it during the day also turned up.  A and I were amongst a group of about six that stayed to the bitter end, which is testament to the relaxed enjoyment that was had.

There were many highlights, but perhaps my favourite was Z’s dramatic recital of this spectacularly hilarious comment.

So, folks, thank you.  I spread my love and gratitude out there to all of you in the Madosphere.

Rant

* Ryanair are a pack of fucking cunts.  Advertising, advertising, advertising.  Money, money, money.  ”Oh yes, already-paying customer, please buy our shit scratchcard – we really need your help to raise money for children’s charities.”  Fuck you, you guilt-tripping, rip-off heaps of fuckwittage.  Children’s charities?  Really?  Michael O’Leary’s fucking children?

I resented every penny I spent on flying with them, but there was something like a £70 disparity between them and SleazyJet, and Ryanscare at least have the relative decency to travel from a less shit airport than their orange-fixated competitors (an aside: are SleazyJet making a Northern Irish political point with their orange livery?).  But fuck me, did Ryanscare suck donkey balls.  On the bright side though, ranting material is always a welcome thing

At about 1.30am today, I received an email from a lady at Medical Assistant Schools (MAS) claiming that her site had bestowed an award upon this blog.  I initially deemed it a hoax as it, although emailed to my address, wasn’t intended for me – its salutation did in fact refer to the author of the PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within blog.

However, out of curiosity, I followed the included link and found that the sender of the message must merely have confused her email addresses or something, as there, lo and behold, was Confessions, apparently a top 25 PTSD blog!

I have been incredibly fortunate this year to have been considered worthy by other bloggers of several awards; whilst I’m extremely grateful for them all, by far the most important to me has been the runner-up one awarded in January from Mental Nurse, as it was bestowed upon me based on voting from a number of very well respected mental health bloggers, thus perhaps making a more objective contest than some others.  I’m also flattered by the nomination and votes at Bloggers’ Choice.

The Medical Assistant School award too is a real honour because, as MAS’s website states that:

Awards candidates are selected using one main method: audience nominations.

After a list of candidates is compiled they are each scored by our panel of five judges. Each judge rates each blog across 20 different attributes providing it with a ‘subjective’ score. These ratings are combined into an aggregate, and the aggregates of the 5 judges are averaged to give the blog its final rating.

The ratings are then compared, and awards are given out to blogs in the 99% percentile (meaning the top 1% of blogs receive awards).

Top one per cent?  Really?  I can’t believe that I would be considered even remotely close to that level but whatever the case, gaining this recognition is still really cool.

I have no idea who nominated me, and I am utterly amazed that a panel of judges consider me worthy of a place on the same dizzy-heights list as the unwaveringly brilliant likes of Catatonic Kid, Faith Allen and Zebra Polka Dots.  Amazed and stunned, yes, but also blown away by my absolutely outstandingly wonderful readership and internet friends.  You all really mean an awful lot to me; your support, kinship and encouragement has seen me through many a dark day and will, I am certain, continue to do so.  I am humbled and touched beyond measure that I am considered worthy of your continued reading, never mind anything else.

Thank you.  I do love you all.

And I look forward to meeting some of you tomorrow!

Pan <3 x

I wrote these melodramatic words the other day:

I shall never see C again.

Officially I am supposed to see him on Thursdays 19th and 26th August, but I shall not.  I shall never see him again.  I have pretty much decided not to go, as I’m certain it would only cause me further pain, and I think he’s put me through enough (as if I didn’t already have a fair dollop of it in my life, but let’s not wallow).

I have not written about my most recent four sessions, though I have my own records of them.  I may get to the minutiae of it all one of these days – when it seems less traumatic, perhaps, if indeed it ever will – but for now I think it’s enough to say that the last few meetings, in particular the very most recent (when the “personality disorder” bollocks that he came off with was actually outright offensive), have been pointless and circular.  Nothing has been achieved and if anything, they have been damaging in an individual kind of way, just like therapy as a conceptual process has been for quite a while now – basically, since I spoke of the longevity and severity of my experiences of child sex abuse only to be told to fuck off out of C’s hair.  How can that not be completely and utterly damaging?  He keeps banging on that he sees ‘worth’ or ‘value’ or some other such meaningless word in continuing to the bitter end, but he’s not the one that has to live with the grief and despair of the situation in which he and his targets-obsessed bosses have put me in.

I know that anything I say ‘on record’ so to speak will be regarded as confirmation of the bloody BPD bollocks, but fuck it, I don’t care.  I’m sure, despite C’s claims to the contrary, that I have got the words ‘non-compliant patient’ and ‘archetypal angry borderline’ scrawled all over my notes in red pen anyway, so what does it matter?  Once you get this fucking diagnosis it stays with you for the rest of your cunting existence whatever you may or may not do, however much you may or may not progress.  So I might as well tell the fat-catted-fat-cunted fuckers what I think anyway.

I can’t just leave him without some acknowledgement, though, so I am penning a ‘goodbye’ letter.  I want to make clear that I feel that my anger is absolutely justified (which it damn well is), but that it is only partly aimed at him, and that in the right circumstances (ie. adequate fucking time) he could have improved rather than destroyed it.  I do feel it’s important that he knows that he has destroyed it, though – I think it’s imperative that they (the Trust, the Psychology Department) understand the power that they have over vulnerable people, because it seems to be a point that whooshes blindly over their heads at the minute.  But that said, I would like C to know that, although our relationship has been irreparably damaged, I have much fondness and respect for him as an individual.

I then found myself too distressed to actually write the letter, so waited until this morning.  My mother had asked me to head round to her’s as Sarah, Suzanne and the latter’s children were in attendance; it is quite reasonably viewed that just because WWIII has split the sorority of my mother and Maisie doesn’t mean it has to split everyone else.

Helps or Hindrances?

Knowing that I would have to fight any distress whilst in their company (as opposed to lone time giving me time to ruminate and wallow) gave me the confidence to sit down and write the letter there, but my mother caught me doing so and tried to persuade me to return to see C on Thursday.  I argued vehemently against it, citing the damage I felt recent sessions had done and how I could not see future ones being any different, but she said that no matter what C may say, no matter how model a patient I have been, and no matter what my notes already state, that the Trust will find some way to corrupt the situation and deem me “non-compliant”.  Pan is teh b0Rdel1NE ev1L innit!!eleven1!!!1!11!!

Suzanne, who has a friend working in the main psychiatric hospital in the Trust, overheard the conversation, and seconded my mother.  She admitted to not being particularly familiar with complex PTSD and BPD, but stated that she felt it was important not to give them any excuse to piss about further.  She also pointed out that, if in the event that the Trust do agree to extend the psychotherapy, I wouldn’t want to damage my already damaged relationship with C any further by not returning.  I felt that this was a fair comment.

There followed a long discussion – or, perhaps more accurately, something of a monologue on Suzanne’s part – on how she “really believes” that I can get through the next few weeks, even if my crusade for extended therapy fails.  Maybe so, maybe not.  She pointed out that we have very different beliefs, but that she wanted me to know that it was still her’s that whilst I will probably always deal with at least residual mental health problems, my life and illnesses can improve.  Theoretically, I do not disagree (and indeed, I think subtle progress may already have been made – see below), but I felt like she was patronising me, and rather than express irritation or a counter-argument, I just sat there submissively and meekly nodded every so often.  On reflection – and I think I realised it at the time too – I know she was just trying to help, or to encourage me, or to cheer me up, or whatever.  So I suppose I ought to be grateful, but it did feel strange having life and pseudo-medical advice extended to me from someone who (a) admits to not having full cognisance of the core issues, and; (b) I was the elder protector of as we grew up under the watchful eyes of a paedophile (not that she seems to have been afflicted that way, given as she called her second baby after said paedophile – but anyway).

One thing she said that was true but still mildly annoying was, to paraphrase, that my fixation with the end of therapy is self-defeating.  Therapy has been useless for several weeks now – probably since about June or early July-ish – and at least in part that’s because I’ve gone into lockdown knowing that I can’t discuss what I need to discuss with C, because the time I have with him means it cannot be resolved.  Suzanne is right – it is self-defeating, at least in some ways (though in fairness to C he’d point out that the dyad is a co-construct, so any failings of recent weeks would not to his mind be solely my ‘fault’).  But what, of necessity, Suzanne does not know is a lot of why I’m in therapy in the first place.  Were she thus aware, I suspect she would understand why preventing such lockdowns as I am now experiencing is nigh on impossible.  All that said, her point is valid in a way – but I can’t just CBT myself into being grateful that I actually have 15 full days (as opposed to only having two mere weeks) before I never see C again.  If I could do that, I’d never have ended up being mental and/or in therapy in the first place.

Anyhow, apparently I need to focus “not on the time left” but “on really getting better, by whatever avenue”‘.  Apparently as a door closes, a window opens.  Notwithstanding the fact I’m too much of a pie to fit through the window in question, I don’t see any reason to agree with the sentiment, and even if I did, the transition through the window will be long and damaging in itself, I fear.  As you will know, it is my plan to seek private therapy in the wake of the disaster of that is NHS mental health services.  If I form the required therapeutic rapport with the first private therapist I see, then brilliant – but can I really expect the same luck in that regard that I had when I met C?  It will almost certainly take a lot of time, and a lot of time when you’re a depressed, confused, disconcerted mess is not always a commodity frequently at your disposal.

To continue the vein of familial do-gooding, my mother then announced – to my abject horror – that she had tried to phone C this morning.  As C does not work in his normal location on Tuesdays, I hoped for a few precious seconds that nothing had come of her attempt to contact him and that he would be unaware of it.

This was not the case.

My mother spoke to C’s secretary who said she would get hold of him and get back to my mother.  She did, with the quite predictable message that C could not comment on patients’ treatment to third parties.

“But,” my mother protested, “I don’t want to discuss the content of their sessions with him.  I want to discuss the recklessness of his decision to end her therapy at the end of this month.”

This is where things start to get interesting.  Apparently C’s secretary – let’s call her Lorraine – was stunned to hear that C is kicking me out of therapy.  She said, incredulously, “but is the decision to end things not Pandora’s?!”

My mother laughed out loud and said that no, the decision was very clearly not Pandora’s.  A stunned silence from Lorraine apparently followed.

How can Lorraine possibly be under this impression?  C receives copies of all the correspondence between Mr D-P and myself, which surely must go to her first.  Maybe my experience as a secretary when I was putting myself through university is different to that of others, but I really find it bizarre that she doesn’t know this somehow.  C wouldn’t have deliberately let her think that ending therapy was my choice…would he?!

Whatever the case, my mother went on to say that she could absolutely guarantee that if the cessation of the relationship ‘progresses’ as planned that my condition will regress markedly (true, obviously).  She told Lorraine that, in her admittedly layperson’s view, I required about another 18 months of therapy (which sounds roughly fair to me), but that even if they would allow me another six months, at least that I would be able to ‘move on’ with more confidence, trauma-resolution and social ability than I presently have.

Lorraine said that C would want to discuss this material with me, which amused me endlessly.  What has been going on for the last 700 years if not discussion of this bollocks?

Anyway…

Part of me is furious with my mother for phoning C, because he will assume that I put her up to it, which is most assuredly not true.  On the other hand, futile as I expect her efforts to be, I also know that she (and Suzanne for that matter) is/are just trying to help.

Today’s assembled adults agreed that I am seemingly a little improved from when I first had this breakdown, which is now pretty much exactly two years ago (I went off work on 5 August 2008, after battling a severe depression for several months beforehand).  This apparent improvement is, to their minds and mine, testament to the effectiveness of psychotherapy with C.  The drugs may help, but as NewVCB keeps telling me, they are only to take the edge off things – and I think that is all they really can do.

No doubt the Health Service would deem this information evidence that I no longer need therapy.  Things are not as bad as they once were = things are perfect and delightful in their (possibly ironic) black and white world of arbitary targets and lives reduced to mere figures on a database.

My view is that, if anything, a slight improvement in my condition is at the crux of continued therapy.  It proves that working with C, as an individual, has been an effective treatment for me – to a point.  I’m still very, very ill – let’s be clear on that.  However, things are a little bit better than they were – thus, does it not stand to reason that they could continue to get better were a productive treatment not continued, to the point where (a) I can go back to work and (b) I no longer need the CMHT?  And in doing so, (c) WHERE THE FUCKING HEALTH SERVICE DOESN’T HAVE TO INVEST ANY MORE OF ITS PRECIOUS FUCKING RESOURCES (read: managerial salaries) INTO MY SORRY BACKSIDE?

But we’ve been over this ground before a hundred million times, and I am boring you now surely.  Query: do any of you actually want to read the minutiae of the last four meetings with C, which I’ve shied away from writing?  Some points therein are more notable than others, but the sessions were in essence useless and merry-go-round-ish.  Nevertheless, I could rustle up a summary if you wish, unless you really want to hear all the anal details.

Still, maybe this week’s session, now that I’ve changed my mind and am intending to go to it, will be more interesting.  I’m still going to write the letter, you know.  The only difference now is that I’m going to watch him the contortions of his facial muscles as he reads it

Q:

I’m obsessed with a man that isn’t you. Discuss.

A:

Short, sweet and to the point, I see, and a most frank admission. Not that you’d choose to disguise it, of course, given this blog’s ample testimony to your obsession.

It’s a strange one, I must admit, and I might have cause to be jealous but for the fact that you have made it clear that there is nothing of a romantic or sexual nature in the obsession. I understand that some therapeutic relationships tend in this direction, but luckily for me, yours does not, and I am satisfied that that is a true account of how you feel. I must admit that this does not prevent the odd stab of perplexity (read: minor jealousy) from time to time. Here you are, sharing your deepest, darkest secrets, or a good number of them anyway, with someone who is in many ways a stranger. I learn of these secrets on occasion not from you beforehand, but afterwards through the medium of your blog or during one of our regular Thursday night trips to our local coffee shop. I’ll have a cappuccino please, a scone – oh, and some dark revelation about sexual abuse. Do I want jam with that? Of course I do. Silly question.

Why my mystification/baby green-eyed monster? C, in essence, remains a stranger to you. The therapeutic relationship seems to me, from my knowledge of your case at least, to be fundamentally asymmetric. You talk. C listens. C utters the occasional ‘wise’ or ‘understanding’ comment. You play with your hair or your phone or look out the window. C sits in silence. You spout something angry. C says “so how do you feel about that?” You laugh, bitterly, because you knew that was what he was going to ask. You talk. He listens. “Have you thought about it like this?” You probably have. On rare occasions, you haven’t, and he thereby brings something new to the table. On most occasions, though, your therapy seems to have become a circular dance of frustration. There were occasional good weeks throughout the process, but most that I have observed have either been about as effective as a chocolate fireplace, or else actively damaging to your mood for the following days/weeks.

Why then, I ask myself, are you obsessed with a man who gives so little and asks so much of you? Clearly, the relationship is designed to allow you to talk about certain issues, to get them out of your system, to engage with an expert who may be able to help you deal with the issues. That’s the theory, and doubtless sometimes it works. You undoubtedly ‘click’ with C on a personal level, and yet the number of times you’ve come away from therapy angry, hurt or bemused makes me at times incredulous at your apparent liking of him, your relentless desire to know what CDs he listens to, what he does on his ‘off’ days, what his e-mail address might be, and so on [...um...for those not in the know, you might need the password to this. It's the usual password if you already have it.  If you are C, then you can't have it: please fuck off].

What you have is by no stretch of the imagination a friendship, though of course you admit as much. Perhaps had you met under different circumstances, it might have been so, but the imbalanced power relationships and the need for C to maintain his professional role mean that it is impossible for this to be anything more, in my view, than a doctor-patient engagement which, regrettably, is failing because an arbitrary time limit has been placed upon it. That being so, I fear that your obsession sets you up for crushing disappointment when the whole thing, in a few mere weeks from now [two from today], comes to its premature end.

In that sense, I resent C because he will very shortly reward your clear attachment to him with what you will perceive as abandonment. But then this all comes back to attachment. They say attachment to your therapist is necessary to get you to open up, but clearly this is a two-edged sword. If issues are not properly addressed during your therapy and the relationship is severed in an unsatisfactory manner, then the amputated pseudo-’friendship’ leaves a gangrenous wound that will fester. Thanks, NHS.

This process, in fact, seems to have actually required you to obsess, and I resent that tremendously, because the result is clearly going to be highly negative. Is that C’s fault? Probably not, but he could have handled things better, made it clear that the end of therapy was not ultimately his call. Do I blame him? Somewhat. However, the system is what is at fault in the end. I ceaselessly harp on the idea that the NHS would never do this to someone suffering from a physical illness. Yet that is precisely what the NHS is choosing to do to you. Because it can. And it has more important things to spend money on. Like managers. Grr.

Jealousy, then, isn’t my main reason for disliking the obsession. I’m not jealous, mostly. What I dislike is the damage that is being done to you. For transference to work (and I’m still not clear on the theory of how), attachment is necessary. In attaching yourself to C, you have grown to care about him, but unfortunately that care is misplaced in a relationship that can be ended at any time because someone wants a nice shiny annual report showing how efficient their psychotherapy service happens to be. It makes me angry, but that’s not a whole helluva lot that can be done.

Update on the Political Intervention Against the Trust

Sorry for not apprising readers of this blog on the current status of my complaints to my MP and other politicians about the Trust’s decision to end my therapy. I had mentioned it on Twitter, but not all of you are onTwitter, so that wasn’t very fair! Here’s what has, to date, happened.

The first person to respond to me was a civil servant – let’s call him Adam – writing on behalf of Michael McGimpsey, the Northern Ireland Health Minister. Adam oh-so-helpfully advised me that “clinical decisions on these matters are made by the various Trusts”. That is something of which I clearly had no knowledge. None at all! Adam had, therefore, “written to the [My] Trust to ask them to respond to [me] on the matter.” Definitely a highly useful thing for Adam to do, given that I have been writing to the Trust myself since December 2009. Adam kindly advised me that he hoped that “this matter will be resolved favourably.” I am, of course, profoundly touched by this overflow of concern.

In all seriousness, one thing he did do of minor use was provide the details of the Patient Care Council, whom I may contact if things don’t go according to plan (which they won’t, so presumably I will be contacting them). In any event, Mr Director-Person’s boss subsequently wrote to me, on the back of Adam’s epic piece apparently ending up on his desk. This person is called Mr Chief Executive. Mr Chief Executive claimed to be “sorry to hear of the difficulties [I have] been experiencing, and [is] grateful to [me] for bringing the matter to [his] attention.” I’ll bet. I wonder if he recalls that my first letter in this crusade was copied to him (its main recipients being the advocacy charities, who were universally fuckwitted), but passed by him to Mr D-P because he could not be arsed with it at the time?

He claims that an investigation has been launched “into the issues raised” in my correspondence to McGimpsey / Adam, so in fairness to Adam, at least something has come of his intervention that didn’t come of my own. This, in all probability, means one of two things. One – the outcome of the ‘investigation’ is already decided, and is essentially along the lines of “Pandora = WRONG. Trust = BLAMELESS”. Or two – they actually do investigate the issues raised…namely, however, the whole catalogue of errors that the past decade’s ricocheting about the system has brought. That would, of course, be welcomed by me, but what it potentially means is that they can avoid providing extended therapy and seem saintly by merely apologising for all that has gone wrong before.

Maybe I am being unduly cynical. I don’t think I am, but one never knows. As I said above, at least it is something. I really think it’s very far from perfect, but at least it’s not the nothing that was endlessly circular-ised in the correspondence between myself and Mr Director-Person.

The second, and so far only other, person to respond to the letters was the MP himself. His letter was friendly and courteous, and he said that he had written to the Trust on my behalf. He said he’d get back to me as soon as he received their response.

There was a letter from the House of Commons when I arrived at my mother’s – after a NewVCB appointment – this morning. I opened it with my customary dread, but found that it was just an update – my MP had received a letter (copied to me) from Mr Chief Executive, stating that I had written to the Trust directly and that his so-called investigation had been launched. He advised my MP that he would send him a copy of the investigation’s report once completed.

So that’s really it as things stand. Hardly life-changing stuff, but perhaps a small step in the right direction. At least the bastards now know I will not go away without a considerable fight.

NewVCB Appointment

NewVCB kept me waiting for 25 minutes, which is a record for her. During the whole time I was waiting I started blankly at the non-descript carpet, not moving, barely blinking. I heard a couple across the room remark on my probable mentalism. The man’s comment was inaudible, but his female companion, who was incapable of modulating her voice, was heard to comment that I look very depressed and “spaced out – as if her brain’s stopped working, like. Kind of freaky, isn’t it like?”

Interesting. I suppose it really must be a universal surprise that one would find a mental person IN A FUCKING PSYCHIATRISTS’ WAITING ROOM.

Anyway, the meeting was to all intents and purposes pointless. I seem to have an unlikely ally in NewVCB, who agrees that there is a lot of work that remains to be done in therapy. She claims, however, that there is nothing more that she can do on the issue.

Apparently she’s spoken to C and tried to persuade him to at least see me again after a break from the current process. She didn’t advise as to exactly what he said to that, but the inference seemed to be that it was going to be the probable outcome.

Good?

Should be good.

Doesn’t feel good.

Whatever the case, as of her last conversation with him, things are still ending in a fortnight, regardless of whether or not they’re picked up again in the future. I don’t know when their conversation took place, so as of right now it’s hard to say whether or not this was before or after the politicians’ involvement.

I told her that I thought that, finally, my mood had perhaps stabilised a little – I’m certainly still depressed, but not quite as morbidly so as is my norm. I would say it’s at a moderate level on average, which is good compared to the usual state of affairs. I pointed out that adjusting to changes in Venlafaxine totally fucks with my head for quite a number of weeks, so she agreed not to change my doses of either medication at the minute.

However, I told her, paradoxically the whole flashbacks/hypervigilance/rumination shit is as bad as ever. “I wish I’d never met C,” I said. “Or, at the very least, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut about stuff to him. I had many, many issues before I met him but he’s made it all ten times worse, and his choice of point on which to end therefore seems criminal.”

She said that she didn’t think this “turmoil” was paradoxical, and indeed that what I was reporting was quite common. She claims – and I don’t really believe her in the sense of its applicability to me – that sometimes the brain “works through these things on its own” before returning to therapy. Forgive me if I say that that sounds rather convenient.

She then came off with some bollocks about a new service being in development for people who “have complex issues and a history of trauma” and that “that might be an option.” This description irritated me in the extreme. She was clearly describing the personality disorder service that Mr Director-Person has wanked a bit on about to me. I asked for confirmation that this was indeed what she was referring to and she said that it was.

I said, “what, do you mean like DBT?” but before she could finish, I told her that I thought that DBT was a pile of utter bollocks, out-bollocksed only by its older cousin, CBT.

She asked why I held this view and I said that they were both victim-blaming, patronising, invalidating crap. I exemplified.

She agreed that CBT is a treatment unsuitable for me but started blathering on about how it’s used sometimes to ease the “most disturbed” patients into deeper stuff that “they couldn’t otherwise cope with emotionally.” It’s like peeling layers off an onion, apparently. Really, how interesting, NewVCB, thank you. Then she said that DBT was used by the self-harm team in the next Trust.

“Yes,” I sneered, “it’s supposedly empirically proven to treat that and suicidality. That’s very nice, but it doesn’t mean it treats the underlying causes of those behaviours, the psychological distress that they alleviate.”

“That’s my point,” she replied, to my considerable chagrin. “It stops that first, and then we can take the person deeper thereafter.”

OK, fine. Whatever. Just as long as your cunt bosses allow adequate fucking time to “go deeper.” Just as long as your cunt bosses don’t go about pretending that DBT is some sort of universal cure for BPD and related conditions, the way they have gone about pretending that CBT is a complete panacea for some other mental illnesses. Can DBT alleviate certain symptoms? In appropriate individuals, yeah, probably. Can it alleviate everything? I doubt it. Can it work for everyone that fits the BPD demographic? I’m absolutely certain that it can’t.

I asked NewVCB what she thought about C’s high-IQ idea of referring me to a CPN/SW upon discharge. She claimed to disagree with C’s take on this, stating that, “if I was referring someone to such a person, I would need a clear idea of what it is that they’re going to do together, and in your case…well, I don’t have such an idea. I just don’t think it would work for you.”

Excellent. At least she knows that much.

“He also said that you might be able to see me a bit more frequently, in the event that there was no CPN,” I told her.

She said she’d see me once a month “for a while” and that “we’d take it from there,” whatever the bloody, sodding Christ that means.

As she showed me out, she said, “sorry it’s not all good news,” and looked sheepish – even embarrassed – at both the historical and the ongoing colossal failures of her employers. At least someone has the grace to show it.

It was a waste of time, but it wasn’t a bad appointment, not ostensibly. I mean, she agreed with me on at least two points, one of which is quite important (ie. that the therapy should not be ending). Despite this, the whole thing has left me in a foul mood. I even considered ringing Lovely GP and asking him to send the crisis team out, because I feel like I’m a danger to myself. There’s this sort of raging foreboding constricting my internal organs and burning through my skin. I know that sounds daft, but it’s physical as well as psychological. My mind won’t stop; it’s in a whirlwind of negative thinking. I keep seeing my mother’s largest bread knife dangling in front of me and have beautiful images dancing in my head of my going to town with the knife on my arms and possibly even neck. I even told my mother that I was going to kill myself, but her response was a predictable one of withering derision and room-leaving.

I haven’t done anything yet, aside from deciding against getting the scheiße-st cunts involved because they’d only make me more mental, just as they have done in the past. Anyway, don’t worry. At least I have my Twitter group therapy friends and lovely blog readers. I’m sure it’ll pass, though perhaps not until I’ve got tomorrow’s session with C – week 61 out of 63 – out of the way. I have a lot of catching up on his sessions to do, I know. I also have some additional commentary that I need to share with you, but all in good time. I shall endeavour to remain alive so that I can impart these details to you

Oh, and as an aside – the below image shows why I’m being chucked out of therapy despite not being ready for discharge. This is taken directly from the Trust’s website.

As my friend More Voices said to me on Twitter, it’s “amazing how therapy can be set to numbers measuring nothing of value or real importance.” I couldn’t have put it better.

On Saturday night, A and I went to see a Queen tribute band, and a particular Freddie Mercury song that they covered once again struck me as being something that could be written about me.  A suggested I do a totally random, essentially pointless but potentially fun post on the issue – what song best describes your experiences of mental health difficulties, or of your behaviour, or of your life in general?

The one to which I alluded above is The Great Pretender, a song originally performed by a band called The Platters but covered in his typically excellent fashion by Mercury in, I think, ’87.  Although it’s written from the perspective of someone pretending their lost lover is still with them, the lyrics nonetheless fit my situation.  I discussed here that I am very, very good at acting.  It exhausts me, but I am very good at it.  The song describes very well the public face that a person projects – an appearance of relative wellness, contentedness, whatever – to the world, despite screaming or weeping internally.  It also briefly makes reference to living in a dream world, another thing to which I can relate.  It sums me up to a tee.  I’m sure it’s not the only song that really fits, but it will do for now.

So here it is.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh yes…I’m the great pretender
Pretending I’m doing well
My need is such I pretend too much
I’m lonely but no one can tell

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own
I play the game but to my real shame
You’ve left me to dream all alone

Too real is this feeling of make believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Ooh ooh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not you see
I’m wearing my heart like a crown

Pretending that you’re still around

Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not you see
I’m wearing my heart like a crown

Pretending that you’re

Pretending that you’re still around

This feud between my mother and Aunt of Oppression Maisie has really got me thinking.  This is a post where I’d really value your advice and thoughts, people.  I know you can’t put yourself in my place, but I suppose I’m wondering what you might do in this situation.

I’ve made clear here before that I don’t give a rat’s arse about whether or not I see that side of the family again, with a few possible exceptions (ScumFan is OK, Suzanne’s two children are OK and StudentMcF, her mother and her brother are OK.  That’s only about 10% of the bloody lot of them).  If it meant never having to see Paedo and Maisie again, I’d forego seeing that bunch too.

My mother said something this morning to the effect of her also only caring about seeing ScumFan again.  I’m not sure that I entirely believe this, but she certainly seems more resolute in her contempt for the McFauls than I would ever have expected.

I’ve unwittingly been dropping hints about my history with Paedo through every conversation I’ve had with her about the sorry lot of them since this all kicked off.  I say ‘unwittingly’ because I haven’t realised I’m doing it at the time, but then I post-mortem the conversation and think, “Christ, that was a severe bout of mentionitis there, Pan.”

As ever Mum is burying her head in the sand.  She now knows all of the following.

• She knows – through my own volition, at that – that I have a diagnosis (amongst many) of complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
• She knows that complex PTSD develops after chronic or cumulative exposure to psychological trauma.
• She knows that I have what may be considered to an outsider to be an unhealthy disdain for that side of the family – after all, ostensibly they’ve never really done anything untoward to me; they’re just a bit annoying.
• She knows – or, perhaps, has chosen to forget – about my telling her of parts of the Paedo story.
• She knows that I have made some what-my-objective-self-would-consider-odd-and-worth-exploring comments since the row with Aunt of Oppression kicked off earlier this week.

  For example, apparently Maisie said of Sarah’s marriage – and, my mother opines, implicitly of her’s and V’s also – “look how her marriage turned out.  Compare that to mine [smug facial expression].”

  This comment actually caused me to laugh out loud quite a lot for a few minutes.  Sarah’s husband (and, of course, V) were adulterous wife-beaters.  Maisie’s husband, however, is a child-fucker.  This is not exactly a great deal more noble than those to whom he was compared, and thus their precious ‘marriage’ is a bit of a sham (for the record, child-fucking notwithstanding, it is a sham.  Paedo hates Maisie, and Maisie bullies Paedo).

  Anyway, after pissing myself, I said something like, “if only she knew the half of it!”  My mother, quite tellingly I thought, did not respond to this otherwise cryptic remark.

So.  Here, finally, is my point.  Knowing that I had at least some level of sexual abuse at the hands of Maisie’s husband surely, given all of these factors, cannot come as a huge surprise to my mother.  I’m not saying that she wouldn’t be horrified to ‘learn’ of it, but really – could she honestly, genuinely be surprised?

I’m increasingly not giving a fuck about who knows.  Whilst I am not sure I really believe, despite my mother’s protestations to the contrary, that this war would actually be permanent in and of itself, I actually don’t really care if the entire bloody lot of them hear my so-called allegations, and subsequently choose to disown me (and presumably my mother by extension).

I don’t think this is just a fly-by-night, sweeping kind of feeling.  I may be wrong, but it seems definite, tangible.  I have nothing to be blamed for, unless you consider telling the fucking truth to be some sort of heinous crime.  If they don’t believe me, then fuck them.  Fuck the fucking lot of them.  I don’t care.

I came this [insert finger-closing gesture here] fucking close to telling her this morning.  I wanted her to ask me what some of my back-handed, vaguely-obscure-unless-you’re-in-the-know comments actually meant.  So at least part of me clearly wants her to know.  This surprises me, and yet I feel fairly comfortable with the desire.  Finding the words to impart the information wouldn’t be a great deal of fun, just as it wasn’t with C, but still.  I must want her to know nevertheless.

The main disadvantage of this, aside from the inevitable total schism it would result in, would be (assuming she even believed me, which I suppose is quite a leap of faith) my mother’s probable harping on about reporting the abuse to the police.  I really, truly, desperately don’t want to do that.  That, however, is not something I think she’d accept easily.  She seems to have this rather unfair belief that if anything like this has ever happened to a person that their first instinct is to report what has happened to them.  Otherwise, she apparently opines, it can’t have really happened.  I know from other people who were abused as children (and adults in some cases too) that this is simply horseshit, and it is in my case also.  So that would be difficult to deal with.

Furthermore, I’m probably being selfish here.  What good would it actually do for her to have this awareness?  It would guarantee her separation from the McFucks, something that is far from certain as things presently stand.  It is selfish.  I have plenty of soundboards about it as it is – here, Twitter, A, C (the latter not for much longer, but still – his replacement perhaps) – so why tell her?

I’m not sure that, rationally, admitting to the abuse to her is a wonderful idea – but at a visceral, instinctive level it kind of feels ‘right’…or at least not as inherently wrong as it has hitherto seemed.  Of course, if I did ‘fess up, my approach would have to be carefully considered, rather than just blurted out in her face when I get riled about something.

But is it really the right thing to do, especially when I’ve expended so much energy in hiding it for so long?  Is this actually just a silly whim, despite how it feels?  Am I simply lashing out because I’m angry with the McFauls?  Do I even exist or am I a figment of someone’s twisted imagination?  Questions, questions, questions.  The last one being: do you, dearest readers, have any thoughts and advice?

[In other news there is a thick letter here from Mr Director-Person, presumably in response to this.  However, I am far too scared of its contents to open it.  Pathetic.]

Waaaahhhh!!!!!  You go away for one incy-wincy teeny-weeny weekend and certain important dynamics of your life change, seemingly irrevocably, in the interim.  Isn’t life is a strange mistress indeed?  I do love a good old-fashioned familial crisis.  I mean, in real terms I suppose it isn’t ‘good‘, but at least something has actually happened in my pointless, meaningless existence for once.  At the very least I have something (other than C, a subject that I still seem to be wont to avoid) to write about for a change.

The familial schism that I have consistently sought to avoid in keeping my gob shut about my history with Paedo has, apparently, happened entirely independently of my involvement.  At the moment, this has nothing to do with me directly.  However, I fear that a showdown is nigh.

Basically, my mother had the row to end all rows with Maisie McFaul on Sunday afternoon (whilst A and I were in Dublin, having been at an Iron Maiden concert on the Friday night).  Maisie had been “spoiling for a fight” all weekend, I am told, and eventually my mother was so sick of her constant whinging and criticism of others that she finally responded.  She was subsequently accused of neglecting her parents (because Maisie was such a saint in caring for them don’t you know – NOT!), of being a horrible and failing sister, of being a liar, etc etc etc.  Sarah (my cousin), who was one of the people Maisie had spent all weekend slagging, and whom Mum had sought to defend, even started screaming at my mother.  Then my fucking cousin Kevin waded in and threatened to kill my mother if she didn’t put an end to the row (“If you don’t put an end to this now, I’ll put an end to you”).  Perhaps unsurprisingly, my mother packed her stuff and promptly left Hotel California, and is now vowing to never return.  This is extremely excellent.

What is not so excellent is the effect this is having on my mother.  She is not a perfect human being, as this blog will have attested to at many times.  Furthermore, I am not enough of a dumb eejit to think that one side of the story is the whole story.  Nevertheless, my mother acknowledges her part in the row, but is refusing to back down, as she has always done on when other unpleasantries with Maisie have been exchanged, regardless of who was in the wrong.  Moreover, in my observed view, Maisie (whether consciously or otherwise) is an arch manipulator, on whose word her various brood of less-than-intelligent sycophants will endlessly hang.  In short: I believe my mother’s version of events.

I am extremely angry.  No one speaks to my mother like that.  Especially not some pointless and capricious pile of 50-stone Jabba-look-a-like manipulative, repugnant flab.  Especially not some brain-dead, spidey, bald fuckstain who is too much of a coward to ever stand up to or move away from his all-controlling mother and who thinks threatening other members of his family is act of maternally-directed heroism.  These assholes being the cuntfucks that they are all the while living in the midst of a pathetic paedophile who thinks it’s acceptable to find fun through fucking children.

As I say, my involvement is not direct, but there is nevertheless a difficulty facing me in relation to them in the immediate future.  I have to see them all on Friday night.  My eldest Maisie-spawned cousin and his wife, who were not involved in the argument at all, are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, and I have already confirmed with their daughter, StudentMcF, that A and I would go.  My mother had initially said upon leaving Hotel California that she wouldn’t go in light of recent developments, but Sarah (who, to be fair, apologised for her part in the screaming match) pointed out, reasonably enough, that that would hardly be fair to the personnel whose party it is.

To that end, Mum has proposed that she take A and myself, and we just return directly to her house that night, as soon as escape is politely viable, rather than spend the night with any of the assorted McFs, as was initially posited.  This is fine by me – except that I will still have to see Maisie, Paedo and Kevin.

Although I couldn’t care less if the family never spoke to me again (for the most part, anyway), I am enraged that they have slandered and upset my mother.  She spent most of her phone call to me about this in uncontrollable tears, and didn’t even react particularly when I said that I hoped Maisie died, something that is deeply out of character for her.  It is a horrible thing to hear your own mother’s hopeless sobs of despair.  It’s a horrible thing to know that you’re her only trusted outlet and beam of support, that everyone else in the world to whom she is close has a vested interest in unfairly disparaging her.  It’s a horrible thing to know that these pointless cunts that you’ve gone to great fucking lengths to fucking protect are so unworthy of even pissing on if they’re on fire that they would knowingly and seemingly deliberately hurt someone that loves them as much as my mother does.

So, I am angry in the extreme.

And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

It is very much part of Maisie’s nature to be vindictive and bitchy when things aren’t going her way.  I fully expect her to sit there on Friday night and make snide little nudge-nudge-wink-wink comments about the heinous being that my mother apparently is to whatever unfortunate sod gets lumbered with sitting near to her and Paedo.  And if she does, and I notice it, I swear to God all hell will break loose.  I will see red, and I will tell her exactly what I think of her and her insensate, imbecilic offspring and her perverted, child-raping cunt of a husband.

It’s not a good idea to do this, I know.  It is, in fact, potentially the most stupid thing I could ever do in my sorry little life.  But the rage is so visceral, so deeply-held – I simply don’t know that I can help myself.  The sensible thing in many ways would be not to go to the party, but then that looks like a slight on the members of the family who were not party to this fight, and I have no beef with them particularly, other than my (entirely unreasonable) academic snobbery to their intellectual barrenness.  Yet simultaneously I don’t want to ruin (like that’s a strong enough word for it) their party by potentially losing it and screaming across the venue that my childhood was spent being raped by Maisie’s husband and by pointing out that they’re all just fucking sheep in her game of desperate oppression and megalomaniacal control-freakery.

The thing is, even if I didn’t go to the party, if I have at some future juncture the misfortune to lay eyes on these cuntflaps, I am quite sure the rage will just lie there dormant until then anyway.  If my mother’s intention to permanently avoid Hotel California holds true, I could potentially avoid them until they’re all dead.  But then this is a so-called family that we’re talking about, and nothing is ever as straightforward as one would like when it comes to that particular social institution.

Catch-22.  A no win situation, really.  I shall have to consider my next move carefully, for my anger with the stupid fat bitch and her cunt son could threaten to overwhelm me.  For once, though, the cloud has a silver lining.  I have something to think about that vaguely involves strategy and planning, as opposed to the perpetual cycle of sad, un-achieving navel-gazing about the termination of therapy or the dull existence of nothingness than I otherwise live.

In the beginning, the computer functioned normally and efficiently. Although there were some malicious attacks directed against it, its firewall initially worked well, deflecting some and making sure the worst of the others was hidden deep in the computer’s hard-drive.

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.