Ending Therapy: How To (Mostly But Not Entirely) Do It Properly – Paul: Week 25, Part II

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Recovery, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff  3 Responses »
Oct 282011
 

This post is continued from here. What follows will not make a great deal of sense unless you’ve read that first; however, it mostly likely won’t make a great deal of sense if you have. I disclaim any culpability for the boredom, confusion and irritation at the mammoth self-indulgence that you will find in the forthcoming. If you want to ruin 20 minutes of your day by continuing to tolerate this complete and utter nonsense, then you do so at YOUR OWN RISK. Now, rather than bother with this bullshit, why don’t you have yourself a nice pint instead?

—

After a contemplative silence, Paul moved back to discussing my writing projects; he wanted to know what they were about. I was forced to admit that everything I have been doing in this sphere has been about mentalism. Even my proposed novel is going to be about mental health issues.

I defended the piece for Rethink on the grounds that it is about my recovery from borderline personality disorder. As I stated to Paul, there is a false perception that BPD is incurable and that, furthermore, there are a billion myths out there about how people with the disorder can’t have loving relationships, or that they’re abusive, etc etc, ad infinitum (Zarathustra noted that I’d debunked some of this bullwank in my writing of this blog, which I hope is true). In that way, I think that article was a very important one to write, because these fallacies need to be corrected, and people afflicted with BPD deserve to have some genuine hope of recovery.

However, as I’m sure many of you will agree, living a life narrative entirely dictated by one’s mental illness is a potentially dangerous idea. I should, at least sometimes, write about normal stuff (insofar as anything is ‘normal’). I told him that I was considering resurrecting the Not as Smart as Pandora Braithwaite blog, which had once been my haven to bang on about telly, the arseholery of Facebook, gaming – normal things in which I take an interest, rather than being devoted to the exclusive domain of mental health or the lack thereof.

Indeed, at about the time of this session, when I was feeling so much better, my prolific posting here on Confessions went notably down. This was because I was living in that fabled place called real life and, y’know…doing stuff.

“Well,” he said, looking piercingly over his glasses at me, “I take what you’re saying, and mostly agree. But you don’t want to be too sane in your writing. That would see you suppressing that pained part of yourself yet again.”

Ha. Would it really. I don’t often use this blog to ‘let loose’ with feeling and emotion, and I am certainly not going to do that with any published pieces. That is just not me.

Rather than labour the point, though, I returned to my old favourite Freudian dictum about the transition from “hysteria” to “ordinary unhappiness.”

To my considerable consternation, Paul started quoting that arsehole R.D. Laing whose tolchock, were he still alive, I would take pleasure in punching. Paul claims that, as per Laing’s advice, he suspends his concept of normality when working with clients. At some point or another, he also alluded to Adam Philips and his book Going Sane. In short, he was blathering about how we are all mad in our own way. Laing-hatred notwithstanding, I did have to concede that point to him.

“The problem I face,” I sighed, “is that I have been out of work for so long now that all I know is mentalness and the pertinent issues surrounding it. It has entirely become my life, yet people in the real world don’t care. They don’t spend their days talking about psychosis or manic depression or borderline personality disorder. They talk about the weather, last night’s shit TV, politics and salary cuts. They don’t care.” I briefly (and anonymously) alluded to a post that Seaneen had written on this subject (a second excellent article she wrote on the issue for One in Four can be found here).

Seaneen is still highly involved with organisations like Rethink, but her own mental health is not the sole kaleidoscope through which she sees life these days; her life is about her boyfriend, her family and friends, and her mental health nursing course, which is an amazing thing, and something to which to aspire. Could it ever be that way for me, though? I have no idea, but one thing I do know is that I have a right gob on me, and whether normals care or not, I will end up talking about mentalism. I mean, I just won’t walk into a room and go, “hi, my name’s Pandora. Yours? … Nice name, I like that. Anyway, I’m mental. … No, I mean really mental. I had borderline personality disorder and still have manic depression and complex PTSD with psychotic and dissociative features. … Hey! Where are you going? … What did I say?!” No, obviously not like that. But if someone says, “where did you get that scar from?” or “so, what were you doing before I met you?” I am going to tell them the truth (see my posts on speaking up here and here).

Having babbled all that out, I concluded my monologue to Paul by saying that although I’m not sure about the accuracy of the perennial ‘one in four’ statistic, that at least it serves as a sort of motif to highlight the prevalence of mental health difficulties in society. “So why not speak up?” I pondered. “Fuck stigma. Fighting it is my cause célèbre.”

He said, “I work five days a week, and I’m off for two – so I get a break from the intensity that inevitably comes with my job. You, however, never get a break from your mind.”

I nodded pointlessly.

He went on, “so wouldn’t it be nice if you could not be mental for, say, two days a week?”

I nodded pointlessly again.

“So…could you take a break from your cause célèbre for a couple of days a week?”

Of course I can. I already do. I don’t spend every single sodding day trying to play some sort of omnipotent mental health warrior advocate. However, that does not mean that I can somehow turn off my mind during those non-advocacy periods, as his penultimate comment had insinuated. If it were that simple, I would have no mental health problems at all, would I?!

Nevertheless, he asked me in what activities I could engage that did not pertain to madness. I monotoned out the usual list you might expect to see on the ‘what are your interests’ section of a social network or dating profile. For some reason, that led to a short discussion around my frequent disconnections from the world at large – how I push this laptop away, religiously ignore my phone, and hide alone in my living room, pretending that no one else exists.

I shrugged. “That’s not healthy, is it?”

“There’s a fine line there,” Paul replied, cocking his head in muse. “Overall I think that whether or not it’s healthy, it’s more normal than not – but I suppose it depends on the extent of it.”

“You see, I struggle with this a lot,” I complained. “If you will permit my use of psychiatric parlance for once, where does pathology end and idiosyncrasy begin? Or, indeed, vice versa.”

As you know, most darling readers, I’ve been grateful for my diagnoses, and have found having a name for the various aspects of my insanity to be helpful in several ways. However, I still think this issue is a very valid criticism of the practice and more general discipline of psychiatry. I suppose the line is where the ‘idiosyncrasy’ becomes distressing to the ‘idiosyncrasist’ (indeed, for this reason, there is an ongoing debate about the validity of schizoid personality disorder as a discrete condition), but even that line can be blurred.

“My wife has a great-uncle that the family frequently describe as ‘eccentric’,” Paul told me. “When they mentioned it in front of me, I responded by saying that that simply meant that he was mad, but with money.”

I laughed. A fair enough assessment – most people I’ve heard described as ‘eccentric’ would broadly fit within that bracket.

Anyway, he had reminded me of a conversation I’d once had with Mike, my erstwhile teacher. For some reason Mike and I had been talking about how well (or indeed badly) we fitted in with social norms, and I characterised myself as, indeed, “eccentric.”

“No, Pandora,” he’d responded. “Not ‘eccentric’. You’re individual.”

Paul liked this little anecdote. Apparently Mike’s “eloquent” distinction had touched upon Paul’s perceived truth that psychiatry involves a certain amount of repression of one’s individuality. He banged on that sanity and insanity are concepts created by times and places.

He’s right – to a point. Psychiatry is an imperfect science, if indeed it can be said to be a science at all, and if we consider the inclusion of homosexuality as a mental illness as recently as the DSM-III, I can agree that some supposed diagnoses are societally constructed. Despite my general support for this field, I do accept those criticisms of it, and have never denied them. But, as I said, there’s a point, surely, when that can no longer be true. I’m told, reliably so, that hallucinating gnomes and being so severely depressed that all you can think about is killing yourself on a chronic basis are not normal states in which to exist…and I would believe that that, at least, transcends times and places.

Not that I had the balls to say any of that to Paul. I sat there, nodding pathetically compliantly. What the fuck, Pandora? Am I afraid of him unwitting me or something? Of looking less intelligent than him (which, frankly, I probably am)? Why can I debate my points intelligently and coherently online or even in the fucking pub, but not do it with Paul? What a stupid bitch.

As I allowed his anti-psychiatry rhetoric to progress, I found myself becoming vaguely irritated with him again. Not because of his opposition to that field per se, but because of how he related it back to me. One thing that had apparently been “big” in his engagement with me had been “peeling back the layers” that were “enforced upon” me: diagnoses, medical examinations, medication.

“It’s like it’s been forgotten,” he intoned with an infuriating earnestness, “that somewhere in there is an abused little girl.” [Emphasis mine. I am SO unutterably fucking sick of that fucking fucking fucking term. Jesus hot jumping Christ sliding down a shit-stick. Just. Fucking. Stop. Fucking. Calling. Her. Fucking. That. GAH!]

(Hypocritical) Ranting about terminology aside, this assessment of my situation was not fair. NewVCB has been really good about the abuse bullshit; she usually asks me at some point during each appointment how things are in my head in relation to that subject. She doesn’t just wank endlessly on about my current symptoms, blindly throwing medication at me as a result. OK, so she doesn’t go into intimate, cringe-worthy detail about the whole sordid mess when I’m with her – but guess what, Paul? She isn’t fucking meant to. That’s your job. You’re the therapist, she’s the the psychiatrist. Simple.

More irritably than I’d intended, I retorted that I had not been a “nice little girl,” as he appeared to opine. As I said, “I was precocious, and because of that I was haughty and arrogant at times. In that way my current predilections toward so-called intellectualising are entirely in keeping with my child self.” My point in saying so had been to infer to him that this constant bollocking on about me v my repressed self was not as clear-cut as he might like to think.

He hammered on for a bit with a story he’d told me before. Little boy falls in the playground, maintains a stiff upper lip all day long, eventually sees his mother and then bursts into tears. Containment, blah de blah, yadda yadda.

“It’s a harsh judgement to describe yourself as precocious. You had to be precocious to survive,” he declared.

Oh really? I mean, seriously?

  1. This particular elucidation implicitly suggests that being precocious is an inherently bad thing. Why the fuck should that be the case? Surely being an intelligent child is something to be welcomed, something that both that child and those around it should find gratifying?
  2. I can’t prove anything, but I’d be stunned if precociousness and abuse are directly correlated. I’m all but certain that not every smart child has been/is being abused, and I’m equally sure that not every abused child is demonstrably highly intelligent.
  3. On a related note, why does everything have to come back to abuse and spurious psychodynamic interpretation? Can’t some things just fucking be?

Palpably uncomfortable with the direction in which this conversation was headed, I tried to shift the subject – but I did it subtly, so that it was still ostensibly related to what he’d said. I said that, in a non-literal sense, from what I could remember I had been a Jekyll and Hyde type of kid. The weird, insular one that despite her then-popularity couldn’t relate to her peers – and then the ordinary, outgoing person that most of the world saw.

“I don’t recall having any distressing examples of mental illness until at least my late childhood,” I told him, though now that I think about it, that can’t be true. I tried to strangle myself when I was nine, and I had that constant, horrid somatic feature of itchy feet with such sickening frequency – so evidently some shit was definitely hitting some fans there. But then, I have so many anamnestic gaps when it comes to my brathood that I can’t easily tell you what the conditions generally were.

“In retrospect,” I continued, “obviously I was a bit barmy – I mean, I lived nightly with pseudo-hallucinations and a delusion that a terrorist was right outside my door, every single night. But I don’t recall being chronically unhappy.”

Paul jumped on the terrorist comment with a force that could turn this metaphor literal. He said, “‘terrorised’ is a pretty good word to describe what you must have felt about the abuse, isn’t it?”

It depends whether you subscribe to the etymological or legal definition of the word ‘terrorism’, I suppose. Me, I tend to view terrorism as a macro phenomenon, ostensibly carried out for political or religious reasons (but really carried out simply because you’re a fucking cunt). It’s all very well for Paul to draw parallels between Paedo and my horrified dread each night that I was about to be murdered, but perhaps he forgets my age and my origin. I grew up in Northern Ireland in the ’80s and early ’90s. Terrorism was a very real issue here and then. Could there not be some connection to that, rather than everything always being about being a paedophile’s plaything?

“I’m reminded of a client I used to work with,” he said, as I sat there wondering silently when he might realise that not everything should be narrowed down to Freudian analysis. “When he first properly started communicating with me, he said, ‘I’ve put a bomb under your car’.”

I regarded Paul with an expression of complete revulsion. What a vile thing to say – especially to someone who’s meant to be helping you!

“It was his way of saying, ‘how would you feel if your life were threatened?’” Paul explained. “He had to find some way of expressing how his deepest fears affected him, and that was it.”

Maybe so; I can understand the context of the remark, I suppose, but it feels re-abusive to me – and much as I sympathise and empathise with any abuse victim, re-enacting what happened to you by abusing another is not on in my book (there’s a lot I could say on that, but this post ((and its predecessor)) is ((are)) already stupidly long and way too introspective vis a vis what it’s ((they’re)) meant to actually be discussing).

“In the same way, your most buried terror was expressed – perfectly appropriately – as fear of a terrorist,” Paul was continuing. “Do you remember when we first commenced this therapy that I told you that all clients are geniuses? Well, there’s a perfect example of it. That was a genius thing to do.”

Whilst there can be no doubt that the human mind is capable of great things, I’ve always been slightly uncomfortable with the assertion that it simply doing its unconscious job is something worthy of being considered ‘genius’. Surely genius involves intellect, which involves thinking, which surely involves conscious consideration? Still, I’m not a psychologist. A widely-read layperson, maybe, but by no means an expert.

“I firmly believe,” Paul continued, “that all delusional stuff is based in reason.”

I can see what he’s saying, to be fair, and I acknowledged that. The connection he was making in my case is at least arguable. However, what about the cases where a person believes that he or she is Jesus Christ or something? That’s not me rejecting Paul’s claims outright, by the way. It’s a genuine query; in all seriousness, where does that come from, and in what way would it be functional?

In any case, I went on to tell him that I’d gone through very little psychotic experiences in the couple of months that had led up to this session – a few whispers from fringe facets of the odious ‘They‘, but nothing more than that. Rather than simply be glad of it, though, he irked me a little by stating that he was sure that NewVCB would “chalk that up to the wonders of Seroquel.”

Again, this was unfair. As she had openly stated to me once, she only cares about ‘what works’ – and for me, that seems to have been a combination of therapy and psychopharmacology. Moreover, I would chalk my lack of psychosis up to Seroquel myself in many ways – but I’m willing to acknowledge that therapy has also played its part. What’s so terrible about a dual approach?!

He ranted a bit about how Seroquel in particular was being “handed out like sweeties” these days (first I’ve heard of it), but when I actually went to defend both it and psychiatric diagnoses – as useful adjuncts and guidance in the treatment of mentalness respectively – he curiously backed down.

And this is why he’s not a dick. We may disagree, and I may rant here about issues over which there could have been minor conflicts, but he’s not a dick. Ultimately, despite some of his more sarky reactions to my defence of psychiatry in the past, he is willing to respect me as an individual, with individual views. And while, in another time and place, the disagreements we have may have merited longer discussion, that was not possible here, and it was of the upmost importance to him – and me – that we parted on a convivial note.

And suddenly, that note of departure was finally realised. Paul said, his voice deep with regret,”we’ve come to the end.”

As I stood, he told me that it had “really been a pleasure” working with me, and that he would “truly miss” our sessions. I advised him that the feeling was entirely mutual, and went on to tell him that I intended to re-refer myself to the organisation come September or October (as I now have done). I asked if that was too soon, but he said that it wasn’t – as long as I was comfortable with that timeframe, then he was too.

“I look forward to working with you again,” he assured me, as he opened and held the door for me for the final time.

The last bits of these things are always the most awkward. How do you say ‘goodbye’ in a professional but affectionate manner? Rarely have I felt so horribly exposed as the socially awkward knob that I am. After handing him his pound of flesh, I suddenly grabbed his hand, shook it and said that it had “been a pleasure” working with him. Almost before he could respond, I smiled idiotically at him and told him to take care.

“You too,” he said unsurely, but with palpable warmth.

We said our goodbyes, and I left hurriedly. My car was close, and as I had done when things ended with C, I sat in the driver’s seat for quite a while ruminating on the ramifications of the (thankfully temporary) cessation of the relationship. Rather than bawl my eyes out though, I allowed myself to shed one single tear of mourning, then wiped my eyes, shot myself a reassuring grin in the rear-view mirror, and drove away.

Ending Therapy: How To (Mostly) Do It Properly – Paul: Week 25, Part I

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Recovery, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff  1 Response »
Oct 282011
 

“So this is it,” he declared, his tone swathed in unwitting drama.

“Yes,” I pointlessly confirmed.

Paul and I looked at each other – what does one say when one comes to the end of a relationship? If the relationship is romantic, although the words are difficult, they’re clear (mostly). If you’re ending a friendship, you generally let it peter out without any particular show-down. But when you’re ending a relationship whose very point is its ending – so as you can live a better life without it – what do you say?

I never did write in detail about my final session with C in August 2010. In short, I sat there defiantly, refusing to tell him my future plans. He whinged a bit about not knowing what would happen to me (something that NewVCB, much to my chagrin, revealed to him – bloody bitch!), and I took satisfaction in his ignorance. When it was over, instead of the normal, “we’ll have to leave it there for today,” he said, “we’ll have to leave it all there.” I stood up, with dignity I think, reluctantly shook his outstretched hand, bade him goodbye, and walked down the corridor with my head held high.

When I got into my car, however, I sat and cried for 20 minutes before finally driving away, but – unless he’s been reading this bilge, which (given the Mind Award nomination and a piece I had in a national publication that I know he reads a few months ago) is actually not impossible – he doesn’t know that.

Anyway, the End of Times with Paul was much more amiable and respectful (as if you couldn’t have guessed that!), excepting a few niggles that I’ll play up later for the purposes of rant material (I’ve noted from my archives that my bitching about C was far more entertaining than my appreciation of Paul, so…). I didn’t piss about trying to keep my future plans secret; Paul made it very clear that he had found working with me to be a challenging but fascinating (!) and enriching (!!) experience; I concluded that ultimately, psychotherapy with him had been greatly beneficial to me. 25 weeks with him compared to 63 with C, the latter having left me in a worst psychological position than when I’d first met him (though the extent to which C is to blame for that is, of course, debatable).

I hope you don’t think I’m employing some sort of apotheosis in the regard I hold for Paul. As the last session (and, to an extent, this one) demonstrate(d), he is not perfect for me; but our differences and any potential conflict points are minor enough that they can be mostly overlooked, and although I still view the concept of therapeutic transference as a beneficial phenomenon in terms of long-term therapy, in terms of a short-term interaction, I think that I shared a healthier relationship with Paul than I did with C. Time has numbed the agony of the bitter wounds I felt so profoundly regarding the latter, to the extent where I feel a bit bad saying that, but overall I can only speak my truth, and that’s it.

Anyhow, in an entirely predictable twist of fate, Paul finally asked me how I felt about the end of the process. “And how well have we done?” he added.

“Fairly well,” I concluded. “I mean, I don’t think 25 weeks is an adequate timeframe for any psychological therapy, but that said, within the weeks that we’ve had, I think a lot of progress has been made – at the very least, we’ve made a good start.”

I also observed that the fact that I was able to return to Nexus in future was a reassurance and, further, that perhaps a break was actually a good thing, given how intense the process had at times been.

He reported (and I concurred) that in his view we had had a “really healthy” relationship, and he stated how much he’d enjoyed working with me. The experience was “very powerful”, apparently. An intriguing comment, I felt; what is even remotely ‘powerful’ about talking to an intellectual snob that loathes the child she used to be and is ambivalent towards the person that abused that child? I personally think it’s fucked up, but who am I to question the judgement of others?

Paul broke into this internal train of rumination. “It’s always great when you’re able to strip away layers, and meet the real person,” he was saying. “And when you get there, you see that there’s a really nice person sitting there.”

I winced at this, and it must have been visible to him, because he laughed at the implied self-invective inherent in my expression.

“You know I have an aversion to compliments,” I hissed, almost spitting the final word out of my mouth.

He laughed again and said, “yes, that’s why I said it!”

Cheeky sod. I am so not ‘really nice’. I mean, even if I were likable – and I don’t necessarily believe that I am – ‘nice’ is such a pathetic word. Paul meant well in his employment of it, I know, but seriously. Before I met A, I went on a few dates that would never have led anywhere. Through same, I met one bloke in particular who seemed genuinely interested in me: the reason that it would never have worked, though, was because he was just so nice. There was no passion, no fire. Just…niceness. I wouldn’t even describe my best mates as ‘nice’. My best friends are smart, funny, witty, irreverent, yadda yadda. They’re not nice. ‘Nice’ is not a ‘nice’ word (as a general rule. There are exceptions – how else would you prove the rule?).

Anyway, that was a pointlessly stupid tangent. I eventually responded to Paul by saying that I had been at a stage in my life for a wee bit where I could accept compliments by saying “thank you,” as opposed to my previous automatic responses of, “oh, you can’t be serious – have you not seen how ugly/fat/boring/stupid/inept at cutting hedges/unable to operate a unicycle using only my tongue/whatever I am?!” Nevertheless, despite my newly found skills in using the words ‘thank you’, being complimented still leaves me squirming.

I exemplified by talking about a mate of ours, who has made no particular secret of the fact that he has something of a crush on me (something I don’t get in itself, mais oui). After imbibing a few too many on-offer pints in his company one evening, I made a thinly veiled reference to the sexual abuse to him. He started wanking on and on and on about how ‘brave’ and ‘courageous’ and ‘intelligent’ and ‘charismatic’ etc I supposedly am. Despite the lowering of inhibitions contingent upon the consumption of alcohol, I still felt horrified by all his gushing. Yeah, there was a part of me that was intimidated by the fact that he has an attraction to me – but it was more than that. It was the praise itself that perturbed me; had it come from someone without an ostensible ‘thing’ for me, I’d have felt the same.

Paul – for the second time, I think – alluded to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo novels. Apparently, the protagonist interprets all support as having an ulterior motive or as being a trick. This led to her being viewed by others as paranoid, but Paul contended that she was responding contextually appropriately in light of her previous relationships, which had been used to manipulate and deceive her.

I empathised entirely with this position; as I told him, one of the rules I’ve lived by for pretty much as long as I can remember is that “everyone is a {insert expletive noun of your choice here} until they prove otherwise.”

“Is that as bad as it was?” he asked.

“No,” I replied – and I am surprised by how genuinely I felt (and, I think, feel) that. “And things in general aren’t as bad as they were.” I told him about the non-Confessions writing projects I’d taken on. An article for Rethink’s Your Voice magazine, for example (not sure when that’s being published, but as and when I know, I’ll advise any readers that care). Latterly some articles for Mind’s blog. Being able to do these things was testament to my improved psychological condition.

“But I think the best measurement of my recovery is exemplified by A’s experience of things,” I mused. “I can’t externally assess my condition, whereas he can. We went from my intention to poison myself with helium to going out geocaching, writing articles and even considering voluntary work.”

As I told Paul, A had also considered my ability to drive in Fuerteventura as an almost perfect metaphor of how far I had come.

[Incidentally, in an entirely predictable reversal of fortune, it's a measure of relapse that I haven't been geocaching for months, have only done a little writing and have not applied for the proposed voluntary position. But at the time of this session - June - I was feeling positive and was looking forward.]

There was a silence for a minute or two, then Paul asked what I was doing for me. Apparently that which I had detailed previously, with the exception of geocaching, was about stuff I was doing for others.

“There’s a certain amount of self-interest in the writing,” I admitted. “It all builds into a portfolio, whether it’s under my real name or my pseudonym, and as I’ve been told I have some talent [!], that might be useful in terms of securing some ‘proper’, paid writing jobs. I’m not delusional about it – I’m never going to make a fortune out of the pursuit, nor do I think it’s a viable full-time job – but you never know; it could be a potential supplementary income.”

“Beyond that? Any other things you’re doing for you?” he queried. Humph. I was ever so slightly miffed – I had that thought the whole writing thing was really rather good!

When I didn’t immediately answer he spoke for me, saying, “well, at least you’re not self-harming. That’s a good thing not to be doing for yourself.”

I shrugged non-committally. I wasn’t self-harming at the time, but even now I just can’t view it with the same horror that he seems to.

He decided to pursue a different vein. “Have we got the balance right? You know, discussing your abusive experiences but also including the whole mental health and psychosis stuff.”

I responded, truthfully, in the affirmative. “I see why we need to focus on the former at times, obviously,” I opined, “but the two aren’t mutually exclusive, are they? My mental health issues have more origins than just those of the abuse, and I think it’s helpful to examine those as well. In terms specifically of psychotic presentations, well – those can’t go unaddressed, can they? So yeah, the balance is good.”

Paul nodded, but went on to say that “when we’re touching on the abuse and feelings related to that, there’s lots of you ‘keeping a lid’ on everything. You have a lot of uncapped pain there, that we’ve only really started to get close to.”

He mentioned the concept of ego-splitting again (ie. the more functional me versus the pained, dissociated mess that Aurora is and that I, myself, often am too), and stated that when dealing with the dissociated part, we had had to tread very carefully during our work together. He seemed to be wondering if he’d pushed too hard at times, or if he hadn’t pushed enough at others. Personally, I think he judged each incidence of this really very well.

He went on to say that he’d experienced the full force of repressed rage projected onto him by other clients – never me – and that it was “pretty horrendous” (though ultimately beneficial). He wondered aloud why I’d never done that; was it to protect myself – or was it to protect others?

The latter is, by and large, the reality. Now, this is an odd one. I have a bolshy, extremely stubborn streak in me when I’m being treated unreasonably, viz the Health Trust saga – but by and large, anger and I are not intimate acquaintances. It lies dormant within me, I know, but it’s only rarely expressed in its rawest form. I will almost never get properly angry without an obvious, here-and-now reason, such as how the Trust failed me, or being falsely charged for something, whatever. Of course, Paul would argue that I have every right to be angry in terms of that to which Paedo subjected me. Rationally, of course, this is a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but I can’t seem to agree. That was 20 fucking years ago, you know? I am calm and collected and calculated. I am zen. *practices mindfulness*

…..

Nah, you guessed it – mindfulness is one thing that could actually wake that hibernating anger, so it can get away to fuck. Anyway, yeah; I rarely feel that visceral sort of fury, and even when I do, I actively attempt to suppress it for, in the main, the sake of those around me. I pointed out to Paul that the (very few) people with whom I deal in everyday life have nothing to do with Paedo’s sexual fascination with little people – so why on Earth would I want to subject them to anything even vaguely relating to it? Besides. I simply don’t feel anything other than a sneering disdain for the man. Bizarre and substantially fucked up? Probably. But true, despite it all. In my conscious mind at least, it just isn’t there.

What I did admit to, though, was my penchant for being very easily irritated. For instance, I drop a pen. I yell expletives at the poor inanimate thing, then kick it across the room in a fit of pathetically infantile pique (oh and then I feel guilty for being so irrationally nasty, catalysing me into – yeah, wait for this one, folks – apologising to the pen. Sane? No. I shouldn’t imagine so).

“Perhaps,” I psycho-babbly posited, “what should come out as a kind of righteous anger towards my uncle instead reveals itself as acute but in-the-moment strong annoyance at very silly little things. I mean, I’d never thought of that potential connection before, but I can see that in context it might be some sort of projection of more profound issues.”

I paused, then decreed that my previous assertions had been “nothing more than pseudo-psychological straw-clutching” because “everyone gets outrageously pissed off when they drop a pen, don’t they?” Well, readers – don’t they? You know it’s true. You know!

—

This post has (unsurprisingly) got out of hand. It shall ergo contineth on the morrow (or rather, later on, given that this is after midnight, but let’s not quibble over niceties). Nighty night, loveliest people! x

—

Continued here.

Semantics, Psychosis and Severance – Paul: Week 24

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse  7 Responses »
Oct 202011
 

As any of you who have followed my accounts of my sessions with Paul will know, I have a lot of time for the man. I both like and respect him. However, there are a few criticisms that could be justifiably levied in his direction:

  • He almost always reads something into everything. I appreciate Dr Freud’s input into therapeutic theory and practice, but some stuff – just some – is just that: stuff.
  • He is a vehement opponent of the medical model of mental illness (presumably the term ‘mental illness’ would in itself offend him. I’d actually prepared a post ages ago, in which I confoundedly asked why this description is so offensive to some people – I just don’t get it. But I’ve gone and lost my bloody notebook, so that’ll have to wait. Well done, Pan!).
  • He keeps blaming people around me for not ‘noticing’ my abuse. Yeah, because it’s fucking standard for each family in the entire universe to be intimately acquainted with the warning signs, isn’t it?
  • His constant use of the phrase, that little girl. So saying that I have a mental illness offends Paul? Well, saying that I have a ‘little girl’ inside me offends me.

I think the palpable irritation of the foregoing probably sets the tone of this session quite well. Indeed, it makes me think that perhaps I was being slightly disingenuous in recently so vocally applauding Paul in comparison to C (though, that said, I stand by my assertion that the former has been more help to me than the latter – I spent many sessions in C’s company wanting to punch him, and only a few such occasions arose with Paul). At any rate, from the offset in this appointment, he irritated the hell out of me. Also, although towards the end there was finally some useful work being done, I felt a bit out of it for most of the session (I had been up to 3am the previous night trying to stop a good friend of mine from killing herself, and had not slept for ages after retiring either) and the whole thing felt a bit disjointed. So, I’m going to go through it in bullet points. Of course, my version of bullet points is everyone else’s version of a protracted essay with a few random, indented dots thrown in for no clear reason, but what else would you have come to expect? Beware of triggers for self-harm and child sex abuse, though the latter is not especially graphic.

  • We discussed our relationship briefly at the start of the session. He proffered the view that one thing that had not really occurred during our time together was any trace of him trying to “rescue me”. Apparently, he’d seen some “scary stuff”, mainly in relation to my erstwhile tendencies towards self-harm (‘normal’ cutting did not, I think, faze him especially. However, my particular modus operandi was often to carve words into my flesh or, latterly, to stab myself with a scalpel. I’m actually shrugging as I type this – such actions really are no big deal to me. They must be to him, though). I opined that his reactions were “refreshing”: C, for example, would often have seemed perplexed by and disdainful of my self-injurious behaviour; A would groan every day it happened; Mum was abjectly horrified. Paul’s dislike of the activity was certainly evident, to be fair, but he never tried to actively stop me from engaging in it, knowing that destructive as it was, it was an important coping mechanism for me at the time. Anyhow, as I noted to him on this occasion, I hadn’t self-harmed for ages. Medication was partly to blame – not that I dared to tell him that – but, to his credit, so I think was therapy.
  • You may recall that around the time of our holiday, A and I had been invited to ScumFan McFaul’s 21st birthday bash. I’d had this out with Paul before – A and I were making excuses to avoid the event, whereas Paul’s stroke-of-genius solution was to say, “well, I don’t want to go because [Paedo] used to rape me all the time.” He reiterated this point in this meeting, which annoyed me intensely. The McFauls, for the most part, and my mother, definitely, do not deserve to have their lives ruined by this information. Does no one give a shit about altruistic utilitarianism any more?!
  • I added, in relation to same, that even if I did confess, that no one would believe me anyway (which is probably true). They’d probably think I was making it all up for attention or something, but the most flattering scenario would be if they held the view that my beliefs and recollections pertaining to Paedo were psychotically inspired. “In other words,” as I said to Paul, “they’d think the mental illness causes the idea of abuse rather than the abuse causing [in part, I'd stress, not in its entirety - not that Paul would agree with that] the mental illness.”
  • He said that in his view I didn’t have mental health problems. Apparently, insanity is where nothing makes sense. He claims that everything I experience and do makes complete sense when considered in context. That’s all very well – I do concur to a large degree – but Paul is a trained psychotherapist, and I am a mentalist that has become very well informed about all the issues surrounding my conditions. The McFauls are laypersons; they aren’t going to know any of the psychosocial connections at play here. If someone tried to explain it to most of them (Suzanne and StudentMcF possibly excepted), it would rush right over their heads and vanish like Willow the Wisp. In any case, “coping mechanisms” versus “mental health problems” is a purely semantic debate, to my mind. You could call it Bouncy Fluffy Bunniness and the nett effects would be identical, so why do the fucking words matter so much to him?
  • Paul wondered why I’d never demonstrated any overt psychosis in session with him (query: why is it OK to use the word ‘psychosis’, but both ‘mental health problems’ and ‘mental illness’ are teh sux0rz?). He was distinctly unimpressed when I made a reference to Seroquel, which further irritated me. Regardless of what he thinks, I think Seroquel has helped me immensely – and surely, when it comes to one’s health concerns, one’s own observations are of pivotal importance? Anyway, he instead ventured that perhaps that particular brand of mentalism hadn’t been “needed” in the room with him. Was it that I was safe there, he mused? I was willing to entertain that notion, but added that although I felt safe with him, that I didn’t necessarily feel ‘safe’ psychologically. A lot of the work had been challenging and extremely intense. He agreed, then said that, based on my previous experiences, that perhaps I unconsciously feared that I would be judged.
  • This led to a conversation around my mother and her refusal to believe my claims about Paedo, when I tried to bring them up at the ages of 14 and 17 (or thereabouts). I defended her, however, on the grounds that she was engaging in “a quintessential pattern of psychological avoidance.” Paul sighed, and asked me for the non-intellectualised version, and I (rather reluctantly, because I felt my first answer had been fine) declared that I was perhaps insulted. My mother had, on the second occasion I think, accused me of making up my allegations of rape because I didn’t want to go to Hotel California. (Of course I didn’t want to go to Hotel California – rape was why!). I was insulted because I find women who make up stories of rape and/or domestic violence to be abhorrent individuals; not only do they dilute the genuine pain and trustworthiness of actual victims, they also make (generally) men look worse than the poor sods really are. I don’t want to be seen by anyone, least of all my fucking mother, as such a person.
  • Apparently Paul detected anger in my voice, which surprised me as I had deliberately feigned nonchalance. The problem is that if I express – or even if I just am – anger/angry with my mother, then she will die and it will be my fault. I said so to him, then launched an invective against myself for thinking and feeling something so patently fantastical. He leapt to my defence, saying that this was another thing that made sense in context – apparently, because I became the vehicle for so many heinous things, I (to my subconscious self) became a walking nuclear reactor, capable of bringing great evil and destruction to all. A reasonably fair assessment, to give him his dues.
  • At one point, for some reason (I think I must have been defending my mother again), there arose a comparison between my father, V, and Paedo. V was a complete twat, and everyone knows/knew it (apart from Aunt of Evil and her cunts). Paedo, ostensibly, is a nice enough old bloke (though in my view he’s a supremely boring imbecile, but when I have said similar to my mother she accuses me of intellectual snobbery, which I suppose is a reasonably fair charge). I exemplified the surface differences by stating that Paedo had never knocked seven bells out of Maisie. Then, to my eternal disgust, I muttered, “though I don’t know how he hasn’t, I’d have gone for her countless times.” Unsurprisingly this led to more self-castigation. Naturally, he defended me again, asking why every caustic comment I made had to be retracted. I responded by saying that I had just condoned domestic violence, which was repulsive. Apparently not, though – the issue of my taking the remark back was “much more complex” and I was using a reference to domestic violence as “an excuse” to “withdraw at the first sign of feeling”. “So,” I mocked gaudily, “I’m brimming over with resentment about Maisie’s failure to protect me and that comes out in throwaway bitchy comments?” His response? “Yes. Exactly.” Whatever. What-the-fuck-ever, Paul.
  • He monologued about how bad the abuse had been and how Maisie had “stood by [Paedo]“, not exercising a due duty of care towards me (and, he through in as an addendum, neither had she acted out of the unconditional love she is for some reason meant to have felt for me). As I witheringly picked my nails, bored of this endless psychobabble, he asked me to see it from that [fucking fucking fucking] little girl‘s point of view. Children don’t analyse and rationalise, apparently (wrong. I may not have a clear, linear recollection of my childhood, but I do remember doing just that), so my reaction to the family’s non-reaction was purely visceral. For instance, “I’m in pain, waaah waaah waaah, please help me, waaah waaah waaah…oh, look you’re not helping me, waaah waaah waaah waaah waaah.”
  • The conversation meandered towards an incident in Fuerteventura. A and I had been sitting at this lovely beach bar, looking out over the bay and enjoying a cool beer. All these little kids were running around mad, splashing in the water or jumping about in that pointless, irritating way that only children do. Aloud, I randomly mused, “I wish I’d had a happy childhood.” After a second or two, I was completely aghast at this out-of-the-blue, out-of-character remark. A seemed – I don’t know, moved? – by it, and when it was duly relayed to Paul, he in turn pronounced it “very poignant”. I was reminded of another occasion in Fuerteventura when yet more children were running around on the beach. Some of them were naked. I am not joking, readers, but this horrified me. Part of me was so disturbed that she could barely look away, thus cementing my belief in that old theory of the compelling car crash; part of me then forced myself to look away, because I felt like a paedophilic voyeur even noticing these youngsters. He said, “most people have a happy ignorance about child sexuality, and therefore have no issues with child nakedness. Unfortunately, you’re not one of them.”
  • He said that I have a lot to grieve vis a vis my childhood and that in conducting my mourning, I turned everything upon myself. I was told that when cutting is not enough, I “degrade” myself. In response, I rearranged my features to reflect bewilderment. Degrade? “Yes,” said Paul. “You sometimes write words when you cut, degrading words like ‘whore’, ‘slut’, ‘bitch’ and so on. None of which you are.” I shrugged, reluctantly but truthfully stating that “they’re not normal terms applied to a child.”
  • Paul raised the subject of the photo of the baby. He proclaimed my reaction to it to be a “wonderful moment”, it having been a single image that cut through all my defence mechanisms and psychological barriers and yadda, blah, and meh. “I saw real sadness in you that day,” he said, “and moreover, you didn’t push it away. It’s hard to pin all that hate and blame on a baby, isn’t it?”
  • This was true. However, as I pointed out, pictures of myself as a five or six year old don’t only not have this effect, they have the opposite. Young Me leaves me nauseous.
  • Blah blah blah, twaddle and waffle for a bit.
  • Eventually he came back to the subject of words like ‘slut’ or ‘bitch’ and remarked that those were Paedo’s words. Although as I said I don’t remember Paedo saying anything much at the time, I reflected that he wouldn’t have had to. Paul agreed, stating that his actions and attitudes spoke louder and intimated the same.
  • Ever defiant, I insisted that I still didn’t like the child, regardless of who actually proscribed her a whore. “Not liking her doesn’t mean I can’t absolve her of blame, though,” I added thoughtfully. And I don’t think it does either. He replied by stating that that was a good start, and that eventually, as he helped me build bridges between her (Aurora, let’s just say again) and me, I would “grow to” like her. (This is complete bollocks. I really, really don’t like children and, in fact, am generally rather scared of them. Of course, he thinks I don’t like children because I specifically hate Aurora and the legacy of madness she’s left me. I do not concur. I think that I don’t like children because I fucking don’t like children).
  • I disputed his assertion that I would like her, but not on the aforementioned grounds, valid as they are in my view. What I told him instead was that (as noted elsewhere) I don’t have a linear path of memories of my childhood. So, if I cannot access Aurora’s personality in the form of her thoughts, feelings, ideas, experiences and so on, how can I ever get to know her? Without those she is, in effect, dead (occasions of which she tries to invade my mind notwithstanding). I am not her, even though I occupy a body into which she grew.
  • For what I’m pretty sure was the first time, Paul deflected the point away (C did this infuriatingly frequently, but familiarity breeds contempt, as the old adage goes: Paul doing it once irritated the shit out of me). Rather than respond specifically, he said that in demonising Aurora, I was “shooting the messenger”.
  • For some reason, the conversation turned to a very brief article I had published some months ago in a national periodical, in which I whined about how terrible NHS provision for psychotherapy can be. I happen to know that C reads said publication. That’s not why I published it, but I did take some satisfaction in knowing that he may well have read it. “It was basically ‘fuck you’ in 150 words,” I told Paul. “Isn’t that really bitchy?” He laughed, and said that “bitchy is good sometimes.” I went on to add that occasionally I allow myself some slack for bitchiness in this area – I mean, the NHS therapy thing was a ridiculous debacle for which I was not responsible. Paul nodded his agreement, but added that all too often I “take the slack back.” True enough.
  • He alluded to the fact that, as well as not showing psychosis in session (mentioned 23 miles back up the page), I also rarely demonstrated anger. This is curious in a way, because I frequently ranted and raved at C, which was sort of a back-handed compliment to him; it denoted total ease in his company. In that way, not being angry with Paul (or, at least, not demonstrating anger) could be construed as vaguely insulting. Not that I said any of that to him, of course, but in any case he wondered if I felt that he would not “accept” my anger. I don’t know; I have never got beyond irritated with him (as I did in this session at points), so it’s hard to say. But why can’t (or won’t) I express that irritability, then? I have simply never felt comfortable doing so, yet I otherwise feel contented in his presence and, as this blog has amply testified, feel that he has helped me a great deal. Anyhow, I made some comment about “being very well aware that I’m my father’s daughter” – by this I meant that I felt that I had to be careful with anger, just in case I ever went into a dangerously blind rage (though, I should note, this was and is not my expressed reasoning for not exhibiting anger in front of Paul). I exemplified by telling him about the events that precipitated this post, though I’m still not going to say what they were here. Paul examined the incident in question against some of my father’s behaviour, and all but dismissed my concerns. I am most assuredly not like my father in any way, in his stated view.
  • As the end of the session approached, he noted that the one following it would be our last together. He lamented that fact because he felt that whilst we had achieved quite a bit in six-ish months, that realistically we had only begun to start scratching the surface of the tiresome iceberg that is my so-called trauma. “In the last few sessions especially,” he said, “we’ve covered a lot of very deep stuff. It’s frustrating to have to end it here.” I agreed that the timing was unfortunate, but brought up a point that NewVCB had made – that a break isn’t always a bad idea. Paul actually agreed with this, which is probably the first and last time that his opinion and that of a consultant psychiatrist will ever meet (and hark! The Earth wasn’t subsumed by the sun, and the galaxy wasn’t pulled into a super-massive black hole by this unlikely confluence, once-every-parsec of events!). Nevertheless, despite my insistence on the issue in the previous session, he asked me if I felt “abandoned.” I said ‘no’, citing the upfront-ness of Nexus on how short-term their therapy had to be. With the NHS, there had been – as far as I was concerned – an implicit understanding that my therapy would be relatively ongoing, at least until such times as I was socially functional. It was only after an attachment had been allowed to be formed that I was advised that that would not be the case. So, I told Paul, in comparison – and given the charity’s very reasonable issues of resource limitations – I felt quite OK about the ending. The fact that I could eventually go back gave me a further buoyancy about the whole thing. “I know we can’t start exactly as we’ll have left off,” I continued, “but at least we can dispense with the whole ‘getting to know each other’ formalities, and just get to work.” He agreed: he remarked that the time between the stints of therapy would be useful for me to consolidate the work we’d already done, and that I’d come back to the process with an increased understanding of myself, Aurora and ‘our’ situation.

As you know, I am in fact going back soon. I really don’t know to what extent I have reflected on everything we did before – not in a discretely contained gap-in-therapy sort of way, at any rate. But I know that I have a much greater awareness and understanding of myself through the therapy as a whole, and I’m still hopeful that I can build on that in the weeks and months yet to come.

Pedagogical Lust and False Abandonment – Paul: Week 23, Part II

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse  3 Responses »
Oct 082011
 

This post is continued from here. Please be aware of possible triggers for child sex abuse and related issues.

—

So, Paul had inadvertently reminded me of a recurring dream that I’ve had frequently throughout this year. Oddly, I haven’t had it much since I actually had this discussion with him, so maybe thrashing it out a bit helped aid it on its merry way. Whatever the case, I found its recurrence to be really strange – as I noted in my first post on this session, although I’ve always dreamt a lot, I have not been particularly partial to recurring dreams – and the subject matter of this one had perplexed me. I could understand if I’d started having frequent dreams about Paedo or something, but I didn’t. No, this dream was about Mike – my favourite teacher at school.

It basically ran thus. I had missed pretty much an entire year at school, yet rather than re-sit the year as would be sensible, I went back in May – having had absolutely no tuition in my chosen subjects whatsoever – to sit my exams, due to be at the end of that month and then into June. The sense of dread was so palpable I can still feel it; I knew there was no way I could pass, and I was dreadfully worried about turning up to Mike’s class, not having seen him for months. There was a sense of hideously foreboding terror as I walked to his room; not only was I going to fail, I was going to let him down by doing so and, furthermore, I already had let him down simply for not being there.

As far as I can recall, as far as the dream went, I never actually did get to Mike’s room nor sit the exams. It was about the build-up to doing so, and my worry about how I was going to try to turn things completely around within a matter of mere days. I remember my sense that I would need an utter fuckload of extra time from Mike, and how unreasonable it was of me to ask that of him, given my lack of responsibility in the situation. The dreams were so vivid that I could almost believe that I’d be transported back in time to an alternative world in which my 17/18 year-old self resided. Some thinking in theoretical physics posits that 11 dimensions (and therefore alternative universes) are at least a possibility, plus the recent results at Cern may, just may, eventually cause us to rethink the notion of time travel. If any of this is proven in my lifetime, I could well be convinced that these experiences, so compellingly real as they were, were not actually dreams.

Anyway, I am mad enough without trying to bring the weird world of science fiction into this blog. The point is the dreams felt as real as sitting here right now does, and I would wake up screaming to myself, “fuck, fuck, fuck, what am I going to do?” for 10, maybe more, minutes, before I realised that it had all been, yet again, a dream – and that I actually left school over nine years ago.

I shrugged at Paul. “What the hell is that about? A deep-seated fear of failure?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so – at least, not primarily. You were very fond of this teacher. Was that mutual?”

“Yes,” I answered. “It was mutual to the point that the others in the class regarded me as something of a teacher’s pet.”

“It’s about the relationship, then, isn’t it?” he opined. “I feel a sense that there’s something about ‘using’ this man to get him to do something he shouldn’t – in this case, provide hours and hours of catch-up time to you, at the expense of his own time and possibly that of others. I would even say, in that regard, that there’s maybe something in there about you taking on the role of an ‘abuser’.”

I shot him a puzzled glance. “Would it not be simpler just to think of it as some ‘father figure’ bullshit?”

“I’m sure that’s part of it,” he admitted, “but I’m struck by the issues of boundaries in your description of the dreams. Dare I say…[he cleared his throat embarrassingly]…was there some sort of sexual tension between you and [Mike]?”

I felt the colour drain from my face – partly because I felt appalled at the idea of any implied accusations of sexual misconduct against Mike, who was usually* always a paragon of virtue – but more because Paul had just hit the nail on the fucking head.

[* Mike was a bastion of black and sick humour, which was one of the reasons I liked him so much. I remember a couple of occasions on which, to my amused delight, he made statements aimed at me that could have been considered what I will politely term 'innuendo'. One such occasion was so blatant that the girl sitting next to me turned to me, laughing in school-girl, goggle-eyed amazement, and suggested he was flirting with me. I feigned nonchalance. How could he not flirt with me, I joked, smiling devilishly back at her. I look back on that memory with a lot of fondness, but I must make clear that he would never, ever, ever, not in a hundred-million years, have acted upon any frisson between us. He was a good man, an honourable man. He just happened to have a wicked sense of humour.]

“Quite probably,” I murmured quietly, avoiding his gaze.

“Perhaps there was a sexual drive there, designed to encourage him to brake boundaries,” Paul suggested.

“That’s horrible!” I spat. I then promptly followed my outburst up with a resigned, “it’s horrible because it’s true.”

“But put it in context,” he said, a willed determination present in his voice.

“Fuck it, Paul – context or no context, that’s as manipulative as it gets.”

“But you were manipulated, then accused [by Paedo, whether overtly or otherwise] of being the manipulator.”

“So? It doesn’t give me carte blanche to go around manipulating others later in my life.” I laughed, but it was a hollow, despairing sound. “I can see this fucking neon sign flashing above my head screaming “BORDERLINE“, warning everyone away from me.” (Though as I noted I can no longer be diagnosed with that most iniquitous of ailments. “Not that it matters, though,” I added, “because as soon as it’s on file, it stays on file.”).

He looked at me sympathetically, but gestured for me to continue.

“Well. I probably did use my relationship with Mike to obtain certain…liberties. But, by the same token, I worked my fucking arse off for him. I worked very, very hard – by parsecs more than the others in the class [this is true]. So in that sense at least, he was…I don’t know, rewarded?”

“Mmm,” Paul agreed. “You see, in the real world, you’re not manipulative. The relationship was co-operative: he rewarded you, you rewarded him. It’s only when you get into the realms of the unconscious – such as dreams – that you become a manipulator, an abuser. It directly sums up your life, doesn’t it? In the real world, you were a monstrously abused child, devoid of any responsibility for the disgusting acts you suffered. But you were taught to absorb [Paedo's] culpability, so you’ve always subconsciously believed you were to blame for pretty much anything that could have been construed as ‘bad’ in your life. Such thinking then comes out in things like these dreams, where your mind tries to convince itself that you are to blame, that you are nothing but a manipulative, slatternly, abusive bitch. And it just isn’t true.”

I sat in silence, strangely perturbed by his impassioned soliloquy of Pandora-defence.

In the absence of a response from me, Paul decided to continue. “I have this image of you as a young girl – an adolescent – standing beside this teacher thinking, ‘I could ruin this man’s life. I could seduce him and make him into a monster’.”

I had never thought of it like that. I didn’t not consider the seduction element, as discussed on the post I’d previously written on Mike, but to me it was just some silly teenage crush. Loads of school children have ‘things’ for their teachers, for fuck’s sake.

Uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking, I tried to deflect it slightly.

“When I was about 14, I used to follow him around like a puppy. I know it irritated him.”

“And what happened as you got older?”

I went to say that I didn’t follow him around like a puppy in my later years at school, but stopped short of doing so. It’s true – I didn’t do so. But when I thought about it, I didn’t do so because I didn’t have to. When I was in sixth form, I saw Mike for usually at least an hour a day anyhow. I also had another class two doors up from his room, so would frequently run into him after it was over and I had a free period, or was on lunch, or whatever. Quite often I’d end up in his room blathering to him about something or other for fairly extended periods of time – and at this stage, he distinctly wasn’t irritated by my presence. He would engage me in discourse about politics, existentialism, journalism, religion – all manner of social issues. Occasionally we’d even talk (shock! Horror!) about those weirdest of things that were our actual lives. Just as I enjoyed his company, he enjoyed mine.

“As you grew older, you grew more seductive,” Paul said in response to this, tilting his head in what I thought was a deliberately provocative manner. Not that he needed to be provocative in his mannerisms, because I felt that the statement itself was loaded enough.

“As I grew older,” I challenged through gritted teeth, “I became more intellectually engaging. Does it have to have to have anything to do with sex?! Yeah, there may have been a frisson. MAY. He would never have acted upon it, however. Never.”

“Of course not,” he acknowledged. “I’m just looking at the possible hidden dynamics of the relationship.”

As I said, it was a loaded hypothesis – but perhaps not an entirely unconsidered one. I heard a cynical laugh emanate from somewhere within my body. “It’s fucked,” I told him, “but it’s a slightly more orthodox version of sexuality than that to which I’d earlier been subjected.”

“In a way, but what is so troubling about it is not that you had a romantic interest in your teacher, or even that he may at some hypothetical level have reciprocated that. You’re walking around your school at the age of 14 with your interest in this man. For you, it wasn’t some typical school-girl crush; you had full knowledge of what you were capable of doing. It’s not this pubescent image of a little kiss, holding hands, blah blah. You knew where to put this, how to do that. You knew how to have sex, and you knew you could do with him it if presented with the opportunity, because, of course, you’d done it before.”

I wondered if Paul was not reading too much into this. Don’t all teenagers think about sex, readers? Don’t they know the mechanics of intercourse? I’m seriously asking. I don’t see any of that as being abnormal.

Indeed, A and I discussed this last weekend. A thinks Paul’s suppositions are utter bollocks – ie., he thinks – yes, teenagers fucking do think about sex, and its specific mechanics. It is possible that A and I are both perverted sexual deviants, I suppose, but I have yet to see meaningful evidence of such an idea.

So, I asked Paul was sexual ideation not a common teenage mental passtime. “Not with the refinement of knowledge that you had,” he insisted.

“Vile, isn’t it?” he went on, staring into space in a way that I can only describe as wistfully non-wistful (yep, I’m sure that epically successful summary conjures up a clear and informative image of his expression in your head). “So vile that you were so different at 14 – but not just at 14. At five. How many five year old girls even know what a penis looks like?”

Well, I’m hardly some socio-sexual research analyst so am therefore unqualified to speculate on the point, but my first instinctive, inner reaction had been, “all of them.” I laughed nervously at the ridiculousness of the notion. “I suppose that shows you the stoicism that after a while comes to permeate this…this kind of thing.”

He nodded. “And, to me, that’s largely where the trauma of the abuse comes in. The physical stuff is horrid, but it heals. If the abuse hadn’t become normalised for you, if you’d somehow been protected from it continuing, then much of the psychological damage that resulted from it all may not have developed.”

I sighed deeply. “You see, I can tell myself that it’s all fiiiine, because after all, it’s only Münchhausen Syndrome, False Memory Syndrome or bare-faced, over-imaginative lies. But then I’m told that positions I deemed entirely appropriate for all young people to hold are in fact uncommon, and I suppose if that’s true then it drives the whole thing home – it is entirely believable, probably because it’s true.”

“Yes,” Paul replied. “It’s easier to think you’re just mad, isn’t it?”

But I am mad. Why is so impossible for him to accept that one can be both mad and an abuse victim?

Rather than confront him with that, though, I merely stated that should my history with Paedo ‘come out’ to the entire world, that that is certainly how the entire world would see me. Few people believe that Paedo is even remotely capable of anything even coming close to what he really is capable of, and since I’m mental anyway, it would be conveniently explained away by my alleged delusional thinking or some such. In that way at least, Paul is right.

He smiled amiably. “Well, at least one person believes you!”

“That’s a good start.”

For some reason, the discussion moved back to Christine, and how I don’t talk in any detail to her about the abuse. To my mind, this is entirely appropriate; she’s there to support me in terms of my everyday living, so far as I can tell. There is no reason to dredge up reams and reams of long-past bollocks when that is what Paul is meant to help me with.

He, though, wondered if she and NewVCB “shy away” from the subject. Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t, but to the best of my knowledge, qualified as they both are, they are not trained psychotherapists.

“Still, though,” I ventured, “does it somehow offend them or scare them? If so, why? I mean, it was me that had to live through it!”

I paused, reflected on the comment, then felt like the bitch to rule all bitches. “God, that was a dreadful thing to say,” I moaned. “I actually really like them both, and do believe they want to help me.”

“But it isn’t about them,” Paul insisted. “There’s a part of you that carries what happened with her at all times [fucking Aurora], and it’s that part speaking: you’re rightfully pissed off, and sometimes that just comes out. I don’t think you’re angry with anyone specific – except, perhaps, for the obvious.”

He paused dramatically for a second, wearing a thoughtfully perturbed expression. Just as I was about to ask him what was wrong, he continued, “you know, when you stutter and stammer over words in here, I can’t help but see these hideous images of you choking on him.”

This shocked me to my core. Does he really see that?! What a truly terrible thing for him to experience indeed. What a complete fucking cunt I must be for even allowing such evil into his head. I said so, adding that I didn’t understand how trauma therapists could do their job without going off their heads themselves.

“I know there’s supervision and whatnot, but it must be at best challenging to have to listen to – to have to see – this kind of stuff all day long.”

He made a gesture dismissing my concern. “I think that what you said about having to live through it rings true – I didn’t have to do that, did I? [Well, I don't know. Maybe you did, and you wanted to help others in this predicament? I don't exactly know your life story]. If I can’t hold some of the toxicity, what chance do you have?!”

He said, “look, Pandora. I don’t get my fingers burnt in these situations. Yeah, it’s fucking nasty, but I don’t. I hope that in that way the toxicity of this can be somehow contained for you.”

‘Contained’. My favourite fucking word. “I’ve been in therapy on and off since I was 14!” I exclaimed, hopeless and incredulous all at once. Paul me regarded me with a sympathetic but nonetheless searching expression.

“FUCK!” I eventually screamed into the air, at a random, ethereal, non-existent persona. “FUCK!”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he enquired as to what exactly I was shouting at.

“Just….FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

Both of his eyebrows quivered minutely, but my God – he was clever and subtle about it. He composed himself more quickly than anyone else that I have ever seen in a similarly ridiculous siutation. In those few minuscule seconds, he diffused my sudden and quite frankly inexplicable ire, and I appreciated this fallacious, yet remarkably calming, tolerance, however bogus it may have been.

“It’s interesting,” I murmured, affecting indifference.

Paul tilted his head. “Tell me how,” he coaxed.

“I’ve spent – what? 10, 12 years? thinking that therapy was a right load of old bollocks. But now, I’ve met you – and things have changed. It does work. I feel better – or, at least, I feel that I’m worthy of being understood. Why is that? Why – how – does therapy actually work?!”

[I deliberately resisted the urge to tread into neuro-psychiatric territory at this juncture. Paul is an anti-psychiatry type, and sometimes I feel too old and decrepit (the fact that I'm only fucking 28 notwithstanding!) to try and defend a position that contradicts that of others. Previous discussions about Paul should exemplify this well.]

He shrugged with amusement. “If you find out,” he smiled, “will you please let me know?!”

I returned the smile, but he must have seen something regretful in my facial expression. “OK,” he started, after several minutes of study of my rather forlorn face. “There’s more for you to say here. Cough up.”

“This therapy is ending soon,” I said, again with feigned nonchalance.

“Yes,” he said, expressionlessly.

“Do you think that I think you’re abandoning me?” I queried, disgusted at the borderline implications of the question.

“Do you?” he batted back – to my considerable annoyance. Why is it so bloody hard for people to answer a simple sodding question?!

“No,” I declared definitively. “However, plenty of others appear to hold that view.”

He asked me what I meant, and I explained that both Christine and NewVCB had postulated the premise that because the therapy at Nexus was time-limited, that I would going to feel “abandoned” and “rejected” when the relationship between Paul and I was no more.

“I don’t,” I pressed. “I truly don’t feel that. My issue with short-term therapy is that two decades of mental illness cannot be reversed in six months. It’s a rational, pragmatic objection – not some borderline freakery, like seems to be generally assumed.”

“I’ve said to you before,” Paul began, “that in an ideal world we’d seen each other for at least two years.”

“I know. But you’ve always been so straight-up about the time-frame that we are afforded here, and thanks to your candour, I’ve been able to accept that. But that bloody word ‘borderline’ denotes to all and fucking sundry that any rational objection I have must be related to an abandonment complex.”

Paul was about to respond, but I felt I’d overstepped the mark a little. Yes, NewVCB and Christine were concerned about my feeling “abandoned”, obviously a central tenet of the borderline personality. However, in fairness to both of them, the key word here was “concerned”. They cared; they didn’t, and don’t, condemn.

Nevertheless. “It’s not about abandonment,” I complained. [The lady doth protest too much? I don't think so, but I'm sure there are those that do.]

“Of course not,” Paul responded, perhaps too appeasingly. “Throughout your life, you’ve been subjected to a string of dysfunctional attachments. Here, in this room, there is, I hope, an attachment – but of a different kind. It’s secure and non-abusive. You’re entirely accepted here. Yes, you’re leaving in a few weeks – but, I hope, you’re going to take that security with you. I’m here in the background; the experience of our relationship is still there.”

He paused, then – more deliberately than I might have liked – added that all relationships come to an end. “It’s about how it’s handled,” he said.

“Of course,” I nodded, in all sincerity. I thought back to the mess that was the conclusion of my time with C, and chuckled cynically. “I can’t help but think back to how poorly this was managed in my NHS therapy…but I know it shouldn’t, and doesn’t have to be, that way.”

Paul made some caustic anti-NHS-therapy comment that I wish I could recall.

“It genuinely wasn’t my fault,” I commented, with a surprisingly defensive tone. “It wasn’t entirely the psychologist’s either – it was more to do with the appalling mess of bureaucracy to which most NHS workers are sadly subjected.

“My psychiatrist has actually been really supportive,” I added. “Yet she and my CPN are still concerned about this abandonment bullshit. I don’t get it. Just because my NHS therapy – as a result of the utter fuckwittery of the Trust – ended badly, it doesn’t mean that I am a demanding twat, and that all therapy I might ever have will go tits up.”

“What do you actually think about endings in therapeutic relationships?” Paul boldly asked me.

I could have given a 4,000 word response, because I’ve bloody read enough into the subject. Instead, I gave him a simple – but accurate – analysis: “no one is in therapy forever. That’s exactly the point of it: it’s not meant to be permanent. If endings are handled well, that exemplifies to me what one is meant to do with the relationship.”

Paul smiled. “You’re right on the mark, girl,” he said. “Right on the mark. Do you think we can achieve a satisfactory ending to this relationship together?”

“Of course I do,” I nodded. “Would I like it to be longer? Of course I would. But do I accept that it’s not going to be? Of course in duplicate. To me, it’s about how it’s handled, and how well it’s been handled. And I think it’s been, and is being, handled well.”

He smiled at me. “I previously suggested that after this is all over, that you come back again after a few months have elapsed, ” he said. “I do hope you do so, Pan. “But if you don’t, I have every faith in you anyway.”

The Evolution of Goldfish – Paul: Week 22

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Recovery, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff  9 Responses »
Sep 012011
 

Right. For absolute God’s sake, Pandora, just write this fucking post and stop finding procrastination-borne ways of avoiding it.

It’s not that there’s anything particularly traumatic about what I’m intending to write, but these session reviews are long and tiring in their composition, and moreover, because it’s from a couple of months ago, the feeling is not as ripe in my mind as I’d prefer it to be. That’s entirely my own fault, of course; I have had plenty of opportunity to finish writing about Paul well before now. Instead, I’ve chosen to dick about – oh look, *shiny thing*! Fuck’s sake. Anyhow, the notes do remind me of some of the nuances and subtleties of the sessions – the way he might peer over his glasses, the palpable expression of hurt or rage within the room, my constant hair-playing – but I’m not sure if I’ll ever nail them quite to the standard I would have had I written them up in the afternoons immediately following the appointments. But therapy is a draining pursuit, and so it’s hard to summon the internal mental energy necessary to engage in such writing; to that end, I’m not going to promise to hold to that ideal when I return to Nexus in the next couple of months. I’ll try, but for at least some of the time, I will fail.

Anyway, here we go…

—

Paul was met with my usual opening gambit of complete, hair-fiddling silence, though it was eventually me that broke it by castigating the living shit out of myself for my failure to speak. He responded with some remark about my feeling that I ‘have to’ speak, and about how that made me ‘trapped’. He went on in an entirely predictable fashion: I still frequently behave as if I’m helpless and have to do as I am told. I am reminded of how submissive I really am in ‘real life’. Everything – well, most things – are given deferential consideration before I dare to respond, and generally I will kowtow to the other party’s wishes in the end anyway, even if I loathe them for it. My last-but-one job, of which I’ve never really had reason to speak here, is a glaring example that still (four and a half years later) sends shudders through my body.

After a great deal of fairly repetitive discussion surrounding Hotel California and my aforementioned submissiveness, he eventually went on to say that my current methods of coping with things and defending myself were such that I was ‘trapped’ in this world, and that Aurora was ‘trapped’ in her world, which is full of pain. “To you,” he continued, “she’s just a nagging problem. She buggered up your life, so although you’re intellectually aware of all the facts – that she was abused and badly hurt – you can’t really empathise with her, can you?”

It depends when you ask me, actually, which in and of itself is progress to my mind. I said that I had written an awful lot on this blog (I can’t be bothered to look for the link((s)) right now, sorry) about how my position shifted about, on how I recognised that I didn’t deserve any of it at all, and, crucially, about how I really felt all of that, rather than just knowing it as an abstract sort of concept.

“But,” I said, inevitably, “then I think of my fat five-year-old face and I feel nothing but disgust. If you put my mere outline in place of that image, I can pity and empathise with and wish to protect her, but not if it’s actually the young me. And then, of course, that leads to tremendous guilt because regardless of what I was like, I should still feel that concern for my younger self.”

Paul asked me to put Paedo into this mental vision that I’d conjured up and which was fucking with my head. In that time-honoured fashion of therapists everywhere, he asked me, “how does that feel?” (At least the emphasis here was on something specific, rather than on some amorphous abstract as it so often was with C).

I closed my eyes and let the image consume me for a minute. It wasn’t at all pleasant, but I tried to walk him through it.

“I feel fear, I suppose. Not intense terror in that Lovecraftian horror sort of way [Jesus, how up my own hole am I?], but…well. It’s more like I’d respond to a hallucination. Trepidation, perhaps?” Self-created Paedo leered at me in my mind. Aurora took a step back. I – the envisioned adult me – looked at him with an examining and curious sort of contempt, but none of the three assembled psychic (non-)personnel spoke.

Paul went at me again for trying to over-analyse the scenario, though he did admit to my description being a realistic one (in the sense that, the first time or two, rapes that are the start of systematic abuse are met with overwhelming terror – but that gives way a resigned stoicism as the abuse continues). “What else?” he pressed. “What is she feeling?”

I ‘looked’ at her. She didn’t look petrified at all, but I felt a sense of dread emanating from her. I suddenly knew what she was feeling, even if there’s not a specific name for it.

“It’s a sense of ‘oh no, not again’,” I told him.

“Not the reaction of a blameful child,” he mused. “More like a helpless wee girl.”

(Completely off-topic, but does anyone else find it odd – not bad, just a bit weird-sounding – when someone who isn’t Scottish or Irish says the word ‘wee’? I remember reflecting on this that day: how interesting it was to hear a Brummie say ‘wee’ ((utterly disregarding the fact that Paul has lived here for years, of course)), yet I say it a hundred times a day. Funny the little things you pointlessly ruminate upon whilst in therapy).

“I agree with you,” I admitted, “it’s just…” …I started my usual carry-on of being unable to articulate the words I wanted to convey… “it’s just that I can’t…can’t throw off this…this persistent self-disgust. That picture of me when I was five that I mentioned…Jesus, it makes me cringe.” Pause. “But…being cringe-worthy does not equate to being at fault for being used as a sex toy.”

“Indeed,” he nodded, his head cocked, his eyes unblinkingly fixated upon me. I wondered what it was that he was so intently looking for. A manifestation of how I was feeling? A tell, as we call it in poker circles?

“Indeed,” he repeated. “You could have been the worst child on Earth and you still woundn’t have deserved a second of it.”

“Do you remember I told you about the picture of the baby?” I asked.

“Yes. That was hugely significant, I thought. You looked at that little baby and thought, ‘You’re just an innocent baby – yet you’ll have that taken away from you before long. I know your future’.”

“I still think there’s something terribly sad about that,” I confessed, fixating my own gaze upon Random Point A on the off-green, non-descript carpet. I could feel his eyes upon me, but I refused to look at him. A lot of stuff was circling in my whirlwind of a mind, and it was frankly quite horrible to think about the issues this conversation raised. I don’t know why. I don’t like babies any more or less than I like five year olds, so my reaction to this one seemed wholly out of character.

“There is something sad about it,” Paul replied, “tremendously so. I recall the sadness in the room when we talked about that before. In fact, when I was writing up my notes on that session, ‘sad’ is the word I used. I think…I think you have some sort of separation from the baby. You can’t remember yourself then, you can’t see any of the physical characteristics you now have [wanna bet, Paul? The baby is certainly fat, so we have that in common], so perhaps you don’t think of it being really yourself.”

He’s right. I don’t.

But the picture of the baby was only once facet of therapeutic discussion that I thought particularly relevant: the other was the session in which we pretty much ignored the sexual abuse and focused on my parents and their tumultuous relationship. In the aftermath of that, and in particular in my writing it up here, I was a complete heap of psychological spaghetti, and at one point, seeing me in a flood of proper tears, A opined that “the therapy [was] finally starting to work.”

“I am given to believe that crying is a more appropriate way of expressing distress than other ways I have I might have chosen,” I self-decried.

Paul cocked his head. “You still view crying with contempt, then.”

Um…yeah. Of course I do. As I said to him, people look strange when they’re crying, and I don’t want to look any stranger than I already do.

I laughed then. “That coming from the girl who dyes her hair pink, blue, green, purple, etc.”

“What’s that about?” he queried. “The hair dying.”

Fucking psychology. Why does something always have to reflect something apparently deeper?! I drolly and cynically responded that presumably I was ‘seeking an identity’, and waited for him to lap the comment up in scrutiny.

Instead, for once he surprised me in dismissing the potential psychoanalytic ramifications of this most ordinary thing. He said, “maybe you just like dying your hair. My former mentor once told me that you don’t have to analyse everything: he said, ‘sometimes a fart is just a fart, Paul’.”

Whilst I laughed at the remark, I was ever so slightly pissed off that I looked like the one that was over-analysing. I mean, of course I do over-analyse, but oftentimes I am wont to dismiss psychobabble, and this was one such occasion. I’m not convinced he picked up on the derisive tone which nuanced my original comment.

As if to confirm this, he suddenly said, “sometimes it’s like you live your life in a goldfish bowl. Everything is there to be watched and examined, and there’s nowhere to hide.”

I snidely returned that if a goldfish was removed from its bowl then it would cease to have oxygen, wouldn’t be able to breathe, and would eventually die – thus, the goldfish bowl is a necessary place to be. Internally, I smiled at what I perceived as my clever comeback, and I looked at him with a smug and challenging expression adorning my facial features.

Right enough, he hadn’t planned for such a point, and was forced to concede it. It was desperately hard for me to hide my cocky satisfaction.

BUT! The man is too fucking quick for his own bloody good. After a few seconds, he ably destroyed my egotism by asking, “what about evolution, then? What if you don’t want to be a goldfish anymore?”

I resisted the urge to point out that merely wanting to evolve does not necessarily mean actually evolving, thinking I had already pushed my luck with my awkwardness. Instead, I went back to a more therapeutically pertinent form of dialogue. “This is the thing. If I didn’t want all this crap to stop, I wouldn’t be here – I would never have been here – in the first place. And I think things have changed a bit, or at least are doing so. Maybe I’m less of a goldfish than I once was.”

“It’s like there are two goldfish in two bowls,” he offered. “One gets its water regularly changed, and it’s well-fed. The other only receives the very minimum possible to keep it alive.”

“That’s self-inflicted,” I commented.

“Perhaps, but maybe when that fish was first hurt, it couldn’t deal with any more than that – it could only concentrate on its most basic needs of survival.”

“Yes, but it wants to deal with everything else now, and it’s brain won’t co-operate. That is so frustrating.”

“Interesting,” he said thoughtfully. “The fish still blames itself for everything. It forgets that it was hurt by abusers and is faultless in this regard.”

“I think its point is that other hurt goldfish progress to a level of not being hurt any more…Well, OK, not entirely – this kind of thing can never just go away. But said other fish somehow capably manage their lives, whereas this one does not.”

“Perhaps the best it can hope for is to move into a bigger, better tank with its healthier friend from the other tank, where that friend can take care of it. It won’t make previous events go away, but perhaps it could make them easier to deal with.”

This was striding into difficult territory for me, which I proceeded to explain to him. “This is a stupid thing to say, I know, but it’s so unfair. Surely people (or fish) who’ve been hurt the most deserve the most relief – and yet they’re usually the very ones that continue to experience the greatest pain.”

“It’s not stupid,” Paul replied reassuringly. “Of course the world doesn’t work like that, but it’s still unfair.

“One of the hardest things in this kind of arena is having to get clients to deal with the bereavement of it all. The pre-abuse person that they were – he or she is never coming back, and that results in a tremendous amount of grief.”

Something about the statement resonated deeply and painfully with me – probably particularly because I don’t really remember much from before it all started. I have no frame of reference of who I was, and who I ‘should’ have become. “Obviously I was always aware of that,” I told him, “but there’s something about hearing it here, in those terms, that’s really big.”

“Huge,” he nodded. “For some people, though, it gives them a reason not to bother with therapy. If I can’t give you your childhood back, what’s the point?”

An understandable but obviously fatalistic view. I said, “but recovery – insofar as that’s possible – is surely better than perpetual misery. Sure, tinges of regret that you can’t make it unhappen are inevitable, but…don’t you have to make the most of what you have?”

After a brief pause, I had to laugh at my own hypocritical optimism. I am the last person on Earth who believes in the ‘count your blessings’ response to depression and related difficulties. How crude of me to patronisingly bring it up in this context!

Paul didn’t respond directly, though. Instead he said that he felt that whilst we were still occupying the bowl of the healthy goldfish, we were at least looking over at the other one. I wasn’t, for once, trying to ignore it, and I could see through the stagnant water that permeated its enforced domicile.

It’s hard to articulate the kind of feelings that were bouncing around the room. As I told him, I was indubitably affected by the analogy and, presumably, aspects of transference and whatnot, but when he asked me to describe said effects, I found it exceedingly hard. I could hardly speak – not a first in therapy with Paul (so much not a first, in fact, that it could almost be described as entirely normal in that circumstance). After a lot of stuttering and idiotic gasping, I eventually concluded that I was sad. Perhaps grieving.

“I had DBT forced upon me once,” I complained. “One of the aspects of it is some old wank about knowing what you feel and accepting that. Accepting, I get – but knowing? There genuinely aren’t always adequate words to describe some of this stuff.”

He shrugged. “I don’t think we do always need to explain. ‘Sad’ is enough.”

After a few silent moments of apparent reflection, he added, “you know, ‘sad’ is big for you. It represents a transition from anger, which is incredibly noteworthy.”

I nodded, but felt no need to reply. We avoided each other’s gazes for another quiet few minutes, before Paul continued by stating that he felt that there was a “softness” to me in those moments.

Needless to say, whatever spell had been temporarily cast was suddenly broken. I was repulsed by the idea of appearing “soft”, and in horror begged him not to “say that”.

“No,” he protested. “It’s OK to be that here.” Pause. “Or is that a step too far for now?”

“No,” I robotically replied. “I’m being stupid.” Then: “I have this life narrative, I suppose. I’m a bit of a bitch, harder than a fucking coffin nail [anyone like Papa Roach? I think they're utter shit, but I do love that lyric]. You know. Misanthropic, a miserable sod. That’s me. A bitch.”

“I don’t see any bitch,” he responded. “Would it be easier if I did?”

There was a long pause before I randomly asserted that I was a child in a woman’s body. I told him that I took very little responsibility for myself, that standard practice in adult domestic living scared the living fuck out of me (example). I admitted to him about the dozens of cuddly toys I’ve ammassed over the last three or four years, despite having almost no interest in them as a child (save for Mr Friendly, of course). I confessed to the childish little ways I will sometimes privately talk to A (though mercifully I’m apparently not entirely alone in my experience of this phenomenon – Maybe Borderline reflects on her similar mannerisms with her husband here. Though I am nine years old than her…).

“Well,” Paul said, with a tone of exculpation. “You had to live as an adult when you were a child…”

“So am I trying to somehow vicariously relive my childhood?”

“Well, you’re trying to reclaim what was stolen from you.”

He brought up the concept of regression, which he says is sometimes used in trauma work. He said, “I wouldn’t ever do that here. You have to accept the loss, whereas reliving it in a therapeutic context only succeeds in avoiding the reality of the here and now. You are an adult – but you have an unheard child inside you, and the ongoing challenge is to allow her to speak.”

“I do think we’ve made some in-roads there,” I replied.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And the thing is, you’ve consistently turned up here each week. On time. That alone speaks volumes.”

“I must be getting something out of it, yes. I’m way too cynical to have kept at it if I wasn’t doing so, and I’m hardly engaging in the process because it’s fun.”

“Indeed. You do appear to be able to see the value in what we do, despite its inevitable difficulties. And that in itself is therapeutic.”

And, I think, so it is. I know I’ve had something of a relapse recently, but revisiting this session reminds me that progress has been made. I am intending to return to Nexus in the next few months to attempt to advance that further, and despite the current bleakness of my world, I am reminded, sometimes, that hope can and does exist.

marketing

Psychology vs Therapy, and Being Burgled (AGAIN)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following was stolen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, off to bed with you! :)

—

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

marketing

Silence is Dolescum – Paul: Weeks 19 & 20

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Traumatic Stuff, Work  4 Responses »
Jun 152011
 

Week 19

I have lost every last word of my notes on week 19. Fuck! This has caused me considerable frustration, but it could be worse. I do remember the session as being a rather frustrating one – it was characterised by a lot of silence and little discussion. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that this happened a lot when I was seeing my previous psychologist, C, and it used to do my head in. In my interactions with Paul, it had not seemed anywhere near as common – but in fairness, I suppose it’s inevitable from time to time.

Paul doesn’t think that this economy of verbal expression is necessarily a bad thing. I know that when I vituperated against myself for same in this session, and the following one (below), he defended me. From a psychodynamic perspective, which I suppose this therapy broadly speaking is, there is, he holds, a lot to be drawn from sitting quietly, just experiencing whatever one is experiencing.

It doesn’t make for a particularly fascinating blog post, however, and even if it did, devoid of my notes and with five sessions in between now and then, there’s little I can remember specific to that day anyway. So I bring you, instead…

Week 20

He opened the appointment by asking me to fill in one of those wanky questionnaires that therapists routinely present to clients – you know, scales of depression, anxiety, that sort of bollocks. Apparently he’s meant to do them every six weeks, but the last time he’d done one with me was either in our assessment session or in the first week or two of actual therapy. He says that their main function, unsurprisingly, is for Nexus’ statistics; it keeps the funders happy, but Paul himself thinks it is “a load of old toss forced on [him] by [his] manager”.

This exercise completed, he asked me if it had been “intrusive”. I responded by stating that no, it had been nothing of the sort – but I did wonder, “why now?”

“I’m quite conscious of the fact that when I first approached this organisation, I was advised that I would have therapy of about 26 weeks,” I told him. “This being week 20, y’know…”

“Yes,” he nodded, resignedly. “This is about the time that I start thinking about this with clients.”

He asked me how I felt we were getting on when measured against the reasons that had brought me to Nexus in the first place. What were those reasons?

I hate it when therapists ask this kind of question. Surely the answer, simplistic and uncomplicated as it is, is to feel better. I said so to him.

“And are you?” he asked me.

I shrugged, which was perhaps not an entirely appropriate response, and gave him my usual spiel about not believing in cures, etc etc. I added, though, that I believed that things could improve; life will never be easy, and what happened will always have happened, but perhaps it can be made a little more ‘in the past’.

He agreed, but did note that much more could be achieved if we had longer than 26 weeks in which to achieve it. Ideally, he stated, we’d work together for two or three years.

“But we do have to stop after those 26 weeks,” Paul sighed. To my own surprise, I felt great sadness as I let this statement sink in. It was partly about the relationship that’s been established, but it was more about regret that the progress being made would now be struck down. As things stand I don’t think there will be a regression [at the time of publication, the therapy has ended, and there's no regression yet], but there could be a lot more moving forward if the opportunities were there.

But wait! Perhaps there could be some opportunity?

“You can always come back,” he said casually.

I felt my brows furrow. “Can I?”

“Yeah. You’ll have to wait a few months between leaving and returning, and you’ll have to go through another assessment and all that shite, but then I’ll just pick it up again anyway.”

Splendifourous! In the weeks that have passed since this appointment, my current relationship with Paul has been and gone, but I confirmed with him several times that I wanted to come back, and he himself confirmed that he would be happy to work with me again. So, in a way, it’s a win. I get a break for a few months, then get to pick up largely where I left off.

I used the ensuing pause to consider how things had changed in the time since I first met him. One key issue is that I mostly know now that everything I’ve said about Paedo is true. I mean, I always knew that some of it was, but as well you know, o my little brothers (and sisters), I doubted myself on many of my memories, despite their vividness, despite their striking detail. This is no longer true, and I really think Paul has helped to guide me to this position. His faith in me, his explorations of my child self (Aurora, whatever) have been strong and in-depth, and that has in turn given me the strength to face the truth and stop running away from it with allegations of False Memory Syndrome and similar wank.

Another issue was that my self-harm had “improved”. Writing this now, reading the word “improved”, kind of makes me laugh at myself. I haven’t self-harmed in months, and it reminds me just how far behind I am on writing about these sessions. I must still have been doing something self-injurious at the time, though I note with interest that I haven’t scribbled the specifics of that down on my nigh-illegible immediate-post-session ramblings. What I have noted is that I then stated to Paul that I still fail to see why self-harm is so inherently bad. Even though I’m not doing it right now, and don’t have any particular inclination to do so, I still largely agree with my stated take on this.

He said, “it’s not bad compared to what?”

I looked at him curiously. I hadn’t considered it to be somehow comparable to something else. Eventually, I shrugged and said, sincerely, “boredom.”

Then my intellectual mind kicked in, and realised what he was trying to get at. “Of course,” I continued, “that doesn’t work from a psychodynamic perspective, does it?”

Used to this kind of inappropriate interruption, Paul immediately returned with, “let me worry about that. What does boredom mean to you?”

I shrugged. “Self-harm is something to do. Blood is something to watch.”

“Isn’t it about feeling something?” he asked. “Don’t you see the repetitive nature of what you’re doing? Stabbing? Penetrating?”

Well, I do, yes. I also see the repetitive nature of this particular conversation with you, Paul, but let’s not get bogged down by pedantry, eh?

I was silent for what felt like forever. The fact that we’ve had this particular exchange so many times frustrated me, and I didn’t want to confess that to him, but at the same time, Aurora was faffing about in the back of my mind and I kept, internally, telling her to shut the fuck up. She wanted her say, as she often does. I didn’t (and don’t) want her to have it (as you might imagine Paul finds this particular issue to be unhealthy, but that’s a story to be told in more depth on another day).

But she kept on and on and on and on and fucking on, until I could bear listening to her no longer. So I tried to speak for her, but each time – for ages, over many attempts – the words stuck in my throat. So I instinctively resorted to a more standard version of communication, and berated myself (whilst beating myself and Aurora about the head) for my inability to verbally convey the matters in my mind.

I was biting my thumb, I remember, during the moments of silence that preceded and indeed followed this childish outburst. Acting out, anyone? Paul observed at one point that the transference emanating from me was “very childlike.” Funny that, when I’ve got this fucking infernal brat in my head trying her damndest to take over my body as well. You folks with DID and multiplicity of other descriptions – fair play to you for coping with that kind of thing all the time. Dealing with one alter on an occasional basis (at least, as far as I am aware it’s occasional) exhausts me entirely.

Eventually he said, in that time honoured fashion of psychotherapists the world over, “how do you feel?”

I made a non-committal facial gesture in response.

“You looked angry,” he prompted.

“Of course I’m angry,” I spat, the vitriol in my tone almost palpable. “I sit here and waste both my time and yours by being unable to open my stupid fucking mouth. What’s the point in that, Paul? Of course I’m angry. I’m angry with me [and, not that I said this aloud mind you, I was angry with her too].”

“OK,” he replied, “you mentioned psychodynamic work earlier. In psychodynamic work, silence can be useful. A lack of words can say an awful lot. You know that.”

“What can it say?” I begged him, sounding pathetically desperate for answers.

“Usually I come to your rescue at about this point,” he said. I waited for him to follow this comment up with the rescue itself, but he didn’t.

After another infernal millennium of no speaking, I blurted out, in a laughable squeal of apparent anguish, “please help me here! I’m stuck!”

Eventually, he began to respond, carefully. “One of the hardest parts of my job,” he said, “is having to sit here not having answers, nor knowing what to say. I have to sit here and let my clients suffer at times. The reason is, they were damaged as children and need an adult to be with them who won’t tell them how to think, what to say, how to feel. Sometimes they just need to sit with the pain.”

Another pause.

“OK, but what do I do?” Reading this comment back has amused me somewhat. He had already said that he wasn’t going to prescribe my comments nor my words, and when he responded with a simple, “I dunno,” I shouldn’t have been surprised.

He added, a few minutes later, that perhaps there was some value in not knowing what to do.

“And how does that achieve anything?” I enquired witheringly, looking out the window behind me at the frustrating normality of life outside the therapy room.

“It enables us to have a comfortable, honest relationship.”

“Right, that’s good and everything, but how does it advance matters?”

“It allows a unique relationship. It’s different from your psychiatrist, wouldn’t you agree? Does she ever not know what to do? Does she allow you not to? It’s even different from your relationship with A [well, I'd like to bloody hope so, yes]. You have to, at least on occasion, live in the real world with him. You don’t in here.”

When I didn’t answer, he went on: “the disorganised part of you is allowed in here, yet it’s the part you fervently fight to keep out. What can that tell us?”

“Well, I’m obviously uncomfortable with that side of myself,” I conceded.

“Yes – but why in here specifically?” he pressed. “I think there’s enough trust between us [yes] that you know that you’re safe here, that you won’t be judged or hurt or whatever, but yet you push it away nonetheless. Is it that it’s not needed in here?”

“It’s very destructive,” I responded, avoiding the question posed. “Sometimes I want to kick and punch the living shit out of things…wait, I haven’t done that have I?” I cried, suddenly panicked. “I didn’t dissociate and kick the fuck out of that wall [the wall has some paint peeling off it in a curious fashion]?”

He shook his head whilst suppressing a wry smile. “What brings those times about?” he asked me.

“It’s just…it’s just so profoundly un-fucking-fair. And that makes me angry.” I cleared my throat. “But so what? Life’s not fair; shit happens.”

“I think you’re allowed a bit of leeway on that,” Paul responded. “Most people thankfully don’t have to go through what you’ve gone through. That’s more than mere ‘life’ – that’s having shit kicked in your face and then some.”

“But I’m not angry with him,” I whined. “The anger is there, it’s just…not pinned down to one specific person. I don’t like him, but I don’t wish him ill.”

“Why?” (Inevitable).

“I just don’t,” I said pathetically, looking intently at the non-descript carpet. “I just…don’t.”

More silence befell the meeting, but I uncharacteristically broke it without it going on for 18 chiliads. Instead, a few minutes later, I admitted that I had lately been torn between feeling sad, and feeling bollock-bustingly furious.

“The problem with either anger or sadness is that neither gets you anywhere nor does anything,” I lamented with a philosophical sigh. “I mean, other feelings serve as uncomfortable but nonetheless useful catalysts or warnings, just like physical pain. Look at anxiety, for example – it’s horrible but it’s there to protect you, or scare you into a fight or flight response. Anger and sorrow do nothing.”

I went on to tell Paul that, a few months prior to this meeting, especially early in our acquaintance, the primary feeling I experienced was one of a low-lying but paradoxically paralysing terror. Or perhaps horror. Or dread. Or a curious alchemic mix of all three at the same time. See this post, for example. But as I said to him, that really isn’t true any more – or, rather, I don’t have that constant horrordread hanging in the air wherever and whenever I walk.

“What scares you now, then?” he queried pragmatically.

I thought this through out loud.

“Family? No. There’s just…well, again, there’s just a sort of sadness there [which is weird to read back as, aside from my mother, I mostly don't much care about any of them]. Let me see…well, crowds. Obviously. Don’t do crowds well at all. And…work. That scares the absolute living fuck out of me.”

“What’s frightening about a job?” Paul asked.

What’s frightening about anything? I never said any of this was rational! As I said to him, it is just a vague, unspecific sort of anxiety that overwhelms me whenever I consider it. However, I did attempt to pick it apart for him.

“I’d theorise that my fear of failure is so profound as to be debilitating. I’m petrified of failing others, of letting them down. I’m scared of people, and in the vast majority of jobs there are – regrettably – people.

“More practically, there’s my pathological phone phobia. My concentration, whilst better than it was a year ago, is still rubbish. There’s no point in doing a job if you can’t concentrate, as it simply won’t get done or, if it does, it will be shoddy, and that is unacceptable. Also, I can’t deal with confrontation, no matter how civil it may ostensibly be, and in my experience even the best job in the world carries the risk of that arising occasionally. So, in summary – there are a number of practical concerns, and a few more abstract ones – but whatever the case, the anxiety about it is crippling.”

“Overwhelming,” he added, apparently having garnered that word from the fear he heard in my voice.

“Yes. But then, I hate myself for not being at work. I hate it. I just don’t want to go back into work, not be ready for it, have another breakdown and be back on benefits again. That would be no good for either the employer nor myself, and would probably set the progress I’ve made mentally back about a decade.”

I sighed. “But then, that makes me feel guilty. I should be able to return to work and just be able to fucking do it. I measure myself so strongly by the concept of a career. I have no idea why, because I’ve never had a career – only jobs.”

I told him about my abject rage when I hear of people I went to school with – stupid people, nasty people, whatever people – doing law degrees and being lawyers, doing computer science degrees and being computer scientists, doing engineering degrees and being engineers. Or the ones who had the bloody sense to jack school in at the age of 16 and become plumbers or electricians. God, if I could live my life over again, I would surely choose that path.

“So you describe your former classmates by their job titles. How do you describe yourself?”

“Dolescum.”

“Dolescum?!”

“Dolescum, yes. Oh yeah, I may try and re-invent myself as a writer [ha] or whatever, but really – ‘dolescum’ reigns supreme.”

“Isn’t ‘dolescum’ a little harsh?”

I ignored him, and went off on some impassioned rant about how I wanted to change my ‘dolescum’ status, but that I couldn’t, not yet, not now.

“Everything makes sense in context, as you know,” he said, which I initially found to be quite cryptic. “An interview panel, a set of colleagues – they’re all judging you, in your eyes…”

“Of course they’re judging me,” I interrupted. “That’s the point of interviews.”

“…they’re judging you as adults. You feel like a demeaned kid in front of them – who can you trust? What will they do to you? It seems perfectly natural to me. The problem is, you judge yourself far more harshly than they will judge you. Do you think a colleague of yours is going to carve ‘bitch‘ into your stomach?”

Well, it’s a funny old world, Paul. Who’s to say there isn’t such a colleague out there, just waiting for me? I responded by saying, simply, “it feels like it.”

Time for another self-directed rant. “It wasn’t always like this! 10 years ago when I was first properly applying for jobs I was confident, cheerful, even charismatic in interviews. It came naturally to me – none of it was an act. Now all that comes naturally is stammering and floor-watching.”

“Is that how ‘Dolescum’ [he made a gesture denoting that he was, with irony of course, referring to me] has handled interviews?”

“Dolescum can’t have done that badly. Dolescum went back to work after breakdowns before.”

“How is ‘Dolescum’ dolescum, then?”

“Because Dolescum isn’t working again. It was all very easy when I was off for six months to make up some bollocks on my CV that I’d be travelling. I can hardly spin that yarn over three years.”

“OK,” he said, trying to ‘ground’ the conversation. “I don’t think it’s about unemployment, to tell you the truth. It’s about you. You don’t work now – you’re dolescum. If you were sitting behind a desk right now, you’d be office scum. If you were in a factory, you’d be factory scum. Etc etc etc. It’s the ‘scum’ bit that’s entrenched.”

“That seems reasonable,” I admitted, which led to the inevitable narcissistic whinge about the just-sort-of-Mensa-level-IQ bint with qualifications flying left, right and centre out of her arse who ended up as a receptionist or glorified typist* (though admittedly, my typing speed is very good – I can usually rack up about 90wpm, which is a bit unfortunate for you, a reader of my blog, as it helps facilitate the ludicrous verbosity of these self-obsessed ramblings).

(* Actually I should state that my last job in particular was a lot more than this, but it was not considered so by my superiors – but let’s not go down that route again. Past is past and everything, yadda yadda).

“Well, it’s my own fault,” I sighed. “I shouldn’t have done the courses I did.”

Pause. Then: “it’s his fault I don’t have a doctorate.”

Paul peered at me over his glasses. “Who said that?”

I shook my head in self-surprise. “I have no idea. It just came into my head.”

“Is there any truth in it?”

“It’s my fault I don’t have a doctorate,” I clarified.

“But did he [there was an implicit understanding that we were referring to Paedo] have a role in it? Didn’t he have a role in everything?”

I avoided his gaze.

“Your mental health issues,” he offered. “Whose fault is that?”

“It depends who you ask,” I said evasively.

“I’m asking you – you’re the only one that counts. Oh and please – don’t give me any bullshit from the medical model.”

I rolled my eyes a little, but shot him a wry smile.

“OK then, you’ve lain down the gauntlet. It’s not just him. There’s some residual issues with my mother, there was a whole pile of fuck with my ex, I still haven’t got over the death of my grandfather. But mainly – well, I attribute most of my mentalism to my father and Paedo, yes.”

“And to what extent did your mental health difficulties prevent you studying for a doctorate?”

It’s impossible to know the answer to such a question, of course, but I replied by stating that I reckoned they severely impinged on my failure to achieve one of the few things I ever really wanted in this world.

I saw Paul glance at the clock. “Shit,” he muttered irritably. “Just when we’re getting into some really meaningful stuff, we have to end the session.”

For some reason this took me right back to therapy with C, and his weekly mantra of shit of “we’re going to have to leave it there.” Shit-tinted glasses show me a glint of satisfaction in his eyes, as if he enjoyed throwing me out of his room like dirty dish water when I’d got into the midst of something gritty and murky with him. Of course, I know rationally that this is absolutely horse shit. But it was how I felt, and I responded accordingly.

“Am I game-playing?” I said, genuinely concerned.

Paul tilted his head and studied me, as if to look for clues as to where my odd comment had arisen from. “No,” he said finally. “If you’re ‘playing’ at all, then you’re safe-playing.” Before I could counter this, he went on: “it’s interesting that you put so much blame at your father’s door [it's not interesting to me. It just is]. It underlines his failure to provide safety and security for his child – both in the context of your life as a whole, and in the context of allowing the abuse to happen.”

He sighed and looked contemplative for a minute, as if he were taking on the guilt that my father should have carried. Then he turned to me reassuringly, made some non-verbal gesture of, “we’ll pick it up next week,” and then it was – for another week – a meeting consigned to history.

marketing

Anonymity and the Beginning of the End…Again

 Important People in My Life, Moods, Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse  22 Responses »
Apr 042011
 

I got a laugh this week when someone asked me why I write this blog anonymously. What is it that I’m scared of, they mused? Is it that I want to perpetrate the stigma that permeates mental illness by hiding behind the dark cloak of the internet? In which case, can I even genuine in what I write? (Incidentally, Astrid ((on her blog about multiplicity)) also got the latter question recently because she, as is her absolute entitlement, wishes not to disclose the nature of her trauma).

Well, aside from the fact that the majority of mental health writers of whom I’m aware write anonymously, I personally have given my reasons for same elsewhere.  See here, for example. As noted in that post, I keep the blog anonymous to protect the personnel that are discussed here, not me, and certainly not because I wish to stigmatise any mental illness. In real terms, my anonymity is to protect Paedo, and those whose lives would be ruined if my ‘real’ identity were openly linked to this blog. If it just affected Paedo, it wouldn’t be so bad. Although as you know I don’t wish him particular ill, neither do I wish peace, joy and some sort of permanent contentment upon him either. However, it isn’t just Paedo, is it? It’s my mother, my cousins, their children, a few of my aunts, probably even people I don’t know who are allied with the McFauls in some fashion or another. These people do not deserve the consequences that would befall them if my revelations about Paedo came to be within their knowledge.

As for not believing I’m genuine – ha! Thanks for that, twathead. I may doubt some of my own claims, sure, but if you seriously don’t agree that I have significant amounts of mental health difficulties after reading the millions of words of whining dirge on this blog, then I don’t really think that I’m the deluded one here. Even people with fabulous imaginations cannot properly understand mental illness unless they have lived through it, and I would have thought the vividness of my mentalist experience (and, by extension, my words here on the subject) would have adequately conveyed the honesty lying behind it. But it’s a free country. Think what you like; that’s your right. But I don’t have to justify or prove myself to you (not that you can read this, since I blocked your IP ;) ), so you can suck my non-existent dick.

Backtracking a bit, on the point of protecting the family: no, they haven’t done anything to deserve this kind of hurt – but herein lies another point. Neither have I. Yeah, there you go, I said it – I haven’t done anything wrong. (Well, I could start an entire philosophical discussion here on the nature of sin and moral wrongdoing or something, and conclude that of course I’ve done something wrong; I’ve done plenty of things wrong plenty of times, which is simply the nature of being a human being. But I am, as you might imagine, referring specifically to sexual abuse).

I am increasingly starting to believe it. I don’t know that the doubts will ever go away entirely, but I am at least beginning to believe (however temporarily) that I am not responsible for being sexually abused. As for actually believing that I was abused – well, you’d think that believing that I am not responsible for it would mean that I would have to agree that it did, in fact, happen. Not entirely, I’d have to say, despite how self-contradictory that is. However, tai0316, in her blog Living and Dealing with Bipolar Disorder, DID and the Consequences of Childhood Abuse has grasped it well in a recent post: something happened, and even in the unlikely event that the rest didn’t, those things still did, and that deserves my recognition. In my case – and based on my reading of tai’s blog, in her’s too – the evidence clearly points to much more having taken place, and I sort of intellectually know that it’s all true. I don’t fully feel it, but I am starting to, and that’s a good step in the right direction. It’s neither productive nor necessary to keep fighting myself on the point, but it is of course easy to say all that. The main thing is that subtle changes are taking place, as this reversal of fucked-up-ness can only ever be taken in baby steps.

You might therefore say that Paul has been very useful to me over the last six or eight months. I owe this blog two session reviews, those of weeks 19 and 20. As long-term readers will know, when I first approached Nexus in August, I was told that ongoing therapy lasts for 26 weeks.

Without going too deeply into today’s session, as I will do that elsewhere, the issue of the ending of our time together was raised this afternoon. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that he has no choice but to discharge me after 26 weeks and that there’s no room for manoeuvre on that, though he himself stated that this kind of trauma therapy really requires a minimum of two years of work, and even then with twice-weekly meetings. The fact that I will have to leave in six weeks filled me with a profound sadness – not the soul-destroying abyss of devastation and grief that came with the end of things with C, because my relationship with Paul is so different – but sadness nevertheless, because it’s been such a useful endeavour, and although positive things have been achieved, it is realistically very far from finished.

There is a ray of hope, though. Paul said that when the 26 weeks are up, which would be about the middle of May assuming no holidays or illness or whatever crop up, there is an option. For “a few months” after discharge, I’m fucked. No Paul, no therapy*, meh. However, he said that I can “re-apply” to Nexus after said “few months”; I’d have to go through another assessment, and then wait for a counsellor to become available, but apparently he “would just pick it up again” anyway. So whilst I don’t relish the prospect of having no therapist for a few months, that would still give me another half-year’s therapy with someone I know to be reliable and competent from, say, about July or August of this year.

I am seeing NewVCB again on Wednesday, and intend to advise her of this. She had initially seen Christine, the CPN, as a short-term support, but if Paul is going to be effectively dead for a few months, maybe I could continue seeing her for some sort of support at least until I can re-commence proceedings with him.

I haven’t asked yet, but I do intend to enquire also as to whether or not Paul would be willing to offer me private therapy. He lives a good distance from me, but I can be flexible on times and am willing to pay him a decent rate (I don’t know how, mind you, but I’d find the money somehow. This kind of thing is too important). I don’t think that this is a realistic option, to be honest, but there is no harm in asking him. If he can’t offer this, then I’d ask if he could give me a personal recommendation of another like-minded therapist who would be able to see me on a private basis. This would give me options for when I can no longer see Nexus at all.

* Of course, another issue remains. You haven’t heard me ranting about the Trust for a good while, so let me explain the absence of my hitherto never-ending ranting on them. As you know, I was can’t-get-out-of-bed-can’t-even-fucking-move depressed in January, February and some of March, and during this period was having a fantasy love affair with a canister of helium that almost became a reality. This meant that my crusade against the Trust fell by the wayside considerably. Now that I am a little better, I would like to continue to pursue the complaint – but doing so will force me to read my medical notes in detail, and frankly I’m terrified of doing so. I’m concerned that they have it in their power to set me back considerably, given the propensity of some of the personnel concerned to twist, fabricate and embellish, and I wonder if it is worth endangering my relative mental health for the sake of that. It’s a balance between that and justice, and I haven’t worked out yet which I value more.

Assuming I do read the notes and pursue the complaint, my advocate Derbhla seemed to think that there is a possibility of the NHS re-referring for therapy within their services, so long as I am willing to meet them half-way – half-way, to Derbhla’s mind, being defined by my ability to return to work, rather than being completely mentally healthy (not that the latter is even achievable, as I am constantly mantra-ing on about here).

The problem is, this approach is imperfect. I genuinely still feel that I’m owed it, but that does not mitigate its flaws. One is, simply, that it’s the NHfuckingS, who (with the exception of NewVCB and possibly Christine) have proven themselves to be about as trustworthy as Ted Bundy and the Liberal Democrats. Secondly, any potential therapist within services would be an unknown quantity, because I refuse to see C again. Is that churlish? No, I don’t think so; I don’t like unfamiliarity, but C ruined my life and behaved more erratically and inconsistently during our last months together than a rebellious teenager does for his/her entire adolescence. It would only ignite more bad blood and resentment all round to see him again, so it would need to be someone new. This possibility unsettles me, but not as much as seeing C would.

Thirdly, I already have a therapist I like, trust, and know I can work productively with. Yes, there may have to be a gap in my treatment with him, but I know him, and based on how things have gone so far, I believe that I could make further progress with him. If I fuck about in the middle of that trying and, let’s assume, succeeding to get another NHS therapist, then what becomes of Paul? Do I see him as well as the NHS person (something the psychotherapeutic profession tends to frown upon) or do I delay going back to him on the off-chance that the health service person might not actually be shit?

In short, I have a lot to think about, and I don’t know how I’m going to think about it. My mood is still relatively OK by my own dire standards, but over the last few days I’ve been perpetually tired and listless and thoroughly without motivation. I may be able to remedy that with a bit of decent sleep and time taken to relax, as in the wake of my dose of Venlafaxine having been increased, I was starting to feel slightly more productive. However, as you can appreciate, given the nature of the therapy, and indeed the therapeutic relationship (not to mention my bitterness and anger vis a vis the Trust and certain individuals in its employment), analysing this all these differing, uncertain options could be terribly triggering. Thinking about ‘losing’ Paul has already led to a bit of a slump.

I haven’t really written much here recently. Apart from the psychotherapy reviews, I have very little to say – so what the fuck will become of Confessions if and when therapy ends?! I’ve often shied away from just general moaning here, even though I do it on occasion. For some reason, although this is a personal journal, I keep feeling like I need to say something when I write. Yet I read the blogs of others, and they talk about their thoughts and feelings rather than some pretentious cunt-gazing shite, and their blogs captivate me. So why can’t I allow mine just to follow a similar, much more healthy pattern?

Mind you, isn’t that what this post has been? A simple update about where I may or may not go from here? Let me then continue with the ‘ordinariness’, briefly. Last year I wrote a brief diatribe about Father’s Day (a flick through the archives in looking for that link reminds me of the series I wrote on the local political parties’ manifestos on mental health. There are Assembly and Council elections coming up here in a month, so I suppose if I must attempt ((and fail)) to weave profundity in my blogging, I could look at that again, to see if anything has changed. Of course, having had the politicians involved in my complaint against the Trust, I have some new views to add myself). Any of you that have read my second blog (which is currently sleeping whilst I experiment with it – please don’t threaten me with any lobby groups that are against testing on blogs – it’s necessary sometimes ;) ) will also have seen an epic rant against Valentine’s Day too.

My point, of course, is that yesterday was Mother’s Day. I regard the occasion with no less derision than the other two aforementioned Clinton Cards Constructs. However, occasionally it becomes necessary to put your own views to one side and try to honour those of others, so I sent my mother a nice bunch of tulips and a box of chocolates:

 

Tulips

She rang yesterday morning at 11am, but I couldn’t answer the phone at the time for a variety of reasons. I assumed that she was calling just to thank me (which would be in her nature), so figured it was not searingly urgent for me to return her call.

To that end, she herself rang back a few hours later, sounding irritable. Her PC is fucked, she reported. She wanted to discuss the issue with A; although he is knowledgeable and qualified on computing issues, he is not being a computer-mind-reader and was thus unable to make a diagnosis of the thing’s illness over the twatting phone. Mum then asked to speak to me again, and when I confirmed that I would see her tomorrow, she thanked me and rang off. She didn’t not mention the flowers at any point.

It is possible that the delivery company fucked my order up and didn’t deliver the damn things, which if the case will result in irate correspondence from me demanding my £40 back, along with some form of compensation. However, if they did arrive and my mother simply didn’t mention them, then I have to admit I’ll be quite hurt. I know that flowers are an easy way out of more original gifts, but (a) my mother loves them for some reason and (b) that I got her anything for a commercial festival in which I don’t believe surely shows that for once I was trying to put her first?

Meh. I’ll find out tomorrow, I suppose, when I take her out in lieu of not having done so yesterday.

Operation Fag-Death has failed, as I strongly suspected it would. When I got back from Paul’s this afternoon, I was so sad about things coming to an end with him that I desperately wanted to smoke. I didn’t, as it happens, at that point – but when A got home and was understanding about it, I sort of said, “fuck it,” and went out the back and lit up. bourach commented on the last post that she didn’t/doesn’t want to give up, and I think that this has been very much my problem this time around. In 2007, I really did want to give up; I was going to do so, and that was that. This time, as the previous post testifies, I was much more ambivalent, and without that rugged determination, I did seriously doubt my ability to stop indulging myself with the fucking things. I am very unhappy to have been proven to be correct in this belief.

It’s the wrong time to do it in many ways; I’ve been thinking for a few weeks now about the end of therapy, and although things are substantially better than they were, I’m not stable like I was four years ago. I can’t afford to smoke, but my mental health (or, rather, sort-of-lack of it) controls everything at the minute (and please don’t comment with some bollocks about my having the power to ‘change’ or ‘improve my quality of life’ or ‘empower myself with positive emotions’. It won’t work and will merely serve to irritate, and I’m Not Very Nice when I’m irritated. OK? OK. Good). I’m its slave – I accept that. When I know what how I plan to play the therapy card, and when I feel like my distinctly relative stability isn’t just a very short-term thing, I will try again. And I will succeed.

Anyway, pointless post over. I hope you’re all keeping well and as ‘happy’ as this sorry plane of existence allows. Take care, lovely people. <3 xxx

The Sad Story – Paul: Week 18

 Important People in My Life, Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Traumatic Stuff  14 Responses »
Mar 252011
 

Beware. There is a lot of ranting in this post. My ire is mainly the rage I usually harbour on the relevant matters, but the particularly belligerent style of some of the following is also partly attributable to the fact that I’m listening to Metallica as I write this.

So, if you’re averse to cursing or aggressive outbursts, then you’d better fuck off now.

Triggers: domestic violence, sexual abuse (including the idea of a resulting pregnancy), self-harm, suicide (vaguely), religion (loosely and rantishly, sorry), parental violence, general un-karmic unfairness.

I felt that Monday’s session was extremely productive, if extraordinarily difficult in retrospect. After the usual initial ‘what do I say now’ questions, I found myself on a sort of discursive roll, and talked openly and honestly for quite a while. When he inevitably had to end the session, I was frustrated rather than my usual relieved.

The truth is that very little of the more meaningful work centred around sexual abuse. I spent the vast majority of the useful part of the session discussing my parents, their relationship, and my relationship with them. A lot of the stuff discussed has already been covered elsewhere on this blog already, so forgive me for any repetitiveness.

I’ll warn you again of triggers – revisiting this material as I have been writing it up caused me to end up in tears. Perhaps it’s not particularly triggering to outsiders – I think my upset comes from my closeness to it – but consider yourselves cautioned nevertheless. [LATER: I've just tried to proof-read this post, and I can't help but feel that I've been overly histrionic in my trigger warnings, expressions of harrowment (yes, it is a word) and various breakdowns in the course of this post. The material certainly isn't all fluffy and dainty, but still - if I've been OTT I'm sorry. I feel like a bit of a twat, but the stuff herein is both close and important to me.]

The session opened with a rant about how shit NHS mental health services are. What a surprise! The short version of this conversation is that Paul thinks I’ve been treated like utter shite by them. Yeah – tell me something I don’t know, mate.

The conversation arose due to my telling him that I was meeting my new CPN the following day (and shitting myself regarding same) and further, that NewVCB had requested a surprise encounter on Wednesday. Paul asked why I felt they were “upping the ante” (have we heard that phrase anywhere recently, readers?) by suddenly throwing all this extra ‘care’ at me.

I proffered the opinion that they were running scared, as when I’d last seen NewVCB, I was on the verge of exit-bagging myself to death. (I later retracted this criticism a little. I am a cynic, pessimist and misanthrope by nature, and until I have definite proof that people aren’t out to get me, I both choose to believe and innately feel that they are. In reality, NewVCB is not a bad person to have as a consultant ((despite her (((inherited))) nickname on this blog)), and I don’t necessarily believe that she is acting to cover her, or indeed the Trust’s, arse).

I told Paul about how his ‘upping the ante’ phrase reminded me of that two-faced whore from last January. I also added that she had apparently told C that she had “no concerns about my mental health” (I still can’t get over that one – how offensive and disgustingly inaccurate!).

Paul said, “it’s like they only care if you die. They don’t care how much you suffer, as long as you’re still alive and they don’t have to justify themselves to anyone.”

Nails on heads there, Paul. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I think NewVCB does (and perhaps Christine will) give a flying shite about my actual welfare as opposed to my mere continued existence, but as a bureaucratic entity, I distinctly feel that the NHS does not – and as long-term readers will know, that is hardly a new opinion. (Though having said that, the deeper I go into mental health services, the more I see how much my care lacked over the past 13/14 years. I touched on that a little on Wednesday, and may elaborate in a future post).

I assume that my continued rage is palpable from the tone of this narrative. It certainly was to Paul, though I tried my best to remain measured. The reality was I wanted to kick the living shit out of the poor, innocent shelf on my left, imagining it was Mr Director-Person‘s smug, elfish face. I wanted to take the phone on said shelf and use it to smash his management-wrinkled cheeks into smithereens.

This inevitably led to a conversation on transference. I would make clear at this point, again, that Paul agrees that the Trust have treated me like some turd they stood in, and believes my anger towards them to be fair and absolutely just. Yet he also has a theory about the sheer strength of it. Essentially, he wonders if I unconsciously see the Trust in loco parentis – is my hateful anger displaced towards them instead of being focused on my parents?

Of late, I have become completely obsessed with the idea that my mother is going to die. Well, of course she’s going to die – aren’t we all? But you know what I mean; I’m terrified she’s going to drop dead in the next few years, which is something with which I do not think I could cope. I’m both advantaged and disadvantaged by the fact that my parents were in their 40s when I was born – on the one hand, I had a mother that had lived already (insofar as my father allowed, at least), with all the knowledge and education that that brings. On the other, of course, that means that I’m statistically more likely than my peers to lose her when I’m fairly young. As you know, my father has already snuffed it, not that I care about him.

Anyway, when Paul asked me about my apparent anger towards the two of them, I told him that I was not allowed to criticise my mother for the above reason. Furthermore, she is on holiday this week. If I am in any way critical of her before her flight on Saturday, then the plane will crash and I will have killed her through my horrible words.

He raised his eyebrow incredulously and said, “you’re very bloody powerful.”

I laughed bitterly. “You should have seen me last week,” I sneered. “I was responsible for Colonel Gadafi’s evil and have caused a potential mass genocide in Libya.”

I watched his face carefully. He may claim he’s not an intellectual, but when he furrows his brow in a certain way, you know he’s processing, analysing, computing. Had his skull been transparent, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a full system of cogs turning in there. Cogs that say things like ‘magical thinking’, ‘delusions’ or ‘psychosis’.

Of course, Paul does not like “labels” (I word I still abhor in this context), so rather than merely accuse me of any of these things, he was evidently trying to work out why Colonel Gadafi is my fault (perhaps I was his mother in a past life? Who knows). However, he surprised me when he didn’t quiz me on that particular supposition.

Instead, he said, “in that great psychological tradition, tell me about your mother.”

Ah, I see. He thinks Gadafi is a deflection. It probably was, to be fair.

“How do you feel about your mother right now?” he continued.

“I feel sorry for her,” I told him.

“Why?”

“Because my father was such an epic wanker. She deserved better from him…and probably from me too.”

Talk about opening the fucking floodgates.

“She deserved better than me because I was very difficult for her to deal with as a teenager,” I went on. “In my defence, I was clinically ill – but how does a person with no frame of reference [I'm an only child] distinguish severe depression from ‘mere’ teenage angst?”

Paul asked for more detail. That detail is something I’ve shirked from on this blog, because I can’t bear thinking about those horrible days. I hated my first five years at grammar school; they remain, quite steadfastly, the most dark and bleak of my life (even though these last three have sort of been more mental, if you get the distinction). Just thinking about my complete desolation back then can bring a tear to my eye.

How is this linked to my Mum? Well, as noted, not only did I hate school, but I was utterly crippled by major depressive illness. These issues conspired together and rendered me completely incapable of even getting out of bed for virtually weeks on end. There were times I didn’t even rise to take a piss, which I know is repulsive, but there you have it. It was that bad. Mum, in part acting on manipulative information fed to her by my Head of Year (a grotesque, vile little man), assumed that my behaviour was standard jadedness and sloth.

This resulted in Some Bad Stuff. Only she, I (having been there) and A (as I told him) know of this, but here goes. In order, I assume, to ruse me out of my pit of despair, she used to beat the living shite out of me. I have very distinct memories of lying, staring at my purple bedroom wall, my back to her, as she brought her clenched fists down – on my arms, abdomen, legs. Even my head and face at times. She would do this in blind fits of seeing-red-rage, meaning, of course, that the fist/me impact was all the greater. One side of my body would end up being as purple from bruising as the wall that I non-reactively fixated my eyes upon.

“Of course,” I said to Paul, “it’s not her fault; not really. She didn’t know what was normal teen moodiness, and what was serious, raw suffering.”

He pursed his lips slightly and asked if my teenage self had realised that.

To be honest, my teenage self hadn’t realised anything much. A lot of the time I didn’t even feel the agony with which I should have been faced after such violence. Depression was all I was. It was all I felt, physically, psychologically, every -ally. I didn’t register anything else for the majority of the time.

“Where was your father when all this was happening?” he queried, carefully.

Cue another scornful laugh. “You tell me,” I said, my bitter spite hardly curbed.

But I thought for a minute. Where was my father? Yeah, probably drunk in a ditch after trying to rape some woman then beating her up because she fought him – but, on a wider level, where was he? He died in 2007 (I think), which would have made me 23 or 24. So we would have been talking about nine or 10 years previously.

That’s where he was, I thought, having one of those rare ‘aha’ moments of existence. He was in a nursing home.

I’m sure I’ve alluded to this before, but for the initiated or those that don’t have photographic memories, V (father) developed MS, and was placed in a home as the illness progressed. I have always resented this with more bitterness than I can describe, even with all the pejorative words and expletives of the English language at my grand disposal.

Aside from raping and beating my mother, cuckolding her, trying to kill her, throwing her out windows etc, he also completely fucked her financially. He took every spare penny she had, and spent it on alcohol. When she divorced him – which was done to protect me, the final straw for same being after he (accidentally, but drunkenly) dropped my few-weeks-old self onto the hearth one day – she even agreed to his demands to pay the remainder of the mortgage, just so as she could get rid of him.

Then. Then! He gets his nice benefits, and they pay for him to have a nice room in a nice home with nice staff treating him to nice things, like nice papers in the morning and nice trips to the football in the afterfuckingnoon. I’m sorry (especially to Christian readers), but there can be no God in this despicable universe. If there was, how would – how could - He allow such outrageously unjust acts to permeate this gruesome species that He created? How in anyone’s estimation can that be considered a reasonable way to conduct the universe You own? (And please, please, no ‘God works in mysterious ways’ shit. I know most of you would never condescend me in that fashion, but avoidance of doubt is always a good thing).

I remembered Georgie and Merv, the fucking cunts, who went to see V when he was in this home. I remembered whatever their son and his bitch are called doing the same, and said bitch feeling sorry for the nasty cunting fucker. For those that don’t know the fucked-up dynamics of my family, Georgie is my mother’s sister, and is married to Merv, my father’s brother. Nice bit of pseudo-incest going on there, oh yes.

My mother’s sister. MY MOTHER’S FUCKING SISTER. She spent 20 years idly listening to tales of my mother’s horrible life from the other side of the Atlantic, and then – then – just because that FAT FUCK became ill, he is somehow worthy of her flying eight hours to come and fucking see him?! FUCKING CUNTWHOREBITCH. I hate her. I fucking despise the fucking nasty, hypocritical, self-righteous CUNT. (Much as I love it, sometimes I wish I didn’t use the word cunt with such frequency, because it loses its impact in this circumstance. But rest assured, dearest readers, I despise her with a passion almost unrivalled. HATE HATE HATE).

Then they took all the money when V died, despite the rightful entitlement to same lying with my mother, after the financial rape he inflicted upon her. But this has never been about money; just indescribable injustice.

Something randomly occurred to me at this point in the session. I met Paul, and indeed first went to Nexus, last August. A good half-year since I changed my name.

“Are you aware that [Pandora Serial-Insomniac] is not my born name?” I asked Paul. “I wasn’t born with this surname. I changed it to dissociate myself from V and his family.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” he returned thoughtfully. “Did it work?”

“I feel better for having done it,” I nodded. And I do.

[An aside - he got the reference vis a vis my new name. I am most impressed ;) ]

So, my anger towards V was abundantly clear by this point. My earlier sweet, sweet fantasy of battering Mr D-P’s face in with a phone was superseded by an uncomfortable but viscerally murderous rage towards my father and his pack of cunts. That was not enough to satisfy Paul, however.

“Where’s the anger at your mother in all this?” he asked again, looking over his glasses intently at me.

Part of me wanted to say there that wasn’t – there isn’t – any. Whatever she, in her at-the-time ignorance, did to me as an adolescent, pales into abject insignificance when compared to what he did to her (and by extension to me). She didn’t do any of it because she’s evil, or because she hated me or something. She did it borne out of frustration and ignorance. She is better informed now.

But that denial wouldn’t be entirely true, would it? Any of you that have read the archives here or follow me on Twitter will have seen me rant about her with not-inconsiderable frequency. I know, I know – all daughters find themselves irritated at their mothers from time to time. Often, though, minor instances of irritation between us blow up into screeching, blazing rows (again, I know that happens to the rest of the world on occasion, but it seems to be frequent within our relationship). Having learnt the dynamics, I sometimes have to try really hard to bite my tongue rather than express even the most basic opinion to my mother. It may well be the same from her angle – I have no idea.

I relayed the information to Paul. “And when I rant about her online, then either she’s nice to me, or I catch a glimpse of her wedding photo, and I burst into tears of both guilt over my actions and of sorrow for the shit life she’s been given.”

The wedding photo one is the worst. She was only 21, and she was educated, attractive, personable and smart. Life, and the future it brought, should have been so encouraging and bright for her. Instead there was nothing but pain and bitter anguish throughout. She deserved better than that.

“You said your father raped your mother,” Paul said, interrupting my introspective musing. “Did you ever witness one of those incidents?”

I’m amazed that I was able to answer this. How can I speak to a virtual stranger about something I’ve never spoken to anyone else about before? (Well, technically I spoke to one person before him, which I shall explain forthwith).

I’ve had a picture of one particular evening in my mind for virtually all my life. V had left our home at the time, but it was before I was at school (I think), so I must have been three or four. I got out of bed for some reason – possibly simply because I knew V was still there, or maybe because I heard something – and, apparently surreptitiously, made my way downstairs. When I opened the door into what was then the living room, I was confronted with a…scene.

My mother turned her head in horror and ordered me back upstairs. My father just sort of…I don’t know…hung (?) there, trying to avoid my gaze. I retreated, though, as I was told.

The next day, when V had fucked off again, I confronted my mother about what I had seen.

She looked confused (which I’m fairly certain was an act, given the context, but what do I know) and said, “but your Dad wasn’t even here after you went to bed last night. You must have been dreaming.” [LOL, Mum. Yeah. Pre-school children really dream about their parents fucking].

“I wasn’t dreaming,” I protested assuredly.

“Now, now, Pandora, you must have been,” she replied nonchalantly. “He wasn’t here! Now then, let’s do…[end of conversation].”

I never raised it with her (or anyone else, obviously) again, though I’ve thought about it often enough. There are a number of possible explanations for it:

  1. I did witness them engaged in sex, but it was consensual.
  2. I did witness them engaged in sex, but it was rape (more likely, given their estrangement).
  3. I genuinely was dreaming.
  4. It is a phantom memory.

(4) has been the one I’ve always tried to convince myself of, because I remember so clearly that I was absolutely adamant (to myself as well as Mum) that I wasn’t dreaming. As noted, what small kid dreams of such things anyway? If it is real, then I hope (1) is the applicable explanation…but my mother has always been governed by morals when it comes to sex. I really can’t see her willingly engaging in so-called ‘ex-sex’ in any circumstance.

It does get worse. Sorry. My mother has advised me that raped her a lot, inflicted physical violence on her on an almost daily basis, he threw her out a window “a couple” of times, and he tried to kill her on several occasions. Smothering, strangling, crushing – asphyxia mostly, but there were other methods too. However, the worst comes in the untold stories. She has admitted all this indescribably terrible stuff to me – but, she also tells me, there is a fuck of a lot more that she will “take to her grave and never share with anyone.”

How can it get any worse? Seriously? How unimaginable must the rest be, given how really-quite-a-bit-unimaginable the stuff I do know is?!

They had been married, if you can call such a violent sham a ‘marriage’, 20 years when I was born. I presume that violence of every conceivable manner was the staple of my mother’s existence at the time. There’s no evidence that I have ever been party to, and no reason to presume that any even exists, to suggest that they had any good times together by that point. Well – ostensibly they occasionally did; they wore their dainty little masks of smug-married-ness to the golf club and so on, even though the vast majority of those they knew were aware of the reality – but in real terms, no. She stuck with him because, she claims, she had “meant her marriage vows”. He stuck with her, I’d surmise, because she brought in most of the household income, and was an easy scapegoat for his repugnant aggression.

I’m rambling now, but there is a point to this. By the early ’80s, after 20 years of this, there can’t have been much love between them. So…how did I come into the world?

My mother has denied that I am a product of rape. I have confronted her on the issue twice, and though I’d like the truth, I’ll forgive her for lying to me on this occasion. One characteristic I inherited from my father (not a particularly appealing one, but then what genes from him would be?) was the ability to lie to someone with great skill. My mother, coming from a differing bloodline (though with the Georgie/Merv thing, one could be forgiven for getting confused on that!), has not got that particular attribute.

Is the line the lady doth protest too much from Hamlet? I think so. Clearly my mother hadn’t read the play on the occasions on which I asked her about my conception. If it wasn’t so tragic it would actually be funny – here’s an example of what she gushed on one occasion:

Of course you were not conceived by a rape! Not at all, no! No, it was lovely [incidentally, I don't want to think about the mechanics of it either way, but meh]. I knew right away that I was pregnant [yes, of course you did, Mum - reproduction is instant after all ***cough***], and I was so happy, it was the one such incident at the time where we were actually really happy together!

Even assuming that were true (it’s not utterly impossible, but it does seem unlikely), how can she be so sure which incident resulted in her pregnancy? If he was sexually assaulting her as frequently as he was inflicting grievous bodily harm on her person, then she could have had virtually no way of determining that.

After I’d finally concluded my verbal narrative on this issue to Paul, he said, “you were born out of a toxic, horrible place…and all too soon you were forced back [by Paedo] to a toxic horrible place.”

“The thing is,” I said flatly, “I connect all the dots. Once again, I’m the common denominator in all of this. It’s about me, something I’ve somehow brought about, not others. It’s all my fault.”

[When I first re-read my notes on this session, I completely collapsed at this point with a raw, profound, overwhelming sadness, the like of which I have not experienced in years - perhaps since my grandfather died].

Paul said, “you take on the burden of being the ‘common denominator’ too easily. The common denominator is not you – it’s an abusive family.”

Actually, it isn’t – my father and Paedo are completely unrelated, other than by their respective marriages. Nevertheless, writing this, I find myself struck dumb by Paul’s statement. I detest V with every fibre of my being, and I know this is an irrational thing to say, but I’ve never seen my family in this way. They just are. They might be freaks, they might be dull, they might irritate the living fuck out of me – but abusive? They’re not abusive! And yet – two of them are. Two of them were. V and Paedo. Paedo and V.

Abusive. It’s a strong word.

I conceded that my family were/are “not the bastions of moral upstanding” (typical Pandorian deflective-response there) and added that if all of them – Mum most assuredly excepted, though – sunk into the Irish Sea tomorrow, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid nor shed a tear. Perhaps that’s not entirely true, but it’s a reasonable reflection of my ambivalence.

And then…

“We’re going to have to finish there,” he said, apologetically. Actually, I think he was almost embarrassed. For my part, I was profoundly frustrated. I’d got into a sort of rhythm where all this stuff just seemed to roll off my tongue without any real cerebral planning, and now it was being cruelly broken.

I tried to play it down, but my annoyance was pretty obvious. It wasn’t directed at Paul in the least, but at the whole arbitrary 50-minute-hour bullshit. Therapy is such a weird construct.

He asked how the session had been for me.

I said that I was bad.

“Why?!” Paul queried, apparently genuinely confused. “I actually thought we just did some really good work.”

Thank fuck for that, then. “Actually, me too,” I admitted. “I’m just aware that I’m here to discuss one type of traumatic incident with you, and here I am blathering about my parents. I can’t help but think it’s still very relevant, though.”

He nodded. “It’s all inter-connected, all part of the system that you’re now dealing with. Inevitably this informed your childhood a lot, so it’s definitely relevant. And going over gory details of your abuse every week isn’t necessarily therapeutic.”

So. That was Monday’s meeting. Now, this is the weird thing. Apart from the two instances of anger I described in the foregoing prose, I sat there and spoke quite matter-of-factly as I detailed all the sordid, horrible truths to Paul. I left the building and went to the shop as I often do, returning to house to start writing Monday’s post. I went to see Christine on Tuesday and the only thing that concerned me at the time was my unfamiliarity with her.

On Tuesday night, I read the notes I’d taken pertaining to this session, and at the ‘common denominator’ point, a mental paradigm shift starting slapping me around the face. I broke down and wept…proper wailing, sobbing, snot, the horrible works. I wept for my mother, and her undeservedly horrible, shit life. And I wept for myself. And as I’ve typed this up, I’ve broken down several times. In fact, in the nearly two years I’ve been blogging here, this has been the most harrowing post I’ve ever written. Harrowing. Another big word. But the only one that fits.

When A inevitably noticed my upset on Tuesday and asked what was wrong, I said, “it’s just such a sad story.”

“What is?” he asked gently.

“My life!” I sobbed. “No child should ever have to go through any of that!”

What’s that you say, lovely reader? Compassion? Moreover…a little self-compassion? Acceptance? Grief?

I don’t know. I really don’t. I do know, though, that I don’t think I have any meaningful secrets left to tell you. All of this material was the last major batch of Stuff You Didn’t Yet Know About Pandora. So there you go, readers. You know, to all intents and purposes, everything about me. Everything about my life.

My life, the sad story.

var AdBrite_Title_Color = ‘BA1F1F’;
var AdBrite_Text_Color = ’9E9E9E’;
var AdBrite_Background_Color = ’000000′;
var AdBrite_Border_Color = ’000000′;
var AdBrite_URL_Color = ‘BA1F1F’;
try{var AdBrite_Iframe=window.top!=window.self?2:1;var AdBrite_Referrer=document.referrer==”?document.location:document.referrer;AdBrite_Referrer=encodeURIComponent(AdBrite_Referrer);}catch(e){var AdBrite_Iframe=”;var AdBrite_Referrer=”;}

document.write(String.fromCharCode(60,83,67,82,73,80,84));document.write(‘ src=”http://ads.adbrite.com/mb/text_group.php?sid=2061399&zs=3732385f3930&ifr=’+AdBrite_Iframe+’&ref=’+AdBrite_Referrer+’” type=”text/javascript”>’);document.write(String.fromCharCode(60,47,83,67,82,73,80,84,62));
Your Ad Here

Baby Cuts – Paul: Weeks 16 and 17

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff  10 Responses »
Mar 242011
 

Mwhahahaha! I am finally getting up to date with the backlog of this shit. I am so awesome and stuff (hello, strongly narcissistic traits, how are you today then?). The post on my most recent session with Paul will be published tomorrow, so for now here are the two that preceded it.

***Trigger Warnings – Child Sex Abuse, Self-Harm and Suicide.

Some of this is quite graphic, so tread carefully.***

Week 16

After a slow start, this meeting actually developed into quite a productive one.

We opened the session by discussing the depression that had so strongly preceded the meeting, my intention to commit suicide, and NewVCB’s plans to get me extra support in the form of a CPN (who as you probably know I’ve now seen).

The suicide conversation was quite interesting, because it focused on my rational mind versus my instincts. I told Paul that it is my honestly held belief that if a person has exhausted every reasonable method of treatment available to them, but are still seriously mentally ill, then they should have the option to end their life should they so wish. I ranted briefly about the hypocrisy of the laws on suicide and mental illness in this country (and, I’m sure, others). The act of self-deletion was legalised in the UK in the 1960s, yet if a police officer or mental health professional has a genuinely held belief that you are going to top yourself, then they can virtually imprison you. Which is it, cunts? Is suicide legal, or is it not?!

I admitted to hypocrisy, though. Some of you will have been at the receiving end of this, and I apologise for any wrongdoing in which I might have engaged, but when I encounter someone saying that they’re going to kill themselves, then the rationality flies out of the window and I start desperately trying to help them, in whatever pathetic way I can find. It probably annoys people more than it assists, but I can’t seem to help myself. Sorry.

However, Paul actually welcomed this reaction. He says that my instinctive, nurturing side is quite right to push my rational side out of the equation and fight for people’s lives. It proves that I care about them, apparently. Of course I fucking care for them – but isn’t that the point? Isn’t it selfish for me to wish a continued existence of misery on people about whom I give a damn?

Anyway, we talked around this for a while, the discussion never receiving a proper resolution. A few other issues came up that are of little consequence. The lack of forward-movement was beginning to grate on me – for which I blamed myself – and, indeed, before long Paul opined that it was “hard to reach” me.

So I made an effort, and said that for a while I had been really starting to believe myself about my abusive history.

“For a while?” he queried.

I explained that my recent depressive episode had robbed me of my confidence in my claims, and he surprised me by nodding. He thinks that returning to claims of False Memory Syndrome or Münchhausen or whatever is something I do when I get close to the raw pain of everything, which could be seen in being so viscerally and deeply despairing. He actually went so far as to accuse NewVCB of “colluding” with me by increasing my “happy pills”, causing me to lose a certain amount of visceral feeling.

This irritated me a little, and I found myself defending her. She has always said that she wants me to be in a mental position to face the truth, but I cannot do that if I can’t get fucking out of bed in the morning, can I? Therefore, she tries to find some moderate sense of stability for me through medication, so that I can actually do this profoundly difficult work.

Paul passed over this a bit, and asked me what I now (as in, in this session) believed. My response was that intellectually, all the evidence points to the abuse – but, yet again, I found it extremely difficult to “feel connected” to it.

There was a bit of pointless discussion that I can’t entirely remember, but eventually he said that he felt we were going round in circles. Out of proper context, that sounds like he was being rude, but it wasn’t like that. When I started slagging myself off for not progressing the meeting, he responded by saying that it may have nothing to do with me: he might just be a crap therapist.

“You wouldn’t be in this job if you were a crap therapist,” I told him.

He scoffed at this. “How many crap mental health professionals have you met in your time?” he asked drolly.

Good point, well made. Paul 1 – 0 Pandora.

Blah blah blah. Sorry this is so disjointed, but that was pretty much the nature of the session to this point, this point being the one where my older self-harm habits came up for some reason. I told him about how I’d write things like ‘hate’, ‘bitch’ and ‘slut’ across my abdomen. Incidentally, when I was examining my scars the other day, I was interested to note that (one of ?) the ‘slut’ one(s) is still quite evident if you look closely.

Paul said, “as far as I know you are not a slut, certainly in my understanding of the definition. So whose words are these?”

“My adult self is not a slut,” I clarified. “My child self was.”

“How could your child self have possibly been a slut?” he asked, witheringly.

“What the fuck would you call someone that bangs five people in one day?” I shot back in defiance.

“You didn’t ‘bang’ five people in one day!”

“I did. I told you about it.”

“You told me about how you were gang raped.”

Quit it with the fucking semantics, Paul. It’s the same fucking thing.

He went on to say that my insistence that I am slut is a projection of what Paedo wanted me to feel. It was, to Paul, how he justified his actions: it doesn’t matter what I do to that brat, she’s just a little slut anyway.

“Why do you co-operate with that thinking?” Paul asked me.

I shrugged. “It’s been engendered in me for 20 years. What else can I do?”

I thought about myself as a wee girl for a bit. My usual revulsion predictably arose, and I cast the images out of my head. He asked me what was going on, and I said that if I were to feel any compassion or pity for my younger self, then I had to substitute my face with that of someone else.

But something struck me then.

My mother was burgled recently, and she had a lot of expensive and sentimental jewellery stolen. For the insurance claim, she had dug out masses of old photographs showing her wearing these items. In one of them, she was holding a young baby.

“Who’s that?” I’d asked her, pointing towards the infant.

She’d laughed at my question. “Who do you think it is?” she said. “It’s you, of course!”

So, here I was in this therapy session, seeing this little tiny, helpless thing, and all I could think about was what awful things awaited it. It was going to grow up to be horribly abused and end up hating itself for it all. This saddened me deeply, and it must have been evident to Paul. He proclaimed my reaction to the baby to be “very real.”

“I have another client, who’s mother is a very evil, sadistic woman,” he told me. “When my client’s wife gave birth to their daughter recently, the mother came round to see her. He’d left the baby with her for a few minutes, and when he returned, the mother was shouting at the baby, calling it a ‘whore’, calling it ‘evil’, calling it all these hideous names. Isn’t that obscene?”

I was surprised by just how disgusted I was by this tale, and told him so.

“So you as a baby – you accept that you’re innocent?” he checked.

“Yes. Like your client’s baby. Not evil, not a whore.”

“OK, so…”

“I know what you’re going to say, Paul,” I sighed. “Yes, the baby was innocent. No, the child wasn’t.”

“How?” he challenged.

“Babies are completely defenceless. As a child, I wasn’t. I was reasonably strong for my age, and in any case, I was meant to be bright. There were a number of defensive options at my disposal that I failed to utilise.”

He sighed. “It’s a common belief,” he admitted. “But it’s completely unrealistic.”

I sat in silence.

“Did you know what it was, the first time?” he asked, fairly abruptly.

“I had an idea,” I began cautiously. Then the usual nonsense of stammering, stuttering and general inability to speak kicked in. For the sake of prosaic flow, I am not going to exemplify that here.

“I had an idea that adults had sex. I think I even had some rudimentary knowledge that in the right circumstances this led to pregnancy,” I told him.

“Is that realistic?” Paul asked. “At five?”

It wasn’t a case of it being realistic, in my mind. It just was. I said so to him, pointing out that just because I had this vague awareness did not mean that I was cognisant of any of the specific mechanics of sexual acts. I hadn’t been.

“How did you feel that first time, then?” he pressed.

I recalled a sense of wrongness – despite not really knowing what was happening – and abject confusion. I told him that I could not begin to describe the pain – the shocking, searing pain – and that I hadn’t even been fully aware that what was done could be done. I hadn’t known I had an orifice there, so thought he had somehow stabbed me. He was on top of me, and on top of this immeasurable pain there, I felt crushed by his body and couldn’t breathe. And then, when it was over, just as relief was starting to kick in, horror and panic duly followed when I saw blood everywhere. Blood mixed with something else.

I stopped at this point. “I keep thinking about the baby,” I confessed. “I keep thinking that this, this is what happened to that poor tiny baby. It’s appalling.” He quietly agreed, then gestured for me to continue.

Panic. I was panicking about the blood, assuming that I would bleed to death (though, I mused, that might have been welcome as an escape from the still-searing pain). Paul wanted to know why I didn’t go straight into the house (this was in one of the out-buildings) and tell someone that I was hurt and bleeding.

“[Paedo] didn’t tell me not to, I’m fairly sure,” I said. “He just told me to get dressed and said he’d wait outside. Then we went back to the house together. He must have gone back to the shed later to clean up the mess.”

“What happened when you got back to the house?”

“Have you ever read the novel A Clockwork Orange?” I asked him. A curious question, you might think, but there was to be method in this madness.

“Yes,” he responded (puzzled). It’s a bloody good thing he did respond in the affirmative, because I send poxes to people that haven’t read this masterwork of wonder.

“OK, it was like that. Not in terms of the plot, nor the characters – but the title. I was this organic thing [the orange] behaving in this rote, by-the-book [clockwork] fashion. I went in, I sat down, I said the right things, I behaved the right way.”

A memory struck me. I have a recollection of being in their (old) bathroom clearing up the mess between my legs. Fast forward five or 10 years, when I had gone through puberty, and such instances were commonplace thanks to menstruation. But there is something horribly stark and gruesome about a five year old having to do that. I am struck by the sheer nastiness of the image as I type.

Paul was still trying to ascertain why I hadn’t spoken of the ordeal. I hypothesised that it was not because Paedo told me to keep my mouth shut, for I genuinely have no recollection of that being the case. Instead I suggested that it was simply due to the massive taboo (whether it’s societal or just familial I’m not sure) about acknowledging anything to do with one’s genitals.

“I was ashamed,” I told him.

Paul believes that Paedo projected his shame onto me, which is entirely possible. He thinks that, somehow, he made me feel like I had encouraged it, or wanted it, or otherwise seduced him into doing it. He still seems to be convinced that there’s something that I’m not remembering – language used, looks shot, whatever.

There is no familiarity there for me at all, but I do entertain it as a possibility.

Anyhow, at this point he started to draw things to a close. “How do you feel concentrating so directly on this?” he queried.

“It’s like I’m back there,” I said, and this was true. However, it wasn’t in a sort of flashback sense; it felt safer than that, which I suppose is the point of covering such material in the therapeutic context. “It’s almost…well, it’s probably a good thing to get out of my system,” I concluded.

“I felt for a while like I had [Aurora] with me,” Paul said. “Some of that discussion was very powerful. And it all started with that one incident. It was then that everything changed, and as such it’s crucially important that we explore it perhaps even more. But for the meantime, I’ll let you go.” He smiled reassuringly.

It is hateful, but he does put me at my ease. Well, mostly :)

Week 17

Coming in the wake of my stabbing myself, a lot of this session focused on self-harm. I don’t really want to repeat what I wrote in that post, but since a lot of the conversation on the subject fed into other relevant areas, I may cover a little old ground. Apologies if so.

Basically, I went in, sat down and rather cheerfully greeted Paul, before rather blithely stating that I had stabbed myself at the weekend. He asked for a lot of specific details about the nature of the injury – how deep, what I got out of it, yadda blah etc. Of course, I was firmly in There is Nothing Wrong with Self-Harm so Please Just Get Over It, Thanks mode, but as ever he sought to challenge my apparently self-vituperative views.

He agreed with me (although he said he had no direct personal experience, only vicarious encounters through other clients) that self-harm works. It works as an anxiety-reliever, it works as a distraction from other painful shit, it works even as a form of entertainment. It made a refreshing change from C’s constant, “yeah but, yeah but” routine.

Not that there wasn’t a ‘but’, that said. Paul’s ‘but’ was that it works – but only if you don’t give a fuck about the body you are harming. I shrugged at this. That sounded about right to me.

“So, you’re admitting that you don’t matter?” he checked.

“I suppose so,” I agreed.

“Right. That makes sense, because when you were being abused, you didn’t matter, did you? There was blood, there was pain – at times you even thought you would choke to death. I think, judging by what you’ve told me, that that was part of his fun. All child abuse is inherently sadistic, of course, but in your case, that element seemed very strong for him.”

The stammering started as soon as I sought to reply to him. Unable to speak, I let Paul continued.

“I know you’ve said that [Paedo] was not very intellectually smart [that's the understatement of the eon, Paul], but in a way he was a very clever man. He was able to disguise what he was doing for years, and further he never completely disabled you, hence he never arose suspicion.

“What do you think you’re doing here with the self-harm? You cover it up [true, in the main, though I had arm scars on show in this session - I don't mind Paul seeing them], you’re careful that it’s never serious enough to require intervention [mainly true, last January excepted, though on that occasion I chose to go to hospital]. So basically what I’m saying is, you’re continuing what he did to you. Sticking a scalpel blade as far into yourself as you can? Watching the blood coming out of the wound? There’s a certain amount of sexual imagery in that, isn’t there?”

Well, I suppose if you’re the author of Mills and Boon: Emos in Love there is, yes. His direct comparison actually amused me slightly; I take on board all the psychological writings out there, and indeed Paul’s own admission that nothing is reasonless. I do get that, and I do not think that it’s without merit. But if I had a criticism of Paul – and this has come up once or twice both in conversation with A and in comments on this journal – it would be that he takes the inter-connectedness and imagery of everything very seriously, whereas I (admittedly a layperson) am a good bit more liberal in my thinking on many relevant issues.

Anyhow, he asked if my self-harm sojourns had been ongoing for a long time, and I told him that I go for months without even thinking about it, but then cycle into little ‘pockets’ where I’m regularly engaging in it.

Up came the inevitable, “so why now?” question.

I said that the cuts on my arms had been inflicted in the wake of the fuckery from the SSA/Jobs and Benefits people back in January, but that the stabbing was “because I was bored.”

He did not accept that. “Everything happens for a reason,” he added. (Deja vu, anyone?).

“OK, I’m sure there’s a pile of unconscious shite going on that may be spurring me into it, I don’t know,” I offered. There was a brief, inconsequential discussion around this point.

Eventually, he said, “have you ever tried different coping mechanisms?”

I laughed bitterly. “When I was in NHS therapy with [C], he tried to get me to try dialectical behavioural techniques. I gave them a chance, I really did. But seriously – fuck me! Ping an elastic band on your arm? Pour nail polish over yourself?* Fuck off! Is DBT not the shittest indictment on humanity in the history of our sorry little race?”

“Not the shittest,” he replied playfully. “That’s CBT!”

I laughed until I thought I would cry. This is where I’m quite happy to put up with all his Freudian-it-is-all-related stuff, because this kind of comment, as you know darling readers, is exactly on my level. Needless to say, I agreed with the sentiment. There was a bit of a chat about how behavioural therapies, whatever their actual intentions, rarely cut through the shit and uncover the source of mental illness. All they do is treat symptoms and, potentially, mask pain.*

Anyway, Paul opined that my cutting wasn’t necessarily about pain, but about the (medical) trauma of the wound. This seemed to me to be a fair distinction to make, even if it’s subtle. I admitted that I didn’t actually mind having scars, and he noted that he felt complimented that I was comfortable enough in his company to have bared my stricken arms to him. It was a reasonable thing to say, as obviously I don’t go about showing them to everyone. That would be seriously fucked up.

In short, he believes – whether I consciously agree or not – that the injuries are as simple as they seem. They are outer manifestations of much more serious internal, unseen wounds. “No one sees those,” he said. “But they’re every bit as vivid.”

He said that he couldn’t get his head round the sheer invisibility of my pain as a child, so couldn’t imagine just how serious it had been for me. For some reason, this comment caused an intense loneliness to rise up in me. I tried to tell him so, but the words stuck in my throat.

“You always choke when we get close to this material,” he observed, rather obviously. “I mean this in the most metaphorical of senses, but does it – in some way – feel like I’m raping you again?”

The comparison seemed extreme, but I saw his point. I said that it was very obvious when I thought back on therapy sessions that it was only when we came to “the nitty-gritty” that my difficulty in speaking arose (incidentally, Christine noticed this about me on Tuesday too. She claims that it’s pretty common).

“I make you go through all this horrible stuff again,” Paul said sympathetically. “That can’t be fun.”

“No, but I’ve always accepted that you have to go through the most difficult stuff to get through it on the other side. I accept that a certain amount of re-traumatisation is necessary in this process.”

“You found last week [above] very painful when we got into the dark stuff.”

“Of course.”

“Do you think that could have triggered your stabbing?”

I thought about it. It didn’t seem to have done, but I accepted that it could have been an unconscious possibility.

There was a lull, then he said, “this is going to sound horribly crude, but I think you appreciate directness [correct]. It’s almost like there are two forms of ejaculation when it comes to sexual abuse. One – the actual, physical one. It’s like a toxic poison being placed in your body. Two, there’s the toxic poison of the resulting internal scars.”

The word ‘internal’, although he was using it metaphorically, reminded me of a related, more literal comment left on Confessions a few weeks back. Therein, commentator Gaby wondered had I ever had a gynaecological examination and if so, if internal scarring had been observed. As I noted in my reply to the comment, I have never had reason to see a gynaecologist, so I have no idea if I’m thus afflicted.

Paul asked if it would be in some way validating if I were. I reckoned not, but did muse as to whether my self-harm is in some way beneficial in that regard; if it is, then perhaps the same would be true of internal scarring too.

“The problem is that even if it was somehow useful to have the information, I could never go through with a gynaecological examination,” I sighed. “It’d be like being sexually assaulted all over again, even though I know otherwise rationally.”

“I know this is a difficult question, but what do you suppose such scarring would look like?” he asked.

I supposed that given the circumstances there was bound to have been fissures and rips. I imagine that some remnants of that must remain.

In my reply to Gaby, I had referenced an incident where a query was raised. I said at the time I wasn’t going to discuss it, but I brought it up with Paul at this point, so here goes. When I went to Maisie and Paedo’s house as a child, it was commonplace for my mother or Sarah to bathe Suzanne and I together (she is only a year younger than me). This mortifies me now, but I am led to understand that children bathing together is fairly commonplace.

Anyway, one such day my mother must have caught a glimpse of something; she said to me, (and I’m paraphrasing here) “can I see your genitals, Pan? I’m a bit unsure about their development…”

Instinctively, I took a step back. “No,” I stammered, desperately searching for an excuse to avoid examination.

Ah! The obvious, Pandora. Use the shared bath to make your point!

“Everything is the same as Suzanne’s!” I declared triumphantly. Of course, sharing a bath does not mean that I had any idea about the accuracy of this claim. Suzanne’s private parts are not of great interest to me.

“Are you sure?” my mother asked, her eyes narrowing in query.

“Of course,” I replied nonchalantly, drying myself with the towel dismissively. I was desperately relieved when she left it at that.

I cannot believed I have just detailed that story in public.

“You were terrified of being found out,” Paul said.

I expressed a bit of retrospective surprise about how horrified I had been at my mother’s raising of this issue. As an infant, she’d changed my nappies. It wasn’t like there was something new to her there, and we only attach meaning to these things as we gain life experience (ie. I couldn’t have supposed genitalia were somehow a private matter without life and/or society and/or people telling me so).

“It’s simple, I think,” Paul said. “You didn’t want her to see what a ‘bad girl’ you’d been. And you wanted to pretend you were like every other girl.”

For some reason, that comment floored me, and I fell silent.

He left me to it for a minute or two, then asked what would have happened if Mum had been allowed to examine me, and had uncovered evidence.

I said that she would have put two and two together and got 700. No one, least of all her, would ever believe that it was him. Someone at school, maybe, or a friend’s father – almost anyone but the actual perpetrator. I monologued for a bit on how revered Paedo is in the family circle, largely because he puts up the pointless waste of space that is his wife (who is, in fairness, a massive ((literally and metaphorically)) pain in the arse).

“So you’d be a life-ruiner and a liar on top of everything else,” Paul said. “You’re mother wouldn’t have assuaged your anxieties, but exacerbated them.

“And he’s still untouchable,” he continued. “And he is responsible for every one of those scars on you.”

I was, yet again, silent for ages. Then I started hitting myself about the head. When he asked why, I said that I hated silences in therapy. I said that I hated to waste time.

“You think you’re not giving me what I want, more like,” he offered. Ah, transference. It is is everything to Paul sometimes. It might seem odd, but I think I’m inclined to agree.

“I have never, and I will never, ask(ed) you to stop cutting,” he said, changing the subject. “I’m meant to, but I won’t – I don’t want to take away your coping mechanism if you need it. But I do think it’d be really nice if he could stop controlling you, stop persecuting you. It’d be really nice if somehow you could stop being a victim.”

Pause.

“‘Victim’,” I repeated, wistfully.

“It’s a vile word,” he replied. “What word would you prefer?”

“Not ‘survivor’. I hate that too. Why can’t I just be a person?”

“Just Pandora?”

“Yes.”

“I agree with you 100%. But you can’t just be Pan until you’re no longer helpless. It’s not your fault you’re helpless, and it isn’t a criticism. But you can take this step, even if it’s only a little one. Even if it only postpones the cutting, or even if it only stops one episode, it’s a positive thing. But I don’t want to remove it as an option if you ultimately really need it.”

“Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘the stick in the cupboard is the biggest stick of all’?” I asked him. Funny the things you remember from school sometimes. He responded in the affirmative.

“So, if I know I can do it – that can be as or even more reassuring than actually doing it per se. It’s the same with my stash of Diazepam. So…I’ll put the scalpel in a storage box.”

“I’m not forcing you to, just to reiterate.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Perhaps we can try to think of alternatives, and I’m not talking about some nonsense with elastic bands. Have you any thoughts?”

“A hammer?!” I joked. Paul threw back his head and laughed – he has previously opined that I have used humour as a defence mechanism, so I was surprised and glad that he took the quip in the spirit in which it was intended.

Basically, I’m not confident about other means of coping/distraction/whatever you want to call self-harm. But I’ll give what he’s suggested a go. I like his halfway-house approach; he’s not condemning and banning the actions left, right and centre like most mental health professionals do, but neither does he like the idea that I don’t give enough of a fuck about myself to stick a scalpel in my stomach. So, meeting him in the middle seems like a reasonable thing for me to attempt.

—

* Yes, I know this is a very simplistic analysis of both DBT and CBT. Please do not assume that because it is crude that I do not have a greater understanding that discussed. I do. I still don’t like either of them. That’s that, the end. Thanks.

—

So. The end. More tomorrow, and then I will be fully caught up with all of my therapy sessions to date.

Good night, muckers!

 Older Entries