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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*throws toys out of pram*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A + B + C = A familial apocalypse.

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

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

What to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

*** TRIGGER WARNING ***

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

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

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

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

“Well and contented” would be a laughably optimistic description of my current physical and mental status, at least in some ways – but we’ll start with the good things, shall we?  I’ve had the pleasure these last few days of connecting and re-connecting with friends whilst I was on a short break.

TEH GOOD STUFFZ

I have already mentioned K on this blog; it was with great pleasure that A and I saw her (again, in my case) on Monday night, along with her boyfriend N.  We spent several hours discussing BPD, cats, our obsessive attachments to our respective therapists, K and N’s work (both together and independent of one another), the sheer inadequacy of mental health services on the NHS, politics, how K’s and my BPD impacts on N and A, and general life.

The day prior to that A and I met Annie for the first time.  I would have called her ‘A’, but that would seriously confuse issues!  Annie and I have known each other online for quite a few months now so it was great to finally meet her.  We spent a great afternoon chatting about her kids, her pets, our pets, mentalism (Annie has bipolar disorder; her aunt to whom she is close also does, as well as possible BPD), Doctor Who (does anyone else think Matt Smith is fucking awesome?  Pertwee and Baker are still my favourites, but Smith is already vying for third place with McCoy) and Postman Pat (don’t ask).

I consider myself a highly fortunate person to have met such wonderful folks online such as these two.  And I’m meeting CVM next month too.  And then there’s all the lovelies I haven’t met, primarily but not exclusively from Twitter.  <3 you all.

TEH SHITE STUFFZ

Following on from that point, last week a situation emerged wherein the support of such people as aforementioned was so profoundly welcomed.  As soon as I made others aware of the problem emerging, I received lots of supportive comments, tweets and emails, for which I am eternally grateful.

It made one thing brutally clear to me: this blog, and the people I’ve met through it in one way or another, mean more to me than nearly all of my entire family.  Family-orientated individuals may find that an outrageous and utterly callous statement, but I don’t care.  It’s true.

What happened was entirely my own fault.  I didn’t do anything consciously if that in any way mitigates my actions, but I was remiss – even reckless – in my accidental use of this online persona, one that is meant to be almost entirely disconnected from my offline one.

I had a couple of pictures on my iPhone that I wanted to share with my mother, so I simply emailed them to her using the built-in mechanism on the phone.  For those of you unfamiliar with the device, it lets you send photographs without the need to actually open your email client.  Unbeknownst to me, though, when you do this, it defaults to a particular email address of which I have three.

If you don’t know already, you can guess the rest.  When I checked my emails the next day I was horrified beyond description to see a response from my mother to the aforementioned email in my serialinsomniac.com accoount.  F.U.C.K.

A and I were due to head away for a few days that day, but I decided to call with my mother under the pretence that I needed to borrow something.  The plan was to get A to distract her whilst I went in to the PC and permanently deleted the email from her computer.  She’s not especially technical, so we reckoned we could just blame its absence (if she even queried it) on the fact that Microsoft is a pile of steaming horse manure (I’m a Linux girl ).

It was straightforward to accomplish this mission, and for a few minutes A and I breathed a mutual sigh of relief.  As if on cue, though, my mother then declared that she had forwarded the email on – to two of my cousins in the McFaul (McF) dynasty.

FF UU CC KK ad infinitum

This rendered the matter completely out of my hands.  Fuck fuck fuck.  I wasn’t so worried about one of the recipients – her being an internet novice even more than my mother – but the second person would have the potential lack of stupidity to Google the term ‘serial insomniac’ had she noticed it or cared about its relation to me.

So, my first instinct was to password the entire blog, as you can do with blogs hosted at wordpress.com (as I used to be).  However, since I now run the blog myself, this option does not exist; I assume that WP’s supposition is that you would not pay for a domain and hosting if you didn’t want people to read that which was on the domain and hosting.  Instead I looked for a plug-in (a third party application that adds further functionality to WP) that would permit passwording of the entire site, found one, and installed it straightaway.  A and I left to head to our destination, feeling that the problem was temporarily solved; all my regular readers could visit essentially as normal, random voyeurs who might be my family could not.

When I arrived I was distraught to note that the blog was totally inaccessible; the plug-in had completely fucked it up.  It wouldn’t allow you to get to a page where you could enter the password and I couldn’t even get into the administrative pages, so I couldn’t delete the damn thing.  It was stuck on an endless loop of blank-screeniness.  My original concern of having been ‘found’ was replaced with a new one – that of having lost everything.

The first few hours of our break were therefore devoted to looking for a wireless network so as A could download an iPhone FTP program and access the site directly, independently of WordPress.  I was crawling up the walls with crazy.  I don’t know how many words I’ve written during my time on this blog, but I have something like 125 posts – of up to 8,000 words each (as seen here) – chronicling, so far, one of the most difficult years of my life.  Not to mention over a thousand comments of wonderful feedback and support.

In those few hours I made the realisation that I cared more about the preservation of the blog than I did about the potential discovery of it by my family.  If all hell broke loose – well, it just did.  I didn’t (and don’t) want it to, but that is actually preferable to being silenced or hidden.

The long and the short of the story is that Lovely A rescued the blog, and I password-protected certain key posts rather than the entire thing (I’ve since removed all passwording except the original four and the family tree).  Over the next few days, I monitored closely search terms that were getting here (after initially revoking search engine access, I later asked myself why the bloody hell I should do so.  Those few days have adversely affected my stats, but onwards and upwards, eh?) and what posts were being read, to see if there were any suspect or anomalous referrals.

TEH OUTCOMEZ

In my view, some of the search terms leading here and some of the reading patterns were kind of unusual.  Disproportionate numbers seemed to be searching for “serialinsomniac.com” or “serialinsomniac”, rather than “serial insomniac” – in others words, it looked to me like someone was Googling the actual URL rather than the blog name (as if having seen the URL in an email).  This isn’t unknown in the past, but it’s not been terribly common.  In all probability, I’m being over-sensitive, but one never knows.

I’ve started making an effort to change some names.  You can see some of the key ones on this page, and others are already changed in the archives which you can look at it if you need context.  I’m abandoning many of the old initials completely so if you need clarification on who a new name refers to, you’ll need to contact me.  I’ll try to add to the ‘Emsemble’ or family tree page with names that weren’t previously included as soon as I can.

I’m also monitoring the geographical location of people finding their way here.  I’d like to assure you that if you are outside a very tiny geographical triangle of Northern Ireland that I will pay no attention whatsoever to where you are, what your IP is, etc – so normal, genuine readers should not feel discouraged from reading.  Please, please don’t stop reading and commenting!

TEH AFTERMATHZ

To the Family:  If you’re from the McFaul family (or any other part of it for that matter), with the IP tracking site I will see you and I will block your IP addresses, rendering you unable to access this website.  I don’t care if I have to pay a fortune to maintain that; you have no place here.

If you are concerned that you recognise yourself, then grow the fuck up.  Everything has been, and will continue to be, anonymised.  The lengths that I have gone to to protect you should be appreciated, not condemned.  And if you don’t want to become aware of matters about which I write then don’t fucking read what I write.  Think I’m lying about Paedo?  I don’t give a shit; what I’ve had to go through thouroughly and utterly trumps any disgust you may feel at what I’ve revealed.  Think I’m being unreasonable about how manipulate and oppressive Paedo’s missus is?  Then you’re deluding yourselves.

In short, I won’t go into a closest for you people, and I don’t care if you don’t like it.  Try and read if you want to, but I will stop you; I’m not going to be in the position where I have to try and pay lip service to you here, on my own fucking diary, as well as in ‘real life’.  This journal is my pride and joy, my own little corner to bitch and whine with impunity about my illnesses, to rant and cry about what all of my family have done to me at various points in my life, to explore the weird dynamics of therapy.  And everything else in between.  And it’s staying as it is.

To everyone else:  So I’ve joined the ranks of mentalist bloggers that have been found by real life.  I know I’m in a long-line of such people…how did you handle it?

There’s a good bit more to report than that which has been detailed, mainly in reference to the aftermath of recent discussions with C, but I’ll leave that for another post.

I’ve been absolutely shite at replying to comments, emails and even tweets recently.  I am genuinely sorry for this, and hope you don’t think it means I value each and every one of you less, because I love you people.  I do.  I know I haven’t met most of you, and I don’t even know most of your ‘real’ identities – but it doesn’t matter.  Your feedback, empathy, advice and wonderful support has meant so much to me over the last 11 and a half months.  Here’s to the next 11 and a half years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post shouldn’t be overly detailed, as a lot of it was repetitive bullshit regarding the annoyances of the previous week. Nevertheless, here we go.

Upon leaving C’s company the previous week, we had agreed that we would use week 35, the last week before a break of three weeks owing to Christmas, as a session to discuss how I would manage the so-called festive season.  In reality, that bit ended up taking approximately five minutes at the end, and although it was ever so slightly more helpful than some of the nonsense he’s come off with at other breaks (“breathe!”), it was still not entirely helpful.  But then again, he’s not my guardian, is he?  Much as I would like it that way.

I say we were flogging a dead horse because the majority of the discussion centred around the same crap we had discussed over the previous week (leave a comment or get in touch if you need the password) and the week before that, ie. my anger and distress about his decision to cut short my treatment, and my general disgust about the NHS’s abject failure to adequately treat me since I first sought help for my mental health problems.  I do understand that in some ways maybe C sees exploring my reactions to this as a form of projection or transference, and maybe in some ways it is: perhaps I feel so rejected and aggrieved because that’s how I was meant to feel about my father, uncle, ex, etc etc.

However, it endlessly frustrates me that I cannot just simply be angry because I have been so horribly fucked about by the health service.  Again, in this session, C reiterated that the 24 week limit (starting from tomorrow) was his decision; he said he was “not a robot” controlled by the NHS.

It completely contradicts all the stuff he says about my right to be annoyed and about how BPD should really be treated, and we went round and round in circles on how I could not reconcile his two contrasting views, and about how he either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain it properly.

I also, having decided as a result of the preceding week that he hated me, went to find out whether or not this was indeed the case.

I said, “if I ask you a question, will you promise not to answer with a question?”

He shifted uncomfortably, then admitted that he was unsure as to whether or not this was achievable.

I asked him anyway, on the proviso that if I thought he was “blagging” his way through his answer I would pull him up on it.

He did come off with the form bullshit such as, “why is it important for you to know that?” and whatnot, but I was pleased when he finally admitted that he too had found the preceding week “frustrating”.  So he is a human after all!

He said that I had been “very angry” with him, which I thought was unfair.  I told him that I genuinely hadn’t been angry with him, merely the system, until he confessed to having been the one that decided on the time limit.

“But you were angry with me then,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” I said.  “You had seemed so supportive of me prior to that; you agreed that my situation was wholly unfair.  Then you completely contradicted that by admitting to this arbitrary limit crap.”

And so back we went to flagellating that deceased equine.  More questioning demands from me, more bullet-dodging from him, no progress from either of us.

He had asked me in week 34 to seriously consider whether or not to continue with therapy, as I “had” to agree to the time limit as part of the contract (which strikes me as being quite unreasonable, as contracts are meant to be negotiated rather than forced in this type of setting).  Apparently if I don’t accept the limit, I cannot continue treatment.

“On that note,” I told him, “I am prepared to accept it, but only if you accept – because this works both ways – that I am going to fight it.”

He asked what I meant by ‘fighting’ it, prompting me to withdraw a copy of the letter to the advocacy groups out of my pocket.

“It’s only fair that you read that, given that you’re going to be involved,” I told him, handing the document over.  He took it and began reading.

I sat there and watched him reading it for a minute or two, then stood up and walked to the window, knowing perfectly well that he would almost certainly comment on this, as he had done two weeks previously.  Indeed, he didn’t disappoint.

“I’m wondering why you got up, SI…” he pondered, as he continued reading the letter.

“It’s not reflective of anything,” I spat cynically.  “I’m not denying my hurt or failing to face up to my problems.  I’m simply looking out the window whilst you are occupied with reading that.  Am I not allowed to get up, C?”

He shrugged and muttered something along the lines of that I was, in fact, allowed to get up, then continued reading in silence.

He eventually looked up and said, encouragingly, “it’s a good letter.  Who all are you going to send it to?”

I told him about the advocacy groups, Mindwise and the NI Association for Mental Health.

I was astonished – and delighted – when he then proceeded to actively encourage me to also send it to both the Chief Executive of my Trust, and the head of the mental health directorate of same.  In the end, he forgot to give me the person’s name, but as it turns out it’s been passed to him anyway (more details on how the letter has progressed in a future post).

C said, “you’ve also made reference there to people I think are in England – perhaps it would also be worth adding information about provision for personality disorders in other Northern Ireland Trusts.”

I asked him what such provision existed, knowing that people with the most serious PDs are in fact sent to specialist units in England as there are no facilities to treat them here at all.

C said a self-harm team exists in one of the other Trusts here.  “Although not everyone who self-harms has BPD, and not everyone with BPD self-harms, they would probably see a disproportionately high rate of people with your diagnosis,” he said.  “No such team exists in this Trust at the minute.  There’s discussion ongoing about making the existing team a regional, cross-Trust one, but it hasn’t yet come to anything.”

He talked on for a few minutes about plans our Trust has for action on personality disorders, and how they don’t seem to much be coming to fruition.  But the best part of the session was when he asked me if he could have a copy of the letter.

“I think it would be good for my line managers to know how you feel about all this,” he said.  He went on to say something (I don’t recall what) indicating that there might be some benefit to me in this, but was very quick to point out that it was my choice as to whether or not he did take a copy for them.  I readily agreed, of course, delighting in his apparent desire to act as my advocate to the bureaucrats above him.

Now, of course, I am convinced that he took the letter so he and his twatfaced bosses of evil can formulate some plan of self-defence in advance of hearing from the advocacy groups.  It was not in my interest at all – merely their own.  No doubt over the next few weeks we’ll see which way it actually is.

Eventually – I don’t remember how – I said that he must get sick of his job, what with all the whinging he would have to listen to.  “I accused you of being a sadist a few weeks back,” I said.  “Now I think you’re a mashochist.”

He accused me (sympathetically, to be fair to him) of splitting, which on reflection makes me slightly irritated, but at the time I agreed and called myself all the names of the day for employing this “silly psychological process.”

C leapt to my defence.  He said he knew that I had long since known I was guilty of splitting, but that it’s now “emotional for [me]“, not just something I recognise intellectually.  And it is OK, I do not need to berate myself for it, because I have suffered serious traumas, apparently, that have caused this defence mechanism (which is not silly, he contends) to develop.

On that note, as I recall it anyhow, we moved on to the discussion about the dreaded Christmas.

C’s advice was basically to get the fuck out if I felt anxious or overwhelmed.  I said that was easy to say, but he didn’t have to listen to my mother’s wrath if I did so.

He advised me to talk to her in advance, but I protested against this as well.  “When I told her about what happened with my uncle, she said I made it up to avoid going to his house,” I reminded C.  “So how can I justify my anxiety?”

“Blame your crowd phobia,” C said.  “She can’t be critical of that, can she?  There will be a crowd there, won’t there?

“Yes,” I replied.  “And they’re all part of the problem – it’s not all about my history with my uncle.  I have nothing in common with them and it’s a weird matriarchal set-up, where about 18 different generations all live under the same roof.  They’re freaks.”

He said, “are there children living there?”

I was horrified.  He was obviously wondering if anyone else is presently at risk from Paedo.

“Now you’re angry with me for putting the baby and all the other generations in danger.  I’m sorry,” I raced, in a bizarre panic.

C looked at me, his eyes wide-open.  “Where did that come from?” he enquired, surprised.

“Oh, you’re not angry with me?  Then I’m using you as a board for my anger at myself, am I?”

“OK, you’ve lost me,” he admitted.  “Just…just remember – get out.  Talk to your mother in advance, blame your crowd phobia if you have to, but if you feel yourself becoming tense, get out of there, even if only for a few minutes.  Allow yourself to be anxious about this.  How could you not be?”

And that, folks, was really that.  Of course, you know how ridiculously awful Christmas turned out to be, but I did remove myself from the others when I went so horribly mental, so I suppose I did at least follow the advice given.

As I was leaving, I wished him a Merry Christmas.  He said, admittedly cautiously, “you too,” causing me to laugh bitterly.  I think he knew that it was inevitable that the season would be utterly shite.

So, the three week gap is due to be over tomorrow.  Of course, I am convinced that C is dead again; either that or therapy will be cancelled due to the stupid, horrible, pointless fucking snow, and I need him so desperately at the minute.  Though I have not heard anything about a cancellation today, and I suppose I would have expected an advanced notification were the snow to fuck everything up on the monumental scale that it has in Britain.

The last time he was on holiday, in August, I didn’t miss him that much.  But this time I have, and I need him to help me pick up the pieces of the last few weeks.

To that end, here, for your dubious delectation, is the good, the bad and the ugly (well, the bad and good anyway) of the last 12 months in the world of this PsychoFreakBitch…

THE BAD

Being Mental

Perhaps rather obvious, but yeah, being mental hasn’t been a great deal of fun.  I know I’ve argued that if I could flick that figurative switch to the sanity setting I wouldn’t do so, and I still hold to that, but nevertheless, the panics, depressions, mixed states, psychoses and frantic states are not exactly things that I enjoy.

As you know, faithful, darling readers, I have been mental for many years – my first diagnosis was in 1998, but in reality I did have some manifestations of madness well before that juncture.  However, 2009 was by far the worst year for it, as I think most of those close to me would attest.  The dysphorias, the exceptional levels of anxiety and the psychoses, all having existed before, have been exacerbated so considerably during the last 12 months.  I’m not sure why; maybe it is the intensity of psychotherapy, maybe it’s medication, maybe it’s simply the ‘proper’ development of BPD and/or bipolar disorder, given as they tend to manifest most strongly in one’s 20s, maybe it’s another psychiatric illness altogether.  Maybe it’s nothing more than coincidence.  Either way, it is.

Specific Issues on Mentalism

–> Psychoses

Tom was alright, but ‘They’ have been a hideous bloody curse.  Even with the anti-psychotic, ‘They’ are almost ever-present, though their severity was mostly reduced with said medication.  The worst manifestations of ‘They’ were when they tried to get me to kill myself and, worse again, when they wanted me to kill Marcus on Christmas Day.

Of course, the psychotic symptoms were not limited to hearing voices.  The shapes continued amok throughout 2009, though in retrospect I think I can say that I maybe noticed some abatement of their severity when I started taking Olanzapine.  However, I also developed new hallucinations, such as music, knocking and whimpering.  And I hallucinated my erstwhile stalker once.  Fuckin’ A.

Oh, and let’s not forget the delusions – A was in collusion with GCHQ, the sun and signs were watching and/or communicating with me, ‘They’ steal the thoughts from my mind, my cousin ScumFan was a drug dealer, A was not A but A’s sister, yadda yadda.

–> Dissociation

This has been pretty fucking annoying and at times highly disturbing.  There have been a number of times that I have found myself in dissociative fugue states – being in random places some distance from home, having no idea how or why I got there.  I need not explain the potential implications of these (admittedly relatively minor) fugues to my readership.

Of course, it does not take a fugue to make a dissociative episode.  Despite my ability to write 3,000 or more words on my sessions with C, my psychotherapist, it is not infrequent for me to dissociate parts of these meetings, particularly (unsurprisingly) when we are tackling something difficult together.  Several of the fugues have been in the wake of sessions with C.

I’ve also found myself in amnesiac states during or after arguments or highly stressful events, and of course I have the standard BPD features of depersonalisation and derealisation – forms of dissociation, I believe – on a frequent basis.

Although I’ve experienced depersonalisation and derealisation for years, I’ve only knowingly experienced full dissociative episodes – ie. proper periods of amnesia, losing time – in the last year.  Well…maybe it began in 2008, but it would mostly have been in 2009.

However, I only remember the rape and other parts of the sexual abuse in flashbacks, for example, and in discussion with C we have found that I have many ‘symptoms’ characteristic of someone who dissociated something traumatic in childhood.  The suggestion has been that, given the strength and quantity of these symptoms, there may be more than I don’t consciously remember.  I hate the idea for its own sake, obviously, but I hate it even more by virtue of the fact that it is not recalled (if indeed it did happen); it leaves me with a distinct lack of control over how I now react to triggers.  Perhaps that can be addressed in therapy over time (if therapy even fucking continues over time).

–>  Self-Harm

Is self-harm even bad?  Sometimes I really do wonder.  As a way to cope, it works.  As a way to fascinate (by virtue of watching the beautiful krovvy), it works.  As a way to seek absolution, it works (albeit temporarily).

Still, it serves as a permanent record of a very horrible year of my life, and I suppose in that way it could be considered a bad thing.  It’s something that, as of this writing, I feel quite nonchalantly about, but who’s to say in 10 years or something, I won’t look at my scars and feel triggered back into mentalism from which I may have found some relief?

I’m classing this as a bad thing of this year because, prior to 2009, I hadn’t engaged in any serious self-harm for years.  2009 saw it return on a relatively frequent basis.

Losing My Job

In reality, I was nowhere near as upset about this as I should have been, but one thing I really do detest is being in the hateful position of being dependent on the state for my living.  I had always dreamed of a career (not just a job) and the opportunity to use my intellect in a meaningful fashion.  I did not want to end up being a dolescum, and this is still something that I am hoping to change in seeking treatment for my madness.

So I suppose that is the worst part of losing my job; I now am officially everything that I never wanted to be in my adult life.  It’s also awkward from the perspective of my developing my career; having to explain a gap in employment of whatever length and an incapability dismissal will not be a lot of fun.

Trouble with the NHS

It all started with all the trouble with getting an appointment with, and then sustaining appointments with, the VCB.  Then C waded into the quagmire with his ‘I can only offer you 24 more sessions’ bullshit.  As you know, of course, I am fighting this.

Then there was Dr Arsehole just before Christmas (about whom I will write in the next ‘C’ installment), and the latest is that I have an appointment with Psychiatry on 20 January (more than a month after I was meant to have my most recent review appointment)…but not with VCB!  No, readers, apparently I am seeing ‘Dr M’.  What in the fuck..?  I might not like VCB, but at least I had got to know her to some extent.  But now they’re fucking me about again.  Arsecunt.

Christmas

It was fucking God-awful dreadful.  Enough said.

C

Not C himself; of course I don’t know the man in any realistic way, but my sense of him is positive.  OK, he does wind me up sometimes, and it is not at all unknown for him to actually anger me, but generally I am very fond of the man, regardless of whether or not that is simply a case of transference.  However, psychotherapy is not a fun process.  It’s not fun at all.  In fact, I believe firmly that it has made me more mental than I already was.

It therefore seems ridiculous to continue with it, but there’s method in the madness…

THE GOOD

C

‘Him again?  You just said he was a bad thing in this year!’

Yeah, I did, but he’s also been one of the most fabulous things.  Aside from my absolutely obsessive attachment to him, which I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have were I not very fond of him in a non-transferential sense, I believe the therapy is good for me, and is working.  Yes, it has made me more mental, but I believe this is a temporary state.

In being forced to (re)live some of the most horrible things about my past and, to a lesser extent, my present and potential future, it seems inevitable to me that my conditions would be exacerbated.  I had to get worse before I get better.  That was what I expected well before I commenced therapy with C, and that is still my belief.

Additionally, and this is probably related to the transference issues, C is the only person to whom I will talk completely openly.  For a long time, I would literally discuss many (not all) things with him, but it is only in the last couple of months that I really have stopped abstracting things.  I’ve now let my guard down and allow myself to be vulnerable around him, and I trust him.  That kind of relationship, however strangely asymmetrical, is a big achievement for me, and I think if it is allowed to continue as it should that it will pay dividends in terms of my mental health.

Diagnoses

Some people hate them.  There are a number of other mental health bloggers for whom I have the utmost respect that consider diagnoses ‘diagnonsense’.  I do get where they’re coming from, but I am grateful for mine.

It helps me to be able to attribute certain symptoms to an actual illness.  Now I’m not saying I use the conditions as excuses, but they do explain some erratic and bizarre behaviour, and I find that rather comforting.  Furthermore, in saying I have certain illnesses, it makes my range of symptoms part of something, rather than just a nebulous bunch of ‘things’; quantifying it in this way makes it seem more real, I am convinced, to others.  Just throwing the term ‘depression’ out makes it sound like a cop-out (NB. please note that this is not my view of real depression at all – I just think that some people, ignorant of mental health issues, view the word this way.  They believe that “I have depression” equals “I’m depressed,”, which of course those of us who have been there know to be a fallacy).

One further positive I’d add about the diagnoses is that they have enabled me to connect with others that have the same (or similar) disorders.  I will be eternally grateful for that, and for the support and kinship those individuals have given me (see more on this below).

Turkey

Our holiday to Turkey back in September was probably the happiest time of this year.  As I wrote at the time, I felt entirely contented throughout our stay, and indeed we enjoyed it so much that we are returning to a resort close to the one from 2009 again in May 2010.  I will never forget the crystal clear waters, the warmth of the locals and the sheer relaxation of lying about in secluded coves.  Whilst reading Social Factors in the Personality Disorders: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Etiology and Treatment, of course.  I mean, obviously!!!

This Blog

I will always be thankful that I started writing this blog, and indeed that I kept writing this blog.  My initial hope was that it might help me to identify triggers, but to be honest in that regard it hasn’t been as successful as I might have liked.  It has, however, given me a focus – writing is an activity that, despite the sometime difficulty of it, is something that I enjoy, and can direct my energy towards.  It also serves as a chronicle of what has been an extremely difficult period in my life, but one that is also likely to be a highly formative one too, if I don’t end up offing myself.  I’ve found it fascinating to rediscover diaries I kept in the past, and no doubt I shall find the same with this – though I hope that I will still be maintaining this journal well into the future.

I’ve been ever so grateful for the wonderful feedback I’ve been given on this blog too.  Some people find my writing style engaging, which is a huge compliment; others find solace in the fact that they are not alone, as what I’ve written correlates with their experiences and/or feelings; yet others seem to be grateful to learn directly what everyday life, therapy or whatever with my various diagnoses is like.

On a similar note, the blog has enabled me to meet so many people with whom I have found affinity.

Twitter

By far the best thing I have done this year was join Twitter (I’ve met many brilliant people through the account allied to this blog, but even more again through my ‘main’, slightly less anonymous, account).  I have met so many wonderful people – both mentals and non-mentals – through this service that I could not possibly thank them all here, much as I’d like to.  The support, friendship, empathy and, frankly, in some cases love that I have been shown has been a source of immeasurable help, more than the personnel concerned will ever know.

–>  Thank Yous – Twitter

CVM*
K*
@bourach
@woundedgenius / @behindthecouch
@notbovvered
@fromthesamesky
@error505
@an_other
@kimshannon
@helentaustin
@benpolar

* Both of whom I now consider ‘real life’ friends – I have met K and communicate with her most days; I haven’t met CVM, but again communicate with her most days and certainly will meet her when finances and circumstances allow the travel.  I love them both.

The above is far from an exhaustive list, but there are others that I cannot mention to protect either their or my anonymity.  Some to whom I am incredibly grateful are not even aware of the fact that I write this blog.  That does not mean I value them less, however.

–> Thank Yous – Blogging Buddies

Some of the above-named individuals of course keep blogs, but they are not people I met originally through this medium.  The following are.  Thank you to:

Alix Rites
Crazy Mermaid
Borderline Case
The Prozac Queen
Pumpkin
Vanessa
NiroZ (no longer blogging, alas)

Again this is not an exhaustive list.

It is my honestly held belief that were it not for the aforementioned individuals – both the Twitter friends and blogging mates – I would either have killed myself or been horribly sectioned this year.  So thank you to all of you listed, to many not listed, and extra special thanks to a select few – I hope you know who you are.

Friends

Of course, real life friends have been of immense value to me this year too.  I haven’t been fortunate enough to see my best friend D an awful lot, but we’ve have corresponded via email and communicated via the hated telephonic device, so of course I am very grateful for his support.  In spite of an acrimonious break-up of a serious relationship, not to mention other problems, D has still been there for me through all of this sorry year, and for that I am significantly in his debt.

B has also been very supportive.  It’s not that we tend to go into great detail about issues of concern, but he’s just there, and that means a lot.  In particular, like D, his ability to provide a metaphorical shoulder to cry on whilst dealing with significant difficulties in his own personal life is testament to his integrity and the strength of his friendship.

AC has also been great; as well as actually giving a shit and supporting me through mental illness, AC has also been there just for those ordinary, everyday things that friends do together – the theatre, lunch, whatever.  I also must hat-tip DL for this too.

Honourable mentions to A’s friends and family too.  Even though they’re (mostly) not conversant with the finer points of my mentalism, they nonetheless have been a source of fun and comfort.

And of course a re-acknowledgement of CVM and K

A

Saving the best for last.  He’s seen it all, and it all ain’t pretty.  Yet he is still there.  Still loving, still comforting, still supporting, still protecting, still fighting the corner, still providing, still entertaining, still staying sane.

There are no words.  ‘Thank you’ seems so woefully inadequate, but it is all I have.  I just want to make it publically known that I will always owe a debt of gratitude to A for everything he has put up with this year.

AND FINALLY…

This post might lead you to believe that there was more good than bad this year, and I suppose in the most objective of senses that may be true.  This is why something like CBT will never work therapy-wise for me; it doesn’t matter how much evidence there is or is not for a belief – the belief is still held.  The reasons for the belief need to be explored fully and processed.  But I digress.  My point: 2009 was an absolutely fucking shit year, and I will be glad to see the end of it.

But I have hope.  A small glimmer thereof, but a glimmer nonetheless.  Not of a miraculous cure, but of some stability maybe.  With the help of C (I hope) and the love and support of my fabulous friends, both those in the physical world and those online, there might just be a path to stability somewhere down the line.

Happy New Year folks.  If ‘happy’ is ambitious, then at least I wish you peace and something approaching sanity in 2010.

Yours ever

SI x

Despite what I said on Boxing Night, I don’t think a hospital admission is necessary or desirable just at the minute (well, not that it would ever be desirable, but you know what I mean).  It is my belief that the delusions and the severity of the hallucinations the previous day were induced by severe stress, and are hopefully ‘just’ transient.  ‘They’ are usually there these days, even to the extent where they are stealing my thoughts (schizophrenic-esque thought-blocking?) but fortunately their desire to cause harm in the same way as the day they first arrived has not been present since I’ve been taking Olanzapine.

I was discussing with C at the last session (which I have yet to blog about – hopefully by early next week) about how I hadn’t been (consciously) bothered about my history with Paedo until fairly recently.  As this was towards the end of the session, we didn’t have time to explore the possible reasons for that, but no doubt it was lying in my unconscious, unprocessed, the whole time, subtly and insidiously contributing to my chronic depression and severe breakdowns.

Anyway, for whatever reason, it bothers me now, and the feeling of horror and dread about it and about him was very acute on Christmas Day.  The McFs were going out for Christmas Dinner (good, because it meant slightly less claustrophobia), but it started out badly when it was decided (after an unnecessarily protracted debate) that A and I would travel to the restaurant alone with Paedo and MMcF.  It was an utterly vile 20 minutes trying to make smalltalk with the two of them and when MMcF surreptitiously handed me £10 to buy A and myself a drink, she said, “I hope you have a very happy Christmas,” causing me to laugh incredulously in her face.

By the time we arrived at the restaurant I was highly agitated, and upon sitting down (trying and failing to not be close to Paedo) downed two Valium.  It was not just him.  It really was not just him.  There were about 16 or 17 people around the table, and I just cannot tolerate that.  Groups make me endlessly nervous, especially when they are all talking loudly and demandingly at once, and especially when (despite knowing them all my life) I am deeply nervous around and have nothing in common whatsoever with the personnel concerned.  My history with Paedo just exacerbated something that would have already been there.

The Valium helped, and I relaxed a bit, but it was still bloody awful.  The meal was nice enough, but I threw half of it up and my IBS was out of control.  A and I forced our way through it, but the worst was yet to come.  Rather than go back to MMcF’s house after dinner, it had been decided to go to Suzanne’s.  I have nothing against Suzanne and her husband, but for some reason the dynamic in their house is always different from elsewhere; everyone congregates in the same room on top of each other, whereas back at MMcF’s, at least people break into factions, making the group more manageable.

Suzanne’s was tortuous.  The overbearing crowd, the inanity of the stilted conversation, the obsessive fixation with Marcus (whose nose will be put out of joint when his sibling is born in March), my mind recalling my history with Paedo and my Mum’s disbelief when I told her about it – it all got on top of me, and indeed of poor A.

‘They’ had been telling me all day what a horrid, fetid slag I am, but I’ve learnt to…not ignore them, and not push them to the back of my head, because that’s where they reside anyway.  I don’t know; I’ve learnt how to not respond to them, I suppose, when they are wittering on like this, which is a lot of the time.  However, it’s pretty much not possible to fight them when they turn into the all-powerful screaming cacophony that they were the first day I encountered them.

Well, didn’t they start it again, just as we had managed to escape the worst bit of sitting about in the living room, joining as we did ScumFan and DMcF, who were playing the X-Box in the kitchen.  ‘They’ started screaming at me that I was evil for keeping my mouth shut about the rape and the molestation, that I had put all the other generations at risk and that it would therefore be a mercy for me to “eliminate” Marcus, given that he could expect “nothing but” the same fate from his great-grandfather.  I tried to ignore them, really I tried, but the more I fought them, the more and more effort they put into their critical wailing.  I was ordered to go to where Marcus was sleeping and smother him.

Of course, the last thing in the world I want to do is kill someone, especially not an innocent kid, so by this point I was hiding behind A and covering my ears and muttering a poem (as well as some ‘shut ups’) in order to try and distract myself.  The next thing I remember was being in the utility room in tears banging my head against the washing machine (!).  I tried to get past A, who was standing their blocking my exit, but he wouldn’t let me past for fear that ‘They’ might have successfully compelled me to go to Marcus’s room.  I think I slid down the wall in defeated resignation then; I was convinced ‘They’ had finally taken complete control of my mind.  The fight was over.

Well, luckily ‘They’ hadn’t managed to take control, and the fight wasn’t over.  I honestly don’t recall how this all finished, but the next thing of which I do have a clear recollection was having a discussion about something or other with Suzanne, Marcus’s mother, in a calm, almost seemingly jolly fashion.  Yet all the time I was thinking, “the voices in my head just now wanted me to murder your baby son, you know.”  Thank God people generally can’t read my mind.

When A and I went to bed, and I don’t remember saying any of this, apparently I was convinced that A was not A but in fact his sister.  I also apparently believed that ScumFan – surely the most innocent and naive of young men – was involved in a serious way with drugs.  Needless to say, these ridiculous delusions disturbed A considerably.  And then, thanks to Zopiclone…nothing.

Boxing Day was better than Christmas Day, but still awful.  In the morning, I completely defied ‘They’ by playing with Marcus as I normally would (obviously in others’ company).  ‘They’ mumbled and whined a little like they usually do, but mercifully it was nothing with which I could not deal, and at no point did they try to persuade me to harm the baby.  Shortly after midday, A and I headed off to his father’s house.

Normally, it’s just A, his father, step-mother and me for Boxing Day, but on this occasion his aunt and her husband turned up.  I just wanted to sit and vegetate, as is the norm on our visits to A’s Dad’s, but the aunt would not shut up for more than three seconds.  Nice enough woman, but she began to grate on me not just through her constant demands for conversation, but also as she made underhand insults directed at A, inferring (and not at all subtly) that he was less intelligent than her children (which is not true, but since they have degrees from Oxford she feels that it is so, apparently).  A told me later that she had been intensely jealous of his parents when it was realised that he was a smart kid, and she always wanted to better them.  What a poor, sad cow.  How pathetic and meaningless must one’s life be to be so utterly fixated on bringing up intelligent children simply to compete with others?

One thing I’ll say in her defence was that despite her laughable level of inebriation she didn’t at any point attempt to embarrass me by quizzing me on the reasons for my present lack of employment, presumably having been warned in advance by A’s step-mother not to do so.  It’s not that I’m ashamed of being mental, but it’s hard to convince people of the sincerity of the conditions sometimes, especially (I’d imagine) when they’re as plastered as she was.

Eventually A and I escaped to his mother and step-father’s house, which is always fairly relaxed.  Upon getting in, knowing I wouldn’t have to drive again, I opened a bottle of red and downed it in literally about five minutes.

And now it is over.  It is over.  There surely is a God!  We are keeping out of everyone’s way on New Year’s Eve, having booked into a hotel for the night.  We’re not attending any function – we’re just going to sit in either a quiet corner of the bar, or in our room with a bottle of wine.  Alone.  All a-fucking-amazingly-lone.  Then, on Sunday 3 January, we’re going to another hotel, this time for two nights, thus using a Christmas present from A’s mother.  Both hotels are fairly plush, with pools, nice restaurants and bars, beautiful settings and privacy.  AI hope these will prove just what is needed as a tonic to the horrors of the past week.

I had strongly considered killing myself on Boxing Morning, but I need to remain alive for the duration of these sojourns, as I hope they will serve to relax me and hopefully mentally prepare me in some small way for the year ahead.

Boxing Day has been a fucking nightmare too, though on a lesser scale. But the psychoses of last night are what matters. It is time to be hospitalised.

‘They’ told me that smothering Marcus would be “a mercy”. Maybe or maybe not, the very thought of harming him is beyond contempt.

Enough is enough.

CVM is very much in my thoughts and I wish I could do something to ease the pain of her and her family. I am publicly sending my sincere condolences here. <3 xxx

—

I know that I have an annoying tendency to open these posts on C with, "today was weird," or some such. Well, Thursday really was strange. It was totally bizarre. C was evidently puzzled by certain directions it took, and when I told him at the end that it had been “weird,” he actually responded by saying that it had, indeed, been “different” (for what it’s worth I feel reassured rather than invalidated by this).

I’m not sure if the written word can adequately convey the oddness of the session, because although it can look disjointed, it would take a better writer than I to convey the sudden and sharp shifts in mood, the nuances of the spoken tones, the randomness and subtlety of the non-verbal communication that took place. Nevertheless, as ever, I shall try.

It was very much a meeting of three parts. During the first – I dunno? – maybe 10 or 15 minutes I sat there petulantly, stubbornly avoiding his gaze and giving one word answers (at best) to any questions he posed. For once he had the decency to open proceedings, and not piss about waiting for me to do so. He said he was aware that part of me was attached to “here” (this annoyed me, though I did not say anything to him – I am not attached to his fucking office for Christ’s sake, I am attached to him!) and that I was concerned about the cessation of therapy. Wow, insightful. I’m absolutely profoundly impressed, Dr fucking Freud-Einstein-Mary Poppins.

I’m ranting about him now for stating the obvious, but I also got really pissed off when he strode into the territory of conjecture. He said he was also aware that I was unhappy that I only had 50 minutes of his time each week and that I was annoyed that I couldn’t just turn up or phone him or whatever outside that time.

This sent me into a rage. At no point have I ever said such a thing. Struggling to control my anger, I snarled that his comment was unfair, and that he was putting words in my mouth. I asked him to exemplify exactly when I had made these assertions to him.

He admitted that I hadn’t, and moved on, but I think I now realise where he got this from. Some months ago – I can’t find the relevant post offhand, sorry – I had asked him who I was meant to contact in an urgent situation (because if my life depends on it I still want to avoid the fucking Crisis Team). Could I have a CPN, a social worker – anyone at the two CMHTs based at C’s hospital? I don’t remember his answer but it was some nonsense about ringing Lifeline or the Samaritans. Yeah, thanks C. So he had obviously read this request – a reasonable one, in my view, given that CMHTs are meant to be multi-disciplinary and he is only one tiny part of them – as a demand for his attention outside of our sessions. This was profoundly irritating. If he had failed to understand my question, then he should have asked for fucking clarification.

Anyway. To follow on from the uncertainty of the last couple of weeks, he brought up the matter of how long he can continue to act as my psychotherapist. Apparently, he can offer 10 week blocks, with four weeks at the end to deal with the closing of the relationship. Fair enough? Well, no, not really; he can only offer me two of these blocks – ie. 24 further weeks (beginning on Thursday 10 December) in total. Now, that will amount to something like 57 total sessions (including the three assessment sessions at the beginning and the four ‘leaving’ sessions at the end) which ostensibly sounds fair enough. Unfortunately for me, BPD is well known to take a very minimum of a year to treat properly, and usually three or four.

I didn’t tell him this as, in the past, every time I’ve made reference to my diagnoses he’s come off with (or at least inferred) some crap about fixating on labels. Heard it all before, C. So instead I asked what I was supposed to do if things weren’t adequately improved by that point.

He said, “I would expect you to have made progress by then – I feel you have made progress.”

Great – I’m so glad one of us does. Most reassuring. I pressed on. “But what if I haven’t?”

He said something suggesting that I shouldn’t be expecting cures from psychotherapy, at which point I interrupted him by telling him I didn’t even believe in cures and, in fact, didn’t especially want them. My question, I insisted, was in the context of alleviating the worst of the psychological pain and providing me with coping mechanisms and greater understanding that I could take onward in life. What if that had not been achieved within his stated timeframe?

I honestly don’t recall his answer, but there was a strong inference in whatever it was that if we were unable to progress by then that there was effectively nothing he could do for me (an assertion with which I do not agree, but what do I know – I’m just the stupid mental that sits opposite him).

No arguing with that, then. That’ll be it. The end. Finito. Fuck you, SI. In response, I just sat there looking at the ground for a while. It’s difficult to articulate how I was feeling. It was a veritable cocktail of fear, dread, hurt, anger, bitterness and depression. I fought, ironically using the breathing exercises that C had so fervently espoused, against tears and rants. I fought them because I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that this abject rejection completely fucking cut me to the core. But he knew. Of course he did.

After a minute or two, he proceeded with that usual question of ultimate annoyance, “how do you feel about that?”

One thing I’ll say in his defence was that at least he was completely straight for once. Often he dodges and dives from material that he doesn’t really want to bring up with me for fear of setting me off (or such is my supposition for why he avoids it), but on this occasion he was upfront and honest, and through my anger and hurt, I felt appreciation for that. I told him so.

He told me to think about this over the next week (“but not so much that you end up ruminating on it” – as if that wouldn’t happen!) and bring all of my thoughts and feelings on the matter to him in the next session. He said, “you’ll probably feel anger, frustration…”

Once again, I got really mad at him for putting words in my mouth, so he desisted from that angle of probing. Whilst it will indubitably be the case that I am angry – I already fucking am – and whilst it was indubitably the case that, in an ideal world, I could phone and/or meet him outside of scheduled sessions, how dare he presume any of that. If he wants to know my thinking on these matters he should fucking well ask me – it’s not like he’s never asked before. He shouldn’t just assume that his suspicions are gospel, regardless of the probability of their accuracy.

During the silence that ensued, I fought a mental battle with myself. One side was crying out, “but that’s another six months! You should be grateful!”

The other responded, “the NHS has failed you yet again, SI. They are ignoring all research on your diagnoses.”

For once, the negative side was, I am convinced, the more rational. BPD takes a long time to properly treat. It is as simple as that.

Finally I said to him, “why do you do this job?”

I knew he would respond with a question, and indeed he didn’t disappoint.

“Can you tell me why it is it important for you to know that?”

“I’m curious.”

Once more, I knew he would fail to answer, and instead question me again. Once more, I was correct.

“But what is it that gives rise to that curiosity?”

I laughed cynically in his face. “Just answer the fucking question,” I demanded. “Please.”

He looked away and appeared thoughtful for a minute. Eventually he said, “because I think it is of value.”

I nodded non-committally and waited for the backlash.

Well, apparently my questioning his decision to practice clinical psychology ties in with my intense rage towards him / the health service (because that couldn’t possibly be fucking justified could it? Oh wait, it could!) and my assertions last week that he was a ‘headfucking sadist’.

I winced. “Yes, sorry about that,” I muttered awkwardly.

“No, no,” he insisted. “You should bring that anger with you.”

I ignored him and said that it must be something of a nightmare to spend an hour with me every week.

He sort of laughed and said that I have to spend all the time with myself. (This could be read as an invalidating statement, which it shouldn’t be – there was more to it than this, but I don’t recall the specifics. Whatever the case, the point was actually made more sympathetically than I’ve made it sound).

“Yes, that is a disability,” I mused. “But honestly – I’ve been such an angry child here recently, it must be shit for you.”

I saw his eyebrow quiver slightly at my use of the term ‘angry child’. Excellent. It had been intended to pique his interest.

“I’ve been reading about schema models recently,” I proclaimed, triumphantly.

This is where part two of the discussion began. Let’s call it Intellectualise my Mentalism.

The other week, when I was convinced my therapy with C was coming to a dramatic and premature halt in January, I rushed to the Yellow Pages looking for suitable therapists. I was looking primarily for practitioners of psychodynamic therapy, as I have been receiving from C, because it’s the only type that I have found remotely effective to date. However, I was open to exploring both schema and gestalt therapy, having read quite a bit on both, and found practitioners of both in the vicinity. As two major studies have demonstrated its effectiveness for all symptoms of BPD (unlike stupid DBT), I have more faith in schema therapy, even though it does involve some wanky (if apparently advanced) CBT, for which (as you know) I have no time, so – convinced I was in imminent danger of abandonment from C – I Googled “Schema therapy borderline personality disorder” and came up with this book. On a whim, I bought it.

The book contends that people with BPD have five main strands to their character:

• The healthy adult (the authors admit this seems an unlikely component, but make the reasonably fair point that many with BPD are not always going mental. Not that they put it quite like that, of course).
• Detached protector – this mode sees the patient protecting the harmed brats that form part of her consciousness.
• Punitive parent – “everything is my fault” mode. Must punish myself. I am usually pretty good at this, especially in session.
• Angry or impulsive child – furious, mainly as a defence mechanism. It is convinced it will be fucked over. It is also angry that its needs / rights are not met. (I am a walking stereotype).
• Abandoned or abused child – alone, no one cares about it, whinges, cries, blah de blah.

I told C that today I was the protector. I was avoiding his questions, getting irritated when he probed me – classic protector traits, according to the book.

We had a discussion around the whole concept of schemas, schema therapy and its development, which to my amazement resulted in him bringing up the term ‘borderline personality disorder’ in a completely unsolicited way. He went on to explain the schemas seen in BPD in more detail, to the absolute delight of my ears and my mind.

Feeling that we were on something of a discursive roll, I presented him with a print-out of this post from Kathy Broady’s blog. I had analysed the piece bit by bit in terms of its applicability to me.

I pointed out that it was written by a DID therapist, however, and that therefore it might not all apply directly to me.

He sort of shook his head and said, “there’s a debate in psychiatry and psychology as to whether or not DID and BPD exist on a continuum. At the very least, there’s often an overlap of symptoms. So therefore I’m sure some of this stuff can apply.”

(For the record I think I’d identified about 18 of the 20 signs Kathy listed as being applicable to me to one extent or another. Fuck! Is there more I don’t know about?!).

Satisfied with this response, I gestured for C to go ahead and read the list. Not wanting to sit there like a numpty whilst he read it, I stood up and looked out the window.

I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was looking at me, puzzled. I turned to him.

“What, am I not allowed to stand up now?”

“Well, yeaa-ahhh, you are,” he began, doubtfully, “but I’m just wondering why you’re standing up.”

“You’re reading that, so I’m going to look out the window,” I replied.

“I think you’re trying to distance yourself from the material in this article,” he told me. “It would be better if you sat down and faced it.”

So, the mere gesture of looking out the window is reflective of an entrenched tendency to avoid confronting one’s problems, is it? Well, fuck me, I’ve heard it all now. I was going to argue, but decided against it, not really seeing any point. I made an arm gesture of “you win” and sat down, internally laughing at how absurd I felt his deep reading of my meaningless action had been.

C read the list – to my annoyance, he read a lot of it out loud – then paused on one particular point. I don’t remember which one it was, but I’d provided an ‘analysis’ at the end along the lines of, “I do this, I do that, blah de blah.”

“Blah de blah?” he queried. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just flippancy.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “but where does that flippancy come from?”

“It’s stylistic,” I argued (I’m sure most readers of this blog will agree that I have a penchant for flippant remarks). “It’s just my writing style. You haven’t read any of my writing…”

“But…” he went on.

Enter stage three of the session – the mad, maniacal bit.

“Right,” I said authoritatively. “You don’t believe me that that’s how I write? Well, let me show you.”

From my bag I pulled out a print out of this post, my (latest) rant on the NHS. I began randomly reading some of the more colourful parts of the rants, in a deliberately exaggerated and dramatic voice. When I finally drew breath at the part where I talked about reading Grey’s Anatomy at the age of five, the completely befuzzled C interrupted me, exclaiming, “what’s happening here today?!”

He looked completely bemused, and on reflection I can’t say I blame him. It was a bit of a random tangent.

I defended myself on the grounds that I wanted to demonstrate to him that the flippant comments he’d seen on the trauma list were sod all in comparison to the flippant comments made by me elsewhere.

“But,” he said, metaphorically stroking his chin, “we’ve been all over the place today [I'm not sure that he phrased it quite like that]. For the first while I thought you were quite upset, quite agitated…now I’m not sure what you are…angry? And in the middle we perhaps intellectualised matters a little.”

“Oh fuck, I’m sorry!” I cried. “I led you into that.”

“These meetings are a co-construction,” he insisted. “I’m just as culpable for any straying off course as you are – we just have to be careful not to head into intellectual territory too much.”

He pondered for a minute and, referencing point 10 on Kathy’s list of trauma signs, said, “your rush to apologise just now ties in with that.” He noted that I had commented on the list that my self-blame wasn’t excessive because that for which I blame myself is, in fact, my fault.

“You do realise, objectively, that it is excessive, don’t you?” C asked.

“No no no, it’s my fault. It’s my fault,” I contended. “Just now I seduced you into that discussion on academic psychology. It was my fault, I’m sorry.”

Readers, why – WHY?! – did I have to use the word ‘seduce’? Why? A dozen other words would have sufficed. It just rolled off my tongue, as hyperbolic metaphors often seem to do.

He raised his eyebrow and narrowed his eye slightly. “Seduced?” he enquired.

Fuck. FUCK. FUCK FUCK FUCK! Now he thinks I want to fucking fuck him. Fuck fuck fuck.

I felt my cheeks turn red in utter mortification and in my rush to defend my use of the term, on the grounds that it was figurative, probably made an utter tit of myself – thus reinforcing any belief he might have that my transference is of an erotic nature.

Fucky fuck, shit and damn. I did try my best to explain what I’d meant, but I was flustered, and in any case it probably looked like a case of the lady doth protest too much. So eventually I gave up, looked down and gestured for him to continue to read the trauma list.

Thankfully for once he had the grace to do as he was told and not press me. He read on in silence this time, and when he’d finished I asked him if he thought the points included were applicable to me.

He said that he thought they were, and indeed that a lot of it had already come out in therapy and that we were beginning to address those issues.

He handed me the list back, and I read over it. For some reason I then went into a dysphoric but energetic rant against myself, telling C that I was “nothing but histrionic” for thinking any of the list was applicable to me, and indeed for bringing it to him.

He listened to and watched me in a kind of bewildered way. Perhaps he’s not that familiar with mixed states.

“Well, this has been weird,” I declared.

He cleared his throat, as if for dramatic effect. “It’s certainly been…” – he searched for the word – “…different,” he acknowledged finally, with a slight wryness I thought, which I found bizarrely reassuring.

“I was nervous about telling you about the schema book,” I admitted to him, rather randomly. “I’ve always got the feeling from you that you think to so much as mention a diagnosis is to fixate on a label.”

“Not necessarily,” he began. “It’s very important not to fixate on it, indeed. You mustn’t allow yourself to be ‘built’ around a diagnosis. But it can have benefits, yes.”

“I’ve found it helpful,” I said. “For one thing it’s enabled me to connect with a range of people who have been a great support network.”

“Good,” he declared. “No, I have no problem with diagnoses. It’s just important that you know that it’s not ‘borderline personality disorder’ that comes into this room, it’s [my name].”

I nodded. I think I do keep a sense of perspective on the diagnoses; if someone asks me about myself, unless it has been directly in the context of mental illness, I’ll usually tell them I’m a rock bird with a love for reading, writing, pubs, sci-fi and Newcastle United. The illnesses are part of me, and I am not ashamed of having them, but they’re certainly not the whole story.

As I was about to leave, C asked me to think over the prospect of there being a maximum of 24 weeks of the process left in order for us to discuss it at the next session. He all but begged me to “bring the anger with [me].” I protested that I couldn’t do so with absolute impunity, as I couldn’t face being heard screaming at him by those in the offices adjoining his.

He looked extremely taken aback at this, which I still don’t fully understand. I have social anxiety for Christ’s sake, does he honestly expect that I can allow anyone but him to be party to my rants? In any case, his secretary phoned today. Having convinced myself at the weekend that he was dead (whilst simultaneously reckoning that he wasn’t dead, but nevertheless believing that he was), I was horrified about what she had to say. Mercifully, so far C is not dead and will see me on Thursday at the normal time – just not in the normal place, due to building work. He is temporarily moving back to VCB’s stomping ground.

In a way, it’s worse to lose it with him there than in his own office. The office in which I suspect I will meet him is next door to the one VCB shares with other psychiatrists. These cunts all have it in their power to section me should I really lose it, which is hopefully unlikely but frankly not impossible, especially with ‘They’ still hovering about from time to time (though wouldn’t you know it, the anti-psychotic has seemingly killed Tom. Just my luck to lose the ‘good’ psychosis and retain the ‘bad’). On the other hand, an advantage of this location is that the building is attached to the day bin and adjacent to the actual bin, so hopefully they’ll be used to having crazies losing it on them fairly often.

As for now, I don’t know what I think. The argument is still ongoing in my head – More NHS Fuckovery, I’m Calling an Advocacy Service vs. Well, It’s Another Potential Six Months, Be Grateful. The truth is I feel both at the same time. A little bit positive, but more than a little bit lost.

Not unlike last week, my memories are rather skewed. My most clear recollections involve me shouting at and insulting him and then threatening to walk out, then later breaking down and crying for what seemed like ages, in a defeated, resigned sort of fashion. Am I defeated and resigned? I’ll see if I can make some sort of sense of it all, but don’t expect miracles.

OK, so I went into his office and sat there like a knob, as seems to be fairly typical these days, as I refuse to start the conversation (no doubt an avoidance tactic). I had vowed to A that I would bring up the material in the aforementioned NHS rant, but as I sat there under C’s silent and enquiring gaze, I felt that I was going to chicken out completely. Eventually the silence led to the usual miserable whinge from me about wasting his time.

I saw my opportunity here – an opportunity to somewhat surreptitiously bring up my concerns, under the pretence that I was concerned about wasting C’s time. So when he yet again asked me why I felt the silences were so bad (apparently they can be very revealing and useful – since when did this become psycho-fucking-analysis?), I responded with something like, “well, we have a limited amount of time to talk about a number of things about which I need to talk. 50 minutes today, something like five more weeks overall.”

I don’t remember his verbal reaction (if any), but I think I noticed a split-second narrowing of his eyes at this, denoting confusion at the statement.

I have no idea what happened next. He must have probed me on my assertion that we only had five weeks of therapy remaining, though I distinctly don’t recall him doing so until later. In any event, I started babbling on about how I’d spent the preceeding few days looking online and in Yellow Pages for an alternative psychologist of a similar therapeutic bent to assist me on a private basis, but that I was having no success so could he please recommend someone, because if he wasn’t going to treat me until I was well enough to face the world without a therapist, then someone else would have to do so.

Again, the sense of confusion emanating from him was palpable, and I think he actually questioned why I’d felt this exercise was necessary.

I can only imagine that this was the point where I demanded specific answers from him on whether or not we were going to discontinue our relationship in January. Most (though not all) of the rest of the session centred around this, but I can’t be bothered to break it down into a specific chronology, and am not sure that I could even if I wanted to.

The very much paraphrased essence of this bit of the meeting was:

• C – I never said it would discontinue in January.
• SI – fuck you, you did.
• C – I said we would review it.
• SI – Same thing.
• Repeat 700,000 fucking times
• C – but you know it’s finite.
• SI – but it would be irresponsible of you to make it finite now. MEGeorgie RANT ABOUT THE NHS – Starting with point 1 from last post (if they’d done something with me when I first showed outward signs of being mental, then we’d probably not even be here), moving on to point 2 (it’s either the bin or C – latter is surely cheaper, but the NHS is such a stupid fucking bureaucratic mess that they won’t consider that).
• C – you may well be right but unfortunately that’s the way it is.
• SI – how do you expect to adequately reverse two decades of mental illness in less than a year?
• C – answer not recalled but probably some politican-esque answer of avoidance.

Blah blah blah. He kept refusing to tell me directly whether his reference to reviewing things in January was a suggestion that we would end things then. He did, however, have the audacity to ask me what I wanted him to say. Hmm, that wouldn’t be obvious or anything, would it?

I said, slowly and menacingly, through (very evident) gritted teeth, that what I wanted him to do was to give me a straight fucking answer.

I don’t remember what he said, but it wasn’t a straight fucking answer – so I lost it. I absolutely, completely fucking lost it. I felt the anger well up in my stomach, like some sort of raging inferno, and felt it rise through my internal organs, eventually finding its way to my vocal chords.

I screamed at him, “I’ve fucking had enough of this. I’m leaving right now!”

And, indeed, I got my things together and went to stand up, but he started blathering on again – so, curious though still furious (I’m a poet, didn’t know it), I relented and sat back down. I think he was asking me where this anger was coming from or some such other non-sensical wank given that it was profoundly fucking obvious where it was coming from. (Or maybe not. Maybe I am angry at my father for abandoning me and C, in his role as a temporary surrogate father, is now bearing the brunt of that anger thanks to the perceived threat of abandonment. Oh yes. It must all be to do with one’s subconscious, mustn’t it? Nothing to do with the fact this uncertainty is fucking with an already fragile mindset. Fuck off, psychology).

I threatened to walk out again, telling him that if we were going to end things that we might as well just do it now rather than waste more of our time, but he kept managing to entice me not to leave.

I then spat at him (in something of a stylistic homage to part of this post) that he was “nothing but a fucking sadist” because he and the profession to which he belongs do nothing but make people relive trauma and misery and that it takes “a special kind of twisted individual” to think that that’s an enjoyable career path. I asked, rhetorically, if he’d use the old cliché of ‘I want to help people’, sneering about that being used as some sort of defence of his decision to practice clinical psychology.

I continued with my contempt-filled bile, telling him that he didn’t want to help people, that instead he wanted to “headfuck” them (I was gratified to see how agog he was at this. “Headfuck?!” he repeated, apparently aghast and astonished. Hahaha). “You’ve had your fun with me,” I asserted, vindictively, “so now you want someone else to headfuck.

He harped on the ‘headfuck’ comment for a bit, asking me to explain it, but I don’t remember exactly what he said and neither do I remember my response. So let’s (regrettably, cos that was fun) move on; at one point he asked what it would be like to end therapy. I said that I would have no real outlet to help me cope with the enormity of what I feel and of what I want to talk about. I said that I was emotionally (yes!) fragile in the extreme and that being left alone with the totality of my mentalism might well send me over the edge.

And how would it feel to continue, then, he pressed. Well, we have reached a point in our relationship where I feel that I can trust him enough to fully explore all that needs to be explored (not that that will be easy, but at least I think I can do it now). Our relationship is, I feel, the only adequate vehicle that I have – and have had – for a recovery of sorts. Only with his support and guidance can I face these things and, hopefully, move on from them. Or something – I don’t remember the exact nature of what I said. It was something like that.

Was it at this point that I uttered those tiny but synchronously hugely vile, belittling words? I don’t know, but this post is so disjointed anyway that it hardly matters. I said, “you can’t have escaped the fact that I’m very attached to you.”

He didn’t specifically respond to that as I recall, but at some point or other he did say that terminating therapy was going to be “a problem” whenever it happened, irrespective of whether we continued now or not and whether we’d worked through things properly. He didn’t say it, but the clear implication was that that would be due to my attachment to him. He’s right; I can’t deny it, it will be fucking horrible. The only thing I can say is that I would hope to be in a better mental place to deal with such a difficult prospect further into the relationship; right now, I am convinced that it would merely result in a hospitalisation – or even a possible run to catch the bus.

The long and the short of it is this: (a) we will review progress this Thursday rather than in January, as he recognises the enormous pressure that Christmas places on me, which will be compounded by his fortnight’s worth of absence at said point; (b) again, he stressed, there would be at least four sessions in the run-up to a termination of treatment devoted entirely to how to deal with that cessation (and it would probably more like six sessions); and (c) he is happy to continue ‘working’ with me as long as there is actual work being done – he won’t just do it for the sake of avoiding ending it.

On (c), I accepted the reasonableness of this position, but told him that if there were occasions where I found it very hard to talk to him about a particular issue, I did not want him to be of the view that that was me simply trying to manipulatively (not that that’s a word) extend therapy. I wanted him to be aware that some issues are just difficult to face, and it will take yet more time to address them.

He seemed surprised that I thought he would think that I would try to draw out the process, but assured me that he wouldn’t and didn’t subscribe to such thinking.

It was probably here that I started crying. I babbled incoherently through my sobs and he couldn’t understand me, and kept trying, in this annoyingly understanding and compassionate tone, to get me to repeat myself. Eventually I managed to articulate that, although I desperately want to continue with psychotherapy, the idea simultaneously petrifies me as I really don’t want to think or talk about so many things that I probably need to think or talk about (deja vu, anyone?).

I sat and cried for a few minutes, then started (literally) beating myself about the head as punishment for crying. He told me to stop it and said that I should allow myself be upset and indeed that he would actively encourage my tears if I was feeling an emotion that may precipitate them. For once I did as I was told, sitting silently in tears for a few minutes. As I said at the start of the post, for some reason I just felt terribly defeated – even though I shouldn’t because it seemed like I had got what I wanted – ie, C was saying that we could continue the psychotherapeutic process. Perhaps I felt defeated because continuing is agreed with the qualification that we are actually still doing something constructive – my visceral desire, of course, is to have him in my life permanently in some way. But this is armchair psychological conjecture; I have no idea why I felt this weird resignation. Perhaps it is simply that I was exhausted by riding on the rollercoaster that this session had been.

At what I think was my instigation, there was a discussion around the fact that it’s basically taken me six months and more to even begin to open up to him properly. I have discussed many things in sort of superficial ways, but I’ve not gone into much detail about specifics relating to my past at least and certainly, I have very rarely – if ever – behaved in a fashion like I did in this or the preceeding meeting whilst in session. I, of course, lambasted myself left, right and centre for being a time-waster.

C disagreed, opining that it was perfectly reasonable for me to have taken all this time to ‘test’ him, to make sure that he was worthy of my trust. Apparently he does not believe this to be time-wasting at all.

Whilst that is ostensibly reassuring, of course I find this a rather curious declaration on his part. If it was reasonable for me to have taken so much time to get to know him (well, kind of) before opening the floodgates, then how can it be unreasonable for me to expect long-ish-term therapy from this point to examine relevant issues from my past, or of transference, or of my life right now? The notion of continuing on some sort of rolling contract, rather than setting an initial timeframe of, say, six further months, seems incompatible to me with the idea that it was a positive thing to have used up the first six months essentially getting to know each other.

Anyway, I dried my eyes and apologised for shouting at him and for “being nasty”. Ever the psychologist, C replied by stating that if that was something I was harbouring, that it was good to demonstrate it to him, and that he would encourage me to do the same in future. He’s right of course, but it seems so terribly cruel for me to sit and shout “sadist! Headfucker!” or some such across the room, when the reality is that I don’t actually believe that and that I probably just wanted to hurt him (which I have no doubt he realises).

One thing I remember clearly about this session was that he seemed reluctant to let me leave. Normally, on the 49th minute mark, he pipes right up with the “we’re going to have to leave it there” line, and uses the remaining seconds for very brief housekeeping or, simply, goodbyes. On Thursday, I kept grabbing my stuff to leave, but he kept interrupting. It was odd and, looking back now, seems a little unsettling; he must have been seriously troubled by my mental state at the time.

Indeed, he said that he was concerned about how much I ruminate on therapy and that, that day in particular, he wanted me to find something else to occupy my mind, noting how difficult I had found the session.

I told him I would go home and kill people on Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.

He laughed (I don’t know why because I was absolutely serious) but continued by asking me what I enjoyed.

“All my interests are solitary pursuits,” I advised. “Aside from GTA and other video games, I don’t do much and don’t enjoy much. I do enjoy writing the blog, but one needs a specific mindset to write about difficult things and I am really not in it right now.”

(As an aside apparently C now thinks this blog is a good thing, despite the cuntified whinging that I reported here. Well, not that he thought it was a bad thing then per se – he just thought I was too fucking braindead to be careful in what I wrote here. Anyway, he now believes, correctly, that I seem to find the composition of posts cathartic and that I have found immeasurable support through the people that read what I write. If you don’t already know, folks, this is absolutely true. Thank you).

In the end we agreed that I would make an effort to rejoin the gym – as they all bloody do, C thinks exercise is imperative in promoting mental health. What’s more, though, he seems to be of the view that the physical effort required in exercise alleviates anger, stresses, blah blah. Personally, I find the gym insurmountably boring, but I’m unlikely to try and do myself in there I suppose, what with the other fuckers about. I haven’t rejoined it yet, but I will tomorrow. As for that day, despite my expectations that I would go back to A’s and my promise to C to actively take my mind off the session, in the end I went to my mother’s house and straight to bed. Rather than reveal why, I let her think I was ill.

So, how do I feel now, several days later? To be honest I don’t know. Although C said he was happy to continue working with me as long as we were not just avoiding the end of therapy for its own sake, the lack of a more definite answer and indeed timeframe still annoys me, and I am nervous about this week’s session as of course we are to review progress to that point. I do think significant advances have been made, as it happens, and I assume that C must too otherwise he wouldn’t have felt it was reasonable for me to take six months to get to this juncture. But nevertheless – I am dubious about what he’ll arrange next. Another 10 or 12 weeks – or something more meaningful?

I am sorry that this entry is so confused and disjointed, but that’s an accurate representation of my mental state during this session and, to a lesser extent, of the entire session itself.

Maybe I am overreacting and maybe C has no intention of ending this herapy in January, unless there is some miracle (and if there is some miracle then it is obviously fine to finish in January – but of course there will not be). But the mixed messages from him are sublimely frustrating – “don’t worry, we will never just suddenly end things” and “we will get there” versus “you know this is a finite process on the NHS,” yadda yadda yadda.

Partly the annoyance is with him and partly it is with this stupid bloody system. Sometimes I think we’d be better off with private healthcare after all.

On the one hand, C is the person that makes the immediate decisions on how long he sees his clients (as far as I can tell, anyway), so he could just say to me, “let’s keep on meeting for the next six months,” or whatever. He refuses to lay down any long term plans, ostensibly as he feels it is important to work to short-term-ish goals. I disagree, but at least he has a rationale, and in any event I am no psychologist. However, if therapy is coming to an end in about five weeks then what is the rationale for that when I am clearly still a nutjob?

On the other hand, C is constrained by all the financial bullshit of the NHS, not to mention the ludicrousness of the service’s inherent bureaucracy. No doubt he has targets and timeframes, must palm off the stupid mental within a few months cos the trust can’t (won’t) pay for the stupid mental any further than that and if he hasn’t cured the stupid mental in that time then he is an evident failure, don’t you know. Targets, man, targets!

The problem with this is that it will end up costing the health service much more in the long-run, and perhaps in more ways than one.

Let me break it down.

1. I am 26. I have been utilising mental health services on the NHS since I was 13. Had I seen a proper therapist for a proper length of time then, how much money could they potentially have saved themselves? Instead, as this post attests, six different public sector salaries were funded, some of the resources of which were devoted to me. Epic fail. (Of course my own money was spent on three other therapists because of the NHS inadequacies. Epic fail again). The point is, one way or another, I will end up back at the GP’s or psychiatrist’s office begging for help yet again, and we’ll be back to square one. Why not just agree a sensible timeframe with someone I know and trust – and clear things up to whatever extent that is achievable – now?!
2. I am so mentally and – yes – emotionally fragile as things stand that if therapy ends in the near future I am convinced I will end up in the bin. One hour of C’s time per week versus 24 hour care by several RMNs, psychiatrists and auxiliaries. Which one sounds cheaper to you?
3. A third possibility, and this may be seen as a threat which it is not intended to be, is that I finally can’t cope and do myself in. When my mother and A instigate litigation against the NHS, as they inevitably would were this possibility realised, even if the NHS won hands down, they would be forking out a fortune to fund their fuckhead solicitors. I used to work for litigation solicitors specialising in the public sector. I know what they charge; even for minor cases that are easily contested and won, it is a bloody fortune. That’s not even including barristers’ fees if it came to court, or out-of-court settlements.

Other points to consider are the following:

1. Dr C is constantly reminding me that psychotherapy is the “mainstay” of my treatment (rather than medicine), yet it seems to be her intention to see me long-term, albeit hopefully only for monitoring purposes once a suitable cocktail of drugs is found. How can therapy be the mainstay of my treatment if I am only seeing her, who only deals with the medicinal and organic sides of things?
2. I know I’ve ranted about this before, but it so utterly and completely fills me with disgust and contempt that I have worked in both full- and part-time capacities since I was 14, and given 11% of my salary to the health service since I was 16. I had two major breakdowns, including this one, during that time – but it still amounts to, I think, eight years of work. When you think about it, is it really that different from US health insurance? Maybe the percentage figure is lower, but then my employers had to pay a percentage of my salary for my insurance also. So why would I get medium- long-term therapy in America, but I can’t here?
3. I am familiar with people in other NHS trusts that have been guaranteed therapy of at least a year and a half on the health service. Now, one person I can think of has a lot more issues than I do, and so that’s fair enough – however, that individual is one of five people I can think of off the top of my head. I would hasten an educated guess that I have much more psychological baggage than each of those other four, but if not, certainly two or three of them anyway. Why, then, is it OK to fuck me about? (Incidentally, I noticed none of them had any trouble seeing psychiatrists either, so maybe my trust is just shit. Now it sounds like I’m playing a teenage game of “but they’re allowed it, so why am I not” – but I hope I’m not. I’m just genuinely mystified as to why my case is different).
4. As stated yesterday, I have been mental for many years. I received my first diagnosis (clinical depression) 13 years ago or so, but as I have discussed here at other junctures, I was mental well before that. Normal children don’t try to amputate their limbs. Normal children don’t hallucinate. Normal children aren’t obsessively paranoid. Normal children don’t deliberately coop themselves up in the house, listen to Bach, read Grey’s Anatomy and seek out the company of the elderly for intellectual discourse. They go outside and play with their friends. So when I said ’13 years’ yesterday, I probably really meant 23, to be honest. Point being, how can two decades of madness be alleviated in less than a year? It’s fucking preposterous.
5. If I had a physical ailment, the NHS would treat me until it was cured, or, were it chronic, then indefinitely. I am not asking for indefinite treatment for my psychological difficulties, make no mistake. But the striking inequalities between the health service for physical health and the health service for mental health disgust me.

In any case, I cannot see why C has to keep reminding me that the psychotherapeutic process is finite. Of course it is fucking finite, I am not stupid – and I certainly don’t want to be in need of it indefinitely as I want to be able to manage my conditions by myself. However, for the NHS’ sake as well as my own, surely that finity (if that’s a word) ought to be directly correlated with the progress of the patient? Surely it is the height of irresponsibility to discharge someone that is clearly still fucked up and only going to, at best, waste more resources?

Fuck it all to hell. I feel like emigrating.

My first proper awareness of going to said town was when I realised I was in the centre of it. I do have a very vague recollection of noticing my normal turn off and thinking that the traffic was heavy, but at no time did I think, “why the fuck are you not in that heavy traffic?” I don’t remember deciding to drive on, and I don’t remember the journey. Another small-scale fugue-like episode. Sweet.

I had been quite good on the self-harm front of late, but the good spell has been broken. ‘Bitch’ and ‘grief’ are the latest, though I don’t remember doing the former (it must have bled like fuck though as I had seemingly used a towel to stem the bloodflow). Grief. Am I grieving for myself, or for what I should have been? If so, is that good? Presumably one is meant to say, “well, the self-harm bit isn’t good,” but you know me folks – not really one to listen to that sort of argument. A is raging with C; in A’s eyes, it is C’s fault that I have taken to cutting myself again. But it isn’t. It really isn’t. All C has done is facilitate triggering discussions, and been someone to whom I am hopelessly attached, which is hardly his fault. We can’t avoid matters of this importance simply because there is a risk it may act as a trigger; the entire psychotherapeutic process would then be pointless, and I’d be left as mental as I ever was.

I’m unsure as to what exactly this entry will amount to, as I remember surprisingly little of the session – perhaps unsurprisingly. But let’s start at the very beginning and see what happens.

C pointed out that he’d been looking through his diary and saw that our current contract was due to end shortly (he thought there were two sessions remaining after Thursday; I thought one, but as it turns out it will not matter). This was something of which I was horribly well aware. Having only begun to open up to C properly in the last few weeks, I was convinced that he’d see me as a manipulative bitch – it looked, to my cynical mind, like I was trying to wrangle more time out of him by leaving the avalanche of confessions until this point. Given that my primary diagnosis is borderline personality disorder, it reasonably follows (in my eyes) that he could believe me to be manipulative, as the psychiatric establishment still seems to think that about those who have BPD more than any other psychiatric problem.

Of course, he didn’t like either the idea that he would find me manipulative, nor in particular that he would think this because I have BPD – that fixates on labels, don’t you know. Actually, it doesn’t, because it’s what I think he should think anyway – the fact that BPD is the only psychiatric diagnosis to still be treated with open contempt by mental health professionals just reinforces that point – though to be fair, I have not experienced that disdain personally, thank God.

I honestly don’t think I was being manipulative – not consciously, anyhow – but it did look like it, and that had been my worry all week. Of course, C refused to concede that this was the case in his eyes. Did he point blank deny it? I think he may well have done, but I don’t remember clearly enough to say for certain. What he was willing to admit to was that I may, consciously or otherwise, fear the end of the relationship, and act accordingly to preserve it. Which is apparently not manipulative. Hmm.

The issue of the end of therapy raised its ugly head a couple of times during the meeting. What he said at this juncture was that we should “…continue seeing each other until Christmas, at which point [he'll] be off for a fortnight, and then we’ll review the situation in January.”

Review the situation in January. You can take a wild guess as to what I think about that. He is going to throw me out with the dirty water in cunting January. Just over a month away, after the most stressful time of the year for me (ah yes, I’m sure you’ll be treated to a delicious rant about fucking Christmas in the near future, dearest readers). A tells me that this is not what C meant; apparently, he literally meant that we shall review the situation, and if further therapy is required (as if it won’t be), then that is what the case shall be. Well, Ms Rationality of course says, “yeah, right” to that. He is going to abandon me.

I honesty don’t remember how I reacted in session to the comment about ‘reviewing things in January’. I think I simply agreed and didn’t voice the aforementioned rejection worries, but I wouldn’t swear to it. As I said, it did indeed come up again, but I don’t remember under what circumstances. I can and do appreciate that the relationship can’t be permanent – in the most rational of ways, I don’t want it to be. I want to live an independent life, free of a need for a surrogate daddy. But can C realistically expect to change 13+ years of misery and being fucked about by the NHS in seven-ish months, particularly when I have such a strong neurotic attachment to him? Trying to be objective about it, I cannot honestly fathom that as reasonable, except in especially productive scenarios (which are about as applicable to me as…um…er…something that is very un-applicable to me). This is a personality disorder. It is ingrained into every metaphorical fibre of my self, the conscious, the unconscious, whatever – and it is causing me to self-destruct. Can something of such enormity and longevity honestly be treated adequately in just over half a year?

In any case, eventually the discussion – predictably enough – returned to the eminently delightful subject matter of the preceeding week. Eugh. It was me that raised it, though not exactly through choice; we were talking about something else (no idea what now) which triggered some sort of memory – it’s a shame I’ve forgotten what that subject was, as it would be useful to know these triggers, especially in cases where there is no obvious correlation, as I think the case was in this instance.

I became rather agitated and told C that I wasn’t “going there”. I hid.

Despite my telling him to leave it, he continued to probe me – but gently and quite subtly, to be fair. I eventually admitted that I was thinking about the Pandora’s Box.

My memory is even more fragmented from here on in, though some things do stick out in my mind very clearly. I was very, very careful not to verbally articulate much at all; at one point I desperately begged, “look, don’t you see where I’m going with this?” But it appears that he believes that I need to say the words. I still have not used the word ‘rape’, and strictly speaking he could still be under the impression that it was something other than rape – but he’s not that stupid.

He must have asked what was so troubling about verbalising this material, because I remember then telling him that I am fairly tolerant of articulating the gruesome information on this blog.

“Which is odd,” I mused, “given that it is all the more real when it is written down, even more so than if I verbally discuss it. It’s there, on the blog, in black and white.” (See here, for example).

I went on to postulate the idea that perhaps it is easier to deal with in writing because I can rationalise everything; life events become something that is seen in the third person, by a narrator, an observer with at least a modicum of theoretical knowledge of that about which she writes. If I have to talk about it, I have to feel it. I am there, in the midst of it, with the rawness, the vileness, the trauma of it all.

He agreed. He didn’t say so, but a sense that he wants me to feel that repressed pain was very palpable. Maybe that is why he was such a cock when I put this, and other shit, in writing for him – in fact, I’m certain it is. What kind of profession capitalises on other people’s grief? If I asked him why he became a clinical psychologist, I’m sure he’d respond along the lines of that old cliché, “I want to help people.” What, by making them relive their darkest memories, by making them suffer through them all again? Does that not take a special kind of sadism?

I am, of course, being a little facetious; I don’t believe C to be a sadist in the least, and I do believe he is in his job for the right reasons. But the human mind, and the sciences that arise therefrom, are odd things indeed. It strikes me as strange that it is an apparent psychological necessity to directly face that which you most revile in your past, before you can heal from the wounds it inflicted.

But this is not a post about the curious concept of psychology as an academic discipline, nor is it a post about the mindsets of those practising this form of figurative alchemy; it is a post about a session I had with my therapist. So…was it at this point that I lost it? I’m not sure, but anyway, in my next clear memory, all I could see in my head was the INCIDENT, or more specifically, the moments during which I was pushed to the floor of the outhouse in which it took place and served up as tasty piece of young meat for the delectation of my uncle. I recall very strongly that (in C’s office, not in my mind) I had my head in my lap and was pelting my skull with both fists with as much strength as I could muster. I have never done anything of this ilk in C’s company before.

And so he too did something that he has never done before; he raised his voice to me. He didn’t shout, but he did raise his voice just enough to try and penetrate through the mentalism that had tenaciously gripped my mind.

“SI!” he called. Well, he didn’t of course – perhaps it will surprise some of you to learn that I have a name, a normal, very ordinary name, and he used that instead – but you know what I mean. One thing I’ll not forget about this session was that he actually used my name three times, and at one point I used his too – these things are unheard of in the whole time we’ve known each other. Does it mean something? Why do I attach such importance to something so apparently normal and trivial? Is it because using names is personal, and that I want to see him as a person, not a canvas? Who knows. I certainly don’t, but I do know that that memory sticks with me.

I think he must have somehow brought me back from this mental place, but I don’t remember the specifics. The next part of the conversation that I recall was when he asked me how I felt about myself and that I told him that I felt like a “dirty, fetid little slut.” I then rationalised things for a bit, proclaiming that I am in actuality not a slut. Unfortunately, I still felt (feel) like one.

Then I lost it again. “I’m a filthy whore,” I spat, hiding from him again with my hands.

I think he actually went as far as to tell me that I am not a whore, but that could be a phantom memory. I mean, how the fuck would he know? I could have sold sex in 28 European capitals for all he knows. One thing he definitely did do was try and help me regain my composure. I sat up and pretended to be fine, sticking out my hand to measure how much it was shaking. I have used an incident when I was about 15 as a yardstick to measure anxiety; the day after I found out about an incredibly twisted lie from my first real boyfriend (a long story that I will have to detail some day), I went into school and, in English, happened to notice how much my hand was shaking. That denotes severe anxiety and/or anger. If the shaking is less than that, things could be worse.

I told C about this. However, a brief reference to the lying cunt of an ex must have touched on the self-disgust I was already feeling over my own lying to C about the INCIDENT (when we first met I told him it was ‘mere’ touching, but that was only part of it, obviously. More on this shortly). I told him this – still without using that word – and went into a major self-invective of utter disgust and abhorrence. It was filled with ranting about how much of a shameful, lying, grotesque, hateful slag I am, lying to the one person that might be able to bring me back a little hope in this sorry mental battle, and about how guilty and sorry I am, blah blah de blah.

When I took a second to draw breath, he jumped in to try and (a) reassure me that I had nothing to feel guilty about and (b) establish exactly what it was that I felt I’d lied about.

I answered (b) first, at least to the best of my recollection. He’d specifically asked in our initial assessment sessions what form the sexual abuse took. As is my wont, I had avoided articulating myself properly, and instead managed to answer the question merely by his probing. I think, though I am not certain, that he asked if I was raped, and that I said ‘no’. I am sure that when he asked if it was inappropriate touching that I said ‘yes’, and that I led him to believe that that was all. In my defence – and I told him this in the session to which this post refers – I have dissociated a lot of the INCIDENT. I remember ghastly, loathsome pieces of it in fleeting glimpses, like looking at still pictures in an album or, sometimes, short video clips. I remember the sensations of pain and terror in these moments too. I am grateful that the memories are so brief, but also resentful of it too, as it feels like it removes my power to understand the INCIDENT and my reactions to it. Furthermore, obviously part of me does remember it, and that part is mentally fucked – perhaps it would be easier to address were it all consciously there at the front of my mind.

Anyhow, I then proceeded to respond C’s (a) point. “I lied to you,” I said simply. “Aren’t you angry with me?”

“No, of course I’m not angry with you.”

“Why not? You should be.”

He sort of laughed (he mustn’t have realised I was serious), but seeing the look on my face, he desisted from doing so abruptly.

“SI,” he said again, firmly, looking straight at me. “Do you seriously think that I should be angry with you?” His tone was a more compassionate version of ‘incredulous’.

“Yes,” I began, “fucking dirty, lying, grotesque little bitch, fucking…”

“One,” he interrupted, rather dramatically, leaning forward and counting on his fingers as he did. “We had only just met and you can’t honestly have expected yourself to deeply discuss such sensitive matters with someone you didn’t know. Two, you didn’t lie, you omitted some information…”

“But then that’s a lie of omission…” I began.

“Three!” he went on, raising his eyebrow in a surprisingly authoritative fashion, signaling that I was to let him finish, “three, this is hard for you to talk about, so it is not surprising you withheld it. What is there to be angry with?! I am not angry with you, and neither should I be.”

Well, that was me told, then. I was quite taken aback by the forcefulness of his tone. Actually, ‘forcefulness’ is a horrid word to use as it has negative connotations – let’s say ‘emphatic’ instead. He was incredibly emphatic. I gaped at him in a sort of stupefied disorientation for a minute or two.

He sat back in his chair, recovered his blank canvas and either asked me how I felt, or signalled for me to speak.

“Um…” I muddled. “That’s reassuring. I do feel reassured. But it also confuses me; you have a completely different attitude to it from me.”

He seemed to understand that in fairness, which not an awful lot of people would. He was able to see the black-and-white chain of logic that I was following in believing that he ought to be angry, but luckily for C things in his world do not seem to be as black and white as they are in mine.

I don’t remember how things ended. I know that I was battered and bruised psychologically (and physically to boot what with punching my head). At no point had I been tearful, but one does not need to weep to mentally suffer. I went and sat in the car and phoned A for catharsis and reorientation purposes. Although the trauma of reliving the INCIDENT had been the most awful aspect of the session, the fact that I fixatedly whined to A that C ‘wants to abandon me’ before I even touched on the rest of things is very telling.

In later discussions A urged me to tell C about this abject fear. What’s the point? C already knows I’m terrified of him abandoning me. Perhaps the real question is ‘is my attachment to him healthy?’ There have been mixed views on this from the readership of this blog. cbtish, for example, thinks it puts me in an intolerable position (cbtish is a therapist). Vanessa from eTransference, a clinical psychologist in training who has a particular interest in the phenomenon of transference, thinks it ought to be encouraged in many ways. Others undergoing therapy – bourach and thesamesky (who’s also a counsellor) for example – have their own struggles with the therapeutic dyad (bourach in particular will understand why I thought C should be angry with me, given this post of her’s).

I don’t know what the answer is; just that the attachment is very real. Just that I feel guilty for withholding information and for lying (though he wants me to stop that – and I’ve just remembered that the session ended with him asking me, again, to try and not post-mortem things in therapy. Oops. He was also worried, after what happened with VCB’s SHO in September, that his actions or words could have a…er…detrimental effect on me. Double oops. All I can say is that I think our current dialogue is progress, regardless of any self-harm that follows). And at least I am far from alone in withholding, and even lying.

But it’s still all a bit of a quagmire, yes?

I’m not in the habit of doing this as this blog is mine; my life, in my words. However, sometimes others just say it (whatever ‘it’ is) better than me, and this is very much one such occasion.

So, ladies and gents, I give you the nature of my present sorry existence – as presented by Metallica.

Until It Sleeps

Where do I take this pain of mine
I run but it stays right by my side

I’ll tear me open make you gone
No longer will you hurt anyone
And the hate still shames me
So hold me
Until it sleeps

(c) James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, Metallica (from the Load album, 1996).

I will write properly tomorrow, but in the meantime you can listen to and watch the video for the above here.

For those of you not familiar with the issue but who don’t have time to follow the links, Ms Broady puts Stockholm Syndrome thus:

It is when victims form positive, caring attachments with their violent perpetrators.  The more victims have to depend on their perpetrators for their very survival, the more likely the victim will form an attachment to their perpetrator…

[Victims] knew that their life and basic survival needs were completely dependent upon keeping the perpetrator happy.  They learned to base their own survival on effectively meeting the needs of the perpetrator, and the perpetrator had the power to decide if they would live or die.  To survive, they became loyal to the perpetrator.

Perpetrators purposefully create this kind of dependence in their victims.

As far as I am aware, and it fairly logically follows given the above set of circumstances, Stockholm Syndrome is most frequently seen in cases of long-term abuse (and is thus not particularly applicable to me).

During a recent documentary on the Dugard case, my mother sat aghast as the narrator described how Kaycee and her two daughters wept as their abuser (and father of the two younger girls) was arrested.  She admitted that, had they randomly told their story without proof, that she would have thought them to be either unforgivable liars or seriously afflicted by folie a trois.  How, she argued, could you care so deeply about a person who had so horribly and systematically abused you?

I spoke to her at length about Stockholm Syndrome, but to little avail.  She understood the concept in theory, I think, but was nevertheless unable to grasp how it could actually be.  The whole idea is so alien to her that she cannot conceive of it being a very real condition, borne – initially at least – out of necessity.

A similar, though distinct, query arose with her when the Fritzl story broke last year.  “But how is it possible for her father to have done this to his daughter?” she despaired.  As with the Dugard case, had the story not been there in black and white, I don’t think she would have believed it.

“He must be mad,” she concluded.

Quite possibly.  Indeed, quite probably.  But at what juncture do we allow abdication from Fritzl’s personal responsibility (not to mention his duty of care to his daughter, morally if not legally at her age), due to the fact he clearly had a twisted and sick brain?  When does bad become mad, and/or vice versa?

Anyway, the point of this post is not to write a psychocriminological masterpiece on Stockholm Syndrome.  I’m only here to say that, although I do not believe for one second that I have it or anything approaching it, I do understand it.

I suspect some of my readers – those few in my real life, in particular – will dislike the latter part of the title of this entry.  “Defending HIM” – ‘Him’ being Maisie’s husband, perhaps unsurprisingly.  I am going to defend him…but, and it is a very BIG ‘but’, that does not mean that I am defending his erstwhile actions towards me.

I mentioned in the last post that I’d explain why I had become less concerned for Marcus’s welfare so let me clarify that point.  I have been exposed to Paedo in large doses twice recently and have found myself to feel nothing other than overwhelming pity for the man.

In some ways, I have done for many years, but he was so much a shadow of his former self of late that the sense of sorriness felt all the more palpable.  I think I have alluded to the fact before that he is mental too, suffering from some unspecified psychotic disorder.  He, like me, takes Olanzapine to counteract it, and it has been effective in its indicated usage.  But he is now incredibly depressed regardless.

So what, SI?  (a) Doesn’t he deserve to be and (b) depression is treatable, so why are you decreasingly concerned for Marcus?

(a) Well, yes, maybe he deserves to be.  But the man has had no life.  His life, for as far back as I can remember, has been nothing more than a pathetic existence.  He was forced to marry MMcF when they were both very young, as she was up the stick (a reviled state of affairs in the ’50s), and he has been under her tenacious grip ever since.

As I have stated on the page about the people in my life, at face value MMcF is a lovely woman.  The reality, however, is that she is domineering, manipulative, cruel and overwhelmingly demanding.  I consider it no coincidence that the two of her children that still live with her – S and K – both have no lives.  In their 40s now, they will never leave that house.  I also consider it no coincidence that S had very severe social phobia and still has depression (she claims she has bipolar disorder, but none of us have ever witnessed anything approaching even hypomania, and she only takes Venlafaxine, no mood stabilisers.  But what do I know) and indeed that Paedo is severely delusional.  The two other sons eventually escaped, but are nevertheless intrinsically linked to every brick of the house’s build, as are their children.  S’s daughter seemingly escaped but her, her husband and little Marcus might as well move in because they are always there.

The hold is enforced by MMcF.  Frankly I am scared of her.

Now, re: Paedo.  Well, given his entrapment, I actually can understand a willingness on his part to stray.  Could he separate from her, divorce her?  He could – or could have, more accurately – but even if he had, she would have manipulated him back.  I guarantee it.

So, yes, I feel sorry for him, and long since have.  MMcF does nothing but criticise him, and yet he serves her and complies with her selfish desires without complaint, and endlessly worries about her health and welfare (neither of which are great).

It does not, however, condone child molestation, because quite clearly nothing does.  No matter how shite his life may be, may long since have been, I did not deserve to be raped by him (nor, of course, by anyone else).

All I am saying is that the person is distinct from the act, no matter how heinous or twisted that act is, so I have the ability to feel pity for this man, who did this most horrid of things to me.  I don’t like him, and I most certainly do not love him, but I feel regret that he’s had such a waste of a life, and if I can feel that, then I can completely understand how in more serious cases of abuse that that could progress to compliance, submission, friendship and even love.

(b) Yes, depression is treatable, and Paedo may well be able to be treated for same.  Still, it is very chronic, and with the aforementioned shitty life, will be all the more difficult to shift.  We have a saying in Ireland: if a person is perceived to be on their last legs or just otherwise haggard and decrepit, it is often said that they are “done”.  Well, Paedo is thoroughly and utterly done.  Quite honestly, death would be a mercy to the man.

So on the balance of probability now, I am fairly sure that he simply isn’t either physically or mentally capable of posing a threat to Marcus, Marcus’s impending sibling, or any other member of that (or any other) generation.  He is beyond it.

Of course, I am not, and cannot be, 100% certain of this – who is ever 100% of anything?  As such, I will remain vigilant and will tune my awareness to any changes in Marcus’s behaviour as finely as possible.  If I think for a second that the child is under threat, I will act.  I will break Paedo’s neck myself if needs be.  However, I do genuinely not perceive this as likely at the present time.

To address my mother’s points vis a vis the sad Dugard and Fritzl cases.

If you, mother, find it so hard to accept Kaycee and her children’s attachment to their abuser, consider proportionally the defence your daughter has just given of hers.  Does it seem so alien now?

Furthermore, as stated Stockholm Syndrome develops of necessity – in the case of most long-term trauma victims, because they cannot escape the situation, so it is better to ‘embrace’ (for want of a better word) what the abuser wants, in order to make life somewhat more tolerable.  In my case, evidently a less serious one, I would also say that some of my reaction to Paedo has developed of necessity.

I have basically accepted him, and I have kept the story to myself, to save an entire extended family.  Others could have been abused, I know, and I will never stop wondering if I could have prevented that – but I would have had to go to the police, alone, as a traumatised child, and with a total lack of evidence, what would have happened anyway?  So, with the best will in the world, I could hardly have prevented harm to that generation, and so I did all I could in the circumstances – I tried to keep the family my mother loves together.  And now I am looking out for the next generation’s welfare, which is the best I can do now.  I cannot ruin a family over an incident 16 years ago for which I have no evidence.

So no, abused individuals do not automatically hate and reject their abusers, for a multitude of reasons.

Finally, why is it really so impossible to believe that close relatives can and do abuse those close to them?  Many readers will be aware that most acts of sexual violence are perpetrated by someone known to the victim.*  Well, I can’t say the rape and the overt sexual behaviour were particularly systematic in my case but still – he was my uncle, I was his niece, so there you go.

* Child Sexual Abuse Fact Sheet, National Child Traumatic Stress Network – http://www.nctsnet.org/nctsn_assets/pdfs/caring/ChildSexualAbuseFactSheet.pdf

Thursday’s session with C was one of the most frank and revelatory that I’ve experienced to date. It was a strange meeting, because initially I thought it was going to be one of those useless, ‘let’s both stare at the floor’ encounters, but if anything it ended up becoming one of the more useful (if difficult) sessions I’ve had in psychotherapy, because we finally began to face some of the stuff I’ve been so strategically avoiding in the last six months (and, frankly, for much of my life).

I was greeted with that usual opening gambit of, “so where would you like to start?” I know why he does this (“the dyad is a co-construction but you have to help inform it by raising issues of concern” or some such, no doubt) but seriously, is it really so much to ask for him to just ask me a question about something he thinks is worth discussing? Although I wasn’t in the same agitated mood that I was last week, I sort of shrugged off the question and we looked at each other.

Two points of interest arise for me here. One – why do I have such trouble just telling him where I would like to begin? Let me try to articulate how I feel in the moments immediately subsequent to his opening question. I suppose the closest I can really get to it is to say that it just feels inappropriate. Is this a boundaries thing? Is it something to do with a possible perception on my part that he is an authority figure? It just feels like I’d be breaking a rule, that it is something of inherent embarrassment to me, like I’d be showing myself up like a child humiliated by her teacher or parent.

Two, regular readers will know that C has directly confronted me – if I may use artistic licence with the term ‘confront’, for want of a better one – about the fact that I hide from him. I mean that I literally hide, not (just) metaphorically: I have fairly long hair, and I either wear it loose in his office and hide behind it, or I take it down from a ponytail in his office, and hide behind it. I also put my hands over my face to avoid him. How, then, is it that I can stare him out at other times (note that above I stated that we stared at each other for a bit)? In fact, I do the stare with such intensity at times that I think I unsettle him – whether or not that’s correct, at the very least I usually win ‘stare-outs’ with him. I stare and stare and stare, confrontationally, challengingly, defiantly even, all in a strange dance of intellectual seduction, no doubt designed to avoid actual exploratory psychotherapeutic work, which is no doubt exactly what this o’er weighty prose is also designed to do, so I shall forthwith desist from it. To try and answer the question, though, my suspicion is that the ‘hiding’ occurs when I am vulnerable or open with C, and the staring when I feel confident or (probably erroneously) believe myself to have the upper hand in the dyad. I am a walking Freudian stereotype.

The beginning of the discussion – and in fact the first 30 or so minutes – were really pretty innocuous. One thing that completed cracked me up was that he made enquiries as to the nature of my finger injury. Initially I was slightly taken aback by this – why the fuck would he show friendly concern over a cut finger? That is at most a medical problem, surely? However, I explained the circumstances in deliberately pedantic detail.

He nodded and smiled slightly in that irritating ‘oh-right-that’s-nice way’ that he does when I have said something that he deems irrelevant (which was most frustrating in this case, as he instigated the discussion), seeming apparently satisfied with my response. I wasn’t going to let him off with it though (more avoidance?) and said, “you thought I did it deliberately, didn’t you?”

He hesitated; I think he was reluctant to answer that, but for once he did give me a straight response, stating that, “that had been [his] thinking.”

For some reason I found this preposterously hilarious, and laughed and laughed. Although he tried to humour me, C was clearly puzzled by this amused lunacy, and retrospectively speaking, so am I. OK, so trying to severe my finger hasn’t exactly been my self-harm MO to date, but then this is the girl that recently bought, for the purposes of cutting herself, a surgical scalpel from eBay, and as a young child tried to amputate her foot. His supposition was not that terribly unreasonable when you think about it.

By whatever means of progression, we ended up engaging in a fairly length discussion about ‘They’ and the VCB’s prescription for an anti-psychotic to combat ‘They’. C, correctly, kept calling ‘They’ ‘them’ when ‘They’ were the objects of his sentences. He then went about correcting himself and apologising to me, apparently believing his ‘incorrect’ term was some sort of invalidation of me (because throwing a whole ream of hard work back in my face isn’t, but whatever), but I honestly couldn’t care less. It doesn’t matter what C calls ‘They’ – it’s not exactly going to rid me of their malice, is it? And his ‘mistake’ isn’t a mistake – he’s correct. Allow me to honour Dr Freud again; does my refusal to name ‘They’ in correct grammatical terms hark back to childhood trauma, when such niceties of the English language were only beginning to be understood? No, it probably doesn’t, so let’s move on.

The discussion of ‘They’ led on to further perusal of my recent psychoses (as detailed in the ‘They’ post and in this tweet); namely, the knocking, whimpering and music. I told C how I sinister I found them all, in particular the heinous music, but that in some odd, vaguely altruistic way, the whimpering was the worst. My desire has been to help the whimpering creature, to rid it of its obvious pain, but of course I cannot do that as, oddly enough, it isn’t fucking there because it doesn’t fucking exist. On the other hand, I explained, even if I could find the source of the whimpering, my pathological fear is that it is a trap laid by ‘They’ to somehow torture my mind further…or indeed worse (if you can euphemistically call taking me out ‘worse’, and I am not convinced that you can).

Anyhow, so far so tame. Well, not so for a normal, but yeah – let’s stick with ‘tame’ anyway. Unfortunately I walked into a trap at this juncture. Well, that’s unfair; C didn’t mean to dig into something right at this point (or at least I don’t think he did), and even if it had been a probing question, it would not be fair to consider that entrapment. He merely asked how I experience these sounds.

I won’t go into my answer nor the next 10 minutes of conversation, as this is the personal information to which I alluded in the opening paragraph. This remains private, between C and me, and no one else; all I’m willing to say is that it relates to me protecting myself. I’ll make only two other points about it. Firstly, this particular subject could have been horribly uncomfortable and awkward – and with the wrong person, it indubitably would have been. But I felt at ease with C, relatively speaking, and thought he dealt with it with tact and sensitivity. Secondly, this part of the session ultimately led to one of the topics I have been dreading to face in detail.

“You’re opening a Pandora’s Box here,” I cautioned at this point.

“Do you want to tell me what’s in the box?” C responded on cue.

I very deliberately turned round to look at the clock, noting only 10 minutes remained of the session.

“What a shame we don’t have time for that,” I smiled, probably patronisingly.

He took another route. “Can you even tell me the name of the box then, or give some details as to its contents?”

I took a deep breath. “You are aware of what happened with my uncle.”

He nodded, and what followed was some slightly circular discussion about my continuing worries about Marcus and his soon-to-be sibling (my cousins twice removed, or third cousins if you prefer the more common, yet inaccurate, assessment), and how that’s diminished a little of late*. Another point was regarding Maisie’s husband’s exact relationship with me – ie. that he is my uncle by marriage. There was subtle reference as to what extent the incident (lovely word) has consciously impacted upon my life in the last 16-ish years.

Finally he said it. I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something like, “you haven’t told me it all, have you?”

That sounds like he phrased it in a sort of blaming fashion, but honestly, he didn’t. I just remember that it wasn’t something like, “there’s more to this”, because I’d have said ‘yes’ to that, whereas the correct answer to the question above was ‘no’.

I didn’t feel like a child, or at least I don’t think I did. I did, however, bow my head, look up at C from this submissive position and shake my head slowly, sadly and in a horribly resigned sort of manner – just like a child does when faced with a similarly awkward position. Submit submit submit. You lied to him, you little bitch, you lied.

I would reiterate that this is my thinking and that I got no sense of blame or recrimination whatsoever from him. Still, I hate the fact that I actually outright lied to C about this matter in our early discussions. I hate it. I hate it almost as much as confronting this bollocks itself.

We didn’t talk about the whole shame issue I mentioned in the sex abuse post, simply as there wasn’t time. We did spend the few minutes that were left exploring who else was privy to the information – A is one of only two ‘real life’ person to whom I’ve actually spoken the word ‘rape’ in this context, though a few others will have now found out thanks to reading the material I’ve written on the blog.

The other person who heard me use the word was my mother. Her reaction to the whole thing is a subject for several sessions with C as, to be honest, her way of handling it wasn’t exactly in my best interests. I gave C the brief version, which is what follows, though of course it will be revisited I’m sure. When I first confessed to my mother that anything happened, she said that I had misinterpreted McMF’s husband’s actions, as “he loves children” and would touch them in innocent, companionable sorts of ways – that must have been what happened, SI, you silly girl! Mum still holds to that position, on the very rare occasion that there is some sort of reference to the INCIDENT. When I told her, on a separate occasion, the full extent of the INCIDENT, she – knowing I am not a fan of the McF dynasty – said I made it up to avoid going to their house. Cheers mother.

Of course it was not just the INCIDENT that permeated this period in my ‘relationship’ with McMF’s husband, though that was always the worst bit – well, obviously, I suppose. The fact that I mainly have flashback-like recollections of the worst part – ie. my wriggling under him as he pushed me down and did what he wanted – is presumably suggestive of dissociation from there onwards, for which I am both grateful and resentful. There was more to it than just than one day too, and God forgive me, I played up to it. I did. I played up to it. I would wear short skirts in front of him and make suggestive comments to him – not because I wanted him to touch me ever again, but because I wanted him to suffer (the rationale being, “oh, you want me, do you fuckhead? Well, you can’t have me!”). When he did later touch me again (once in a room full of other children – thanks for that memory, mind), I would seize up and eliminate myself from the situation with as much speed as possible. It makes my skin crawl to think of this.

Yes, it makes my skin crawl, and my reaction to it makes my skin crawl. I know I was a child, and I know flirtatious and sexualised behaviour is a common response to child sex abuse, but I feel like a grotesque little slut nevertheless.

Readers, I cannot do this. I cannot face the enormity of not just this hideous link to the past, but also that of the first boyfriend saga, and that of the desolation of grammar school, amongst others. How can I face this all with C? How? I can’t even face it with me! I am not strong enough. I am weak. The word flows through my blood and inhabits every cell and fibre of my being. Weak, so, so horribly, pathetically weak.

OK, I have totally digressed. This post was about a session with C, and I have turned it into a mini discussion on child sex abuse and my failure as a human being. Sorry. To return to the point, C and I had to finish the session after the talk about my Mum not believing what I had told her about her brother-in-law. A Pandora’s Box indeed. I should have kept my mouth shut – the next few weeks are, I suspect, going to be tough.

And yet I should not have kept my mouth shut because it needs to be confronted, and in this way I am heartened too. Even though I don’t think I can do it, it is a real development. It’s only taken six months, but what’s half a year between therapist and client!

The session ended with C advising me that both offices on either side of him are being renovated shortly and that as “we can’t do work of this nature with such noise”, we’ll have to have an office change. It will be the second, which is a completely cuntified state of affairs – but there is an upside to it. The building work, which is starting in two or three weeks or so, is due to last for 12 weeks. Our current therapy contract is due to end on 26 November which would mean only two more sessions, which from my point of view simply cannot happen or I’ll be straight into the bin (or the ground – who’s discriminating). But C said something like, “so we’ll have to move out during that time…”, which is an excellent statement, as it strongly infers a continuation of treatment for the foreseeable future. Certainly, he once told me before that there would be a minimum of a four-week preparation period prior to any cessation of therapy, and very clearly that has not come to pass, but whatever way he phrased his words it sounded like he still expects to see me back in the current office when the work is over, so that’s a decent extension to the current timeframe.

What I expected to be a reasonably short post has turned into my usual 2,800 word bullshit. I see, reading back, a lot of pontificating about words and language. More avoidance?! Anyway, I’m going to bed. Goodnight, dearest readers.

* I’ll blog on this in a future post. Suffice to say, I saw Maisie’s husband the other week and he really is a pathetic shadow of his former self which, for the benefit of his great-grandchildren at least, is a most beneficial state of affairs.

My initial thinking was that, from a psychodynamic perspective, this was a very bad thing.  You can’t just switch transference off, not well before the relationship has fulfilled its duties anyway (which as you can tell, ours as yet has not). I mean, one is surely supposed to feel strongly – or at least not ambivalently – about the therapist in the course of this type of psychotherapy.  But perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

As I walked behind him from the waiting room to his office, I couldn’t help but observe how much his bald spot has grown since I first met him back in February.  He has lovely fluffy hair, like a man about 40 years his senior (old people always have lovely fluffy hair, don’t they?).  But now it is falling out.  By odd coincidence, I noticed my first grew hair on the evening of the disaster session that this meeting followed.  I must not allow myself to be deluded into thinking that I am encouraging or in some way perpetuating C’s hair loss.  That would be fucking stupid.

I sat down, and immediately cast my eyes downwards, so as to avoid his gaze when he sat down.  I don’t recall what he said at first – maybe he offered some salutation or asked where I wished to begin, but in any case he paused for a few minutes (during which I sat in a fiddly silence) and then told me that I “seem[ed] very agitated.”

Well, look at Dr fucking Insight. Your powers of perception astound me, C!  Well, actually, they do at times – but I think on this occasion the observations could have been made by a dead giraffe with its neck twisted in a strait jacket.

I elected to ignore him beyond a mere shrug.  ‘They’ were laughing spitefully at the back of my head and getting on my tits, though I don’t think they influenced my behaviour around C particularly. He hadn’t mentioned the previous week, and I hadn’t the balls to bring it up unsolicited, so what did I have to say to him?

Eventually, of course, he broke the silent deadlock with that perennially irritating question, “what’s going through your head as we sit here?”

As I recall, I told him that very little was going through my head.  Apart from the grammatically- and personality-challenged ‘They’, not much really was happening in my head.  It felt as if I existed in a thought vacuum.  I didn’t feel good by an stretch of the imagination, but I didn’t exactly have anything tangible to exemplify that at that particular point.

This impasse continued for a few minutes, as ‘They’ assessed C.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, their conclusion was not especially positive.

Eventually, after having ‘They’ berate C for a few minutes I took a deep breath and told him that I was seriously considering voluntary admission due to the danger posed by ‘They’.  I went ahead and explained about ‘They’ in detail.

“I don’t want to go, C, I don’t want to go,” I told him, anxiously.  “But I’m concerned that I’m in dangerous position and that I ergo have no choice.”  It’s funny; it’s the the first time I recall using his name when addressing him directly.  Not that it matters really – but it seems more personal or something.

He talked for a while about the procedure one has to follow to seek admission to an NHS psychiatric ward.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that it is as simple as it used to be.  You have to meet your GP or psychiatrist, but rather than them referring you directly, they then send you to one of those fuckwit Crisis Teams who decide how mental you are.  Based on my experience, you’d need admitted after meeting them, not that they’d realise that, because apparently a cup of tea and some meditating will cure all mental illnesses and emotional difficulties.  Yep.  That’s why people in my position are considerably more likely to end up topping themselves than the general population, you pathetic cunts.

Anyhow, I was actually reasonably impressed with C’s non-judgmental take on on both ‘They’ and my hospitalisation proposal.  It is often his wont to tell me that I can be in control of stuff like this, which to my mind is (mostly) horseshit.  Although we later discussed the possibility of exploring non-medical ways of dealing with ‘They’, certainly at this juncture, his tone was accepting, as was the content of what he said.  That was encouraging.

After the discussion around hospitalisation, I admitted to him that ‘They’ didn’t like him.

This enraged ‘They’.  “That is not what we said,” ‘They ‘ shrieked at me.  “We said he was a cunt.  Tell him.  Tell him…TELL HIM!”

For the first time, in utter frustration, I actually spoke aloud to them – or rather, I shouted at them.

“Alright, for fuck’s sake, I know!” I yelled.  I had actually been in the middle of a sentence directed at C at the time, and he must surely have been taken aback by this random outburst – but he managed not to bat an eyelid.

I don’t remember how the discussion of my anger at the previous week’s annoyances arose, but eventually arise it did.  I do remember that he said that I hadn’t commented on that, and my responding that he hadn’t asked.

Rather than express my raw hurt, I simply said, “let’s put it this way; I wasn’t in the best of moods last Thursday.”

His response surprised me slightly, though I think I hid it well.  He said, self-referentially, “what a bastard, right?”

“Um…well.  Am I allowed to say ‘yes’ to that?”

“You’re allowed to say whatever you like.”

“Then yes, exactly.”

He nodded, apparently unoffended (not that he should be given his job), then we discussed the issue in a fairly forthright and adult manner.  There’s little point in going over it, as most of my annoyances were discussed in the letter – though I didn’t give it to him as I said I would in the comments of that post.  I did tell him about it, though, and admitted to having a printed copy in my bag.

C actively encouraged me to read it to him, but I refused.  I don’t know why; I’m annoyed with myself for chickening out, but it just didn’t feel ‘right’ at the time.  I told him I would think about it, and indeed I have the letter ready to take again tomorrow.

I had made the point that I had taken an awful lot of time to prepare the stuff I’d taken to him the week before, and told him that I’d found it horribly invalidating when that work was “thrown back in my face because [he] couldn’t be arsed to read it.”

He didn’t bother to defend himself in anyway.  Instead, he went to what seemed to me to be great pains to tell me that he really did understand my upset.

“And maybe you felt rejected?” he later queried.

Rather than duck out of this, as I would normally have done, I went ahead and confirmed his suspicion.

I wasn’t overly emotional throughout this discussion (though had been a bit during the discussion of ‘They’), but I had been out the day before wearing eye make-up (and hadn’t been arsed to wash it off – I know, I know, how disgusting), and my reluctance to express myself in this fashion in front of C had more to do with the possibility of having big black mascara-streaks down my face rather than my usual ‘must-fight-against-it-it-is-evil-and-weak’ stance.  For the first time I began to get a sense that I could and should talk openly to C about things I’d deliberately avoided, and that I could maybe start to demonstrate exactly how I might feel – and if that includes crying, or ranting or kicking things, then so be it.

There was nothing clear in the discussion that led to this, but for whatever reason, I felt the dynamic had subtly changed for the better – not that it’s generally been a bad one, of course, but perhaps it took an argument for me to fully trust him not to abandon me; ie. that if he was still there, still very much part of my life – and if anything more supportive – after a major disagreement, that just maybe he could be trusted with a range of unpleasantries.  Not that I ever consciously doubted that, but I don’t know – the subconscious is a funny thing I suppose, and I’ve always been firmly of the view that one should trust no one until they have definitively proven themselves trustworthy.  And even then, the trust should be cautiously administered.

Whatever subtleties took place last week, I hope they can sustain the future of the therapy.  Far from wanting to seek an alternative therapist, as I did the day I wrote the letter, I am quietly encouraged by things with C as they stand.

But it could all change tomorrow…