Them and Us

 Psychotherapy, Random Mental Health Related Philosophising, Traumatic Stuff  13 Responses »
Dec 212010
 

A few weeks ago, I made very brief allusion to the (highly unlikely) question of being seen by random people whilst in a therapy session.  The point also applies to the issue of waiting for or leaving such a meeting; given the nature of the department, building or clinic you’re in, people can immediately make huge assumptions about what you’re there for, whether they are accurate or otherwise. When I was seeing C on the NHS, I almost never saw anyone before the session commenced, but afterwards, the corridor would suddenly be laden – sometimes extensively, sometimes less so – of elderly people; there was a hearing clinic next door to Psychology, specifically catering to this demographic.  As such, given the signage about the place, all of these old people would have known that I was in the building for being mental, as – old as I feel – I’m a few years off pension-age yet.

On one occasion at C’s, there was another young-ish woman waiting before the beginning of the session. The atmosphere was as awkward as fuck, meaning that it was almost inevitable that we’d have to start talking to each other; we both knew we were there for psychotherapy, though a direct confirmation of same was never entirely verbalised.  She made assumptions about me, and I made assumptions about her.  Depression, I reckoned.  Isn’t it the usual catch-all term that GPs dish out when they’re making a referral, regardless of the accuracy thereof?

I wondered what the assumptions she’d made about me were.  Inevitably, “complete fuck up” would have come in there somewhere, as I accidentally intimated to her that I had been “seeing this bloke” for over a year.

In Nexus, my current centre of psychotherapy, this sense of assumption is even more amplified: the entire point of the organisation is to counsel those that have been raped and sexually assaulted.  Although you can’t tell exactly what has happened with a client of their services, you know – as opposed to assume – in general terms why they’re there.

As most of you will know, over the past month the weather in the UK has been very snowy, and because we lack any sort of normal and adequate infrastructure for dealing with same, people end up being sucked into the centre of the of the Milky Way’s central super-massive black hole late for appointments.  Because I do not have the shocking audacity common sense to be petrified of a bit of snow, I have not been late for my appointments.  This late/on time confluence of circumstances has resulted in that most dreaded of things: encounters with other in-therapy clients (actually, it has now resulted in that other most dreaded of things – a session cancelled by the allegedly snowed-in therapist.  I may rant about that, I may not, but it will come in another post if so.  Perhaps in my review of Week 10 ((ie. last week, 13 December)), which I really ought to try and write tomorrow, because cunting, fucking, wankshaft, bollocks Christmas and its inane miscellany of shite are monopolising my fucking time for the rest of the fucking cunt of a week).

Anyway, meeting other Nexus clients.  Perhaps needless to say, I haven’t exchanged words with them – I mean, what the fuck are you meant to say?  ”How’s it going there, lovey?  So…who was it, then?  Your ex? Father?  Cousin?”  No.  Sexual abuse does not lend itself well to polite smalltalk – however, for a split second, you lock eyes with the other person and, in a weird, intangible, unquantifiable sort of way, you know each other.  You could be polar opposites in terms of character, outlook, political persuasion and so on – but somehow this similar sort of tragic shared history forgives any such differences. At the risk of sounding insanely pretentious, for that second, you are united.

Then you both remember that society rarely allows itself to openly acknowledge what has happened to you, and you look away from each other.

The particular branch of Nexus that I attend is quite a surreptitious building – a deliberate choice, I am certain. The sign denoting the name of the building is tiny, in stark contrast to some of the other properties in the area.  I am in fact convinced that the name of the organisation – though probably symbolic in some way – was chosen mainly because it’s so anonymous and dull.  Inside said branch, there are two waiting rooms; one for those there for training, or interviews and the like – and another one, tucked quietly round the corner, for us.

I am grateful for this.

I resent myself for being grateful for this.

Why shouldn’t I sit with non-client attendees?!  It’s not like I have some sort of infectious disease or something, unless Nexus somehow have paranormal-like powers in the arena of medical classification.  I’m not a walking case of dynamite or airbourne poison.  The charity would no doubt claim that they arrange the rooms as they this for the privacy of the client, and I would not doubt this assertion for a nanosecond.  As I say, I have only gratitude for their thoughtfulness in this regard.  But should it have to be this way?  What have I, or any of the other abused clients, done to deserve a sort of pseudo-banishment from ‘ordinary’ society?  Why should we be hidden away from the world, like things to be brushed under the carpet?  And, maybe more importantly, why should we want to?!  (Yes, yes, yes – I don’t speak out because of my family situation, and I know I’m highly unlikely to be the only one – but in a way, that’s part of the point. My family would disown me and probably me my mother.  Why should they do that?  I didn’t fucking systematically rape my-fucking-self!  And why would his claims of innocence be more convincing that my recounting of reality?  This is exactly my point.).

I should note that I am not criticising Nexus in the least.  They’re only implementing a policy that all their clients want.  What I am doing is asking why we want it, and let’s face it – isn’t it in large part because sex abuse is still such a taboo subject?  Society, whilst peripherally acknowledging its existence, turns a blind eye to the harsh reality of the phenomenon; it always has.  In the modern era we are more aware that it happens, certainly – but have we come far enough?

I have so much admiration for those victims of the Irish Catholic institutional abuse.  Many of them have waived their rights to anonymity in order that they could openly raise awareness of the issue, and indeed of child abuse in general.  And nobody blames them for what happened, rightly reserving their antipathy for the horrible perpetrators instead.

I do wonder though if we as a society are really ready to accept that families and “ordinary” people do this to each other – in some cases, to their own children.  Moreover, can we accept this without unwittingly excusing it?  I know my little corner of the world can’t cope with such recognitions.  My mother simply cannot believe that incest occurs, for example.  ”Parents couldn’t do that to their children,” she claims: because she feels maternal love for her offspring, so it must be for every single parent in creation.  She has come to ‘believe’ in the afore-referenced Irish scandal, as if it were something that somehow warranted doubt to begin with, but opines that if the Church allowed priests to get married, then it would never have happened.  Her childlike naivety and wilful disregard for evidence staring her in the face still has the power to shock me.

Why is the default setting of many people to deny the existence of this stuff?  Why is it society’s default setting to ignore it?  Why do only a single-figure percentage of rape cases taken to Crown Courts result in conviction?

It’s not just sex abuse that I’m ranting about either.  It’s general discrimination faced by people who have experiences the world is scared to try and understand – mental illness, indeed, though such attitudes are by no means limited to these two arenas.

Even as recently as the latter half of the last century, cancer was a big taboo.

Oh, yes, my sister’s ill.  [Nervous pause]  Er…well…it’s…well [whispering] it’s cancer.

Oh… [backs away]  Oh right.  Well, it was nice to see you.  Cheerio. [Practically runs away]

In this stigmatic sense, mental health problems are today’s cancer – but then again, these forms of illness have always been regarded in demeaning or horrific fashions.  From ignorant cunts claiming that mental illness doesn’t exist, to things like enforced electro-convulsive therapy – mentalists amongst us are still under attack with little hope that I can discern of ceasefire.  True; no one really fully understands the mind and its parent organ, the brain – but nonetheless, mental health problems are still subjected to a complete Cinderella of a service in terms of accessing meaningful treatment.

Why?  What is it that this stupid fucking planet is so scared of?  It fears the unknown, certainly, but it has overcome its prejudice in that regard on a multitude of previous occasions.  Various organisations are trying to help it overcome this one, but I really wonder sometimes to what extent they are succeeding.

In this little corner of teh interwebs in which people like me write – the little part of the blogosphere that has become known as the Madosphere – there is no stigma, no horrified and urgent backing away, when you discuss the finer (or even the general) points of your illness.  But, if you ran into an old friend today (that had not studied Psychology, Medicine, Nursing or some allied professional) and said to them, “I have borderline personality disorder,” do you think they would even know what you meant?  If you said, “I have schizophrenia,” would they automatically assume that you have 17 different personalities and/or are, by your very nature, violent and deeply dangerous?

Would you even tell them you had a diagnosable mental health difficulty?  If not, why not?  It’s none of their business, is it?  You’d tell them if you had gall stones, would you not?  How is that any more their business than your schizophrenia?

On the point of the erroneous assumption that schizophrenia is dissociative identity (or multiple personality) disorder, would they know that cases of multiplicity are almost always connected with severe and chronic childhood trauma – or would they simply be of the view that it was some bizarre, at times even amusing, quirk of the mind of those thus afflicted?  If they’d even heard of borderline personality disorder, would they know that in a notable majority of cases, an abusive history is present?

Would they care?

Of course, everyone would claim that they would care deeply – how could one not feel repulsion and compassion for a mistreated child, blah blah blah.  The problem is the person with the mental health problem is no longer a child, and in ageing for some reason seems to have lost the side with which one is allowed to have sympathy.  One’s bad experiences – if indeed there even were any, because they might have ‘imagined’ it to their psychotic madness, or lied about it owing to them being a useless malingerer! – should be resolved by now; if one remains mentally ill, then it has nothing to do with either brain chemistry or trauma, and is merely a fault – a deficiency – in you, the person afflicted.  Either you should get off your arse and get on with your life, or you should be sectioned.

I am simplifying, and of course a lot of people do recognise the existence – in theory, at least – of a middle ground, but I really don’t think I am grossly overplaying this hand.  It is easy for us in the Madosphere and, if we’re lucky, our friends and family, to  universally accept that mentalism is understood and accepted, because that is what we’re used to here.  Experience, however, has taught me that as soon as you deviate from an inner circle, you see the views of the rest of the world – and they are the reason for the very existence of this rambling, meandering post.  And it’s sad to see – from my own point of view, yes, but more so from the perspective of those people whom it prevents from seeking help.  They suffer alone or, in especially tragic cases, end up committing suicide, feeling they simply have no outlet for their misery.

The problem is, of course, ignorance – at least in the main.  As noted, that widespread setting is being challenged by the likes of the Time to Change project (or – here in Northern Ireland – um…er…well…nothing). However, these organisations can’t reach everyone, try as they so steadfastly and admirably do.  At some point do individuals not have to take responsibility for their own lack of awareness (they do in court – not knowing that something is illegal, or that that person you slept with is a minor, is an illegitimate defence in British law)?  I’m not saying that every single person across the space-time continuum should drop everything right now and start Googling the finer points of the academic discourse on mental ill health.  That would hardly gain us any points!  But when a non-disordered person encounters (I originally typed encunters, which also works) mental health difficulties in others – at work, school, the gym, or even through entertainment such as film and music – would it really be so much to ask that they took a few minutes to (a) understand that they don’t understand, (b) accept that they cannot therefore judge those affected, and (c) do at least a little research?  Is modern life really that full and frenzied that 10 minutes out of a person’s day can’t be devoted to this, at least when there’s a clear catalyst for it?

Deary me.  Trauma and mental illness, and the sometime correlation between the two.  Can those of us affected ever be entirely integrated into normal society like, say, those with cancer largely have (rightly) been? Or will the issues always remain taboo – someone else’s problem, not something that happens amongst one’s direct friends and family?  Will it always just be a case of them and us?

/overlengthyrant

(NB.  Questions are rhetorical (though discussion is, as ever, welcome); nothing in particular precipitated this gurning except my annoyance at the waiting rooms issue at Nexus; I probably perpetuate stigma and a Them and Us culture in using some of the terms I do; I am just a mental freak with bells on and you should not listen to ((read)) a word I say ((write)); the Earth is flat and orbits around a giant tombstone with a statue of a banana on top; blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, etc etc etc, ad infinitum ad infinitum ad infinitum, la la la, meh meh meh…)

Child Minder – Paul: Week Four

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse, Traumatic Stuff, Triggers  24 Responses »
Nov 072010
 

***TRIGGER WARNINGS – SEXUAL ABUSE, DISSOCIATING, TRAUMA***

After my last (ie. this) session with Paul, I reported sensationally on Twitter that the meeting had been “…simultaneously the most horrible and most fascinating therapy session of my entire life…” Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic – I can certainly see why it would – but if anything it was actually an understatement. As I reported briefly in my account of the previous session, misanthropy aside, the human mind is such a remarkable device. I would love to understand it better, but what I do comprehend amazes me. In particular, I am referring to the mind’s ability to dissociate as a measure of psychological protection.

The session started in a completely innocuous fashion. If anything, it was a little forced to begin with, and I began to worry that it would not be remotely useful. I’ve found myself comparing to C to Paul in each of these review posts to date – the latter emerging rather more favourably than his predecessor, as my readers appear to concur – but this was the first time where I feared that we would have one of those pointlessly and irritatingly vacuous encounters that so frequently characterised my time in NHS therapy.

I reminded him that I wouldn’t be around on Monday 1 November (due to being dead / in Newcastle-upon-Tyne), and we engaged in a bit of time-filling smalltalk pertaining to same. To be honest, it was slightly awkward – I didn’t know what to say to him, and I (mistakenly) felt that it was a mutual feeling. Of course, starting the conversation that you’re there to have is by its very nature difficult. It’s not exactly frivolous or light-hearted subject matter, now is it?!

We talked for a few minutes about the guided imagery exercise of the previous week, and agreed that it had been useful. I admitted to having had a certain measure of cynicism to start with, but told him that I had reflected upon it, and was especially intrigued by the issues he’d brought up at the end – namely the locked door and the lack of boundaries around the imaginary house.

Paul said, “I was also really interested to note the maze of rooms.”

“Yes,” I nodded, adding, almost as a murmured afterthought, “it was a bit of a labyrinth.”

“Labyrinth!” he repeated, excitedly. “That’s the perfect word. Because, of course, the purpose of a labyrinth was to prevent entry to an inner sanctum.” He looked at me enigmatically, his grey eyebrow slightly arched in curious query.

Even now, nearly two years after having been in some sort of constant-ish therapy of some type or another, I am horribly uncomfortable with people looking straight into my head like that. If C was Derren Brown (and he was…he really was), then Paul is…um…an older, stouter, beardless, non-suited version of Derren Brown…Yeah. That. [No, I'm not happy with that. I am a prosaic failure. In fact, I just skimmed the entirety of DB's Wikipedia article looking for a older contemporary with whom I could compare Paul, but there is no one. Paul is not a magician, and that's all to which it seems to allude. If you can help out a pathetic writer and popular culture failure, please name mind-readers in their 40s or 50s who are bald and...er...not thin in the comments of this post. Preferably English people, but I can live with other nationalities. Winner gets a random Pandora-created drawing].

I looked away, eventually making some non-committal guttural sound of reluctant acquiescence.

A brief silence ensued wherein I desperately searched my head for something to say to this good man who a mere few weeks after our first acquaintance knows some of my darkest secrets. Eventually I said that the ‘labyrinth’ worried me because, “I recall some pretty horrible stuff. What more don’t I know? What all lurks behind those closed doors?”

He replied, “possibly quite a bit, but it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing state of affairs. For example, you can watch a vicious horror film without feeling like it happens to you. You can watch what’s behind those doors in the same way.”

“Like it’s in the third person?”

“Exactly.”

For the first time I nearly laughed in his face (something I bitterly did to C nearly every week). Me, have the capability to experience stuff in the third person? Yeah fucking right mate. I could do it well when I was a child, evidently, but I can’t do it now; that’s why I’m such a fuck-up. Every speck of every trauma memory terrorises my psyche with a profundity I never imagined possible (or rather did, because it perpetually haunts me, but you know what I mean). I am the most neurotic person in history, and I feel it so acutely that if it weren’t so fucking nasty it’d be amusing. I’m pathetic, in the truest sense of the word.

Rather than respond thus bitchily though, I shifted the agenda and said, “yeah, the human mind’s fascinating, isn’t it? That it copes with this stuff in that sort of way. It’s kind of remarkable, in a way.”

“One thing that has stuck with me about you,” Paul said, “is that when I once rhetorically asked you how you, a little girl, had coped with something as serious as systematic abuse, you answered, ‘surprisingly well’. How? How does a tiny child cope with something like that ‘surprisingly well’?”

I shrugged. How the fuck was I meant to know? I’m not a child psychologist. “I don’t remember much minutiae of my childhood,” I muttered. “I was precocious and popular though, so I must have put it all out of my head in the aforementioned way.”

“Have you ever heard yourself described as ‘remarkable’ before?” he asked, referring to my earlier comment on the brain’s means of psychological protection.

“We’re not talking about me,” I responded definitely.

“We are. We are.”

“Well, I think that these psychological devices are capacities that probably all humans have; it’s not unique to me. Fortunately it’s only a small minority of us that are ever put in the kind of situation where they need to be used. But I think in the ‘right’ circumstances everyone can probably do it. Whether it’s God-created or whether it’s evolutionary, it’s…well, it’s interesting. But it’s not just me.”

I was later to see just how ‘interesting’ dissociative coping mechanisms can be, but in the meantime, Paul changed the subject slightly, posing the question, “how do you think our work together is going?”

“Well,” I responded, with no need for consideration of the query. “I’m happy with things so far. I think I can make progress through this.” After all, ever since I first met him, I had felt the relationship we shared was likely to be a positive one.

“How do you think it’s going?” I returned.

He smiled his broad grin and said, “I’m really enjoying myself!”

We laughed; although there is obviously a very serious side to what we’re doing, I find it comforting to know that at least he doesn’t find my company completely repellent.

I told him that I don’t believe in complete cures to mental health problems or trauma-related illnesses, but that I do believe in one’s ability to – with the requisite help – manage their symptoms and/or experiences. “I feel that I can maybe begin to start that management through this process,” I went on. “I feel positive about it, and it’s very rare for me to feel that – so I suppose you can feel rather complimented by it!”

“Wow,” he said, blushing slightly but smiling warmly and, I believe, genuinely.

Thus ensued a discussion on how progress and, indeed, sanity itself was measured. He asked, “when we come to the end of this, how will you measure how far you’ve come? Do you have some sort of mythical – or, indeed, real – role model to whom you aspire, or is it just a case of survival? Are you happy to go on surviving – just, hopefully, doing a slightly better job of surviving?”

“Given that this is rape counselling, I’m not sure how much of it we can address here,” I began, “but I have this horrible yardstick by which I measure psychotherapeutic success, and that’s how able I feel to go back to work without going doolally.”

Paul said, enthusiastically, “I love this term ‘doolally’. If you were to go ‘doolally’ here, what kind of thing would I see?”

“Probably something not very nice! I would probably expect the belligerent voices to come out; perhaps I would hallucinate my uncle again. There were also times at home where I’d go around banging my head off the wall and screaming [see almost any post between June and September last year], so you might see that here…”

“What about communication between you and I?” he interrupted. “Would that be able to take place?”

“Yeah. I think so. I remember one occasion with my NHS psychologist where I was having a conversation with the voices as well as him. Also, I got particularly annoyed with the same bloke one day, and screamed a barrage of abuse at him, including calling him a ‘sadistic headfucker‘. A terrible thing to say, but that’s what I mean by ‘doolally’. So. Wrap up your furniture and yourself!”

He laughed lightly. “This sounds horrible, but it is a part of you that’s represented in these situations, isn’t it? It sounds like a very hurt, very painful part of you.”

We spent a few minutes discussing my anger issues, and how this blog – plus the aforementioned incidents – were really the only times I exhibited that side of myself. As I told him, I’m normally a remarkably submissive, mind-numbingly ‘nice’ person, which makes me feel almost as sick about myself as my inner cauldron of blind rage does.

All this led to the same discussion I’d had with C a thousand times, namely that I end up intellectualising matters, and analysing them with the therapist. Both C, and now Paul, admitted that they were easily inclined towards that kind of conversation, and that in the process, sometimes being in touch with ‘feelings’ was something that got lost amongst the mire.

I said that I had been perpetually guilty of seducing C into intellectual discourse and that I apologised if I had (or would) do the same with Paul, but he waved his hand dismissively at me, and said, “we go where we go. It’s not my job to say, ‘don’t go there’; it’s my job to enquire as to why that’s where we’re going.”

He went on, “that’s what we’re doing now, isn’t it? Dissociation from feelings. That’s really interesting – the thing that you experienced in the past – dissociation – is playing out in here, right now.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. I considered it for a silent few minutes, and then asked him was my behaviour – ie. avoidance by way of apparently intellectual analysis – ‘normal’ in the course of his job.

“Yes. I’m a very specific type of therapist,” he told me. “I’m into object relations, how you coped in the past, how you’ve built relationships. What you did to survive in the past, you are now doing here. 95% of my clients do it, but in different ways. Some say, ‘right, how can I please Paul? How can I make Paul feel good?’ They’re trying to avoid the hurt or danger of their feelings – just like they tried to avoid the actual hurt or danger of their abuse. And I admit it; it sometimes works. Sometimes I feel like the greatest bloke on Earth, and it’s all down to this countertransference. In your case, you seek reasons and analysis. Let’s avoid the dangerous stuff by talking psychology. And I feel like bloody Einstein!”

I laughed, sincerely, but his point was a serious one. “It’s a balancing act, isn’t it?” I mused. “Between that need for safety, but the need to confront that which needs to be confronted.”

“Yes. The balancing act for you now is how much can you deal with leaning towards that anxiety?”

We sat silently for several minutes before I said, “I can cope. I think I can cope.”

“We need to go inside that labyrinth again – but you need a safe space as well.”

This sounded as new-agey as the guided imagery stuff had originally done for me, but after a bit of querying of the suggestion, I agreed to employ a particular memory from my holiday to Turkey last year as a ‘safe space’.

And so commenced the latest guided imagery exercise. I’m going to leave a chunk of this part of the session out (“thank God”, I can almost hear you say), as it essentially mirrors the early part of the previous week’s meeting (the discovery of the house, its downstairs rooms, stairs etc).

Eventually I again ended up in the second landing of the ‘labyrinth’. He asked me how I felt there.

“Do you know when you walk past an industrial estate late at night,” I began, “…well, not that I make a habit of walking past industrial estates late at night, but you know what I mean. There are signs up about trespassing, guard dogs, how you must keep out. I get a distinct air of that kind of place here.”

He asked about the layout, and I told him that there was a door to the right but that it was “vacuous” and that I didn’t get any particular type of vibe from it. The storage area to my left felt vaguely sinister, but not crippling so. The door immediately opposite me, however, felt distinctly hostile.

“Not that a door can be classed as ‘hostile’,” I remarked, but he told me to forget practical issues like that for the time being, and asked about the doors I couldn’t see around the corner – was I sure that they were there?

I was. I said I wasn’t sure how many there were but that they were certainly there alright, and to that end Paul suggested I take a ‘stroll’ around the corner to see what was there.

I ‘proceeded’ with caution, but did as I was told. There were two doors – I had suspected this, but hadn’t been certain on the point. One was directly ahead of me, the other one on the right, actually going into the slope in the roof, as if it were a loft or something. I told him Paul that there was, again, ‘an air of hostility’ emanating from these inanimate wooden objects.

Gah. This all sounds so ridiculous in review, doesn’t it?

“If I asked you to open a door right now, which one would you choose?” he queried.

I thought about it intensely for a few minutes, before telling him that “my sense of masochism” was still gravitating towards the most belligerent room – namely the one that had been directly opposite me when I entered this imaginary house’s second landing.

“Wander into it then,” he said, annoyingly nonchalantly.

I felt deeply uncomfortable about doing so. In an instant, I was reminded of an occurrence at my grandfather’s house when I was about seven or so; I’d gone out exploring some of the buildings and had come across a door somewhere or other, the details of what lay beyond it completely unknown to me. I remember staring at it for what felt like hours, though in reality it was maybe about 10 minutes, willing myself the strength to open it. For some reason, the prospect of doing so intimidated me greatly, despite its discovery being the result of my own curiosity.

Eventually, I flung it open, rather dramatically – only to stand there for another eon, frozen with terror at the blackness that greeted me.

Fast forward back to the future, specifically to this session with Paul. My ‘encounter’ with this similar door was exactly like the real one of my childhood. After summoning up all my courage, I opened the ethereal entryway, and found my gaze fixed upon a menacing, but sinisterly beguiling nothing of darkness.

And so, eventually, begins the ‘fascinating’ part.

“I feel something…something bad…it’s a really weird idea that doesn’t particularly exist in adulthood. Fear – proper fear – terror. Of…of monsters, of evil monsters, childhood monster figures.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“There’s a kid. She looks like me, I suppose she must be me…”

“No,” Paul interrupted gently but authoritatively. “How old are you?”

I paused. “Four, maybe five? Certainly no more than six.”

“Are you scared of the dark?”

“Ordinarily, no – but I’m scared of it here, yeah.”

Soon-to-be 27-year-old me stared intensely at the heat gauge on the radiator. It was a real, tangible object, but also a completely random one that my mind was not likely to simply create. I fixated on it to remind myself that I wasn’t in that house, wasn’t in that room – I was there, in a room at Nexus, in 2010, with Paul. I also caught myself pulling my hair quite viciously at times. Trich is still often my first line of defence against greater instances of self-harm.

“What do you imagine is in that dark?” Paul went on.

“There’s a load of nebulous images going through my mind. Shapes. Belligerent ones. Plus faces, but they’re sort of pixellated – I can’t see them properly.”

“Scared.”

“All consuming horror and dread. I’m like a deer in the headlights.”

“Are you inside the room?”

“Only about a foot in.”

“Is there a lightswitch?”

After some thought, I replied that I couldn’t find one.

“You’re stuck in the dark, with no way to lighten it. With all those things - in the dark.”

I think it was at about this time that I felt it. It was the single weirdest and in some ways most disturbing sensation and experience of my whole life, and whilst thinking about it intellectually delights me, it also brings with it yet another sense of horror. Nausea and butterflies, a bitter, metallic taste on my tongue, a mental whirlwind of denial and failed reasoning.

I felt ‘me’ lift out of my mind. It was physical as well as psychological – I know that sounds utterly asinine, but I cant think of how else to describe it. My body was not my own – I was an observer of it, and I had ‘left’ it. If I were to put the somatic nature of it into words, the closest I could come was that it was like a pressure of an unknown something rising from the top of my beck, right up through the back of my skull – then…’out’. Gone. That doesn’t grasp the reality of it at all, like, but it’s the best I can do.

But my body wasn’t devoid of an owner. I was actually still in it – but unfortunately I was five. I was a child, a Child-Me, a younger, weaker version of the real, now Me.

“What do you want to happen?” Paul asked ‘me’.

“I want to go to sleep,” ‘I’ replied. I sounded like the Now-Me, but there were one or two audible inflections that would not be in keeping with my normal now-voice. As this strangeness continued, I noticed how relatively basic and unrefined my spoken vocabulary was too. (This disgusts me. I was meant to be a fucking intelligent child. My speech 20 years ago shouldn’t have been that different from my speech now. Fuck’s sake!).

“You just want to close your eyes, and drift off to sleep, make it all go away,” Paul re-iterated, somewhat to Child-Me’s irritation. She/I had already said that was what she/I wanted. You shouldn’t be wasting time repeating me.

“…and that’s just what you did, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.” [An interesting idiomatic construction; I hate the word 'guess' in this context, and would almost always use 'suppose' in its stead.]

For the purposes of clarity, I shall henceforth refer to my adult self as ‘Pandora’, and the child as ‘Aurora’. There’s no meaning to the latter the way there is with the former, nor did ‘she’ self-identify as such – it’s simply a name that I have always liked.

Pandora popped up in the psyche from which she was partly dissociated and said, “OK, the weird thing is that I actually feel really sleepy right now.” My eyes continued to apparently stare at the heating gauge, but I was staring past it now. My eyelids weighed heaving on my brows. I had to rest them a few times and had to will myself not to give in to this soporific strangeness. There was an ensuing several minutes of silence whilst I tried to fight it.

“Dissociation in action,” someone who was mostly Pandora eventually mused. Then: “…floaty.”

“Comfortably numb,” Paul offered, which worked for me.

“You were in that room, with all these bad things -terrified,” he went on, “and you survived by going to sleep.”

Aurora rolled her eyes at the second instance of Paul’s repetition. This childish indignation reminds me of something important, which I must bring up with Paul in due course. I was about four or so, and Paedo had asked me to do something (innocuous – I don’t remember what), a request that I adamantly refused for whatever reason. When Paedo told me that I had to do whatever it was, I responded by saying, “no. It’s my life!”

I shouldn’t have said that. It pissed him off and he went on to punish me for my impudence. I shouldn’t have been surprised by it really.

Anyway, back in 2010 – or not, depending on the particular moment of the session – Paul spoke up again.

“You have just witnessed, in the here and now, what you did then.”

“Yep. Strange.” Pause. “The shape things – not so much recently, but I used to see them all the time. I thought it was normal until she…” – I raised an eyebrow in confused self-directed horror – “…until I started reading about mental health issues. They were just normal to me. I didn’t know they would be connected to that…to that room.”

I listened to the sound of my own voice from afar. It was still fairly deep, as it is in reality, but that subtle inflected oddity was nauseatingly audible.

“Did they remind you of anything?” he asked.

I/she/it said that they didn’t, but then went on a long monologue of description. I noted with interest that she/it/I/blah blah once referred to them as ‘blobs’. Very much, very notably, not ‘my’ word at all. (For your reference, a description of the shapes can be found in the latter half of this post).

I ended my little soliloquy by saying that I associated the shapes with downright, abject terror.

“And now I want to beat myself about the head for being so bloody histrionic!” Pandora whinged, pushing Aurora out of the mental way.

“‘Histrionic’,” Paul repeated, noting some sort of transitional occurrence. “It’s an odd word to be using.”

“It does seem somewhat incongruous, I suppose,” said (I presume) Pandora.

Paul chuckled lightly. “‘Incongruous’? Can you see that you’re moving away from her…”

“Sorry.”

“…that you’re coming out with some brilliantly descriptive words, but that they’re too brilliant; you’ve evidently moved away from the little child that was speaking a few minutes ago.

“What was it like,” he went on, “coming that close to the power of that fear? I think that’s the first time we’ve really ‘got’ to it so closely.”

“Some meteor hitting the Earth notwithstanding, I know I’m safe in this room – but it doesn’t make it any less real; it feels genuine and…well, quite indistinct, to be honest. It doesn’t feel related to one person or one thing – basically, I don’t know what I’m scared of.”

“Something in the dark,” he suggested. “It’s easier to fill the room with ‘fantasy’ monsters, isn’t it, rather than see the real monsters. It’s like psychosis. I suppose the shapes could actually be considered psychotic. What you described there – shapes, pixellated faces – they don’t exist. You’ve created them based on a reality too hard to deal with. It must have been very painful indeed.”

“Must have been,” a sad voice, laced with several inches of regret and raw hurt, finally replied. An Aurora-hangover. “This is the first time since I’ve come here that I feel really, really horrible. And then practical matters hit you head on – for example, right now I’m in too much of a state to drive home, how will I do that?”

He took the question as rhetorical, which was perhaps a good thing because then she (Aurora) answered it in her apparently co-conscious brain-share.

What are you talking about? You can’t drive, you’re five years old!

This amused me/Pandora – even though it simultaneously terrified me – and I relayed the information in question to Paul. “That’s just ridiculous,” I laughed.

After a long pause, he said, “wouldn’t it be lovely if you could keep that contact with [Aurora]? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could say, ‘OK, you’re safe, you can tell me what happened to you’. You’re not battling her; you’re listening to her.”

I sighed deeply, exhausted by the whole thing, but on he went about Aurora telling me her experiences. Utilising the brain-share, I tried to ask her.

“Even a kid as smart as she is doesn’t have a full vocabulary to describe some of it,” I told Paul. “‘Pain’ and ‘terror’ are the two words that continually come up. People. Men. I think they’re men. Something around her wrists [I demonstrated by wrapping my right thumb and index finger around my left wrist, and tightening]. [Long pause] Sorry, communication has been interrupted…”

It was too much. Too raw, too visceral, too real, too there. Not then, now. Now now now. NOW! I/Pandora was suddenly gasping for breath, speechless except for incomprehensible but urgent gibberish.

He guided me away.

Several minutes of ‘recovery’ followed, before we briefly reviewed the frankly bizarre and disturbing events of the previous 45-ish minutes.

Pandora was now firmly in control again. Where Aurora went, I still don’t know. I’m slightly scared of meeting her again tomorrow, but she’s been elusive for the last fortnight.

“I know I dissociate, and not-inconsiderably at that,” I analysed. “There’s stuff like derealisation right up to full-blown amnesia or fugue states. But that just happens. There isn’t some sort of transition from ‘me’ to a dissociated ego state. Just now, though – well, there was. I felt it all, I saw it all.”

I kept tumbling over my words in my attempts to explain it. “Something was lifting out of my head,” I explained through a haze of ums-and-ahs, “which is just ridiculous. So now I’m off home to panic that I have dissociative identity disorder.”

“It was really interesting when [Aurora] stopped you driving away,” Paul told me. “I know you were thinking in practical terms, but I think it’s also demonstrative of your desire to mentally drive away – and she wouldn’t let you. That was brilliant. You tried to dissociate, and she made you stay.

“But all those things she dissociates,” he went on, “they’re still there somewhere. It’s not about you having a disorder. This is about you coping. It’s something positive that you did. Words like ‘disorder’ intellectualise it. They cloud that positivity.”

Silence.

Eventually, after much reflection, I said, almost in a state of ruminative awe, “what a strange experience.”

“You referenced a lot of people. A touch on the girl’s experience, perhaps?”

“Yeah. I have some very rudimentary, flashback-y awareness of that. My vocal chords refuse to utter the words.”

“You struggled with that last time,” he recalled.

And I had done – but ultimately I had said it. This time, I just couldn’t. “There was him, there was always him, for years and years and years” I tried desperately. “It’s bad enough to throw accusations at him, but now I’m doing it for a number of other personnel. What if I’m wrong? That’s unspeakable.”

“It’s the lesser of two evils,” Paul said. “Believe yourself to be a fantasist and a liar, and them to be guiltless. Easier to think that than to believe yourself to have gone through a, in your own words, gang rapes.”

I winced, and he duly apologised.

“We aren’t intellectualising now,” he noted. “We’re sitting here with feelings, and you keep fishing around for explanations, because connecting with this is so hard.

I couldn’t speak. I tried, desperately, over and over and over again, but I stammered and stumbled and ultimately completely fucking failed to utter an understandable statement of any kind.

Eventually, though, I managed to say that if ‘that thing’ had happened, that it was mystifying because ‘it’ was normally ‘just him’.

“Where did those words that you can’t say just come from?” he asked, rhetorically. “They don’t come from the adult you. It’s [Aurora].”

Indeed so. It was. I wouldn’t have known those words as a child, and when Aurora was trying to say them, naturally enough, she could not.

However, on this note, the session ended. Paul had already allowed it to overrun by over 10 minutes so I apologised (“why are you sorry?! It’s me that’s sitting here with the watch!) and left. I walked back to my car, and simply sat in it for a very long time.

So I have an “alter”, whether co-conscious or otherwise, whether she is or is not a normal, regular part of my life.

This is disturbing, exciting, horrific, intellectually awesome and unbelievably dreadful – all rolled into one.

Aurora.

Functional Psychosis, Self-Harm and Depth Psychology – Paul: Week Three, Part II

 Nexus, Paul, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse  12 Responses »
Oct 282010
 

***Psychosis / Suicide / Self-Harm / Sex Abuse / Sorry Use of Alliteration Triggers***

****In Fact, Probably Every Post About Paul – Given the Nature of the Therapy – is Hereby Deemed to Require Trigger Warnings****

The following is a continuation of this post. Today’s date is 28 October, so refers to a counselling session that took place over a week ago and not that of this week. The meeting of of Monday 25th was, as I rather bemusedly noted on Twitter that afternoon, one of the most horrific and appalling therapy sessions I’ve ever experienced – and yet, intellectually, it was sublimely interesting. Misanthropy and joking about our species’ mass stupidity aside, the human mind is truly a fascinating device, capable of more than will ever be understood in my lifetime, and indeed in all probability of that of my phantom, not-to-be descendants.

Anyway, regardless of Monday’s rather philosophical awe, Paul is still A Good Thing. Where we went last week immediately after the short discussion on the 4 October Plan as linked to above (my immensely long post was stupidly deceptive) is, by now, anyone’s guess, but I believe that he must have asked me how I had been in the week since I’d seen him, because I ended up confessing to him about an incident of self-harm about which I had (at that point) not told anyone.

It happened on the Sunday, the evening before I saw him. I was sitting minding my own business quite indifferently one minute, and the next I was in one of the bleakest depressions I can remember this year, and maybe for even longer than that. I can’t say “it just hit me” or something similar, because that would suggest that it felt ‘new’ or something. It didn’t. Obviously I know that it was sudden, but depression fucks with one’s most rudimentary grasps of the passage of time, and in this curious way it felt like it had always been with me.

A, perturbed by this reasonless nosedive, reminded me that we had a fun weekend to look forward to* but I remember responding that I doubted I’d still be respiring by that point. Actually, my usual retrospective analysis makes clear that of course I would not have done myself in whilst in such a state; it takes effort and a certain amount of determination to develop a suicide plan, and I didn’t have either.

In that regard, self-harming at the time was an odd progression, but then again the cuts were pathetically superficial and required little direct attention on my part. I wrote ‘EVIL’ and slashed the blade about randomly for a bit, watching in a satisfied trance as it all bled.

Self-harm, as a mood management function, works (at least for me). I find myself rather reminded of last July – as soon as I had emblazoned the word ‘HATE’ across my abdomen on that occasion, I was quite simply fine. And so it came to pass on this occasion also.

I told Paul about it, perhaps a little sheepishly. I know he told me at the end of the first session with him that he expected my mood to probably get worse before it got better, but still – it seems nasty to tell a therapist that in the course of your work together that things just get shitter and shitter, to the point where cutting yourself is not only a desirable course of action, but a required one.

Of course, it takes more than that to faze Paul. I remember C finding some of my elaborate acts of self-harm to be quite perplexing, but Paul makes no judgement one way or the other (more on the refreshing nature of this later). His main point of concern, after establishing the extent of the damage, was why the word ‘evil’ was my chosen form of body art.

I didn’t know the answer to this. I remember resisting the urge to shrug, because it seems sort of rude to do so, but it seemed the response that most accurately answered his question. I had no idea what the exact reasons were, and to be honest I didn’t especially care.

Paul being the type of therapist he is though – almost Fruedian or psychodynamic in some ways, even more so on certain points than his predecessor – thinks that nothing is motiveless. I wrote ‘evil’ as opposed to ‘I love fluffy puppies’ for a reason.

“I suppose it’s rather obvious, though,” I said eventually. “It was, at least at the time, how I felt about myself. I don’t now especially, but I probably did then.”

I don’t recall his exact response, but he is always very direct in revealing what he thinks and, as he has done in the past, in some way or another he voiced the view that I had nothing to feel ‘evil’ about.

I said that I knew that rationally – at least sometimes – but that did not make it any less real in terms of visceral feeling. It just ‘feels right’ sometimes to think that I am an evil being.

Naturally, he thinks that I have largely projected the apparent evil of others onto myself. Such thinking has apparently been encouraged by those who inflicted their apparent evil upon me, and it all alchemises in a large cauldron of psychic confusion.

We talked for a while about the general mechanisms of cutting, and about how it improves my mood almost instantly. I said that I appreciated the biology involved – endorphins rushing to the site of the wound and whatnot – but that I felt that there was more to it than just that. For one thing, I find the flow of blood calming and fascinating. Also, the short, sharp shock of making an incision is a far better grounding mechanism than C’s stupid breathing techniques ever were, are or will be. I remember W once sagely noting that those were comparable to throwing half a small bottle of Evian on a state-wide Australian bushfire. Quite so.

Anyhow, I told Paul of how I would ‘use’ self-injury to prevent myself dissociating, to ease anxiety, to manage my moods and to distance myself from psychotic symptomology.

So began a discussion surrounding the types of psychoses I’d experienced. I said, “my psychiatrist thinks that my psychoses are not of the traditional schizophrenic type. She thinks they’re sort of dissociative.”

“In what way?” he enquired.

“Well, rather than be engaged in some sort of external fantasy, my mind ‘branches off’ into these kind of voices or unreasonable beliefs.”

“Which sounds like a good description schizophrenia to me,” Paul replied. “One of the best explanations I’ve heard for psychosis is that the reality of what the mind is faced with becomes so huge, so unbearable, that the ego ‘splits’ and ergo psychosis takes over. Oftentimes, it is a horrible place in which to be, but it’s still an externalised psychological fantasy designed to mask reality, and in that sense you will find that parts of the self – as in your case, and as in others – are expressed in ‘unreal’ ways. So I suppose I’m saying that it is in many ways functional – a protective device of the mind, just like more obvious forms of dissociation.”

So, it is as I suspected. Paul believes in the trauma model of mental illness – he doesn’t hold particularly to the idea that bio-chemistry can be responsible, at least in some cases. I, of course, do not agree with such an assessment, but then it hardly matters in this context. He is there to treat me for trauma-related symptoms, whether or not there is a biological element to them or not. My agreement or otherwise with his hypothesis is unimportant, as long as we are on the same wavelength vis a vis my treatment – and so far, I think we are.

As I mentioned in the previous post pertaining to this session, Paul thinks there is a small ‘nugget’ of my mind that cares about myself and wants to protect me, and it is his view that the late Tom represented said nugget. The nugget kept me from purchasing the helium needed to kill myself on 4 October 2010.

By the same token, ‘They’ are the dissociated side(s) of myself that view me as the whore that seduced Paedo (and, it seems, others). ‘They’ are the parts that believed Paedo and friends when he/they said (or otherwise intimated) that I was ‘evil’. Every time Tom, or some other ‘part’ of me, wanted to comfort and soothe myself, ‘They’ fought back. Before they were dissociative hallucinations, they manifested as depression, mixed states, yadda yadda.

“In some way or another, he’s always inside your head,” Paul said, alluding further to the presence of ‘They’.

“They,” I murmured, absent-mindedly.

“Sorry?” he pressed.

“Not just him. They’re always inside my head.”

“The voices?”

“No. Well, I mean, yes, of course the voices, even though they’re controlled by medication. But what I meant was it’s not just him. You know…” – I hung my head and lowered my voice – “…more than one.”

He asked me to be more specific.

“I don’t know if it’s real,” I started, but he told me to forget for a minute whether or not it was real, and just concentrate on telling him what it was that was on my mind.

“I mean, there’s him, of course there’s him – him for years and years and years. But I think, maybe at least once, I don’t know – I think ‘he’ was a ‘they’.”

“Go on,” he gently encouraged.

But I couldn’t say it. I can type the words ‘gang rape’ here with relative nonchalance, but every time I took a breath to speak those words, that breath seemed to literally stick in my throat, rendering me mute.

This went on for what seemed like twenty minutes, though in reality it was probably closer to two. I desperately wanted him to say the hideous phrase for me, and for me then simply to confirm that was what I meant. He did know what I was talking about, I’m pretty sure; but he wouldn’t let me off the hook.

By some miracle, eventually, the words found their way out. They took on a strange and almost ethereal quality as they did so though, like they had been elongated and pulled out of my mouth by some unseen but nevertheless powerful force. Gang rape.

“OK,” he nodded. “You aren’t certain that this happened?”

“It probably didn’t,” I said, regaining my characteristically dismissive tone. “I have an overactive imagination. I just thought I ought to bring it up.”

“There you go again,” he said, looking at me almost sadly. “Your last line of defence. ‘This never happened‘. The ultimate in self-blame, in avoidance, in coping. It is easier for you to face being wrong than to face the wrongness of what he and they did to you.”

I looked away, wordless.

“I’d like to try something with you,” he said, changing his tone slightly. “It’s not hypnosis. I’m not even sure I believe in hypnosis, and even if I do, I haven’t a baldy notion of how I’d go about conducting it. This is just us…taking a little walk.”

“What, to go and get a coffee or something?” I asked, slightly mystified. On reflection it was a ludicrously stupid question, probably the stupidest I’ve ever asked in any therapy session.

He laughed. “No, not literally taking a walk. Just seeing where your mind takes you when you let it wander a bit. It’s called guided imagery. I ask you to imagine a few things, you do so and we see where your mind goes within those confines…potentially, it can allow you to psychologically go to places that are tucked away somewhere. Would you be happy enough to give it a go?”

It sounded a bit faffy to me, but after a few seconds of consideration, I thought, ‘what the hell?’ and decided to go with it.

He asked me to relax, and I rather surprised myself by feeling comfortable enough to close my eyes in front of him.

Paul said, “imagine you’re at a waterfall ["oh my God," I heard myself say, "one of these new agey 'see your inner rainbow flying out of your arse' techniques. That's all I need!"]. Picture it falling, into a pool at the bottom, with greenery and trees around it. Can you see it?”

“Yes,” I replied, the even tone of my voice disguising my internal cynicism.

“OK. Move round the corner, and you’ll find yourself in a field, or a green plain. There’s a fence somewhere in front of you, with a gate. Do you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Ordinary. Innocuous. That dull, light colour of wood you often see separating fields in rambling trails. The gate is secured by a black bolt thing on the back. You have to reach over it to open it.”

“OK, go ahead and open it…Have you done so?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a path ahead of you. Do you see it, and what’s it like?”

“I see it. It’s not an official path, it’s just one formed from the constant wear and tear of many feet walking the same route.”

“Follow it. At the end of it you’ll see a house. Can you describe that?”

“It’s small. Thin. Detached, two-storey, whitewashed, with black window ledges and a black door.”

“Is there a fence? A wall or hedge? Anything surrounding it?”

“Nothing, no.”

“OK. Go up to the door, open it and head inside.”

“It’s locked.”

This took him aback slightly, but he covered it well. “You have a key,” he told me.

“OK. It’s open.”

“Can you describe the hallway?”

I could. It had three rooms; one opposite me, two on the right. There was a staircase to my left which had a turn in it. The walls were panelled with quite a dark wood. There was some sort of table thing near the stairs, but it had nothing on it.

He asked me to go into each of the rooms, in turn. The first one was a living room. It was sparsely furnished, with a dull coldness to it. The dining room next door was similar, and both were distinctly uninviting, although not particularly belligerent. The kitchen was warmer – there were lingering smells of food previously cooked, the actual heat a hangover from same. He asked me to look in the cupboards. Most were empty, and the ones that weren’t only had old-looking tins of food populating them.

As I got to the stairs, they morphed – and, it turned out, so had the outside of the house. I told Paul that it reminded me of the TARDIS – tiny on the outside but massive on the inside.

“At the top of the stairs there are three doors,” I told him. “However, I know there are more than three rooms. There are extra rooms off these ones, I think.”

He asked me to enter one of them. Sure enough, there was another door over to my right. The room – indeed, upstairs in general – caused me much more trepidation than downstairs had done. It felt as if there was a malice about it, a sinister, unquantifiable undertone that I couldn’t quite see, as if it was just outside of my peripheral vision – but totally ready to pounce when it deemed the time to be right.

The room was dull and dark. There was a double bed, dressed in a non-descript beige. There was a chest of drawers and a window with a dark curtain over it. It reminded me of a room that would have been vaguely offensive to its occupants even in the 1970s.

Paul instructed me to go through the second door. This led to a second landing; there were three rooms off it that I could see, but I knew there was at least one more on the other side, which was obscured by a low roof on my right. On my immediate left was a dark, indistinct storage area.

The undercurrent of menace seemed to swirl around me, starting at my ankles, slowly creeping higher. It was palpable and, if I’m honest, slightly suffocating. I could cope with it, but I kind of got the impression that if I went further into the area, the ominousness of the situation would only increase considerably.

It was therefore merciful that it was at this juncture that Paul asked me to leave the second landing, and indeed to depart from the house and walk back down the path, away from it.

There followed a discussion on how the exercise had been. I was surprised by how the simple act of seeing things in my head had created such sensations and an almost palpable alternative reality for me, especially given how cynical I had been about it. I told him that I thought it was interesting to have observed that – and, indeed, potentially telling.

Paul agreed. Apparently, the first thing he really noticed was that there was no wall or fence around the house. To him, obviously enough upon reflection, this denoted the lack of boundaries that I had, whether currently, historically, or both. “That of course is perfectly exemplified when your boundaries are robbed from you, when you’re being abused,” he said.

Apparently I was the first person with whom he has tried guided imagery that had a locked door to the house. I was silently quite pleased about this (I love being unique), but I’m not sure that it’s really a good thing. If indeed this kind of therapy can yield results, does the potential for same decrease for me because I have so much locked away that I don’t really want to discover? Who knows.

“The kitchen,” he murmured wistfully. “The smells, the heat – they had been there, but you only caught their embers really. It was kind of as if there had been some warmth and homely normality in some part of your life, but that it’s been taken away from your conscious recall, or that it’s somehow died in your head.”

I nodded, but said nothing.

“Don’t you find that incredibly sad?” he asked.

“It’s just the way it is, I suppose,” I replied, resignedly.

“Indeed,” he returned, with a tone of deep regret. “That’s what’s sad about it.”

Another thing that Paul found intriguing was the maze of rooms in the upper portion of the house. The symbolism requires no explanation, really, so there you go. He finds it intriguing; I find it deeply concerning. What all don’t I know? Do I really metaphorically exemplify the tip of an iceberg? Or is this all just new age bollocks that simply means I once imagined looking through a house that I didn’t like?

And so, on this unsettling but somehow compelling note, Paul began to draw the session to a close, tying it up with a few housekeeping matters.

“On the issue of self-harm,” he said. “At this point, I’m actually supposed to negotiate a contract with you stating that you won’t engage in it over the next week. I’m not going to do that, however; if you ended up injuring yourself whilst under a contract, that would be only one more reason for you to be critical of yourself – and anyway, at times you need to self-harm.”

My heart leapt with joy. Finally, a therapist who gets that!

“That said,” he went on, “if you’re feeling really desperate, you can always contact us. I can’t guarantee that I’ll always be available, but someone will.”

He paused momentarily, and then said, “I have a phone number that I use for work too. You can text me on it if you want and I can text or phone you back. It’s only for use during working hours – I’m not an emergency service – but please do use it if you need to during those times. Don’t wait until you’re at your wits end.”

I was frankly stunned by the very notion that I am allowed to contact someone qualified and familiar with my case if I’m going mental. I kept thinking about all the times I practically begged C for advice on who I should contact in such circumstances, and how I was always dismissively told to ring those arbiters of life and death: the fucking Samaritans (no offence to them, but they simply are not fully fledged mental health professionals).

The guided imagery thing was weird, and was expanded upon in the following session (report on same coming soon). But weirdness aside, I’m still encouraged by this therapeutic relationship. At the very least, for once it actually feels like someone gives a fuck about me as a person, rather than them feeling that I am just someone who takes up fifty inconvenient minutes of their week.

—

* And it was a fun weekend; thanks from both A and I to Chaos and Control, Magic Plum, Finding Melissa, @talkingtocactus and of course Zarathustra for a great mini-Mad Up on Friday night! Roll on the next one in December :) Thanks also to my dear friends CVM and Daniel for their excellent company, and to Newcastle United Football Club and its supporters for making our first away fixture surprisingly non-shit!

Fear of the Dark

 Life, Paul, Traumatic Stuff, Triggers  12 Responses »
Oct 272010
 

Paul has completely fucked with my head this week.

I know fear. I know terror. I thought I understood hypervigilance before, but I see now that it was only a mild version thereof.

I awoke from an odd but since-forgotten dream, itself perhaps unsettling but not especially frightening. But it was with abject horror that my woken self greeted the seemingly-endless darkness and, particularly, the normal noises of the night (floorboards creaking, freight trains passing, distant traffic, etc).

I lay here (for I am still in bed, it being 3.55am) frozen numb with dread and a very childlike fear, unable to turn around towards the door to make sure that no one – or, indeed, nothing – was lurking there, ready to pounce. I waited. Breathless, frozen, nauseous and petrified. And then I took a large, determined breath and spun myself around.

To nothing, claro que si, but the usual array of the room, albeit bathed in this infernal blackness. Of course. I knew rationally that I was almost certainly safe, but the places that therapy has taken me to these last two weeks are dark indeed, both metaphorically and literally, and they have evidently stayed with me, whether consciously or otherwise.

Dark. Blackness. It alone has been enough so far tonight to have me tearing my hair out. It both facilitates and exacerbates my dread. Hiding places for bad things abound in this uncertain, quite unforgiving light.

The closest I have experienced to this sort of pathetic horror was an almost-nightly fear I experienced when I was…oh, maybe six to eight? Maybe even younger? I would go to bed quite normally but subsequently lie awake in frozen but silent alarm, utterly and completely convinced that a member of the IRA or similar was outside my door on the landing, ready to come in to torture and ultimately kill me.

Every creak of the floorboards was, I truly believed each time, a step in his deliberately slow progression towards my door, and towards my death.

Naturally, I realised that statistically this was quite unlikely, but of course that was useless knowledge. Sometimes I would curl myself up into a ball and hide under the duvet in what was then the paradoxically comforting darkness, willing whatever my fate was to just hurry up and happen, to just be over. Other times, when I was feeling ballsy, I would quietly crawl out of bed and surreptitiously tiptoe to the door and stand there, chest silently heaving, before flinging open the door and throwing my head round the corner, adrenaline-driven towards confrontation.

But there was never anyone there. The friendly neighbourhood terrorist was, time after time, a mere figment of my own mind.

Despite all that, I have never been scared of the dark, not to my particular recollection. I don’t want to be scared of the dark. It may have hidden the “bad things” when I had exposure (or imagined exposure) to them, but it also hid me from them. But here, at the age of 27 rather than seven, it rather looks like my mind has sought to play out what should have been a phobia of my erstwhile brathood, not of the here and now. Yay yay. Thanks, brain.

Pathological Dissociation? C: Week 48

 C, Psychotherapy, Sexual Abuse  21 Responses »
Apr 262010
 

So, here I am playing catch-up with the C sessions here, thanks to my recent laziness and endless forays into procrastination.  Let me add an advisory preamble to this post: I’m afflicted right now with a terrible dose of Blog-and-life-inertia-itis, so don’t expect this to be remotely scintillating, like several of you curiously found Sunday’s update to be (thanks, by the way! Sorry I’m toss at responding to comments at the minute but that’s the devious, underhand work of the Blog-and-life-inertia-itis again. Is there medication for this condition? Actually, yes, there probably is – Pro Plus, decent coffee and Red Bull. But if I self-medicate with those, then I’m hopping back onto the insomnia merry-go-round that I’ve been trying to get off, requiring more and more sedatives. So maybe that’s not as good idea. Just like it’s not a good idea to ramble ((and ergo procrastinate)) endlessly within parentheses).

The Blog-and-life-inertia-itis is compounded by the fact that I’ve completely blocked out most of this session from my conscious memory. I remember how things started, and I remember how they ended. What happened in the ‘middle’ portion of the meeting is frankly anyone’s guess; it’s almost like the chunk of my brain where the recollective (yes it is a word) neurons pertaining to those 30 or 40 minutes were stored has been cut out with a sharp knife. Well, así es la vida. On the bright side, I’ve always wanted a lobotomy.

As far as this session went, with the exception of a few minutes at the end, I’m not sure how much it really added to what had happened in the last meeting and the one before that – how could I be thus sure, however, when I don’t remember what the sodding hell happened. We started with the usual crap of silence – he asks where to begin – I say I don’t know – silence, which in fact has almost become the subject a parody between us now.

C was the first one to cave in. I’d noticed a couple of sheets sitting on the coffee table that sits between us (where the hateful, cheap tissues are housed for when mentals ((or rather, ‘mental’ – singular – because of course I am his only patient *cough*)) start bawling their eyes out), and was interested to see him gesture towards them.

He explained that he had obtained dissociation scales to measure just how extreme my ‘general’ episodes of dissociation, derealisation and depersonalisation were, as well to determine the seriousness of the dissociative psychoses. He had two such survey things; one is a standard dissociation scale, the second a much more in-depth questionnaire. He had apparently initially hoped I could fill them in during or at the end of the session, but given the length of the longer one (218 questions or something), he’d decided it was best if I filled them in at home then just posted them back to him.

He then mused about when he might receive them back, supposing it would be Tuesday (tomorrow). I was surprised to learn that he does not work ‘there’ on Tuesdays or Wednesdays; I missed the opportunity to ask what, if anything, he does on those days, but if I had to guess, I would say those are research days as I am aware that he has been involved in research in the past at least.

At any rate, he advised me not to sell myself short in the questionnaires; he feared I’d downplay the severity of my symptoms.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “you obviously don’t want to exaggerate them either, so…”

“So go with my first instinct,” I finished, to which he nodded. “I’ve always been advised when completing psychiatric questionnaires that I should basically go with the first rating that my mind thinks is appropriate.”

He agreed with this and asked if I had any questions regarding why he wanted me to fill these in.

Of course, I did. “Are you going to use these to bin me?” I enquired.

For some reason he initially smiled at this but, seeing from my facial expression that my question was serious, he desisted from that with very quick effect. “Not at all,” he replied.

I asked what, then, he hoped to achieve through the exploration of my answers to the questions, and he said something about it being able to inform deeply the way we work together. Apparently it could give him great insight.

I filled in the two questionnaires that afternoon, but found mysef to be somehwat irritated by the way in which they scale dissociation. Both ask what percentage of the time you have symptom x; for example:

Some people have the experience of finding themselves in a place and have no idea how they got there. [Thanks for not patronising me there, questionnaire, thanks very much ineed].

Circle a number to show what percentage of the time this happens to you

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100%

(Source)

When it says “what percentage of the time” what exactly does that mean? All the time? Times when you’re unwell? In the above example, how can that possibly be 100% of the time – surely that’s impossible. If you didn’t know why you were somewhere every time you were somewhere, which is a state of permanence, then…no, fuck it, it’s too late in the evening to try to articulate what I mean properly. Just…it’s odd. I would have liked some proper context to these questions, and it wasn’t there. So I added a note for C stating that, and advising that in the absence of such information, I was answering the questions at face value – ie. assuming that “percentage of the time” meant all the time. In all probability, having done so may well end up minimising my levels of dissociation as far as these scales go, but all I could do was be honest within the framework I was given.

Two things concerned me about the longer test (the MID) in particular. Firstly, a cursory search online suggested that the MID is used to diagnose Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Even though I’m all but certain this diagnosis is not at all applicable to me, I worked myself into a panic and convinced myself that C thought I had it. Not that there would be anything wrong with having it, obviously, but given how much I don’t think it applies, it would create an incongruence between C and I if that were his opinion. Fortunately, I now see that the scale is used more widely than just in relation to DID; it’s also applied to measure borderline and PTSD dissociation, which of course is me right off to a tee. So hopefully C is on my wavelength after all.

The second thing to annoy me was that there are several questions that ask about how much you exaggerate your symptoms – either physical or psychological – in order to get attention (or variants thereon). I know C didn’t write the MID, but I nevertheless took this as a personal insult. Does he really think I am faking all of this?! On a more logistical note, even if I were, am I really going to own up to that to him, the very person in front of whom I would be faking (at least psychic) symptoms?! Now, in fairness, I’ve been known to exaggerate some physical issues, but never ‘for attention’ – at least, not in the traditional sense. I’ve done it only when I know a completely honest description of the problem would not garner the treatment required, as is quite typical throughout the NHS (at least in my experience). To the best of my recollection, I’ve never done it in relation to my psychological health – if anything, the polar opposite is more likely to be the case.

C had thought we wouldn’t get to discuss the questionnaires this week as he reckoned they’d have arrived tomorrow (Tuesday) and he wouldn’t be back in that office until Thursday (at which point I am the first person, other than his secretary I assume, that he sees), but I ended up posting them in time that they may well have gotten there today, thus affording him the opportunity to study them in advance of this week’s session should he wish to do so. We shall see if indeed that comes to pass.

Anyway. I’ve diverged from a discussion about the session to a discussion of dissociative scales, so let’s move back to where we were meant to be.

Eventually, for reasons I can’t particularly fathom because it wasn’t relevant to anything we’ve been discussing in-session recently, I mentioned briefly to C that I had been out the evening before with A, as it had been the anniversary of my meeting him.

C asked me how things were with A, which was a curious question I thought; I don’t believe I’ve ever led him to believe that things were anything other than good between us. Of course, as I was typing that last sentence I remembered that of course I’ve told C about what a cunt I’ve been to A at times (for example, here) so I suppose it wasn’t such an odd question after all. Anyway, I said that things were good and that “A takes care of me.”

Unfortunately, I literally said that “A takes care of me.” Not his real name, but A. I corrected myself and continued, thinking of it as nothing more than simple absent-mindedness, but C interrupted me and asked what I had meant by ‘A’.

“Oh, that’s what I call him on my blog,” I said dismissively. “I suppose it shows what a big part of my life it is.”

I was ready to move on and discuss something that might actually have been vaguely useful, but C started harping on my apparent allegation that “the blog had taken over my life.” He looked suspicious, which disturbed me considerably. My paranoid mind is now convinced – especially in light of the exaggeration questions in the MID – that he thinks I make stuff up, or that I exaggerate and embellish to a significant degree, to make things sound interesting here. I don’t think that’s true. Is it? I know I’m guilty of paraphrasing and perhaps not always describing things exactly as they happened, but isn’t that the nature of any subjective human experience? Am I fucking things up?

And here we hit the brick wall of nothingness. I don’t remember the next half hour to 40 minutes at all. I could understand it if I just forgot little bits and pieces or nuances, but I literally remember nothing. My supposition is that this is because – hurrah, you’ve guessed it – I dissociated it. I’m almost certain that I didn’t reveal any specifics to him as regards our ongoing subject matter of child sexual abuse, because I remember having a discussion dodging that later. But I don’t know what I did say. I intend to ask him on Thursday, because I can’t tolerate this blankness, longed-for-lobotomy or not.

The next thing I recall was telling him that I hadn’t really discussed the flashbacks I’d been experiencing with him the previous week, owing simply to the fact that we hadn’t had time (as the session was almost entirely spent discussing the hallucinations). There was a bit of (largely un-recalled) probing from him, and a lot of humming-and-haing from me, though I think I admitted that the flashbacks occur as if they were my ‘present’ and not my past. I’m sure he asked me something on that point, but – wahey – I don’t remember what it was. Well done, P.

Eventually, I admitted to the somatic symptoms that accompany my flashbacks and, indeed, that often stay put quite independently of them – the almost constant physical pain that has plagued me as part of this whole nightmare for the past few weeks. I think he may have asked me similar questions to those he posed in this session – namely, were the somatic symptoms in my genital region – but I don’t remember fully.

What I do recall is that eventually I told him my back hurt like blazes all the time, and that it’s especially pronounced during a particular recurring flashback. He asked in what way it hurt, and I responded by telling him that I had been forced to sort of stand against a wall and that that was what had caused me pain in that area.

Cue a lot of investigation from him as to exactly how I was standing and a lot of attempted avoidance from me. In short, this flashback is one wherein I was pinned to the (outside of) the garage wall, my knees bent forward considerably so that I was at the ‘right’ height and angle to suck Paedo’s cock. The pain emanates from the pebble-dashing of the wall pressing into my back, as well as being pushed against the wall with some force during each hideous thrust.

I managed to get out of telling C what went on, but he couldn’t understand what way I was standing during the incident in question, leading to much confusion. I was about to act it out for him, but found that I couldn’t bring myself to do so, and told him as much.

He said, “could you draw it for me?”, pushing a pen and a bit of the bland Trust-headed note-paper towards me.

I was surprised at the request, and ever so slightly horrified, but made some gesture of reluctant acquiesence, and drew a stick-figure me contorted against a wall in the aforementioned grotesque fashion. To my immense revulsion, C then went to the wall and physically depicted the stance I’d drawn myself in. “Like this?” he asked.

I nodded, and looked away, suddenly ‘back there’ for a minute or two.

Fortunately – or otherwise, depending on your perspective – this was at the tail end of the session and he couldn’t probe me deeper any further. He said that his supposition was that this particular incident was a forced incident of oral sex (no shit).

“But,” he added thoughtfully, stroking his chin. “I don’t think calling it ‘oral sex’ is an accurate term. It’s not sex; the word ‘sex’ implies consent, not to mention the ability to consent.”

I stared at him blankly, determined to give nothing away.

And that’s suddenly reminded me of one thing that happened in the ‘lost’ half hour: I remember repeating over and over again that “shagging one’s uncle at the age of five is disgusting,” and C reminding me that a five year old can’t consent, and my counter-protesting that I knew that, but that didn’t change my view on how disgusting I was/am and that no amount of evidence or rationalisation ever would.

Indeed, I now remember that I repeated the word ‘disgusting’ in relation to myself and what happened over and over and over and over again, then went into a self-vituperation of epic proportions for failing to employ synonyms of ‘disgusting’ in my speech, thus in turn failing to utilise the English language in a more creative fashion. Very rational and helpful, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Anyhow, discussion of the forced-fellatio-flashback completed (that even sounds like a dubious sexual practice), I was feeling physically ill and as if I were about to explode with a doom-filled internal energy. I joked to C that I was going to throw up all over him, and he joked back that he would dodge the vomit and catch it in the bin. For some reason the gentle banter calmed me slightly – but I was still in full-on crazy-mode.

As a consequence, I held out my hand in front of me, in order that I could measure how much it was shaking. This harks back to an incident when I was 15. The day after I’d found out about my ex’s colossal betrayal – an incident about which I must write one of these days – I was sitting in school, literally shaking from head to toe. At one point I noticed my extended right hand shaking up and down, like the Golden Gate Bridge shaking in an earthquake. Ever since, I have used that as a benchmark to determine my levels of overt anxiety.

It was shaking a fair bit on Thursday, but not unmanageably so. “That’s OK,” I muttered thankfully, mainly to myself.

I noticed C’s raised eyebrow, and explained what I was doing. I was delighted when he said that he’d seen me doing it before. I know he’d seen me doing it before, but it was the fact that he remembered such a small, meaningless thing about me that was so pathetically important.

I was further delighted when he described my facing up to the fellatio flashback with him as ‘brave’. He’d also said I was ‘brave’ in the last session, and I have to say, the fact that he thinks this makes my heart and mind sing like something out of The Sound of fucking Music.

Clearly, though, C does not know that his endorsement (if that’s the right word) has such a positive effect on me. He said, “you probably don’t like me calling you ‘brave’, do you?”

I nonchalantly responded that I “didn’t mind” the use of the adjective in reference to me. Oh, what a belier of truth I am!

I went on and told him that although I appreciated him saying that, that it really didn’t “fit” with what I felt about myself.

“I’m not brave in my mind,” I murmured quietly.

“Well,” he responded, rather definitely and slightly authoritatively. “I think you are brave.”

And for the second week running, I got an “all the best” as I left, which always makes my week. I’m still desperate for him to actually like me, which I know rationally is probably a silly pipedream. But his present extension of an arm of kindness comforts and reassures me, and I’ll continue to bask in its loveliness for some time to come.

Putting it into Words [TRIGGERS]

 Sexual Abuse  29 Responses »
Mar 222010
 

*** TRIGGER WARNING ***

This goes into much more specific and disturbing detail than my last post of this nature.  Please, please take care in reading this. If you’re in any doubt about how much you may or may not be triggered, click here instead.  P. xxx

Earlier, bourach at Conversations with my Head wrote an incredibly brave and personal post on the sexual abuse to which she was subjected at the hands of her father.  Although it’s utterly heart-wrenching, bourach’s usual eloquence and bravery in facing her horrible experiences comes through, and she deserves much credit as always for that.

‘Armed’ with both my ‘new’ memories, and the ones I already had, I had been thinking for a while about trying to do something similar, but had been deliberately avoiding it.  bourach has finally inspired me to get my arse into gear and do it.

I don’t know what C would say about the hitherto avoidance.  Is it good that I psychologically dodge this bollocks when I’m away from him (so as I don’t end up gaining an Art degree from the portfolio of my stomach, or have a go at slitting my wrists again), or should I be working my way towards finding the words to express it to him in session?  I don’t know.  Who cares?  I’m ruminating on it anyway, so why not try to put it into words…even if they are only written ones for now.

I’ve been able to say the word ‘rape’ a few times to A, and once, as you may know, to my in-denial mother.  Last week I think I even said the words ‘forced fellatio’ to A, which is a first.  Hurrah?  I still can’t imagine saying these words in therapy, though, which is where they need to be said.  A may be able to support me, but he can’t therapise me.  Or maybe he can, what the fuck do I know – but I shouldn’t think it’s his primary function in my life.

Is it because C is a man that I find expressing myself to him about this so difficult?  Do I feel all the more defiled in front of him because of some inherent (and, I assure you, unconscious) anti-feminist bullshit that’s been planted in my head?  That I’m not meant to be a debased whore in front of a man…that I’m meant to be pure?  Maybe it’s the stupid fraternal-paternal transference bullshit – don’t want my nice Daddy-friend-person to think of me as the tramp that I think I am.

Would it be any different with a woman?  I think I might be able to say rape, but I’m not sure how much further I’d get than that.  But yeah, maybe in front of a woman, in front of whom my sense of defilement would seemingly appear to matter less, I could discuss this bollocks in the most literal of terms.

Detached.  Aloof.  Depersonalised.  Third person-esque.  It’s all a technicality.

I recognise, therefore, that in the long-term sense this is why C really is the best person for this stuff; it can never be so emotionless and abstracted because of our shared relationship and my attachment.  Ha.  The beauty of the ‘long-term’.  Aside from the very real logistical difficulties of that – in the sense that I will stop seeing C in June or July – the reality is that in the short to medium term this is the most horrific, unbearable thing that I can imagine doing.  I do not want to relive this stuff.  The sense of shame and utter debasement of it all paralyses and sickens me.  Whore whore whore slut slut slut bitch slut whore tramp cunt.

As bourach rightly said in her post, the recall of the sensations is some of the worst of it.  The one that is my current psychic fixation is the terrifying choking mechanism of when he inserted his penis into my mouth.  Can’t breathe, can’t breathe…tiny hands push his legs, trying to move him, scared of choking to death…but he seems to like that – back and forth it goes, deeper and deeper in my mouth, harder and harder.  Can’t breathe.  Please stop.  Tears.  Not sure if they’re from being upset or the physical problem of choking.

And finally it ends, but not before he squirts a horrible drink right down the back of the throat.  Oh help…I’m gagging…gag gag gag…but he moves back, it’s out…thank you God…spit spit spit.  Wipe it away at the corners of the mouth.  Something between teeth…one of those strange hairs the eyes were faced with when he was doing the choking.  He closes his trousers…walking away now.  Safe.  Safe.

Fuck.  I feel violated and physically sickened all over again.  What is striking is that I feel choked again, just remembering / writing, even though there’s nothing physically making me feel that way now.

I feel the sensation(s) so strongly; the physical ones, the mental ones.  The gagging, the terror, the utter bewilderment, the pain of being forced to stand at the angle I was.  My back hurt, my legs hurt.  I remember my eyes being about level with the top of his pubic hair.  In every other way, though, although the first person sensations are so completely and thoroughly mine, the visuals of this are all third person.  The man is my uncle, and the little girl is me.  But I’m watching this from elsewhere – from an angle not even physically possible in the environment that this particular incident (and others) took place.  It’s like a vile pornographic film on loop inside my traitorous bloody mind.

Oh, and then there’s rape.  I didn’t know that word at the time, even though I did have a rudimentary knowledge of sex.

Incidentally, a couple of people have asked me – just in the course of silly conversations in which friends sometimes engage – how I found out about sex.  I always said, truthfully, that I really didn’t remember, and I still don’t.  But, I now ask myself, could this abuse have ‘informed’ my tiny mind?  I don’t know.

Anyway.  Rape.  I was about to say that, officially, that’s where the penis is inserted into the anus or vagina without consent, but I see that it apparently now includes oral penetration too.  Um…yay?  It’s a good thing, I think, but it’s hard to feel anything approaching cheer in this subject matter.

But let’s go with my original, uninformed interpretation.  Thank merciful God, there was never any anal rape – not that I can recall, at any rate.  But there was certainly vaginal penetration.  Oh yes.

I feel suffocated as I type this.  Literally.  God.  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.  There’s that old can’t breathe again.  This time for different reasons.  I see him there, on top of me, crushing my small body.  And the pain…oh, the pain. [Wincing now]  It hurts it hurts it hurts…please, God, stop the pain.  Won’t be bad again if you just stop it.  Can’t breathe…pain…gasp for breath…he goes in and out, didn’t even know there was anything ‘down there’ to go into before…but it hurts [Wince wince wince] it hurts so much…please stop

What are these noises he makes…gasp gasp pain pain…why does he move like that…what is this about…it hurts…he sounds like he is hurt too, every time he moves he makes those weird noises…why…what…

Very loud noise now…[he arches his back]…’down there’ where he put it in, it feels strange along with the pain, like there’s water in it…pain…gasp…oh God oh God why has he fallen on top of me…can’t breathe, can’t breathe…is he dead…gasp gasp…oh thank you God…he’s moving, onto his honkers…it’s out…relief relief relief…breathe breathe breathe

Pain still…something oozing…what…don’t know what is happening…oh good he’s putting his trousers back up, maybe he will get something to help the pain?  Why is he sweating, why are his cheeks red like that….pain pain…OH GOD BLOOD…what what what??!!! Pain, breathe, blood…and white stuff, pink stuff…it’s there, with the blood…Oh God what is it…he stands up.  “Pull your pants up Pandora, and put your skirt back down,” he says [something like that], “there’s a good girl.  Then come back inside.  You’re OK.”

But not OK…it hurts…crying…always was crying….he’s leaving…cry…hurt…breathe.  Dress.  Follow him outside…walking is hard.  Aow…

On both of these occasions he was waiting for me outside / round the corner.  If I was under his charge, I presume that it would have looked suspicious if he was suddenly spotted wondering around without me.

It hurts.  It hurts.  Physically.  Mentally.  All my nerves conspire against me like they did when I was experiencing akathasia in January.  It is so real, so overwhelmingly and profoundly fucking real, and so unbearably now.  It wasn’t then, it is now. Now.  Now.

I can’t write this anymore.  I’m sorry.