Jul 062011
 

***Please be aware that in this post there is some material, mainly regarding child sexual abuse, that could be triggering***

An unusual memory that I took with me from week 21 was that of the few minutes I spent waiting for Paul in the (hidden) waiting room at Nexus. There are consistently information leaflets, legal advice packs, material on helplines and related organisations, etc etc, but on this occasion there was something additional: a colouring-in book. Yes, one of those things that children recklessly aim crayons at, in what appear to be perpetually failed efforts to contain colours within lines. (You can see my general views on this subject here - as long as you can cope with a scathingly un-PC review of children’s artistic “skills”. Don’t blame me if you don’t like its content).

Of course, this colouring book wasn’t one that you might see as standard. It wasn’t filled with broom-brooms or woof-woofs or choo-choos or whatever other inane words are common in the parlance of Parentese. Instead, it involved actual children. Well, obviously not actual children – technology has as yet failed to reach a point where we can superimpose real people onto paper – but you know what I mean. And it had a little story board running along side.

The idea was that the children coloured this rubbish in, whilst (presumably) their parents (or whoever) read the accompanying narrative to them. It went something like this:

You may find that adults or other children may want to touch you. Usually this is all nice and fluffy, and you have no reason to kick them in the face for doing so. However, there are times when other people may want to touch you in a bbbbbaaaaaaaaaddddd way. Generally speaking, if someone touches you in a spot that your bathing suit or trunks would cover, this is Bad Shit Indeed. If you are being bathed by someone it is OK to be touched in these places when you are very young, but only if it’s enough to clean you [I'm making this sound more amateur than it was - there was more nuance to that particular sentence than my redacted shite suggests].

If you are being touched like this you should firmly say ‘no!’ or shout if you need to, then speak to an adult you trust, such as your Mum or Dad. If it is your Mum or Dad touching you like this, speak to a teacher or aunt or uncle that you like.

If someone shows you a part of their body that would normally be covered up by bathing suits/trunks, that is usually bbbbaaaddd too.

Blah blah blah, you get the idea.

Despite the dismissive tone of the foregoing, I actually thought this was a piece of eminent world class literature (OK, I’ll stop being facetious now) a pretty smart resource (resource?! That sounds ridiculous. I can’t think of anything more appropriate, though). Trite though it may seem coming from my lips (fingertips), children learn through play, activity and the sort of interaction that this kind of thing would bring up. I remember writing in one of these session reviews several months ago that I was left in the position as a child of thinking that what was happening to me, unpleasant as it clearly was, was a fairly standard, everyday sort of practice. No one ever explained to me that it was wrong, I whinged. How do you explain, to a normal kid, that it is wrong?!

Well. Like this, perhaps.

Anyway, that was a long and rather inane introduction. Anybody with any sense would have made it a post in itself, but as well you must know, good readers, sense is not a commodity with which I am frequently blessed.

Apparently, the first thing I do (did) at the start of each therapy session is (was) “check my hands”. By that Paul meant that rather than speaking to him (beyond standard greetings), I look down and start fiddling with my fingers. What does he expect? Should I run in and scream, “Paul! I was thinking about this particular rape and I was like, sooooooo overcome with, like, emotion, and I was like, ‘wooooaaaahhhh there, that was like, sooooooo hardcore’?!”

No. Not exactly my modus operandi. I responded to his remark with a mere shrug.

“What would you like to talk about?” he pressed.

I can’t remember my exact words, but I said something along the lines of being at his organisation to discuss very specific reasons – but that the word ‘want’ would be something of a misnomer in this context (or whatever the equivalent of ‘misnomer’ is when you’re dealing with a verb). Before he could reply, though, I started babbling about my week. This was the Monday after I’d had the ECG.

“How is your heart, then?” he queried.

I metaphorically rolled my eyes. “Is that meant to be a double entendre?” I returned, knowingly.

And guess what? It was! He said, “that little girl [I really wish he'd stop using that terminology] had her heart broken.”

Unfortunately for Paul, he had inadvertently hit upon a pet hate of mine. Hearts are a vital organ that pump blood round the body. If my heart had been broken, then I would be seriously ill or dead. You don’t feel with your heart. You don’t love with your heart, despite the nauseating greetings card industry that would seek to convince one otherwise. You feel and you love with your mind (and, if you want to be even more technical about it, you therefore feel and love with your brain).

I complained that I associated the notions of “heartache”, “thinking with your heart” and the myriad other anatomically inaccurate permutations of the same with my whiny female relatives.

“You hate being a woman,” he observed, somewhat to my surprise.

“On the contrary,” I challenged. “I like being one because I’m so different to the stereotypes.” (Seriously, how can someone who is so ideologically a feminist be such a misogynist in practical terms? I suck).

“What are the stereotypes?”

“Crying, cooing over babies, bitching about each other behind each others’ backs. That sort of thing. That’s a disgusting generalisation, I know, and I don’t believe most women are necessarily like that. Just…well, just that I’m more comfortable with men.”

“You’re describing everything that you’re not,” he said.

“So what? Are you suggesting that I somehow became this way, this divergent from perceived gender norms, because I was abused? Can’t it just be? Where does personality end and pathology and/or trauma begin?”

I thought that was quite a philosophical point that might be able to throw him for a minute or two. No more than that, because Paul is a highly intelligent and extremely well-read person – but I thought I had a bit to play with. Apparently not, though: it turned out that, by bizarre coincidence, he’d been reading about that very issue that morning. (Seriously. Who reads about psycho-philosophy first thing on a Monday morning?!)

“In a sense,” he began, “dissociation [or disassociation as he insisted upon pronouncing it] is chosen, where repression isn’t. Not consciously, perhaps, but it’s a split that occurs because the mind chooses it to separate into parts – one that experiences the trauma [the repressed part], one that avoids it [the dissociated one]. So here you have two parts of the ego. The dissociated one is ostensibly undamaged – and that’s where you consistently try to place yourself. The other part is screaming [the intensity of his tone was such that he almost spat the word], full of pain, agony. Your dissociated self may acknowledge that the repressed part exists, but it tries not to let it out. The former is strong. The latter, in some ways, is what you might term ‘girly’.”

I’m sitting here reading this weeks later, and I have certain views on that assertion. I’m trying to blot them out, however, because at the time I was overcome with this metaphorical sense of having been punched in the face. I had an intellectual interest in what he said, of course, but it felt as if there was more to it. I can barely type this, but I think my mind was asking if there was a grain of truth to what he said. Yeah, yeah, I actually wrote that. Point and laugh, everybody. Of course, I know that the vast majority of you won’t actually do so. But the very idea that I have some weepy, hurt, childish, girly piece of shit inside me somewhere is one of the greatest self-indictments I’ve yet beheld.

Of course, this tidal wave of pseudo-realisation rendered me dumb. Anyone who follows these accounts of my therapy sessions will know that that’s pretty much par for the fucking course each week, I suppose. So instead of talking about what he’d actually said, I managed to croak out something about my inability to speak being an entrenched feature of our work together.

“If the words get out, you might get hurt,” he posited, looking over his glasses at me intently.

I looked away with what I’m sure was some sort of disgruntled expression on my face.

“When all this started, those two parts were one and the same,” he went on, goading me (in the nicest possible way) into a reaction.

He got one. “If the strong part of me was part of me, then why the fuck didn’t I fight back?” I asked viciously, suddenly infuriated with myself.

He raised his eyebrow quizzically and stated that I hadn’t behaved thus because I “was a tiny child.”

“Yeah, but I could have kicked him in the bollocks or something.”

“Sorry, what age were you again? 31?”

Touché, Paul. Touché. I couldn’t help but let a wry grin escape onto my lips.

“As well as people molested as kids, I work with men and women who were raped or otherwise sexually abused as adults,” he continued. “Even in these cases, what is always so palpable when I see them is their helplessness at the time of the assaults. Regardless of whether you’re physically capable of fighting back, it’s not always easy – or even possible – to do so.”

“That’s different, Paul.”

“Why?”

“Well, I can understand that more. They’ve been caught in the headlights, haven’t they? If I were raped now, I could understand why I wouldn’t fight. I’m not a strong person, psychologically, despite what you may say about my dissociated self. I was a strong child, though. No nonsense. I didn’t generally take shit, so why did I take that shit?”

Then I went into the Yet-Again-Standard Self-Berating-for-Being-Irrational Mode.

“If it’s irrational, why say it?” Paul enquired.

“Because even though I’m not stupid and know it’s idiotic, it’s still what I think,” I replied.

“Why think it if it makes no sense?” he returned. “You always seem like such a rational person, yet you admit to believing wholly irrational things – as long as they’re about yourself. What is it that makes that possible?”

I thought for a second; as is typical, a string of academic explanations came to mind, but as I said to him, I didn’t think that’s what he wanted to hear. Instead I shrugged and oh-so-profoundly stated that it ‘just felt right’.

“I need to imagine what it was like in order to empathise with my younger self,” I began. “The problem is I have no conception of what it must have been like to be a child. I don’t really have much linear recollection of my childhood. I remember some specifics, I know some other things took place, and I remember things that I was taught – but I have no clear recollection of what it was like simply to be at that kind of age. Thus, I have no way of seeing my childhood other than through the glasses I wear today. Until recently, I thought that no one had any consistent recollection of their childhood, but I am reliably informed now that that is not the case. Is that not the case?”

“For most – ie. for non-traumatised people – it is not the case,” Paul told me. “But in people who have traumatic histories, it’s pretty normal. Children psychologically process events in different ways from adults. When shattered by trauma, or a lack of containment of trauma, they lose the sense of safety that most non-traumatised people take for granted. It prevents cognitive processing within a linear framework.” He paused for a second, sighed, then continued by saying that just as I had had no safety as a kid, neither did I truly feel that I had safety now.

To my own surprise, I randomly blurted out, “I’m scared of children, Paul. Is that odd?”

I have been scared of children for about as long as I can remember. They stare at you, and they always win the inevitable stare-outs that ensue. Every time I see one, even if it’s Marcus or Sean, I have at least passing fear pulsating through me, not to mention images of Damien from The Omen flashing in front of my eyes.

“I think that makes perfect sense, actually,” Paul was saying. He went on to explain that he thinks I’m scared of Aurora / my younger self / that childish part that resides in the darkest recesses of my traitorous brain because she / I / it might make me experience the pain she / I / it did.

I rolled my eyes sulkily. “She should have dissociated properly so I don’t have to put up with her crap,” I complained drolly.

Paul laughed. “If only it worked like that,” he said. “The quirky thing about this situation is that she survived all this [God, I hate the term 'survivor' in this context - what was I meant to do? Just...die?], but you find it so hard to face it. Neither of you are weak, but your perception that she is is inaccurate, when you put it in context.”

A valid point which I validated with a weary nod.

He went on: “the most damaging part of this trauma for you was the lack of containment [I've grown to dislike this term too]. The trauma is undoubtedly bad enough on its own, but if it had been contained, if you had been made safe, that would have made things so much easier for you throughout your life. You didn’t have that containment and that safety then, but that’s exactly what I can give you now – you can face it all in here, with me, and be protected. But that’s a terrifying thing for me to ask of you.”

I considered previous occasions in therapy, both with Paul and with C, where I’d experienced the most horrible flashbacks. For some reason that led me to remember the incident in my bathroom where I went through a particularly vicious flashback of forced oral sex whilst brushing my teeth, prompting me to ask Paul if I’d ever told him about that.

I hadn’t, so he asked me to tell him how it had felt. I described the panic that was initially borne out of it, and how that had ultimately given way to shame.

“The overriding thing about all of this,” I said, “is just that – shame. Shame and degradation and defilement.”

“New words,” Paul claimed. “You’ve not often used those in here before.”

“I suppose I didn’t know the proper terms when I was being abused, so I’m retrospectively applying them. All I would have known at the time was that I felt ‘bad’.” I felt a pang of disgust at what I felt was the inadequacy of my childhood vocabulary and, by extension, intellect – but I elected to keep that thought private.

“In an oral rape, you’re literally forced to swallow something that becomes part of you.”

I shuddered, disgusted. “Yes. I never thought about it like that.”

“You mentioned being able to feel those kinds of tastes in your mouth again. You also said that as a child you just felt ‘bad’. I think you also had a sense that you were bad. ‘Good’ five year olds don’t know those tastes.”

In a sudden explosion of angry passion, I exclaimed that “the whole thing [was] just disgusting!”

He nodded. “It is, but not in the way I suspect you mean.” (ie. that I am disgusting, rather than what was done to me. His suspicion was mainly accurate, but it’s pretty disgusting in general).

This session was way back before we even booked our holiday. I mention this because ScumFan, Paedo’s grandson, had his 21st birthday party whilst we were away; however, at this session I didn’t know we’d be out of the country, and so I mentioned to Paul that I really didn’t feel that I could get out of the not-so-happy reunion.

“I’m not especially worried about seeing Paedo myself,” I explained, “but I am slightly concerned about how A will react. I mean, he’s not going to punch his face in or something, but he hates Paedo. I don’t want it to fuck with his head.”

Paul told me that A was welcome to come to Nexus himself; apparently they offer services for families and partners of those who have been sexually abused.

“Obviously it wouldn’t be with me,” he said, “but he’d be more than welcome to come and talk to someone.”

I thanked him for the information, and said I would pass it on to A, which I did. He didn’t avail of it in the end, but I thought the fact that it exists at all further demonstrates that Nexus is a very worthwhile organisation.

Anyhow,  for the sake of context I tried to explain the family dynamics to Paul. He would have understood a recital of Beowulf in Old English more easily than he understood the convoluted family tree that I tried to outline to him, but that was part of the point: the family is such a nepotistic sprawl of insular shite that if you’re confused by its intricacies, then you’re certifiably normal.

The result of this was that I began to tell him of how StudentMcF, ScumFan’s slightly-older cousin, had uploaded lots of pictures to that accursed rubbish that is Facebook, including some of Paedo.

“I haven’t seen him in ages,” I said, “but seeing his face disgusted me.”

He disgusted you?” Paul checked.

“No. Just seeing his face.”

“Did you feel this disgust for anyone in particular?”

“You’re trying to work out if I was repulsed by him or me, aren’t you? Well, the answer is neither. It was non-specific.”

I sighed and looked out the window. “Facebook has a lot to answer for,” I said to the pane of glass shimmering in front of me.

“So I’m quickly learning from all of my clients,” he responded disapprovingly.

He proceeded to observe me quietly for a minute or two, then commented that I seemed to be “feeling vulnerable”. I sheepishly admitted that I supposed I was.

“This is a dreadful thing to say,” I moaned, “but I wish he’d hurry up and just die. Not because I hate him, just because it would be more convenient for me.”

“That wouldn’t make things go away,” Paul opined.

“No,” I admitted. “And anyway, if he snuffed it then I suppose he’d be subject to John Lennon-Kurt Cobain Syndrome [my diagnosis for people who are 'merely' liked when alive but then reverently worshipped after their reasonably unexpected demise from this plane. I should ask the DSM-V research groups if they'd like to include it in their forthcoming manual, but then I don't suppose that tome applies particularly if you're dead.]. So maybe he shouldn’t die.”

“And what would the little girl [fuck fuck fuck] want?”

“Not to see him. On that point, she and I can agree.”

Paul screwed up his face in apparent perplexity. “What is it that makes you feel compelled to go to this thing? People have advised you against seeing [Paedo]. You clearly don’t want to go, and neither does A. You can’t stand half of the attendees. Why do you feel that you have no choice in this?”

I tried to defend myself on the grounds that they’re not all bad (which is true) and that I didn’t want to offend ScumFan, who’s one of the nice ones despite his poor choice of footballing allegiance, because he’s very fond of me and always looks forward to seeing me. When an opportunity for him to meet me comes up (within the very specific confines that his mother and grandparents allow – for example, God forbid he might drive to our house and see me there), apparently he becomes very excited – and if I then don’t show, whatever legitimate reasons I may have, the poor boy is left deflated and disappointed. (Incidentally, I have no idea why he looks up to me in this fashion. Both he and StudentMcF have done this throughout their lives, sometimes to the point of imitation – thus, unfairly but unsurprisingly, leading to my being irritated by their behaviour. Maybe it’s because I was what one might call ‘badass’ when we were all younger, and they found me entertaining. I don’t know).

“About a year ago, NewVCB specifically prohibited me from seeing Paedo,” I confessed. “I went anyway.”

“Why?” he pressed, exasperated. “So you like the young fella. Fine. Send him a card. Why do you have to go?!”

“Sooner or later I’ll run out of excuses to avoid these things. I’m already low on them. The fuckers will start asking questions. So either they’ll assume I’m just a piece of shit, or I’ll explode in desperation and just come out with it all – and I do not want to do that. So, in short – a large part of my obligation to go to this thing is to avoid arousing suspicion.”

“‘Nobody must know’,” he imitated. “‘I must not arouse suspicion’. You do indeed sound just like an abused child. You’re worried they’ll find out that you’re ‘bad’.”

This postulation irritated me, but I let him continue for a few minutes as he talked about me becoming the “container” for “everything bad” within the family. “If they find out, it’s you that made them feel bad, it’s you that made them face it, if you had just shut up, all would be well. And then – again – the child doesn’t get heard, even by yourself.”

“Look,” I said firmly, trying to make it clear to Paul that this just was the way it was, and that nothing would change my mind on the matter. “There are two people directly involved in this: me and Paedo. There are something like 22 other members of the family, and a lot more if you move out of the specific dynasty that Paedo heads. Thus, it’s a utilitarian thing. I don’t remain silent to protect myself, or even him: I remain silent to protect the majority.”

This seemed to anger Paul – I mean, I don’t think he was annoyed with me, but with them, which hardly seemed fair. He prattled on for a good while about how their reactions to finding out Paedo’s dark secret would be “their shit to deal with” and that it was him (Paedo) that would destroy the family if it came out, not me. All true, I suppose, but also all academic. If I have anything to do with it, they will not be finding out.

After a while he calmed down a bit and we had a more general conversation about Paedo. He talked (again) about the dichotomy between my rational position that I was an innocent kid versus my more strongly held view that I was a whore.

This reminded me of an incident. An incident for which I, not Paedo, was responsible. Even thinking about this makes me squirm, but through gritted teeth I managed to admit it to Paul, so I will admit it here too.

Maisie, Paedo and fuck knows how many of the others were at my mother’s house one day when I was about nine or so. Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was, for reasons that completely elude me, playing in the living room where, for reasons that also complete elude me, I was rolling around on the floor. Paedo was sitting beside my mother when the chorus came on; I looked at him enigmatically and sang along…replacing the word ‘fun’ with ‘sex’.

This nauseates me and makes me feel utterly filthy, and I cannot believe I have just admitted it on a public forum, even if it is one that is largely anonymous.

Paul accepted that the incident was probably not in keeping with the general behaviour of a nine year old – at least, not one around adults. But he continued with what you might expect – that even if my vile behaviour was felt to be through choice, in reality it wasn’t. It was a result of Paedo’s manipulation of me, of his abuse of me, and of the normalisation of all of that.

“You didn’t like any of it, did you?” he continued. “Remember, you felt like you were being stabbed. You started out not even knowing you had an orifice there – but quickly had to become intimately familiar with genital anatomy.”

This remark reminded me of the aforementioned colouring-in book in the waiting room. “I wish such a thing had been around in the mid-’80s,” I told him, alluding to it. “I had a vague knowledge of sex, certainly, but at five I didn’t understand the specific mechanics at all. I knew that it hurt and that it was horrifying psychologically, but I didn’t know it was specifically wrong. Something like that little book might have helped me.”

After another desultory conversation about the alleged stabbing/self-harm correlation, I suddenly said to him, “why do people fuck kids?” (Which, on reflection, seems like something of a stylisitic homage to the excellent blog Reasons You Shouldn’t Fuck Kids).

“I don’t understand it. It’s a stupid thing to do,” I added, perhaps rather naively.

Paul considered my question in chin-stroking silence for a few minutes. When he finally replied, he said, “I don’t think there can be any understanding. From an intellectual point of view, I can see how paedophiles find ways of allowing themselves to do it – they make you into a whore in their minds, for example, even though that’s obviously bollocks rationally. As for where the urge comes from, though…I really, truly do not know and cannot understand.”

“I know that any rape, whether of an adult or of a child, is essentially about power,” I mused. “But even so…what can possibly be sexually attractive about a child?! Was it something about me?” I paused. “Or was it even just me to whom it happened?!”

“It’s a scary question to contemplate,” he sympathised.

“Yes,” I replied wistfully. “It’s troubled me all along.”

“We have to finish,” he announced shortly after. “But would you agree that we’ve touched on some pretty deep stuff here?”

I nodded.

“I think you’re developing a touch more empathy for your child self. Why do people fuck kids? - I think that’s a very significant question. It rightfully puts the blame onto the abusers, rather than onto the child.”

I nodded again. “Yes,” I agreed. “I’m still plagued with self-doubt a lot, obviously, but I have more periods where my general position is ‘no, Pan, it wasn’t your fault. That’s significantly better than, say, a year ago where my setting was a blanket ‘you’re to blame, you’re to blame!’ one. I’ve not got rid of that entirely, but I have progressed from it.”

As we got up and he showed me to the door, Paul delivered that week’s parting gambit: “the line between the adult you and the child you is, little by little, becoming increasingly more blurred. We’re getting somewhere.”

It is a petrifying place to be, feeling what Aurora did (and does). But all in all, I think he’s right. Getting to that point is A Good Thing.

marketing

Mar 102011
 

Yeah, I know, I know. I asked at the end of the last (random and lazy) post that you castigate me aggressively if this material was not published before midnight on…Tuesday? Wednesday? Meh. I failed. You failed too, readers. Only two or three of you had a go, and 227,000 of you have read these absurd writings from my perverted mind. (Admittedly that figure is over nearly two years rather than the last two days, but if you don’t care for my gross generalisations, then sue me and see if I care). Nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh!

Since I have four psychotherapy sessions to catch up on here, I have elected to write minimally (*chuckle* – as if I know the meaning of the word) and mash a few together. I hope that normal service will be resumed after next week’s meeting. That I feel capable of wading through this bollocks at all is testament to the fact that I must be feeling better than I did a few weeks back. I couldn’t have done this a fortnight ago.

I’ve often been asked how I retain memories of these sessions, and nowhere is such a question more pertinent than in this post, where one of the discussions was over a month ago (and the second not far behind it). This is the answer:

Scribble-Scrobble-Scrubble

As soon as I leave the Nexus building and get into the car, I scribble down everything I can remember. I used to type it all onto my iPhone, but to be honest I’ve found that random scrawls are quicker than two-fingered on-screen typing, so here we are. If I later remember something else – which is frequent – then I go back to the notes and scribble it on the side of the relevant area (or at the end if it’s unrelated to anything else I’ve noted). Not hi-tech, but certainly functional.

Anyway, enough procrastinating around the issue. ***Beware of child sex abuse and related triggers, as always. Some of the following is fairly graphic***.

Week 13

As is usually the case, this session opened with Paul asking me how I was, and my responding with “OK.” Apparently this was the wrong answer. He claims that I go in and proclaim myself to be fine most weeks, when I’m clearly more off my head than Charlie fucking Sheen (I wonder, will someone read this as an archived post in two years and wonder what I’m on about? Probably not, but just in case: clicky). I was told that I use the term “OK” as the easy option.

That may well be the case, but it seems thoroughly odd to me to sit down and scream, “everything is fucking shit!” As has always been the case in psychotherapy, I need prompting from the professional in the room.

This session was in the wake of the fuckery with the twatbags at the Jobs and Benefits office (Christ, that seems like millennia ago), and so I admitted to being highly pissed off, mainly in relation to that. Then, predictably, I launched into a full-scale attack on myself for being unable to work. Paul asked me why I couldn’t.

I remember mumbling some drivel about my pathetic concentration, complete inability to socially interact and my pathological fear of the phone. For some reason, he started banging on about what he called “ego strength” and my demonstrable lack of it.

He said, “I have ego strength. I’m self-assured, I feel confident in my abilities. I think you find it difficult to maintain that sort of thing.”

Slap me sideways with a dead fish. Revelatory stuff, Paul! 10/10 for observation!

I’m being unfair. It was obvious, yes, but of course he was using the point to lead elsewhere. In any case, I agreed with him, adding that whilst I was at least well aware that I have a moderately decent brain (ooh, listen to my ‘strongly narcissistic traits‘, ooh!) inside my skull, that possession seems kind of redundant when it’s rarely, if ever, put to any proper use.

He seemed to disagree with that, referencing briefly my perennial penchant for analysing and intellectualising matters that he feels should not be analysed nor intellectualised. Of which more later. He went on thus: “ego strength is based on our value as a child. When I was a youngster, I was – and, crucially, I felt – loved, cherished, protected and safe.” He cocked his head questioningly at me.

I responded in a rote, but honest, fashion. “Those words are alien to me,” I said, laughing nervously. I instantly felt guilty about this admission, though, and said that thinking that was grossly unfair to my mother, who had tried her best for me. And she did. None of this is her fault.

Paul accepted that point and nodded, but continued by saying that regardless of my mother’s love and good intentions, I still hadn’t been safe or protected.

“In your case,” he told me, “interpretations of a lack of worth seem to me to directly correlate with a lack of safety. Tell me – when did you last have any sense of self-worth?”

‘Strong narcissistic traits’ aside, I admitted truthfully that I could not ever recall such a state of being, at least internally (to an external observer, I was extremely self-assured and confident as a child. Not that that’s necessarily mutually exclusive with a lack of self-worth, mind you: I didn’t feel I had any worth, but I wasn’t un-confident nevertheless). I thought about this for a few seconds, and was reminded of something I mentioned briefly on this blog a few weeks ago: that Paedo had once raped me with some sort of pole (I retrospectively assume that it was the end of a mop or some such). I made the connection with this discussion because to rape someone with an inanimate object is to see them as someone not even worth fucking properly – I had no worth to him, just like I have very little to myself.

I started trying to tell Paul about this incident, but of course as ever the words stuck firmly in my throat. Cough, cough, splutter, splutter. Eventually I managed to say that “a pole [had been] used against me, if you know what I mean.” He did.

I gave him my analysis – ie. that in whatever twisted way, someone had to give a fuck about you in order to make the effort to rape you in the more conventional sense of the word (I was quite pleased that I managed to use the word ‘rape’, but of course this was my sitting back and reviewing the matter rather than talking directly about my experiences). For someone to rape you with a pole, they don’t have to give any sort of damn. It’s the ultimate in degrading, because it completely dehumanises the afflicted individual.

Paul agreed. “To put it crudely,” he said, “he couldn’t even be bothered to get a hard-on.”

“Exactly.”

“Which completely validates the idea of ‘worthlessness’ in your mind.”

“Quite.”

He paused for a bit, then asked me how long I’d be carrying that memory for. Had it just emerged, had it always been there, what?

I found this hard to answer. As you know, a lot of my memories of the abuse are skewed by the dissociation I invariably experienced at the time. This was one of those memories that had been on the periphery of my anamnestic consciousness – I’d sort of always ‘known’ it, but it was pushed away and compartmentalised. I estimated that the actual visual recall had solidified in my brain maybe about two months prior to this meeting, but it’s really hard to put a timeframe on this kind of thing. It sounds odd, but it just is sometimes.

There followed a discussion surrounding my recollections of the abuse. I complained that whilst I understood the science behind dissociation, the fact that certain memories just randomly appeared sometimes merely served to reinforce my long-held belief that I’d made the whole thing up. I have written on the notes that I said that it was “odd” to ‘forget’ things, then just remember them out of the blue 20 years later. From an academic perspective, it actually seems obvious – but from a I’m here, I feel it point of view, ‘odd’ is the understatement of this entire geological age.

Paul said, “it’s like you have a cupboard. It occasionally opens, and something falls out. What stops the rest emerging?”

Forgive my naivety, Paul, but I would have assumed that was rather obvious. As he himself has said in the past – why would I want to remember?

I reminded him that the previous week I’d told him about my hallucination of a fucking peccary (of all fucking things – how creative my subconscious is), and how terrified I’d been by it.

“This concerns me,” I told him. “That terror was so strong, so visceral…it was overwhelming. I wonder if that means I’m blocking something utterly horrific out of my mind. What more is there to discover?!”

“But of course the terror is immense,” Paul replied. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s reams more to it – terror is an entirely appropriate response to what you’ve already described to me. And in my view it makes perfect sense for your mind to externalise that in the form of a hallucination. It’s a massive internal cross to bear, so it translates itself into psychosis.”

He went on to opine that psychosis is also a “clever way” of me showing myself that what happened was, in fact, very real indeed. My mind constantly terrorises me like this. It’s trying to communicate something.

I looked out the window behind me and avoided his stare.

After a few moments, he said, “you’re uncomfortable now. This is too close for your liking.”

He was perfectly correct, of course, but I wondered how averting my gaze gave him so much information.

“Do I have tells?” I asked.

To my astonishment, he didn’t know what a ‘tell’ was. I explained that it was a poker term, denoting subtleties that gave away clues to a player’s hand.

“OK,” he said, playing Dr Freud on me by over-reading my use of a poker analogy, “do you feel that your hand is becoming exposed?”

“I want it to be exposed, but my mind never lets me co-operate.”

“You need to cut yourself some slack, girl,” he said (which sounds hideously patronising as I type it, but it wasn’t delivered that way). “You’re here, you’re talking to me – your mind co-operates as much as is possible.”

I was reminded briefly of my 63 sessions with C, and how I didn’t even admit the extent of the abuse until…*checks archives*…week 46 (I knew this blog was useful for something). Yet here I have been, in a mere 13 weeks, discussing the finer, horrible minutiae of it with Paul. Admittedly, I went to Nexus with that clear mandate, which was not the case when I met C – but still. This stuff is A Big Deal.

He asked me what kept me coming back each week. “I’m guessing it’s not my animal magnetism,” he joked, which made me chuckle. With every respect to him – no, it’s not ;)

I provided him with my old disclaimer about not believing in cures for psychiatric problems, but added that I felt that therapy was the only proper means to “get back on track. Or, rather, get on track in the first place.” I added that I felt the only promising path to resolution of the issues was to go there, face them, and ultimately process them.

Paul nodded, seemingly encouraged. “But the first part of that resolution process is acceptance – accepting that it really happened.

“I have another client,” he continued. “Her life has been ruined by mental health problems. There’s an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence for her abuse – but she can’t and won’t believe that it happened.”

“I empathise,” I muttered.

“I know.”

“Well, I don’t know about her – but rationally, logically, I can fully believe that this happened to me. But I just can’t always…feel it. So how does one accept it? You can’t just flick a switch, Paul.”

“But what’s the benefit in making it up?”

I hypothesised that I knew that something had happened (which he proclaimed to be a good start), and that my imagination had spiralled out of control since.

“Right,” he said, definitely. “I am certain that you were abused. It’s absolutely unequivocal in my mind. You doubt, but I accept. You criticise yourself, and I defend you.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry – I think you need me to.”

“Yes…I suppose so. It’s certainly nice to be validated. Thank you.”

“You needed validation then, and you didn’t get it, so you certainly need it now.”

True enough. I thought of my mother and her denials of what happened, and ended up banging on about this to Paul.

“She had one friend that went psychotic and had to be sectioned,” I explained. “During her psychotic phase, the woman alleged that she’d been abused by her mother, but later denied this. So whether that was true or not, my mother is of the view that anyone as mentally unstable as myself cannot legitimately make such claims, because we can’t tell fiction from reality.”

As you know, Paul does not adhere to the medical model of psychiatry. His view is that all mental illness somehow relates to trauma. That I disagree is temporarily irrelevant: his response to my anecdote was, predictably enough, that psychotic people are, in a sense at least, the most qualified to make such claims.

Of course, I hadn’t developed any psychotic symptoms when I told my mother about (some of) Paedo’s activities, but if I tried to tell her now – well, she’d be even more convinced that I was just “away in the head” and ergo incapable of reliably telling the truth.

“Well, I believe you,” Paul concluded. It is nice to hear it validated by someone not directly involved in it.

This saw the end of the session. His final comment before we said our goodbyes was that it was his challenge to help me see the certainty of what happened, and take ownership of that (or some such). I felt a passing draft of DBT in this statement, but I’m pretty sure it was just a turn of phrase and furthermore that he’d have been horrified if I’d likened him in any way to a DBT therapist. Paul is very much an analytical/dynamic practitioner, not at all a behavioural one, and I thank my lucky fucking stars all the time for that. Fuck behaviourism!

Week 14

Remember the depression rating scales? This week was in the wake of those. This time, I didn’t go in and tell Paul that I was OK. Instead, I told him that I was, apparently, extremely depressed.

“Apparently?” he queried.

I told him about the dichotomy of these apparently scientifically verifiable questionnaires versus my internal sense of utter normality. “Is it possible to get used to being severely depressed?” I asked, mostly rhetorically. “My blog readers seem to think so.”

Before he could formulate an answer, I trainwrecked my way forward to the rest of my week, telling him about how I’d burst into tears over the recollection of my old ragdoll, Mr Friendly. In doing so, I unwittingly strayed into one of Paul’s favourite areas of psychology: that of early attachment patterns, and how they affect the subconscious mind.

He banged on a bit about transitional objects and about how they serve as a means of healthy attachment. Whilst true of children who do have healthy relationships with their parents and/or other caregivers, he claims that their effect is especially amplified in abused kids: in such cases, the transitional objects are the only form of healthy attachment.

Which makes sense, but then – aside from Mr Friendly, as a child I mainly regarded cuddly toys and suchlike with complete derision. Now the fucking house is falling down with them. Am I trying to live a robbed childhood?

I told Paul that my first reaction when I started bawling about Mr Friendly was to consult Detective Inspector Google about obtaining a new version.

“Hmm,” he said. “You know it’s not about the doll, don’t you? You can’t search Google for a new parent.”

“Who knows these days?” I interjected, trying to be droll.

Paul laughed briefly, but then asked me why I had been crying.

I must have employed a lot of phrases such as “I was trying to work out…” and “I hypothesised that…” because he told me to stop it, and to just ‘feel’.

“At the first hint of emotion [would someone please ban that fucking word from the English language], you wrap everything up in intellectualising, in analysis. I can do that – but that’s because I’m not you.”

I defended myself on the grounds that going through therapy was pretty useless if I couldn’t make sense of the issues in my own mind.

“True,” he admitted, “but that has to come after. You have to feel first.”

I know this to be true, but it disgusts me nevertheless. I sat in silence for a very long time.

[Cue random memories of therapy with C (again). I used to sit silently every single week with him, and it was something I had fervently sought to avoid - mainly successfully hitherto - with Paul. I hate it; it feels like such a complete and utter waste of time...and, further, a waste of time that is hugely limited].

I apologised for my quietness, and he asked me if I disliked silence. I told him that as a general rule, I welcomed it – but not in this circumstance, where I am trying to do something productive. He admitted that “the pressure [was] on” to get things done in a measly 50 minutes.

I told him about my frustrations about my medical notes being delayed, and how raging I was with those responsible within the Trust for their continued incompetence. I also told him how a blog reader, Faith, had asked why my fury was directed at them – and not at Paedo.

Of course (as you’ll see if you follow the link) I responded with all the form bullshit – they are a public body breaking the law, they’re an arm of government who should comply with their responsibilities, yadda yadda, whereas Paedo is just some miserable individual git. I still hold to all that, I have to say, but on reflection Faith did make a fair point, and I should have acknowledged that in my reply to her.

I told Paul that I felt nothing other than indifference towards Paedo. This is absolutely true. A detests him and I can see why – but I simply don’t. He’s just sort of there.

“What did the little girl think of him?” Paul asked. [I really wish he'd stop calling her that].

I shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot of my memories are in the third person, so it’s hard to access my then-thinking. At other times – you know, those times where I was trying to sustain a continued existence on this plane, like when I felt I was choking to death etc – I was investing all my energies in just surviving it, so it’s impossible to tell what I thought about him.”

“Why not hate him? It’s not dangerous to do so – not now, at least. I think it’s because you transfer that hate to her [Aurora, or my younger self, whatever] – in some capacity at least, you feel that it was all her fault.”

I nodded. “That’s true – additionally, there’s the issue that I didn’t realise that it was somehow an abnormal way to live until I was a lot older. I mean, I had a rudimentary understanding of sex from the offset, but probably didn’t really realise that it’s not supposed to happen when you’re five.”

“It became normalised,” Paul confirmed. “Just like you were saying about your depression at the start of the session – it becomes a standard part of your life.

“So you have plenty of anger – not so much at the girl who was sexually abused, but towards the girl that had sex. Do you see the subtle distinction?”

I did. “It’s ridiculous,” I replied, referring to my objective view that blaming the abused child is an absurdity.

Of course, as is so typical, the word ‘ridiculous’ sent me off on a tangent.

“Last night, I told A that GCHQ were reading my blog,” I said. “I think he thinks that I’m delusional. But they are reading my blog, narcissistic as it sounds,” I protested. “Is that ridiculous?”

“No,” he assured me. “Nowhere is safe, is it? You didn’t have any safe place to turn to as a child. You have super-strength barriers up against all the dangers you perceive around you even now. Why should your blog be any different?”

It shouldn’t. Therefore: HELLO THERE, GCHQ! WELCOME TO MY LIFE! (Actually, would you mind giving me a job sometime when I’m feeling vaguely sane? I can do corruption with the best of them and I am good with codes. I was a master codebreaker as a child – at least when I wasn’t being a pretentious little fuck, or, indeed, being fucked).

He asked me what made me feel safe, and I responded by saying that I had to lock myself in the house with all the doors locked.

“And in here?”

“Metaphorically speaking, the same thing.”

“Exactly,” Paul said. “It’s the fact that everything is ‘locked’ in this room – we have boundaries, confidentiality, and everything’s enclosed. Believe me, if GCHQ are bugging this room, then I’m in deep shit!”

I laughed. Shame I can’t keep to the confidentiality bit given my reckless blabbering about everything here, meaning that GCHQ will find out about it all anyway.

He said, “psychiatry still describes psychotic people as ‘being out of touch with reality’. I say, ‘that’s crap; psychosis makes total sense to me’. If you were sitting here after all that happened to you and were happy or what society regards as ‘normal’, that would be out of touch with reality.”

We engaged in a short discussion about societal conformity and the nature of (in)sanity. Paul referred to the author or Going Sane – Adam Phillips – and how he contended that we are all born ‘insane’, but that convention dictates that as we grow, we learn to kowtow to certain prescribed behaviours and thought patterns. For my part, I ventured that when you considered the so-called bigger picture nothing was sane or insane: it just is what it is, and it all boils down to a pathetic case of moral relativism.

“So,” Paul concluded, “all those diagnoses you have – they’re time-structured, and constantly subject to re-evaluation. Therefore, the only real evaluation is that of your own experience.”

Paul and I don’t agree on the discipline of psychiatry, nor on the medical model. I don’t like psychiatry, but I do think it can have value. However, he’d got me on this point. Once before he’d exemplified by stating that homosexuality was once a DSM diagnosis, which of course it (quite rightly) is no longer. So whilst it’s unlikely in the short term, in time it’s quite conceivable that BPD will simply be regarded as a perfectly normal state of being – a reaction to something, rather than an illness.

Another silence ensued. I wanted to respond, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I sat there playing with my hair and chewing my lip absent-mindedly. Eventually, his voice broke into my thoughts.

“This is going to sound awful, but…was there any part of you that enjoyed it?”

It does seem like a horribly inappropriate and grossly insensitive question, but that was not how I took it. I saw (and see) it as perfectly valid. Sadly, I am aware of a few people who were abused as kids that did enjoy parts of it. Not because they’re bad people, never that, but because they reacted as they’re supposed to in a purely physiological sense.

I consider myself fortunate not to have felt such ‘enjoyment’ – or, if I did, that I don’t have any recollection of it whatsoever. I told Paul so.

“It’s just that it strikes me that – although you ‘disappeared’ a lot – maybe you had a bit of acting to do,” he suggested.

The honest answer to that is, again, that I don’t know. I don’t recall ‘acting’, but then I don’t recall a lot of stuff. It’s entirely possible. In a hideous but sensible sort of way, it holds a twisted logic; play the part, make him enjoy it, get it over more quickly.

On a related note, I admitted to Paul that I was “…doing…um…sexualised…er…things…” at quite a premature age (I made brief reference to it here ((back in the days where a Pandorian post could be less than 2,302,227 words long)), but I didn’t and won’t discuss the specifics). I thought about Paedo, and suddenly felt utterly nauseated.

Good? Feeling the disgust of it all there, Pan? No, not really – or at least, not in the sense one might expect.

I said, “it’s not because I hate him – it’s because having sex with someone who looks like that is abhorrent to me.” (Paedo is very ugly).

“Interesting choice of phraseology,” Paul observed. “‘To have sex’. Adults ‘have sex’. Children don’t ‘have sex’. Children get raped.”

I ignored him and continued. “I’ve told you several times that the occasions that were worst were those where I was choking and so on. In my never-ending quest to contradict myself, I might now say that that wasn’t so bad – I mean, at least I couldn’t see his face.”

“You’d rather choke than see his face.”

“Yes,” I confirmed, and he nodded acceptingly. “But now my mind is pervaded with disgusting images of his face contorted in orgasmic delight. It’s fucking repugnant.”

“How was your face?”

“Probably completely blank. Well – not the first time, I suppose. I was so bemused, so confused, that I probably looked appropriately mystified. But after that came resignation. Reluctant acquiescence. Simply a wait until it was finished.”

He again picked up on my terminology, blathering on about how I never ‘acquiesced’.

“‘Tolerated’, then,” I chanced. “The first time he touched me – as opposed to the more serious stuff – I tried to push him off. But after that I didn’t. I just let it happen.”

“You’ve fallen into a trap of thinking that ‘fighting is helpless’ equals ‘I have to let him’ equals ‘I do let him’,” Paul said.

“Yes, but I was meant to be intelligent, strong and decisive! I epically failed to use those tools.”

“As a five year old?” he said, witheringly.

I looked away and neglected to answer, but inside I was completely enraged. Yes, as a fucking five year old! I wasn’t like other five year olds. I was precocious, determined and stronger-willed than Maggie fucking Thatcher (who would have been at the height of her power at the time. Maybe she subconsciously influenced me). So yeah, of course I should have been able to do something about it. I don’t get why he doesn’t understand that. I don’t get why anyone doesn’t. I’m not saying that I deserved it, but I could have done a fuckload about it, and I didn’t. Not all – not even most – five years could (or should) have done, but I could (those pesky ‘strong narcissistic traits’ rear their ugly heads again, but I’m actually serious. I was a vicious little brat. I could have done so much, but instead I just lay there and took it).

“I was at a training course the other day,” Paul was saying. “One recurring theme was about how abused kids, by about the age of six, can become very good not only at actual sex, but at masturbation. It serves as a ‘tool’ to make them better at sex the next time their abuser wants to rape them.” He looked at me probingly.

How else can one respond to that but with abject disgust? It is unspeakably vile that someone so young should be in that position.

Evidently, my repulsion was palpable. “This is your world, Pandora,” he urged. “Of course it’s disgusting, but it’s not all about third parties. It’s about you!”

[Eyes down, lips curled, brow furrowed.]

“I have this lovely memory,” he went on, “of when I was a little boy. I can’t remember my age, but I was old enough to have been out walking alone, so I can’t have been that young. I was dandering up this road, and suddenly, from nowhere, I realised that boys and girls were different [biologically speaking. I don't think he's a raging closet misogynist or anything]. I remember that moment with such fondness – I had this gentle way about me – such a lovely childlike naivety.

“You didn’t have that, did you? And you were far younger than what I was at the time. You knew that men and women were different and you knew – or thought you knew – what you were for: your purpose in life was to have sex.”

This was deeply disturbing. Not the concept, but the way he phrased it. I had literally been within half a second of saying, “my purpose in life is to have sex.” Had he read my mind?

I stared at him goggle-eyed for a minute, then told him why. He hadn’t read my mind, he claimed – he just knew that that was what the circumstances dictated. Your purpose in life is to have sex. Yes.

So, knowing my purpose, I decided to deflect the apparent seriousness of the moment away by stating, again, that it wasn’t that bad. “I know of one woman whose mother prostituted her out to the highest bidder each time,” I said. “That poor girl was made to think her purpose in life was to have sex. So if it was mine – well, at least it was generally the same fucking person each time.”

“In a way, though,” Paul replied, “it’s almost worse – you had a pre-existing relationship with this man, you continued a relationship with him throughout, and you still have a relationship with him.”

We discussed the fact that I still have to see Paedo from time to time. I stoically grin and bear it; A sits and seethes and tries not to rip his cock off. I confessed to being terrified of getting into one of Maisie’s notorious and epic fights or getting pissed or something and blurting it all out.

“I don’t particularly care for my cousins,” I said, “but I wouldn’t wish this on them; they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s moot I suppose – they wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“That’s the thing with abuse,” Paul sighed. “It’s always the victim’s ‘dirty little secret’. It’s you that would destroy lives. It’s you they wouldn’t believe. It’s you that would be persecuted.

“But,” he added, nodding pointedly in my direction, “they’d still never look at him in the same light again.”

And on that note, things drew to a close for another week.

M. E. H.

I have absolutely no idea how to end this post, so I won’t try to develop some prosaic / pretentious / uplifting conclusion to it and shall instead just fuck off. Cheerio.

Jan 172011
 

You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’m really not.  I mean, I’ve sort of grown accustomed to ‘They‘, simply because they’ve been hovering about at various intervals for over a year now.  I do hate them.  I hate them so very, very much – but meh.  Old housewives tell it best: as the eons-old adage goes, better the devil you know.

I was lying in bed about 4am this morning, awake but not as hopelessly frustrated with my insomnia as I usually am, mainly because I had at least got a little sleep.  A was breathing deeply but quietly beside me, given my irresponsible donation of half a Zopiclone to him (he’s exhausted and stressed at work at the minute, dear love him).  As I listened to the gentle, rhythmic sounds of his breaths, I began to hear something additional.  A gnawing sound?  Or chewing?  Then…swallowing?  What the fuck?

PeccaryI turned round, and on the other side of the bed – near the corner beside A’s head was a thing.  Initially it reminded me of a peccary; it had that general look about it, and it had the brownish, wiry hair that that species boasts.  But it was thinner, and it stood upright rather than on all fours.  Perhaps it was actually more of a large squirrel, but its facial features were distinctly porcine.

It was gobbling away at something in its non-trottery trotters (which, on reflection, were probably more like claws), accounting for the bizarre audible accompaniment to its presence (or, rather, lack thereof).  Chew chew, gobble gobble, guh.  Chew chew, gobble gobble, guh.  Repeat ad nauseum.

I stared at it in wide-eyed horror.  I knew that I had to be hallucinating; it has been an ‘advantage’ of my hallucinatory psychoses that I still mainly know that my mind is creating them, unlike – say – a schizophrenic who actually believes that the hallucination is an example of reality.  (Delusions are usually a different thing – I do, when in the midst of them, firmly consider them to be factual, though there have been a few exceptions to that).  Nevertheless, my mind was, in an instant, filled with horror-filled streams of aghast thoughts.

  • What is that?!
  • How the hell did it get in here?  Yeah, I know it didn’t really, but still – how did it get in?!  [You gotta love self-contradictory sentences!]
  • Is it going to harm us?
  • How can I get rid of it?

And so on.  It must have heard me thinking because, within a few seconds, it turned its bizarre little face towards me and regarded me with, at first, apparent bemusement.  In another life, it could have been quite a likeable creature.  Peccaries delight me in the main, and I love rodents and other types of pigs too.  This thing certainly carried an aura of evil malevolence about its self, but I wonder was that really innate, or was it simply a case of ‘good guy gone wrong’?

Either way, unlike the gnome, it seemingly came to the conclusion that it had some not-entirely-positive message to convey to me that was not passing ambivalence.

Still chewing the nebulous coloured air that it held in its paws  (or whatever one would call them), it drew back its lips (do you call the edges of the mouth lips in such animals?  Do you even do so outside of humans, or at least primates more generally?), bared its ridiculously-sized fangs, and began to snarl and hiss at me.  In a masterful feat of laws-of-physics defiance, the chew chew, gobble gobble, guh continued amok as it conducted itself in this fashion, which led up to a crescendo of abject screeching.

I think that maybe peccaries (in common with their cousins, the domestic pig) do screech, after a fashion anyway, though their trademark noise is clicking.  Funny to think such trivial and pointless thoughts as this as you sat like a deer in the headlights that was this pig-rodent mutation of malevolence, but think it I did.

I just looked at the peccary-thing.  I simply lay there and looked at it.  As noted in the foregoing paragraph, it’s akin to a deer in headlights.  Car crash psychosis.  I should make it into a reality (or, perhaps more accurately, non-reality?) TV show.

Here is the most confusing thing.  It stood there and it snarled and it squealed and it swallowed and it chewed and it generally made a nuisance of itself.  Despite its disruptive behaviour, however, I never actually felt that it would attack me.  I was not scared of that eventuality.

But there was fear.  Very, very much fear.  That fear is about something deeper; more profound, but also more nebulous.  It is a horror so deep within myself that it makes my nerves stand on end with such dramatic force that they feel like daggers piercing my skin from the inside out.  It didn’t matter if the peccary threatened to attack or not – its very ‘existence’ carried all the amorphous utter terror that was needed, thank you very much.

Why?  I could say, “well, it just does; I don’t know why.  I actually quite like peccaries to be honest, but this thing that vaguely resembled one was just petrifying,” but you could very reasonably call me up on that.  The ‘why’, when you look at the matter from an outsider’s perspective, is quite obvious.  The peccary was frightening not because it could or would harm me, but because of what it represented.  The gnome, that day when it so nonchalantly walked past me, didn’t even acknowledge me – and yet it too carried the vivid smell of unspeakable fear and loathing.

Paul is always banging on that psychosis is a preferable option to facing the truth.  He thinks that is easier for me to interact with fake ‘monsters’ than it is for me to face the real ones, and so here we have ‘They’, gnomes, fake Paedo and peccaries all competing for a place in my consciousness.  The point is that the peccary-thing rendering me so paralysingly petrified scares even my now-(hopefully)rational mind.

Sex abuse.  Is it really that bad?  Can it do that to someone?  Why should the fear be so profound and so buried?  Why should it be terror of an unquantifiable, indescribable and unspeakable nature?  It’s horrible, but is it really that bad?  What did they/he do that was so bad that I carry this with me somewhere, no matter how cloaked and deceptive it may be?

Seriously.  My life feels like something out of a bloody Lovecraft novella.   The terror about which the man wrote so vividly, and the atmosphere of dread, revulsion and malice that he so adroitly created - that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about here.  That’s the sheer level of fear I have in relation to these things.

And what, alas, of the peccary-thing?  I eventually managed to un-paralyse myself enough to blink a few times, but the peccary remained in its place, at the edge of the bed on the other side of A.  It continued to snarl, chew, screech, etc.  I blinked a third or fourth time – for longer on this occasion, and when I re-opened my eyes, the peccary-thing had gone.  Vanished.  Disappeared into thin air.  So, I noted shortly afterwards with a sort of confused interest, had the various noises the thing had created – but they just didn’t disappear in an instant like the vision.  Well, they probably did, but it felt like they were old news – not just something frustratingly loud and daunting from a mere few seconds ago.  It felt that it wasn’t that they had stopped – but that they had never happened.  It was as if someone had gone back in my life’s timeline and simply erased them; but – and here is why I’m not a temporal physicist – they had still happened, because I could remember them.  Even though they hadn’t.  Even though they had.  Etc etc etc, ad infinitum.  I know that makes no sense and is impossible to fully appreciate when you haven’t experienced it, but it’s the best I can do.  Steven Moffat is better at this kind of thing than me: it was a bit like, in 2010′s Doctor Who Shitmas special, how the character of Kazran developed memories he hadn’t previously had after the Doctor went back in time and put them there.  Except kind of in reverse.  Or something.  Hmm.  Not sure I can work this one out adequately. Sorry.

Sorry that this is such a crap post, but I’m exhausted, in a lot of physical pain and feeling generally listless and can’t-be-bothered-ish.  But I felt it important to record this fuckery for posterity if nothing else.

Advocacy woman tomorrow, unfortunately.  If she turns up this time, that is.   Wish me luck…

Jan 132011
 

***Possible triggers, as if you hadn’t guessed***

I’m so tired and miserable.  I want to sleep – forever.  Accept that any way you will.  I don’t like this consciousness.  I don’t like this life.  In some of my brighter moments, I delude myself into thinking it might get better through a combination of therapy and medication.  In my darker moments, I find that suggestion laughable – well, I would, if I were able to laugh.  Either way, it always come back to this.  The darkness always comes, even if it’s occasionally interspersed with mere clouds (or, very rarely, actual sunshine).

If the simple act of brushing your teeth can, in an instant,  send a person knock a person back in time by over 20 years, what hope is there for that person?  I was just brushing my teeth.  All that happened was that I swallowed the foam creating by the toothpaste – unfortunately it caught somewhere in my throat, I couldn’t clear it instantly, and I ended up choking humiliatingly for several minutes.

As this went on for a few seconds, I was in my bathroom.  Without warning, though, I was no longer in my bathroom.  In one fraction of a nanosecond I was a child again – a child in the midst of a terrifying, perplexing and seemingly life-threatening horror.  I was in that lane at the side of their garage, aged maybe five or six, being fucked in the mouth by him.  Choking.  Gasping for breath. I’m trying to move…that thing…out of my mouth, but he pushes it further in, and pushes me even harder against that sort of spikey wall.  I can’t get away.  Please help me.  Spluttering.  Spit and stuff is dribbling down my chin.  It goes deeper again.  I’m still choking, even worse now.  Sweating, gasping, whimpering, dying…please let it stop.  Please, God, I’m sorry. Whatever I did I’m sorry.  Please let it stop, please.  Just let me die if that’s what it takes for it to stop, if you want me to die than that’s OK.  Cough, splutter, cough cough.  Gurgle choke…I can’t breathe.  I’m choking.  I think I’m dying.  Please let me be.  Please let it stop…

I don’t know how long it lasted.  Too long, whatever the case.  Half a second is too long to go through that.  Whatever the case, I was rendered a mute, shaking wreck in its aftermath anyway.  The sheer degradation of the imagery is some of the worst of it all, though the sensations of being choked half to death are hardly exhilarating and drenched in fun either.

I sat down in bed for a while and just…I don’t know.  Existed?  I then lay in bed and started cuddling my teddy bear like the pathetic little child that I apparently am.  I eventually ‘came round’ enough to read a little and, surprisingly sensibly, take a hefty dose of Zopiclone.

And so to today.  I was crudely awoken by an alarm I’d forgotten I’d set on my iPhone.  For a few moments, I pondered where I was – the room initially seemed unfamiliar.  I sleep in a single bed in Mum’s house.  My Little Pony on the wallpaper.  Or else…well, sometimes I sleep there.  But not here, I don’t know this place.  Where is it?!  Where have they taken me?! Oh, wait Pan (Aurora?) – that was then, this is now.  You’re actually nearly 30 now and you’re in your partner’s house, in his bedroom and in his bed.  Oh.  Oh good.  I will be safe here, then? Well…yes.  I think so, yes.  But I wasn’t safe last night, was I? *whimpering* Um…well.  No.  No.  I suppose you weren’t.  [Long pause].  But don’t worry, you’re OK now.  Really?  Do you mean it? Yes, I mean it.  I mean it absolutely.  OK then – if you say so.  Thanks.

But wait.  Fuck!  I recalled with horror as I lay there that I had agreed to go to my mother’s house today. Nothing unduly awful about that, you might say.  However, the conversation I had had last night with her on the heinous device that is the telephone had revealed to me that the McFauls would be at her house when I arrived.

For the record, Paedo was not going to be one of those in attendance.  It was due to be my aunt Maisie, cousin Sarah, cousin-once-removed Suzanne, and cousins-twice-removed Marcus (almost three) and Sean (almost one).  Fine?  Hmm.  Not really.  You can’t avoid at least hearing of Paedo, and with a hideous flashback so forefront in my mind, and Aurora’s co-conscious uncertainty underpinning much of my thinking, I knew that merely seeing those who had intimate acquaintance with him would be deeply triggering.

I picked up my iPhone, intending to call my mother and tell her I wasn’t coming.  The idea of facing Paedo’s family seemed like a cross too huge to bear.  Instead I quite typically failed: I just stared at the thing, before whinging about my unfortunate circumstances on Twitter.

Anyhow, it’s not my mother’s fault – nor the fault of the McFauls who were visiting – that I was, and am, a mess.  So I got up, got dressed and left.

I tried to avoid a lot of conversation with those assembled, but it was of course impossible.  They enjoy talking.  Why?  Why?!  What is there to say that is even remotely worthwhile in this sickening universe of shite?  Besides, ‘They’ and Aurora were keeping a running commentary up in my head, as they have been doing for about 24 hours now, and not blurting the whole sorry story out to the fuckers was a frustratingly difficult undertaking.

Yet I managed to keep my gob shut on that point, hard as it was.  In fact, at one point when I got a second to myself, I was acutely

Sorry, I just had another major choking fit right now.  The memories invaded my head, though it didn’t become an out-an-out flashback.  It lacked the ‘realness’, the sense of it being ‘now’, the physical sensations – but the images still drilled themselves deeply into my psyche in the few minutes that the choking fit went on for.  My mother dashed from her position on the other sofa to help me; she was (and is) on the phone.  When I recovered and she returned to her call, she said to the individual with whom she is conversing, “Pan often takes these terrifying choking fits, usually for no obvious reason.”

Really?  Do I?  My mother has been known to be guilty of embellishment on occasion, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt on this occasion.  If this really happens a lot, and happens randomly at that, then that is very odd.  Potentially telling.

‘Telling’ of something I’m sure I don’t like.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yes, I was acutely aware of how well I was acting my fit-in-with-the-world part in front of the McFauls.  I’ve written about my ability to mask my illnesses, trauma and symptoms a lot on this blog; I am very, very good at it.  But it is fallacious, utterly fallacious.  It is such a ridiculously huge construct.  It isn’t real.  Am I even real when I do it?  Am I even real at any point?  What is ‘real’ anyway?

One of the things that bothered me most today was seeing Marcus and, especially, Sean.  Sean is so small and innocent and sweet (that I think him ‘sweet’ nauseates me, but it is not his fault).  I had these utterly repugnant images of Paedo doing that to him and I flew into a panicked rage – though a panicked rage I hid well from the others, as usual.

I should re-iterate that I think the likelihood of Paedo being ‘active’ towards either of these children – or any others – these days is infinitesimal to non-existent.  It is my mind that is the trouble here, rather than any nefarious intentions from him.  I see these grotesque images.  I am even sicker than I thought.  How can my mind even begin to think of that tiny little baby being raped by that cunt?  IT IS VILE.  I AM VILE.

Paul will tell me on Monday that I am not vile, but Paul will be wrong.  Paul and I may try to utilise our therapy sessions to make me ‘realise’ that I am ‘not at fault’ for what happened in my childhood, but in the (in my current mindset unlikely) event that that does happen, that doesn’t – it can’t – stop the images or, indeed, the actual returns to being there.  I will always see it.  I will probably always feel it.  Paul is skilled, and perhaps he can make things better – but he can’t make it not have happened.  It will always have happened. I will always be stained.

I can’t be arsed to proof-read this.  Sorry.

Dec 242010
 

The advantage of it being Christmas Eve is that it’s only a matter of hours – and I’m counting them – until the whole farce is over.

I was asked on Twitter last night why I hated it so much.  My reply was as follows:

I hate the commercialism.  I hate the lies (ie. Santa) [as alluded to in a recent therapy session].  I hate the wankers that drink fuck all all year and then get obnoxiously pissed.  I hate the fakery and the pretence (“oooh, what a lovely gift!” when you actually think it’s complete shite).  I hate the politics (“he bought for me, so I must buy for him”).  But most of all I hate my extended family. They’ve ruined any possible joy in it for A and me both.

I left a couple of things out.  One is that I hate the hypocrisy of it: OK, it’s highly unlikely that if Christ even existed that he was born on 25 December, but nevertheless, it has been chosen to represent a Christian festival.  Now I am not at all religious, but that’s meant to be its point.  How in the fuck does this capitalist charade remotely symbolise the birth of the Son of Man?!  What complete and utter fuckshite.  (Before anyone says it, I know there are Church services over Christmas Day and days close to it, and Christians will often attend these.  But really – are they in the majority?  Are the majority not actually the pissed wankers who run out to buy their spouses shite underwear or socks in a frenzy of unoriginality on Christmas Eve?).

The other point missed in my Twitter rant was that I find the day and, indeed, the whole bloody season to be immensely triggering.  I burst into tears the other day, as I have done on many previous occasions, when I saw this Guinness ad on the TV:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWfdbYbDVzg[/youtube]

…and all but the most upbeat Christmas songs send me into a crazed state of tearful and breathless anxiety.

I know that most of my childhood Christmasses were spent in the company of the McFaul dynasty, and I recall that I always dreaded that.  I have very few clear memories of the occasion until my teens, which may or may not be telling – but I can’t fathom how Paedo could have done anything significant when the house was so full all the time.  I suppose one thing of note was the crowd swelled and diminished in waves over the Christmas week, and I was generally unfortunate enough to have been there for most of that time, if memory serves me correctly.  So if something did happen in said period, I would probably have ended up associating it with Christmas – and association is the most powerful tool in the psychological box.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be some sort of big analytical post.  I just wanted to note that owing to the ridiculous schedule that this occasion demands, I may not be about here much.  I still have a Paul session to review, and I will try and squeeze it in at some point, but there is a lot coming up, so I’m not sure when that – or any other posting – will be.

Here is my schedule:

  • Christmas Eve – head to mother’s.
  • Christmas Day – sit around mother’s eating and drinking.*
  • Boxing Day – head to A’s Mum and step-dad’s, bringing mother with us.  A’s brother and sister – and possibly sister’s boyfriend – will also be in situ.
  • 27 December – come home for a day or two.
  • 31 December – head to hotel with A and one of A’s best friends, home briefly from his new life in the USA.
  • 1 January – come home.
  • 4 January – meet advocate woman re: battle with the Trust.
  • 5 January – head to another lovely hotel – we went there last year too – for two nights, thanks to a Christmas present from A’s Mum.
  • 7 January – finally start getting back to normal – for a bit…
  • 22 January – head to Dublin for a friends birthday.
  • 23 January - start driving around Ireland for a week.
  • 30 January-ish – come home and completely get back to normal.

Gah!  Too much, too much!  * But there is something wonderful about it all – and that is that we will not, at any point, be darkening the door of Hotel California, the McFaul’s house.  Do you remember I wrote recently that my cousin Kevin had threatened me, and that I wasn’t taking that shit?  Well, we weren’t going to Hotel California anyway – don’t forget last year’s shenanigans – but Kevin’s behaviour has adequately served to put the final nail in the coffin of my attendance.  Last night A and I toasted him for his most generous favour to us.

Anyhow.  I will try to drop in if I can to write up the latest session with Paul and perhaps do another End of Year Post, though of course that is likely to remind me of how much I’ve failed this year and am likely to do in 2011.  If you don’t see me about, however, I probably have not killed myself.  I’m sure A would let you know were that the case :)

For those of you that enjoy this time of year, may you have a lovely Christmas filled with fun and laughter.  For those of you that, like me, find it inherently difficult, I wish you as much peace as possible throughout the period, and hope it passes swiftly for you.

Much love to all.

Hugs

Pan <3 xxx

Nov 112010
 

I’ve been almost entirely abminuscule details of conversations in therapy. The answer is, generally speaking, really rather boring: I have simply been blessed with a very good memory. Which, when you think about it, for a serial dissociater (perhaps I should change the name of the blog to that?) is sort of ironic. Maybe remembering stupid things makes up for failing to remember others? Who knows. Anyhow, Nick wondered if perhaps I furiously scribble notes when I arrive back at my car – this is often the case indeed. Additionally, I’ll be sitting minding my own business, thinking of something else entirely, and then something will remind me of something said, and I’ll instantaneously whip out my iPhone to note my recollections.

That said, there are two qualifying points to that. As I note in the disclaimer section of this blog, I do often paraphrase or slightly embellish dialogue for the sake of (*ahem*) dramatic effect, and additionally, it is sometimes the case that maybe things didn’t necessarily take place in the order in which they are described. I’d like to iterate though that everything sad/described was said or did happen essentially as detailed – just in an even more desultory fashion. Secondly, there have been a few cases where I did record a session. If I recall correctly most of the relevant posts are protected, because I was paranoid that C may have found this blog and would be furious with me for my subterfuge. Now I don’t care if he knows, and even if I did, it’s not like any anger or irritation on his part is likely to affect me in any way now, is it?

** I really, really hate the word ‘survivor’ in this context. Apologies if that offends anyone – I certainly don’t mean it to. As ever, this applies to me, and not others. I don’t believe my life was ever in danger; therefore what the fuck was it that I survived? I once survived what could have been a serious car accident. I didn’t survive abuse because what else was I meant to have done? Just randomly died? Actually, Judith Stout in her book The Myth of Sanity argues that that very thing can happen, but I would be very surprised if it were a likelihood in cases like mine. Still, as she notes:

…[DID] seems to emerge spontaneously in situations of extreme early trauma, and is a highly effective self-protective strategy that may preserve the individual’s very life, by allowing him to think at all in circumstances that would otherwise be tetanizing [sic]. In situations that are too chronically terrifying for the self to deal with, the self may take advantage of its several ego states, may divide the stress, and cope as a group of specalized [sic] but interrelated selves. In this way, we survive. In this way, as in so many others, our resilient brains are much more brilliant than we know.

Thoughts?

So I see that I have failed in my attempt to keep this relatively short. I strode far too much into random introspection. Augh well. I should have learned by now that I can’t control my fingers when they touch the keyboard. Goodnight!

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.

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!

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.

Oct 182010
 

My counselling session with Paul last Monday was so wide-ranging that I hardly know where to begin. As I noted in this post, it was like I condensed years of sexual abuse into a minuscule 50 minutes, which doesn’t make for a good written recollection of the session. I’ll therefore take it on a desultory point-by-point basis.

The Shutter

As I sat down with Paul at the start of the session, there must have been some ongoing amicable-enough conversation bouncing between us. When he’d first seen me downstairs in the waiting room, with my formerly-blue hair now jet black, he’d said, jokingly, “you’re trying to confuse me, aren’t you?” Maybe we were discussing that, but I don’t remember. The subject matter is unimportant in any event.

He asked where I wanted to start the discussion, and I didn’t have a clue (as had been so frequently the case with C, Paul’s predecessor). But somehow or other, we eventually got to the subject of the sex abuse (I mean…it is what I’m there for!) and in doing so, I instantaneously switched from this cheerful, fairly vivacious and easy-going young woman, to a verbally dried-up, suspicious, nervous, child-like…thing.

He asked me how I felt in that moment, but I failed to articulate myself particularly well and out tumbled some incoherent mutterings about it being an awkward subject to discuss. How wonderfully insightful of me; I bet he has never heard anything of the like before. Self-vituperations notwithstanding, I must have ‘relaxed’ into it eventually (insofar as that’s possible, anyway), because on our Let’s Talk About Sex (Abuse)! journey of fun and discovery we eventually arrived at the thrilling destination of…

The Power of Words

Ever since I began talking about my experiences of sexual abuse, I have been horrified by the use of the terminology that’s inevitably involved. I’m fairly OK in certain circles with using the supposedly vulgar swear words for those ‘proper’ terms that I still find wholly intolerable, but that’s about it.

I remember when I talked about one of the somatic symptoms of my various illnesses to C one day that his response – to my utter, utter horror – was, “is this feeling in your vagina?” Vile word. Disgusting. I hate hate hate it. I feel sick even typing it, never-mind hearing it, never-never-mind saying it. I nearly threw up all over poor C as a result of his verbal use of this term. Eugh. Yuk yuk yuk.

(As a related aside, I have made a discovery. Well, not a discovery, but I have come to a gradual and clear realisation. Paedo – and/or, apparently, his friends – must have been heavily pissed during many of their little anti-me enterprises. I’ve always experienced this kind of physical reaction ((a dull ache or sense of horrible and distinct pressure down there, or the tactile equivalent of an illusion that I need to micturate)) when confronted with overt drunkenness – stuff like hiccups, significant word-slurring etc. It’s particularly notable when it’s on the TV, though it happens in person too. Which is all a bit odd given that, staying ever patriotic to this island, I happily knock back booze with the best of ‘em. Strange).

Anyway, back on topic, one thing that stands out in my mind about this session with Paul was that, during the discussion of a vaginal (grr) rape that I recall well, I quite matter-of-factly said, “I remember looking down afterwards and seeing this horrible mixture of red, cream and pink liquid, which I now realise was a concoction of semen and blood.”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t shift my gaze from him as I said this either, and I don’t remember being particularly shamed using the words, though of course I harbour great shame in general. If I had ever been able to say that to C, it would have been through stuttered gasps, and from behind a protective mane of Uncle Fester-ised hair.

Not that I am criticising C, but I was desperate for him to like (love?) me, and I would not have readily put myself in a position where (in my erroneous but strongly held estimation) I looked like a shameful slag in front of him (at the very least, not until I was convinced that that wasn’t how he would have seen me). Maybe that shows a problem with the existence of attachment in psychotherapy, and maybe it doesn’t. It is just an observation.

“Bewilderment”

This was my eventual response to Paul when he asked me what I felt as I was being raped, or in the immediate aftermath of such an incident. The question produced something akin to a reliving-it-style-flashback, although I didn’t feel as much physical discomfort as one may have expected, thank fuck. I didn’t entirely have words for the sense of WTF? that Child Me / Adult-Me-Having-a-Flashback-in-the-Room-with-Paul felt, which indicates that I must have been very young as my vocabulary would have included words such as ‘confusion’ and ‘perplexity’ from a pretty young age (I’d guess seven-ish).

The WTF? of the moment was best summarised by me eventually, there in Paul’s counsellor-ly room in 2010, as ‘bewilderment’. He said that that was “a good place to start.”

Keeping Quiet

We spent quite a bit of time discussing why I never told anyone what was going on and how great the “emotional trauma” of that alone must have been. As he rightly noted, it is not in the normal psychology of a child to keep quiet about something that hurts or confuses him/her (certainly not to at this level), and to that end, he held, Paedo must have made some threat to or instilled in me some worry that made me keep my trap shut.

I have absolutely no recollection of anything like this whatsoever. After Paedo had done what he was doing, he would dress, tell me to do so, wait for me, then lead me back to the house (or wherever was applicable to the incident in question). I can’t remember if we exchanged words during these brief jaunts, but I am certain that there was no malice emanating from him (which sounds laughably improbable but, you know…relatively speaking).

Paul urged me to consider the issue deeply and I really, really did. He reiterated his position that something must have made me so terrified of repercussions to keep something of such magnitude to myself, but all I came up with was a big, fat blank. This remains the case a week on.

His view of this is that there was a fear running so deep somewhere that I was/am not ready to ‘recover’ it. My theory, in contrast, is a little less dramatic.

Pre-Marital Sex

My mother (who has mellowed out considerably since, praise be) loathed (or at least regarded with the utmost contempt) the idea of sex before marriage when I was a kid. I can’t imagine that she must have harped on about it specifically to me when I was at the age at which the abuse started (five-ish), as she only found out that I knew about sex (that I knew far more than she about sex!) when I was about eight, but still – I have recollections of her views on this anyway. One such memory is of her and my grandfather sitting in the living room, tutting moralistically when some unmarried woman on the TV was up the duff. I asked them what was so unspeakably heinous about this woman who should clearly have been burnt at the stake, whilst being doused with sulphuric acid whilst having her eyes gouged out with a rusty spoon. Rather than give any sort of reasoned or thoughtful response, they both look at me in aghast horror and advised that one day I would understand the nature of her offence. Patronising pricks.

So anyhow, my theory is that I thought that my mother and her family would have been so utterly ashamed and mortified that I had engaged in sexual acts before marriage – indeed, with someone already married – that they would have disowned me, or at the very least judgementally condemned and sneered at me.

I said so to Paul. He doesn’t think this accounts for my complete failure to reveal to someone in authority what was happening to me, but he did acknowledge that it could certainly have added to my senses of shame and complete defilement.

He sighed, and told me he’d read through the ‘how depressed are you’ questionnaire that he’d given me to complete the previous week.

“You ticked the box stating that you felt ‘very’ guilty and ashamed,” he said.

I nodded.

“Almost all of my clients tick that option,” he continued, shaking his head with gentle sadness. “What – what – have you got to feel guilty for?!”

I shrugged, and hypothesised that whilst I had nothing to feel guilty for really, that I had only developed that awareness as an adult. “I grew up thinking it was my fault, I think” I explained. “Rationality and logic are all very well, but even they can’t reverse 20 years of tunnel-vision thinking.”

Whoredom

Of course, for every utterance of “it’s not my fault,” comes about 17,000 “I’m a filthy whore!” declarations. I told Paul that I was a disgusting slag who seduced Paedo (I’ve just spent 20 minutes looking through the archives of this journal, because I had the following conversation with C too, and I know I wrote about it. Alas, I am missing it somewhere). I admitted to my sexualised behaviour around Paedo, a debauched behaviour on my part that occurred on two types of occasion: (1) when I knew he was incapable of touching me for whatever reasons (meaning I could satisfactorily watch his frustrated ‘suffering’); and (2) after I had become pubescent and Paedo was no longer interested in fucking me.

I saw this as my own mini version of revenge, but opined (and still do) that it exemplified my unadulterated (or, perhaps, adulterated? That also works) sluttery. Paul had a somewhat different view, which slightly echoed what had been C’s take on it (I still can’t find the relevant post, and it’s fucking doing my head in. If you’ve spotted this missing post, please contact the Missing Posts Unit at the Serial Insomniacal Headquarters…). The idea to both men was that dressing ‘seductively’ had given me some level of control over a situation in which I’d always been powerless. I don’t remember exactly what C had been getting at when we’d had the discussion, but with hindsight I can say with some confidence that it was probably a similar line of thinking to Paul’s.

Paul thinks that I was taken aback by the sudden or (more accurately) trailing off of the abuse, not understanding entirely why Paedo had ‘lost interest’ in me. He said that because no one had realised that anything was happening, and that it had gone on for so many years, it had become normalised in my head – and that when it stopped, although part of me was decidedly grateful, part of me felt rejected too. He wondered if my ‘seductive’ dressing was therefore some (admittedly unconscious) pseudo-attempt on my part to reignite Paedo’s interest in me. Better to have some attention than to be greeted with utter indifference.

I don’t know what I think of this. I don’t remember feeling ‘rejected’, but the implication is that even if I had done, it would have been as a psychological undercurrent and was not something of which I was aware. I do remember, again, a sense of WTF? when IT was no more – but quickly concluded that he simply wasn’t interested in anything other than pre-pubescent bodies, which is still my held position. But did that make me feel unloved? I suppose in a twisted way that it’s possible, though it doesn’t feel true.

“Acting Out”

Paul asked me if, either in my childhood or my adolescence, I’d had what would these days be termed “behavioural problems” by the psychiatric profession. My cynical laugh confirmed that this had, indeed, been the case (only as a teenager, mind you. I was a strange child, but not a nightmare one).

Paul spoke of his anger towards care-givers who are slapped around the face everyday with classic symptoms of child abuse in those of whom they are in charge, dismissing their ‘issues’ as teenage angst, being a spoiled brat or whatever. I nodded in agreement, but did point out that the dividing line between an ill-bred little cunt and a severely traumatised young person was blurred and hard to define.

He didn’t disagree, but said that most parents/guardians had it well within their power to do a little research into their kids’ behaviour, which would shed a lot of light on things, and possibly enable as-early-as-possible treatment for the abused youngster.

Was there an implicit attack on my mother here? I think so. I couldn’t disagree with him though – I still have a lot to tell here on that score. In short, aside from her denouncements on the information I gave her about Paedo (which, unsurprisingly, have “served to make [me] think that [I] was the one at fault” in the saga of Him and Me), she used to beat the living fuck out of me until I was ‘within an inch of my life’. My crime was being depressed.

But that’s a story for another day.

Paul said that when adults don’t notice the obvious signs of abuse – in my case walking strangely (obviously in the immediate aftermath of a certain type of incident), dramatic social withdrawal – that the child has to start leaving more cryptic-seeming hints all over the place. This leads to thinks like anger, regressed behaviours, theft and/or lies and generally disruptive behaviour. Although he accepted that the crossover between ‘bad’ and ‘traumatised’ was at times unclear, he said that the behaviour that I described from my late childhood/adolescence was classic mal-treated-kid behaviour.

Of course, my mother doesn’t believe in the lasting effects of trauma (despite the fact that she herself is very clearly suffering from some sort of PTSD), so I doubt she’d buy that, but it made me feel better about some of the shit things I’d done as an unruly brat. It doesn’t excuse them, but it does go some way to help explain them.

False Memory Syndrome – Again

It’s my last line of defence, apparently. I used the term “repressed memories” for some reason, then started lambasting myself because “repressed memories” were/are simply “false memories”.

“You know that’s not true, don’t you?” Paul queried, refusing to break eye contact.

I broke it, staring up at the skylight and pulling at my hair. Eventually I nodded regretfully.

I asked him had he seen Life on Mars. The philistine had not (I shall sack him as my therapist tomorrow ((today)) for this unforgivable atrocity), but he understood the premise, so I outlined its relevance to me (the first episode deals with the tiny things that the protagonist’s mind has ‘invented’, leading him to conclude that because there was no point in it making up such details, that his circumstances must be real).

Paul asked how I had felt during the experiencing of my small details – watching the rain water meandering down the garage wall, for example. I said that I had developed an odd fascination with such mundaneness at the time. Predictably, he saw this as a precursor to dissociation, and a coping mechanism to deal with the “unspeakable-ness” of what was being done at the time.

Birds and Blokes / Misogynist-Feminism / Feminism is Not Misandry, Not That That is What This is About, But Anyway

Way, way back many centurie(s-in-days) ago, not long after this blogging began, a blogpost lived in the land of Paaa-aahhnn, that identified her as a misogynist-feminist.

(If you understand what the deliberate cadence of the preceding paragraph was alluding to then you lead as sad a life as I do. Sorry).

Paul asked me how I felt about discussing the whole sorry thing with him, and I replied that it was odd talking about it with such candour to anyone. He accepted that, but was especially interested in whether or not having the conversation with “an older man” freaked me out.

I said that on the contrary, I preferred it. I told him that I had never particularly gotten on with women (though as I encounter more and more lovely ladies in the blogosophere, my flawed perspective on my own sex is finally being corrected – nevertheless, my older friends and acquaintances are still almost exclusively male, as was briefly discussed on the ‘About‘ page), and that I had actually become quite anxious about the possibility of seeing a woman rather than a man at Nexus before it was confirmed that I could see him. I said that my interests – heavy metal, science fiction, beer, poker, cars – were the much more frequent domain of blokes rather than women, and that things that women did generally seem interested in – babies, weddings, soaps etc – were strongly disliked by me. (Obviously this is a generalisation in terms of both genders, for which I apologise).

Paul thinks that it’s not as simple as that. Or rather, it is – I do harbour more traditionally masculine interests – but that it’s not been an accident of nature. This is where I think we’ll have to agree to disagree; I don’t believe in ‘innate’ gender roles. The fact that I do not have a penis (how odd, I can type that one without apparent difficulty) does not mean that I lack the interests more traditionally associated with those that do own such an appendage. Similarly, I deem it perfectly acceptable for blokes to be interested in fashion, kids, home furnishings, whatever – they’re not inherently not that way. I hold that we are first and foremost people, rather than members of groups that are specifically defined by our reproductive organs.

Paul, on the other hand, feels that I (unconsciously) developed my ‘masculine’ interests so as I could fit in better with men, thus (apparently) affording myself more protection than a female who was clearly ‘different’ in some ways from them. Psychology is a powerful thing, it must be noted, and I can see the argument that he posits. Nonetheless, I don’t like it, because it assumes that I intrinsically should have been different to the way I am, and I don’t feel comfortable with that idea at all. But then, what is there to feel comfortable about in this whole thing? He may be right. I don’t know.

As a counterargument, I postulated the idea that perhaps it was not about me becoming like males, but becoming unlike females. It was a male (males) that abused me, of course, but it was primarily females that sat idly by and ‘let’ it all happen. In that way, perhaps the development of a certain amount of disdain towards them was natural? I don’t know, and he admitted that neither did he, but it doesn’t seem totally unfathomable.

I also remember my eternal disgust for the public displays of emotion of Mum, Maisie, Georgie and to a much lesser extent Maureen, even from when I was very young. It used to grossly offend me to see an adult woman (or even one of the other girls) in tears – and I can’t say that led to an increase in my opinion of them. I suppose that I learnt early to be ‘hard’ and self-sufficient. I don’t know. I do know that Child Me cried a sum total of once in company greater than that of my mother, and that was when I had very severely twisted my ankle. I went about apologising to Maisie, Paedo (I was at their house) and their descendants for this gruesome iniquity in its immediate aftermath.

And Finally, On Transference (and Countertransference)

Paul and I had a brief discussion regarding the dynamics ongoing between us in the room at the time. One thing I really like about Paul so far is that he says what he fucking means. So for example where C would have endlessly asked, “what’s going on between us right now?” (a perennial mantra which, through no fault really of his, made me want to batter his face in), Paul asks, “what kind of transference are you feeling towards me at the minute, if any?” What’s even better is that he will then say, “…my transference is along the lines of x…”

C almost never alluded to countertransference, other than to sometimes (to be fair to him) admit to defensiveness or to remind me that the relationship was a co-construction. It would have been obvious to a dead fly that C reacted, at times quite strongly, to me, as I did to him – that was particularly noteworthy because, despite everything that happened, we did ‘click’ at a personal level. As I said before, Westminster’s loss is the NHS’s apparent gain. C was/is terribly good at avoiding and dodging questions are not traditionally the permitted territory of the analysand.

I have no idea whether or not Paul has such an ability towards avoidance, because he doesn’t bother to insult my intelligence by trying to employ it. He just comes out and says shit like it is.

Having said all that, don’t ask me what the countertransference to which he alluded actually was! I faintly recall an expression of sadness, but then that’s hardly surprising. It isn’t necessarily that I elicit that in him, I shouldn’t think – the material under the spotlight (no matter how hardened he is to same) can do that quite ably without any overt currents of psychological projection from me.

So, I don’t recall the nature of the transference/countertransference conversation, but – 3,800 words notwithstanding – my memory of this entire session is lacking. I knew as I sat there that I would be unable to detail it as accurately as I would have liked, and this instance is probably the best example of that. However, the very fact that he referenced the concepts with such openness was enough to continue to impress me.

So now it is Monday again, and I shall be seeing Paul in about 10 hours. I was going to write that I expected not to know where to begin – but that’s not entirely true, is it? I think he’ll have to be the first person other than A to have verbally been made aware of the unpleasantness of this – and, of course, my apparent return to being completely mental.

The latter I expected, even if I wasn’t fully prepared for it when it came. A gang rape? Well…not so much. Even though I sort of knew of it for a long time. Bloody brain and its nefarious dissociation.

Goodnight, lovely people. xxx