Life in a Bind – BPD and me

My therapy journey, recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I write for welldoing.org , for Planet Mindful magazine, and for Muse Magazine Australia, under the name Clara Bridges. Listed in Top Ten Resources for BPD in 2016 by goodtherapy.org.

Tag Archives: obsessing over therapist


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Have you googled your therapist?

My husband was away today and I spent a lovely sunny day out with the kids, exploring fields and paths, playgrounds and pubs we weren’t familiar with; taking in the scenery and people watching. I drove nine miles from our house so that we could spend five hours doing all of this within a mile (or less) of my therapist’s house. On the way there I tried to navigate a slightly circuitous route, map on lap, that took me past Jane’s (my ex-therapist’s) house – both on the way there and on the way back.

I’m not proud of either action, though to be fair (and partly by way of an excuse), I love the part of the city near my therapist’s house – it’s one of the ‘gut-instinct’ reasons it ‘felt right’ when I had to choose a therapist when my sessions with Jane were ending. It’s the sort of area I would love to live in and so spending time there, with the added bonus of activities for the kids, would be a pleasure whether or not my therapist lived nearby. But I would be lying if I said that feeling physically closer to her wasn’t a factor.

As for driving past Jane’s house – it’s been a very long time since I last did that, and I’m somewhat surprised that I did it today. Particularly given the fact that as described in ‘Progress can be painful’, I have finally accepted that, important though she is to me, she is a part of my past, and though I certainly miss her, I don’t think I’m grieving her in the same way. But as I drove past her house and saw the same car in the driveway, I felt some reassurance and relief, and I realised that I am still worried about her health (which was one reason she decided to retire and could not take me on as a private patient). Although logically the presence of her car means absolutely nothing at all, it felt as though it was some sort of indication that she was still okay.

A few months ago, ‘Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers‘ wrote a wonderful post about searching for her therapist on Facebook. I was struck not just by how much I related to how she felt and acted, but also by her honesty and courage in writing about it so openly. It challenged me to write about my own experiences in this area, and to be honest about events I had not yet dared write about.

Judging by what I have read on other blogs, trying to find out about one’s therapist (most often online), is not unusual. Technology, search engines and social media make this so much easier than it has ever been before, and it must be an extremely rare therapist these days who has virtually no online presence at all. I suspect too, that it is extremely rare for a therapist not to realise or perhaps even to expect, that many of their clients will behave in this way. I think it’s important to remember that the online searching is not just about information: it’s about trying to become closer and feeling connected; and keeping the therapist ‘real’ in between sessions. That’s why the ‘searching’ does not just happen online – behaviour can extend to walking or driving past the therapist’s house, or waiting around places where he or she is expected to be, for example. The client may even dread what they could see or find out, or they may dread being seen; but the feeling of greater physical proximity may over-ride that dread.

Leaving my children out of the equation (because to try and put them on one side or the other would make me feel like an even worse parent than I already do) –  my therapist is the most interesting person in the world to me, and I have a very strong desire to know more about her. ‘Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers‘ called this a ‘craving’ and sometimes, that is exactly how it feels. Most of the time I can control the craving – if I want to know something and if I decide I dare to ask, I do so in session, fully expecting (though at the same time dreading) not receiving an answer. But occasionally that craving takes hold and I feel I’m in the grip of an urge too powerful to withstand. That has happened a couple of times in my current therapy, and both times I ‘confessed’ and we had a very helpful discussion about my ‘googling’ activities. My therapist took it remarkably well – if she was perturbed, she didn’t show it. If anything, she seemed completely un-phased by it – for which I am extremely grateful, as my behaviour carries with it both feelings of great shame, and great fear that she will want to leave, or at least withdraw and close herself off from me. Today was the second time I found myself on a walk near her house – when I told her about the first time, she commented not on how close I’d come, but on how I’d stayed away. I was within sight of her house – but turned and went back. In her words, I didn’t ‘close the gap’ – and perhaps tolerating that distance was more significant than trying to narrow it a little in the first place.

I am grateful for my therapist’s approach to this issue – and for the fact that I can bring these occurrences to session, and deal both with the feelings that lead to them, and the feelings of fear and shame that result. But there are some situations that can’t be resolved in that way. I wish I could say that the story of my therapy relationship with Jane ended with the ‘love letter’ I wrote to her in June last year, and with that recent realisation of the gradual passing of my grief. But it didn’t – in between those two events is a story about which I still feel great regret, and which I fervently wish I could change. That story took place on the first anniversary of our last session together, a day I knew I would find immensely difficult, but wanted to use to ‘honour’ her and the work we’d done together.

However, far from honouring either her or our work, I found myself caught inside an intense desire to find out more about her (triggered by accidentally finding out more than I had before, when I googled her to simply get that sense of her existence and reality that seeing her name ‘in print’ had so often brought me, when I was grieving her). I succeeded in finding a few additional details, but it didn’t stop there – I actually paid money to a well-known and widely-used directory enquiries website to receive a brief report compiled from ‘public information’ (e.g. company director listings and census data) which listed individuals of the same name, and current and previous addresses. To cut a long and rather distressing story short, I thought I’d discovered a couple of things which didn’t fit with the picture of Jane I had created in my mind, one of which I soon realised was an error, the other of which I still find hard to believe. I remember rocking backwards and forwards, repeating the phrase ‘I don’t understand’ to myself – it was a fairly minor fact about her professional life, but it felt as though my world had been turned upside down.

But even worse than the ripples in the picture I had formed of Jane, were the feelings of guilt and betrayal that I felt. I hated myself for letting her down; for acting in a way that I was sure she would not approve of, and that I was sure would have disappointed her; for invading her privacy in way that I found abhorrent, despite the fact that the information was essentially publicly available. I was deeply ashamed for what I saw as my betrayal, and deeply upset about the way in which I saw this as ‘sullying’ what I had previously seen as a very honest and trusting (and yes, perhaps a little perfect) relationship.  Looking back, I find it hard to ‘let myself off the hook’ and to have sympathy for how I felt. My situation was entirely of my own making – if I didn’t like what I had found, I had only myself to blame. And yet, I have a sincere sympathy for others who are going through the same thing. I know how hard it is to have that intense desire to know more, and to feel so very bad for having it and for acting upon it.

It occurs to me that this post is a logical follow-up to my recent post on how it feels to be excluded from your therapist’s life. Although separate issues, I think that the sense of exclusion and the harsh reality of the boundaries of therapy, can certainly fuel the desire to know more and the need to draw closer. If there’s one thing I hope to achieve by writing these posts, it is to try and encourage others to talk to their therapists about these feelings – however painful they may be and however much shame and embarrassment may be involved. When it comes to those feelings, I think that our fear of retribution and rejection leads us to greatly underestimate out therapists’ capacity for understanding and acceptance; and our twisted desire for uniqueness (I am uniquely ‘bad’ in my feelings or behaviour) leads us to think that we are our therapist’s ‘worst’ client, and least deserving of his or her love.

Whereas in fact what I’m coming to realise through exploring these issues in therapy, is that my therapist’s caring is neither conditional on me being able to please her by knowing more about her and what she likes; nor limited by her need to maintain boundaries and the restricted nature of our contact. This is progress painfully won, but I humbly submit that it is worth it. And I would suggest that the true value in trying to find out more about our therapists’ lives lies not so much in what we discover about them, but in what we discover about ourselves, and about our relationship with them, and theirs with us.


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Memory Monday – “Waiting to fall – BPD and obsessive attachments”

With the exception of my ‘Home page’ and my post on BPD and invalidation, this week’s Memory Monday post has had more than three times the number of views of any of my other posts. It is by far the most consistently viewed post; and the most frequent search engine terms that lead people to my blog, are centred on obsession and attachment.

These are powerful feelings that evoke powerful responses, which can include shame and guilt. Obsessional emotions can ‘feel wrong’; they can make us wonder what it is about ourselves that means that we get taken over so completely by a force we feel unable to control – a force entirely centred on another human being. The obsessional feelings may be temporarily intoxicating, but something inside may nag at us, wondering if this is all a sign of deep trouble. What does it mean? Why me? Do other people feel this way?

If you feel the way described in this post, you are certainly not alone:

https://lifeinabind.com/2014/06/21/waiting-to-fall-bpd-and-obsessive-attachments/

I searched for information on obsessions, when I was in the middle of a particularly difficult obsession with a friend. I may have written this post many months ago, and I may have had particular individuals in mind when I wrote it, but it is as present and as difficult an issue for me now, as it was then. Whether the feelings relate to a friend, a partner or a therapist, the intensity of an obsessive attachment has brought me, repeatedly, both the most intense highs and the most painful lows. It seems to me that therapy, in particular, is a cruel form of unrequited love in which attachment can be necessary for healing, but the boundaries of the relationship may serve to make the obsessional nature of the attachment even more painful. 

I have tried, in this post, to give a very personal take on what an obsessive attachment feels like, how it comes about, and why it happens. We will all have our own particular versions of ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, but I hope there is enough commonality here that my main purpose will have been achieved – that you will feel less alone with these feelings. Less shame, less judgement; more understanding and more acceptance. I think our obsessive attachments are trying to tell us something – and if we’re in therapy (or even if we’re not), it may be a major part of ‘moving forward’ to try and work out what that is……

 


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Let it grow

flower in iceI am going to start by owning up to the fact that this post has nothing to do either with the film ‘Frozen’ or with gardening. So for those hoping for some insight on either topic – I am sorry to disappoint. Having said that, if you have any interest in the subject of therapy, or if you are in therapy yourself, I do hope that you read on.

A couple of months ago I had one of those ‘revelatory’ moments through therapy, that it is easy to live for, but hard to come by. It was a significant realisation for me, as it challenged my assumptions about the nature of therapy itself. Those assumptions had affected both my engagement with the process, and also my relationship with my therapist. The ‘revelation’ had an enormous impact on the way in which I approach therapy, on how I relate to my therapist, and on the expectations I have of what ‘should’ happen in session. (“There is no ‘should’, there are no rules”, I can hear my therapist saying….).

In ‘A matter of choice – BPD and self-worth’, I started by saying that therapy has twin tasks – to reveal the ways in which we really think about ourselves; and to ‘make up for’ what has been missing, and that those tasks can be more broadly described as dealing with content (or process) and with relationship. In that post, I said that both of those tasks were important – but that wasn’t the position I started with, several months ago.

So much of what BPD is about is concerned with relationships, and my absolute desire for connection had led me to place the therapeutic relationship at the centre of my therapy. It was my primary interest, and I thought it should be my therapist’s primary interest too. All the reading I had done had pointed to the fact (or so I thought) that the key vehicle for change, particularly with a ‘condition’ such as BPD, was the transformative power of the therapeutic relationship. I thought about it, and I talked about it, endlessly –it was my key preoccupation. Those with BPD are often said to have an ‘all or nothing’ approach to life – and this was certainly the case with how I thought about therapy. The therapeutic relationship mattered – and in the context of sessions, it mattered to the exclusion of all else.

Whenever my therapist suggested that content  and process were important too – or that her task was also to uncover my unconscious thoughts about myself – I argued that that was not possible until the ‘re-provision’ of what had been missing in my life, was well under-way. If the ‘patient’ has not already forged a rock-solid relationship of trust with the therapist, and has not yet been ‘re-parented’, how will they be in a position to cope with the potentially devastating realisations surrounding how they think about themselves? Nothing could have shifted me from that position (or so I thought) – and any attempts by my therapist to try and ‘re-focus’ me, I simply construed as rejection.

My husband often grumbles that I listen to my friends but not to him. He can make a point over and over again, but it’s not until I hear it from an ‘independent source’ (whatever that may mean!) that I actually take it on board, and trust it. In this case, it was only when I read the point my therapist was trying to make, in two separate books by Irvin Yalom (a well-known American psychotherapist and author), that it truly hit home. It grabbed me, in only the way that something can when it truly makes its home in the innermost parts of your being. It made both intellectual and emotional sense and I felt it as a conviction at the deepest level.

In his book ‘Love’s Executioner and other tales of psychotherapy’, Yalom describes his work with a client who, amongst other traumas, had suffered sexual abuse by her father. In that context of that tale, Yalom writes the following (the highlighting for emphasis, is my own):

“When I first began to work as a therapist, I naively believed that the past was fixed and knowable; that if I were perspicacious enough, I could discover that first false turn, that fateful train that has led to a life gone wrong; and that I could act on this discovery to set things right again…..But over the years I’ve learned that the therapist’s venture is not to engage the patient in a joint archaeological dig. If any patients have ever been helped in that fashion, it wasn’t because of the search and the finding of that false trail (a life never goes wrong because of a false trail; it goes wrong because the main trail is false). No, a therapist helps a patient not by sifting through the past but by being lovingly present with that person; by being trustworthy, interested; and by believing that their joint activity will ultimately be redemptive and healing. The drama of age regression and incest recapitulation (or, for that matter, any therapeutic cathartic or intellectual project) is healing only because it provides therapist and patient with some interesting shared activity while the real therapeutic force – the relationship – is ripening on the tree.”

In his book ‘The Gift of Therapy’, Yalom puts the same point in this way:

“But it is not the content of the intellectual treasure trove that matters but the hunt, which is the perfect therapy mating task, offering something to each participant: Patients bask in the attention paid to the most minute details of their life, and the therapist is entranced by the process of solving the riddle of a life. The beauty of it is that it keeps patient and therapist tightly connected while the real agent of change – the therapeutic relationship – is germinating.”

As Yalom also states, “In practice, there is a great complexity in the link between the intellectual project and the therapist-patient relationship”. And he does not deny that the key therapeutic force is the relationship itself. So my focus on this aspect was not misplaced – but my focus was certainly too narrow and too exclusive. The therapeutic force  – the relationship – needs feeding in order to maintain its momentum, and its food is both process and content. Its food is ‘the hunt’, ‘the intellectual project’.

I have a tendency to want to ‘do everything right’ – and therapy is no exception. It would be easy for me, therefore, to substitute an exclusive focus on ‘getting the therapeutic relationship right’, with an exclusive focus on ‘getting the content and process right’ – or to try and do both. But I think that would be to both misunderstand the nature of therapy, and also to misunderstand what Yalom is trying to say. In the same chapter in ‘The Gift of Therapy’, Yalom writes that he discovered that what he and what his clients remembered and valued about sessions, were very different. He tended to value intellectual interpretations, whereas they tended to value small personal acts that were relevant to the therapeutic relationship. The precise intellectual interpretation was not what made the crucial difference. He writes that, instead, “…the search for explanation kept us engaged and our engagement ultimately made the difference”.

I take that to mean that it is not necessarily the precise content of sessions that is most important, but the process of talking about the content, and indeed that it what Yalom said when he talked about the ‘treasure hunt’ being more important than the contents of the ‘treasure trove’. And I have seen this borne out in my own therapy. Recently we discussed a difficulty in a friendship, for which I felt a failure and was blaming myself entirely. My therapist kept offering up suggestions for what might have been going on with my friend at the time, and when I thanked my therapist in my next session for the fact that I had since felt much better, she said she had been trying to give me a different perspective. However, what I took away from that session was a sense that she was on my side. Without that sense, I would have been unable to get through my distress and take on that different perspective. The intellectual interpretation and the personal act: two different views on one session, in which our relationship was made stronger through our shared endeavour and exploration.

What I learned from my reading, and from experience itself once I applied that reading to my sessions and ‘widened my focus’, is this: therapeutic alliance is central to change, but it doesn’t have to be central to the conversation.

I was ‘majoring’ on our therapeutic relationship, but in doing so, I wasn’t giving it room to breath or grow. By constantly putting the spotlight on it, I was freezing it in time. By neglecting the importance of content and process, I was completely missing the fact that the relationship grows, in the background, using the process and the content as its sustenance. I was not feeding our relationship – I was stifling it, and starving it of oxygen. I was expecting a flower to grow, in an expanse of ice. I wanted, desperately, for my therapist to care about me. But what was I giving her to care about? What was I telling her about myself, or my life? We all know that our best and deepest friendships are based on shared experiences, and a shared journey (emotionally, even if those friends are not physically present). My therapist and I need to go on a journey together, and to get to know each other through the things we encounter. If we only encounter each other, in isolation from the world around us, there is not enough ‘grist for the mill’, and there is no way to deepen the relationship.

I still have the urge to spend most sessions talking about ‘the relationship’, just as I spend so much time thinking about it. But when I do leave room to talk about other things, it’s amazing how often and how naturally ‘the relationship’ comes into it, whether that’s through the interpretation of  a dream, or the way I reacted following a session, or some other situation. But it comes up in a way that is not forced, and which provides continuity and a deeper understanding between us.

So for those who are also struggling with what to expect of the therapeutic relationship and who find themselves constantly engaged in thought or in talk about it, my suggestion would be – take your eyes off it for a little while. It will grow – if you let it. But it will do so in the background. It will germinate, it will ripen on the tree, while you are engaged in turning over and ploughing other fields. And when you turn your attention back to it again, you will have a rich harvest of shared experience, understanding and mutual caring. You relationship will have matured, and it will be beautiful to behold.


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Good therapy

For Jane

A fellow blogger said that I should write more about Jane, my ex-therapist, because she sounded like a good therapist. I said that I wanted to – that I wanted to write about all the things she did that made her such a good therapist, and more importantly, such a good therapist for me, as ultimately, I think that it’s the therapeutic relationship that is the key to how well a therapy works. But I also said that part of me was afraid. Afraid that if I wrote about it, there would be nothing else left to say. That all we went through and the work we did together, will make up just a few words on a page. That that will be the end of that.

But the reality is, that is the end of that, and in a way, that’s another reason for writing. Not just to show why she was indeed such a good therapist, but as a way of saying goodbye. And that is something I find it so hard to do. So hard, that my reply to Jane’s last email was a ‘holding reply’, while I tried to gather my thoughts and feelings enough to figure out what it was I truly wanted to say. That was two weeks ago, and the longer I wait, the more apparent it becomes that I’m simply postponing two things that feel impossible – finding the perfect words, and bringing our relationship to a conclusion. I can’t promise that this will be my final word on the subject of Jane, but it will be my final word to her.

And if this ‘final word’ sounds a bit like a love letter, I guess that’s what it is.  But if there’s one thing that therapy has helped me to realise about love over the last few months, is that it is complicated, and so are its origins. That although the Ancient Greeks may have tried to carve it up and separate it out  into four different types of feelings, it defies simple definition, compartmentalisation or categorisation. I don’t try to analyse my feelings about Jane. Not just because they scare me (though that is true), but because I don’t need to. My feelings just are – and they don’t have to be of one type, or another.

So how do I answer my fellow blogger? What did Jane do, that was such ‘good therapy’?

She held me. Figuratively. By which I mean, that she held and contained everything I was and felt, without judgment and without becoming overwhelmed by it. She was a vessel into which I could pour out everything that was hurting me, but without diminishing either her, or me, in the process. Her capacity to contain me was intimately linked to her capacity to stay bounded. I was acutely aware (in a way that was both painful and reassuring) of a gentle but unyielding boundary – of the fact that I was ‘fully known’ but that she was ‘hidden’ from me. She reassured me that what I did see of her, was real, and not a mask. That ‘Jane the therapist’ was part of who Jane was, and not a pretense, or a role. And I was grateful for that reassurance. But I was even more grateful for both the infinite containment and acceptance, and the immoveable boundaries that made it possible. Because of those things, she was the ultimate safe place.

She gave me permission. She gave me permission to feel the things I felt, and to talk about them. And she gave it explicitly – she said, “I give you permission”. At first this sounded strange, but now I know she did it because she knew what I needed to hear, even when I didn’t know. She knew I didn’t, in reality, need her permission (or anyone else’s) – but she also knew that I couldn’t give it to myself, because there were certain things I had never been ‘allowed’ to feel or be. And hearing her say it, made it feel okay. It made the feelings themselves, okay to be felt.

She finished my sentences. She really saw me, into the depths of me, and the words that she used, demonstrated that. My hunger for intensity; my need to ‘merge’ with her – she saw, and spoke, about them both, without me needing to say very much by way of explanation. For that hour every week, we shared the same mental space, as well as the same physical space. If ever there was someone who I felt was ‘on my wavelength’, it was her.

She walked alongside me. She knew that it was my journey, to be taken at my pace. She told me that it was okay that I couldn’t yet commit to wanting to get better, because it felt as though for that to happen, part of me would have to die. She took subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) cues from me about what I was prepared or ready to talk about, and she opened up painful areas slowly, carefully, and so very gently. She was happy for me just to ‘be there’, wherever ‘there’ was – I didn’t have to do, or say, or feel, anything that I wasn’t ready for.

She related to the different parts of me. I often felt I had two ‘modes’ in therapy: the adult who relished what felt like a truly ‘equal’ relationship for the first time in her life; and the twelve year old who felt completely vulnerable and just wanted to be guided, protected and sheltered. She made them both feel valued, and gave them what they needed. She praised and encouraged the child, for example, by letting her know that she ‘led’ the conversation, far more frequently than she thought she did. And she reminded the adult that therapy was a partnership, that they worked well together, and that she was making progress. At the same time, when the adult (or was it the child?) was desperate to lay certain ‘victories’ at her door, she saw that need and desperation, and graciously accepted those victories.

She wasn’t afraid of how I felt about her. Even though I was terrified that my attachment and my intense feelings for her would repel her, and would drive her away, she repeatedly reassured me that nothing I said or felt, changed her view of me. And she understood that even though I truly believed her when she gave me those assurances, I still doubted and panicked that I would lose her and that she would end therapy with me, when I was out of her presence.

She reached out to me. In the silences, when I could not talk because I was so ashamed or afraid of how she would react to what I was thinking and feeling, she let me know that I could do it. That I could talk to her. She always gave me time, but she didn’t just leave me drowning in wordless space – was it because she knew that the space would have felt horrifically empty, and full of abandonment?

She cared about me. Professionally, of course. But she cared about me. The same blogger who said that I should write about Jane, also said that you can train yourself to look for cues or signs that your therapist cares about you. I don’t think I trained myself to look for them – although I think it’s fair to say that my idealisation of her probably led me to look for those signs, wherever I could find them. I cannot list all of the ways in which she made me feel cared for – there are too many. Even the fact that she was always up-front and direct with me, which I had originally seen ‘just’ as evidence of the fact that she realised how important these qualities were for me in order to establish trust – I now look at as another form and demonstration of caring.

But there are two instances that I cling onto, dearly, when it comes to reminding myself of that care. Two phrases that I will never forget, that she didn’t need to say, but that meant, and mean, the world. Our penultimate session was charged with emotion, and somewhere along the way, wires got crossed – I thought she’d misunderstood something I’d said, and she thought I’d misunderstood something she’d said. When that became clear, she replied: “we were afraid that we had hurt each other”. “We were afraid that we had hurt each other”. She was worried about hurting me. It took my breath away.

But perhaps not as much as when I said that I wanted a hug but knew I couldn’t have one, and she said that I could have a “metaphorical hug”. A metaphorical hug, a ‘safe embrace’ – the most that she could legitimately give me. But in giving me that, she gave me so much more – she gave me the sense that when it came to holding me, she would have, if she could have. I hope she will forgive me if I’m misinterpreting her words. I hope she can allow herself to be misinterpreted if she knows what it means to me  – if she knows that it will allow me to hold myself in her caring and in her regard, indefinitely.

To me, this was all ‘good therapy’. It was all good therapy for me. And all of it, ultimately, amounts to this. She validated me.

Validating: ‘causing a person to feel valued or worthwhile’.

She ‘held me’. She gave me permission. She finished my sentences. She walked alongside me. She related to the different parts of me. She wasn’t afraid of how I felt about her. She reached out to me. She cared about me. She validated me. Validation – so much more than the sum of its parts. So intrinsic to the source of borderline pain; so intrinsic to its solution.

All we went through and the work we did together is so much more than the words on this page.

This is my final follow-up to the ‘holding reply’ I sent to Jane’s last email.

“I want to say ‘thank you’ for being held. So gently, so honestly, so safely. So acceptingly, so caringly, so validatingly. You will always mean so very much, and I am so very grateful for you.

Just this last time, I won’t end by saying ‘with love’. Just this last time, I’ll say what I never had the courage to say to you before.

I love you.”

 

 

 


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All about Jane – Postscript

All about Jane. That was what I had originally wanted to call my blog, as it seemed to sum up my life for the past year or so. Jane, my ex-therapist – despite an absence of many months, she still feels like the mainstay of my life. How can that be possible when all the time we had together was fifteen one-hour therapy sessions, spread over a few months? Yet I started to grieve her from the very first day, when she completed a sentence I was struggling with, with a word that perfectly captured what I was reaching for. I knew our therapy was time-limited, and I still remember the contradictory aftermath of that first session vividly. Self-harming to distract from and give expression to the pain I was feeling at the thought of losing her, eventually. And an intense, burning desire to fill up my whole body, every inch of it, with pain, at the frustration of not being able to feel enough.

I wanted my post on losing Jane to stand alone. I wanted the grief to stand alone. But I also had a nagging need to write a postscript. Because I feel such guilt and shame at writing and sharing how I feel about that loss. I feel guilty for my grief. I feel condemned.

Jane is still alive, and I barely knew her (though I felt she knew me intimately). I don’t feel entitled to my grief. I feel I have no right to that emotion. I feel that it must be a slight on the grief of those who have lost enduring and long-standing loves to death.

I have lost in that way, as well, but Jane’s is the only loss that I have allowed myself to feel since my aunt died when I was ten. In two years of therapy, I haven’t dared to broach the subject of death. It’s entirely possible that unfelt grief of losses since, have become transferred onto and wrapped up into, how I feel about Jane. It’s just a theory, because I haven’t dared to explore it. Or maybe it’s just an excuse, to alleviate the guilt, and to justify the pain. I do  wonder why I was so adamant that I would allow myself to feel Jane’s loss, and not close myself off from it. Perhaps there is a degree of emotional safety in grieving when you know that you do not necessarily have to accept finality as part of the loss.

Some time on, and the possibility of resuming therapy with Jane, privately rather than through a free service, is now available. The possibility, but not yet the reality, as there is no space for me, yet. My life has become a series of markers in the sand  – a list of ‘not yets’ and ‘contact me again’, in two months or three, or after Easter. Now it’s after Easter. Now I’m waiting for another reply. I’m waiting to lay down another marker, preparing to live a little longer without the air I feel I need to breathe. I’m waiting to put down anchor. I’m waiting to come home.

In the meantime, my grief feels stolen – stolen from those who have more right to feel this way. And so I had to write a postscript, to say sorry, in case I stole from you.

 


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All about Jane – attachment and loss

I have a spent a great deal of time trying to write this post, but like grief itself, it just feels wrong. Like grief itself, it feels senseless, jumbled, confused, meandering. I go over it and over it, and just can’t make it right. So I have to let it be. I have to let the words, such as they are, communicate as best they can.

I wear a silver ring to remember her by. She liked silver jewellery, as I used to when I was growing up. Silver rings on every finger and silver bracelets on her wrists. I need a constant reminder of her, something to keep the memory of her alive, something to keep her real. But the ring wasn’t enough. I also wear a silver bracelet – maybe the more items that remind me of her, the more real she will feel, and more I can try and keep her with me.

The day I lost her was the first and only time in my marriage that my husband and I slept in separate rooms. I couldn’t describe what I was going through – I just needed space and time to grieve. I didn’t want to be touched, to be spoken to, to be with anyone else. I needed to be alone and to try and give it all expression, to pour it all out in tears, if I could. It was only a few hours later, but I felt as if my memory of her was already fragmenting, and as if I was already losing the reality of her. I felt as if I would shatter violently, as if I wanted to break out of my body, because there was just too much hurt to hold inside. The one week anniversary of the last time I saw her was a powerful re-experience of the devastation.

Over the next few weeks and months I put her name into Google repeatedly, even though I knew the result would always be the same, and that I would find nothing. I looked at the one document I had that had her name in it – somehow seeing it written down made her feel more substantial, confirmed the fact that she had actually existed, brought her closer in some very small way. Seeing her name, repeating her name in my mind was a strange kind of attempt to self-soothe, to fill the void left by her absence.

When I was out in town, I looked for her in crowds, searching for her face amongst those of strangers. Every day, driving past the windows of the building that we met in, I felt physical pain at the reminder and memories of her, as I looked up at the windows and imagined her inside. I felt a little angry at her for abandoning me – ‘a little’ was all I could let myself feel. I was still determined to keep her on her pedestal, still determined to halt the idealisation/devaluation cycle indefinitely, and keep her in an idealised state forever.

Any attempts by another, to provide the support that she used to provide, served only as a reminder of what I was now without, and brought fresh despair and anguish. I no longer had a ‘safe place’, an ‘anchor’. The sense of self-acceptance that had started to grow within me, entirely due to her acceptance of me, was fast fading away, and any little self-esteem I had left, could be pummelled into the ground by the weight of a feather.

As the months wore on the pain turned from a raging fire to constant burn  – a permanent ache but also a strange emptiness. Often, unless I’m feeling intensely, it doesn’t feel like I am feeling at all. But every so often, for no clear reason, an intense sadness and a missing of her, comes upon me and makes me utterly desperate for her again. In those times, the need for her is overwhelming. In those times, I cling pathetically (and thankfully, at a distance), to my two closest friends, transferring the unbearable need for her, into a desperate neediness towards them. And even outside those times, when I mention her name, the tears are never far behind. It takes just four little letters, spoken out loud, to reconnect me to the hurt.

In her absence, there is no longer anything to tie down the reality of her, or to keep me grounded. When she was in my life, she occupied her own space within it. That space was so large, that sometimes it left room for little else. And within that space she was adored, obsessed over, but still an idealised person of human proportions. But now that she’s gone, she has started to become less self-contained and the image of her is losing its integrity and coherence. It is as if the black hole of her absence has sucked in all meaning from elsewhere and attached it solely to her. The ways in which I have begun to think of her are quasi-religious. She is my Alpha and my Omega – my only hope, the only one who can ‘save me’. She stands for all that is good, noble, compassionate, caring, and for a million other things besides. Forgive me, for I have fucked up my life. Absolve me of my iniquities.

In her ‘elevated’ state in my mind, she has become less a person of flesh and blood, and more a philosophical construct, a concept of ‘the ideal’.

I want her to be human. I want her to be here. I want to feel again – intensity and love. I want her physical, perfectly imperfect presence. And it kills me that I’m grieving for someone who is still alive. That we could continue to share the same city air, until one of us dies, without me ever seeing her again. Trying to grieve, while living with the possibility of reconnection – is this what purgatory feels like?

Just as it was the last time I saw her, I don’t know how to end. I think a close friend of mine summed it up as well as anyone could ever do, in four short words.

Darling, grief does you.