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: therapeutic relationship


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Starting Therapy – the Twitter chat

Earlier this evening, psychotherapist Alison Crosthwait (from The Good Therapists) and I, had an interesting Twitter chat on the subject of ‘Starting Therapy’, and the story of that chat can be found here:

https://storify.com/lifeinabind/starting-therapy

Inspiration for our chat came from Alison’s new book, of the same name, which can be found here:

I can thoroughly recommend it, and not just for those starting therapy, though it’s an ideal introduction in those circumstances. It is also thought-provoking and a valuable reminder of some key concepts, for any client at any stage of therapy. I had to chuckle when I read the section where Alison describes how significant statements or connections by the client can often be accompanied by words along the lines of ‘I’m rambling…..’. That same morning, towards the end of a very productive week’s work in therapy, I found myself repeatedly saying that I didn’t think I was making much sense….!

One of the most important things about the book, in my view, is its emphasis on the uniqueness of every therapeutic journey, and the fact that it is a journey created and experienced by two people in relationship. As such, the book very explicitly is not a guide on ‘how to do therapy’, but a dip into a number of concepts and ideas that it is helpful to be equipped with, in that individual journey. I have read fewer and fewer therapy books the longer I have been in therapy, precisely because I was finding it too easy to be diverted by others’ stories, and to make comparisons with my own therapy, rather than focusing in on my own story. However, there is no such risk with Alison’s book – she encourages you to put your focus firmly and squarely on your own life and your own therapeutic experience, and the subjects she writes about are eloquent and insightful prompts to do just that!


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Twitter chat 6 November – Starting Therapy

Join us tonight at 9pm GST / 4pm EST !

Life in a Bind - BPD and me

I’m really excited to let you know that psychotherapist Alison Crosthwait and I will be holding our third twitter chat on Monday 6 November at 9pm GMT/4pm EST. The chat will be called ‘Starting Therapy’ and we will be using the hashtag #startingtherapy .

Even more excitingly, the topic of the chat is built around the title and theme of Alison’s new book, ‘Starting Therapy – a book for new therapy clients’, and I can’t wait to talk about it, and this whole topic, with her!

Whether you’re a therapist or a client, or both, or neither, it would be lovely if you could join us, either as an ‘observer’, or by taking part in the chat itself. Looking forward to seeing you there!

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The work of therapy

I wish I could email my therapist. Sometimes you just want to reach out to the person your heart feels safe with. Not even for a reply or an acknowledgment, but to be received and wrapped in thought.

You know that it will pass. That you will talk about it tomorrow. But right now she is the only person you feel intimately connected to. And you miss her, very much.

I wish that I could say: “I’m crying, and you make me feel safe ; I just wanted you to know”.

But what could she do? And would it disturb her peace of mind? And one day you won’t be able to email her just because ‘you wanted her to know’; and she wants to prepare you for that.

When I was at university I held on at night through absolute fear during panic attacks, constantly fending off the urge to go and wake up a friend. It felt like I was going to die, and I needed reassurance that everything would be okay.

I never woke anyone up. It always passed. I didn’t die. But it always felt like terror and it always felt like death. I got through it alone. I got through it.

She would tell you that you’re not alone; that you have her with you because you are slowly internalising her. That you have the resources within yourself to get through it. That tomorrow is not so far away.

I know. But is it so wrong to want to reach out through words and say: “I’m crying and I’m so tired of battles and feeling hopeless and you – you make it better and even though you’re not here I wanted to share some of myself tonight”?

It’s not wrong – but……what feels like the greatest imperative is not always the things that makes the most relational sense. There is a shifting to adjust to each other, even when apart.

I don’t know, I don’t know. I need her, I want her, I’m confused. I’m sad, I’m lonely, I’m unhappy, I’m wretched. I’m.

Waiting for tomorrow. I can honour the space and relational language we are creating – that lives in session and abides in silent connection between times.

She told you once that you were brave. This is something that she sees in you. This is something you are living out. And yes, it is heartbreakingly hard.

Therapy is a work of faith, and ‘steadfastedness’, and love. Tonight, I’m doing the work of therapy.


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How do you pay your therapist? The answer could be part of your therapeutic work.

In therapy, anything and everything is up for discussion – whatever happens in and outside the therapy room, provides ‘grist to the mill’. But the material of therapy is not just about the experiences we bring; it can include how we experience therapy itself. The context in which it occurs, the practicalities that govern it, and the boundaries that contain it, can provide fertile ground for exploration and self-discovery. In the interactions that take place between two people in one room, even the practical and the mundane can become a vehicle for expression and a means of unconscious illustration of what is going on for the client, and what is going on in the therapeutic relationship.

Unless the therapist is using an online payment system such as that provided by welldoing.org, for many clients one of the first practicalities they have to contend with, is payment. Even those who are comfortable with the ‘great British taboo’ of talking about money, may find it awkward or jarring discussing payment in the same session as covering very personal or emotional issues.

In addition, the fact that they are paying for a ‘service’ can make it difficult for some clients to accept the very genuine nature of their therapist’s attention, interest, and caring. It is also a reminder of what many clients would rather forget – that despite the real closeness and intimacy that can be involved, the interaction is not a friendship, and it must retain some of the distance and imbalance of a professional relationship. Raising these issues and talking about them can feel embarrassing or painful, but they can be ‘therapeutic gold’, resulting in a rich exploration of clients’ doubts and fears around relationships, intimacy, and boundaries. They are also important to tackle because overcoming them and achieving a positive and secure attachment to their therapist, is what enables many clients to heal from past and present relational trauma or other difficulties.

The practicalities of payment can also function as the non-verbal equivalent of a Freudian slip and can be revealing of a client’s feelings and attitude at particular points in time. A few examples come to mind from my own therapy. Early on, my therapist wrote a note on one of her monthly invoices, asking me to pay by cheque or bank transfer (rather than by cash). Her simple request – made in that way, I am sure, to save me the potential embarrassment of discussing it face to face – triggered intense feelings of shame, anger and distrust. We spent a number of sessions talking about the childhood origin of those feelings, and my fear of ‘doing the wrong thing’ and not being communicated with directly. The same issues have come up again and again in the last four years, in a number of other guises.

I now pay by cheque, and I do so within a couple of days of receiving an invoice; however, my therapist recently remarked on how my payment wasn’t always this prompt. It used to take me several weeks to pay, though she kindly never mentioned it at the time. I felt too unwell to be organised; I kept losing my cheque book; I didn’t have time to look for it, or I kept forgetting. My therapist’s comment was not a complaint, but an observation on how things had changed. She interpreted the change as evidence of my commitment to and investment in the process of therapy and the therapeutic relationship, and the priority I now give to it. Though I never delayed payment deliberately, I think she is right in seeing the difference in the way I now approach it as a reflection of more than just an improvement in mental wellbeing, or greater organisation. It is a matter of the regard in which I hold her and her role in my life, and the importance of the task we are engaged in together. This has impacted me in several ways – including making sure I never misplace my cheque book!

I’ve also had a very recent realisation about the significance of a past payment habit of mine. I now feel comfortable handing over cheques in person, but for a while I used to send them in brightly coloured envelopes, imagining them dropping through her letterbox and onto the doormat and being instantly recognisable as having come from me. I was aware at the time of a desire to be seen as creative, and perhaps a little quirky. I shared a feeling that many clients experience – a desire to be ‘special’, their therapist’s ‘favourite’, and to stand out from the ‘crowd’ of other clients. It’s interesting to me now that it didn’t even occur to me that my personal qualities, our interactions, and the time we spend together in sessions, could be sufficient and special in their own right.

What I recently realised is that my behaviour was also driven by a powerful desire to be present to my therapist, when we were not together. The envelopes were a way of making contact, and of trying to ensure I was remembered, and kept in mind. This hunger for remembrance has become more obvious as I have become more adept at ‘keeping my therapist alive’ between sessions and holding onto a feeling of connection. It is as if my previous preoccupation with needing to keep her in mind was masking an underlying preoccupation with needing to keep me in hers. It’s a realisation I’ve come to after the fact, but it’s also another potent example of the way in which deep fears and desires can be communicated through the vehicle of the most ordinary and seemingly mundane things. I continue to realise that how and when you pay your therapist, can be so much more than a purely financial transaction!


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This was my #therapybreak

Since the 2016 summer therapy break, I have been posting daily #therapybreak tweets during my therapy breaks, as a form of self-care, and also as a record of the breaks. It started simply as a way of trying to count down the days and to self-distract, but it ended up as somewhat of my own personal take on a ‘gratitude journal’. I found that as well as posting about difficult times, I also ended up capturing, and then actively seeking to capture, the small little positive steps or events that kept me going, and lifted me up.

That is, until this summer’s therapy break, the #therapybreak tweets of which, can be found here:

https://storify.com/lifeinabind/summer-therapy-break-2017

In my previous post I talked about some of the reasons why this was my worst therapy break in a while. On a very practical level, I realised how valuable it is for me to be at work for the first parts of a therapy break. I am a different person when at work, and the distraction and interaction with other people forces me into a place outside my head, where I can appear competent and content, and can leave my ‘other selves’ at the door. Work also means a familiar routine, and that, in combination with my ability to compartmentalize and put on ‘work me’, places me on a more familiar and even keel. That even keel helps me to deal with the start of a therapy break and for me, a break that starts well, has a better chance of continuing well.

This time, however, the start of my therapy break coincided with my summer holidays, and therefore time off work. It had never occurred to me that that might be a problem, but in hindsight I can see how the sudden loss of both my therapy routine and my work routine, led into a rapid decline in mood and an inability to lift myself out of that place. Everything described in my previous post – in terms of poor decision making, the setting in of fear and anxiety, and difficulty in feeling connected to my therapist – crept in so much more easily and quickly. Low mood meant I had fewer resources to fight those feelings off, and giving in to them affected my mood even more, so that it became a very difficult circle to try and break out of.

My #therapybreak tweets stop fairly abruptly on Day 30, two days earlier than I had meant to stop them. I have thought about going back and retrospectively adding those days in, but it would feel somehow dishonest, and I think leaving the story as is, is a more accurate portrayal of what happened. I will pick up on that in a future post, tying it in with resuming therapy after the break. In summary, on Day 31 I received a brief email reply from my therapist to a long update I had sent her a few days before; and on Day 32 I had my first session back. In that session we spent most of the time talking about my reaction to that brief email, and how it had felt as though it reinforced all my fears from the previous four weeks. But by the end of Day 32 I also knew that all my fears belonged to the past, and that my therapist was the same as she had always been. I’ve been back in therapy for a week – my deep depression has persisted, but at the same time I feel the safety, security, caring, and metaphorical warm embrace that I was so missing and unable to feel, during those four long weeks. I feel I’ve come back home.

 


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Approaching the end of the therapy break

When I returned to therapy last month after a short one week break, it was with a sense of excitement to be able to talk to my therapist about how things had been, and a sense of safety and relief at being ‘home’ again. I’m returning to therapy in a couple of days, after my therapist’s four week summer break, and it’s with the knowledge that this has been the worst break for a while. I’m nervous, afraid, in need of reassurance, low and sad – in that sense, we will be picking up from how things were for several weeks leading up to the break. It was a tough summer of sessions, with a horrendous ‘muddle’ (as my therapist called it – rupture, in other words) back in June. I muddled through after that, but I don’t think I fully recovered. And my big worry, of course, is that in some sense, perhaps neither did she, or our relationship.

In these last few days before I go back, I’ve been trying hard to ‘give myself a talking to’, to clear my head of all the scare-mongering, worrying, and self-critical thinking, and to remind myself of the good sessions that we had in the run up to the break, and the close moments; but much more than that, of the fact that this is a four year relationship with a history and a solid basis , with deep trust and genuine caring, that doesn’t just get wiped out or set back by a few difficult months, or the seemingly real fears in my head. It’s what I should have been doing for the last four weeks, not just the last four days. But I didn’t. And I was in a bad place. And I can put part of the blame on lots of things, some of them external, and others also external but more within my control. But I did not exercise control – over what I read, or allowed to influence my thoughts. I made poor choices, or no choices. I didn’t feel very much, because I was completely overwhelmed by feeling too much – too much filthy, contaminating, miring, all-consuming unhappiness and hopelessness; unhappiness that covered so much ground it ate up everything else. Unhappiness born of being unreconciled – to myself, and to my past, present, and future.

‘There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient’ – this was by far the most challenging thing I read during the break. There were many more that were far more depressing, but even this challenge, rather than becoming an inspiration, turned into a self-judgment – a pinnacle I couldn’t scale, a personal quality I was too flawed to possess. In a book full of challenging passages on humility, forgiveness, vulnerability – this was the one that hit me hardest at the time. There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life; yet during the last four weeks only one of them seemed sufficient – my children.

I think what I have learned during the last four weeks, from a range of different sources, is that it’s hard to be reconciled – to yourself, to others, and to your circumstances – when you are under judgment – your own, and the perceived judgment of others. If you pray – as autumn approaches, pray for me that like the trees, I will be able to let things go. I don’t want to be or to feel under judgment. I want to be reconciled – I want to feel at home.

 

[Quote is from ‘Gilead’, by Marilynne Robinson, the first book in a trilogy, with the other two being ‘Home’ and ‘Lila’.]


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Reducing email contact with my therapist – Part 3

A few weeks ago, I wrote the following section of a post, before I decided that it shouldn’t be a post at all, or at least, not until I’d spoken about its contents with my therapist. Within the part-post that wasn’t a post that now is part of a post (!) I mentioned the fact that I have never wanted to use my blogging as a way of communicating with my therapist, but I was very conscious that that is what I was attempting to do, and ultimately that held me back from publishing it. I considered emailing her the part-post, but given that it was about the fact that we were trying to curtail out of session contact, I didn’t really feel I could do that either. I even considered putting a copy of the part-post in the post (this is getting ridiculous 😉 ) but I wasn’t convinced that my therapist would respond to that particularly well! And it still didn’t meet the aim of what the whole ‘email experiment’ was meant to do – create spontaneous and immediate and ‘lively’ (as my therapist calls it) discussion in session.

So I took the part-post, printed out, to session, and we talked about it, noting that it was a positive sign that I had been able to ‘hold on’ until session, and bring it with me. But the feelings described in my post lingered on, and became magnified. A couple of weeks later the same thoughts and feelings poured out again in session, in the form of a ‘lecture’ on the things my therapist wasn’t doing and the things I wasn’t receiving – namely, reassurance – that I felt were preventing me from being able to accept and openly engage with reducing contact, while still feeling connected. As an aside, to have reached a point of familiarity, closeness, and trust, and to have made sufficient progress, that my therapist feels comfortable telling me (good humouredly) that I was lecturing her (and for that to feel okay), feels like a special and comforting place to be……!

This is the part-post that wasn’t a post that now is part of a post…..

***

I woke up this morning with no recollection of my dreams, apart from the fact that they had involved the need to ‘follow rules’ (‘needing to be good’ and to ‘get it right’, having been part of the discussion during my session on Friday), and with a heavy sense of things not being right.

The feelings I described in my previous two posts (Part 1 and Part 2) regarding reducing (or, in fact, stopping) email contact with my therapist, have not changed. If anything, they are becoming more entrenched. As well as feeling distanced from her, outside of sessions, I am now feeling increasingly distanced from myself. I feel able to engage (as long as I feel secure) in session, but outside it I feel a little numb. Or, as Anna (from ‘When Marnie was there’) would put it, I feel ‘on the outside’, but not only as far as the world is concerned, but as far as I myself am concerned, as well.

This isn’t working for me. I can’t help thinking that it must be working for my therapist, which is an important consideration in itself – less time spent reading or replying to things I have sent her, means more time for herself and her family. But it doesn’t feel like it is working for me at the moment, and I think I need to talk to her about it at my next session. I was thinking of writing a more detailed post about this but would like to at least partly honour one of the reasons we did this in the first place – to try and keep more material within the session itself. I’m also conscious that I have always been careful and keen not to use my blog as a means of communication with her – and though that is clearly what I am doing now, I would like to minimize the extent to which I am doing it.

I could just email her about this – but the fact that I can’t, illustrates part of the problem. Reducing email contact was never meant to be another way in which I could enslave myself to the endless list of ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ in my life, but that’s what it has become. It was meant to be a way of deepening and freeing up the relationship and the discussion in session, but instead it inhibits it in the sense that I am worried about carrying material and feelings out of session, where it doesn’t feel safe to think about or experience them without her.

Reducing email contact was a good idea – but in hindsight, I think the timing was pretty terrible. Things have been very difficult over the last few weeks, and though I’ve come through them, with her, it still means that I started this ‘experiment’ off the back of painful and unsettling experiences (unsettling, in some ways, for both of us). In addition, though I have more of a sense of object constancy now, such that it’s not just our more recent interactions and conversations that define our relationship, but the entirety of our experience; nevertheless, at the moment, it is the difficult memories of recent words and interactions that are dominating and at least partly defining how I feel about myself, and how secure I feel in her regard of me. And that is not a good springboard from which to take a step that requires an almost unwavering sense of security and more than a little self-belief.

And there’s an important additional consideration – I am genuinely worried about the timing of this, in relation to the upcoming summer therapy break. Being able to sustain a positive experience during the break is both personally important to me, and very important to the therapy. I feel as though I simply cannot risk going into the break feeling as disconnected and numb as I am feeling now. During my last session my therapist said that it seemed as though I was ‘lost’, that I didn’t ‘know which way was up’. I need to be found again, and turned upright, on a secure footing, before going into a long break. I worry about me, but I worry about the therapy most of all. And given my anxiety over how much time there might be left in the therapy (before my therapist retires), that is an even more vital consideration.

I have written more than I intended, but I’m sure there is plenty still to talk about on Tuesday. I am worrying, of course, about whether I have done ‘the wrong thing’ here, by communicating in this way. I have also now set up a situation in which I will be anxious about how my therapist greets me on Tuesday. I feel as though I have been ‘failing’ a great deal recently, and that reducing email contact, and this post, are just two more examples. There is, of course, a never-ending loop here – I even feel I’m failing because I think in terms of right/wrong and failure, to start with!

***

I did get through the situation and the feelings I talked about in my part-post, as recently demonstrated in ‘My therapist was right – again!‘. But only after a great many weeks of ‘failing’, though not of the kind described above. My therapist and I had a fairly significant (and distressing) rupture a couple of months ago, which was, as my therapist described it, ‘a muddle on both sides’. And since then, I have been failing to see through my projections of my mother and to see my therapist as she really is, despite her repeated encouragement to rely on the four years of therapy with her, and on my knowledge of her as my ‘therapy-mother’ (who is very different to my biological mother).  I had also been failing to ignore the critical voice of those projections, and therefore spent a great deal of time drowning in self-hatred and feeling desperate for reassurance that I am worth something. And all of those things felt as though they were making it so much harder to be okay with reducing contact, because it felt like rejection, as did every unsuccessful attempt at obtaining reassurance.

If there’s anything I hope this part-post illustrates, it is that what feels indubitable and persuasive when seen through a particular lens (which may be heavily distorted), can seem very different when seen through a lens undistorted by self-hatred and projections from the past. It is possible to reconcile oneself to things that it might feel almost impossible to reconcile oneself to – and I hope that that is an encouragement to anyone going through a similar situation at the moment.

As I write those words I am recalling my own most recent post about my fear of the eventual end of therapy, and the kind comments of readers who indicated that impossible though it may feel now, the ending may be a little more bearable, when it comes to it, than I imagine. A point also made my therapist, of course. Perhaps if I am not able to take on board all of their words at this stage, I should at least try to listen to my own!

 

 


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Understanding fear of intimacy – A brief exploration

I am really pleased to share this important post by psychotherapist Joshua Miles, and I am glad that he is writing again! I have shared some of his posts before, and initially what resonated with me in his writing was his emphasis both on the therapeutic relationship, and on creativity in the therapeutic process.

This post is on intimacy, and I suspect that many of those with BPD will recognise in themselves most if not all of the symptoms of fear of intimacy described above. I would add only, to the section on how and why that fear develops, that it can arise as much out of too much attention in childhood, as well as out of too little. My mother was not able to meet my emotional needs, but she was also very intrusive and tried to force a level of emotional intimacy that I did not want and that violated my own space. It was not, of course, genuine intimacy in any sense, but it still left me with a fear of being intruded upon and swamped by another’s needs and wants.

Through the process of therapy, I have become much more conscious of my own fear of intimacy. I have always been used to throwing myself really quickly and seemingly ‘deeply’, into both romantic relationships and friendships. It was easy for this to masquerade as intimacy, but I tended to share facts rather than feelings; and as I tended to ‘chase’ rather than ‘be chased’, I didn’t have to deal with the fear of someone else wanting to draw closer than I was happy to allow.

My therapeutic relationship was the first time I was involved in something where I became known, and got to know, slowly. Where the process involved conflict, as well as closeness. Where it took wrong turns and misunderstandings but got stronger through them, rather than weaker. It helped me to realise that genuine intimacy can only take place in the two context of two people acting freely and openly, and it has little to do with the volume of information shared, and much more with the nature of what is shared, and the quality of the sharing.

I hope you enjoy this excellent post!

Joshua Miles BA, MSc

We as humans are relational beings, and inherent in all of our relationships is a need for physical and or emotional closeness and intimacy. We need to develop, build and experience relational bonds and experience closeness from another person. For some people however, intimacy is not so simple, and for some people it can be a source of fear, worry and difficulty. In this article, I aim to look at possible reasons for why people might develop a fear of intimacy, detail some of the symptoms people might exhibit and lastly, how psychotherapy can help those who may be struggling with a fear of intimacy.

What is a fear of intimacy?

At points, we all experience find ourselves contemplating the validity or meaning of our intimacy or closeness to another person. We may have concerns over the outcome of the relationship, whether we will be rejected, that the relationship will…

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Dreams and endings – always endings

I had three dreams on the two nights prior to my last therapy session before a four week break – all of them betraying my fears not just about this temporary ending, but about the more permanent ‘ending of therapy’ to come. It’s a familiar pattern for me – one type of ‘loss’ cascades into layers of loss stretching into the future.

***

I was standing on the balcony of a block of flats and my ‘therapy jacket’* fell from where it was hanging and onto the street below. I thought to call out for help, for someone to pick it up, and then I decided I should instead run down and get it. But as I was about to rush down, a man drove up on a motorbike, picked it up, and sped away. I screamed after him, hoping someone might pursue him, but he was gone. I was devastated at the loss of something deeply meaningful and irreplaceable; even awake, I remember the quality and intensity of the distress I felt in my dream, which was so great that it actually woke me up. This is my version of a nightmare, which haunts me and jolts me awake – not fear, but overwhelming sadness and loss.

***

I got off a bus and found myself near my halls of residence at university. Waves of nostalgia hit me – good feelings, a sort of happiness, but tinged with the sadness of times now distant and never to be re-lived. Good memories shot through with the faint unbelief that this could ever have been my life – that I was ever there, younger, less burdened with things not done, lives not lived, joys not felt. I walked up to the building and the front desk staff recognised me without me saying a word, and the familiarity felt comforting. But when I looked behind them, I saw that the place had been gutted by fire. Only blackened structures remained, and the beautiful buildings had disappeared. I was shocked, saddened, horrified – overwhelmed with tears, and grief. They told me what had happened, but I don’t remember what they said. Something to do with Fresher’s Week, I think – it seems that what was meant to be a new beginning, had in fact brought about an ending.

***

I was in my car, in the bottom right hand corner of an enormous open-air courtyard within a building that completely enclosed the space on all sides. All of a sudden, the ground started falling away, starting from the bottom left hand corner and moving towards the right. I began driving up the right hand side of the square, at first managing to escape the collapse by some distance, but then having a narrower and narrower strip of land to drive on, as the break-up of the earth caught up with me, and almost overtook me. Just as the strip of land was about to disappear to nothing, I drove between a pillar and the building but the space was slightly too narrow and I crashed and came to a halt, wedged in the gap. The ground disappeared all around me, but I was pinned in place, and didn’t fall. Being stuck felt like my salvation.  

***

My therapist suggested that perhaps my husband was stealing my therapy – a reference to the fact that I deeply resented the fact I had spent much of the last week of therapy before the break, focusing on the feelings that my couples therapy was triggering in me. It was not how I had planned ‘setting up’ for the break, and it felt like an intrusion. It felt as though I was losing valuable individual therapy time and wouldn’t be able to cover everything I wanted to before the break. My therapist was not wrong in her interpretation of my first dream, but as with any dream, a number of different interpretations are possible, all of which may lead to their own insights.

For me, it was the loss of a visual representation of therapy, and the absence of a tangible reminder, that struck me most. I was reminded of the conversations I’ve had recently with my therapist about how I’ve always hoped that at the end of therapy she would give me a photo to remember her by. I don’t think it had occurred to me it was a request she might refuse – so many therapists these days have a photo online, even if their web presence is limited to their contact details and a summary of their areas of expertise. Yet she indicated that I wouldn’t need a photo – that I would carry the memories I needed, within me. It was an implied, rather than a direct, refusal, and it was far from reassuring. Sometimes I find it very hard to recall faces – and I am terrified that one day, I may not be able to recall hers. I am scared that I will lose that vital reminder of her presence, one way or another, whether the reminder is stolen by age, or illness, or another cause.

***

Over the last few months, I have spent more and more time worrying not just about the end of therapy, but about the fact that I don’t know when it will end, or when my therapist will retire. She has said she will let me know at least a year before it happens – but now it feels as though I live in dread of walking into a session only to find out that it is the session at which she makes that announcement. I have been imagining what it will be like – even though I don’t want to imagine it. I imagine it in various different ways, because the possibility of it is so difficult to conceive, there is no telling how the reality will go.

I imagine the version where I am numb and in shock, and my defenses kick in to protect me from pain, so that I just carry on as rationally and as much in denial, as I can. I imagine the version where I simply can’t bear to be in such pain in the presence of the person who has hurt me, and I ask to leave – but I’ve never left a session, and I know I would regret it, so that scenario doesn’t seem very likely. And I imagine the version in which I show her that it hurts indescribably much – as it sometimes does when the premonition of the future hits me at home at night and I hold my stomach with wordless cries and open mouth and soak my pillow with streaming nose and eyes and it is unbearable but I bear it and yet I know that even when it passes, this time, it is coming, actually coming, this and more. And in the exhausted quiet after, part of me is grateful to be able to open myself up to the grief, which feels like an honouring of everything my therapist means to me; but part of me trembles in fear underneath, at the thought of the time when the grief will really, really take hold of me, and it won’t last half an hour or an hour, or ten hours, or a hundred…..

The imagined shock of that announcement is what the shock of the burnt-out building reminds me of. The distress following the shock, a dim foretelling of what the reality will be like. The nostalgia of returning to a familiar place with good memories, at Fresher’s Week, a time of new beginnings, reminds me of returning to therapy after a break. And it is then, in particular, that I imagine coming face to face with devastation. Therapy seems to run on academic terms, just like schools and universities – August is the ‘month off’ and things resume again, come September. It seems likely she would choose to retire at the end of an academic year, particularly as she sees a number of students. And so it also seems likely that, if she ‘gives me notice’, it will happen at the start of the academic year, and following the summer break. I’m afraid of therapy breaks – but these days  I am also afraid of going back.

***

The third dream took place on the same night as the second, and I believe it is on a similar theme. It was my therapist who saw it this time – the collapse of the ground and the ever narrower strip of road, mirroring the passage of time. The longer I am in therapy, the less time I have left in therapy. If only I could stop time….There is so much that – perhaps generously – she didn’t say, about just how my behaviour and resistance in therapy is sometimes geared towards just that. Towards denying progress (or at least minimising it and trying to show how much more there is to do); staving off the end, even though the end is inevitable and ultimately will be determined by her retirement, irrespective of whether I am ‘done’ in therapy, or not. There is a sentence in ‘Lila’ by Marilynne Robinson, which perfectly sums up that denial, and that holding back: “She couldn’t lean her whole weight on any of this when she knew she would have to live on after it”.

My therapist’s conclusion about the dream’s message disturbed me – whereas I felt that getting stuck had saved me, she suggested that perhaps I needed to carry on, despite time getting ever shorter. It makes sense – that I should carry on, make the most of the time, complete the work, if the work is ever really complete. But I can’t help wondering, did her words mean more than that? Was she encouraging me to keep going not just because it’s a good thing to do, but because she now has an actual timescale, an actual date in mind? However much I tried to think about the disappearing ground as representing time left in therapy, I could not persuade myself that driving on and falling down into the chasm was anything other than dangerous and to be avoided.

***

“Ends are for yesterday, not tomorrows.

What will you do with the time you have left?”  **

 

[* I bought my therapy jacket during a therapy break more than two years ago, and it is a constant comfort blanket and a warm reminder of my therapist, acting both as a jacket and a blanket, depending on the season and the time of day!

** – from ‘The Time Keeper’ by Mitch Albom ]


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My therapist was right – again!

[The text below was written a few days ago, straight after one of my therapy sessions. I waited to publish it, because I wanted to share its content with my therapist first. Particularly since we started curtailing email outside of session, I really want to try and keep our work spontaneous and ‘within the room’, otherwise it almost feels as though the very difficult process of changing our previous email pattern, will be undermined. I will continue blogging about my therapy, and writing is still a valuable way for me to process material – but it will more often, these days, be ‘after the fact’, rather than when I am in the very middle of a situation.]

Having spent weeks finding it really difficult to write, I now feel absolutely compelled to do it. Why? Because I’ve been driving home after my therapy session feeling incredibly grateful, and for some reason, for a moment, I’m allowing myself to be one of those people I sometimes find very irritating on Facebook, who go on about their gratitude while many of the rest of us are feeling anything but. So I sincerely apologise for inflicting that on anyone. But on the other hand, part of the problem with Facebook is only seeing the positive parts of the picture that others are happy to present to the world, whereas my gratitude today is part of a bigger, messier, darker, and un-straightforward picture, which I have tried to present as honestly as I can.

I have written so often about the feeling of having a bottomless ‘pit of need’ inside me, and how painful that is to encounter within myself. As I was driving this evening I was conscious of the contrast and of the excitement and pleasure of feeling as though I was a container overflowing, rather than a pit needing filling.

I’ve just had two therapy sessions on consecutive days, after a short therapy break, and both times my feelings upon entering my therapist’s house were different to other ‘returns’. This is the shortest break we’ve had (a week) so perhaps that helped – it was long enough to trigger break-related feelings and also to function as a period of consolidation, but short enough that I still had a sense of connection to the material we had been covering before the break. There was therefore less uncertainty about what it would be like to resume; but even so, I don’t remember feeling quite so excited before, about ‘coming back’. I have always longed to resume sessions, and couldn’t wait, as well as getting frustrated and anxious about the return – but unafraid excitement was something a little new.

I felt like running up the stairs to the therapy room, and just entering it had a real sense of safety, comfort, and of coming home. I literally cried with relief (and other emotions) at a couple of points during yesterday’s first session back, and even today couldn’t quite get over how good it felt to be back. And not just back – but back in a really engaged and open and undefended way. It’s how I really wanted to be, in session, before the break happened, but I couldn’t really manage it at that point.

I’ve been wondering why – where this sense of excitement and ability to be open, came from. It’s not as though the break was easy or my feelings positive the whole way through. As I mentioned in my previous post, though the break started well, my mood changed completely part-way through, and rather than feeling confident and secure in the therapeutic connection, I felt fearful and very self-critical.

I did try and think myself out of that state  – and was helped both my own realisation that the change in mood and my perceptions of my therapist came from within myself and were not triggered by anything she had said or done; and also by a brief email exchange that we had. She was open and supportive, and posed a couple of interesting questions for me to think about. And I did…..

My therapist has sometimes expressed surprise that I have not shown more curiosity about my dreams or about my subconscious. One of the things that was different about this break and the return, was that I was more curious about what had been going on during the break, and I was more invested in trying to understand it. I returned to therapy excited to talk about what had happened and my attempts at unpicking it; but also excited about trying to understand it with my therapist, and not just on my own. The first session back was emotional and difficult in parts, but also thought-provoking; and with the luxury of some time to myself after the session, I felt as though I took a number of important steps forward in getting to grips with the material we’d covered.

I couldn’t wait to tell her, and had an even greater sense of excitement and anticipation when I arrived at session today, knowing that I would share these steps and that we could talk about them further.

If I try and think about why there has been this change in my curiosity and excitement about the material of therapy, I suspect I may not be able to identify a single factor, and that a range of elements contributed. However, it’s also possible that among the range of factors there may be a single very important one; and that I might have to acknowledge that maybe this is part of what my therapist meant when she said that the reason for reducing email contact outside of sessions was to ‘free me up’ so that we could interact in a more ‘lively way’ in person. It’s a little irritating when she’s right…..!

But it also makes me feel very very grateful for her, and for everything she’s done and is doing for and with me. I’m enjoying this feeling of overflowing, because I know that while the fact of overflowing may continue, the feeling will come and go, despite wanting to hold onto it.  When I look at the wider picture, there is a great deal that continues to be very painful. Outside of therapy, my husband and I are finally in couples counselling, but probably at least a year too late – we have essentially withdrawn and become used to ignoring each other and only talking when the need arises. In therapy, despite the connection, trust, and gratitude I feel, I’m still a little too afraid and insecure to read an article I saw on Twitter about what happens when therapists dislike a client, and I feel renewed pain at the question of touch in therapy, when I read about others’ current struggles with the very same issue. And I’m still jealous of my therapist’s daughters, and the place they occupy in her life. In no way have these things been suddenly ‘fixed’ and nor do I expect them to be – resolved, at some point, perhaps, but who’s to say in what way, and when?

But the feeling of overflowing is there together with those other things, and they can co-exist, and I think that that is different, too. It reminds me of some passages in a beautiful book that my therapist recommended to me a while ago, which had a big impact on me. “This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognised for what it is. Sorrow is very real……life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous…..so joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.”*

I think that pretty much sums up how I’m feeling right now – and I wanted very much, to share that with you.

*from ‘Lila’ by Marilynne Robinson