Category Archives: Therapy

I Miss My Friend

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 I miss my friend. 

It’s there. It hits me like a ton of bricks in the chest and knocks me over. I don’t know how to get up. I’m struggling. 

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and it is a nice morning. I am sitting outside in the garden working, because I know sunshine and fresh air is good for the soul and mental wellbeing. Sitting outside in such a beautiful day and I would normally think this is great. 

It’s just quiet. The dogs are sitting in the shade, the back door to the house is open and I have music playing. 

I feel like a pot that’s been broken and stuck back together. I move around, pieces of me fall away, crumbling to the ground and I kick them under the sofa, into holes, into the dark where no one can see the many ways I’m falling apart. 

I’m silent, but I’m screaming and all I can do is look at the many ways I failed. 

But I didn’t. 

I want to say I told you so. 

I’m not so good with friends. I don’t ever manage to keep them. They don’t stay, not when they know me, when they see me. 

And it’s funny because I always warn them. I always say one day you’ll leave. Everyone does. It’s usually my fault for it. But they go in the end. 

And they always tell me no. That they know themselves, and I don’t. That they’ll never leave. Nothing would ever make them go. “You’re stuck with me.”

I wish I could time travel. Go back each time to that conversation and show them a ball with the images of now. 

I’m always right. 

Always. 

No one sticks around. Sometimes I did something, and sometimes it’s just what it is. In the end, though, it’s always the same. 

I never try to hurt anyone. I’m not malicious or hurtful. I know what pain feels like. I don’t have it in me to inflict it onto anyone else. Even those who deserve it. 

Of course, I do things that hurt others, but I never mean to. It just happens. 

I end up here in some way. 

I don’t know how to pick myself up. I’m trying. I’ve managed to eat. Rice crackers and some fruit. Each mouthful has felt so hard, like a lump going down my throat and settling into my stomach. 

My OCD examines every piece, every mouthful because the food might make me sick, and I have to test the taste. 

OCD is my protector, the guardian who keeps me safe. It’s sensing danger right now, but not sure where the problem is. It knows I’m in pain. 

I deserve it. 

When I did therapy a decade ago for my OCD, she told me that when I am upset, or stressed, or something is bothering me, then my OCD will go a little crazy. It has. It’s out of control in the places it senses danger. My hands are so raw they look like I’ve dragged them down a cheese grater. They bleed and hurt to move when I type. 

My OCD has also declared war on the colour green. I’m not sure why. I have my suspicions. The car that broke my family all those years ago was a green MG and just typing those words sends shudders down my spine and through my body. 

I’ve had a loss, and maybe it’s linking to a previous one. 

So green is the enemy. I can’t write with a green pen because every word I scribble down will be somehow tainted and something terrible will come from it. I can’t wear my favourite green jeans, so they sit in the drawer. I can’t wear a green t-shirt or use a green cup. I can’t even cross the road when there is a green car around. 

I just hope it doesn’t focus on the foods I eat. They’re all naturally green, but maybe that is why food is so hard to swallow right now. 

Something bad happened, and now my OCD is trying to compensate. To ease the tightness in my chest I feel all the time, to calm me down. 

I made two days with no cuts but failed this morning. The weight in my head was too much. So I gave it what it wanted then got up and came outside. I made myself move, because I need to live, I want to live, even when I want to just turn out the lights. It’s a fight inside my head. A war with my spirit and my soul. 

I never ever mean to hurt anyone. My intentions are always right and I tell myself that, every time the trigger pops into my head and takes my breath away leaving me crushed. 

I wish I could pull everything out, dump it on the ground and walk away. 

I wish I could leave me too. 

A Place for a Broken Heart

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7

My Healing Place

It has been some time since I have written on here. So long that as I write this in a word document and think maybe I’ll post this on my blog, I’m not even sure I’ll be able to remember the password. 

Does my blog still exist?

I’ll find out. 

The blog has always been my healing place. The place for me to talk, to share my feelings, to put down things I can’t say to anyone else, and I’d like to say that maybe I’ve done healing, that I’ve been feeling so much better, and I didn’t need to come here, but I think I forgot myself. 

This is my place to come and be my authentic self. A place where I can just talk about what is in my head and not worry about any of the repercussions that may come from that. But, that in itself is strange and odd, because I write under a pen name. I wear a literary mask, yet the times when I am not myself, when I wear the shroud of someone else, I am myself. I am me. 

The mask allows me to be who I am inside. It allows me to not fear rejection, to not fear pain, to not hate myself. It allows me to make connections that I would have otherwise shied away from. But does that mean because I don’t give my real outside self, that I am not giving who I am to another?

It is the only way anyone who ever like me, because no one likes the real me. Not even myself.

It is so hard. 

How does anyone put themselves out there? How do we risk pain?

It’s taken therapy and insights to understand why I feel better when I am not me, and maybe it’ll take a long time to undo what caused it, maybe I’ll never undo it. 

I don’t like myself. I hate myself. 

That is so hard to write and so hard to admit, and when you say it, people don’t want to really listen. They don’t want to hear and they don’t understand.  They want to tell you it isn’t true.

When I look in the mirror, I see something else. I am shocked. I’ve built up this other self so much that when I am reminded of the real me, it hurts. I want to erase him. I want to reach into the glass and pull away his face and deny he exists. 

I want to make him vanish and scream at him. 

My parents did that to me, I think. I mean, maybe. If they couldn’t love me, then how can anyone else, and how can I even love myself in all the parts I had to play in the childhood I had in the life where things have gone wrong?

I struggled when my father was still alive to play the part of the caring child, when I had to look after him, when I had to put away the parts of me that ached. 

I’m not sure which loss affected me the most. When I lost my innocence at five, or when my parents left me. They both haunt me in their own ways. 

Because maybe my father’s pleasure was the only thing, I was good for in his life. 

But I am not really talking to the page for that. They’re just the whisperings in my head of how this happened.

I lost a friend this month. Not to death or sickness, or anything that takes them out of the world, but to a mistake. To an argument. To things that can’t be undone or changed. Yet, I grieve. Loss is loss. I’m sure they grieve too. I’m sorry.

Pain is ugly and hard and I’m struggling with it. I’m wishing it away and in many ways wishing for life to end so I no longer feel. I know I could make that happen, and I have thought about it. 

I have cut my skin and thought about cutting lower, deeper, of reaching in to try to make it all feel better. 

I’ve thought about jumping, about running into the sea and just to keep going until there is no where else to go.

I hate the feeling when it’s all through my body and I can’t move. I feel paralysed by it. I feel like I will never feel happy again. My heart hurts and breaks and I don’t know how to make it go away. 

I have had loss before. Bigger losses, smaller losses, but loss all the same, and they hurt, yet I remind myself I have survived every single bad day in my life. I have made it here. I have wiped away every single tear I’ve shed. 

And sure, I have fallen along the way and been unwell with it and suffered so many mental battles that I still bear the scars for, but I am here, and I am breathing, and I am alive. 

It is sad to think that a year from now, me and the friend will be nothing more than strangers. People who used to know each other, who may occasionally think of the other. We’ll be memories, chapters in each other’s lives.

I will miss her. 

I miss her now and maybe the intensity of that will fade. 

She’s been a big part of my life, and maybe some of the reason I’ve not needed to come here. 

But I’ve also had people. Through my words I have found an army who have helped me in more ways than they’ll ever know. 

I’ve been lucky, but I still feel …

I feel pain, and sadness, and hurt, and anger, and grief, and regret and sorrow. I feel broken. Like the jagged pieces are there, cutting into me and making it that I don’t know what to do with myself. 

If I hold my breath, maybe I can stop breathing, and if I stop breathing, maybe I can stop feeling …

For just a little while at least. 

Time Limit on Mental Health Recovery

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Why does mental health recovery have a time limit? It’s one of the things that bugs me the most. Many people put into therapy get 4-6 weeks of therapy and then they are cast out into the world again. Some people get 12 weeks if they are lucky, but that seems to be the maximum. Why is it that mental illness comes with such a limit?

Would we treat a cancer patient and say well you’ve got so many weeks of chemo, but after that you’re on your own? Or tell someone who is recovering from something like a stroke that they have 12 weeks to rehabilitate and then off they go to do it themselves? I don’t think so. Why is it okay with mental health? It’s just as debilitating as any other illness. The difference is, is that it can’t be seen.

The reason from my rant today comes from my own experience. When I had taken an over dose those few weeks ago and gone to my doctor after the hospital had discharged me and for the first time I said to someone that I think my thoughts are wrong. I need some help, did I get some and felt relieved.

I was assigned a therapist. I have had therapists before and for various reasons either I didn’t stick or my time was up. This time I tried to give everything I had. I tried to be honest about how I was feeling. I even showed him my many self-harm episodes across my skin. tumblr_mjvm92IrOr1s8qsclo1_500

It was heart-breaking to hear at my last sessions that I only have three left. His manager said I could have 14 sessions. I’ve done 11 so far, because I needed so much, but that’s it for me. I feel let down again. I feel lost again. I keep hearing those words in my head and it makes me upset.

I am not a stupid person, but I am an ill person. I don’t understand how the doctors can say to someone who –

Who is suicidal and has tried many times before.

Who self-harms almost daily (although at the moment it’s been 8 days)

Who has flashbacks, sometimes so bad he has to leave the house.

Who suffers disassociation and often doesn’t know if he is a real person.

Who has BPD and breaks down and wants the world to end at something as simple as a cancelled lunch date.

Who suffers DDNOS and flits between different parts of himself at different ages because he is fragmented.

How can someone with so much to recover from be told they have 14 weeks and then they’re on their own again.

No wonder people don’t tend to get better. You can’t put a time limit on recovery from anything. That includes mental health.

 

Therapy

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14

After much deliberation, I have decided that I am going to give up on therapy. It’s ironic I guess, that this is what I am training to be yet, I find that it is not right for my own things. Maybe, I am just a better listener than a talker.

Recently I did a session of EMDR. This was probably the session I realised therapy is not for me. I cannot connect with this therapist or any that I have gone to, before him. The textbook answers, and the fact that they are paid to listen, hinders my mind, and I know that really, they don’t care. How can I give my darkest, and deepest things that are so hard for me to say, to someone who after I leave, will probably think nothing of me for more than five minute?.

I found myself going over this in my mind a lot and then I thought about the therapy itself. I really don’t think healing is a thing that is possible, not in a way that it is all gone. How can a lifetime of things be undone by talking to someone? How can the broken parts of me ever be put together the way they were so long ago, when its before I can even remember? The most I can hope for is to learn how to calm the child inside. To care for him when he is sad or upset. To understand when triggers happen, and not to fight them, but to sit down with that part of myself, and just allow it to be there.

I’m not really sure how I will achieve this, but as I learn more and more in my psychology classes, I understand myself better, and the child from long ago.

Writing the Teddy books helps me. It’s giving him a voice when he has never had one. I am not sure what I will do when I finish this final one. I plan to write it all to the end now; Teddy 3.5 as it is called, and if you have read my others, then you understand why I cannot called it Teddy four.

My father suffered a heart attack recently, and whilst I know many readers of my books will perhaps think, this is a good thing, I found myself shocked at my own reaction. I put the phone down after I had been told, and wondered what if he dies. That would be it. I would never have a chance to tell my father what I thought, and never the chance for him to be a father.

I know these things will never happen. I have to find some way to accept that. I think what shocked me the most, was my own upset and breakdown, on the phone. So much of a breakdown that I couldn’t even talk, and someone else had to take the call for me. I realised that I care, somewhere inside, for my father, because he is, after all, my dad.

External Images.

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External Images.

I feel sad today, I’m not really sure why. I saw my therapist yesterday and then I had a date and went for a drink and then saw the hobbit. It was an enjoyable evening, yet this morning I find myself with that lost empty feeling.

Some of the things my therapist said I understand why he said them, but they don’t make me feel better. He reassures me that the things I deal with aren’t so strange, that many people have the same fears.

We talked about the fear of the dark, the way I am terrified of it at night. The way I’d rather be outside in the dark than trapped in my home. He told me that many are afraid of the dark, it’s quite normal and that some part of us is inbuilt to have fear, it’s a part of our survival.

I feel like I want to shout at him, it’s not the same. I don’t care if others have this fear, I don’t care that I’m not alone. I don’t care that it’s ‘normal’ it doesn’t feel normal. It feels insane when I’m afraid at night; sure that just maybe the bad man is there once again.

We talked about my mum a little, where my fear of the darkness comes from. He told me I had really suffered. He told me he was sorry that I had. He said that considering all I had gone through, I survived. I came out quite sane. It makes me want to scream inside. I wish I could show him inside my head. I wish I could make him feel what I feel so he would know that I didn’t come out the other side in one piece.

But I also realise that I sat there. Perfectly still. Perfectly sane on the outside, without the tools to break my silence of how I feel, because I’m trained in keeping secrets. I even do it on the outside. Perfect external images.

New Therapy

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New Therapy.

I met with a new therapist today. He was pleasant enough and direct which I think is what I need. Not someone that will aww and pacify me. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not for me.

It was very hard to talk and tell him the things I did. He asked me if I wanted justice and my answer was no. I don’t. I don’t see the point. My father is sick, what would ripping a family apart to label him whatever achieve?

Then my therapist explained it and I’ve never had it explained before. He said if I sought justice it’s more symbolic. The blame gets given to him. The words are said out loud. It would officially not be my fault.

What a thought. I can’t even begin to explain how it feels. That maybe I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t make him do it like he said.

There’s a child inside down on his knees crying because maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he wasn’t bad inside. Maybe he was really loveable. Maybe he wasn’t made evil. Maybe he didn’t make them do it. Maybe it wasn’t the way he was made.

Maybe it wasn’t his fault at all.

And the adult on the outside, I feel such anger and frustration, I can’t ease those feelings. I can’t bring myself to gain justice for that child. All I can do is watch the child suffer and not be able to put it right.

I keep him where his father put him.

I wish it had been someone else and not my father. I wish it was just a no one that treated me badly all the time, maybe then I could hate him enough to not care.

There isn’t anything I can do.

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