Discussing the letter to my therapist

Warning: this post contains some very long sentences which some readers may find mentally exhausting. Do not read unless you are a glutton for punishment... cup of tea and comfy chair might also help.

Phew, I've been way too busy! I survived the horrible talk on the complicated health condition complicated by another complicated health condition, however I've been dreaming about it the condition for two nights since so I think I am still getting over the stress of it. The talk itself went OK I think. 

So I want to tell you about why I left therapy with a smile on my face this week. I will try to break it up into two posts as I don't want to overwhelm you with all of the details at once (I'm grateful that anyone reads this blog so I do try to make it easier to follow. I'm sure reading some of my posts is like trying to eat a leather sandwich). Besides, I'm still figuring it all out in my own head...

OK so obviously, T wanted to talk about the letter I wrote her (I want to post it on my blog but I don't know if that's OK to do yet). She had read it, which was a bit of a surprise. Her initial comments were that it was very well written and quite insightful and she wanted to know which part had written it (hard question to answer). She asked if it was the part that writes on the blog. I felt like it was me but then, I also felt like it was me in the session too; but obviously the me that writes letters and on this blog comes across very differently to the me that she speaks to in therapy as it seemed rather clear to her that the person sitting in front of her was not the one who wrote the letter. Indeed, she gave me a copy of the letter for me to reference as she wanted to discuss it, and looking at what I had written and contemplating trying to discuss it with her, I felt as though it had been written by someone else. Needless to say, I didn't do a very good job at 'discussing' it with her. It was more her telling me her thoughts on what I had said and me giving the odd nod or agreement. But then maybe that was just because I felt I had already said everything I had to say in the letter. I don't know. I did feel like I had come to therapy without my brain though, which is never helpful. I feel sometimes that I must be one of the hardest people to work with in therapy, because I can be so quiet and unobliging with my reflections.

 

Despite the disadvantage of me having left my brain at home, the session progressed and T laid out the points that she wanted to talk about from the letter. Firstly, she said that when she was reading the letter she felt like she was reading a letter from another therapist giving insights and reflections about someone else. I was quite taken aback by this comment and my initial thoughts were that she was about to give me a lecture about her being the therapist and that it's not my place to be trying to do her job or that I shouldn't be 'intellectualising'. However, she surprised me further by saying that she would like to view this part as a 'co-therapist' who could help do some work on some of the issues in the therapeutic process. 

Huh? Well, it was hard to conceive of myself being any help in the process at all at that moment, having as aforementioned: no brain. But I was open to the notion that perhaps at other times, I do have a brain so I agreed that this could be considered.

She didn't really go into 'how' this part could help but she did say we would talk about that. I think this could be a great idea, dependent on what exactly it is that she requires me to do, however, I just hope she doesn't expect some kind of presence in therapy sessions, because it seems to be mainly 'Stupid C'. Stupid C can certainly act as a messenger though to relay the tasks back to someone more intelligent for them to work on between sessions.

In my letter, as an aside, I had gotten talking about how I hate having two weeks between our sessions. T already knew this as I have raised it before. I was simply raising it in the letter as a detail in my explanation as to why our sessions run on too late (IE it's a long time until the next one so I need to make the most of it). 

Well, T surprised me again by announcing that she would be willing to give me weekly appointments from now on! (Cue celebratory marching band of alters with acrobatics, drummers, pipes, whistles...). She said they would need to be only 50 minute sessions though (band crashes to halt causing pile up... legs and drum sticks everywhere). OK so that's fair enough really. I wasn't expecting her to offer anything as a response to my comment (I had actually stated that I wasn't telling her this to try to get it changed because she already told me in the past it wasn't an option) but I'm not sure about shorter sessions, even if it does mean a session every week. I also HATED how short the sessions were when I had weekly sessions with my first therapist. At least with having sessions every other week, they last an hour and a half which gives me time to not be panicking about how fast time is going. There are pros and cons of each. I can't have my cake and eat it.

 

So I was ambivalent. I'm sure she probably thought I was an ungrateful bitch for not being more excited about her offer. She reminded me that she was only offering it to help reduce the stress that I had talked about with having the sessions every other week. I asked if we could give it a try with the option of going back to the old way if I don't like it, which she agreed to.

So, I'm overall quite excited about this development, meaning I now have a therapy session this coming week. The bad news is she's pissing off on holiday for two weeks after that so I will have an even longer break than usual. I'd probably be more upset about this long break if I wasn't still feeling the after effects of her recent let downs. I'm still feeling defensive so part of me couldn't care less about her at the moment. It makes a pleasant change from being obsessed with her. Maybe we should have a big fall out before she leaves for good and then I will be too angry to mourn her abandonment.

Where have the kids gone?

So as you may have noticed from the last post, I seem to be going completely bonkers... but I'm sure I'll still continue to get up every morning and drag myself to work so my purpose in life is being fulfilled in keeping myself 'debt to society' free (it's all energy in versus energy out again). I appear to be becoming more and more dishevelled by the day and I'm pretty sure I must be on the verge of starting to go bald because every time I shower I am getting handfuls of hair coming out. I don't know how I don't have any bald patches yet (that's just a little FYI for you there). I also seem to have developed horrible spots all over my body. It must be some kind of stress condition like psoriasis. This paragraph makes me sound like a freak.

Someone has already told you about 'fucking clinical fucking psychology' yesterday and I don't have the energy to expand on how it went but, I will get round to it eventually.

So for now all I wanted to say is, I haven't seen the kids around lately. I don't know when they disappeared because it wasn't an immediate noticing of their absence, but it was definitely at least since the previous clinical psychology session two weeks ago. In fact I think Little C spoke to T at that session and oh yes! I am remembering now; Little C and Pan took pictures of things they liked after that session and then... off the radar.

Is it me or them? Maybe they are all still there and I'm the one gone. Lets not get into all of that at this time of night! It's just curious and I miss them. It's easy to be around them. I like them and Ad likes them. I've noticed a few signs that maybe they aren't that far, like the odd brief and incomplete appearance with Ad and I noticed I was sucking my thumb last night (cringe!) but my teddys have been neglected in the cuddle department over the last few weeks and for the main part I haven't heard from them.
It's times like this that I feel the prospect of 'integration' is horrifying.

I guess one thing about them being wherever they are is that there's an opening for others to have time out, as evidenced by the post yesterday. I can't identify who that was by. 

When we were children

I was never one to really notice negatives as a child. I don't really remember having feelings about much except about how much I hated my sister and how much my father seemed to hate me. But other things didn't usually bother me that much.

It's only recently that I've begun to reflect on some of the few things that I can remember from my childhood and have started to feel anger. The anger is for things that happened as well as things that didn't happen which should have.

I guess when you're little you don't know what a childhood should be like. You don't get handed a manual when you arrive on earth explaining what you should expect so you tend to accept what you have as being normal, unless you compare yourself to others and find that what you have is different.

Although I could clearly see some differences between myself and other kids (I didn't know I was in a cult but I knew I was in a very different kind of church than anyone else) in many ways I didn't realise that my childhood was lacking in some important ingredients such as affection, stimulation, security, supervision, encouragement, routine... I was probably too busy worrying about my impending damnation to a place where I was going to burn for eternity, to really notice. Also, being in a cult itself meant that I wasn't regularly around other families to be able to compare myself to what they had and the families that I did associate with were usually ones within the cult anyway.

But was it as simple as that I was too stupid to realise I was unhappy or was it more than that? Could it be that I was already dissociating and that the happy-go-lucky child that I heard people talk about at times was an already functioning alter who didn't have to deal with any of the crap stuff?

As I am writing this I feel like I'm seeing for the first time that there were two alters of me as a child. I need to get my head around this. I don't know how to explain what I'm seeing.

Half an hour later...
On reflection I don't know why it is a surprise to realise that there was more than one of me even way back then. The books I've read about dissociative identity disorder explain that alters form as a child when there are things that are too difficult for a child to understand or deal with so they split them off into another personality who can deal with the things. This means the child doesn't have to think about the bad things. OK so I knew the theory, but as I don't have a very good memory of my childhood I didn't really consider that it would have been obvious to me if I did remember. But while I was writing this and thinking about what I do remember I realised that there were two parts of me as a child. I still don't really know how to explain that.