Therapeutic News

It’s a two post day, mainly because I didn’t want to put therapy stuff in a post about my nice Christmas and also because I have absolutely no idea when I’m going to get around to having more than five minutes to myself in the coming days.

I came to the top of my NHS therapy list a couple of weeks ago. My original plan was to pay for therapy until the NHS therapy kicked in, because money is tight and also doing two lots of therapy together seemed crazy intense. Having said all that, I decided to have my first session of NHS therapy before I made my mind up, because if it was terrible I wouldn’t want to have stopped the therapy that is actually helping and then be left with nothing.

I had the first session and actually it was great. It’s badged as ‘talking therapy,’ but bitter experience over the years has led me to approach with caution. I’ve had NHS talking therapy before, where the therapist said absolutely nothing and even I, who can talk for England at the best of times, was in despair by the end of an hour where I had talked myself in circles with absolutely no response or direction. I ended those sessions feeling madder than when I went in. I’ve also had this kind of therapy with therapists who are wedded to a particular school of therapy and will do literally anything to shoehorn you into their way of thinking, for better or worse. In my case, usually worse. This was not like that.

It is also all over the phone, which I wasn’t sure I was going to like, but it turns out that it’s ok. The guy who has been assigned to me is astute and compassionate. He knows when to talk and when to listen, and has useful things to say. I have had two sessions with him so far and have cried myself silly during and after each one, which sounds awful and is awful, but in a good way. I have a lot to cry about, it turns out.

Having said all that, I had forgotten that NHS therapy is in short supply and because of that, you also get short rations. I only get six appointments with him and if I can’t make any of them, I get less. There is no rebooking for another time.

After the first session I didn’t entirely know what to do. What he and I are working on is very much what is happening in my life now. What I am working on with my other therapist is deeper than that. The two things actually complement each other. I decided that after having waited so long for the NHS therapy I would continue with it, and continue with my paid sessions, because six weeks in therapy is not very long. Certainly not long enough for me to get to the bottom of my own, personal swamplands. So now I am doing two sessions of therapy a week.

As a result of this, I am coming undone like a ball of wool round a particularly hyperactive kitten. It’s exactly as crazy intense as I thought it might be.

I’ve got more homework from my original therapist, which is to think about what I am angry about and figure out what to do with it. This homework landed in my lap on Monday. On Tuesday all the children arrived at the boat for our Christmas. I could feel my thoughts sloshing around inside me, clamouring to get out but I was ignoring them due to the fact that I had no idea how I would behave when I did pay attention to them. It seemed a bit rough to explode either in fury or tears or both right at this particular moment.

But then, my NHS therapist and I talked about a particularly unpleasant quirk I have picked up over the years, which is to believe that my inner thoughts and feelings are only heard/seen/validated by other people when I am either literally on the point of going insane or on the point of physically dying. As a result I tend to dismiss my own thoughts and feelings in favour of everyone else’s and wait until I am a ticking time bomb before deciding that I probably deserve a bit of room at the inn. I expect that this is something I feel angry about, only I made the decision not to deal with all that until we’d had a nice Christmas.

And lo, there was my belief kicking into action right before my very eyes. So you can see that one therapist complements the other and it is all, as we know, quantum and holistic etc, etc. I am almost certainly on some kind of therapeutic ladder, if only I had read the right books to know this stuff.

Also, in relation to the above paragraph, my NHS therapist has picked up on my ‘everything has to be a funny story’ routine, particularly if it’s in the slightest bit sensitive or upsetting. The more upsetting and sensitive it is, the more I have to make it entertaining for people so that I don’t bother them with my anger or my sadness, because that would be weird and awkward.

He is right, and that’s a bit annoying and also a huge bit vulnerable making and frankly all of this is pretty bloody awful and very, very hard work. I feel rather like Prometheus, lashed to a rock and having my liver pecked out by furious birds and that’s not very Christmassy at all.

I am pulsating with anxiety about all of this. I know that I have to do the work. There is no point in doing therapy if I don’t do the work. For me, once I know stuff, I can’t pretend I don’t know it and just wander around ignoring it, especially when ‘it’ is myself and my feelings. I mean, I’ve been doing that for the last few days and that’s why I am a human stress ball. Also, that’s what I was doing before I knew this stuff and look where it got me? I am nothing if not royally fucked up.

I am afraid that if I do this particular lump of work that things are going to get really messy, and when I say things, I mean ‘I’ and that goes against everything I have taught myself not to be, unless I am about to be committed to an asylum or am in an actual hospital bed. It is proving extremely frightening and difficult to make time for myself and to start unpacking some of this stuff. So I forced myself to sit in bed alone, and write, which is why I spent half an hour writing about Christmas instead of this. Christmas was genuinely lovely, by the way, but also, all this is going on inside my head and two things can be true at the same time. Christmas was lovely and I am also going crazy.

I did think that one of the things that I might be most frightened about is how angry I am. I am, in other areas of my life, dealing with quite a few angry people at the moment. What I have noticed about their behaviours is that they use anger to mask how frightened they are. It is easier in this world to be furious than it is to be scared, for the most part. I have started to wonder about my fear, which is immense and many tentacled and extends to all kinds of things because it is so slippery and vast. I thought about whether I might be doing the opposite to most people, which is usually where I’m at, to be honest. I wondered if I find it much more acceptable to be frightened than I do to deal with what is probably, if I squint at it sideways, a huge, roaring inferno of rage at some of the absolute shit that life has thrown at me?

I used to be a much more angry person. Before I had my hysterectomy, I suffered from an undiagnosed strain of PMDD forever, which used to leave me in the grip of terrible rages, which I had very little control over and which made my own and other people’s lives very uncomfortable. I spent about sixty percent of my life feeling furious and the other forty feeling guilty and apologising. I had a lot of migraines.

After the surgery, it felt rather like being washed up on a beach after a storm. The calm was beautiful and very, very welcome after so long out at sea, fighting. Not being livid 24/7 was something I embraced utterly, but I wonder whether I forgot the very real point of and use for justified anger and just sublimated it all into rising levels of terror, which I then attempted to hide. Hence more migraines. It seems true. It also seems like something I used to do as a child, when there wasn’t a lot of room for my anger, what with one thing and another.

That’s as much as I can look at right now, but it’s a start and that’s what I locked myself away in here to do. It’s all I can do.