It was my grandpas funeral on Wednesday. I had seen Anna the Tuesday night and she had helped me figure things out in my head. She made me feel strong and encouraged me to do what was right for me while tackling a number of difficult family dynamics and requests. I had been really worried about being completely overwhelmed by my emotions on the day and scared that the requests my dad was making of me would become too difficult. I was worried I would let him down. He wanted me to stand in the line outside the church at the end of the service which I have never been able to do at previous funerals. He wanted me to help lower the coffin which just felt completely beyond my capabilities and he wanted me to work the room at the wake and listen to stories of other people’s experiences of my grandpa. I felt under pressure to do all these things but going what I’ve been like in the past, I didn’t think I would manage any of them.

The day itself was hard but I was really pleased with how it all went. We hired a babysitter for when the kids came out of school and so on the way back (across country) from where the funeral was we stopped and had dinner and a couple of drinks before going home. It was actually nice to decompress, I wasn’t ready to be faced with parenting and needed time to just BE with my husband.

On Wednesday evening I sent Anna a message.

Anna,
Thank you so much for all of your words of support and encouragement the past week and for helping me sort out my thoughts and feelings around my grandpa’s death and funeral.
Today was such a beautiful tribute for a well loved man who was highly thought of and valued by so many people. I felt a lot of very intense emotions, I cried a lot as I thought I would.
But I was able to lower the coffin and stand and thank people after the service. It felt right to do that, it was so nice to hear everyone’s stories about Grandpa, so many people loved him.
I just wanted to tell you that I could feel your support all day. I wore my necklace and had my blue heart stone in my pocket and your words ‘be yourself’ in my head.
I just wanted to tell you.
See you Saturday. Lucy.

On the Thursday I woke in a completely different mind space. I felt like everything became very dark and difficult again. I was really short tempered with the kids, didn’t want to see them or spend any time with the family at all, I wanted to just hide away. They were at school most of the day and I didn’t do any of the chores I had planned on doing, to be honest I cant remember what I DID do… a lot of sitting around scrolling on social media trying to find something to hold on to. When the kids came home, they were both bad tempered and because I wouldn’t let them go straight onto the ipad my youngest punched me in the stomach (totally out of character for him) and told me he hated me and didn’t want to be part of this family. Rather than me being able to rise above it I just took it all to heart and stormed off upstairs like a teenager, threw myself on the bed, pulled my hoodie up over my head and cried into my pillow. I wanted to disappear.

At some point Adam came up and sat with me. Rather than telling him to leave like I have in the past, I cried with him beside me. I was cycling through that negative self talk that I have been through in my head a thousand times before and a few times in the therapy room with Anna, but this time I was saying it to Adam (with my face squashed into a pillow)… ‘I’m such a shit mum, the kids deserve someone better, I fucked up the plaster of paris activity the kids wanted to do this morning, it got ruined, it started to set in the bowl and the shapes look shit and crumbly now, they were so excited about it and I messed it up – that’s what my whole childhood was like – looking forward to stuff then it being shit and having to be grateful for the shit. I’m failing at life, I’m such a failure…’ He just sat on the bed next to me as I sobbed. He rubbed my back and stroked my head. Eventually when I took a big breath and calmed a bit he said, ‘that was a really cheap crap craft set no one could have made it any better than you did… and you’re being too hard on yourself, you’re a human being!’ he then said, ‘do you think you’re depressed today because you had a drink yesterday?’ I said defensively, ‘I think I’m depressed today because I buried my grandpa yesterday!’ he said he understood. When I repeated this to Anna she said, ‘I guess it doesn’t really matter why, what matters is that was how you were feeling and you honoured and expressed the feelings.’

A bit later on the Thursday I sent Anna a text asking if I could have a 90 minute session instead of just an hour on Saturday. She replied saying she was sorry but she didn’t have that available. By that point I’d taken myself off to the gym and didn’t feel quite as helpless. I believed that she would have given me the time had she been able to. Friday was a better day, I woke up feeling fine and was far more patient with the kids. I looked back on the previous day and realise just how awful I had felt. In comparison to how I was feeling on Thursday – such a huge difference.

Saturday morning was the last session before the Christmas break and I felt quite nervous driving to the city. I figured it was because I wanted to make sure the session was perfect and took ten minutes prior to my session to think about what I really needed from Anna. I needed connection, that’s all – not perfection, just to feel close to her.

When I went in I gave her a one armed hug because I was carrying my bag with my other hand but then when I was hugging her I really felt the need for a proper ‘holding’ hug so just as we would normally let go I dropped my bag and put my other arm round her. She had begun to let go slightly but then as I hugged with both arms she went in again with a stronger hug. She said, ‘it’s nice to see you’ and I said, ‘you too’. It was so lovely because it showed me that she’s not rushing to get the hug done. She knew it had been a really hard week and I guess she was happy to give me a hug.

When we sat down she said, ‘thank you for your text I really appreciated you telling me about your day on Wednesday,’ she looked kind of emotional and I was wondering if the previous session had been hard or maybe she reread my texts or notes from our last session… I nodded and said I was glad she didn’t mind me texting. She said she was really pleased I’d text. Later on I told her a bit about the funeral and she said she’d been moved to read that I had been able to lower the coffin because she knew I was worried about that. She also apologised for not being able to give me a 90 minutes session and then thanked me for my ‘lovely Christmas card’ with a big smile which was nice. I wish I had talked a bit more about that but I had forgotten I’d given it to her. I wanted to ask if she liked what I’d drawn and if she’d read the back of the card.

I told her that the funeral was really moving, that my dads tribute was amazing and I was really in awe of him for being able to talk about his dad despite it being an obvious struggle for him. I explained that it was really incredible to hear how loved my grandpa was and all the stories of him from so many different people. The woman who walked in front of the hearse (the funeral director) told us she had worked with him before when he was a minister and so it was an emotional job for her that day too. Anna said that was lovely and she sat listening carefully to me as I explained more details of the day and some of the stories people had told me of my grandpa. I explained to Anna that my dad had obviously told the funeral director that I might not want to do the lowering of the coffin on the day because both dad and the lady on separate occasions checked in with me to see if I was okay to do it, which I was. I told her that it felt like the respectful thing to do for my grandpa, after everything he’d done for so many other people, it felt like a privilege to be his granddaughter.

Anna said something like, ‘so it was a good send off but a hard day emotionally?’ I said, ‘I have experienced so many funerals of people very close to me and each time I’ve been overwhelmed by the grief… I thought I was processing the emotions in a healthy way… but actually it was too much for me… this was different. This is the first relative’s funeral since working with you and you know, I’m feeling everything now…’ she nodded encouraging me on. I said, ‘the depth of feelings, it wasn’t overwhelming in the sense that I thought I couldn’t cope but it was devastating – you know I was really in it, I felt like I was fully in my body, like aware of everything, noticed everything… passing the rope between my hands as I lowered Grandpa into the same plot as we buried my grandma 5 years ago but I felt it all this time. I didn’t feel like I was floating away. I don’t know how to describe it but everything felt more real and…’ she said, ‘present? I wonder if what you’re describing is that you’re not as dissociative anymore?’ I felt like mindblown by this, even though it’s obvious and I’ve definitely thought it recently, it just felt so viscerally real in that moment, ‘yes. YES! So much yes… way less dissociative and more present. Wow… and on Thursday when it all really hit me I wished I could switch on the dissociation you know? I wished I could just float away but it doesn’t work that way annoyingly.’ She laughed and said, ‘no, that’s the downside. It’s good that you are more present and don’t feel the need to dissociate away from the feelings anymore but it is fucking agony, I know it feels like it will destroy you at times, I understand, but it does pass, as horrific as it feels in the moment… I mean it’s like everyday life is happening, you could be putting something in the microwave one minute, totally fine and feeling happy and 3 minutes later, the microwave has pinged – you’re flooded, crying your eyes out. That’s grief, it comes in waves.’

I said, ‘yeah… so anyway, that was that!’ which seems to be my go to topic changer when I feel like we’ve spent a bit too long on something that I didn’t want to dominate the whole session with. Anna said, ‘Yeah, so where are you just now?’ I shuffled around and said, ‘well I thought about what I wanted to get out of this session coz obviously it’s the last one before the Christmas holiday and you know the most important thing is that I feel connected to you, which I do so that’s good… um… can you actually sit beside me?’ She nodded and repositioned the chair right beside me, moved the portable heater and settled down.

I explained to Anna what happened on Thursday and that I’d cried with Adam. I said I hadn’t realised how awful and how real the feelings were until I’d got to Friday and I was feeling so much better. I said, ‘you know I invalidate my experience so much when I’m in the middle of feeling shit I feel like I must be making it up or something…’ she said, ‘yes but it’s important to remember that you’re an adult, you don’t need someone else to validate you…’ I sort of glossed over her saying that because it felt a bit rejecting or shaming or something, I’ll need to ask her what she meant. I went on to tell her that on the Friday I thanked Adam for being there for me and for not badgering me with questions or trying to fix anything, just sitting with me through it… no guilt trips. He had said to me that it was okay, that I didn’t need to thank him. I said to him, ‘don’t you wish I was better though? Like not such a fuck up.. I feel like I really failed at parenting yesterday, failed at life actually, don’t you wish I just got on with things…?’ He said he didn’t think I was a failure and that life is just like that sometimes. Anna stopped me as I was explaining this and said, ‘well done Adam’ for being able to support me in a helpful way without being too much or too demanding and she also said, ‘well done’ to me for opening up and letting Adam in when even just earlier in the week I’d told her in made me feel nauseous to think of him comforting me as I cry.

She then said, ‘I think it’s important that at some point we talk about your attitude towards your low feelings… that when you feel low you say you’re a failure, that you’ve failed. We need to work on that.’ I said, ‘but it’s not ideal is it Anna, I’m up in my room crying my eyes out ignoring the kids, not doing the housework, not doing homework, not making the dinner… it’s really not okay!’ Anna said, ‘Lucy! It’s not like you’re doing that every minute of every day. You play with the kids, you take them places, they have food and a lot of fun and laughter… and when you’re struggling, Adam is there to do it. You are not failing them, you’re human..’ I said, ‘but I don’t see other people falling apart like this. In fact the thing that made me cry in the first place was looking out the window and seeing a mum walking her kid home from school outside my window and they were chatting away to each other and she just looked so patient and lovely.’ Anna said, ‘she definitely won’t be like that all the time. People may see you walking outside and think you look like you’ve got all your shit together… we don’t know what is going on for people on the inside or behind closed doors.’ I nodded, I know she’s right.

Side note: I have reflected on this since the session and this is a core belief that will take a lot of work to be properly challenged. ‘I am a failure if I feel things. I am a failure if I get upset. I am a failure if life has to stop so that I can cry/be upset…’ as a kid and teenager I had to cope, I had to keep my feelings and my overwhelm a secret so that everyone continued to tell me I was so brave and so strong and so grown up… if they knew what a failure I was they wouldn’t love me anymore… taking a note of this for work in the new year).

We talked a bit about what I can do over the holidays if things begin to overwhelm me. We listed some things, the blue heart, the necklace (which we were both wearing today), cuddling Luna, going to Adam, talking to friends, writing… Anna suggested I take some time to go outside over the holidays as well, go for a walk before dinner or something. She said, ‘I know you like going to the loch where you live so maybe you could go there and look at the birds, take the kids with you and let them burn off some of their excess energy…’

We had about twenty minutes to go and I said, ‘I had two dreams about you since our last session…’ Anna said, ‘oh that sounds ominous!’ and laughed. I proceeded to tell her about the dreams. Both of them were sessions and they were both realistic, not abstract like a lot of my dreams. Anna said, ‘I don’t really know much about dreams, I don’t analyse them, I know that sometimes with dreams they can be have a great deal of meaning and sometimes not so much.’ I said, ‘okay well I think their meanings are quite obvious… there’s no hidden meanings!’ I explained, ‘the first dream, we were in session, you were sitting next to me and you told me that you were changing your career and that we had 6 sessions to work to an end… I just felt myself totally shut down to you…’ Anna said, ‘okay lets look at that dream for a bit…’ silence… I said, ‘um… well obviously this is a familiar fear…’ she said, ‘yes, so… and how does it apply here, to us now?’ I said, ‘um… well, it was just a dream so it’s not reality but… well I guess I don’t know what’s going on in your life so… it could be in the future?’ She said, ‘yes, it’s just a dream and it’s not reality… I don’t have any plans for stopping. If for some reason we had to stop working together that wasn’t within your control, we would spend a lot of time on working to an end… how does that feel to hear?’ I said, ‘um, well I know it’s meant to be reassuring but it feels scary, I don’t like it… that’s what happens in my dream, that’s what the 6 sessions was all about.’ Anna said, ‘we would have a lot more than 6 sessions, unless it was completely taken out of my control!’ I said that was good.

There was a bit of a pause and I could tell she was thinking. She then said, ‘this feels like that young part, maybe 4, maybe younger… the one who hides behind the chair and peeks out every so often. It may feel okay for your adult but don’t forget your child parts this Christmas. Two weeks feels like a lifetime to a 4 year old and ‘see you next year’ sounds very scary. Little Lucy has been coming out a little more in sessions and maybe she’s scared because just as she’s started to let me in a bit we’re approaching a break. All the things we adults have planned on talking about ‘next year’… I wonder if she needs reassurance? How does that sound?’ I took a big breath and felt such warmth for her. I love how she does this… I said, ‘yes, that could be it… I know I’m meant to say to myself ‘it’s okay, I won’t leave you, I’m always going to be here’… but that’s not what she wants!’ She nodded and said, ‘Remind your child we will see each other again soon and I will not forget about you during the holiday.’ I said, ‘I know that this is just meant to be like a drop in and out type thing… therapy… but it’s not like that for me… the important thing IS the relationship, it’s spending all this time building up trust… and I think coz Paul stopped before I was ready to stop with him… it just feels so important that I get to do this for as long as I need to.’ Anna was listening and nodding and she said, ‘I agree, it’s very important, it’s not a drop in thing… this is how we are working, the relationship is where the work is. The building up the trust, it’s very important.’

Anna asked me how I felt about not having contact over Christmas. I said that I’d been talking to some other therapy goers online about how they feel about Christmas breaks. I said, ‘I don’t find the Christmas break as hard as like when you go on holiday because it doesn’t feel like a total vacuum, I’ll be busy you know? We’re both off, it just feels different… I know that some people feel angry at their therapists for spending time with their families or jealous maybe but I don’t feel like that. Unless it’s very deeply supressed and I’m not aware of it yet, I don’t want to be part of your family, I don’t want to know what you’re doing over Christmas, I like that our relationship exists solely in this room, it feels safe and contained and protected like my sessions are anchors… like between the sessions I’m swimming and sometimes drowning and then you throw me a line or an anchor in the form of a session, sometimes when we have a break the line is pulled further away from me and it gets harder to cope by myself but at least I can see it in the distance… does that make sense?’ Anna said, ‘yes it makes total sense, maybe in the new year we could talk about some of your thoughts of me outside this room or what you’ve thought about my family, what the experience of knowing nothing feels like for you…’ I said, ‘yeah I mean it’s not like I haven’t wondered, I have thought about what your family might be like but maybe it’s because I experienced the opposite with Paul, I know how agonising it is to know about his family and it still hurts to think about his kids… I don’t want that here, you know? This feels more special like it’s just you and me in here…’ I sort of looked at her and smiled a little and she smiled back and nodded. She said it made sense that because I had experienced very loose boundaries with Tom it made sense that I felt comforted and safe within her clear boundaries. As I sit here typing this up I felt a millisecond burst of utter grief when I thought about her cozy at home right now with her family, maybe snuggled up on the sofa altogether laughing or something but the image burst in and out very quickly… I think it is the very efficient protective part of me that’s blocking the thought of her outside my beautifully sterile relationship with her. I can imagine it will be very difficult to talk about this with her but also very interesting.

I then said, ‘so the second dream was also a session in here. In the dream we were sitting next to each other again and I told you that I had been thinking about showing you my um… the scars on my arms and I said that I was annoyed because I wanted you to see them like they were when I was 14 or 15 years old because they’ve healed so well and you can’t really see just how bad it was. So you handed me a red pen and suggested I show you what it looked like back then. So I drew all over my arms where all the cuts used to be with you watching…’ She said, ‘have you been thinking about this recently, showing me your scars?’ and I said, ‘well, not really recently but um… well I do think I’d want to do that at some point you know not with the pen but..’ she interrupted and said, ‘you think you’d want to show me?’ and I said, ‘yeah maybe at some point yeah… but well I guess recently, well on Thursday I was really triggered and um, I guess it’s the inner critic who hands me these images immediately as soon as I’m in that place mentally she’s right there with pictures of blades on my skin like ‘here, try this, it’s your only option, do it, it’ll feel better!’ and I guess I remember the last time I was really badly triggered and I told you I wished I had cut myself so you’d know how shit I’d felt and you said, ‘you don’t need to hurt yourself for me to know how much pain you’re in’ and you know it was so powerful, I even wrote it down, it really touched me and stayed with me, so on Thursday I was thinking…’ she interrupted and said, ‘it’s not your only option anymore!’ and I said, ‘yeah, it’s absolutely not my only option, and also… I have ways I can communicate myself now and you believe me, you understand me and that’s helped me believe me and I understand myself better now…’ she said, ‘and you know how to ask for what you need and you know what you need.’ I smiled at her. ‘So maybe all of that was in my head and that’s why I dreamed it.’ She said we could definitely pick up on this over the next few months.

At the end, when we were doing the usual ‘what are you doing for the rest of the weekend’ chat, I sort of paused and said, ‘um… soooo…. Uhhh I just wanted to say….’ I put my shoes on then awkwardly, while bent over putting my shoes on I thanked Anna for sticking by me the past two years, for her patience, for believing in me. She said, ‘you’re so welcome. Thank you for saying that.’ I said, ‘you know, it’s really important to me, all of this.’ She said, ‘Lucy, I know I am important to you, but you are also very important to me… did that go in? Is everyone listening?’ I laughed and said, ‘a part of me doesn’t believe you.’ She smiled and said, ‘yeah I get that, but I’m not talking to that part! You know, I admire your determination and consistency. You have religiously come back, week in week out, despite how painful this is – because you are dedicated to feeling better… dedicated to working through this. Thank you for letting me come along for the journey!’

She asked me how I was feeling and I said I felt good. I said, ‘you know I think I’m going to be okay, it’s gonna be fine – this break.’ She smiled and it was a sort of calm moment of quiet between us and she said, ‘yeah, I think so too Lucy.’

Jan 18th 2018 Session 10

After getting massively worked up this past week (following the last session) and sending Anna the text telling her how I was feeling, I spent the morning feeling so anxious and nervous about the session. Imagined just texting saying I wasn’t going to come. I did go though. Sat in the car for fifteen minutes before my session getting more and more worried. I rang the buzzer and Anna answered quite quickly compared to usual. I was so fucking nervous, my heart was pounding and my breathing all weird. I could barely look at her. She said something about it being really wet today and I muttered that I was going to dump my bag and jacket, which I did, then I went to the toilet.

So the session started with me sitting awkwardly trying to regulate my breathing and Anna asked if she could turn the recorder on. I nodded and she asked how I was. I sort of widened my eyes and shrugged – ‘pretty nervous’ – is all I managed. She said, ‘I just want to start by saying that I was really moved by your email,’ she went on to say how pleased she was that the session had meant so much to me and that it had meant a lot to her too. That really surprised me. She then said, ‘ I was surprised to receive your text, you had sounded so positive in the email. I’d been wondering how you were after the session because you’d said it was an intense session and so I was pleased to get the email and to hear you were doing well.’ I felt really uncomfortable – it’s so hard to trust her. I felt like saying, ‘why are you saying this to me, is this a trick?’ It is so hard to trust anyone. But I held with it. She said that maybe my inner child was getting mad at not getting responses to messages. That it was hard to not get a reply and that it feels like when I was a kid and I’d be really excited about something and it would fall flat or mum wouldn’t share my joy. She said that it’s important she doesn’t reply because I could misinterpret what she writes, that I need to see her and see her face and that the way she is speaking is genuine. That it might not feel authentic if she wrote it in a reply. But that she understands it’s really hard and that it’s okay to be angry about that.

She told me that she was concerned when she received my text and sad to hear I was feeling overwhelmed but also said something about me being careful about how I word things when I’m texting her. She asked what I had meant when I said I thought she would tell me off. I said, ‘it’s not like I literally thought you would tell me off, it’s like I thought anything you say, I wouldn’t believe it was genuine… but I guess I do believe you’re being genuine, but its like I thought you would say ‘thanks for sending the email. I was pleased to read that you felt the session went well, but its probably not a good idea to send emails like that so could we just stick to talking about all this in session’ – and although it’s not directly being told off, it is like a rejection, I would be able to just see it on your face, just a subtle change in the way you look at me or the way you speak, I’d know you were getting sick of me and didn’t want to work with me any more.’

Anna asked me what I had been feeling when I sent the email and I said I’d felt really good, that I was happy and felt good about it all. She said she could sense that. She said my inner child was really excited to be allowed out, to be seen and understood. So what happened..? I said that the inner critic took over – ‘don’t be fucking stupid, she doesn’t really care. She has to care for that hour she works with you but don’t try to infiltrate her life between sessions, she doesn’t want to hear about this between sessions. Like in the sessions it’s just you saying what you need to say to get the client better or something.’ She said, ‘do you think I don’t think about you between sessions?’ I was kind of taken aback by this like my breath was taken. I said, ‘well I kind of didn’t think that you would..?’ she stayed quiet just looking at me and I felt confused and sort of reluctant to ask, but I did ask… ‘do you?’ in a voice that was so much more quiet than I expected. She nodded with an open expression, ‘yes I think about you, wonder how you’re getting on… don’t you work with kids and maybe they tell you something and it makes you think about how they are when you’re at home?’ I said that I did but didn’t think I was worth thinking about. This moment was agony.

I said that I felt the same with Paul, that it’s like – ‘therapist has a set of things they need to say. Say you care or whatever, just to get the client ‘healed’ then you can hurry up and stop working with me.’ she said, ‘well hurrying up is not on the agenda. It’s really important that you tell me when you’re feeling like that.’ I said I felt like I’d been trying to be this ideal client and just to be good and say the right things, that I did find the boundaries hard. I said that I should probably talk more about Paul at some point, because I feel like he was not as boundaried as her. On one hand I liked it and on the other hand I felt like it wasn’t good for me. She made a note of that. I said that although I totally understand why the boundaries are there, that they make total sense and that in a professional sense I am the same with the kids I work with, but that on some other level it hurts… ‘like isn’t there something in transactional analysis about strokes or something and like even a negative response is better than no response at all? So I felt in the past like I might as well just not even bother sending a message if I’m going to get nothing back because it’s worse in some way… why give me the offer of allowing texts if it’s just going to hurt me when you don’t reply?’ she listened and understood but didn’t really answer.

I said I was worried about whether I was distracting us from the main things we’re meant to talk about by making up all these fake issues, that she had asked at one point what we actually talked about with Paul and how it was mainly this kind of thing. Like me emailing him, getting worked up between sessions, talking that through, and how I can see the value of that but also it annoys me I wish I could just get on with the stuff I’m meant to be talking about. She said, ‘but do you think this is all fake? It doesn’t feel fake to me, it feels important and real, you’re not making it up.’ I said, ‘oh no, sorry I guess not… um maybe I mean that its like all invented stuff in my head.’ She said it was okay (as in, don’t apologise) and talked a bit about the restorative relationship and how worthwhile this kind of conversation actually was. She said if she felt like I was getting side tracked from what we had discussed then yes she would bring me back to focus but she feels that all that we discussed so far is definitely worthwhile.

I’m sure the conversation moved on and I was talking about something else when Anna asked directly, ‘so, this has been a hard week, did you cut yourself?’ I couldn’t believe she just came straight out with it. I said, ‘no,’ with a slight smile and shook my head. She sort of looked at me for a while and said, ‘what would cutting have done for you?’ I said, ‘um well one part of me is like working really hard to use everything I’ve learned over recent years to stay grounded and mindful and on top of things and then the inner critic is just like pulling all that down and criticising it all. That side won, I just felt like all the emotions were just so much bigger than me. Like I just couldn’t pull it all together. You know, I have a life I need to get on with, kids relying on me and work and everything, I just know that when I’m struggling like that and I’m way up here, the only way… the quickest simplest way to bring me back down is to cut. It just immediately works. Then I could just get on with life again and be what I need to be. You know? Och I don’t know that sounds really stupid. But that’s just how I felt.’ Anna said, ‘You’re explaining it really well. I understand. I’m really glad you were able to keep yourself safe.’ She said she knew that it was very difficult and that I had obviously made a commitment to telling her when I felt like cutting and she appreciated that I had done that. I said a part of me was like, ‘don’t tell her that! Once you tell her then you won’t be able to actually do it!’ She said something about how I’ve found something that works, that texting her works and stops me from doing it and so for now that’s a good thing. I agreed.

Anna then asked if I did draw to try to help me calm down. Conversation went like this…

Her – ‘did you draw?’

Me – ‘oh, yeah, uh hu’

Her – ‘what did you draw?’

Me – ‘um, well… do you want to see? I have a picture on my phone.’

Her – ‘oh yeah, yes!’

Me – ‘oh my god that makes me feel so nervous, it’s almost worse than sharing the hard stuff!’

Her – ‘yeah, I can understand that!’

… so I got my phone out and got it onto the picture. Anna said that she couldn’t draw for toffee, ‘if that helps you feel any better’. I wish I’d said she just didn’t have the right teacher but I didn’t think quick enough. So I leaned over and passed her the phone. Anna sat and looked at the picture for ages with a smile and said, ‘oh wow! That’s really brilliant! Oh I love it. I love the colours, you have a real talent!’ I felt so awkward by this point and didn’t know where to look – I was sort of smiling and looking around and thanked her and said, ‘it’s so weird I just find this so hard like I don’t know how to take all that I want to leave the room… like I feel like the critical voice is just saying ‘och it’s not that good, nothing special, there’s so much I could change and improve. Don’t be full of yourself.’ Anna said, ‘but whose voice is that?’ I said, ‘hmmm but mum wouldn’t really say that, she would say something like… (closed my eyes to concentrate)… she’d say, ‘oh that’s lovely (in a sickly voice), of course you get your artistic talent from me.’ or something like ‘yeah I could do something like that if I had the right materials or time but I’m too busy doing the housework’ or whatever – you know like taking it away from me.’ Anna said, ‘she effectively is saying that then, by saying you get it from her or that she could do it she’s saying it’s nothing special and taking the pride away from you.’ That made sense to me.

Anna said, ‘That mumma bear stuff really meant something to you didn’t it? It really had an impact!’ I said it did. She said, ‘I hope you’ve got that picture framed on the wall!’ and I told her it was still in the art pad. She suggested I get it printed on a cushion or something and put it on my bed. I quite like that idea, I think I will! Anna then said, ‘it was a really meaningful session for me too, it felt special.’ I said, ‘yeah it did feel meaningful, I felt like um like I was closer to you or you were closer to me or something, like I felt understood by you.’ Anna said, ‘yeah there was a connection, I felt that.’ That was so validating, oh my god – SO AMAZING! I really feel like she actually does care about me and that she enjoys working with me. I can feel something shifting in me… this could be really beneficial for me – this relationship, it feels like it could be a really positive, healing experience. But there’s a fear there, it’s frightening to let go and trust.

Anna asked what kind of conversations I was having in my head with her and I talked about worrying that she would be annoyed with the email. I talked about how I really wanted to work on being authentic and that with Paul I spent so much time shitting myself about the work we were doing together that I would go over and over stuff through the week and rehearse what I might say so that I would feel the emotions at home by myself, maybe cry on my own, then by the time I spoke to him I didn’t feel anything anymore. That I don’t want to do that with her. She talked about how it makes sense that I was doing that because I didn’t want to be blindsided. She said, ‘It’s like an interview where you learn what you want to say and it feels good but you’re knocked sideways when you get a question you weren’t expecting.’ She said that in Transactional Analysis they work on contracts so each session I decide what we will focus on for that session. She asked if I wanted to talk about the snakes card or keep talking about all this. I said we could maybe do the snakes chat but if it seems to be taking a while we could split it. She said the session about the bear was slow to get started then got quite in depth and she had worried that I felt overwhelmed when I went away so maybe we could spend 25 minutes talking about the snakes card then have ten minutes to come down afterwards.

So she handed me the snake card and I looked at it, ‘yeah I really hate this picture… what am I meant to say about it?’ she reminded me that was the one I didn’t like and just to say what I noticed about it. There is something awkward about that moment, what do I actually say?? I said, ‘well I guess I don’t like snakes very much, they’re adders – even worse coz they’re poisonous… um well I don’t have a big problem with snakes, I held a snake when we were on holiday with the kids… but anyway… so I don’t like that there are two of them, like they could gang up on me. And snakes can like squeeze you and bite you, like they can sort of get in at you… something about them getting in at your boundaries. She said, ‘because they can sort of get in anywhere?’ and motioned her hands in a zig zag way and I nodded. I said, ‘fuck its so weird how this just gets right to the heavy shit straight away…’ I said, ‘you know your home is meant to be this safe place that like holds you and protects you from anything dangerous, and like your parents are meant to reinforce that protection. I just never felt safe with her. She didn’t protect me. You know, your body is meant to feel like a safe place. That safety… I never had it.’ I was getting kind of worked up and Anna made agreeable noises like she compassionately understood what I meant… even if I didn’t really know what I meant.

I said, ‘I feel like I spent a lot of time on my own. Like when I was 5 or 6, maybe 4 and we lived in the tenement flat and there were like rows of gardens out the back and I used to be out there on my own for what felt like hours. Like I didn’t feel like I could go back in the house or something. I remember playing out the alley way in a skip with some random kid who was also out there. You know but mum was so inconsistent like sometimes she would not want me around and sometimes she would be overly anxious about where I was and come out screaming searching for me. I remember wandering over across the gardens to where there was this old man. It ended up I used to go and help him dig his potatoes in his allotment but I so vividly remember the first time I met him, ran across and spoke to him. Then mum came running across the gardens shouting my name and was so gushy, holding my face and like acting so worried. Led me back to the flat. She always acted so overly loving in front of people.’ Anna asked me what she was like when we got back home and away from people. I said, ‘I don’t remember in that particular instant but I can imagine she would either have gone back to ignoring me or maybe been really angry. Both mum and dad really struggled with like containing their feelings and would rage. They’d get so angry, they couldn’t control themselves. She would maybe have lectured me about wandering off and talking to strangers… but she just left me out there on my own, you know?’

I said, ‘there are quite a few sort of weird memories that like we all used to laugh about as if it was funny… like this time when I was in P1 and mum took me to school when it was a bank holiday and left me there when there was no one else there.’ Anna said, ‘what? That’s awful, you must have been terrified, how old were you?’ I said I would have been about 5 – primary one. She said, ‘poor little Lucy standing there at the school gates with no one else there that must have been so scary. What happened?’ I said I remember feeling a bit frightened when the door wouldn’t open and then I don’t remember much else but I know that the cleaner drove me home. But I explained how we would all laugh about that as if it was funny, how mum would have just said it was an accident or that it wasn’t that big of a deal… Anna asked if I believed that, that it was just an accident. I said, ‘she didn’t give a shit about me, it was easier for her if I wasn’t there.’ Anna said, ‘and that hurts, that’s hard to say… it’s easier to say it was an accident, it’s hard to imagine she didn’t care.’ I said, ‘it just illustrates how far down the list of priorities I was. I mean there’s loads of stories like that… like they used to put my sandwiches in a margarine tub, which is sad in itself, they couldn’t buy me a fucking packed lunch box… and one day they actually gave me the margarine tub for lunch instead of the one with my sandwiches in… (I was laughing a bit but Anna looked serious), I mean, it was obviously a mistake… but I just felt really crap.’ Anna asked what mum’s reaction was and I said, ‘probably just that it all worked out fine, that I still had something to eat, a school dinner…’ we talked a bit about how mum didn’t give me the responses I needed. I talked about how when I’ve forgotten to put my daughters water in her bag I’ve gone out of my way to get it to her, gone back up to her school to give it to her. Anna said, ‘because you could imagine how she would feel when she went into her bag and saw it wasn’t there.’ I agreed.

I said, ‘I mean, another thing that’s laughed about a lot is how like when mum used to take me to playgroup she says I enjoyed it, I do remember enjoying it, then she would collect me and bring me home and I would drag my wee red chair into the corner of the room and ignore her, she says for an hour… and they would laugh about that, like how funny it was that at 3 or 4 I was punishing mum or whatever… but I just feel like, what I’ve read about attachment, that just screams of like I didn’t feel safe with mum, like so I felt rejected or abandoned or whatever but I couldn’t go to her and she didn’t try to see what was wrong, it was easier for her to leave me to it and just get on with whatever she was doing. If I was sitting on that chair I was at least out of the way. I mean I would go to my daughter if that happened now and read her behaviour and try to work out what was wrong…’ Anna agreed and we talked a bit about the mis-attunement.  

‘I hid quite a lot. I would hide if they were really angry.’ Anna said, ‘where did you used to hide?’ And I said, ‘well it depends which house we lived in… but you know like under the bed… in the wardrobe…’ She repeated that back to me stating that they were my safe places then asked me where my safe place in my house is now. I said, ‘well there is nowhere I can go that I won’t be followed!’ she said, ‘but being followed is different from being safe.’ And I said, ‘oh right yeah well my whole house feels safe.’ We exchanged a smile and she said, ‘your whole house feels safe.’ And I said, ‘yeah and my kids never hide from me! Unless we’re playing hide and seek!’ and she smiled.

There’s something else about this picture but I feel like I don’t really want to say that just now… (Anna told me to take my time) ‘sooo…. Um yeah’ – lots of hesitation then Anna said, ‘what is it that makes you reluctant?’ I said, ‘it’s um a pretty heavy topic, and embarrassing, like… just difficult to talk about…’ there was a gap and then Anna mirrored, ‘you feel like it’s quite a heavy thing to talk about. Embarrassing.’ I said, ‘yeah… um well it’s just. There’s something phallic about the picture or the snakes… or like the tall stone thing (I turned the card to her so she could see) – it’s pretty phallic. She said, ‘so there’s something sexual about it?’ and I said, ‘hhhmmm yeah well male.’ I paused and said, ‘yeah I really don’t like this picture.’ She said she could tell and I said, ‘I get why it makes me feel this way, you know… there’s obviously stuff there about this kind of thing but I’m just definitely not ready to talk about that at all.’ She said, ‘yeah stuff that’s not to do with your mum and dad?’ and I nodded… she said, ‘there’s no rushing this, you talk about things when you are ready to talk.’

I said, ‘there’s something I want to bring up, and I know it’s nearly time to stop, I just want to say… you asked me a question twice and I struggled to answer directly and I don’t know why. I mentioned to my brother, about how you’d asked me if mum and dad had every hurt me or whatever and I’d said they hadn’t… maybe I was ashamed, I feel weird about it because they treated my brother so differently to the way they treated me.’ Anna said, ‘so shall we bring that up next time then?’ I said, ‘yes lets!’ sarcastically and she overlooked my tone and said, ‘so they did hurt you… physically?’ I nodded.

This was the first session where I felt a connection with Anna.

It was our 9^th session.

Jan 6^th 2018

I wished her a happy new year and asked if she had a good break. She said she had and asked how our Christmas was. I said it was okay – lots of sickness with chicken pox and vomiting etc. I said Christmas was always bitter sweet for me because I enjoy it with the kids but have some unhappy memories of Christmas as a kid.

Anna asked if I was still up for doing the picture card activity that we’d discussed before the break. She had laid the cards out over the sofa and table. I was so touched she’d remembered and stayed true to her word. I smiled and said I was up for it. It felt a bit strange like maybe I felt awkward and embarrassed about being into it… it’s a bit of an ‘out there’ type thing to do – we never did anything like this with Paul. There’s actually something so endearing about the fact that she shamelessly set it all up… I don’t know how to articulate it but it had a sort of innocent optimism about it. Like a safety.  

I stood up, felt my skin burn with embarrassment as I became so visible to her standing up and walking over to the sofa. I looked at the cards and Anna gently asked me to choose one that I liked and one that I didn’t like. I commented on how beautiful the cards were and she agreed and told me to take my time, no rush to choose. I see a few that I like but I’m drawn to the bear as one I love and the intertwined snakes as one I really hate. I brought them back to my seat.

Anna took a note of them and asked me to start with the Bear. She said, ‘tell me what you notice about it.’ Sat poised with her notepad and pen. I feel a pressure to come up with something clever and perceptive. I want to impress her. I don’t know what to say.

I sat uncomfortable in the seat directly opposite her. Feeling her gaze bore into me I said, ‘it looks like a warm and strong bear… that’s all I have!’ She smiled and said, ‘take your time…’ and I just thought what else is there? I said, ‘um… it looks like a caring and protective bear and reminds me of how I am with my kids.’ Sort of with a questioning tone as if checking with her that it’s the kind of answer she’s looking for. She asked what I notice about the colours and just anything else I might notice about the card itself, not just the bear. I said, ‘I like the blue, it’s my favourite colour… um… she looks like she has a kind face… ummmm…. it’s kind of Christmassy which I don’t like so much, the snow is okay, snow can be fun as long as you don’t have to drive in it. But the border is a bit Christmassy… that’s okay though, I guess.’ Anna said, ‘you have some unhappy memories from Christmas?’ Sudden burst of panic in my chest and down my arms. I wanted to leave the room. Couldn’t even look at her.

Eventually, reluctantly this triggered a conversation about some of my memories and feelings of Christmas. Memories of feeling guilty for receiving presents, for mum and dad having no money. That they would go on and on about how much they’d spent on Christmas and that they couldn’t really afford it. That I was made to feel lucky for everything I’d received even though I never really got anything I wanted (because I would never have asked for what I wanted)… I always felt so undeserving. I then jumped out of that sombre mood and switched to a more lively, defensive tone, ‘I did have some happy memories of Christmas. I had fun with my brother, mum and dad did buy us stuff… maybe they did their best… it could have been worse… it wasn’t total neglect…. I feel guilty talking badly about them, family loyalty is high up in my values. With Paul it took so long before I could talk about my mum and dad, I just feel so awful about it.’ Anna said she understood that it was difficult. I said I’m sure they tried their best and that they weren’t happy and that I’m sure mum has something like bi-polar or borderline or something and she struggles and it’s not her fault. Anna said none of this is about apportioning blame, that she isn’t judging them or me… that it’s important for me to share anything I want to share.

I talked about there always being arguments, that it was hard not being at school over the holidays – school was my safe place, I had teachers I talked to regularly at secondary school, ‘being at home and not being able to go to school was difficult. I missed the consistency, the safety.’ Anna was nodding and looked understanding. It was hurting to think about it actually, I didn’t realise I felt like that. I explained how holidays when everyone was at home all the time was like a pressure cooker. That if there were arguments or if I back answered them or something they would say I was so ungrateful and that I didn’t appreciate everything they’d done for me. Anna asked if I still felt undeserving of I receive gifts and I thought a bit and said, ‘yeah I do feel a bit like that. It maybe gets less every year but there’s still something there.’ I said that my husband had grown up with very little and has this scarcity complex type thing where he just thinks we shouldn’t buy each other things at all. Anna asked if it was just for Christmas or birthdays as well and I said all the time. He doesn’t ever buy things. I’m sure she’ll bring that up later!

Somehow we moved on to talking about mum talking to me like I was an adult my whole life – uncensored, unfiltered, not age appropriate. I said, ‘The first time I really remember doing this was when my cat died. He’d been ill and there had been lots of tests and medicine but nothing worked. I was twelve and he was a really special cat, he was my companion. He used to sleep on my bed and I’d talk to him. It seemed like mum totally fell apart. It was never really about the cat for her, she was mad or sad about something else, maybe her failing marriage. But she would sob and I would comfort her. We had to go to the vet and have my cat put down and she couldn’t handle it, she wanted to leave him there but I just felt like that was so wrong to leave him there on his own. So I sat with him and held him, even though I had a phobia of needles, I looked away as they injected him, then sat on my own holding him as he slipped away. And for weeks and weeks she grieved that cat, even though she’d never cared about him. And I comforted her, because that’s what I’m good at – being there for people. No one asked how I was doing with it all. They just presumed I was fine.’

Anna said, ‘that’s so sad Lucy, I’m so sorry that happened.’ I find it hard to believe her when she says things like that. It just sounds so empty to me. Or maybe it’s me that’s empty. I said, ‘I remember that was the first time I had gone to speak with my guidance teacher. She sat there with her note pad and pen poised, ready for me to talk. I didn’t really know what to say so I just said I was sad because my cat had died and she looked at me as if to say, ‘that’s it?’ She didn’t get it and neither did I. I didn’t know that the feeling I had was bigger than just my cat dying. That it was a total lack of anyone caring for me. That I was alone. That I was miserable all the time on the inside. I thought my mum was amazing, I thought my family was amazing…’ Anna said, ‘it’s all we know so we believe it’s normal.’ I said, ‘but it was more than that, it was like a cult – we were brainwashed to believe we are the best, this is the best family, the best mum, there are these truths you are taught to believe and there’s no other way of thinking.’ She wrote something down… maybe I chose the wrong words. I wonder what she wrote.

We went on to talk about the times mum would talk and talk at me about her life. How much I loved that time because when I was listening to her and talking to her about her, she was looking at me and hearing and seeing me, telling me, ‘oh you’re so wise Lucy, where did you get all this wisdom? You know just what to do and say to make me feel better…’ I looked at Anna and said, ‘I threw my heart and soul into her, I bought her self-help books with my pocket money, I made her mood boards and cut out quotes and inspirational things from magazines and I printed stuff out for her about mental health and I helped her make doctors appointments and suggested she get counselling. Then at about 17 when I couldn’t take it any more, when I felt like all we ever did was talk about the same things over and over again and said to her, ‘we’ve been over this, these are the things I’ve suggested I don’t know how else to say it!’ she got so mad at me. How I was so selfish and didn’t I see that she needed me.’ Anna said again it was sad… I hate that word! It’s not SAD! It’s shitty, it’s vomit inducing, its unbearable… it’s not fucking sad!

I said, ‘I remember you said to me in the last session that the child works hard to try to help the parent in the hope that the parent will eventually be well enough to be a good enough mother. It’s about survival.’ She nodded. I said, ‘I remember when I was in my mid teens – 14 or something – I said to mum…’ I laughed at this point and said to Anna… ‘why on earth I thought it was a good idea to say this to mum… it was such a provocative thing to say… I said how when she said horrible things to me I imagined I had like a Perspex bubble around me like a protective forcefield, that her words were like daggers and spears that would hit off the shield.’ I looked at Anna and said how weird it was that I should say that to mum and not to someone else, I said it was such an aggravating thing to say and she agreed it was a provoking thing to say but she wondered why I would say it, ‘what do you think you hoped would happen?’ I said, ‘that she would have a personality transplant and suddenly say oh I’m so sorry that you are hurt by what I’ve done, ill never do it again… and maybe hug me or something!’ ‘And that didn’t happen?’ Anna asked. ‘Nope! She said ‘thanks very much! I’m your mother and I love you and nothing I do can harm you!’ she was so angry and full of rage. Anna nodded knowingly and said, ‘that’s so sad. Lucy, that is so sad.’ Still I feel nothing.

Anna asked me if I have ever said to my mum, ‘can you be there for me now?’ I said, ‘NO! I’ve never said that… why would I? I can’t trust her. She would belittle or invalidate what I said.’ Anna interrupted me and said, ‘or she would tell people what you had told her,’ I agreed – ‘exactly! She told people everything, even right in front of me, or on the phone, she would talk about things I had told her in confidence. So I learned to never share anything of me with her. I cut off my feelings and emotions, I just thought with my head, helped her by being ‘grown up’ and not being ‘childish and emotional’ I just focused on her.’ Anna said, ‘do you think you consciously shut down your feelings? Deliberately stopped the emotions?’ I said I did think that happened. She wrote something down again.

We talked a bit about when we would visit my grandparents. That it was a two hour drive deep into the countryside, we’d often make at the weekends. I explained that dad would often sit in the other room for the whole weekend and I would sit up with the other adult women, involved in all the adult conversations. Topics ranging from violent news stories, tv soap storylines, family affairs, gossip… I said, ‘I felt important and very much part of the group and conversation. I was the youngest one there by a long way and it made me feel special and like I belonged in their family. It was like being accepted into the mean girls gang… better to be inside the gang than on the outside being their victim… quite often we would all bitch about the male members of the family, often mocking and demonising my dad. I hate that I played a part in this. But these conversations would last for hours, them all smoking cigarettes and drinking around me. But then this weird thing would happen. I’d feel an overwhelm come over me and I’d have to go to the bathroom. I would then get all shaky all over my body, like proper all over body jitters (it felt like the shock my body went into after I had a serious car accident and I was lying on a stretcher with a neck brace on violently shaking on the table)… then, standing in the bathroom trying to stifle the shakes, I would burst into silent sobs on my own.’ Anna asked if I was away for a long time and I said I must have been because I was crying my fucking eyes out. ‘Even my brother remembers noticing it once and feeling like everyone was just acting like it was a normal thing that Lucy did sometimes.’ I sort of laughed and said, ‘I mean, that’s not normal! Why would no one come to me? Why would no one think, hmmm there’s something wrong here!’

Anna checks in on how I’m feeling all the time, asking for physical check ins and emotional ones. She asked, ‘how’s thing doing here?’ and pointed to her stomach. I said I wasn’t feeling anything in my stomach I was feeling it ‘here’ and I pointed to the centre of my chest. She mirrored me (like she often does – mirrors my breathing when I have a big inhale/exhale or mirrors when I change my head tilt from one side to the other) she pointed to her chest and said, ‘here’ in confirmation. I know she’s trying to align herself with me so she can figure out how I’m feeling and how I work but also so I feel like she understands me, so that I trust her. I wish I didn’t have this much understanding of the therapy process… it steals the wonder from it a bit. I’m overthinking every fucking detail. She asked what it feels like and I said I didn’t really know what it was, ‘is it anxiety? It’s like flight or fight, like it hurts in the centre and bursts out and down my arms…’ she said, ‘so it’s like panic – a panicky feeling that if you let someone in they might hurt you. You want to trust people but you don’t want to be hurt. A part of you is panicking because you are sharing so much with me.’ Yep – that just about sums it up! Wow.

I talked about mum’s behaviours changing when she would move in and out of relationships. That she was relatively stable when we were growing up but when dad left she totally changed. It was like she was a different person. With these different guys she had relationships with she became so obsessed with them she even lost interest in eating. She lost loads of weight and forgot all about us. I talked about how I just held everything together. Made sure we were fed. Would get angry with mum when she was out all night and came home at like 3am. Anna asked how I felt when she did that and I said I just felt totally responsible for her and my brother and like I was an adult, then I checked myself and quietly said, ‘no that’s not a feeling that’s a thought…hmmm.’ I then said after some thought, ‘I felt frightened. Frightened and alone. There was no one looking after us.’ Anna said it was sad. She said a few times through the session that things were sad.

We got back to talking about the Bear. Anna said because we’d talked about difficult things and there was just under twenty minutes left we would leave the snake just now and that she would bring the cards back next time. She assured me we would revisit it next session if I still wanted to.

She said, ‘You know Lucy… I think that bear is you.’ I just stared at her and back at the picture of the bear. She said, ‘You’ve had to be that strong, protective bear to your inner child your whole life. Protecting her from your mum and from all the hurt and the pain. You’ve had to do that since you were very small.’ I looked at the bear and at Anna and really felt like that was true, felt so touched that she had said all that. She continued, ‘I was really touched when you said the bear remined you of yourself then later you said she had a kind face.’ I smiled, it feels nice to imagine that is maybe what she sees in me.

Anna said something about how no one had shown an interest in me and how I was doing and asked, ‘how does it feel for you when I ask you about your feelings? When I say that it was sad?’ I said, ‘well I’m getting really frustrated with myself because I want to feel this, I’m totally intellectualising still, I mean, I can say – it’s sad! Yeah, it’s sad! But I don’t feel it… I’m so annoyed that I’m not feeling this! Well I mean I am feeling something, sitting here with you.’ She said, ‘what are you feeling?’ I said, ‘well, I’m noticing that I’m starting to care about what you might think of me and I don’t like that feeling. It started way earlier with Paul, like from day one I had this almost infantile need for him, like a push and pull of wanting to need him and wanting to like him then wanting to not need him and wanting to not care what he thought, like I was going mad.’ She then said, ‘what do you think I might think of you?’ This kind of question makes me squirm. After searching the room and her face for an answer I looked at my feet and muttered something about her maybe thinking I was self-obsessed… that she must help people with really awful problems, terrible lives, way worse than mine. That I have a good life and a lovely family and job… that I should just be happy with it and get on with my life. Anna looked kind of thoughtful and concerned. She said, ‘that’s your mum talking that’s not you talking, those are your mums words – you should get on with it, get over it… of course there will always be hundreds of people worse off than us but we can’t compare ourselves.’ She said, ‘Do you want to know what I think of you?’ As much as I wanted to crawl behind my chair and say, ‘no not really!’ I hear a voice come out of my voice before I could push it back inside, ‘Yes please!’ Anna said, ‘okay, I think you’re a young woman who works really hard to try to make the right decisions with everything she does…(I can’t remember some bits she said)… and it’s like you are trying to rewire your brain, it’s not that it doesn’t come naturally, it’s that you feel like you can’t trust that instinct and you need to rewire what you were taught with everything you do and you have these two wonderful children and I know you’ve told me you get down on the floor with them and play with them and you love them and want what’s best for them and I know that it’s… I want to swear (I nodded her on), it’s fucking tiring for you to be working so hard all the time!’ She then said, ‘and you have these walls up for a good reason, you’ve had to protect yourself and it’s hard to break that down, it takes time and we’ll take the time, I mean here I am, I don’t know you and you’re expected to open up to me, these things take time and you’ve done such a good job of protecting yourself, the people who you were meant to trust let you down so of course it’s hard to let the defences down. I think you need to stop berating yourself so much. You’re very hard on yourself.’ We just kind of looked at each other, probably just for like two seconds but it felt like ages… it felt so amazing to hear her say all that! She said, ‘how does it feel to hear me say that?’ and I pointed to my stomach and said, ‘I’m feeling it now!’ She said, ‘does it feel good?’ and I laughed and was like, ‘no! ha! No… aw man we should have started here half an hour ago!’ She said, ‘shall we pick up from here next week then?’ and I agreed. I said, ‘thank you for understanding me. I feel really understood and…. heard. Thank you.’ She seemed moved by that and just gently smiled at me and nodded.

I put the cards back. She thanked me. I paid her and she gave me a receipt. She asked what I had on for the rest of the weekend and I said, ‘I just feel like I need to go sit in a dark room for an hour.’ She said, ‘yeah maybe listen to some music and have some time to yourself. Remember, if you experience some sort of kickback from what you’ve shared today, remember my thoughts I shared… and maybe you could draw or write about how you’re feeling and bring it to the next session.’ I felt like I needed to reassure her that I was fine, I smiled and said, ‘it’s a beautiful day, we’ll probably take the kids out for a nice walk in the countryside.’ I thanked her and she said see you next week. I said have a good week and left.

Big deep breath in the car. Drive home.

I felt pretty liberated and empowered. It was such a revealing session and what she said had an impact on me.

That evening I sent an email…

Anna,

I promise I won’t make a habit of emailing this kind of thing I just really wanted to thank you for today’s session. It felt really good to talk all that through and to feel so understood and validated by you.

I’m feeling so empowered holding the thought of me being like a protective mamma bear – that really resonates so much and has given me a beautiful way of reframing a part of me that I had struggled to see in a positive light.

Since looking again at the photo of the card I’ve noticed that the bear’s probably coming out of hibernation (after winter rather than it being Christmas time). That made me smile considering I had mentioned at the start of the session how I like new year and how it always has an optimistic energy of potential change for me. Also, perhaps she’s left her cub in the cave to check on how safe it is to come outside – maybe it symbolises me slowly letting my guard down. It does feel like that.

Something quite profound happened today. Thank you for guiding me through it.

Looking forward to seeing you next week.

Kindest regards,

Lucy

Five days later I sent this text…

I’m stressing myself out so much. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my head. Made up this scenario that you’re going to tell me off for emailing you like it’s a boundary violation or something. But that’s not the way I meant it at all I just didn’t think and I’m sorry if that’s how it came across. I’m struggling to stop all these made up conversations with you in my head.

But now I’m wondering if a part of me set this all up so that would happen so you would say something that makes me feel bad and I could go back to closing off to you. It’s like sharing joy and expecting rejection. I’m so angry with myself for this.

I’m obsessing about ways of cutting that would look like an accident but I know that’s not what I really want. I couldn’t bring myself to be in the room with you if I did it because I couldn’t lie and I don’t want to let you down. It’s like I can’t let myself feel a connection without wrecking it. What the fuck is wrong with me.

I’m trying really hard to bring myself out of this. I’m texting you to try to stop the conversations in my head and I’m going to draw to see if that helps calm me down and take my mind off things.

It’s good to know I’m seeing you on Saturday. I really hope you don’t want to stop working with me.

I know you won’t reply. Thank you for giving me this outlet.

Session 10 to follow…

• 

During the holiday break last year between Christmas and New Year, there was a low point where I felt completely stranded and helpless. In that moment I had an idea of what Anna might suggest… think about next year and what you would like to get from our work. I broke my old and rather painful tradition of setting New Years resolutions that really only set me up for failure and instead wrote a more gentle set of intentions.

Today, almost a whole year after writing it, I shared it with Anna. She smiled warmly at me after reading it and said, ‘well done, I see you doing all of these things… all of those seeds you’ve planted and all of the buds appearing… and we don’t do these things all the time but I see you being brave every time you come back to a session, working on bringing that awareness back to yourself. I see this in you! Well done, this is lovely. Would you add anything for next year?’ I looked at it, thought about it then said, ‘maybe I don’t always have to be brave…’ Anna said, ‘there’s bravery in being afraid remember! Being afraid and showing up anyway.’ I said, ‘I need to work on crying when I need to cry…’ and that’s what the rest of our session was focused on. What is stopping me from ‘really crying’ with her.

Intentions: be kind to myself, forgive myself, trust my intuition, care for my body, move when I need to, eat when I need to, sleep when I need to, cry when I need to, let others help me, be patient with myself, listen more, be open to change, be brave, practice mindfulness, let go.’

Learning that I’m not quite as alone as I thought on this road to recovery.

This blog entry includes some of my Instagram posts so if you follow me there it may feel like repetition. I’ve had a really hard week and wanted to try to gather my thoughts on it all in one place.

My grandpa died a week ago today. I went to work because I thought it would be good to keep busy. I had cried four times before 9am the day after finding out but I stayed in work, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. It felt important to keep going, keep moving/thinking/talking. Plus my attendance record is appalling and I didn’t need another absence.

Grief is such a powerful force. It crashes through the centre of you in waves with no warning. All of a sudden you are reminded of the loss. A longing to speak to the person. The pain of remembering times you will never be able to get back.

And each new grief reminds you of all the other griefs. It brings with it a tsunami of memories of all the people you long for that are no longer in your present life.

When I told my four year old son that his great grandpa had died he dropped his head and his eyes filled up. He said, ‘it feels sad in here’ and put his hand on his chest. He’s right, it does… it feels so sad inside.

I text Anna as soon as I found out saying, ‘My grandpa died today. I postponed my last visit to him because I was tired, I feel awful. I should have gone. I’m sorry to text you, I know we don’t do text chats but my first thought was to tell you. I’m really gutted 😢’ I didn’t think she’d reply but she did send me a message back within half an hour and stepped outside her normal boundary to say, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your grandpa but glad you have told me. That is very sad news. You looked after yourself, that is self care and nothing to feel bad about. Maybe take some time to yourself, and think of the many times you had together. The times we have with loved ones are special, please don’t dwell on one missed visit. Be kind to yourself, spend time with Luna and your family. Take good care of yourself.’

It really went in… I felt it, her care. I really believe she was pleased I reached out to her and that she wanted to be there for me. I asked her for a session on the Tuesday but she didn’t have any time for me. She said, ‘unfortunately there have been no cancellations.’ I do actually believe that she wanted to be there for me. I did want to see her but also felt relieved that I could just stay at home. I’ve been feeling so tired recently. I just wanted to sleep.

The following day Anna sent me a message out of the blue asking if I’d like a phone call. I jumped at the offer. She said she would call me at 7.30pm and she did just that. Something about that consistent, reliable care is both intoxicating and terrifying to me. It made a part of me melt and a part of me panic. I never experienced consistency and reliability and trust with my parents – this is going to be a massive part of my restorative healing process with Anna. Letting her be the things I lacked and believing I deserve it.

I didn’t even know what to say to her when I answered the phone… she said, ‘let’s start by thinking about what made you say yes to a call to begin with…’ I said, ‘because I wanted to talk to you. I’ve just been feeling so much since grandpa died and I knew you’d know what to say. You know me and you understand more than anyone that this is a whole new world of grief for me now I’m not numb anymore. I thought you’d know what I’m going through…’ she said, ‘yeah, I do.’ I talked a bit about my grandpa and my realisation that this grief is the same as the grief I feel about my childhood. We talked a little about that but I could tell she was keen to keep me ‘in my adult’ for the 20 minutes of the call. She talked about how it’s important to tend to my small child parts too. ‘Make sure your having lots of cuddles with Luna and that you’re telling Little Lucy that it’s okay and normal that she’s grieving. She needs your love and compassion now more than ever… she is grieving all the memories she has with your grandpa. I know you can do it because you’ve done if for your own children.’ She said, ‘Remember it comes in waves. You’re allowed to feel okay in between the sadness. Allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you’re feeling.’ As the plans for the funeral are underway I feel the stress and family chaos building. There’s just so much to do and think about and so many different opinions to take into consideration.

Like I said to Anna on the phone, I have noticed that this grief is familiar to me. It feels exactly the same as the pain I feel in my chest when I think about my childhood or my mother. The longing for it to be different. The grief of it all is the same as the grief of someone dying. I’m actually feeling it now instead of being numb to it.

I’ve managed to talk to Adam a bit more than I usually would about how I’ve been feeling. I’ve been so overwhelmed by the emotions that I’ve not been able to hide it from him. Randomly crying in the middle of making the dinner or watching tv. My husband and I have been together for over 18 years. We met when I was still living with my mother. He witnessed a lot of what was going on and we talked about it at the time but then as the years went on it felt natural to let all of that stay in the past. We rarely bring it up these days. A couple of years ago when I was working with my first therapist I asked Adam, “when you first came back to the house and saw the chaos, didn’t you think ‘I want to get the hell out of here and away from that’ to protect yourself from it all?” He said with complete sincerity, “no Lucy I thought, ‘I want to get her the hell out of that house and away from all that chaos!’ I wanted to protect you.” His words mean so much to me. They say ‘I saw it all, I saw the way it was and it WAS that bad’. It’s so immensely validating.

Recently I shared with him a story I’ve never told him, about a time when my mother deeply betrayed my trust when I was a child. He said, ‘you grew so kind and so caring when these things could easily have turned you to stone.’ I work so hard at letting his words reach me. Ignoring as best I can the shouting snarls of the inner critic.

The other night he noticed I’d been crying and he said, ‘I’m so sorry you’re having to go through this grief, on top of all the pain and overwhelm you’re already going through. It’s so unfair. I was thinking about you today when I was at work. I imagined this barren, destroyed waste land, like a nuclear fall out space… and a lone green shoot pushing up out of the cracks. You are that green shoot – resilient and determined. You’re doing all this work by yourself, despite how painful it is, pushing up out of the shit that you came from… I really admire what you’re doing you know…’

My dad spoke to me the other day of how he got to know my grandpa so much better in recent years since my grandma died. He told me how my grandpa was like a broken man on the inside. How he would cycle round have these very dark periods where he’d repeat what a failure he was, that he believed he was a coward, a useless human. This is the man who dedicted his life to serving others. My dad told me that grandma hid (and managed by herself) years of grandpas mental health dips. But there was more that my dad learned… my grandpa’s father was a sensitive man who had been signed up to the army and forced to be a machine gunner in the First World War. I can’t imagine what that would do to a young man. There’s undiagnosed, untreated PTSD right there. Then he met the life of his life when he was quite a bit older and they got married, shortly after became pregnant with my grandpa. My grandpas mother died in childbirth. So from his first breathe he was motherless… born into trauma. Within my grandpas first 9 years of life his grandma and his aunt (both of which had cared for him) died. So much loss in such a young life. Trauma inherited. Layers of it. My dad told me he could hear his own inner voice in the words my grandpa would say about himself. I told my dad that those words had been passed down to me and my brother. Generation upon generation of trauma, self hate, abuse, neglect, loss.

It has to stop with me.

Thinking about Adams analogy of the lone green shoot pushing up out of the barren landscape reminds me of the community here and on Instagram – of all the people who are swimming upstream trying to heal their wounds. There are so many lone shoots of green, pushing towards the sky and away from the trauma that we ‘grew in’. What we are doing is having a greater impact than we realise. A ripple affect far stronger than the fall out that tried to destroy us.

I had a really holding session with Anna on Saturday, in the middle of all of this. We sat next to each other. It was quiet and slow. I talked about the funeral arrangements. I shared a couple of memories of my grandpa and showed her some pictures of him. She reminded me to not let myself get pulled into the games that everyone else was playing and to try to focus on my needs and my well-being.

I eventually pulled Luna out of my bag after talking quite a lot about the anxiety I felt about showing her to Anna. I sat her on my knee and Anna was so delighted I’d brought her. I handed her over to Anna and watched as she held her between her hands and spoke to her, then made Luna speak back. She said she could see why I’d fallen for her and that she wanted to keep her. It was lovely to watch. I wanted Anna to hug her but she didn’t. I think part of me felt like I was watching Anna holding a very young part of me. I will bring her to future sessions and maybe we’ll progress to that.

Anna reminded me of how precious the memories of my relationship with my grandpa are. She told me that however I feel is just fine. That it’s okay if I feel numb (which I did in the session) and it’s okay if I’m crying my eyes out (which always happens to me at funerals). I’m seeing her the evening before the funeral as well which is amazing. Feeling very well supported and held through this. I think she understands how much more painful this feels for me now that I no longer block all my feelings.

I’ve been writing a letter to my grandpa. In it I’ve told him how grateful I am for all that he did for us and all that he shared. I’ve also apologised for not visiting him the week before he died. The guilt I was feeling over that was immense but Anna has helped ease it. I’ve also told him that I am working hard at untangling the web of trauma that has been laced between and around our family for hundreds of years. That I am not just doing it for me, for my children or for generations to come… I’m also doing it for him and grandma, their parents and all who were before them. Those who lived in a time where mental health was not as well understood and help and care was not so easily accessible.

Interestingly I learned recently that my grandpa actually saw a transactional analysist for some time in his early adulthood. I don’t know if I’ll ever find out more about that but it’s comforting to know that he did try to heal things. My dad also saw a psychologist as a teenager. Perhaps I can see the work I’m doing as a link in a chain. Not an isolated shoot… maybe there are other shoots around me that died but their roots fortified my roots…?

Not sure if any of this is making sense, but here it is anyway.

I was unbelievably nervous before my session. Sat in the car with a huge panic building in my chest and bursting out across my whole body. I know I’ve explained this feeling before and I’m not sure how to articulate it well enough just now but it really was so physically painful. I had to deliberately take slow, intentional breaths because I felt like I was going to have a panic attack or hyperventilate at the very least. It was actually the worst it has ever been. I felt physically sick. I had texted Anna yesterday saying, ‘Anna, I’m not ready to stop doing the fortnightly Tuesdays in the new year. I’ve been thinking a lot about it and one hour a week just doesn’t feel enough at the moment. I’m hoping you haven’t arranged for another client yet. I’m happy to go back to paying full for it if that’s a deciding factor for you. If it’s gone already please don’t tell me by text. We can talk about it in session. It’s been another really hard week, see you tomorrow. Lucy’ I had been thinking about sending her a message every single day since our session last Saturday. I wanted to ask for a phone call but I couldn’t imagine what I would say to her if we did speak… ‘oh I just feel awful and wanted to hear your voice…’ hmmm… so I held on and held on. It’s been a long seven days.

I walked into her room and she greeted me with a huge smile and hugged me straight away. I love that we have moved on from me nervously asking if I can have a hug. It just happens now, after so much talking about hugging… months of talking about it and not doing it… now it feels natural to hug on arrival and when I leave… still feels so massively moving and holding and wonderful, even the 5 second welcome hugs. She said, ‘it’s great to see you,’ and I couldn’t speak, I was shaky and my breathing all uneven and weird. I put my keys and phone on the table and went to the toilet. When I came back in she was doing something on her phone, she often says she’s checking it’s off just before the session.

Anna said, ‘so, your text… the Tuesday sessions… let’s get this sorted.’ I cringed and covered my face with my scarf and she said, ‘no it’s okay, it’s not bad news, it’s just a bit of a change…’ I peeked out from over the top of my scarf and she explained that she has given my Tuesday slot to a new client, that she has a waiting list (which felt weird to hear – like, I’m so happy for her that she is so successful, she deserves that, she’s amazing! But also, it makes me worry that she could easily drop me and fill my space in a split second. She doesn’t need me… but that’s another story). She said that although my time isn’t available any more, a later time is free now because someone is stopping at the end of the year. I very quickly said I wanted that time. I asked her if she was annoyed that I’d changed my mind. I said, ‘I’m really sorry I feel like you’re going to say fuck sake Lucy make your mind up, this isn’t the first time you’ve said something and changed your mind, you can’t keep doing this – but you know, my minds all over the place and I find it hard to make decisions.’ Anna said, ‘you should see in my head then… yeah just coz I’m a therapist doesn’t mean I’m perfect, I change my mind all the time… we were able to figure it out, it all worked out.’ I said, ‘I don’t know why I automatically assume you’ll be angry with me.’ Anna said, ‘yeah I was going to bring that up, I wondered if we could maybe talk about that today? Did you have something in mind for today?’ I said, ‘yeah I wanted to continue talking about the last session, I’ve processed some stuff I wanted to talk about… can we talk about both?’ She said, ‘no its okay this can wait, let’s talk about your thing first, shelve my thing.’ I said, ‘but can we just talk about your thing for like 5 minutes then do mine coz mine is a big one.’ She said, ‘Lucy, there’s no rush, it’s going to take longer than 5 minutes to talk about my thing so I’ll write it down and we can talk about it another time… let’s focus on your thing.’ And so we did just that.

I started to say that I was going to talk about the thoughts I was having around her saying that my adult trusts her but my child doesn’t and Anna said, ‘okay that sounds important, before we do… what made you change your mind about the Tuesdays?’ I said, ‘I realised I was rescuing my husband.’ She asked what I meant and I said, ‘I was only cutting down my sessions so that he can afford to go to therapy. But it’s not my job to enable him, he’sjust  not ready. I said through the week to him that I was really sad I’ve had to stop my Tuesdays and he asked me who was putting me under pressure to stop, I told him I was and he said, ‘well Lucy that spare money’s just going to get swallowed up… do what feels right…’ and I realised that stopping the Tuesday sessions didn’t feel good and when things don’t feel good it’s normally because I’m not ready…’ I looked up at Anna and she was beaming at me. she said, ‘well done! You listened to yourself and you met your own needs, that’s brilliant, Lucy.’ I smiled back at her and sort of slowly nodded and looked away. Still hard to take praise from her. But I’m learning. Anna talked about how my husband is responsible for himself and I can’t persuade him to start therapy when he’s not ready for it. I said he had asked me if I had a good psychology book he could read and Anna laughed and said, ‘welcome to my library!’ she knows I have a huge collection of therapy/psychology books that I stashed away when she gently asked me to stop readingreadingreading as a way to stay in my head. I ended up lending him ‘The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read’ and asked Anna if she’d heard of it. She sort of nodded in an ‘of course I have’ way and we laughed. She then told me to back off from him, give him space on his own journey and to not ask him what page he’s on…I heard her and took note.

I said, ‘I’ve done a lot of processing this week and, well actually before I talk about all of that, so I just wanted to say to you… see, you know how I talk with a lot of imagery when I’m really struggling and the words don’t come but pictures do and… well when I was finding it really hard and I talked about the road and the fog and you stepped right into that metaphor and just asked me what the fog was like and suggested we pull over and… it was seriously fucking amazing Anna! Like, perfectly exactly what I needed, you know!’ I looked at her and she looked kind of emotional. I said, ‘you didn’t try to pull me back into logic and words and explaining… Paul used to intellectualise and he would observe what was happening then explain it to me and it would snap me back out and I wouldn’t feel anything anymore but you… you entered my world. That was amazing, thank you so much.’ Anna said, ‘you’re welcome, you know that I think in pictures so it makes perfect sense to me, I’m just glad that works for you… and of course it is important to bring you back, that is the end goal, but there is no hurry, I’d rather take it as a sign that you’re needing to slow down and that part of you needs someone to step into the pictures with you and we can walk out of it together when you’re ready.’ I could have leapt across the room and wrapped my arms round her waist in that moment. She then said, ‘I think, when you feel the fog come down and you lose connection with yourself… you also lose me. We need to find ways that you can keep the connection to me, like a guiding light shining through the fog. That no matter how thick and bleak it gets, you can still see that I’m there shining through it all. A constant, with you through this… I never left you, you just struggle to see me when the fog comes down.’ She described, ‘you know when you’re driving in fog and you can see the faint fog lights of the car in front of you… very faint but you know they’re there… we need to find a way for you to see that I am still here beside you.’ It was a really striking image to have, that even though the fog was blinding – her light was there in the distance. She never left me.

I took a big deep breath in and out and then she said, ‘what image did you have about today’s session?’ I said, ‘hmmm… I’d imagined you sitting next to me, because of what we’re going to talk about and I hoped I would feel a connection with you, without a wall there.’ She smiled and said, ‘would you like me to come over then?’ I nodded and so she rearranged the chairs and placed herself at an angle next to me. a few minutes in I asked if we could be closer and without hesitation, she pushed the chairs completely together and sat down asking if that was okay. I can’t explain how much it means to me that she’s okay with sitting close to me. She’s really okay with sitting right next to me. She isn’t repulsed, she doesn’t want to quickly move away, she doesn’t want to look away. It’s not too much for her. It’s amazing.

I really struggled to get going, told her I was massively anxious… she said, ‘okay so you were talking about the fog and the spaceyness and the loosing connection,’ and I said, ‘yes and I am experiencing that fogginess right now…’ she said, ‘okay I wonder if that fog is creeping in because you know you are trying to tell me something that didn’t work or you feel like what you want to say might come across as a criticism and you’re worried I will be angry with you or it will cause a rift between us?’ I said, ‘yes… that’s it.’ She then launched in to this amazing speech… ‘okay Lucy, I want you to see if you can take a step back away from that fear, there’s the inner critic telling you that I will be defensive or hurt by what you’re going to say and maybe I’ll want to stop working with you if you push me too hard. That’s not going to happen. So, I want you to fuck the censoring and just try to share your feelings with me because this is all very important and it’s very important that you experience telling me how you feel about this and even if we don’t agree, we will still be okay at the end of that… do you think you can give that a go?’ I nodded. We were sitting side by side and I was sort of looking down and slightly to the side, looking at her hands and the arm of the chair, it’s a good positioning because I feel close to her without feeling in the spotlight.

I said, ‘I did an inner child guided meditation this week, I wanted to try to connect with her in a different way… so it was a short thing where you imagine your childhood home, I imagined the one I was happy in coz I thought that would be easier, you imagine your child is standing at the front door and you go up to her and take her hand and walk through the house with her and just notice things. You’re meant to notice what is in each room, who is there, what they’re saying, what you see… it was all empty Anna, there was no one there, nothing there, empty echoing rooms, just her alone there… then you are meant to walk away from that house and walk her back to your life but I was crying quite a lot by then so I didn’t do the ending properly… but it was amazing that I could even hold her hand!’ Anna asked where I had got the meditation and I told her it was on youtube.

I said, ‘I was thinking about the trust thing – of course I trust you – I know you’re a safe person, you’re reliable and consistent and you’ve been so kind to me and… but there are some things I don’t know… I can’t predict how you’re going to react to some things… um and there have been some things you’ve said that…’ I started to say how hard it was to talk about, that I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and I hadn’t thought all this through so didn’t know what I wanted to say. She reminded me again to ‘fuck the censoring’ and that this is my therapy and it’s important to share how I feel. So I continued… ‘my brain interprets some of the things differently to how you intend them. I know you mean for me to feel supported by these things but the inner critic pops up and I just can’t take any of it in… if you imagine there is an actual child sitting in the room… (she made an agreeing noise) and when I’m talking about the really really hard stuff… like… um well sometimes you say things that sound generic and I struggle to believe them.’ There was a silence and I felt myself sinking in my seat. I covered my head with my jumper and she encouraged me to keep going. She said, ‘nothing bad is going to happen to you when you share this, I really want to encourage you to keep going.’

I said, ‘maybe I need to give an example then… um… when I was trying to tell you about when I was… um… (agonising delaying)… when I was assaulted and you said the words to me, you said, ‘did he make you do something you didn’t want to do’ and I just nodded, I hadn’t even told you anything I just nodded and you came and sat next to me and you said, ‘I see you… that wasn’t your fault… you did what you needed to do to survive…’ it felt like you leapt from the first step to the last step… all of that, it’s just therapy jargon, it’s stuff I’ve read over and over. All the therapy books have ruined me for this stuff coz I’ve read it all and I know it doesn’t take away from the fact that yeah maybe you really mean it but in my head it just sounds like you’re defaulting to some powerpoint slide you’ve seen at a training course.’ Anna said, ‘okay, I see what you’re saying, but you were never seen as a child, and your previous therapist didn’t see you, it’s vitally important that I see you…’ I said, ‘yeah but there’s a difference between having a felt sense of being seen which is powerful and connecting and being told I am seen which just feels empty.’ She picked up her notepad and started taking some notes and said, ‘this is really good, this is so good, you’re teaching me how to help you… keep going,’ so I took a big deep breath and kept going, ‘I’d hardly said anything. How can you say that you see me or that it wasn’t my fault when you don’t even know what happened, you don’t know what I did!’ I took a breath and said, ‘you said to me at the end that I might want to talk more or that might be enough for me and what I heard was that should be enough for you, that I should stop talking… that I’ve waited my whole life to find someone to finally talk to about all this and you’re telling me to stop talking and…’

Anna interrupted, ‘Lucy, you were 14… you were still a child, there is no way any of it was your fault. He was an adult and you were frightened and didn’t know what to do. No one was there to protect you so your protective part stepped in and created this self critical story around the abuse, that if only you had done something… it’s safer for you to believe it was because of something you did wrong, but that is not true. The child doesn’t understand and the critical part wants you to stop talking about it. That’s why I explicitly state these things… and maybe this is where the fog comes in, the resistance to accept the words I am saying to you, to protect you from the reality of what I’m saying, it’s too painful to hear from me that I see you… and maybe some days there is no fog, it’s just black… so then we will talk about the blackness. When we are talking about these things in future sessions, do you think you would be up for telling me what the critical voice is saying?’ I nodded and said, ‘yes but often I can’t even hear it, it’s like when you can’t tune in to the radio station you want and you hear overlapping voices and mixed up songs or white noise. I can’t pick out the words until I’m home and then it becomes clearer.’ Anna said, ‘that white noise is telling us something though and so I’d invite you to tell me when it is there as well… and when you are quiet and I am quiet too, I am staying quiet for a reason. I don’t want to cover that white noise with my words, I want you to be able to have the space to explore the noise and the overlapping voices and share your experience with me so we can work on untangling it together. How does that sound?’ I agreed that I would try.

Then a weird thing happened. I could hear muffled sounds outside Anna’s room and see shadows moving under the door. I told her there was someone outside the door and my voice sounded distant and small to me. However, when we both stopped and looked nothing happened so she kept talking a bit more, then I saw it again and this paranoid panic washed over me, ‘there’s someone out there, there is, I can see them at the door!’ There was this moment of pure, beautiful connection and care… I expected her to say there was no one there and that I should just ignore it and keep talking but she didn’t, she got up out of her seat, confidently walked over to the door and opened it. I was shaking, I felt so scared and small, looking back I can see I was triggered to an unsafe, young memory and she wasn’t triggered so she was behaving like a normal adult but at the time she was like this brave hero who was saving me. She stepped out of the door, keeping it mostly closed for privacy and then came back in, closed the door and said, ‘there’s a cupboard just outside my door, my colleague was getting something from the cupboard, she’s in her room now… you feeling okay?’ in an instant I felt fine again… it was actually quite amazing, I’d expressed a fear, she’d checked on it and reassured me I was safe… it probably lasted 3 minutes, if that, but it felt like a tiny little puzzle piece of trust or something similar had clicked in to place. I’m not sure she will even have noticed how momentous it was for me, perhaps I’ll share this next time I see her.

I then continued, ‘when I’ve told you about times mum hurt me and you’ve said things like, ‘you were a child, it wasn’t your fault…’ I dunno I can’t think of it anymore but you say things sometimes that sound like pat answers and I just can’t take it in…’ Anna said, ‘I have an image of a bubble around us when you’re opening up and sharing with me and then I say something like that and it’s like I’ve taken a pin and popped the bubble and you lose the trust in that instant.’ I nodded, feeling quite sad at how accurate that fragile, delicate analogy is… the tightrope she walks… I said, ‘you can’t win, I’m so sensitive, I mean what are you meant to say to me? Of course you’re going to say you believe me, I deserved better… all that.’ She said, ‘yeah but your parent ego want’s to keep me at a distance, part of you really doesn’t trust me and is looking for any evidence to support the belief that I don’t really care about you.’

I said, ‘I feel so bad about all this, I want you to know that so much of what you do is helping me, so much of what you say is exactly what I need and I’m working really hard at this and…’ She stopped me and said, ‘Lucy, this is very important, it’s really great that you’re sharing this, you’re helping me understand how I can best support you… you may feel worried that you’re criticising me but you’re not,’ She looked at me in my eyes and repeated, ‘trust me, you’re not!… you’re telling me how that part of you feels when she can’t speak for herself… that child part of you who is very frightened and doesn’t know what she’s allowed to say, this is really great work… thank you for telling me all of this. Do you think that part is able to communicate when she’s triggered?’ I shook my head.

I said, ‘you know when we were talking in the last session about something and you asked me if I could feel our connection, that you had your hand on me and you felt the connection and I said I could feel you trying to connect with me but I felt there was a wall there… I loved all that, I loved that you asked me if I felt the connection and I loved that you said maybe it’s a small wall… all of that imagery really helps me feel closer to you… (she wrote this down) you know my mum and dad never had time for all that and Paul always tried to get me to intellectualise but you really let me explore things the way my brain sees them…’ She said, ‘you were always a very creative child, that is what helped you get through some incredibly difficult times and that is what’s helping you progress in your therapy now. You are able to articulate things to me through pictures and when there are no words – images are there for us… when there are no images, colours…’

Anna said, ‘I hope that if you take nothing else from this session and when you are driving away from here going over the session and you’re questioning, did we actually talk about that, did I really say that, was she actually okay with this I want you to remember that we did say these things and that I’m saying well done. I want to hear all of this even though we may not agree on all of it. I will still say these things in session in the future, that I see you… I want you to know we can survive not agreeing and I will still be here even if you tell me in the moment that you hate what I’ve said…’ I said, ‘but it’s really scary, I find it frightening when we don’t agree or when you don’t understand what I’m trying to say… really frightening… like that’s one of the things that makes me shut down… remember when I said to you that I felt myself shutting down and I wanted to sleep? It felt like I was dying because I had this felt sense that you weren’t here with me anymore, like you’d left me…’ Anna said, ‘can we liken it to a sense of losing gravity and floating away? That you don’t have a sense of yourself…?’ I said, ‘that is EXACTLY what the dissociation feels like… lack of gravity… and I start feeling like that when I don’t trust your responses. The spaceyness… dizzy, floating.’ We looked at each other and she nodded and smiled as if she was saying with her eyes, ‘I completely understand because I know that feeling.’ I’m imagining that in my head but it really felt like she got it on a personal level. Anna said, ‘so when you’re shutting down, what do you need in that moment? I have an image of a very young child, 3 or 4 years old and I’m spouting all this adult therapy jargon and it’s completely going over her head and she just feels ignored and lost and like she doesn’t exist.’ There was quite a long silence. I’m so floored by how powerful it is when I feel understood. Like it makes me feel so full of hope and promise… she fucking understands me. I repeated, ‘what do I need?’ She said, ‘yes, what does your child need? What does she need that she is unable to ask for?’ I said, ‘she needs to feel like you really want to be here. To hear you say, ‘I’m here with you now’, she needs to tell you she’s scared and she needs to feel your touch…’ Anna said, ‘in that moment, is she aware that there’s another part of you that understands the words I’m saying?’ I said, ‘no! She hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, she doesn’t know she can trust you, she doesn’t… they don’t… I think there are big walls between the parts…’ my heart was pounding because we haven’t really talked explicitly about ‘parts’ a lot and I didn’t want her to freak out but she just carried on talking as if we were sharing info about our favourite food or something.

A bit later we started talking again about when her responses are slightly out and it feels like techniques or jargon it reminds me of mum and dad. I said, ‘mum and dad both didn’t listen to me but in different ways. My dad would sit there distracted with the paper or football on the tv and he would pretend he was listening but none of it went in whereas my mum would look like she was listening but whatever I said she would twist around and make it about her.’ Anna said, ‘and what does talking to me feel like?’ I said, ‘It’s like night and day. I know you’re listening.’ Anna asked how I knew and I said, ‘I can feel it inside myself, I feel you are listening, you respond to what I’m saying, you remember things I’ve said, in so many ways you show me you’re listening.’

We started to talk about how frightened I feel when we don’t agree or when I say something that appears to be pushing the boundaries a bit. Anna said, ‘I get the feeling you have a rebellious kid inside you who keeps wandering off and you keep pulling her back into line.’ I nodded enthusiastically and she said, ‘But kids wander off for a reason… maybe we should let her go and see where she takes us?’ I said, ‘but I want people to like me, that’s why I pull her into line, I don’t want to be difficult and push you away…’ Anna said, ‘that’s your critical parent coming in saying if you explore or wander off, you’ll be told off or abandoned.’ I said, ‘fuck sake, why is the parent ego such an arsehole!?’ and within a millisecond she laughed and said, ‘because the adults in your life were arseholes!’ we both laughed and then she continued, ‘… but also you do have nurturing, supportive sides to your parent ego, you did have caring adults too, but your critical parent is very strong.’ I said, ‘the critical parent voice can be really belittling and I think it belittles others to keep the wall between me and other people so I don’t let them in.’ Anna said, ‘just so you know we have 5 minutes left.’ And I tutted and said we’d have to leave it til next session then. She made a note of that and said, ‘okay we’ll pick up on the critical voice belittling others on Tuesday…’ I was staring at the wall and she said, ‘where did you just go?’ (THAT Anna… THAT’S when I FEEL seen… when you notice I’ve gone somewhere!!) I said, ‘I went back to Tom. He did a schema questionnaire with me early on and told me that the results showed I had a big abandonment schema and I had unrelenting high standards and was very critical of myself and others. I fought him on it and said I wasn’t critical of others.’ Anna said, ‘so, do you think he might be right?’ I reluctantly said I did but that it was a protective strategy, that it stopped me getting close to people coz I knew they’d leave me. We agreed to come back to this in a few days.

When she hugged me goodbye, Anna thanked me for sharing everything I did today and told me I should be really proud of how I pushed myself. She asked me what I’d taken from the session and I thought for a minute and then said, ‘that you’re going to stick around even when I have difficult things to say… and that I can say difficult things.’ we smiled and reluctantly I left… always, always wanting more.

Since the session I’ve been thinking about why the ‘therapy jargon’ and techniques is so abhorrent to me. I have a theory. I think on some unconscious level, I believe that when Anna resorts to her techniques and tried and tested therapy chat, it’s because she’s out of her depths or struggling against being triggered by the material I’m presenting. She’s not Anna with Lucy, she’s therapist with client. It’s like a part of me believes that she is finding it really difficult to respond in an authentic and connected way because I am hurting her so she goes to the baseline, safe responses that she knows works… it’s a fear of my poison, a fear I am breaking her, a fear that she will abandon me.

That, I will take to my session on Tuesday.