Today is the two-year anniversary of the first day of lockdown in the UK. Two years ago, today, we woke up and the kids didn’t go to school… instead, they came downstairs to the living room rearranged. I’d stayed up half the night setting up one side of the room as a classroom. I wanted to establish routine and familiarity very quickly. I knew my kids would need it… I knew I’d need it.

It was exactly this time also that I lost in person sessions, and Anna and I entered a painful and unpredictable dance of cancelled sessions, reuniting sessions, sessions with Linda and then finally a phone call that would end mine and Anna’s work completely on May 19^th 2020.

When I look back on those days… weeks… the early months of the pandemic… there’s a familiar twinge of touching the raw edge of unprocessed grief, and now there comes a strong response to that painful cry that says, ‘I promise I’ll get to you, I haven’t forgotten.’ I know I haven’t even come close to unearthing everything I felt and struggled with. This work is painfully slow, but it needs to be. There are many doors unopened and I know I’ll get there.

The more I work on myself, the more aware I am of all there is left still to be worked on. And I’m getting to a place of acceptance with all of that. I trust in my own ability to bring forward and sit with the hurt and broken pieces. I actually love this resilient, persistent part of myself that continues to fight for my healing. I love my fearless determination and commitment to ‘do the work’. As Mark has said to me numerous times, this loyalty to my process is what has got me this far and is something that will continue to accompany me and encourage me through difficult times ahead. I used to fear this part of my character, but I now understand that I value this relentless dedication to healing. This is the thing that will impact not only my life but the lives around me… I see it in my own children every day. They are thriving, they love themselves, they are full of life and optimism and vitality precisely because I have dedicated myself to this work. I refused to submit to the weight of generational trauma and though it’s been an almighty struggle for me and will most likely demand energy and effort from me for the rest of my life, it means my children have been largely protected from it all. This is something I could not see before, but I can see it clearly now. My mother and father hurt me in unthinkable ways and neglected my most basic needs, but I am not doing what they did. I am not my parents, and my children are not me. I say all this, not to be a voice of self importance and arrogance… but to bring a more factually accurate reflection on what we are all doing… those of us in depth therapy… we are there because we brought ourselves there, because we are damned if we’re going to be destroyed by the trauma that was inflicted upon us. It is an act of self love simply to show up, attend sessions, read the blogs, read the books, listen to podcasts, hope for change. And we should be proud of that!

Mark is on holiday at the moment, which is funny because I took a positive lateral flow test today and the last time I had covid was the last time he had a long holiday. During that time, myself and my whole family were very ill and unrelated my son ended up in hospital. Enduring all that without therapy was hard and when Mark returned, we had a few really intense sessions where I cried and told him how let down I’d felt that he wasn’t there when I needed him. ‘I missed you… I needed you… you weren’t there…’ I was crying those words to Mark while the little girl in me cried them to my mother. It’s incredible what can be worked on when you have a therapist who understands transference. ‘You needed me, and I wasn’t there. I let you down. You know what it feels like to need someone and for them to not be there, and this time that person was me.’ He said these words with so much depth of emotion in his voice… both of us feeling into the unspoken agony of being a little person in such desperate need for someone to see you and nurture you and yet no one is there.

So much comes up between me and Mark that’s powerful and strong and real and also everything to do with the past. Most recently I had some very painful feelings of guilt come up when I spoke to Mark about a therapeutic massage I’d had with a body therapist I’ve built a strong relationship with. She touched into something deeply somatic, and it brought up deep grieving. Whatever parts of my history were accessed, triggered my body to move into a panic attack that transitioned to crying and shaking as she held her hand on me. After I told Mark, I noticed a fear that he might be jealous or angry with me for having such an emotionally intimate moment with her. As we explored this, we opened something I wasn’t fully aware of before… that my experience of love from my mother was that of possessive love. She was a jealous woman who could not be happy for me unless she was getting something out of it too. She would say, ‘no one will love you as much as I do,’ while she gave me crumbs of what she called love. She didn’t love me in an open and unconditional way, it was hers or nothing at all. And I realised I expected that from Mark. Not only was I worried he would be jealous or angry, I was also worried if he wasn’t. I questioned if he really cared about me at all if he WASN’T jealous or angry… what is love if it’s not possessive and angry and full of jealousy? This brought up memories of the interim period when I went back to working with Anna after having 6 sessions with Linda. Anna told me she’d taken me to supervision in that time and felt feelings of jealousy, wishing she could have been the one working with me instead of Linda. I explored this with Mark and found how painful it was for me to hear this from Anna. Initially it felt nice… ‘wow she really does like working with me?’ But deep down I wished she could just be happy for me that I wasn’t left to fend for myself. It’s complex but it feels deeply significant.

Realising all of this was like unlocking a secret level on a game you didn’t know existed… you’ve been past that point a thousand times and suddenly you have the key to this whole new level and WOW it blew my mind. It wasn’t that my mother couldn’t love me, it’s that her love is immature, insecure, narcissistic, and possessive. Hearing Mark tell me how delighted he was to hear of my experience and that all he wants is for me to constantly be met with this kind of love in my life, clicked a puzzle piece into place. It also helped solidify in me the realisation that I am not like my mother. The love I have for my children is not a possessive love. I want them to find happiness and love, even if it can’t always come from me. The most important thing to me, when my daughter was 8 months old and had to start going to a childminder 40 hours a week, was that we find someone who could connect with her and form a strong attachment with her… so she could get her needs met, even when I wasn’t there. That is real love. I wasn’t jealous of the bond between my daughter and her childminder, I facilitated it. I knew it would be far less traumatic for her to be away from me for such a long time if she felt safe and loved within the relationship with whoever she was with. Love isn’t about being the most important and only soul provider of love to a person, it’s about wishing love and kindness from all directions and hoping needs get me, regardless of your role in all of that. Love lets go of control and ownership.

I imagine what it would have been like if I’d brought a similar thing to Linda, or even my first therapist. They would have responded to me saying, ‘you let me down, you weren’t there’ in a far more ‘adult to adult’ way… something like, ‘I was on holiday, it’s important that I take breaks. I held you in mind, lets talk about how you are now in this moment.’ It takes a skilled and incredibly self-aware therapist to be able to go into these transferential places with a client and allow the client to relive the pains of the past, projected onto the relationship, not in a fake ‘role-play’ way, but in a very real and powerful way. This is the healing work I need. I don’t believe a therapist can do this unless they themselves have worked very deeply within a transferential therapeutic relationship. It has to be experienced to be believed and trusted.

So, the anniversary today brought a desire to slow down. I spent the morning wandering through memories. I read over all the old messages Anna and I sent each other… from the first to the final email. I messaged a friend. I listened to playlists from 2019 and 2020. I cried and remembered the little 4 year old girl who finally reached out and held Anna’s hand, followed her through the dark forest, only to have her hand dropped suddenly without warning. This morning I revisited that grief filled forest and let my heart hurt for what I was going through back then. There was a time when that grief would ingulf me but I am more able to navigate the depths in myself these days… and I can clearly see the green shoots of new growth. As I was reflecting, initially I thought that part of me had gone away, the little girl… but my friend suggested that actually she’s more integrated now… and that fits more closely to my experience. Not all parts of me are loving and not all parts of me accept the child I was… but the core self, she is strengthened and she loves, accepts and wraps her arms around all the parts. I definitely didn’t feel like that this time two years ago. I’ve felt a shift in how I meet all the different parts or emotions or affects. I don’t get overwhelmed anymore… but that doesn’t mean the pain doesn’t pull my feet from under me sometimes. I still feel things just as intensely, but I guess the muscle of self-support is stronger. A bit like someone training for a marathon (not that I have any experience of this) might initially struggle with even a quarter of the distance, or when they do finally manage it it takes them days to recover, but the more they go there, the consistency and determination of the repeated efforts eventually strengthens something inside them and they’re able to feel the effort and maybe even pain of doing something so grueling, without it wiping them out. They know that what they’re doing is hard, but they are strong enough to master it. This has happened by constantly sitting with the pain, while in session with Mark. Being with it and growing my window of tolerance. Literally teaching my system I can cope with this. Pendulating between the pain and the ‘okay-ness’ of being. Repeatedly withstanding it all, in the safety of a close attachment. I came close to this with Anna but really we’d only just begun. But I’ve been able to take those initial building blocks of work I did with her, and build on them with Mark.

I feel a desire to share more but I don’t want this post to be too long… not even sure who this will show up for as it’s been so long since I posted. I want to share so much of the therapy I’ve done this past year but I don’t know where to start and the relentless desire to share sessions verbatim just isn’t there anymore. Beyond anything psychological, I just don’t have the time anymore. I still have two sessions a week, I often work full time these days and family life is full and busy… and there is a need for a lot of ‘down-time’. I used to blog in that down-time but now I rest. I would love to write about the powerful work we’ve been doing around dissociation. That I can now meet the dissociation with conscious awareness and let myself ‘go there’ and ‘come back’ in sessions. I am a witness to my parts and their ability to be present, or not. I want to talk about these very painful parts of my history that I am still to put words to, yet have explored in therapy through somatic experiencing to the point of feeling it ‘live’ in the room and taking the power out of it without even needing to name it. I want to talk about what it feels like to work with a therapist who exudes love… who isn’t afraid to name the love that exists between therapists and their clients, and all other emotions too! That it is a real and powerful relationship that impacts both the people in the room. I want to write about what it feels like to trust your therapist and to feel that trust grow in yourself and in the relationships in the real world.

I also feel a desire to write something about how it is possible to survive unimaginable pain… and that even when you lose all hope, there is still a possibility that the road will lead to something better. Despite the lack of current content, I still get messages on my Instagram account from people discovering my blog, thanking me for what I’ve shared… in similar positions to me. They read over my posts from a few years ago and relive my loss of Anna and then find that despite believing she was the only therapist I could trust and work with, I have been able to find someone who can do even deeper work than I thought possible. I want people who are in a similar position to the one I was in to know that the power and hope was never in the therapist, it is always in the client. You just can’t feel it yet, but it’s there… it’s the thing that made you search for a therapist, it’s the thing that carries you to your sessions and it’s the thing that grieves the loss of your beloved therapist… because you believed they would help you navigate your journey. I want people to know that all the work you’ve ever done in therapy stays inside you… you don’t lose it when you lose the therapist. You take that healing with you, even if they leave you. And there is always hope… even when it is impossible to see or feel, it’s there. At some point I imagine trying to write a more helpful post about exactly this… or something about what I’ve learned from the four different therapists I’ve worked with… but for the time being this is where I will leave things.

I’ve missed the WordPress crew I used to chat to regularly, I’m hardly ever on here these days… I will attempt to do some catching up but if you used to talk to me, especially back in the Anna days, please know that connecting with you (however brief) helped me beyond words during a time of desperate isolation and a grief that I thought would end me. And for that I am so very grateful

Sending love.