On the eve of my reconnection with Anna.

I have been reflecting on how I’ve experienced the past month. How the virus and it’s impact on the world has changed my current way of living and how Anna’s absence in all of this has affected me.

I’ve been thinking about our collective experience of the pandemic. How some may have gone into their well rehearsed freeze response, shutting down emotional responses and feeling safe in their familiar coping strategies. Some may feel the panic rising – a more hyperareousal than hypo. Some may respond with resourcefulness and productivity, masking their feelings. However it is interpreted by our reptilian brain… the unconsious instincts we may be unaware of as we walk through empty towns and are faced with masked people who cross the street to avoid us. The fear of contracting or passing on this virus that has led us to wash our hands til they bleed red raw. It made me think about some of psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s work that I read years ago when I first became interested in different theories of psychology and the human brain.

The collective unconscious is sometimes called the objective psyche. It refers to the idea that a segment of the deepest unconscious mind is genetically inherited and is not shaped by personal experience. Jung believed that the collective unconscious was an inherited collection of knowledge and images that every human being has at birth. People are unaware of the items contained in their collective unconscious. However, at times of personal crisis, the psyche may open a door to the collective unconscious. The images contained in the unconscious are frequently manifested in dreams.

It makes me think of intergenerational trauma and intergenerational wisdom. The mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers of our families passing down their traumas and their truths. The wars and famines, the tribes and rituals. Birthing their babies in caves lit by fire and howling at the moon. All experiences, emotional imprints, woven into the fibres of our being, our cells and the deepest parts of our brains. An intrinsic knowing that things can feel very right and they can feel very wrong. No matter our individual experiences, we know in our guts, our collective unconscious, what feels safe and what feels unsettling, dangerous.

The current scenes of the pandemic frequenting our tv screens, flooding our various social media feeds have a deep impact to those really paying attention. Our experiences when we leave the house have an affect on us all, both consciously and unconsciously. Our natural instincts are to protect ourselves and to fear the unknown. The invisible threat. It fires up our collective unconscious. There is a deeper impact than we’re aware of currently. Something only time will show.

For many of us, our lives have been turned upside down. If, like me, you grew up in chaos and uncertainty, subjected to emotional neglect and abuse then this ‘new normal’ may have an even deeper sense of impending doom. If, like me, you have fought hard to establish a sense of calm and composure in your adult life, if you’ve dedicated years of your life to building foundations and walls and connections and bonds and bridges and you have delicately and carefully, painstakingly built a life for yourself that feels safe and healthy and beautiful… then this ‘new normal’ feels devastating. It feels like someone has lit a match and burned down the precious world you made for yourself by yourself. The extensive, detailed and varied tapestry of your life that you so carefully laboured over is now singed and shrivelling at the edges and reduced down to a single patch. In an instant. Violently and while your hands were tied behind your back. It felt like all control and freedom was taken from us. It is an assault on all the senses.

For nearly two decades my days have been full, my mind has been busy. I have worked hard not only to build my career but also the other roles in my life – I have built a family and a home (a family home unlike any I lived in as a child). I have grown as a mother, a wife, a friend, a client. I have worked tirelessly at my journey through therapy – focusing purposefully on the goal of recovery. I have dedicated time and energy to building my fitness levels. Focused on fuelling my body and moving my body with a more mindful and loving effort than was ever demonstrated to me as a child. Overnight, many of these purposeful activities and freedoms were taken from me (as they were taken from everyone) and I found myself imprisoned in a forced lockdown. Restricted and forbidden to extend beyond these new limitations.

These forced restrictions were retraumatising for me. They felt like the stuck, alone, isolated, suffocating years of my youth. This is personal to my lived experience as a child. All of the joyful and purposeful things I had enthusiastically and sometimes bravely cultivated in my life as an adult were no longer allowed. I could no longer get in my car and drive to the gym to take part in a class that made me feel alive and fully in my body, part of a group of people all with a shared goal. This felt like I was plunged back to my childhood with a mother who wouldn’t let me join clubs or learn skills I was interested in. A mother who would ‘teach’ me to drive while she was drunk and needed a lift home. A mother who refused to pay for professional driving lessons. It took me years and three failed tests, all paid for by myself, before I finally passed my driving test and gained that desperately needed freedom. The lockdown meant that I could no longer go out for a meal with friends which felt reminiscent of my childhood when we never went for meals out. As an adult this has always felt like a luxury I gifted myself and a pleasure I gladly gave my children. I could no longer take my kids to the park or cinema or museum. Something I could count on one hand the amount of times we did when I was a child. I would pass the parks and longingly watch the other happy children as they played. Thanks to the lockdown I can’t hop on the train and stop in at a wee independent shop or walk to the cafe and sit in the corner journaling and enjoying a cappuccino made my someone else. I am no longer able to go and get my nails done or have my hair cut. A luxury I was never allowed as a child. I would have to endure my mother hacking at my hair whenever she felt like it just as she would hack at my fingernails until they bled at the quick. I would dissociate from the pain of these nail cuttings so much that I now feel close to passing out when I have to cut my own children’s nails. The lockdown dictates that I can no longer sit with my therapist and allow my soul to be filled up with her attunement and presence. An active listening and authentic caring that I never experienced growing up.

I am fully aware that these things that have been temporarily taken from me during this period of quarantine are all indulgent privileges. However they are all also significant triumphs in the new life I was forging for myself, post childhood trauma. Gifts I worked hard to be able to provide for myself. I am attempting to validate my personal experience, while also holding the truth that the very real warriors of this war against the virus are of course our keyworkers. There are always, always others worse off than us. I am holding this awareness as well. This experience has undeniably highlighted my privileges. The wealth of things I had introduced to my life that I now long for are the very things some people have never had the luxury of experiencing. I know this deeply because that was me. I was so very grateful for these things because I didn’t always have them and I’d worked hard to get them. I didn’t take them for granted but now I feel a deepened awareness of how much I had to lose.

I am still privileged now. My home is small but it’s safe and I have a garden. I love the people I live with and they don’t cause me harm. For this I am beyond grateful. I have technology and the internet that allows me to access a community online that keeps me from feeling completely isolated. I am able to afford therapy still, grateful that video sessions exist. I live in a rural village where the little shops are fully stocked with fresh produce and the rolling fields and single tracks always welcome my need to get outside. I am grateful that although our household income is being reduced, we will financially stay afloat. We have access to credit if we need it and we will be able to pay that back in time. It’s not ideal, it’s not part of my plan. But it’s better than it might have been for us ten years ago, twenty years ago… in childhood. I wouldn’t have survived this in childhood.

There is still this panic rising. Less frequently than when the lockdown was first established. This terror at the forced changes. The emotional flashbacks to times when I was locked in a room alone. To a time when I was refused access to friends. To a time when even school was taken from me and I no longer had my safe place and safe people. To a time when my only comfort was food. This lockdown has brought me to a very dark corner in a hidden room in the back of my mind that I have as yet not explored. The grief and overwhelm I’ve experienced was locked away for over twenty years. And I had to re-experience all of this without my attachment figure. Instead I had an emergency replacement that I had to attune to – learn to trust – very quickly – in emotional chaos. Thank god for Linda. She was the exact thing that I needed in the absence of Anna.

Just weeks before the lockdown Anna and I had a few of our most exposing, emotionally vulnerable and connecting sessions. We opened a space that had been locked away for a lifetime. My child was learning to trust her, to be seen by her, to love her and feel loved by her. On the one hand this feels like the worst timing ever. Just as we start to uncover the delicate core wound, this worldwide crisis happens and I can no longer sit with my safe person in our safe place. However, I am also grateful this has happened now, if it had to happen at all. My child has had a taste of her care and connection. Luna, smothered in Anna’s perfume, keeps that small part of me comforted and reassures her that the connection is real and strong and meaningful. I’m grateful that happened, even though it was just moments before this separation.

So, this collective unconscious… this deeper knowing that things just aren’t quite right just now. The awareness that so many of us are misplaced, put in danger, imprisoned (in many cases with an abuser), at risk, alone and isolated… Anna is experiencing it too. It connects us. It connects all of us. As I stand on my doorstep every Thursday evening and clap with my children, I glance over the road and up and down the street and I see my neighbours at their doors and windows clapping and smiling. I hear a trumpet proudly blasting out a triumphant tune. I hear a saxophone in the distance. I hear bagpipes and even a violin. I hear wooden spoons on pots and someone turns their stereo up loud so that Caledonia fills the air. There is a sense of community in this shared chaos. It moves me. I have a deep love for this place that has adopted me as one of its own. I feel at home here. Something I never felt as a child. We never stood still long enough for me to lay roots. On a deeper level the Thursday evening applaud for our keyworkers unsettles me to my core. It feels like we are in the eye of the tornado, while those on the frontline are caught in the twisting force of the storm as it wipes out tens of thousands of souls that were alive and well a few weeks ago.

There is of course a sense of luxury at all this time we have now suddenly gained. Time to bake and make crafts with my kids. Time to learn how to play an instrument. Time to sleep in til mid day and stay up til midnight of we choose. Time to watch more tv than necessary. Time to make home cooked meals every day and eat it as a family. Time to run and play and cycle. Time to write and draw. The very nature of my preoccupation with regret tells me I will look back on this pandemic (if I’m lucky enough to survive it) and wish I’d made more use of all this time. Enjoyed it more, not been so in my head.

I have a video session with Anna tomorrow morning. I noticed she’s already sent me the zoom link. I sat and studied that email, each letter she typed while sitting in her house thinking of me as she set up our meeting. She said she’s looking forward to seeing me. I can’t figure out how I feel. I can’t articulate it. Every emotion on the entire spectrum is swirling inside me like oil in a puddle. So much has happened since I last spoke to her four weeks ago. A friend said to me, ‘I’m hoping for you that it’s going to feel like going home. That familiarity that makes you feel so comfortable and at ease.’ This beautifully reframed things for me in my mind. I may fear her rejection and anger. I may fear my own anger. I may question our connection and her dedication to me, but it may also feel like a familiar coming home to a person who has been there for me consistently for years. Another friend reassured me that, ‘all the words in the world aren’t enough’ to express how I’ve felt in Anna’s absence. Yet also I am reminded that there is time. I can go slowly and gently. She has agreed to twice a week sessions for however long I need. There is no rush and if I know anything about Anna I know that she will welcome a slow pace and a gentle approach. So I need to trust myself and trust her.

Hi Linda,

I wanted to let you know that I’ve decided I won’t need a session on Wednesday. As you rightly pointed out, I don’t make decisions lightly, I’ve thought carefully about this and took what you said on board encouraging me to think about what feels good and right for me. Despite the fact that I would enjoy chatting to you again, I don’t really need another session.

Yesterday’s session felt like a gentle, natural ending. We had time to reflect on what brought me to you and go over some of the things we worked through in our sessions. I felt there was a relaxed energy to the session and I was grateful that we agreed the door wasn’t completely closing. We will most likely see each other at some point at the centre, if not for a one off session in person then certainly by chance in passing. 

I think it’s a good idea for me to have a bit of space this week to rest before turning my attention back to the work Anna and I will be doing together. I’m really looking forward to seeing her again and I feel better prepared for the ‘unboarding’ of the windows thanks to you giving me space to express and unravel my thoughts and feelings in real-time as it was happening. Linda, you really helped me feel supported through the loss and grief I was experiencing a few weeks ago. I’m very grateful for that. You also helped me work through and process what was going on with Grace which had a really positive impact on how family life feels right now.

Working with you has made me reflect on my previously held assumption that for something to hold meaning and be important it has to last for a very long time and be forever remembered. We only had 6 sessions and there is a pull for me to drag it out for longer as if to make the length of time mirror the impact felt. But in that short space of time we did significant work and the impact of that will stay with me. In this space and time, it mattered. I have a tendency to be overly sentimental but I guess it makes sense that this has felt like a big deal to me considering it’s only in recent years that I really experienced this level of attunement and careful listening. It is important to me. 

My biggest take away from this whole experience is in learning that I am the driver and Anna is my guide. I always held the belief that she was the engine and I would break down without her. Through momentarily losing her I’ve been given an opportunity to learn that my personal growth needn’t ground to a halt if she is no longer available. I am able to look after myself, I knew that I didn’t want to do it alone and I was able to ask for and accept support from someone else. I’m glad I was able to learn this about myself.

Anyway, this is my characteristically brief (!) way of expressing my thanks to you for being there for me. I never was very good at being succinct.

Thank you for rising to the challenge of being my therapy aunty!

I hope you and those close to you stay well and safe over the next few months. 

Take care,

Lucy.

Session number 6 with Linda.

I accidentally closed all my tabs just before the session and had to log in again so it was 3 minutes after the start time when I finally logged on, annoyingly. I explained that to her and we had a bit of a laugh about it.

I felt really calm and not anxious at all prior to the session. I said to Linda, ‘I’m actually feeling really great just now.’ She smiled and raised her eyebrows and said that was really good. I said, ‘yeah I went for a run this morning and it’s such glorious weather… it felt so good to get out and move my body!’ Linda seemed really pleased to hear this. I explained that I also think part of my low mood was down to my cycle. Now that I am half way through my period I feel more human. The past few days I was very low and sluggish and just felt fat and horrible. I feel much better today. Linda asked me if this was a pattern I’d noticed before about my cycle and I said it’s taken me a while to notice a pattern and that it’s changed since having my kids but there definitely is an impact hormonally. She acknowledged this and talked about turning my attention towards this with compassion while also not invalidating the feelings I was experiencing.

I said I forgot last session that I’d wanted to thank her. I explained that since our session last Saturday things have felt very different at home. I told her that after things reaching a climax with Grace (with us shouting at each other every night and her being very upset) and me working through it with Linda, I was then able to talk to Adam about it and come up with a plan. ‘We slowed things down, I took things down a few gears and really started to enjoy a slower way of being. I asked Grace what she needed from me and she said she wanted me to sit with her at night. So since then I’ve been sitting with her while she falls asleep, which is only taking about fifteen to twenty minutes (a lot less time than it took when we were locking horns) and things feel much more peaceful and happy now so I really just wanted to tell you that and thank you, it was a very important session.’ Linda thanked me for telling her. She said it was lovely to hear that I’d asked Grace what she wanted and she pointed out that even screaming and shouting is communication, we never lost each other through all of that we just struggled to receive the messages.

I referred to our last session when Linda suggested we could use our remaining time together to work to an end. I said, ‘What exactly does working to an end look like? I mean, I can’t imagine being able to work to an end when you’ve only had 6 sessions?’ Linda said, ‘well… you’ve sort of been doing it all along Lucy, you have always seen this as a short term thing that will eventually end with you going back to Anna and you have been revisiting things each session. Also things like updating me on how things went with Grace last weekend, that kind of thing is what we do when we work to an end.’ I said, ‘oh well I do that all the time, I’m constantly feeding back how it’s been, reflecting and thinking about the journey and the process so far.’ She nodded and said, ‘you do this sort of thing in your work with Anna. Yeah… and I know it might feel odd to you that we only had 8 or 7 sessions but everyone is looking for different things from therapy and you had a very specific reason to come to me. There are a few people who just have one or two sessions and that’s all they need, there are some who have hundreds and then the vast majority have 6 to 12 sessions… so this is what I’m used to, although this has been very different in that you always knew you’d be going back to Anna… of course people work for longer if there is deep trauma work needing to be done, like what you’re doing with Anna.’ I nodded and said that all made sense. Linda said, ‘the thing about working to an end really is about revisiting anything necessary and making sure that nothing is left unsaid.’ This really struck me because it feels like such an important thing for me to observe in many of my significant relationships. All of these things left unsaid. I said, ‘that’s what I did in my last phone call with Anna, in this panicked way. I really sensed that she was going to get ill and cancel our next session and I really did believe she was going to die so I spent the whole phone session scrambling for words to express everything I ever wanted to say to her. You know like when you are at a loved ones funeral and you just really wish you could tell them how much they meant to you… so I did that with Anna, told her how much I liked her, told her how grateful I was for all the work she’d done on herself to be able to help me with my work, I went on and on telling her all these things because I didn’t want her to die not knowing how much she had impacted me.’ Linda said, ‘I really hear you, that you thought she was going to die.’

At some point Linda said, ‘You will have a lot to cover when you start back up again with Anna,’ and I laughed and said that I really hoped she was ready. I said, ‘I’ve been tempted to text her and ask her if she’s ready for me to be full on or if she needs to be eased into it!’ Linda laughed and said, ‘she will want to hear all about your experience, she will want to work on all of this with you I’m sure of it.’ we smiled at each other. I really wonder whether they’ve talked about any of this. I mean, I know there are professional boundaries and that there is the code of confidentiality but they are friends and colleagues, they text each other daily. Ordinarily they work in the same building at the same times on the same days and they have had wee chats over coffee between clients… surely little bits come out. I realise this is going to sound kind of full of myself as if the world revolves around me but I’m thinking, imagine Anna coming out of a particularly difficult session with me and standing in the kitchen making a cup of tea and in walks Linda. Maybe Anna mentions her previous client, no names, just that they’re working on some very deep attachment stuff, that this client draws as a way of expressing herself and the work is challenging (or whatever)… then a few months later I’m sitting with Linda and telling her that I’ve been drawing to help me in sessions with Anna because the work we’re doing is really hard attachment stuff. It’s not completely outwith the realms of possibility. I wonder, does Anna text Linda and ask how I’m getting on? ‘Is my client going to give me a hard time when we get back to work on the 18^th?’ haha… I doubt it but it does make me wonder. Judging by the chats I’ve had with Linda it sounds like this is a very unique situation. I don’t think she has ever done this for one of Anna’s clients before. That in itself might make it a tempting conversation. Maybe not though, I’m sure they have plenty to talk about besides me! Anyway, back to the session…

I said, ‘I have thought a lot about these two sessions… you know why is it important to me to have these two sessions? Do I really need two? Did I really need this one? No… I didn’t… I said this to you in the first or second session, my life is good, I have lots going on and I’m stable and you know, functioning… it’s just when deep feelings are triggered they destabilise me. I find it very difficult to cope with big feelings by myself and I don’t have anyone in my life that I talk to like this… I noticed a defensiveness when you said what you said about the gaps and I was annoyed you brought it up in the last 5 minutes of the session…’ she nodded and listened, ‘… but I was able to process it and figure things out, I wanted to try to soothe myself and find a compassionate way to understand my motives behind filling the gap. I thought that Anna would say to me, ‘of course you feel overwhelmed by these feelings, you’ve only just started feeling them. You’ve been numb all your life and now you’re feeling. It makes sense you would want someone you trust to be with you while you feel them to help you feel safe.’ Linda had a kind smile on her face and she said, ‘and can you hear her voice when she says that and see her face in your mind?’ I said I could. I said, ‘I was finding it very hard to feel her, I do find it hard to keep feeling a connection with people when it’s been a while you know it’s like they fade into the distance like ghosts or something…’ Linda nodded and said, ‘and despite feeling like this, you were still able to hear her words of encouragement, she never really left you.’ I nodded and said I was glad I was able to bring her back to me, open the door inside again. Linda said, ‘my therapist has this thing he says to me, he says, ‘are you going to be able to keep me in mind Linda…’ I think that’s a lovely phrase, keep in mind… don’t you?’ I said, ‘yeah it is lovely, I used to hate it… Anna would say she was holding me in mind and I’d be like ‘well what good does that do me? I can’t feel when you’re holding me in mind!’ and I think there needs to be some trust there, to really trust and believe that the person isn’t just saying it you know? For so long I thought Anna would dread our sessions and be burdened by my incessant neediness and hate hearing from me you know, not want to think about me… but yeah it’s about trusting her for her word I guess. If she says she holds me in mind then that’s what she is doing. and I hold her in mind.’ Linda said, ‘it definitely is about trust and although your trust in Anna might have been tested recently I think you are noticing some aspects of the trust that are intact and feel very secure.’ I nodded.

Linda said, ‘Lucy, the thing that was very clear to me from the start was that you were looking after yourself. You were going through a very difficult time, it was a very frightening and upsetting time for you and you knew that you needed support. So that can only be a good thing. I’m glad you set this up and that you were able to get the support you needed.’ I got the sense that she was trying to tell me that there was no need to feel defensive about her asking me to look at the reason why I feel the need to fill the gaps. I said, ‘yeah, I don’t know if you would have a different opinion but for me, I feel like it’s easy to forget that there’s this very deep well of attachment trauma that is still there and is triggered massively by Anna and other things like abandonment stuff… I was starting to invalidate myself you know, I was thinking I’ve only worked with you for a couple of weeks why is it so hard for me to let this thing go, why can’t I just end it with you? But it has been meaningful for me!’ she said, ‘I’m really glad to hear that,’ I continued, ‘and you know, you’ve seen me in this tiny slice of time in my life and you don’t know what has gone before but it’s never been easy for me to just let someone in like that I’ve always been very protective and closed off so I guess this feels like a wee sign of progress, I was able to let you in enough for you to be able to help me.’ she said, ‘yes I really got a sense of that Lucy, that you were working very hard to make the very most of these sessions in a very difficult time.’

I said, ‘Do you have any thoughts on what would be the right thing to do for these two sessions?’ She looked curiously at me and said, ‘do I have any thoughts on it… hmmm?’ with a questioning tone. She said, ‘well let me think… well one thing I’ve learned about you is that you think very carefully about decisions you need to make… you weigh things up, you consider all the options, mull it over, you’re not the sort of person who is just going to say ‘right, that’s great, Anna’s coming back so I’m just gonna say bye now!’ I laughed and said, ‘uh huh… this is nuts, it’s reminding me of the couple of times I’ve been to a psychic, which is a bit of a blast, and you sit there having told them nothing about yourself and your life and they tell you all these things about yourself… but obviously you’re not psychic haha you’ve just been listening! But I’m sitting here mind blown like ‘fuuuck sake! Shit how does she know this about me, wow!’ hahaha!’ Linda laughed a lot and said, ‘well yeah, it’s my job you know, to listen and make sense of you, Lucy.’ She has this rather melodic, lilting way of speaking. She is from the East End of Glasgow and has a very strong accent. To me it sounds raw and authentic and real. She draws out some words with a gentle upturn in the middle and downwards tone on some of the endings, ‘well yeaaaaaah, it’s my joooob you knowww, to liiiisten and make sense of you Lucyaaa.’ I could sit and listen to her talk all day actually. I really love it. I wish I knew her in real life actually because she seems like such a decent human being, I need so many more people like that in my life. She continued, ‘…and also I wonder if you’re trying to make the ‘right’ decision, whatever that is you know… the right decision, not wanting to make any mistakes… but I’d encourage you to think that maybe there are no right or wrong decisions, I would encourage you to think about what feels safe for you. Does that sound accurate?’ I nodded. I really liked that. I like that there is this unspoken knowing between us. She knows there is far more going on for me than we have ever spoken about. She knows that she is holding space in this tiny window of a much bigger picture. Way back in the first session I had said to her that I felt there was no way this could work because she didn’t have the back story. This afternoon I said to her, ‘it turns out you really didn’t need the back story!’ she smiled and nodded and said, ‘yeah, no need for the whole back story… we met each other on the same level, we met here,’ she put her hands straight, palms down fingers pointing at each other horizontally in front of her face as if to signify this moment in time that we were on the same plane, meeting each other in sync.

I said, ‘I can’t actually believe it’s only been a couple of weeks it seems ridiculous now that I got so carried away with imagining Anna would die… I genuinely thought I was never going to see her ever again… it’s actually quite funny now, looking back.’ Linda said, ‘there wasn’t anything funny about it in my experience, Lucy.’ She had a straight face and I almost felt like I was being told off. But I understand she was just showing me how seriously she took it all and how much she believed what I had been feeling. She said, ‘What struck me when we started our work, was the fear. There was a lot of panic and fear in you. Whatever age this triggered, there was huge fear in her.’ I replied without even thinking. Just spoke the words, ‘there is this deep unmet need in me from years and years of… um well abuse and neglect and well Anna and I have been working very slowly gently picking away at these tiny little bits of it all and it felt like we had just exposed the edges of the core of it, deep inside me, you know?’ I had my closed fist on my heart and continued, ‘I was always so closed off but we’d opened it up and then all this shit happened and she left me in the middle of it and it triggered this massive trauma response in me, it felt like when my dad left and when my mum abandoned me emotionally so many times, every time, and it felt like when school ended and I no longer had this safe space to go to anymore and I couldn’t get support from the teachers who had always been the thing keeping me alive and I just remember this powerful black hole swallowing me up… the day after the last day of school I slipped off the edge of any kind of hope and I would sleep and sleep and just hid myself away. I didn’t have my safe space anymore and I had no control or rhythm to my life it was just well… just abusive and neglectful and… this crisis, having my work stop, not being allowed out, being kept away from things that keep me going, keep my rhythm… it triggered all of the same feelings from twenty years ago.’ Linda had a very compassionate expression and said, ‘I can understand that. It triggered a very painful memory and the emotions that were reawakened… it’s understandable you were frightened.’ She had used an analogy earlier that she said some other clients had been using, that this lockdown feels a bit like the week between Christmas and New Year where you don’t really know what to do with yourself and there’s too much food around. She referred back to that and said, ‘that analogy doesn’t really fit with your experience of the lockdown. Your experience has been retraumatising.’ I nodded. Felt very seen.

I said, ‘I may have been able to cope with this interim period without Anna and without you, Linda. I may have got through it, but I didn’t want to. I will no longer force myself to do everything alone. I don’t want to feel these overwhelming feelings alone anymore. It’s incredibly powerful to feel seen and even just to have someone sitting there looking at me while I am feeling the feelings in my body is incredible… I mean, when you say my name it just feels so fucking like WOW, I’ve said that to Anna… just really feeling like this person is here with me, completely present and here now. It’s very important that I provide that for myself, having never had it when I was a child.’ Linda said, ‘it is so powerful, you’re right. I completely understand how important it was for you to look after yourself and to make sure you had a supportive presence while going through this. I’m really so glad you did that.’

I joked that I had ten minutes left to decide if I wanted this to be our last session and Linda said she didn’t want me to feel under pressure to decide, that it wasn’t fair or necessary for me to do that. She said, ‘I want you to think about what feels safe and good for you… not what the right thing to do is or the best thing, what feels safe and good for you. There’s no rush, you don’t have to decide just now. Give yourself the time you need, your session time is ringfenced – no one else will be in that space – so I just want to encourage you to see how you feel and let me know on Tuesday.’ I said that felt good and I appreciated it. I said, ‘you won’t be offended if I say no or disappointed if I say I do want it?’ Linda said, ‘no I wont feel offended or disappointed, I just want you to decide what feels good for you… even if you just want to save the £45 that’s fine by me, or give yourself some space before your session with Anna on Saturday… whatever you decide is fine by me.’

She then said, ‘I was trying to think if I’ve ever seen you before at the centre and I have, I’ve seen the back of you many times.’ We laughed, she continued, ‘I have that big front room and I’ve seen you go into Anna’s room before… we will see each other in passing in the centre, we are not saying goodbye never see you again… this is not a closed door. We will bump into each other I’m sure.’ I said, ‘that’s funny you remember me from those fleeting moments. I loved that front room, we were in that room for the first session when you guys moved to that building. It’s such a nice room I was gutted when Anna chose the back room! I really want the sofa in that big room coz I want to sit next to her in our sessions but she just drags the chair round beside me instead… I’ve told her I’ll buy a bloody sofa for that room!’ Linda laughed. I said, ‘I know I said this to you in the first or second session and it now seems a bit silly but I do feel like it might be nice, when the world all goes back to normal, to have a face to face session with you, to sit in your company. Would you be okay with that still?’ Linda nodded enthusiastically and said, ‘yes I’m absolutely okay with that, that sounds great.’

We then ended the session, she said, ‘look after yourself, take care and I’ll hear from you soon.’

So, at the moment I’m considering not having another session with Linda. I’m considering carefully composing an email to her thanking her for everything she did for me in the short time we worked together and leaving the door open for a random face to face session at some point when (and if) the world goes back to normal. This felt like a nice way to end our work and in fact the last fifteen minutes was quite sparse in terms of talking. We didn’t have a huge amount to cover. I don’t feel I will have a lot to talk about on Wednesday that isn’t just a rehash of all of this. Which is a bit of a waste of energy and £45! I will think about it and email her in the next day or two.

Session number 5 with Linda

I really felt good about things yesterday, everything I wrote out in the last post made a lot of sense to me. Then I struggled to get to sleep last night and my thoughts turned to Anna and how much I have missed her and that although I have coped with this rollercoaster so far, I’m anxious about what might lay ahead for us. I even had thoughts of stopping working with her and choosing to only work with Linda. This morning I woke up very tired and agitated and emotional. My period came this afternoon and I instantly felt the agitation, irritability and tension ease off so that was definitely a lot to do with it but also, all this therapy stuff has been a lot lately! I really feel like I’ve been through it.

So I clicked in to my zoom session and Linda immediately thanked me for my email and for paying. She confirmed that she’s happy to hold as many sessions as I want before I move back to Anna. I told her I felt very very nervous. I actually felt sick. I’d had an upset tummy all morning. She asked me what I thought that was about and I said, ‘getting the message from Anna has stirred things up… I mean this feeling is familiar to me… I always feel like this before sessions with Anna.’ Linda asked if I had a sense of what that was about and I said I always just thought it was my attachment stuff being triggered… feeling close to people, feeling like they matter is so risky it makes me nervous, panicky, anxious.’ She nodded as if that is a thing and said that it makes sense and she asked me why I thought this was happening today. I said, ‘maybe because I know we’re going to have to say goodbye and I actually feel kind of sad about that.’ She nodded.

I told her, ‘my mother could make a best friend from a stranger in the first five minutes of meeting them at the check out queue and it used to be mortifying to me. A new best friend every few days. She would tell them every detail of her life and mine, I hated it. I think from a very young age I decided to keep myself closed off and never let people in. So it’s weird to me that I let you in so quickly. But I worked really hard to learn how to let Anna in and then I guess I really felt like I needed to let you in to help me get through this and now I’ve let you in and I feel a connection with you and it feels a bit shit that I have to stop. I feel so stupid that it all happened so quickly, I mean its like four 50 minute sessions for god sake I don’t want to be like her but also it is so unlike me.’ I finally took a breath and Linda said, ‘can you allow yourself to find an alternative reason why you let me in?’ I thought for a while then said, ‘maybe because that part of me that was so protective and closed off knew that in order to get what I needed from our session I would need to open up? And maybe also something I wrote about yesterday comes to mind, that I am learning I can trust myself… I think, you can’t trust other people if you can’t trust yourself and maybe now I am getting better at listening to my gut instinct, I really felt like I could trust you… Anna wouldn’t recommend someone she doesn’t trust but also I really just felt it when we talked, and you said it, there’s no bullshit with you, and I experienced that… so maybe I just knew deep down that we could do the work safely together.’

Linda is a person centred therapist and I really notice a difference between her and Anna in these kinds of moments. Linda sits and listens. She affirms and nods and smiles and frowns and empathises and always, always turns my attention to what I think, rarely shares her own observations. Anna asks a lot more analytical questions and frequently shares insights. One reason for this could be that Linda knows we don’t have the time for deep work, that’s not her purpose with me, another reason could be their different training methods. I miss Anna’s responses.

Linda referred to my email and asked me about the mixed feelings I was having about going back to work with Anna. I said I hate having so many contradictory feelings. I said, ‘why can’t I just feel one damn thing at a time!?’ I started and didn’t finish about 8 different ideas/sentences. I said, ‘I don’t know how you therapists follow this kind of chat it must be so confusing!’ She said, ‘does it feel confusing to you?’ I nodded and said I hate not knowing the one thing I should be feeling. Linda said, ‘you can’t feel multiple things at once?’ in an inquisitive way and I said, ‘it’s funny because I wrote about this on my blog… that it makes perfect sense to hold more than one feeling about something.’ We laughed at the irony of me not being able to accept that right now and I said, ‘I can preach it though!’ she laughed and reminded me that we can now something cognitively and still not fully feel it. She said, ‘this is what therapy is all about… that out there we can’t show our unrefined muddled thoughts and our mixed feelings but in here you can bring all of that, all of that is welcome here.’ I said, ‘if you keep being like that it’s going to be even harder to stop working with you.’ she did that sort of straight lipped smile like she understands its tough.

I said, ‘well… okay let’s try to articulate this then… I mean okay so logically and sensibly I know that it is absolutely right that if Anna is not well she should take time off and that it’s professionally right to look after herself if she feels she can’t hold space for me… I’m grateful to her for that…’ Linda said, ‘buuuut…?’ I laughed and said, ‘can I be totally uncensored… keeping in mind everything I just said?’ she said, ‘of course, please do!’ I said, ‘first of all I really appreciate that this might be weird for you coz she’s your colleague and friend but you’re definitely okay with me talking about her?’ she nodded. I said, ‘I know you won’t tell me what’s been wrong with her and I definitely don’t want you to, I almost don’t want to look at you when I’m talking because I don’t want to see your response,’ she smiled and I continued, ‘so… I’m angry with her, I’m angry that she just left at the peak of this thing when I was in some sort of fucking crisis, the whole world was in crisis and she said we would get through it together and then she quit on me and then she didn’t reply to any of my messages even though she knew I was really struggling. Then when I chooses she’s just gonna drop a text as if it’s the most casual thing like ‘oh I’m ready to work with you again’ I mean, I know it’s only been a couple of weeks but actually I haven’t sat with her since the end of February and it feels like it’s been a fucking year. After having two sessions a week to not seeing her for over a month and those two phone sessions and… but then the sensible side comes in and, you know initially I was certain she had the virus and she was going to die. I know the difference between an attachment wound trigger and a real life worry and you know, she got ill at the start of the lockdown, I genuinely thought she was going to die I was fucking devastated, I really felt like I was never ever going to see her again and I feel like I grieved and really just tried to make the most of working it through with you.’ I paused and Linda said, ‘I know, you did believe she was going to die. That was the sense I got of it all, that you were preparing for a loss that didn’t happen in the end.’ I said, ‘was it really necessary for her to let me believe that!? But then I think, I’ve thought a lot about this and I don’t think she did have the virus, I think maybe she was struggling emotionally or mentally. I’ve kept in mind what you said questioning why it is important to me – what was wrong with her… and I know I may never learn why she was off… but well, if she was off coz she was struggling, I mean I get that – the whole world is falling apart and her life will have been turned upside down. But it doesn’t help that we had these two phone sessions where I sobbed my heart out for the first time with her and it was just too much for her and she then got ill. Like I broke her, I was too much for her and she couldn’t cope with me anymore. So I guess that’s some of the stuff I’ve been thinking.’ I stretched and took a big staggered breath in and out.

Linda smiled and nodded and said, ‘phhhfff yes, you guys are gonna have so much work to do together… and you will get through it together. You will bring this to her and you will work through it together because she is your therapist.’ I felt weird and lost my focus. Reflecting back on it I think I felt a slight rejection or shame. Like she wasn’t willing to go into this with me but also in hindsight, she couldn’t really go into it… it is work I need to do with Anna. She continued, ‘but I want to say that all of your feelings are valid and everything you’ve said makes sense to me and thank you for sharing it with me.’

I said my tummy was going nuts again and she said, ‘What is the feeling in your belly telling you?’ I squeezed my arms around me and said, ‘it’s a fear, a part of me is frightened at the thought of seeing her again.’ Linda asked what the fear was and I said, ‘What if it’s not the same as it used to be? What if she’s changed and I don’t feel a connection anymore? What if I can sense she doesn’t really want to work with me anymore?’ Linda smiled in a knowing way and nodded. I said I was afraid that she wasn’t going to be well enough to cope with me. I said, ‘I don’t want her to rush back, I actually want to tell her to give it a few months, I wanna text and say no rush Anna, Linda and I are doing fine just now… don’t come back until you are totally ready! You know, if I get the tiny glimpse that she’s not fully okay it’s going to make me hold back, I won’t be able to talk about half the stuff I need to talk about, I won’t be able to talk about the pandemic or how I’ve felt these past two weeks… I don’t want to know her weaknesses… like you appear really strong and stable and grounded to me and like even the tiny details I know about your life like the fact you have cats, I don’t even know if Anna has pets and I don’t want to know!’ Linda asked, ‘what would it be like to know something about Anna’s life?’ I said, ‘maybe it would hurt, she would become human to me and I don’t want her to be human…’ Linda said, ‘you don’t want her to be human, yet.’

She asked me how I felt about doing zoom sessions with Anna and I said I hoped someone had practiced it with her coz I don’t want her to not know how to work it, it would be awkward… I just don’t want to see any flaws… I don’t want her to trigger my need to take care or it will stop me ever reaching out for her, it will stop me being honest about my experience.’

There was a pause… I can’t remember what Linda said, she does say more than I am writing but I find it hard to remember exactly what she says which is weird because I remember what Anna says very clearly. Anyway, I said, I’m not sleeping at the moment. I didn’t get to sleep until close to 3am last night… and that’s with me lying there from half 10.’ She asked what was going on for me and I said I’ve just been so agitated like my whole body is full of this agitated anxious energy. She talked about the need to encourage myself to switch off. She asked what helps with the agitation and I said that self harm was always a good go to but I don’t do that anymore. She asked if there was any alterative to self harm and I said the gym worked, though not at 3am, but I am eating so much more at the moment and I’m not moving enough and I have all this energy. She encouraged me to think of ways I could move more, go for a run, workout at home. We talked about my drawing and writing and that I do try mindfulness techniques but I struggle because they often make me cry and I don’t want to cry in the middle of the night.

At one point we talked about what I might like to focus on in the remaining couple of sessions we have left and I got the pain back in my tummy. I talked about Paul and how I never had a proper ending with him. That he just stopped working in Glasgow when I was on maternity leave and we were on what I understood to be a break. I expected to start up our work again but then I found out he’d moved cities, I said, ‘so a bit further down the line I started working with Anna and she had a prearranged holiday about a month in to us working together and in that fortnight I got back in touch with Paul and asked for a final session on Skype as a bit of closure. It had been over a year since I’d seen him last. In the skype session he told me he thought that having sessions where you work to an ending was contrived and didn’t mirror real life… that relationships and friendships end abruptly all the time. But I actually think he avoided endings, he wasn’t even very good at ending each session I often would end it sometimes up to forty minutes after the end of my time. I said, ‘So maybe what we are doing here will give me the chance to experience a therapeutic ending.’ She said that sounded like a good idea and that we could definitely focus on that over the next couple of sessions.

Linda looked intrigued and then asked if she could share an observation. I nodded her on. She said, ‘there is an interesting theme that I’m noticing, about how you respond to gaps. Something about the gaps… I get a sense of panic?’ I was completely silenced and felt flooded with shame. She continued, ‘so what is it about the gaps for you..?’ we had 6 minutes to go. This is something that Anna would never do. She wouldn’t throw that kind of observation at me within the last ten minutes. But Linda works to the 50 minute rule so you really feel sort of rushed to squeeze it all in. Plus she doesn’t know me like Anna does. I said, ‘I feel really ashamed now.’ Linda looked shocked and confused. I said, ‘you haven’t shamed me…’ (why do I always feel like I have to relieve them of any responsibility?) I went on, ‘What an idiot I was for feeling proud of myself, oh my god, I feel like a fool for thinking I had done a good thing by seeking your support when Anna couldn’t be there for me. When really I was just plugging a gap because the thought of sitting in a space, alone with my feelings, was so intolerable I would rather share it with a fucking stranger!? And years ago, after getting a taste of Anna’s support just a few sessions in, the space she left when she went on holiday created such a painful vacuum that I went back to a therapist who had abandoned me! Wow!’

She looked concerned and sort of raised her eyebrows in the centre. She said, ‘I wonder if you can see that you were looking after yourself, you weren’t weak. It was self care. You reached out for support when you needed it which is always a good thing. But it’s important to look with curiosity at our habitual behaviours, to find our core beliefs and to question them and maybe be curious about how we might have responded in a different way – that can help us grow… so in pointing out what I noticed about your response to the gaps, I wonder if you can get a sense of why the gaps feel intolerable for you, and look at that with compassion?’

I said, ‘yeah… because the gaps were always intolerable. The gaps when I was a little kid… a teenager… when I was left alone with it all, I could hardly bear it… and now we have two minutes left! I feel like you’ve taken hold of this perfectly settled snow globe I was holding and you’ve shaken it all up so it’s wild and confusing in there…’ Linda smiled and said, ‘yeah and you’re left thinking where the hell did all this snow come from?’ I was like, ‘yep and I can’t see a thing!’ She said, ‘maybe that’s what therapy is all about Lucy, maybe if you could just let it ‘combobulate’ by itself and not try to control or make sense of it, just let it be there and it will settle on it’s own, ready for you to pick it up again with Anna.’ She must have noticed me drift a bit and with about 30 seconds to go she asked what that was bringing up for me and I just said, ‘lots to think about! Thanks Linda, I’ll see you on Saturday… you still okay with that?’ and she said in a very real and meaningful tone, ‘of course Lucy, look forward to seeing you on Saturday.’

Yesterday afternoon it dawned on me that I hadn’t text Anna after my session with Linda on Saturday. It was the first time I hadn’t immediately wanted to reach out to her and let her know what we’d worked on and that I hoped she was doing okay. In fact I hadn’t really thought much about her for a few days and I was beginning to notice a shift away from talking to and working things out with Anna in my mind… now it’s Linda’s voice.

Then I got a text in the early evening from Anna. She was letting me know she’s starting up sessions again next Saturday. I sat with the message for a bit and noticed the feelings that came up for me. I replied telling her how pleased I was to hear from her and that, to my surprise, I was experiencing very mixed feelings about moving back from Linda to her. She told me she understood and that it was important to take my time and to work on this together with Linda.

The more I think about it, the more my mixed feelings make perfect sense. I have missed Anna so much and I’m delighted she is safe and well. But I really believed that I was never going to see her again so I put all of my energy into forming a meaningful connection with Linda. I needed to quickly process my grief and abandonment pain with effectively a stranger… and I managed to do that.

Later on in the evening I emailed Linda explaining things to her. I’m sure Anna had already been in touch with her. I wanted to let her know that I plan on untangling all of my thoughts and feelings with her in our next few sessions and that much to my surprise, I’m not in any rush to finish working with her.

I did a lot of processing last night. Straight away I sensed some anger towards Anna. The anger was saying that she disappeared when she explicitly said she wouldn’t, at a time when I needed her the most. She knew I was struggling with fears of her dying and she kept silent. I sent her texts that she ignored, when at other time’s she has broken our texting boundary to reply to me when I’ve been in deep distress. My mind explored the darkest possibilities day and night as I had fantasies of her lying in a hospital bed with tubes down her throat and a machine helping her breath. At night I woke crying from nightmares of me standing on the periphery of her funeral. Unable to express my complicated grief with anyone. I haven’t sat in Anna’s company since February 29th and the first few weeks of her absence (including the emotionally destabilising phone sessions we had) were really hard for me. I was in a state of shock and suffered a great deal with emotional flashbacks to times in my childhood when I was abandoned.

It felt like a crisis moment. Even in Anna’s final text to me, when she referred me to A&E if I felt at all suicidal, I sensed this shared crisis. We are experiencing a worldwide crisis, a trauma… one that I desperately needed help to get through. In the absence of Anna, Linda showed up for me… the day after I reached out to her. Exactly when I needed someone. Linda and I were able to form a trusting and deep working relationship in a very short space of time. I’m very grateful to her for stepping into my space and meeting me where I was. She could easily have put the bare minimum effort in but I sensed a really authentic care in her. She really meant it when she said she was up for being my therapy aunt, in the absence of my therapy mum. It felt like there was this intimate ‘knowing’ between us. Just because we both knew Anna. We had both talked to her. We could both picture her in our minds. This helped me drop some defences straight away. I think also, I have learned how to trust myself and my judgement of others. I could tell Linda was one of the good ones.

I’ve had many theories of why Anna was off and I know I may never be privy to the truth. There is a professional boundary there and it’s not within my control to decide what I do and don’t know about Anna’s personal life. Just like my children don’t get to dictate to me what I do and don’t tell them about my adult life. I decide because I know what’s best for them. Anna has a wealth of experience, training, supervision that I don’t have access to. I have some understanding of psychology and therapeutic strategies and the complexities of the human brain but she is the therapist. She is the professional. Part of the therapeutic process is a certain letting go of control on the clients part and allowing the therapist to do her job. Anyway… my theories on why she was off have helped me gain a certain perspective. Initially I just assumed it was the virus. All of the worst case scenarios cropped up. But in time as I processed things with Linda and by myself I started to get a sense that perhaps Anna had been struggling mentally/emotionally. As the virus crept ever closer to Scotland and in the early days of lockdown, we had these two phone sessions where I could hear Anna’s professionalism slipping. I started to hear her insecurities and fears seeping into our conversations. I noticed tiny changes in her responses to me. We cried together in a shared grief and fear of what was happening in our world. The focus wasn’t as acutely on me and my needs. Linda helped me articulate that this felt deeply unsettling. I’ve never experienced Anna being unable to hold and contain me. Her shit was bleeding into my sessions. It was very very subtle and I couldn’t put my finger on it until recently. It would be so understandable if Anna struggled with the impact of this pandemic. On her and her family. And it is the most caring and professional thing for her to do, in the awareness that she couldn’t be fully present for me in this time, to encourage me to seek help from Linda and take some time to look after herself.

I now feel very strongly that the only way Anna was able to show up for me was by connecting me to her friend and colleague who she trusts. She never left me, she supported me through Linda during a time where she was unable to hold space for me. Much like I organise trusted childcare for my children when I go to work. And even when I’m away from them, I think about them often. The coming weeks will hold some interesting work. I am feeling really strong at the moment, I survived what I’d imagined to be the worst case scenario… my therapist took time off with no idea of how long she would be away from me during a time of extreme stress and intense need for support. My belief was always that Anna held this special magic key to my healing, that all of our wonderful work was down to her. But the past few weeks have shown me that actually within this partnership, I hold the key. The therapist is the guide, like a copilot. But I’m the driver. I’ve learned so much about myself over the 7 years that I’ve been in therapy and specifically the two and a half years I’ve worked with Anna. I know what I need now and I know how to navigate therapy to help me get to where I want to be. There is a lot less anxiety around losing Anna now that I’ve experienced fully believing I had lost her. There’s a healthy level of sadness at the thought of it and a hope that our therapeutic relationship will not end prematurely. But I now have faith in my own ability to seek help if that were to happen.

The past few weeks have been extremely difficult and also held a huge amount of potential for growth. I feel like I’m heading towards some deep work with Anna as I plan on bringing my authentic feelings and thoughts about this experience. I’m not fearful of this work like I would have been in the past because I’ve noticed this resilience inside me that I wasn’t fully aware of before.

Session number four with Linda

This is not very well written. My head was a jumbled mix and that’s coming through in my writing.

I clicked on the zoom link and Linda appeared in view and asked me how I was. I hesitated and said, ‘I’m okay right in this moment, but I was absolutely not okay last night or yesterday.’ She looked concerned and asked me what happened. I immediately launched in and said, ‘this is so weird… I mean, therapy chat is weird anyway in that we just jump right in to the deep stuff but this is even more weird just because we’ve spoken three times and here I am about to talk to you about something deeply personal, but I need to talk about this and if it were Anna I would just talk about it, it’s hard because you don’t know me like she does you don’t have the back story… and I feel like I want to tell you some things first like, for example Anna believes I have a phobia of fucking my kids up, she thinks it’s a deep fear, that I’m going to traumatise them like I was traumatised… she thinks I’m a good mum… but well, yesterday and last night was the worst ever and I really need to talk about it, I want your insights.’ Linda said, ‘okay well firstly I want to hold what you’ve just said, that this is indeed unusual and that I admire you making the most of these sessions in this time. And yeah, I’m not sure that I really need a back story… just go for it.’

So I explained with growing shame that the past three nights Grace has been up screaming and shouting and crying way past her bedtime. I said, ‘Grace is usually a happy, confident, outgoing kid… if she was in the room with us she’d be right up to you chatting away asking you questions and telling you about herself. She has this thing where she says, ‘four people in this house love me’ then she counts through all of us and includes herself. She loves her friends, loves school, throws herself into everything she does…’ Linda was smiling and listening. I said, ‘Wednesday night it started. We did the usual bedtime routine…’ Linda asked lots of questions to get an idea of what things are like for us normally. I told her we read the kids stories, we give them baths, we play quiet games upstairs, we take it in turns to sit with them and then we go downstairs and they fall asleep in their own bedrooms. It’s mostly calm, sometimes with a wake up here and there but that’s always easily resolved. ‘On Wednesday night almost as soon as we got downstairs she started banging then shouting out, we went up to her but pretty much immediately I was angered by her. I hate to admit this because it completely lacks empathy but I wanted her to shut up and go to sleep, to just be good like she always is.’ I said, ‘this is not how I want to parent. I mean, ten years ago when I decided I wanted to have kids at some point I started reading the books… gentle parenting, respectful parenting, positive parenting, the power of validation for children, love languages in childhood… any book I could read about how to not fuck up your kids… everything I do is to try to make sure I don’t pass this on to them and basically everything I’ve ever feared happened the past few nights.’ With a weighty compassion in her voice Linda said, ‘hmm, tell me what happened.’

I was really activated. I told her my chest felt full of feelings, I said I didn’t know what the emotions were but my body felt full of very heavy feelings similar to what I felt last night. I was starting to get spacey. I explained, ‘all of the stuff I’ve been trying to do to be a good parent and meet all her needs and not mess things up for her went out the window and me and Adam both lost it with her. She was screaming and shouting and we were screaming and shouting back at her… so Wednesday and Thursday night were both like this after trying so hard on Thursday to help her emotionally, to try to help her feel better. I mean Wednesday night I was so angry, shouting at her to get back to bed and stop being so difficult… I swore I would never say that to her, ever! And even as I sat on her bed trying to be calm I was still speaking so angrily to her telling her I was disappointed she was still doing this. I was saying ‘why are you doing this!’ and she was sobbing saying she didn’t know what was wrong with her… I just couldn’t be rational and caring and kind. I was just angry. It was horrible. At one point she was saying ‘why am I even alive, I hate myself, what is wrong with me’ – I mean, fucking hell… it was horrific.’ Linda was making very supportive sounds and she said, ‘what do you think she needed in that moment?’ I said, ‘she needed to be held, she needed to be told she is loved, that I understand and that I’m here… but I couldn’t even be there for myself let alone her it was too much for me. Last night it was happening again and I think Adam and I were just at the end of our patience. The evenings are the only two hours we get to ourselves and he was shouting at her and telling her he didn’t want to spend another minute in her room. I am so angry with him.’ Linda said, ‘What do you want to say to him?’ I said, ‘I’m so angry with you, you let me down, you let Gracie down, you really fucked up, I don’t think I can forgive you for doing all of that…’ Linda said, ‘what do you want from him?’ I said, ‘I want him to feel as shit as I do about it all,’ she said, ‘you want him to share the shit!’ and we smiled and I nodded. I said, ‘I feel horrific about it all, I want him to really feel the gravity of this.’ Linda was nodding and I really felt her non judgemental presence while I was explaining all of this. I continued, ‘I know I sound like a total therapy snob but I said to him that he’s 7 year behind me in terms of understanding emotions and our childhoods and how it can impact our ability to bring our kids up in an emotionally healthy way… he hasn’t done all the work I have you know and so when we have moments like this it is so stark that he isn’t on the same page as me. He was saying her behaviour is unacceptable whereas I see it as her struggling emotionally, he said Grace is coming between us and playing us off each other but I see it as her desperately trying to get her needs met.’ Later Linda came back to this. She said, ‘you described yourself as a therapy snob but I don’t see it as that, I see it as you are more sensitive than Adam, you are sensitive to Grace’s emotions when he isn’t.’ I am constantly amazed with how therapists are able to reframe things so beautifully. When all I can see is the critical view of what I have done or who I am, they find a positive. It’s amazing!

Linda asked me what Grace was saying and I told her, ‘she doesn’t want us to die, she wants her life to go back to the way it was before, her tummy was sore, nothing felt right… and you know after three hours of all this I did eventually calm down and I held her. I got into bed with her and stroked her hair. I told her it made sense to me that she was feeling like that. I explained that her tummy was sore because she was worried and anxious. I told her we were doing everything we could to keep her safe. I told her about people she knows who have had the virus and survived. I reminded her that both he kids and I had the flu last winter and although we felt awful we got through it… I told her I was sorry for shouting at her… she was saying she was sorry she’d let me down!’ Linda made a sort of sad, ‘oh’ sound and I said, ‘it’s just awful! I told her she hadn’t let us down, that she was feeling big feelings and that it’s up to us to help her deal with that and not just escalate things and we shouldn’t have been screaming and shouting back at her.’ Linda said, ‘you sound to me like you’re in shock. Does that sound right?’ I thought about it and said that maybe I was. Linda said, ‘it sounds like you surprised yourself and that it’s not how you normally do things… you are shocked with how things escalated.’ I nodded and said I was deeply disapointed in myself.

I said, ‘I remember having massive horrible feelings like that when I was wee and I had to feel them silently. I bundled them up inside me and hid them. And I hid. I hid under my covers or under my bed…. and you know… no one read me a fucking bedtime story, no one was tucking me in at night, its awful but part of me is like ‘it’s never fucking enough!’ and I feel really fucking horrific saying that, but I give my kids everything and it’s never enough!’ Linda said, ‘in what way is it never enough?’ and I said, ‘well even though we did all this work on her feelings and lots of family together time and loads of other stuff the day still ended with her screaming her head off…’

Linda said softly, ‘you know that image of Grace screaming and shouting at the top of the stairs is very poigniant to me, she was scared. Very scared. That makes perfect sense to me. We’re all scared, I’m scared too, I feel like her screaming at the top of her lungs makes sense, you know?’ I said, ‘fuck. I know.’ I felt the tears stinging. She said, ‘and how wonderful is it that she felt that scared feeling inside her and she screamed out for you, knowing you’d come. When you were little, no one came… you couldn’t scream out so you hid the scared feelings and you hid yourself. Isn’t that right?’ I nodded. I whispered, ‘but I stood at the bottom of the stairs and shouted at her to get to her bed, so loudly that my throat hurt this morning.’ Linda asked me how I was feeling about it all now and I said I was deeply ashamed and still very angry. She said, ‘hmmm it’s probably too soon.’ I said, ‘too soon for what?’ and she said, ‘not enough time has passed, you’ve not processed it yet… there is no expectation for that either… but yeah, it’s too soon.’ I said, ‘it does take me a very long time to discharge my feelings. It’s like everyone got up this morning feeling fine and Adam was all happy and chipper and I was still furious. I told him the only thing that’s changed for me is thepassing of time. I was still just as angry as I was 12 hours before.’

Linda said, ‘Lucy, how old did you feel when you were shouting at Grace?’ I thought about it, I put my hand on my chest and said, ‘I think about the same age as her, 8.’ Linda gently enquired, ‘oh, and how could a little 8 year old, you, how could that little girl know how to cope with Grace’s big feelings? She was so very scared too… you are scared.’ I looked at her and her eyebrows were swooped in and her whole face looked attuned and caring. I felt like I wanted to slam the laptop shut, I felt so exposed, she could fully see me and my emotional experience. I managed a small nod.

I said, ‘when I was 8,’ I’d literally only said those four words and Linda said, ‘uh huuuu,’ in an interested tone… I fucking love active listening, its seriously like a drug to me I love it! I continued, ‘we had already moved house loads of times and I’d moved schools a couple times and I didn’t have any friends, Grace has loads of friends you know which is really great, but anyway, so at that age my mum was going out a lot singing in a band and she was having an affair which she would tell me all about, graphically… (I wish I’d looked at Linda when I was saying this but I couldn’t)… and well some nights she’d stay out really late and my dad would worry so he would go looking for her and he would tell me to look after Daniel and not get out of bed and then he’d leave. So we would be on our own and I’d be terrified and all this panic and fear would overwhelm me but I had to be grown up and… you know I was good. I was a good kid. And I didn’t always think that but we’ve really unpicked it, Anna and I, they tried to make me feel like I was the problem, that I was difficult, but I really wasn’t. I was a good kid. And I still didn’t get what I wanted… it was so hard.’ Linda said, ‘it sounds like you had to hold a lot, far more than you should have at that age.’

I said, ‘I cried myself to sleep last night again, I felt so awful about it all… it’s the damn perfectionism, I know it is but I can’t do anything about it… it feels really true inside me. Like, I’ve used this analogy before with Anna when talking about my own childhood but it feels like if Grace’s life was this big huge canvas, a beautiful painting, perfect, and I’m coming along and burning holes in it, permanently scarring it, you know?’ I was looking down and then looked at the screen and Linda’s face was full of concern and sadness. I said, ‘well that’s how it feels anyway, like I can see her whole life spanning ahead of her and everything I do or say I plan so carefully… I imagine in a split second, whether this thing is going to be something that builds her up, encourages her, makes her feel confident and loved and worthy or whether it is going to be a thing that in thirty years has her sitting in a therapists office sobbing, the thing that has made her have an insecure attachment style, the reason why she always goes for partners who hurt her, the reason she doesn’t believe she deserves happiness… I cant help my brain from expanding to this bigger picture where my tiny actions have massive consequences.’ Linda said that sounded exhausting, that I couldn’t possibly be solely responsible for all of that, that Grace would forget these small things in time. I interrupted her, ‘but I didn’t forget, I never forgot! I remember everything they did and everything they said… it massively impacted me!’ Linda said, ‘Lucy, I know I don’t know a lot about you but from the little I do know, I’m going to guess that what you experienced was a lot worse than what your kids are experiencing.’ I nodded and she continued, ‘Lucy, I want to share an observation but if it doesn’t fit you, I would invite you to tell me that it doesn’t fit.’ She paused and looked like she was really thinking about whether it was helpful to share this. She then said, ‘So, do correct me if I’m wrong. I think it’s important to say that you are not your parents, you are you and Grace is not you, she is Grace. You are very worried you’ll see any likeness in yourself to them and the thing is, you will. There will be things that you do that they did. There will be similarities but you are not them. You are very different to them.’ I said, ‘I know this is true but I hate it, I don’t want there to be any similarities… if I am the same as them, how can I be angry with them for what they did, if I am hurt and angry at them for shouting at me how can I then shout at my kids and forgive myself?’ Linda smiled knowingly as if this is some sort of next layer in the recovery process but annoyingly we didn’t explore that further. I went on to say that my parents never came back to repair things, they never helped me make sense of my feelings or what had happened. That although I am very angry and disappointed in myself for the things I’ve done like shouting at her, at least I know that I try to mend things with her any way possible. Linda said, ‘I would encourage you to think about the fact that we have never lived through something like this before, this is all unchartered territory. There is a worldwide pandemic. The whole world is in a state of shock and panic. No one knows how to get through this, we are all just learning and trying to take things a step at a time. You and Adam will be experiencing all sorts of emotions because of this pandemic and then you are having to parent and hold your kids emotions… this is a very hard time right now and I think you could afford yourself some compassion for this… you are parenting while under extreme stress right now, your parents weren’t.’ I said, ‘well actually they were under stress, they fucking hated each other, they never had any money, dad was always going from one job to another, my mum was having affairs… it was very stressful…’ Linda said, ‘nothing compared to this.’ That felt very validating. This is fucking hard. Parenting during this pandemic, it feels near impossible to get it right.

Linda said, ‘earlier when you were talking about how no one read you a bedtime story, you sounded angry.’ I said, ‘I guess so.’ She said, ‘I think that 8 year old inside you is still holding on to a lot of anger for the things she didn’t get. And she has every right to be angry, it’s not fair.’ I felt that burning feeling again, I think it is shame but under the shame is anger and a sort of powerful sense of being seen and understood. But I guess being seen was always quite dangerous so the shame pops up trying to encourage me to hide. Linda said, ‘what do you need?’ I said, ‘oh my god that’s always the hardest question!’ I said, ‘I can’t have what I want right now because I want a hug but not from anyone in this house.’ She gave me a knowing smile. She said, ‘the 8 year old inside you, what does she need?’ I said, ‘to be told that it wasn’t her fault, that she did deserve to have bedtime stories… to have someone sit with her and help her make sense of her big feelings instead of crying by herself?’ Linda nodded and smiled.

Linda said, ‘you know Lucy you are just so hard on yourself. You hold yourself to an impossible standard.’ I said, ‘hmm yeah you’re not the first person to say this to me.’ she said, ‘no one could reach the standards you set yourself. I’m going to use a car analogy because I love driving and it fits well here… imagine the gears of a car. I wonder what would happen if you went down a few gears, from 6 to 5 to around 3 or 4.’ I said, ‘I would have a breakdown.’ She smiled and said, ‘no, the car would still work, you wouldn’t break down, actually the lower gears work harder, you have more control in those gears.’ I said, ‘hmmm yeah I’m going to think about that one for a bit coz I don’t know what that would look like.’

I said, ‘I was telling Adam that I know Grace will test us. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to mend this and apologise and now she is going to test that we really are sorry. She will be up again tonight and we need to both be patient and meet her fear with compassion and understanding… I understand testing in relationships because I have experienced it and processed it with Anna but Adam hasn’t experienced that so he just sees it as her being difficult.’ Linda talked about how I will need to really talk it through with Adam so that I am sure we are both aware of what we want to do. That we can support each other through it.

I said, ‘have you seen that illustration online of the therapeutic relationship where there’s the client and therapist and above the client is a speech bubble with lots of tangled wool and above the therapists head there’s like three or four neatly wound balls?’ she nodded. I said, ‘that’s what I feel this session has been like, everything was very confused and now I feel like I have these separate balls of wool that I can see a bit clearer… one of Grace being scared and how it’s good that she was sharing her fear with us by screaming and shouting, one is of me at 8 years old having to hold my fear by myself and you know I haven’t really worked on ‘8’ with Anna much so that is all raw and unprocessed. Then there’s me also feeling scared and responding from that place because of this pandemic and the stress we’re all under. There’s me being hard on myself and the perfectionism… yeah this has all been really helpful thank you!’ she said she was glad it was helpful and I said, ‘actually I think I’m going to draw about this… I’ve not told you this but when I started working with Anna I could hardly talk in sessions I found it so hard to open up so she encouraged me to draw. I would draw and bring the drawings to the session and we would work on that and now I have a big folder full of these therapy drawings, I’m going to draw this because it feels big.’ Linda was nodding through all of this and smiling. She said, ‘wow that’s amazing, great!’ We sort of ended things here, I thanked her again and we said we’d speak on Wednesday.

I am actually quite taken by the fact that this therapeutic relationship is really working. I feel a connection with Linda that took months to build with Anna and Paul. I think this has happened for a number of reasons. Firstly I have worked very hard with Anna, building trust between each other but also building trust within myself… I know I can trust my judgement now. I can trust how things feel within a relationship and things feel good here. I’m not second guessing her all the time wondering what she’s thinking (this may also be because she isn’t triggering my attachment wound… shes my therapy aunt afterall not my therapy mum… although also, maybe… just maaayyybbeeee my mother wound is healing? Secondly, Anna recommended Linda, she trusts her therefore Linda and I were able to begin our therapeutic relationship one step up on the stairway of trust and familiarity. Thirdly, we are living in a very strange and unchartered time just now. I desperately need support and in the absence of Anna I have to leap into the support being offered to me by Linda. It doesn’t make sense to hold back, I want to get my needs met so I am giving my all here. Fourthly, hopefully, this will be short term and Anna will be back working with me at some point. So I know I don’t have the luxury of time to slowly build up trust with Linda, I need to just make the most of these sessions. And I’m learning that this can work, I’m learning it’s possible to get a lot from a therapist even if they know very little about you, I’m learning that I can trust my instincts, I’m learning that (most) people in the helping fields genuinely do care and that you can feel that care from these people even if you hardly know them and even if you haven’t sat in a room with them. That leads me on to my fifthly…. I think only having video sessions with Linda has really helped me be at ease with her. I don’t need to worry about all the things that make me feel physically self conscious when I’m sitting in a room with someone. It is just about our facial expressions and our words. I feel like there is a lot more that I want to unpack around this but I’m tired and can’t think it through with any depth so I’m going to have a break and come back to it later. For now, these are my thoughts.

I’m always so amazed with how much a therapy session helps me. I really love therapy so much. I mean it’s painful and hard but it really moves mountains in me. Saturday afternoon I felt so good, way better than I’d felt the previous few days. And Saturday night my husband and I had a plan. We were united. We were patient and calm. It all went so smoothly. I sat with Grace until she fell asleep. No screaming, no shouting, just me parenting with gentle love the way I always wanted to.

Third session with Linda.

We clicked on to the zoom session and I instantly asked her how she was without thinking. She told me she was good and asked me how I was. I faffed around with the screen and minimised the front facing view so I couldn’t see myself then sat back and sighed. I said I was very activated this morning, really angry and irritable. Needed to calm down.

I said, ‘I have so much I could talk about, so much so that I feel like I don’t want to choose any of it!’ she sort of knowingly smiled and nodded and said, ‘hmmm… yeah, I wonder if there’s anything that sticks out?’ I said, ‘anything that I think I could talk about gets batted away instantly for being not that important or not as bad as some people have it or a waste of your time…’ Linda said, ‘what does it matter how your experience compares to others, it’s your experience therefore it’s valid!’ I started to try to consider that and then I said I was overthinking it and needed to just start talking and see where it took me, she agreed.

I explained that I was finding it hard sharing this small space with my family 24/7 and not getting any time to myself. At one point she asked if I get no time to myself apart from when I’m asleep and I said that Adam and I do try to give each other breaks every so often but I tend to nap in my break and then I don’t feel like I’ve had the time… it tends to be the kind of mid afternoon sleeping you do when you’re depressed rather than when you’re tired. It’s an escape. I said that Reuben had been struggling this morning, ‘I hate this word because it’s just emotions but he was having a tantrum up until like one minute before this video call and it just makes me feel these massive feelings in my chest and it takes all of my strength to stay calm and be present with him and not scream at him to shut the fuck up and send him to his room.’ Linda said, ‘and is that how it always was, even before this..?’ I said, ‘well I think sometimes I can manage their emotions better than other times and right now things feel heightened. I mean, 4 was a hard age for me and so when Grace was four and now Reuben is four, I get triggered really easily by them. And you know I’ve tried to keep to the routines all day every day but today has to be different because I have this session so the kids have to go upstairs with Adam and I think they maybe find that unsettling. They don’t know what I’m doing, they just know I’m busy doing something important…’ Linda was listening and nodding and making ‘ahhh, I see’ type noises. She said, ‘So I’m just wondering out loud here. Two sessions a week… now, I know that’s what you were used to with Anna but I’m just wondering, this is different work we’re doing and maybe if the disruption is too much to the family, perhaps we could go down to one session a week. What are your thoughts?’ I said, ‘uhhhh… um… I feel like, this feels really rejecting like you’re saying you’re sick of me and you don’t want to see me this frequently, it’s already too much for you and you’d rather not work with me.’ She had a sort of dramatic shock ‘eeek’ facial expression and she said, ‘wow, this filter is there all the time isn’t it, these what I would call fantasies, they are made up in your head these interpretations of what people are saying… it’s there all the time isn’t it?’ I felt a wash of sadness and shame as I nodded. I welled up and explained, ‘I always needed to be able to read between the lines, to figure out what people really meant, so yeah… this is where my anxiety and hypervigilance is at it’s peak – when I’m trying to figure people out.’ She said, ‘I understand that and it made perfect sense for you back then. Is it serving you now?’ I said, ‘well no! It just gets in the way now, but it’s hard to make it stop.’ I had another short cry.

When I’d dried my eyes and sat straight up again Linda said, ‘I wonder what you would like me to do with your fantasies Lucy. I’ve noticed that this is an almost constant thing for you, the filer that you experience and hear people through… you move very quickly from reality to the fantasy. With some of my clients I do this (motioned reeling in a fishing line) and just as a reminder I will tell them to reel it in but I’m not sure that would be helpful for you.’ I said, ‘hmmm no I think I would find that rejecting.’ She said, ‘yeah, I wondered about that, so do you have an idea of what you’d like me to do?’ I joked, ‘is there a multiple choice?’ and she laughed and jokingly said, ‘option a)….’ I said, ‘I think just hearing me, not judging me, gently reminding me that it’s fantasy, maybe looking at why I’ve created that fantasy… just what we’re doing just now?’ she said, ‘okay that sounds good, it’s important that I check in with you like that. I want you to know that I was suggesting dropping a session a week out of care for you and your situation. If the sessions are causing stress amongst your family I wanted to remind you that we could move to one session a week because two can be a lot. If I wanted you to move to one session I would tell you straight, I don’t beat around the bush you get complete honesty with me. Okay? How does that sound?’ I said, ‘hmmm, yeah, I appreciate you saying that, it’s hard to believe.’ She said, ‘can a part of you hear what I’m saying?’ I said, ‘a part of me is reassured by what you’ve said. Another part of me doesn’t trust it.’ She nodded and said that was okay and made sense.

I said, ‘and another thing!’ and it must have been in a really animated way because she did a faux jump and face as if I had got her attention. It was kind of funny. I said, ‘this pandemic has shut down every area of my life, everything I did just for me. All the things that took me our of the house have all gone now… all I have is these sessions and so if anything I want more of them not less…’ she smiled and said, ‘yes that’s right we spoke of this last time I remember…’ and I said, ‘in fact I want to limit the contact I have with these three people I’m living with not the sessions!’ and she laughed. I talked about how I am just working so hard to meet everyone else’s needs and even as I look around the room it’s all for other people, there’s nothing there for me. I said, ‘but now I feel really selfish and needy like why do I deserve this time? You know I’m so fucking stressed with all the virus stuff and all the restrictions and I’m sitting here talking to another human being who is also living on this planet, also stressed about it all!’ she said, ‘but just because we’re all experiencing it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the time to talk and feel. That’s the voice again telling you that you don’t deserve relief from your suffering and support.’ I said, ‘It makes up like 90% of my brain… I mean we’ve been working a lot with the inner critic and Anna would point out when the voice crops up and I remember I got kind of angry with Anna at one point where I was like, ‘it’s not a fucking inner critic though is it? I mean it’s me, it’s my voice… there’s no space between me and the voice! You know, I can’t even separate it from me… so for you to tell me to reel it in or stop that train of thought it’s like you’re telling ME to stop… you know? Then I’d be left with nothing.’ Linda said, ‘wow yes that really makes sense and I can see how that would feel so rejecting. So slow it down and look at what the voice is saying and how you’re feeling, explore how you feel underneath what the voice is saying… how does that sound?’ I nodded.

Linda asked me if it was always this way in my mind. I said, ‘this world in my head, when I was a kid it was the best place to be, it was amazing… so detailed and full and I could be or do anything I wanted you know, in the absence of good stuff in my real life I went inside and I loved!’ She was smiling and nodding but in a kind of sad way, like she knew that this coping strategy was because I didn’t have what I needed when I was a kid. I went on, ‘but then at some point I started to lose control of it, I could no longer master what was happening in the world in my head and bad things would happen or bad thoughts and it was horrible… I guess that’s when the depression and anxiety started, in my early teens… but yeah, it’s there all the time… it’s the fullest aspect of my whole life, all the thoughts in my head.’ She said, ‘well yeah I’m hearing that voice loud and clear today, yeah and it’s really persistent and just constantly there… I hear it. Do you find it exhausting, to constantly interpret people and situations through this filter or does it just feel normalized?’ I said, ‘it is exhausting…’ I tailed off and started to tear up. ‘It’s exhausting but it’s also my normal… I don’t know how to just be without it.’

She said, ‘I guess the key would be kindness. Accept kindness from other people, be kind to yourself, be kind to others.’ At the ‘be kind to yourself’ part I lifted the corner of my mouth and said, ‘do I have to’ and she laughed and said, ‘well, yep… I think, give it a go!’ We talked about how that would look, for me to try to look for the kindness and not let the sound of the inner critic be the loudest voice. I said that I found it hard to believe in kindness, that it always feels like the person is probably after something or isn’t being genuine. I said that I imagine she is annoyed with having to work with me. She said, ‘You know, for me though Lucy, one thing that has really stuck with me this week after talking to you, is the ‘therapy mum and therapy aunt’ thing. That just really sat here (hand on chest) all week… you know, it really felt right for me and was such a great way to describe it, I’m totally on board with that – therapy aunt, I can do that! That really sits nicely with me. I can play that role, I can be Lucy’s therapy aunt.’ I was smiling and thanked her then said, ‘even that is tainted by the filter though, after our session I text Anna to let her know we’d had a session because it felt like I was cheating on her with you,’ we both shared a laugh, ‘and I told her about the therapy mum and aunt comment and you know, the boundary… so she didn’t reply and so I just imagined that she’d be raging with me, really angry that I was insisting on still texting her and she’d be thinking, ‘for fuck sake Lucy you have Linda, now leave me the fuck alone…’ and I also imagined her being really angry at you for telling me that she wasn’t dead and breaking a boundary and I thought I’d dropped you in it and that you would say that because you guys know each other and because of the way I was behaving that we wouldn’t be able to work together anymore and I’d have to find someone else…’ She looked really concerned and was gently shaking her head.

Linda said, ‘One great thing is that when all this is over you guys are going to have so much great work to do together in that room.’ I started to cry and said, ‘I just feel like I’m never going to be in that room again, it feels like I’m never going to see her again!’ Linda asked why I felt that was true and I said, ‘maybe the thought that she is dead is less painful than imagining her sitting there in her livingroom having a cuppa, feeling fine, deliberately not texting me back! You know, I don’t even know what is wrong with her. She could be on a ventilator in a hospital bed or she could have something wrong with her that’s an ongoing thing that’s kept her off before or she could be stressed and need time away from work… I just don’t know and I know I don’t deserve to know either!’ Linda said, ‘why is the urge there to know? What would that bring you?’ I said, ‘peace from all the fantasies of what it might be? But she can’t win though, because if she text me back I’d feel like she had breached a boundary and if she doesn’t text back she’s abandoning me… she can’t fucking win! It’s my perfectionism, no one reaches the bar.’ Linda said, ‘Can anyone win with you? Does anyone ever come close?’ I said, ‘Nope! Well… Anna comes the closest.’ Linda smiled. I said, ‘Because she is willing to listen to me. To apologise. The first genuine heartfelt apology I ever received was from her. That was powerful.’ Linda said, ‘wow that sounds very powerful.’ I said, ‘she is willing to self reflect and non judgementally look at the situation. Paul was defensive. He always turned stuff around to be my problem but she always takes on the problem like we are a team in it together.’

I said, ‘I want to talk about the last two phone sessions I had with Anna but it feels like I would be betraying her to talk about her.’ Linda asked me why it would feel like that and I said, ‘well because I care a lot about her, it feels wrong to talk negatively of her, you know she could be really ill and I’m just gonna sit here and talk about what didn’t work for me in a session?’ I think Linda just encouraged me to keep talking and I said, ‘so… is she still alive by the way?’ Linda nodded and said she was still alive. I said, ‘the last two phone sessions I had with her… is it okay to talk about them?’ Linda said I could. I said, ‘when we have face to face sessions Anna is so amazing at holding the space for me and on the odd occasions we’ve had to have phone sessions they’ve felt just like face to face sessions but these two were different. I was crying a lot more than I ever have with her, properly sobbing…’ Linda interrupted me and said, ‘who were you crying for?’ and I thought and said, ‘well I was saying ‘I miss you so much’ – it felt like very young feelings, like I just wanted to be with her and sit next to her and get a hug from her… and I could hear she was upset, she was sniffing and blowing her nose and saying that we are all finding it hard and we are all panicked… it just didn’t feel like she was focusing on me, it felt like I was talking to Anna the person not Anna the therapist. She said things like she talked about a mindfulness exercise that her supervisor gave her which made me think, wow she must be needing this right now, and she told me she is trying to enjoy being woken by the birds at 4 in the morning instead of being annoyed by it, it just felt like she was sharing more of her own experience… we were both in the fear and sadness rather than her meeting me at mine. And in the last one she spent half of it preparing me as if she knew she was going to be ill. She kept saying that I shouldn’t turn away support if I need it and it’s offered to me, she talked about you again and she said that if she was ill or a family member of hers was ill she wouldn’t tell me what it was she would just let me know she wouldn’t be able to do the session and that I should seek support if I need it… like she knew! I hate this feeling because there’s stuff going on behind the scenes and I don’t know about it and it makes me feel like it’s very serious and that I will never see her again. Maybe she is suffering mentally and if that’s the case it could be months before I see her.’

Linda listened intently and there were points where I was emotional. She then said, ‘so the two phone calls you had were quite unsettling for you, she wasn’t her usual self, she wasn’t able to contain things for you.’ I nodded and said I felt awful because she is an amazing therapist and I don’t want to be bitching about her. Linda reassured me that these feelings were mind and valid and only showed how much I cared about Anna and the connection we’ve built.

I said, ‘In sessions when I’ve been really dissociated, Anna has observed that when I lose connection with myself I lose her too, I can’t feel her, it’s like she’s not in the room. But I’m noticing now that it works the other way too and right now I can’t feel her. I’ve lost her and so I have no connection with myself either. I used to have conversations with her in my head all the time and maybe the last 6 months or a year her voice in my head has been very supportive and encouraging. But recently I haven’t been able to feel her inside me at all, the conversations have all stopped. When we started working together we had this analogy of a wall. Like at first it was a brick wall between me and her and we couldn’t see through it or over it and it was like I was alone in the room. Then the wall became a blind that I could roll up and down whenever I wanted. More recently it’s been like a glass wall and Anna suggested it was glass doors. She said it was nice we could see each other and that I could choose when I want to open the doors. But now it feels like the wall is back. It really feels like I’m never going to see her again and that our time together is over.’ Linda said, ‘ah yes, I don’t know if you’ve seen the news today… the pictures of all the pubs in Glasgow and all around Scotland boarded up…?’ I started to smile as I could see where she was going. She continued, ‘so obviously because of the pandemic, all these places are shut down at the moment and they need to be protected and made safe, so they’ve used chip bard to cover all the glass windows and doors and it’s quite striking to see these places that I am so familiar with, all boarded up. And one day when all this is over, the boards will easily be prized off with crowbars…’ I said, ‘I’m really loving this analogy. I love when you therapists really leap into the imagery with me. She said, ‘well I’m happy to talk in images and it’s a very striking one… perhaps you and Anna have hammered a temporary chipboard covering over your glass doors, for security and protection, and when you reconnect and when you are ready you can get a crowbar and prize those boards off. How does that sound?’ I was smiling widely and said I loved the sound of that. That it felt reassuring to think of it as temporary and a form of protecting our work and connection rather than something separating us.

Just before ending the session we sorted a regular time each Wednesday and Saturday and then I said, ‘so you’re really okay with me having two sessions a week?’ She smiled and nodded and said, ‘yes, YES Lucy I am more than happy for you to have two sessions a week. Did you hear that?’ She said that in a gentle tone with a smile and I smiled and told her I heard her.

Five minutes in to my session with Linda on Saturday and I still felt super activated. I told her my heart was pounding and I sensed my hypervigilance. I said, ‘I’m so anxious and nervous, really panicky and overwhelmed by the thought that Anna is definitely dead. Yesterday I was going over and over the scenario that you will be preparing to tell me that she died and it was just breaking my heart all day. It felt like absolute fact, you know? And I’d be the last to know… it’s just driving me insane.’ Linda said, ‘that sounds really awful, really so painful to be consumed by those thoughts.’ I nodded and started to feel a wall of shame rising. I said, ‘but that felt like a different part of me, today I’m just ashamed that I care that much about her.’ Linda said, ‘you know, I’m just thinking, I don’t think it would be a breach of boundaries for me to keep you up to date with Anna, I mean we text every day, I could, let me think… how do you feel about it? I could easily keep you updated on how she is doing.’ My heart was in my throat and I said, ‘yes please tell me’ and she said, ‘okay, well Anna’s alive, she is resting and she’s okay.’ I nodded and started to smile and say, ‘that’s good’ but I could feel my face changing and the emotion rising and then I was crying. I had my hand over my eyes and was properly crying. Right in front of her. Eventually Linda said, ‘what’s happening for you just now?’ and I said, while still crying and not looking up, ‘it’s such a relief, I’m just so relieved! I really believed she was dead.’ A bit later Linda talked to me about her observation that I tend to default to binary thinking, black and white thinking. We explored that for a bit and although I initially criticised myself calling it immature she offered me a reframe. She said, ‘it can be a really useful way of thinking, if our brains are trying to find order in chaos, it can be really comforting to look for boxes that we can put things in… there’s a sense of safety in making sense of the chaos by polarising it.’ I wondered aloud that perhaps it’s easier to imagine the pain of her dying than the grey area of her choosing to not end my suffering and text me back.

Today I have felt an ease that hasn’t settled inside me for a long time. I’ve been reflecting and it has helped soothe me. I’m so glad I wrote all of my sessions down. It means that despite the distance between Anna and I, despite not being able to speak to her, I can call on her wisdom and the comfort she’s gifted me. I can reread session notes and in my minds eye I can relive moments of her sitting with me, dedicating herself to me. I can be reminded of all the spaces inside myself we’ve been cultivating where self compassion and self acceptance are growing. She might not be here right now but the seeds we planted together are. They will never die, they will only grow and flourish. I must remember that distance physically does not equate to distance emotionally. There is a closeness there between us that time and space can not break. We have shared moments together. We have shared words, emotions, realisations, connectedness. She has the memories of those moments as do I. They don’t vanish from her mind and her heart just because there is a break in our time together. I have felt calmer today than I have for over a week. I’m grateful for this dampening of the heightened anxiety, panic and fear. I’m trying to soak it up while it lasts. We are under the same sky… and perhaps at points, we both look up at it together.

In the absence of Anna…

I felt incredibly nervous. The attachment pain I’ve been experiencing since I had the text conversation with Anna about being unable to work with me just now due to illness has been unbearable. The worst pain ever. It has felt like the inside of my gut is on fire and there is a hollowed out cavity in the centre of me. I’ve been in shock, feeling the need to cry but not being able to… then sobbing.

I sat down for my first ever zoom session, with a complete stranger… she came on the screen and smiled and waved, said, ‘hi Lucy, nice to meet you… shame about the circumstances though.’ We had some light chat and then we explored getting to know each other.

This is a mixed up recollection of the session. It’s been harder to write it start to finish, maybe because I wasn’t feeling as settled as I do with Anna.

Linda said, ‘my training is different to Anna and you’ll find that I do work differently from what you’re used to but I did do a short Transactional Analysis course so I am familiar with that modality… I am person centred but not strictly traditional person centred so I won’t just sit here and nod while you talk…’ I laughed and said that was a good thing. She said, ‘I also really want to be honest and authentic… no bullshitting from me. You will bring your authentic self to the table, I can tell you are already committed to doing that, and I will bring my authentic self as well.’ I said I liked that.

Linda said, ‘Anna and I work at the centre together on a Saturday. So ordinarily I see her every week. I would also consider her to be a good friend as well as my colleague, Anna’s a bit older than me…’ I’ve no idea why she said that it was so unnecessary lol… maybe she was going to lead on to something else but I interrupted, ‘Can I just stop you there… I want you to know that because of my personal history it’s very important to me that you don’t tell me anything about your personal life or Anna’s personal life. I set that boundary with her in the first session and she has stuck to it which is amazing. I just… well very briefly… my mum and dad, in fact everyone I grew up around had no boundaries and I grew up not even knowing I was allowed to have boundaries and then the therapist I worked with 7 years ago, he wasn’t great with boundaries and unintentionally re-traumatised me by being very unboundaried and so now I know that firm boundaries is what I need and really hope that you can stick to that.’ She was smiling and nodding and thanked me for telling her. She said she also doesn’t disclose anything about her personal life and wouldn’t talk about Anna either. I was reassured by that.

Linda said, ‘So Lucy, obviously I don’t know anything about you at the moment… how would it feel to tell me a little about yourself and your life?’ I readjusted myself in my seat and laughed and said, ‘fuck I don’t even know where to start… okay… um… so I’m uh… I’m a teacher, primary teacher, I’m uhhhh I’m a mum I have two kids, Grace is 8 and Reuben is 4… uh they’re upstairs playing with Adam my husband right now, seeing as we’re not allowed out anymore! Um… so I started therapy 7 years ago with Paul. I worked with him for 3 years then he stopped working in Glasgow so I had to stop working with him, that was a massive abandonment right there, piled on top of all the other abandonment shite my parents gifted me… so uh, I’ve been working on that with Anna too… I’ve been working with Anna for 2 and a half years and the past 6 months I’d say have really been the deepest work I’ve ever done and I’ve really formed a very strong attachment with her… I know obviously we avoid the ‘dependence’ shit in therapy…’ she smiled and nodded, ‘…and I don’t think I am dependent on her, I can function in my life you know, everything isn’t falling apart, but a part of me had to form a strong attachment with her in order to work on the very deep and painful stuff and that part of me is really aching so much now that I’m having to go through this without her.’

I said, ‘The last time we spoke I asked her if she felt burdened by me and she said she didn’t, I asked her if she wished she didn’t have to work with me anymore and she said that we would get through this together and uh… well we’re not! And so that feels really shit.’ Linda said, ‘I’m wondering, do you feel like you’ve been betrayed by Anna? Is there a sense that you feel let down by her?’ I said, ‘It might be there, but I’m not aware of it right now, I just feel very sad and like I really want to go to her office and be with her and get a hug…’ Linda smiled. I thought at this point that the conversation was flowing easily, I felt accepted by her which was nice. She talked about building trust between us and that hopefully I’d be able to feel a connection and I said, ‘I do kind of feel a connection… and I think it helps that I know you know Anna, obviously no one else in my life knows her but you do, and I trust her, she trusts you enough to give me your details so I trust that… and I knew about you anyway, she had told me about you before… coz of my very sensitive abandonment issues I’d freaked out on a number of occasions that she was going to leave me, die or something, so she told me about the working will thing and that you were the person who would contact me if something happened and so uh… when we had these two sessions and I was freaking out about the virus she told me again about you and she prepared me that I might like to work with you if she is unable to. I had told Anna that I didn’t want you, I wanted her, but Anna had encouraged me to look compassionately at myself and to see that I shouldn’t turn away support that’s offered if it’s needed… and this feels kind of like a crisis so I uh… I thought I should at least try it.’ Linda said she didn’t realise I already knew about her and I joked that I’d already looked her up. She said that was fine and understandable. She said, ‘so you got in touch with me, begrudgingly?’ and laughed and I nodded.

I cant remember what Linda said about that, just lots of nodding. I said, ‘this feels scary and shit, it feels like I’m being handed over to you, I don’t want that… I want to go back to her… but it feels like she’s already dead…’ Linda said, ‘hmmm I understand it feels like that but this is not a handing over, it doesn’t feel like that to me, we have contracted to work together in the time where Anna is unable to work with you and when she is better you will continue working with her… that’s what it feels like for me…’ I was reassured by that. I said, ‘I really respect the therapeutic boundaries, they help me, I don’t want to know about her life but also its hard, she could have some pre-existing condition… I felt like she knew she was going to be ill the last two times we spoke, and I don’t even know if she has the virus it’s just so shit not knowing!’ I’m pretty sure she didn’t say much to that but she had a relaxed calm face. I didn’t feel like she was holding knowledge about something dark and awful.

I said, ‘och but you know this is what I hate and love about therapy… I love the boundaries but also its so hard… I was crying my heart out to Anna telling her how scared I am of all the changes happening coz of the pandemic and she was just sitting there with me in the feelings saying, ‘yeah it is scary’… and here I am telling you that I’m scared of Anna dying and you’re just sitting with me in those feelings you’re not telling me that Anna’s okay, or not… I mean, for all I know she could be in hospital on a ventilator, or she could be lying on her sofa relaxing watching tv getting herself better… and she is like the most important person in my life right now but you know this is where it hurts like hell that I am ‘just’ her client coz I really… she’s so important to me but I am not important to her, understandably you know, she cares about me on a professional level but nothing else, im at the bottom of the list, if something happened to her I would be the last to know… that’s really hard. Again she didn’t say much here but I felt that she was listening non judgementally and understanding what I was saying.

Linda said, ‘so considering what you have said about the attachment work you are doing with Anna, where do see us in that? Just so that we can establish a holding environment, let’s think about the parameters of this relationship, our attachment.’ I thought for a bit and sort of looked all around the room and had a thought but didn’t know if I should share it. Eventually I said, ‘fuck it why hold back… I don’t have months and months to fuck about with being shy and reluctant to share shit I have to make the most of these sessions now!’ Linda smiled and widened her eyes and said, ‘yes, under these circumstances that sounds like it makes a huge amount of sense, for you to get what you need from these sessions…’ I said, ‘okay so um… how do I see us? Well maybe if Anna is my therapy mum then you can be my therapy aunty… while she’s unable to see me?’ I laughed and said that sounded daft and she said, ‘I like the sound of that, therapy aunty, I can do that, yes.’ I smiled and felt sooooo good that she didn’t think that was an awful idea. I was afraid that she was going to think I’m way too attached to Anna and that I have totally misunderstood the whole therapy thing but she was on board with it all which made me feel really supported and so much calmer about everything.

A bit later Linda said, ‘so while your therapy mum is…’ and I interrupted and said, ‘oh my god please don’t tell Anna I said that haha!’ and she said, ‘that’s actually a really good point that you’ve brought up about confidentiality, so anything that you say to me is absolutely just between you and me, I will not repeat it to Anna or anyone. The only time I would consider breaching that agreement is if there was a safety concern with you or a vulnerable person. You can tell Anna anything you want about what we’ve talked about but I wont repeat any of it to her and she is the same.’ I said, ‘so yeah, what did she tell you about me prior to me emailing you?’ Linda looked thoughtful and said, ‘she didn’t really say anything, which was why I was surprised you knew about me beforehand, she basically said ‘can you work with my client’ and then she said ‘can I give her your contact details’ and that was it really… she can’t and wouldn’t tell me anything about you.’

I said, ‘this is so amazing by the way, seriously crazy… so basically the last face to face session me and Anna had was on the 29^th of February because then I got a cold and couldn’t come to my sessions and then the social distancing stuff happened but yeah in that session we talked about something to do with my mum that I’ve never talked about before. I told Anna about how my mum betrayed my trust over and over and it just led me to feel that I can’t ever trust anyone. I always felt like there was a web of people behind Anna that would know everything I told her… I mean if you said to my mum, please don’t tell anyone this, it would be the first thing she’d do, so I could never fully relax into a sense of trust with anyone…’ Linda was nodding and had a serious, listening expression. She said she understood and I continued, ‘so at the start, Anna would audio record her sessions you know for her training,’ Linda said yes and I continued, ‘and she would take notes… and basically over the first year or maybe 18 months I could not figure out why it was so hard to trust her… then one day she forgot her audio recorder and I felt this amazing connection for the first time ever, then the next day she had the recorder back and I realised that was it… so anyway, over our time together I’ve asked her to not record our sessions and not write her notes in my session and she has changed both those things… so… I sort of tied all this together in the last face to face session and Anna told me she totally understood now. She said to me that if my child feels she wants to test her in any way at all, to test that she can trust her, she can do that… that Anna welcomes my child to test her… and I didn’t know how I could do that, I reflected on it, I journal and write a lot about my sessions, and I thought – how on earth would I test that? It’s not like we have mutual friends that I could tell her something and see if it got back to me – but then here is this moment right here… and wow… I’m realising, I do trust her! I really do!’ Linda said something about that being really great, that she was glad we were able to establish that.

At some point we talked about how I feel about Anna. There was a noise and I asked what it was because it sounded like someone moving around in the room and Linda told me it was her cats, that they’re brother and sister and they were play fighting (it’s interesting how therapists interpret the ‘no info about your personal life’ so differently)…. Linda said that in the room she normally works from there’s a poster behind her that says ‘boundaries are my best friend’ and I was like ‘me too!’ I told her that boundaries used to feel really punishing to me and she looked concerned and confused. I said that with Paul I experienced really painful transference because of all the stuff he told me about his life. I said that he talked about his kids and his wife and where he lived and his work history and when his wife was pregnant he told me about that too and I wanted to hear it all but it was also incredibly painful. Linda looked kind of bemused and pissed off. I said that I did a lot of really amazing work with Paul but that he probably didn’t have the knowledge or experience that Anna has about all that. He was used to doing like 20 CBT sessions with clients and I worked with him for the longest he’d ever had a client. When I told him I was jealous of his kids he got defensive and said that he didn’t work with transference even though as I pointed out to him, it was in the room so we kind of had to deal with it. Linda said she couldn’t believe it and was so sorry that was my first experience of therapy. I said that Paul then stated that it was his fault he was too loose with the boundaries and needed to tighten everything up but that just felt like he was punishing me, taking away things that I really liked. Whereas with Anna and her consistent reliable boundaries I said, ‘the way she does boundaries it just feels like the most loving thing you can ever do for someone, to hold boundaries, to respect another persons boundaries and be firm in your own, you know?’ Linda had a smile as if she was pleased to be hearing nice things about Anna.

I told Linda that I spent almost all of my sessions with Paul outside my window of tolerance because I was always on the edge of not knowing what would happen, whether I would trigger a defensive response, whether he was going to suddenly have to end the session because another client turned up… it was unsettling but I didn’t know any different. Now I know how safe and holding sessions can feel I can see it wasn’t helpful a lot of the time. Louise said, ‘I want to let you know that I’m experiencing a big feeling of anger and disgust, disappointment that this was your first experience of therapy.’ she apologisedfor that being my experience and I said I felt like I wanted to defend Paul, that a lot of good came out of the work too, but that I’m very glad I’m now working with Anna.

At one point I started to feel myself numbing and getting a little spacey. I had told myself before the session that I was going to be upfront with her about that in the session because I need her to know what’s going on. In the session she actually said that she is going to rely on me to tell her what is going on for me. So as a result of me sharing a lot of stuff about myself I felt flighty and said, ‘I just want to let you know that it’s possible I’ll get dissociative in sessions, it’s something that happens to me, I’m way better at noticing it and doing something about it myself now whereas in the early days Anna would have to check in with me and help ground me but I just feel its important to let you know, because I just felt it happening and I caught it and was able to put my feet on the ground and bring myself back.’ Linda thanked me for telling her and said, ‘can you tell me a little more about your experience with disassociation?’ (annoyed me she called it that for some reason)… I said, ‘um so at the start I experience spaceyness and floaty and uh…’ Linda said, ‘and is there something I can do or anything I will notice and can encourage you to do to help you before you completely leave yourself?’ I liked that she asked that. I said, ‘Anna would check in with me, she would remind me to put my feet on the floor or look around the room at things or take a drink of water or look at her… I used to not really understand what was happening, in fact I was so ashamed I couldn’t even say the word, I’d just say I felt weird. But we’ve worked on it quite a lot.’ Linda thanked me for telling her and said we could work together on that.

Linda said, ‘so how have you felt about telling me all of this?’ I said, ‘it’s weird coz I feel okay but I know that in like twenty minutes (she does a 50 minute therapy hour… eye roll!)… the screen is going to be black and you’ll be gone and I’ll be left sitting here.’ Linda nodded and asked me what thought’s I’d be left with. I said, ‘the worry is that I’m left with a lot of residual feelings so it’s really important that I feel things in the session… and I’ll probably panic that I’ve said too much, shared too much!’ Linda said, ‘what is the fantasy about saying too much?’ I said, ‘that I’m just like my mother! And that you’re going to think I’m a fucking weirdo!’ Linda responded with a shocked, wow what the hell type face, she said, ‘am I right in thinking that voice is there all the time? The critical voice..?’ I said, ‘Yeah… I didn’t realise everyone didn’t have this going on you know? I remember when I really got into this with Anna and she pointed out how often the inner critic pops up and there cam ethis point when Anna was getting me to speak nicely to myself and I was like, ‘do other people really talk to themselves like that..?’ and she nodded and I was like, mind blown you know, that people actually speak nicely to themselves in their heads.. wow!?’ Linda did the same sort of expression Anna had done, pressed her lips together and raised eyebrows and nodded. I feel reassured that she is noticing similar things as Anna, I feel safe in this.

I said, ‘you know Anna being ill, its triggering a lot of my attachment shit you know… I feel like shes left me… there’s this fucking gaping hole here,’ I put my hand on my chest. I realised then that she doesn’t know me very well so I continued, ‘you know, obviously Anna is a transactional analysist and she focuses a lot of the adult, parent, child model and you know… I guess you would say that my adult is really capable, high functioning, you know despite the chaos at the moment my life is calm and orderly, I’m teaching my class remotely through video lessons and I’m educating my kids at home… it’s all very structured and going smoothly and… but then there’s my child, she is frightened and you know, she’s been hurt badly and I’ve only really just started listening to her, accepting she’s even there… the last two phone sessions I had with Anna I cried my heart out telling her how much I missed her and she was sad too I could hear and she told me she felt emotional and well, my child feels like she was too much for Anna, I broke her… that Anna has been struggling with all this pandemic stuff too and I pushed her over the edge and made her ill and now she can’t work with me anymore.’

Linda said, ‘hmmm, I’m not an expert on TA but to me that doesn’t sound like the child, that sounds like the inner critic…’ I said, ‘ahhh you’re right! See I don’t even notice it!’ She continued, ‘so I’d like to ask, I don’t know if Anna spoke about the technical side of therapy… I’m inclined to talk about neural pathways here…’ she did a motion with her hand and briefly explained about the repeated patterns created. I said, ‘ah yeah… so, Anna has joked before that I could qualify for a degree in psychology the amount of books I’ve read. When I started working with her I had bookshelves filled with books. I’ve read all the major therapy books, the ones that are for psychologists and therapists and… well she spent a good year or more getting me to stop intellectualising and…’ Linda said, ‘ahhhh yesss, okay okay I understand,’ lots of nodding. I said, ‘so I was totally numb and just dead from the neck down when it comes to feelings and she has been working with me on connecting to my self, my body, my emotions, to not think my way through everything, to slow down and feel…’ Linda said, ‘okay that’s all really important information, really good to know, thank you. So shall we follow that same route?’ I said that was a good idea and said although I do know a fair bit about what’s going on in the background, neural pathways etc, it’s good to not talk too much about all of that because it keeps me in my head. I said, ‘it’s a bit like driving a car, I know all the theory and have the knowledge but that can go on in the background, I don’t think it’s useful talking about it a lot.’ She said she understood and was happy to work that way. I wonder what she thought of me saying all of this. If she was frustrated that I didn’t just bend to her will. I wonder if it feels weird for her to pick up half way through like this.

Linda asked, ‘how do you envisage this panning out? Do you feel that you will end things with Anna and work with me or do you want to work with Anna again when she is better and end things with me?’ I felt kind of freaked out by that and said I definitely wanted to go back to working with Anna but that Linda would be a great support in the break. She was happy with that and said it was just really important to clarify where we stand with each other. While reflecting on this I think that she will potentially be really helpful in the future if I’m allowed to have that back up support through holidays and sickness.

She asked me, so would you like to do weekly, twice weekly..? I explained how I’ve been doing it with Anna and said I would like to do that but also kind of play it by ear. Linda asked if we usually plan in advance and I said, ‘yeah haha she lets me plan as far in advance as she can bear to alleviate my fear of abandonment haha…’ Linda laughed and we agreed to see each other on zoom this Saturday for another session. She asked if we usually plan what we will talk about and I said I used to over plan and over analyse every session, ‘it was a control thing, I would plan and write notes and almost script and rehearse it but over the years Anna has taught me to relax a bit, to trust that whatever comes up is meant to come up, to slow down and just focus on the feelings and…’ Linda said, ‘slow down and trust the process.’ I agreed.

We talked a bit about the between session contact and I explained the boundaries we’ve sorted for that. Linda said, ‘Are you hoping to continue that method of working with me? Where you are able to send texts.. I don’t normally work with clients that way but was wondering what you were hoping for…?’ I said, ‘no, I think it’s really important to not start that… it took me months and months to find a good way of working with Anna and I just don’t have that time here. Let’s just stick to emails and sessions.’ She said she was fine with that.

We wound down the chat and she said it was nice to meet me under these unprecedented times. I said I was grateful to her for allowing me to work with her just now.  

So all in all it feels sooooo good that I was able to do that. So good to talk to someone who knows Anna. So good to feel a connection to Anna through Linda. I feel supported and cared for and like there is going to be someone there for me in this gap until Anna is able to work with me again.

I sent Anna a text directly after the session saying, ‘Hi Anna, I hope you’re doing okay. I know you wont reply to this. I just wanted to let you know that I found it really helpful talking to Linda this morning. Just knowing that she knows you helped me feel more connected to you. We have a session arranged for Saturday. We’ve contracted to work together until you’re able to pick up the sessions with me again. Thank you for suggesting I do this. In your absence it will help to have her there. Take care of yourself. Thinking of you a lot, Lucy.’

I took Anna’s advice and emailed her ‘living will’ or ‘working will’ colleague… I can’t rememeber the name… the person suggested to support Anna’s clients if she is unable through illness or death. Anna had said I should take support when offered if needed.

I emailed,

Hi Linda, Anna gave me your email address. Not sure what to say in this email… I’m finding it difficult not being able to speak to her just now. She suggested getting in touch with you. Regards, Lucy.

She replied first thing in the morning…

Good morning Lucy, Many thanks for your email. I’m sorry to hear your counselling is being affected by the impact of the pandemic.  I’m currently well and offering sessions via Zoom or phone to clients, so we could certainly have a initial discussion to clarify how support for you just now might look.  If you would like to go ahead with this, I have a session available tomorrow morning at 10am or on Saturday afternoon at 4pm. I would also honour the fee already agreed with Anna. I look forward to hearing from you. Stay safe and well. Kind regards, Linda

Thank you for replying so quickly Linda, I really appreciate it. I would like to accept your offer of a session at 10am tomorrow. Please let me know your bank details. I can transfer the money in the morning. Ordinarily I would pay 24 hours before a session but I’m unable to do that just now. I hope that’s okay. Best wishes, Lucy

HI Lucy, You are very welcome. Please send me a Zoom link around 9.50am tomorrow and we can get connected for the session. If you’re not signed up for Zoom I can send you the link, whichever way suits. Take care and I look forward to meeting you tomorrow. Linda

Hi Linda, I don’t have a Zoom account as Anna and I were going to have our first Zoom session tonight. We had only done phone sessions since stopping face to face. Do I need to download something for it? 
I’m feeling very anxious about speaking to you. It’s taken me a long time and a lot of hard work to build trust with Anna and I’m completely devastated at not being able to speak to her just now. 
I’m also concerned about how my husband and kids are going to stay out of the way for the session. I guess we’ll just need to see how it goes. 
Lucy

HI Lucy, Thank you for being honest with me about this, we’ll take our time and get to know each other in these unprecedented circumstances. I’m sorry you are feeling devastated. You don’t need to download anything, I’ll send you a link tomorrow, just click on it and open any dialogue boxes it says to open. If I could encourage you to go with it, Zoom is pretty straightforward. if after tomorrow you prefer to use the phone then we can switch to that. Speak to you tomorrow. Linda

Okay Linda, thank you. I appreciate everything you’ve said. I’ll be there tomorrow morning. If for some reason it doesn’t work or the internet fails us or we can’t connect, my phone number is _____________.
Lucy. 

So there it is. I feel like having the session tomorrow, even giving this other therapist a pseudonym, feels too much like I’m giving her a perminent feature in my life. I don’t want her, I want ANNA.