Ponderings about preverbal developmental trauma stuff…

Before I had kids I read about different parenting styles – anything attachment/gentle/respectful/responsive. Even though I hadn’t explored my own experience with childhood trauma much I knew in my heart there had to be a better way to parent.

My mum wasn’t responsive to any of my emotional needs but she became a whole other level of inaccessible at night time. It was known that you just did not wake my mum up. I clearly remember not being allowed to go to my her at night no matter what happened. I’ve blogged before about my memories of crawling in her room and secretly sleeping under her side of the bed when I had nightmares. I may not remember what nights were like as a baby but I know she wouldn’t have been able to meet my needs even then. I do have a strange half memory of a room and bars and a broken mobile playing Brahms lullaby and a closed door and the muffled noises on the other side of the door and no one coming. I’ve been told that even in my first 48 hours of life she refused to give me what I needed. She wouldn’t have me with her because she needed to rest and she didn’t want me to be fed milk without her so I was fed distilled water by my dad until she was ready to see me. I know she left me to cry.

I had a number of friends who had babies around the same time I had mine. There have been many different parenting opinions discussed over the years. I’ve got friends who sleep trained their babies. Infuriated by the baby’s constant need to be held or fed they desired to leave them. They’d tell me they just left them to ‘cry it out’ and eventually they ‘learned’ to sleep through the night. I witnessed it a couple of times. One friend even told me she used eat plus so she could get a good night sleep and not hear her baby crying. ‘She’s fine, shes has everything she needs. She’s just got into a bad habit and needs to learn to stay asleep.’

It doesn’t work that way! Babies can’t be taught how to self soothe by being abandoned. What happens is the baby’s flight/fight response kicks in when they realise no one is coming and their reptilian brain tells them, ‘This is catastrophic, my life source is not coming back. Stop crying, everyone’s dead and if you keep making noise the sabertoothed tiger will kill you too!’ Their system shuts down. Sometimes these babies become really docile and compliant. Seemingly ‘good babies’. It’s because they’re in survival mode. They know their cries won’t be answered and I’m fact they know that if they cry ‘too much’ then their caregiver will leave them alone, close the door and not come back until they’ve been quiet enough for long enough.

This is just one of many examples of how developmental trauma starts to take grip before we even lay down our sense-making memories that can be communicated in words or pictures. This is somatic. Pre-verbal. So when we’re sitting in the therapist’s office saying, ‘I can’t put it into words, I just feel like I’m dying, the need is so massive, it’s bigger than me…’ You are experiencing an emotional flashback – feeling the unmet needs of your tiny infant part that was neglected and ignored as s/he cried out for milk and comfort. And it was bigger than you and it did feel like you were dying. It is life or death. You need the warmth and protection of your caregiver. Without it, you will die.

This isn’t about shaming people. Being a new parent is the most overwhelming experience, especially if you’ve experienced childhood trauma yourself. I had post natal depression, I know how hard it can be. There were times I wanted to run away. We still don’t get a full night sleep and my kids are 8 and 4. It’s exhausting! We’re constantly up and down in the evening and through the night and sometimes it feels like it’s going to break me. But I committed to not passing this pain on. I will not bring a life into the world who is defenceless and depends on me, to then turn my back. Even if I’m crying silently on the floor beside them holding their tiny hand, I’m not leaving that room until they feel secure enough for me to leave.

That’s what it’s all about… ‘you’re only as needy as your unmet needs’… meet the child’s needs and they will, in time, develop and change and grow past the need. Those of us sitting in the therapy room trying to heal these wordless developmental traumas didn’t have these very basic, primal, life or death needs met and so guess what… we still need them to be met. Being a parent has given me a moment by moment window into all of this. I see it playing out in front of me. And it’s far easier to meet the baby needs as they developmentally come up than to restore the adult carrying the heavy weight of the motherwound.

It’s so complicated, grieving the loss of your therapist. It’s not like ‘normal grief’ – I didn’t get a funeral where I could process and mourn with a group of people who understood my loss. I didn’t get to sit on a bench and sob into tissues surrounded by people who shared my pain. I didn’t get to take time off work for bereavement. There was no simple way to communicate the grief to work acquaintances so that they would know what I’m going through without knowing too much about me. I didn’t receive cards with condolences and kind words about all the beauty in the person that I’ve lost. Shared memories and funny anecdotes. There’s none of that. No one else even knew she existed. I can’t burst into tears while putting the bins out, knowing that my neighbours had heard the news and would understand… No one heard because it’s a secret part of my life that no one knows about. I didn’t get to tell my friends, ‘I feel like a piece of me has died with her… now that she’s gone.’ To share my loss would mean sharing my trauma history. I can’t even summarise and say that a close person to me has died… people expect more details. And what does she equate to..? A close family friend? A distant relative..? Why is no one else mourning then..? It’s not that simple. If I was to say, ‘my therapist stopped working with me,’ I imagine a chorus of, ‘it’s not like your mother died,’ streaming back at me. People wouldn’t understand. Even if they themselves had ‘had counselling’… it’s not the same… unless you’ve experienced deep attachment wounds and have formed a loving connection with a long term therapist, you won’t understand this loss. I know because a few years ago I wouldn’t have understood. So there is no outward grieving. This all has to happen in secret.

So this community became my church. I held the funeral on this page and people who deeply relate came and mourned with me, shared their heartfelt sentiments. Told me of the ways our work had touched them. I haven’t been held in the arms of a loved one while I broke my heart crying over this loss. I’ve done it by myself. Alone and in the written word.

It’s not like ‘normal grief’ – it’s worse. It’s mixed up with all of the pain from all of my wounding. It’s a far greater loss than if my mum died. That would be no real loss at all. She doesn’t play a role in my life and I wouldn’t notice her absence. Anna actively loved me. And she made my life better… each session brought me a little more relief and a little deeper understanding. I miss sitting with someone who really knows me. I miss being with someone who unconditionally cares for me. I couldn’t feel it half the time when I was sitting right in front of her but I feel it now. Fucking disorganised attachment ruining the moments I had what I needed. The fucking wall between us… and now that she’s gone there is no wall! Now she’s ‘abandoned’ me I can feel it all… of course I can! I want to go back in time with what I know now. Ask for the hugs and holding hands. Tell her I love her no matter what she says back. Look her in the eyes when I talk to her and feel her presence. I can’t believe I’m never going to see her again.

‘I wish you could see yourself the way I see you, Lucy.’ Ohhh Anna and now there’s no one in my life who sees me that way. It’s taking all of my strength and all of my love for her to not scroll down my messages and send her a text. But I know it would put her in a really difficult position. I just want to tell her I still think about her every day and that I want to find a way to make it work again… the restrictions are easing all around me but she has to stay locked away. I vividly remember her sitting in front of me tapping the table between us and saying, ‘touch wood I have no intention of going anywhere, Lucy! I’m here until you don’t need me anymore… unless sickness or death separates us. I’m not going to abandon you.’ She would never have chosen to end things this way. It wasn’t what either of us wanted. Who could have known what was coming. If it wasn’t for this virus, I’d still have her. It’s because of the lockdown she got so sick and because of the restrictions she had no choice but to close her practice. I keep imagining one day in the future her getting in touch with me to say she’s started up again… but it wouldn’t be the same. It feels like torture that I can’t process this with her. Absolute torture.

If childhood defines you
Can it ever be behind you?

Yesterday I had a phone conversation with my brother. I sent him this message, ‘I just wanted to say that despite what happened last week being difficult and misattuned that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to ask how I’m doing. I’m going through the worst grief I’ve ever felt and I’ve never walked this road before, it’s really hard and I feel like our interaction drove us further apart. I’d love if you text to see how I am or how things are going with Linda. I opened up to you and it feels like you’re punishing me by withholding care which I know won’t be your intention. I wanted to share how I’m feeling about it. I was painfully honest with you last week and it blew up in my face, now I have less from you than I did before.’ And then we spoke on the phone. He told me he felt like he couldn’t win, that the help he’d offered me had been thrown back in his face. I asked him to please let his defensiveness stand to one side and let this conversation be about understanding me. I said, ‘please let your loving child heart see my grieving child heart,’ I reminded him how much we love each other and how much we’ve been through together. I asked him, ‘do you feel you’re able to really see and feel my pain?’ he was silent for longer than imaginable on a phone call and then said he wasn’t sure. I know he isn’t. I’m not angry or resentful about that. I had never experienced this level of pain before and so I know he hasn’t either. Before the past couple of weeks I could only have imagined this kind of grief and before working so deeply with Anna I wouldn’t have felt it this deeply, I wasn’t capable. I really believe you can’t know or empathise with the pain a person is in until you’ve been to the depths of it yourself and he is very detached and still in the early stages of his own therapy. I could tell in his voice he didn’t know how to respond to me. I told him, ‘please don’t feel you need to offer solutions or fix me… there is nothing to fix with grief. It makes perfect sense that I would feel like this. This pain needs to be felt and all I ask of you is that you sit with me in it and love me through it… all I ask of anyone who loves me is that they don’t turn their backs on me through this… it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever been through and I don’t know how to reach out so please be the one to reach out to me… can you do that?’ he said he would try. We spoke for nearly two hours and I cried through a lot of it. We definitely moved forwards but there’s still a big disparity between our understanding of things that’s creating distance.

I feel like this experience of losing Anna has opened a portal to a space in the universe inside myself that I never knew existed. My maternal grandpa died when I was 20 and since then I have lost 7 more very close and special relatives and one friend who had just turned thirty. Four of my relatives were too young when they died… two of them were sudden deaths that no one could have predicted. I’ve also lost beloved pets which is a pure and all encompassing grief. I know grief. I have cried and hurt. And it’s different for everyone. So for me, this grief, losing Anna… nothing compares. I miss my aunt who died in her 50’s of cancer. I cried for my uncle who had a sudden aneurysm – I think of him often and there are hundreds of songs that remind me of him. What I wouldn’t give to sit with my paternal grandmother and talk to her, ask her to share all her amazing housekeeping secrets… thank her for her box of handwritten recipes and her jewellery I inherited. I wish my kids had met these people. Each of them have a permanent special place in my heart… but nothing has hurt like this. Losing Anna has ripped my heart open. She played such a huge role in my life, I’ve lost so much more than just the person I lost. I told my husband that I feel like I’m a walking bubble of emotion right now. Apparently we are made up of 60% water… I feel like the grief has turned that water to tears. Grief infused tears filling me right up, sloshing around when I walk or roll over in bed, ebbing and flowing like a tide inside my body when I catch myself laughing then feel the tears well up. I’m carrying it around with me everywhere. I wake up with it. I go to sleep with it. It’s everywhere. Before losing Anna I didn’t know this existed.

My session today was intense… again. I told her I’d found our last session really difficult, it had brought up a lot of stuff and I was completely wiped out when we’d ended the call. I told her I slept straight after the session and the few days after had felt full of heavy emotions. I told her I’d been sleeping a lot recently. I said, ‘yesterday was a really griefy day. I think the grief I’m feeling about Anna is mixed in with grief from my childhood…’ I told her that I drove past my childhood house yesterday, the one where I was most unhappy… which stirred up a lot of feelings. I sat in the car crying for an hour. Linda asked me if I knew what drew me to the place I was most unhappy and what the crying was about. I can’t for the life of me remember what I said to her. I jumped around from one subject to the other, as another anecdote popped into my mind I would share it then another and another, finding loose connections between each one. I talked about very early memories of being responsible for my family, responsible for my mothers emotional wellbeing. I talked about my parents splitting up and people being shocked and upset. My neighbour coming to the door and crying when I answered saying she just couldn’t believe it, that my parents were great together and it was breaking her heart that he’d left. I had become a walking robot by then. I didn’t feel. No one knew what it was really like in our house.

I talked about feeling like my experience of the family was so different to what people on the outside saw… I said, ‘we were held up as this perfect family, no one knew what it was like.’ Linda later revisited that statement and asked me who described us as the perfect family. I said, ‘probably my mum… she’d describe herself as a natural mother, she was loved by everyone, she had this persona… so there was this version of life that we were told to believe, like brainwashed and then I’d be left thinking, ‘why do I feel so awful then?’ you know? It must be me… I’m the problem… it’s me who is the problem.’ After exploring this a bit more Linda asked me if I could remember any time in my childhood when I knew that it wasn’t me… she said, ‘kids are really intuitive, especially young kids, you knew deep inside that there was nothing wrong with you, that it was your mum who was wrong…’ she prefaced that by saying ‘hit this one out the ballpark if it doesn’t sit right with you’ and afterwards I said, ‘I wish that were true, I wish I could say that I knew it wasn’t me but that doesn’t feel like how it was just now… were talking day in day out insidious, covert, subtle brainwashing… being made to believe her truth over mine.’ I told her about the time when I was 14 and I spoke to my guidance teacher and he’d said to me that the way my mum was treating me wasn’t right. I started thinking more deeply about my experiences and questioning what I was being told. I told her about them finally taking me to a psychologist and how she never took me back. That even with everything I’d told them, they still didn’t protect me from her.

Linda talked about the incongruence of feeling something to be true and being told it’s something else. I said I was feeling weird talking about it all and then skipped on to talking about something else. She went back to check in and asked me what I was feeling in my body, where in my body. I said I was shaking all over right inside my bones, down my arms and legs, in my chest and tummy… like I did the day I flipped my car over and was taken in an ambulance on a stretcher. The shaking. Like shock vibrating under the surface of my skin. She said, ‘your body knows it wasn’t right… even as a small child, you didn’t have the words but you knew.’ I’m reflecting on this and I can see it’s moments like this where I need something deeper than this, at the very least I need to process this in the room with someone but more than that I need someone who can help me take these somatic experiences further. My body is trying to work something through by shaking like that.

I told Linda I’d been thinking about my analogy of the house on fire. I said I’d been talking to my friend yesterday about it all and that she’d sent me a song with the lyrics, ‘But if childhood defines you, Can it ever be behind you?’ (I’ll include the whole song at the end because it’s totally spot on and amazing that she knew it would resonate). I then told Linda about ten individual anecdotes from various years of my childhood – the time when i was 4 years old and intentionally left behind, a time I was blamed for something very serious that clearly wasn’t me, the times my mum told me she never wanted me.

I jumped to another story, ‘I remember when this case was televised on the news about a couple who had murdered their toddler and my friend saying how disgusted she was to watch the footage of the couple walking to court holding hands… the idea that these people were capable of any kind of intimacy and affection when they had committed such a heartless crime… they’d tortured that poor baby. And I remember feeling the same and then realising that’s what I had felt through my childhood, this disgusting, shameful, confused feeling when I would watch my mum being overtly sexual with my dad or gentle and affectionate with my brother while she also made it glaringly obvious she couldn’t stand being near me. Such a clear message that it was me who was unlovable. She would stand up and walk away if I sat next to her. She would leave the room if I walked in. She would physically push me away when I went to hug her and I remember her telling me when I was a young teen that I wanted to much, I was too much, she’d tell me I’d never meet anyone who’d want as many hugs as I did…’ Linda asked me if that happened a lot, being told I was too much. I said, ‘yeah… all the time, but I know that was her internal experience of herself, being too much… but yeah, I received that message loud and clear.’

Another memory I shared was when I was 12 years old and my beautiful cat, my best friend who I told all my secrets, became very ill. I nursed him for months and then he became too ill. My mum couldn’t handle it so she drove me to the vet and I carried him in and held him as they shaved and injected him. I sat with him and stroked and loved him as he died. Then afterwards I helped my mum process her pain and guilt and grief. My arm round her shoulders as she sobbed. I kept my crying to the middle of the night silently under the covers. Linda stayed with that for a while talking about how heartbreaking it was but I kept repeating, ‘it’s not that bad, it was so long ago…’ Another memory I shared was the time I went to my doctor at 14 to talk about the self-harm and he said, ‘if you’re trying to kill yourself you’re cutting the wrong way.’ He told me I was selfish and that my mother was going through a painful divorce and I was adding to her problems. She shuffled in her seat and exhaled loudly at that one. Told me it was shocking. I shrugged and said it was the 90’s and maybe he had no experience of it back then. She apologised on his behalf and said, ‘that is the exact opposite way to respond to someone talking about their self-harm!’

I skipped again, to present day. I told Linda I really struggled to believe what everyone’s telling me that my kids are secure and well adjusted. I said, ‘I can see they’ve been affected by the lockdown and by my struggles, I can see they know something is up with me but kids don’t just walk up to their mum and say, ‘hey you seem really emotionally distant and I don’t feel connected to you,’ instead it crops up in weird behaviour changes, unsettled nights, volatile emotions, squabbling… I can see they are impacted and I guess it just feels really confusing to me because how do I know if this is what’s gonna fuck them up… how do I know exactly what fucked me up? If they are well adjusted and resilient enough to deal with me being unhinged for a few months then what the fuck happened to me to make me have so many deep routed issues… how bad was it? How poorly attuned was she? It’s like my whole childhood was a lie… or I’m finally listening to what I always knew.’

There’s a lot I can’t remember about the session. We talked about the intergenerational trauma running through my family. Generations of alcohol abuse, infidelities, emotional instability, toxic dynamics, the perfect storm that resulted in me. Linda didn’t say much. I felt her presence, she was responding and she was actively listening but I guess she doesn’t know me well enough yet to go too deeply into things. I told her I was embarrassed and this was like verbal diarrhea like in the first few sessions we worked together and she laughed and said, ‘that is not my experience of you at all Lucy, not at all.’ That felt nice. I want to hear more from her actually… I need to slow down.

At one point Linda said, ‘I’m really struck by the fact that it’s all right there on the surface for you, all of these very painful stories are right there and they are just as powerful and energised as they were when they happened.’ She had a caring expression on her face and I told her that’s exactly how it feels and I want it to not be like that anymore. I told her it feels like I’m just scratching the surface and all these things will need to be talked about again but in more detail and she agreed enthusiastically.

We had a couple of minutes to go and there was a bit of silence and she looked away for a bit mid sentence then told me she was appalled by some of the things I told her that had happened to me. She said, ‘I know how any child would be able to make sense of any of that.’ I said I hadn’t made sense of it and that’s why its still alive inside me. She said she understood that and there was space here for me to try and make sense of it all now.

I came off the call feeling really dissociated again and laid my head down for twenty minutes then sat up and emailed Linda the following message.

Hi, I just wanted to get this written down in real time. I need to remember to go slowly Linda. There’s this massive kickback I get when I over share and I can’t believe I’ve not learned that about myself yet. I jump around from one traumatic memory to the next sharing multiple events that had a deep impact then I invalidate my experience by telling myself it wasn’t that bad. While I verbally disclose only the tip of all those icebergs, under the surface I feel the weight of what’s beneath every single one of them. Massive amounts of shame and pain filling me up. It’s too much for me to hold by myself after the session which I think is why I then feel the need to sleep – the big feelings plus the thoughts in my head telling me I shouldn’t have shared so much with you is overwhelming. I know it’s my job to be responsible for myself but please can you help me remember in the session to stick with one big thing at a time. I get carried away and I think the pain of it all makes me move quickly. Please could you encourage me to look deeply at one subject and not expose multiple things all at once. It leaves me feeling very vulnerable. Also it makes me reluctant to revisit any of the things I’ve disclosed because I don’t want you to think I’m repetitive. I just want to say this now because there’s a chance I’ll forget that this came up for me by the time I next speak to you. Basically I need to remember to go slow. Speak to you about it on Wed. Thanks, Lucy.

The song…

The Valley by Ethan Gruska
I’m driving through the valley
My whole childhood was here
Early memories of my family
Mom and Dad were still together
For the first couple years
I remember it just barely
I never really cared
And I still don’t, to tell the truth
But if childhood defines you
Can it ever be behind you?
Hmm
At the house at the end of the alley
My first love, she lived in there
It’s where I kept disappearing
She was all I cared about
For two and a half years
Now I remember her so vaguely
I know I broke her heart
But she broke mine equally too
If it’s heartbreak that defines me
Can it ever be behind me?
Hmm hmm hmm hmmmm
Please…
And the years go by like a close race
Headed for the finish line
Looking back in the rearview mirror
Holding on for dear life
Like how I’m layin’ in bed
Lookin’ into the eyes of my future wife
Thinking it’s family that defines me
I can’t help if they remind me
Of the fear that can be blinding
That history repeats itself in me
Oh, hmm

Firstly I thanked Linda for the previous session. I specifically thanked her for being open to my feedback and allowing space for it all to be discussed. She said it was fine and good that we talk about it all and she said it’s important as we settle into working together that we continue to talk like that. I said I was really pleased about that and explained that when I worked with Paul I very quickly started to feel the need to talk about the relationship but didn’t feel like that was allowed. He would often say I was pushing him beyond his capabilities or his experience and it meant that I felt ashamed like there was something wrong with me for feeling the need to talk about it. Linda said that it’s often not important how long a person has been a therapist for or what experience that have, the important thing is for the therapist to remember that every client is completely different and they need to adapt to that person sitting in front of them. I said, ‘yeah I’m really glad you’re saying that. In sessions I would bring something to Paul and he would start talking about techniques and it really annoyed me, it felt patronising like as if I could just magically cure like 25 years of issues by doing one or two easy things. I did feel like Paul cared a lot about me but he was rigid in his beliefs, the CBT got in the way to be honest and I told him that. I really needed to talk about stuff from my past and he would tolerate it a little but then he would say that he didn’t believe analysis of the past was helpful, he’d say people spend thousands of pounds analysing their childhood over years and years and it’s important to be present and to live in the moment. Whereas Anna was very much like, you need to talk about this, you’ve kept it inside all your life which was helpful because I had kind of pushed it all down thinking I was being self obsessed or something… and this relates to us because in the first block of session we had when you said you were used to working short term with clients and that you tend to work in short blocks of 6 to 8 sessions it reminded me of Paul… and I was worried that you would agree with him, that I shouldn’t dwell on the past.’ Linda said, ‘you’ll know this already but it’s been widely written about that the relationship is very important in therapy.’ I said, ‘my experience of therapy is that it is the single most important thing about the whole therapy process… the relationship.’ Linda smiled and nodded and continued, ‘and within that relationship, looking at exactly what the client specifically needs is really important… for you, your childhood is still very much alive inside you and so that’s where the focus should be.’ I said, ‘I think that’s what the whole of the last session was really about… checking that you were okay with that… you know that you’re okay with me talking about my childhood and you’re prepared to invest in the relationship.’ She agreed.

We talked a little about the way that Paul broke boundaries with me and how even though they were minor boundaries (such as letting sessions run on sometimes more than 40 minutes past what I’d paid and arranged for), it triggered in me this sense of uncertainty and hypervigilance, that I was never able to fully relax and trust and feel safe in the relationship. It reminded me on a physical, unspoken level, of what life was like with my parents… this consistent inconsistency that I’d told Linda of before and she brought up again that it had stuck in her mind.

I then said I wasn’t sure what I wanted to talk about today and that the familiar anxiety about finding the perfect thing to talk about was there as always. I said, ‘I’m feeling a bit better today, you know all the things in my life don’t feel as out of control as they felt on Saturday.’ Linda said, ‘that’s good to hear, you said that you felt all the areas of your life were crumbling, is that not what it feels like today?’ I said, ‘I think it’s just that I haven’t been spending time looking at them recently so they’re not in the forefront of my mind… so I’m still struggling to feel close to Grace, the house is a tip, Adam’s annoying me so much I want to leave him sometimes and I’m really anxious about work and just want to quit. I guess… I just feel a really strong desire to walk away from it all, it’s not that it’s not all still there it just got too much for me and so I sort of left it all.’ Linda said, ‘is that a familiar pattern for you?’ I nodded.

I said my dad had visited yesterday and the visit was awkward. Linda asked if it was awkward physically or emotionally and I said, ‘I don’t know it’s just awkward and I’m on edge in case someone says something that’s going to torment the kids later about the virus or deaths or whatever and my dad can’t engage emotionally and if you ever talk about anything emotionally difficult, he is emotionally distant. Always has been. Memories from childhood, he was just like vacant. He could be in the room with me and I wouldn’t even remember. You’d have a full conversation with him and at the end you’d realise he wasn’t listening or he’d say he wasn’t listening… or he’d go off and read in the bedroom and ignore us all day.’

I continued, ‘I hate that I can be like that, I don’t want to be like that. I really hate it when I notice that I behave anything like either of them… and I take myself off to type or think or rest and sometimes I drift off and don’t listen… I do try to let the kids know what’s happening and not just wander off. I’ll tell them I’m working or whatever and reconnect with them later but it’s not enough.’ Linda said, ‘I wonder if those reconnecting moments are actually the most important bit though, they’re the sense making parts of the day… that’s what you lacked growing up.’ I said that everyone keeps telling me that but it doesn’t really feel like it makes up for it.

I said, ‘My parents always leaned on me emotionally. It made me feel…’ I pulled a face and then continued, ‘but they’ve never been able to be there for me you know so there’s this imbalance…’ Linda interrupted and said, ‘can we just go back to that, what came up for you then?’ I said, ‘um… it just feels… it’s just yucky and gross and… uhhh yuck! Like I don’t want to be that for them I just want them to be strong and stable and… my parents! You know’?’ Linda nodded and said, ‘yeah I thought that was it I just wanted to make sure.’ Linda said she could tell it makes me feel very uncomfortable just to even talk about it.

I said, ‘With any of this, family life… whatever… I get very overwhelmed then I just leave.’ Linda said, ‘you leave physically?’ I said, ‘yeah or mentally/emotionally I just leave…’ Linda asked if that happens a lot and I said yes depending on what’s going on in my life. She asked if it’s always happened and I told her I don’t remember ever not having this very vivid inner world and an ability to stop being out here and to escape inside. Linda said, ‘Okay, this feels important, are you alright if we stay with this for a bit? Talk about it and explore how it might play out here between us? Did you ever talk about it in great depth with Anna?’ I was nodding.

I said, ‘It happened throughout therapy with Anna and then there was this one session about a year ago where I said something about feeling dissociative and Anna jumped on that and we talked in great detail about it in that session and she was saying that it happens a lot in the therapy room and I said to her, ‘why haven’t you brought it up before?’ and she said she was waiting for me to bring it up… I was like ‘Anna! Fuck sake, we could have been working on it all this time!’ and she said, ‘but I could have brought it up a year ago and unintentionally triggered a huge shame response in you and you’d have been out that door, it needed to come from you,’ you know we talked about the need to go slowly at the pace set by the client.’ Linda was nodding and smiling and asked how it may come up for me in session with her. I said, ‘over time, as you get to know me, it will become fairly obvious when it happens. I’ll be unable to continue whatever I was talking about, I say uhhh a lot, I say that I feel spacey or weird or sick or foggy or I say ‘I don’t know’ a lot.’ Linda said, ‘ah yeah I’ve heard you say you feel spacey before, okay and are there any particular times you’re aware it comes up?’ I said, ‘It happens a lot when I talk about my mum…’ she said, ‘right hmmm,’ with a sombre tone and I continued, ‘if I feel shame or any strong emotions, the fog rolls in… sometimes I’m aware of it and other times I don’t have the awareness.’

Linda asked, ‘What would be helpful for us to do when it happens? Would it be helpful for me to bring it up, to ask what’s going on for you? Coz that might not be what’s happening, it could be a number of other things… something in the house has distracted you or you’re thinking about what you’re going to say… how would it feel if I was to ask you?’ I immediately said, ‘I’d like that.’ I was thinking about how validating that feels, like truly being seen… when they gently name what they see. I said, ‘I don’t really know what the right thing to do is when I get into that space. I think it’s part of the slowing down thing… it happens maybe when my system feels the need to slow down… so maybe looking at what we were talking about just prior or when it happened would help.’ I told her about the session when I told Anna how frustrating it is because it’s like I can see the whole road ahead of me and then this thick fog goes down. Anna asked me if it was a protective fog and I said it felt like that so she asked what we do in the fog… basically we sat it out together, in safety, and that felt so nice… to experience it with someone, not by myself.’ Linda was listening and nodding… I feel like I write that a lot, she does contribute and talk but there has been a lot of her listening while I talk lately. I guess she’s getting to know me.

Linda asked, ‘Does it impact your daily life a lot?’ and I laughed and said, ‘yup! It keeps me separate from people and means that I miss things… Adam said I’ve always been a daydreamer, he knows I have a vivid imagination and I live in my head a lot… we talked about it once in a kind of light way and he said I’ve just always been like that and he loves me anyway kind of thing.’ She said, ‘oh right, wow, has it always been like that… do you remember periods in your life where it wasn’t a problem?’ I said, ‘When I feel happy or settled in the present moment then it’s not there and that can last days, weeks. When I’m stressed and overwhelmed or upset it’s there on and off all the time.’

Somehow we got onto the subject of me stressing about fucking the kids up… again. At one point I said that Anna always used to remind me that I am not your mum and I joked about how annoying that was to hear. Linda said, ‘this might not be helpful right now and tell me if it’s not but I do want it to be said that none of us grow up unscathed, we can’t protect children from pain, we all have our own issues, that’s the beauty of being human… the difference is that your experiences hurt you very deeply and are still impacting you today.’ I nodded and told he that it just doesn’t seem good enough. I told her I overthink and analyse everything. I told her that I asked dad once if they ever sat in bed at the end of the day and went over things, talked about how they could have done things differently that day, or talked about me and Daniel and how we were coping or not coping, he said never. I asked him, ‘surely there were times when mum said she wished she’d done it differently’? He said no… there wasn’t a single day where they thought about the impact on us I mean what the actual fuck!? I always go over and over things. There isn’t a night goes by where Adam and I don’t talk about the impact of our parenting. We talk about it every single day, multiple times a day in fact… almost every interaction. What we have done and how we could adapt, repair, change things for next time. I said to Linda, ‘I mean I want to go back in time and fucking shake them! Grab them by the shoulders and scream at them ‘wake the fuck up!’ – they were the adults, they could have done something but day in day out it was just….. (long silence)… ummm well…. (long silence… I might have said stuff here but I can’t remember, I became very dissociative. I was staring out the window and then noticed out the corner of my eye Linda moving slightly further forward towards the screen, like she was watching me closely (embarrassing) I grabbed my new stuffed dog, River and stroked him off camera)… uh anyway it doesn’t matter now…’ Linda said, ‘what happened for you there, Lucy, you were talking and then you suddenly stopped talking?’ I said, ‘uhhh’ a lot. Then covered my face and said, ‘I don’t even know what we were talking about,’ and then Linda repeated what I had said (which is the only reason I know what I said and was able to write it above) and said, ‘you were getting angry, I could feel your anger’. I said ,’and here comes the shame, I just want to close the laptop now.’ Linda asked, ‘what’s the shame about Lucy?’ I said, ‘…uh… coz we’re just talking! It’s just words.’ She gently said, ‘yes but they are words that carry a lot of weight, we’re talking about something very painful and you were feeling anger about it.’ I said, ‘Maybe anger wasn’t a safe emotion for me to feel either then.’

I then had this very vivid image in my mind and said, ‘it’s like I’m standing here with a huge hose desperately dowsing water on my current house in front of me in case it catches fire when there isn’t even any fire there at all, while there is this other house ablaze behind me. I’m focusing on my kids and on all these possible ways I might mess them up but it’s a distraction taking me away from closely looking at what actually is hurting which is everything that’s behind me… the childhood behind me, the one that’s beyond saving, it’s burned to cinders.’ I was talking quite quickly again and I continued, ‘Overthinking everything, like everything. I over think EVERYTHING – like Grace has been asking about sex and I’m stressing out about whether I’m explaining it the right way. We were watching Cheaper by the Dozen on TV and the dad had a vasectomy and she asked Adam what was happening so he said he was having an operation so he couldn’t have any more babies and Grace said she thought it was women that had babies and Adam explained that sperm is needed as well and that led to more questions and I’m just terrified that something we say will scar her for life I mean I don’t even remember when I learned about sex I was that young and it filled my head, she filled my head with this stuff and…’ I involuntarily took three or four huge breaths in.  

In the gap Linda said, ‘I was really struck by the image of the burning house you know. This is really big important pressing work that’s demanding we take notice, that’s a striking image and you said it’s on fire right behind you, right behind your head… that’s powerful. It’s still hurting you, Lucy.’ I said, ‘yes it is.’ And sort of nodded with my head down for a while.

I said, ‘I just think all these things are like smoke and mirrors… you know focusing heavily on my kids and present day anxieties that distract me from what brought me to therapy in the first place… like all these road blocks you know, like the transference I’ve experienced with all my therapists… you know, why focus on dealing with all my painful childhood stuff when my mind’s conjuring up all these fucking weird fantasies about my three therapists!’ Linda smiled and said, ‘it’s interesting you would say roadblocks because they can be moved… but they make us stop and pause and take care of something in that moment, don’t they? And they’re there for a reason, so maybe whatever the roadblock is, daily life stuff, transference… maybe it’s encouraging us to look at something important.’ I liked that she used my analogy to help me understand it in a deeper way. I love that she is allowing me to explore and process through analogies like Anna would. It’s what I need to do to figure out what my internal experience is.

I said, ‘so we’ve got 7 minutes to go and I had something on my mind, I just wanted to say that I was processing our last session a lot this week and you said that me feeling this grief is really respectful of Anna and my relationship and I was thinking about how grief really feels like love. I thought about all these great quotes and poems I’ve read about grief being love turned inside out and I thought… it’s easy to own this grief that I feel for Anna because I love her so much it feels like the only thing I can do is feel this grief, almost to honour her and the love we developed between us through the work we were doing. I thought that maybe that’s why I struggle to grieve my childhood, because I don’t love myself or the child I was… there’s just hate and shame and anger and resentment and loathing about that girl, there’s no love there…I mean I had slowly started to feel the beginnings of a connection but really, I don’t love my child self. It’s easy to grieve for Anna because I love her and miss what I’ve lost. It’s hard to grieve a childhood when you don’t even know what it feels like to have the thing you missed out on. I guess that’s why it hurts so much when the therapist is caring or loving because then it gives you a taste of what you longed for and that’s the loss… you’re grieving the love you didn’t have… anyway, that’s something for another time.’ Linda said, ‘wow… yes, that is a very big something for another time. Definitely.’

And we sort of ended there. We talked a little about the sunny weather and we confirmed Saturdays session time and said goodbye.

As I closed my laptop I sort of ‘realised’ I was in my room in my house and I suddenly felt very spacey and uneasy. I had to lie down and in my head I was thinking, ‘wow I’m not feeling okay, I feel so weird…’ I was really dissociative and felt very unreal. I slept for about an hour and woke up feeling a little more grounded but still emotionally fried. 12 hours later and I’m still feeling the affects! I felt like Linda was a very present, patient and caring listener today. I felt that she was committed to finding out about me and learning who I am and what I need. Right now, I feel hopeful about her ability to work with what I am currently bringing her. And I am getting more used to sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what is round the corner in terms of my therapy journey. This is where I am right now and so this is what I need to deal with… and I keep reminding myself that Anna had faith in me that I could continue this therapeutic work without her, so that is what I will do.

This grief is pure love.

‘In order to stay healthy, our nervous systems and psyches need to face challenges and to succeed in meeting those challenges. When this need is not met, or when we are challenged and cannot triumph, we end up lacking vitality and are unable to fully engage in life.’

Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

We are approaching the end of the second week since Anna phoned me to let me know that she was closing her practice. I keep going over phrases that we said to each other during that call and despite going over her words countless times in my head, I can’t hear her voice anymore, I wish I had recorded her at least once. I do remember her words though… ‘if you remember nothing else from this conversation I want you to remember this, I am not rejecting you…’ ‘…you were never too much for me…’ ‘…I am so proud of you… you gave your all, every session, week in week out…’ ‘…working with you changed me…’ ‘…I care deeply about you…’ ‘…I will never forget you.’ I can hear me quietly voicing my realisation, ‘so this is the last time I’ll ever speak to you and I’m never going to see you again?’ Crying silently as she replied yes, so she wouldn’t feel any worse than she already did. A 14 minute phone call to mark the end of two and a half years of deep attachment therapy. She told me, ‘don’t let this be the end, take this to Linda. Work on this ending with her.’

On Tuesday the 19^th of May my therapy mum died. That’s not an analogy… it’s a fact. She’s just Anna now. She’s not Anna my therapist. She doesn’t see me twice a week anymore. She doesn’t regularly read my texts, talk to me on the phone, sit writing notes about me between sessions. She will have closed her folder within which she held her case study of our work for her dissertation, she will no longer read up on ways to help support me, book herself onto courses that will deepen her knowledge. She doesn’t make her way to her office every Tuesday and Saturday and in one of the hours sit with me, look at me, study and analyse and feel with me. She will never-again leave that building holding me in mind. None of that happens anymore. My therapy mum is now just Anna. It’s only now that our work has finished that I can see so clearly how much she cared about me. That she really did value that time we spent together. I feel our connection and love so powerfully now. It feels like I’ve been torn from the soft womb of her mothering, cord severed, ripped from her arms violently, prematurely. Parts of me were brought to being in that room in front of her. Parts of me were breathed to life in that room in front of her, because of her. Because she saw me.

I didn’t just lose someone I loved. It’s not just the relationship I’ve lost. It’s the hope of healing some of these very deep wounds in the next few months or years with her. It’s the sentences started that I intended on finishing with her. All those times I said, ‘I can’t go on with this today…’ through words or dissociation and so she would hold it for me, indefinitely, until I was ready. I want to phone her up and scream into her voicemail, ‘I’m ready now! I’M READY NOW! I want to cry with you now. The dam has burst and I couldn’t stop myself even if I wanted to. I want to ask you to hold me and rock me while I howl. I want to lie with my head in your lap and have you stroke my hair like my mother never could, I know now that you’d do that for me. I want to sit cross legged on the floor holding hands with you, eyes closed breathing together. I want to tell you all the things that happened to me and have you hold me in the pain of it all. I want to tell you that I love you and hear you say it back to me. I want to tell you that the wall is no longer there Anna, there is no wall. And I’m sorry that I said I had mixed feelings about coming back to you after the first six sessions with Linda. I was always going to come back to you. I wish I’d never said that. I was hurting and I was frightened. You told me that you will be inside me forever and I am inside you. I feel it now… I fucking feel it now as I grieve losing it. I want to be given the gift of leaving when I’m ready to go.’

She invested so much in me. I can see now that she connected very deeply to my journey and I trusted her so much with it. I knew I could take anything to Anna and she would help me work through it. My personal development has been massively interrupted. I was on a train moving steadily forwards and suddenly someone switched the track without consent and I’m veering off on a route I hadn’t planned. She didn’t plan it either. I don’t even know what track her life’s hurtling down now but it’s definitely not the one she wanted. Back in March during her first bout of illness Anna said to me, ‘I’m sorry that me being ill has impacted your therapy journey,’ and I didn’t even think anything of it because I just figured we’d pick things up again when it all went back to normal.

So it’s been two weeks. I can honestly say that the pain I felt immediately after she said goodbye felt like it would kill me. I cried so much I thought I was going to be sick… and as I write those words just now I am transported back to Lucy of 1998, sitting on my bed in my room writing a poem with the first line, ‘have you ever cried so much you feel like you might throw up?’ It’s such a thick and powerful grief and I know it well. It scarred my heart as a child and I’m tracing those scars now. It threatened to kill me at the age of 14 and it threatened to kill me again 22 years on. Back then I had no one to share the pain with. I cried by myself, I cut into my skin, I took pills and drank. All in secret. Eventually I grew an impenetrable shield that no one could get in or out of… numb for decades until now. I am not numb anymore. As Linda said, ‘it is an act of respect to fully feel the grief.’ Last week I didn’t think I was going to make it out of that pit and if I’m honest I may not be out of it yet. Driving to her office hours after the call with this huge heartache pouring out of me. I genuinely thought I was probably going to kill myself by the end of the week. It was fucking dark as hell.

When I was 14 years old I did everything I could to not feel the pain and when it did creep out of me, despite being completely alone, I felt deep deep shame. Now, there is no shame. I walked across a field this afternoon where the grass has grown to my waist the past three months and as I walked I cried openly, with one hand on my chest and the other on my belly. This grief is pure love. It is all of the love I felt for her and all of the love I long to feel from her firing around inside my body and spilling over. It feels like the past two and half years she has been preparing me for this moment. Deconstructing the shame that silenced me, cracking me wide open, loving me to a place where I could finally honour the grief. Giving me something to grieve in real time that allows me to send a lifeline back in time to that 14 year old girl that I buried inside me. I’m feeling it with her, she’s no longer alone.

A very patient and wise friend who has witnessed and given time and space to my raw and unfiltered expressions of this grief each day for the past 14 days said to me today, ‘I fully believe the conditions that get presented to you, you’re going to use them to heal…’ and she brought this quote to me… “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” This feels like real and validating hope. It is the perfect way to express that there will be no silver lining because the best option will always have been that Anna could stay with me and finish our work together… but in the absence of the best option and in fact regardless of what option I’m faced with, I will find a way to heal.

This week I bought a beautiful little stuffed dog that looks like a fox. I have tucked Luna and her little family away, lovingly, for the time being. It is just too painful to see them right now. I named my little fox-pup, River. He is a symbol of my unending desire to move towards my goal. Rivers keep going. They are strong enough to wear away the land and move rocks and boulders yet gentle enough to cleanse and caress and ground us. The river can smooth a jagged stone to a shiny pebble in time and score great trenches that change the landscape forever. The river can be a calm, quiet reflector of light and it can be a deep and vast body of dark unknown wonders… whatever the river is, it moves. And so here I am, faced with these conditions that continue to bring me to my knees at points each day… but whether it be for the love of Anna or more importantly the love of myself, I’m gonna use this to help me heal.

It was fucking brutal.

This morning I noticed that I felt fairly indifferent about the upcoming session. I felt good about my decision to send the email ‘using my voice’ as Anna would put it… I haven’t worked this hard for over two years just to have someone crap all over that in one session! If anything it felt like honouring the work Anna did with me to advocate for myself. Also, I’ve felt so massively supported by everyone commenting and sending me messages the past couple of days (and in fact through this whole thing) that I felt very confident in my position and secure in the knowledge that if the whole thing didn’t work out I’d have a beautiful group of amazing, empathic survivors and allies linking virtual arms in a circle around me ready to validate, love and support me on my search for a new therapist. I ended up going for a drive with my family the hour before the session. The first drive in nearly 3 months. It felt amazing to be out, like it was healing my mental health with each field we passed. We had the music up full and all four of us sang along like before lockdown, it was seriously so lovely. At one point I thought about how normal it felt and that maybe we will eventually be able to get to a place of feeling like life has settled again. Then a tiny wave of grief when I remembered there will be no Anna coming with me on that journey. That I will have to get used to life outside of lockdown without her… everyone else’s lives will slowly return to what they were before but for those of us who lost someone through this, we will carry the loss with us.

I logged on and we both said ‘hi’ in our usual way, in my head I’m wondering what she’s thinking. Linda asked me how I was and I said, ‘well to be honest, putting the email to one side I actually feel really good today. We went for a drive this morning for the first time in nearly 3 months and it was fucking medicinal! So good to get out and see something new you know.’ Linda was smiling and said she was so pleased it felt good to see some new stuff and do something different. I said, ‘and I decided to stop taking the diazepam and it might be a coincidence but I haven’t felt suicidal today or yesterday so I don’t know but maybe that was contributing to the really low feeling.’ Linda asked me when I stopped taking it and I said, ‘well on Wednesday I had three which is more than I’ve ever taken in a day before and after our session I crashed massively and could barely function I just felt like my whole system was shutting down you know and I think it was partly a nervous system response to the intensity of the session and not knowing how to deal with that but maybe also because of taking the meds so on Thursday I woke up feeling really grateful that I hadn’t acted on how I felt and decided to make some changes and one of those things was having a break from the diazepam to see if that helped…’ Linda said it sounded like I was in a really hard place on Wednesday and she was sorry to hear that.

So then we launched in to the email. I asked her if she’d read it and she said, ‘I read it once this morning. I was very busy yesterday and didn’t have the chance to read it any more times than once,’ I thanked her for reading it and said that I had assumed she wouldn’t read it and I was prepared but also shitting myself about having to read it to her in session. She said, ‘okay so you don’t need to shit yourself about it…’ I laughed and told her it was par for the course that I always feel like that anyway and I just push through the nerves and anxiety every session. She smiled then continued, ‘obviously there was a lot in the letter so, I know you mentioned reading it to me, you can if you want to do that or… I don’t know how you want to do this but it’s important that we cover everything you want to cover today… and also as you mentioned we will talk about the boundaries around that today as well because that’s also important.’ So straight off I noticed that she seemed calm and open to listening and relaxed. Which obviously felt great. She’d read it and she was willing to turn up and work on it. I thanked her for being willing to talk about this and said I understood it was important to go over the boundary.

I asked her what she felt about the email and Linda said, ‘I want to say that I got the very clear message in the letter that you did not feel understood by me on Wednesday and I want to share with you that as I read the letter I felt that I was not understood either. You know sometimes that happens where we completely miss each other, we just go off in different directions.’ I said, ‘I hear what you’re saying and that’s important but I do feel that… well this is my session and so it’s vitally important that I’m understood. This is meant to be benefiting me and it’s me who feels the massive impact if I’m not understood.’ She said, ‘while that’s true, there are two of us in this relationship and I need to feel understood and heard as well.’ She then said, ‘I’ve got to be honest with you Lucy I was horrified… fucking horrified when I read the email, honestly… fucking horrified.’ I felt a burst of panic in my chest and asked her to clarify what she meant by fucking horrified, ‘because to me it sounds like you’re angry with me.’ She thought for a bit and then said, ‘well I was just reading through it fucking horrified that this was your experience of the session and I was trying to think about how I had said things and what we’d discussed and my experience of the session was completely different from your experience… horrified… for me it’s the sense that my empathy had been completely misinterpreted as gaslighting.’ I said, ‘right…’ trying to take it in. She continued, ‘Sometimes we can be in such a dark place where we cant take in anyone’s care, you know? We could be in a space where nothing feels good and everything feels like a threat, perhaps the place you were in on Wednesday meant you weren’t able to take my empathy in. A really horrible hard place to be and I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to help.’

I thanked her and she looked quizzical and said, ‘hmmm that sounded a bit, I don’t know, flat… are you sure you were able to take that in?’ I said, ‘So… yes I am grateful for what you’ve said there, that you’re sorry. I’m uncomfortable with what you said before that.’ She asked, ‘Okay, which bit are you uncomfortable with?’ I thought for quite a while and then said, ‘…your empathy was interpreted as gaslighting… saying that to me IS gaslighting!’ She looked shocked. I said, ‘what you’re saying to me is that what you were doing was kind and nice and caring and the problem lies in how I interpreted it. I’m the one with the problem.’ She explained some more about how we can find ourselves in such a dark place that we can’t take in empathy. I said, ‘No… I know what empathy feels like, that did not feel like empathy.’ She sat back and looked right at the screen for a while as if she was really actually paying attention and she said, ‘Okay I’m listening to you Lucy, I hear you. It didn’t feel like empathy and that’s very important. And I am really sorry for that Lucy. I genuinely mean that. I’m sorry that my words made you feel worse.’ I couldn’t help but smile broadly with tears in my eyes and I thanked her. She said, ‘thank YOU for your honesty, you know Lucy, if it wasn’t for what happened with Anna we wouldn’t be working together and in therapy terms we really haven’t been working together for very long at all.’ I said this was out twelfth session and she continued, ‘yeah we really don’t know each other, I don’t know you and I’m listening and learning because I want to get to know you… so this is very important work. A very important conversation.’

I nodded and really felt so glad that we were both facing this conversation. It is important. I said to her that I was really glad to see that she was willing to hear me out and try to understand me. I said, ‘I think it’s important also that I say this… what you are describing as sensitivity is actually hyper vigilance. Which is a trauma response. To call it sensitivity is to say that this is some sort of character flaw. Whereas this is actually a survival strategy that makes perfect sense when you know my history. And yes I’m an adult now and no I’m not in any real threat but this relationship does in some ways mirror the parent child relationship, certainly to some parts of me, the parts that need to be healed, those parts struggle to trust. My trauma is interpersonal so your words and tone and mannerisms and facial expressions and body language… I’m interpreting it all, all the time. Minute details. Because that’s what I had to do as a child… and I get that I’m not a child any more but that is what I was exposed to every day of my life from birth so… like you’ve talked about neural pathways before, so those grooves that have been scored millions of times over these fundamental, developing years… they are pretty fucking deep… it’s going to take a shit load of work to really shake up and dig up all that deeply engrained stuff to then create new pathways of a new way of being in relationships.’ Linda was listening and nodding and saying sort of active listening noises and phrases. She said, ‘yeah this all makes a lot of sense and I’m taking it all in. It makes so much sense that you would be like that, yeah… it is a perfectly understandable response to the… yeah to the uh… to the trauma actually yes.’ And she had a really sort of deep feeling expression on her face, like she was seeing this part of me that she didn’t realise was there or something. Like it was sinking in for her. She told me again that she was grateful that I was willing to be so honest with her.

I said, ‘the thing is, you’ve met me in this really fucking strange time in my life and like, if you’d met me like a few months ago I was doing good. I was happy and life was going well. I was dealing with working through the childhood trauma stuff in my sessions but my daily life on the whole was going well. I had these things in my life that I’d carefully curated and sculpted and gathered around me that made my life feel full and fun and fulfilling.’ She was listening and repeating things like, ‘yeah you were happy,’ and ‘you had made this great life for yourself hmmm…’ I said, ‘and you know Anna and I had a really solid relationship so anything that came up in my life I would take it to her and she would help me work through it. Whether I was stressed with work or arguing with Adam or struggling with my perfectionism in parenting I would take it to Anna and she would tease it all out with me and help me process and figure out what was going on… life just ran so much more smoothly when I had her to talk things through with.’ Linda had that warm smile on her face that I recall noticing way back in the first few sessions whenever I would talk about Anna, like she was thinking fondly about Anna. I interrupted myself and said, ‘that right there…’ pointed at Linda and she widened her eyes and looked startled and like she was paying attention, ‘that version of you… that caring, kind Linda… I feel like she wasn’t with me on Wednesday and then I spent all my time thinking about how you probably have got sick of me and you don’t want to work with me and I couldn’t even remember this part of you and now I see it and I’m like struck by the fact that you’re here and you’re listening and I mean, of course you are this is what your whole job is about!’ Linda again was nodding and agreeing. I said, ‘anyway, back to what I was saying… It’s like in the movie Inside Out. You know how all the areas of the girl’s life are all suspended around in her mind and one by one they all start crumbling and dropping out the space they’re suspended in. That’s what is happening in my life…’ She said that was a powerful image and she said, ‘all the areas of your life have crumbled.’ I said, ‘yeah and like I said, if you had met me a few months ago I wasn’t like this, I wasn’t overly sensitive, I had a lot going on in my life, just like in the film… I’d worked really hard at getting to a great place… but all of a sudden everything in my world that brought me all this happiness and gave me a sense of identity and made me feel solid in who I am, all that has disintegrated in such a sudden and short space of time and not only that but I’m then having to try to cope with that by myself because the person I would have taken all that to has gone.’ I started to cry a little but kept talking. ‘So the island of my life where my marriage sits is crumbling because for the past 3 months I’ve had no one to process our disagreements with and the island of my relationship with my kids, especially Grace is crumbling because I have no one to help me iron out all of the tiny little ways that relationship triggers me daily. My ability to do my job… I mean my job has changed so much through this lockdown and the stress around that is immeasurable and yeah so that’s crumbling. My health, so I can’t go to the gym anymore I can’t go to my weight loss classes… I’ve been binge eating and not exercising… so that islands crumbling. And even my close relationship with my brother is crumbling. I don’t know how to deal with any of these issues by myself, we hadn’t really got that far yet. I processed everything with Anna. I used to take everything to her Linda. This is why I need two sessions a week. It’s a lot! Family life, in particular my relationship with Grace… for example at bedtime when I read Grace a story and cuddle up with her, it fuckin hurts so much because I never had that, my mum never read me bedtime stories and she never cuddled up with me… so I have these emotional flashbacks and reminders of pain from my childhood all the time and I would have taken it all to Anna and she’d have helped me process it so I could then go back to family life with a better understanding of things and the ability to repair with Grace. The past few months all of that has been piling up, un-worked-on, since the end of February I haven’t had that support… and so now it feels like I’m looking at this life that was once great, like I really felt like things were going great, and its all fucking crumbled before my eyes and then as if that isn’t bad enough I fucking lost her! The most important attachment figure in my life and the only person I trusted with all of this. She’s gone and I cant get her back and the grief of losing her… god. My life is chaos and I’m barely keeping my head above water and I am meant to then try to process the grief and then you know, I’m told that I’m sensitive… you know? Of course I’m fucking sensitive…’ Linda interrupted me and finished my sentence, ‘…your life has fallen apart and you’re deep in this very painful grief… this is trauma. It’s fucking traumatic!’ and I said, ‘yeah and I have to try to build a relationship with you in the middle of it all just so I can try to get some of this back on track, somehow.’ She said, ‘and yet here you are showing up!’ I said, ‘yeah what choice do I have really? This is about survival.’

I said, ‘I had convinced myself that this session wasn’t going to happen. I was quite relieved to receive your email with the link. It’s hard for me to determine the inner critic sometimes you know it’s not like she comes through with this like witchy voice in my head luring me into the dark side of hating myself… it sounds very logical, like a rational thought process – Linda doesn’t understand me, she thinks I’m some sort of overly emotional, hyper sensitive, easily triggered irrational person and nothing I do or say will help her change her mind. But I can see and hear now that you have come to this session open and willing to hear me out and I do want to continue this you know, I was kinda frightened by all of this, I was looking at other therapists online thinking it was going to be too triggering to work with you because you didn’t get it. But I do want to continue to work with you…’ Linda said, ‘you do want to continue, good, I want to work with you too.’

I said, ‘You know, maybe 6 months down the line I could talk reflectively about my sensitivity around the words people use but one week after losing Anna and you know, I’m feeling all this grief and you’re telling me I’m sensitive and that I’m easily triggered. It was too soon. I think I just need someone to sit with me in this, understanding and caring. It feels very delicate and painful.’

She said, ‘I hear you. It felt too soon. This is on me you know Lucy, this isn’t yours it’s mine… generally as a rule I work with quite fast paced clients (she specialises in working with armed forces short term treatment) so we maybe do 6 to 8 sessions and I am a fast person by nature and so I’m used to moving quickly… I need to be mindful of that, I am going too fast for you.’ I said, ‘oh that just makes me feel like shit though because I want to be able to process things quickly. I want to be one of those people who is just like in and out after 6 sessions you know, I feel like I’m broken and I really feel so ashamed that it’s taking me this long.’ Linda said, ‘Hmmm no but there’s no shame in that. It takes as long as it takes and their situation is different – they are working on different things, you are dealing with trauma and that will understandably take time. What I said to you on Wednesday felt brutal and it was too soon.’ I sort of laughed and said, ‘yeah well anyway so…’ and I started to talk about something else and then Linda said, ‘no hold on let’s stay with that because it feels like you’re trying to brush that to one side but it’s important that you hear what I said. So I replied, ‘hmmm okay well, it sounds like you’re saying that I felt like it was brutal because I’m sensitive but anyone else would have been able to take it… and this is a lose lose situation for me because by pointing this out I am showing how sensitive I am, which is the twisted nature of gaslighting… whichever way you look at it, it’s my fault that it hurt.’ Linda spoke a little firmer and said, ‘I want you to hear me,’ she put her hand on her heart and said, ‘I am taking responsibility for this. What I said on Wednesday was fucking brutal and I’m so sorry that it hurt you and made you feel unheard and misunderstood. I want to work hard at getting to know you and understanding you. It takes time to get to know someone and I want to do that with you…’ I said, ‘I feel that. I can feel that. Thank you. It was brutal and it was too fast.’

I said, ‘I’ve always wanted things to go faster. Why would anyone want to stay in this much pain for any longer than they need to you know? To be honest a similar thing happened when Anna and I worked together in the early days. Things moved too quickly and it was pretty retraumatising for me actually until we settled into a better rhythm… this isn’t as extreme as that, there has been some progress over the years! And actually, in the last phone call I had with her she said to me to remember to be patient, that the temptation is there to rush through this work because it’s hard and painful but pace is really important for me and I need to remember to go slow, baby steps… she specifically told me to be patient and go slow.’ Linda smiled a sort of sad smile and said, ‘this is really important, Anna knew you and that’s really important advice. I’m hearing you that we need to go slow. I will work on that.’ I thanked her.

I said, ‘I’ve said this before but this is such a good example of this… so there are really different parts of me. So there’s this really capable, coping adult part that is seemingly confident and is articulate and reasonable and can be rational and logical but there are these other parts that can’t cope with that, they feel much younger and they don’t have the words to describe what they’re feeling and they carry the really hard emotions and you know… they ARE younger because they’ve been trapped in a space and time and all of the pain has been frozen at whatever age I was and then when it’s triggered it does feel young and the pain is overwhelming and that’s when it needs to be sort of drip fed to me and really carefully controlled so I don’t go too far and actually, you know the times when I’ve been crying and maybe you’d say it was an example of me being sensitive but if Anna was here she would be saying, ‘noooo don’t tell her she’s being sensitive, she’s doing so well, this is amazing, she’s feeling, she’s crying, she’s sitting with it, this is such great progress!’ honestly she would be so proud of me for expressing my feelings, so fucking proud of me for crying as much as I’ve cried and not doing it only by myself and the fact that I’ve been advocating for myself… she’d love all that! So yeah, its these child parts that are holding the emotions that need very slow, patient, nurturing kid gloves you know?’

I then explained further why the interpersonal stuff is really painful. I gave a couple of examples of what my mum was like and how flippant she was with what she would say to me. I said a number of times in the session that words are really important to me because words are all I had and Linda said, ‘I’m hearing that loud and clear. Words are really important to you.’ I said, ‘and this is something Anna learned as well as the timing thing, I guess learning the hard way but hitting a sore point and having to repair it you know… so there was a time when she said something about the fact that I, ‘still haven’t cried’ with her and it really jarred me and I wrote to her about it and we worked through it and she said she knew instantly that it was a clumsy and hurtful thing to say and wasn’t how she’d intended it and she regretted the phrasing… that kind of apology and repair is so meaningful to me it really means so much.’ I continued, ‘I need you to remember that this is really hard for me, to hold on so tightly to the words people say… I overanalyse everything and to be given the space to explore why something has impacted me is so healing.’ She said a few things about how she understood why it was important and that she will remember how important words are to me.

I spent some time talking about the situation with my brother (I wrote about this in my instagram stories this week – basically I told him how I’ve been feeling recently and he overreacted with a bunch of helplines and interventions then gave me the silent treatment when I told him how unhelpful and codependent he was being, that I just wanted love and understanding, not to be fixed… that it was his desire to alleviate his own worry and concern that had fueled his jump to action and not a desire to give me what I needed which was connection and compassion). I talked about how the misattunement strangely mirrored the situation with Linda and that his lack of attuned support this week has hurt so much because I feel so misunderstood. And that’s a sore point because it reminds me of what I’m grieving. That I’ve lost Anna who knew me so well. I said, ‘and when I talk about Anna and the things I’m missing, I’m not comparing the two of you, I’m purely grieving the loss of this person in my life who knew me better than anyone. I could say just a few words to her about something and she would immediately know how that thing would have impacted me because we’d worked together for so long. I miss that. It’s not that I don’t value what I have here with you but I miss that relationship that I’d invested so much time and effort into. And it’s hard to have to overly explain everything to try to help you understand what I’m trying to say or how I’m feeling, it requires energy that I just don’t have… I just want to be understood and empathised with you know? And I guess that’s what hurt with Daniel too. I wanted him to just know what I needed.’ Linda reflected on the situation as I explained it all to her about him overreacting to what I’d shared with him and that he really can only ever see me as a mother figure and therefore just needed me to be okay.

I said, ‘I really do value your willingness to thrash all of this out you know… and I do like people being honest and open with me and I try to be like that too. I know the email is kind of a side step round and not all that direct a way to communicate but it was a way for me to feel heard. It’s like I imagine people will have very rigid thoughts and beliefs and nothing I do or say will make them change their mind so I need to give myself time to explain myself perfectly before I give them the space to read through my thoughts. I get that it’s important to bring these things directly to you but this is our first rupture I suppose (she smiled at that bit) and I had no idea how you were going to respond, I just felt that it was really important and I couldn’t let it go.’ She said she was glad that I’d brought it to her. I said, ‘so is the boundary could you please not send emails between sessions?’ she said, ‘um, no, it doesn’t have to be as strict as that, you can send emails but maybe not ones like that because it’s far more safe when it is brought to the session, this is the only safe way to deal with it – in session, in real time, within this containment, you know?’ I nodded and said I understood and that was talked about at length with Anna and I do agree. I didn’t feel told off at all, it felt like a really calm and mutually clear conversation.

I said, ‘so, 90 seconds to go… over the next few sessions I want to cover a few things. It’s important I talk about my self harm urges and the things that have happened recently and also I want to talk about all the things I’m missing from working with Anna. I want to be able to talk about these things without you thinking I want it from you, I just need space to grieve losing these things you know like phone check ins and texting between sessions I really miss these things and want to talk about it.’ She said, ‘okay you have a list of things to cover,’ I laughed and said there was plenty to keep us busy. We confirmed the time for Wednesday and we both thanked each other for being open and honest. She really made a point to thank me… then there’s that awkward three seconds where you’ve said goodbye and you’re both still visible trying to find the ‘leave meeting’ button. Hate it!

Anyway, so one thing I’ve noticed is that there is this need to make use of every last minute of a 50 minute session. And I thought it wasn’t possible but it really is! I needed longer with Anna and there will probably be times when we delve into some of the trauma work that I will need longer and hopefully she will let me have double sessions if necessary. But there was a point in the early days with Anna where I wouldn’t open up until I was about 40 minutes into the session then we’d have ten minutes or even 5 minutes of very deep and painful work and then fifteen minutes of grounding. I can feel the difference, I don’t feel ashamed of the need to launch straight into the work as soon as we’ve said hi and to make full use of the entire session. I also have the gift of hindsight. Now with two long term, deep attachment therapy relationships under my belt, I know how important it is to be transparent, honest and open from the very start… to speak my mind and tell the therapist exactly how I feel about the way she is being with me and state exactly what I need about the service she’s providing while I’m not knee deep in the transference and deep attachment which makes it ever so slightly more complicated and difficult to be my vulnerable self! (Also… my god how proud Anna would be to hear that I am fighting to have my needs met. Jeez that was a hell of a lot of work right there. Hours and hours of ‘what do you need?’ – ‘I don’t have any needs’ – ‘I don’t know what my needs are’ – ‘you can’t help me’ – ‘I don’t deserve to have needs’ – ‘you should know what I need’… shit!)

What’s happening here with Linda feels like very important work and something a friend was talking through with me earlier really resonates. It’s the idea that having to stop working with your therapist prematurely and moving on to a new therapist can feel like you’re going back to the beginning again but you’re not, its about starting from where you are now with fresh eyes. And I actually said this to Linda, that of course I wish all of this had never happened, but having lost Anna and having to go into detail explaining myself, feeling this grief, revisiting things, working through getting to know myself through a new person, it has propelled me onto a new road of learning and growth that I wouldn’t have experienced had I still been working with Anna. And its not that I was stuck with her, I do believe we were doing amazing work and would have continued with that. But this situation has broken open a box of potential growth that wouldn’t have been triggered within my work with Anna. So for that, I’m grateful.

What have I got to lose?

Hi Linda,

I really need to say some things about the last session and if you decide you’d rather wait until the session before reading it then I’ll read it to you at the start of the session but it feels very important to me that you understand how I feel about a few things you said. I understand that you are straight talking and I really value your authenticity but along with that direct nature this relationship still needs to be therapeutic for me. My experience of you on the whole is that you have been very supportive and compassionate in previous sessions so I believe you’ll appreciate me being honest about this and you’ll be willing to discuss it with me.

I want to preface this by saying that all of what I’m about to explain boils down to my attachment trauma, childhood abuse and neglect. And I think that when I’ve been asking you if you are prepared to work with me long term and that this could get intense etc, what I should have been saying specifically is, ‘I was doing deep attachment work with Anna around early developmental trauma that was often intensely emotional and pre-verbal and that work was ended prematurely and I want to continue it somehow… is it within your remit (albeit through a different modality) to work on that with me? It is very slow and delicate work and takes time and patience and a lot of compassion. If not then please can you help me deal with the grief of losing Anna and support me until I find a therapist who can focus on the more in depth long term recovery from childhood trauma.’ I know that on one of your websites you do list trauma as something that you can help with but I understand that complex trauma is a specific issue and I think we just need to be upfront about whether it will work out with us long term or not.

In the last session, I feel like you were taking quite a harsh stance with me as if you had lost your patience with my grief and wanted me to draw a line and move on. I am grieving the loss of Anna, my therapy mum and the person I was most deeply attached to who knew all the sides to me that no one else knows. On Wednesday, when I recalled a session to you that was really meaningful because I wanted to share one of the things I’m grieving losing you responded by telling me, ‘that’s finished now, it’s over, your work with Anna has finished and you’re working with me now and I work differently to Anna.’ If I had come to you because I’d lost my sister who was my best friend and confidante and I was recalling how much I loved talking to her and that no one knew me like she did, would you have said to me, ‘that’s finished now, she’s gone, you can’t have that anymore’? I really need to explore the grief that I’m feeling, I need to go into all the details of everything I miss without you reminding me of the obvious fact that she is gone. I’m not going to be able to heal from this loss by being forced into accepting it. I need to be allowed to reminisce and grieve all the things I’m missing and be given the space to explore that in detail. I know I’m working with you now but I need to talk about everything that I miss about working with Anna.

When I say that something has hurt my feelings or that it’s made me feel defensive, I’ve noticed that you respond by pointing out that I am easily and frequently triggered and that I’m sensitive. Rather than making an observation that in your opinion I am sensitive, it would be more helpful to explore what it is that’s hurt my feelings and how I have interpreted it in my mind. Maybe exploring the life experiences that have lead me to believe that people will inevitably be criticising me and look at the role my inner critic plays. Telling me I’m sensitive feels like gaslighting, that I am overreacting and that my feelings aren’t justified. I grew up with a really insensitive mother who would mock and humiliate and criticise me then call me overly sensitive for being hurt by what she’d said. So being called sensitive is a personal trigger for me. Pointing out that I am constantly bombarded by triggers also feels like gaslighting. I think you’re trying to show me that you see that it must be hard for me to experience life like that but what it feels like is that you’re saying there’s something wrong with me and the way I interpret people. Of course life would feel easier if I didn’t take everything so personally but it’s not just going to magically disappear. Again, it would be helpful to look at how my system is reacting to these perceived triggers and find a way to tend to the parts of me that are still responding as if they’re in threat. Pointing out to me that I find it hard to tolerate hard emotions also feels like you are telling me that I am the problem. Finding it difficult to tolerate emotions is what attachment trauma is all about… no one was there to coregulate with me so I would daydream and dissociate or self harm. I don’t have a baseline pre trauma that I can go back to… there was no caring, supportive other to help me. I literally learned how to feel the feelings the past couple of years with Anna in a very drip fed, carefully controlled way… Anna would call it baby steps. And what’s happened now is this grief has burst the dam and made me feel all of the abandonment pain all at once, more emotional pain than I’ve ever felt before and so no, I don’t know how to tolerate or process it by myself.

I also don’t understand where the therapeutic value is in telling someone a week after they’ve lost someone significant to them that loss and bereavement is selfish. I know that’s an accurate statement but how does it help me in that moment? When I am still cycling through shock and I’m crying because my session is the only window of time in my life where I get privacy and space to be fully seen and to express the feelings (because every other minute of my life is taken up by tending to my kids needs) I don’t need to be told that I’m selfish, I need to be told that you understand and that the way I’m feeling makes perfect sense.

You have met me in this bizarre moment in time which looks nothing like my normal life. You have met me in crisis, in lockdown, during a worldwide pandemic in the midst of losing my therapist. You’ve experienced me as someone who cries a lot and gets overwhelmed very quickly and wants to opt out of life. Anna worked with me for two and a half years and never experienced me like this. Had you met me three months ago you would have met someone who was enjoying life, seeing friends a couple of times a week, going to the gym three or four times a week, teaching, working hard at being a good parent, maintaining a weight loss and fitness journey and on top of this was exploring self development and healing from childhood trauma with her therapist. I was able to analyse myself and was not overly sensitive because I had built resilience with Anna. Within a couple of months my whole life as I knew it has fallen apart. It’s like you’ve walked into a warzone, the bombs fell the week before and devastated the local area. A woman is standing among the wreck of her home picking amongst what’s left. She has lost her closest loved one and as you talk to her a bit she cries and finds it hard to take any observations on board or constructive criticisms and so you call her sensitive and note that loss is selfish. I feel like I’m living in the most difficult time of my life right now and on top of that I’ve lost the one person that would help me deal with and process it all. I think it makes sense that I would be feeling emotionally raw and needing a sensitive and compassionate supporter.

This email might be more evidence for you that I’m sensitive and have a filter that alters what people say because you didn’t mean any of it the way that I have interpreted it… but surely that is where the work is? Also, it’s not about you feeling understood, it’s about me feeling understood. This email might be an example of how things can get intense with me and something that you’re up for working with. Or it might make you decide you are not prepared to change how you work for me. I have looked up person centred therapy and it might be that it’s just not the right modality for me. It is really important that we lay that all out on the table and figure it out now before I get deeper into the attachment. I do hope that even if you feel you can’t work with the deeper attachment stuff, that you will still help me deal with the loss of Anna and not terminate our work immediately. I’ve found you really helpful the past couple of months and what I have written here is specific to the deeper work and it’s very important to me. I’m also aware that this may prompt an important conversation about the boundaries of between session contact. And I guess that’s also an important thing to iron out if we are to continue working together. It is another things I am grieving the loss of… I don’t expect you to work the way Anna worked but I do need to grieve the things I’m missing.

I hope all of this makes sense.

Speak to you tomorrow.

Lucy

‘The ocean is wild and over your head and the boat beneath you is sinking.’

Last night I stayed up until 3am. I was curled on the sofa crying feeling the weight of this grief heavy on my chest. You know when you stand barefoot on the sand near the lapping waves of the shore and when you step away, your footprint fills rapidly with water? That’s what this loss feels like. She’s evacuated herself from me and the pain has flooded into the space she’s left behind. Sometimes it feels like it’s drowning me. I ache to feel her presence. I’m left with reminders everywhere. Every time I walk into my bedroom I see Luna and remember when Anna held her in session, she stroked her fur, talked to her and made her talk back. Anna’s perfume is on my make up stand. Sometimes I spray it on my belly so that I can smell her when I move but oh my god the pain is excruciating. Her blue heart is sitting on my side table. This tiny glass symbol of a connection more powerful than anything I’ve ever felt before. Two folders on my desktop, one entitled ‘Anna Sessions’ that holds nearly 200 documents and one named, ‘Linda Sessions’ that contains just over ten. Going from session number 126 to session number 1. It breaks my heart. When Anna phoned me last Tuesday I took a screen shot of her calling me before I answered, I knew it would be the last time I’d see her name flash on my screen. When I go into my messages, there is a thread of hundreds of texts between us. And a space at the bottom waiting for me to break the boundary and text her. Just a few buttons away from bursting into her life again. But I won’t. A final expression of my love to her, I will respect her wishes and never contact her again. I’ve noticed her photo and bio has been taken down from some of the sites she was on. Like it never happened. Like she was never there.

Last night I was reminded of the session where for the first time I pulled Luna out of my bag and onto my lap for comfort. I sat cross legged on the chair holding Luna with my head resting on her head, face covered. Anna came and sat beside me and held my arm, stroking her thumb back and forth and we just sat there in silence with me feeling feelings and her sitting with me in it. There were no words and there are no words really to describe how powerfully therapeutic that moment was. At one point I whispered that I hated how I was feeling and she said she knew. I miss that. And I’m scared I will never have that again. What if Linda doesn’t know how to do that type of therapy?

I have this recurring image in my mind when I think about what I went through with Anna the past couple of months. I can picture the Titanic slowly sinking and some of it’s passengers still don’t know the chaos and catastrophe that’s happening below deck. The third class floor is flooding and a mother, desperate to save her baby, begs a kind looking stranger in a lifeboat to save her child. Already knee deep in sea water, she wraps the infant in her only shawl and leans over the side of the sinking ship’s railings, passing her baby to the stranger she watches as the lifeboat is rowed away from the wreck before she is sucked under. There is a, ‘go on without me’ feeling to all this. ‘I can’t go any further with you but please don’t stop here with me, keep going.’ Anna could easily have told me she wasn’t going to be able to work for the foreseeable future but that we could take a break until she is well again. I would have waited for her but it would have been a different type of torture. My life on hold. My healing on pause. An anxious, preoccupied worrying of what might be happening. An uneasy anticipation. A dance like the one we’ve been in since the beginning of March. Anna told me she was jealous of Linda for getting to work with me and she could have easily held on to the possession of me, knowing how high I hold her and that I was hanging on her every word. But she has never let her ego control my therapy, she did what was best for me in letting me go. She told me a few weeks ago, ‘I’m sorry that my ill health has disrupted your therapy so much,’ and in her final email to me she said, ‘it is really important that you carry on with your own therapy journey, as there is no guarantee if or when I would return.’ She never let it be about her needs.

It reminds me of what I have read in gentle parenting books. That it is the most loving way to guide a child – to never force your own need to be needed onto them… to encourage autonomy and self sufficiency. That doesn’t mean forcing your child to be independent before they are ready because that is abandonment. What it means is not forcing your help and support onto a child when they are capable of doing it themselves. Anna understood that my therapy was never about her, she never encouraged dependence but for as long as she could be there for me, she met my needs and she shone a light on my own ability to do the same for myself.

It was always so much more than just the hour I spent with her. Building a relationship with Anna enriched my life. She gave me complete freedom to explore myself and reflected such a kind and hopeful version of what she saw in me back to me. I don’t now if Linda can do this work with me long term. It has been a blessing to have her here to carry me as I float from the wreckage but I don’t know if I can stay in her boat. Perhaps she will navigate me to a place where I feel I can stand in the waters and wade to a new shore. I can see now that the most significant relationship we have is with ourselves. I love Anna wholeheartedly and there are still moments where I feel like I can’t go on without her, but the end goal for all of this work is my healing. I didn’t walk into her office in September 2017 so that I could find a 52 year old woman to fall in love with, I walked in there because I needed help with my recovery. And she did help me. She helped me more than I can ever express, evidence of it is all around me. Last night I was googling ways to kill myself easily and was desperately searching helplines to call. This morning I helped my children release butterflies that we have watched grow from tiny caterpillars over the past month. If that isn’t a beautiful analogy of painful transformation I don’t know what is. There are days where the motionless chrysalis hangs there looking completely lifeless. Then, through patience and perseverance, this crumpled and tired looking butterfly emerges. It clings, wings flickering and shaking for quite a while, adjusting. And the first few times it flies, it smacks around it’s net home and lands on the ground on it’s back. No transformation is without pain, nothing worth fighting for is easy or without risk of ‘failure’. I do feel as if this ending could be a catalyst for further growth, taking me down a road I may not have traveled had she stayed by my side for the next few years. I am being forced to adapt. This is testing my resources and it’s shining a blinding light on my resilience. An ability to cope with something that I thought would break me. And strength does not stand on the top of a mountain arms stretched high bellowing like a warrior. Strength crawls through the white heat of the fire, eyes stinging and throat burning, not knowing how much further she can go. Strength keeps swimming when drowning feels like an easier option. Strength feels like longing to end your life and yet taking another breath.

I find the analogy of silver linings difficult in times like this. It is too soon to look for reasons why this might have happened and any bright sides just sound like toxic positivity and invalidation. I don’t want to be told that this will all work out in the end. But I do know that I am resilient enough to make the best out of this situation. Because I have done that my whole damn life. We evolve and change. I don’t have the same needs as I did 3 years ago. I needed Anna to love me like a mother loves her children, I’m not sure what my needs are now because they are drenched in the immediate need to tend to the grief. But Anna reminded me to be patient, that this journey takes time and that it isn’t always apparent where we are going but we just need to have faith, take the first baby step. I refuse to believe ‘everything happens for a reason’ but I will trust the process.

A huge part of my healing has been in learning to love wholeheartedly and speak the truth in full knowledge that I may suffer great loss. That the risk it took to connect to Anna despite knowing there was a chance it could hurt, was worth it a million times over. That the pain and fear of speaking up brought relief of equal proportions. It is agony to have had this love and have it leave, but she has left me with so much more than I had before I met her.

It is terrifying to let someone see you but it is torture to never be seen.

Some time spent looking back and some looking forward.

I had another session with Linda. It was our tenth session, but to be honest it feels like we are so much further in. I think it’s because my defences have been down from the start or maybe I always felt that Linda could be trusted because Anna trusted her… maybe it’s because I came to her in crisis and could only deal with what was right in front of me and saw her as my key for survival. Whatever the reason, I dived straight into the deep end with Linda from day one and skipped the months of delay tactics and dancing around the pain that had happened with Anna in the early days. It has fast tracked me to this really raw and authentic connection that I am actually surprised I feel especially considering we’ve only met on zoom so far. But I am not going to invalidate myself on this one, I know I can feel it, it’s real and she said she feels it too.

I did a lot of what Linda called ‘reviewing’ today. I asked if that was ‘a thing’ in grief work and she said, ‘it’s what you’re doing, so it’s a thing for you… I’m sure it is part of the grief work but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s what you need to do right now.’ I was retracing my steps. Making sense. I have felt so much more grounded today, the difference is amazing from how I felt the past few days. I told Linda I was worried that I’d dissociated all the pain away and that at least on Wednesday I was feeling. She assured me that these feelings are not polarized. She said, ‘you were in crisis on Wednesday and that is my word, you don’t have to use it if it doesn’t fit for you but it’s just my understanding of your experience, and it makes sense, but it’s not good for us, not natural to stay in that state long term. Your nervous system has settled and you are adjusting, you’re being afforded a break from the intensity of the shock. That doesn’t mean you’re numb it just means you’re somewhere in the middle.’ That felt so reassuring.

I went over things again. That somewhere inside me I knew what was coming. I knew back in March. Before the lockdown Anna stopped seeing clients in her office and I just felt in my gut that I would never sit with her again. The two phone sessions we had unsettled me. I know I already wrote about that but I can now see that my gut feeling was valid. In hindsight I imagine she was probably grappling with the idea that she may find it very difficult to cope with the logistics of the virus for a long time let alone deal with her own anxiety about being in such a high risk group. To be honest her experience of this whole thing must be terrifying for her and her family. She didn’t let me into her experience of this in an overt way but Anna and I have worked so closely with each other for the past couple of years that I know her and I am (by the nature of my relational hypervigilance) tuned in to the wellbeing of important attachment figures in my life. I just knew something was there. I felt that she was preparing me for an ending. Even if she wasn’t consciously aware of it. I had a number of clues that led me to believe I was her only long term client and perhaps the only one that was still working with her through the lockdown (she counselled part time around her non-therapy related day job and only ever had a handful of clients). In those two phone sessions we did a lot of reflecting on my progress. She did a lot of reminding me of my strengths. She told me again about her colleague who would be the one who would contact me should anything happen to her… reminded me that her name was Linda.

Then I had the 6 sessions with Linda because Anna was ill. As Linda articulated, I came to her ‘preparing for loss’ and worked through a process of preparatory grief through those sessions. Very open and honest in my fear and pain. Still both Anna and Linda maintained this was just temporary until Anna was well enough to pick things up again. I believe that was true for them both. Neither of them intended this to happen. However, Anna knew what I didn’t – her asthma had deteriorated and she no longer felt that she could control or predict it. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to imagine her being able to hold space for clients. Perhaps she had thought she could hold out for me (knowing how much I needed her due to the attachment work we were dealing with) but in the end maybe it wasn’t viable anymore. I had 3 sessions with Anna and these had a reconnecting and ‘ending’ feel to them. She was the most real and raw I have ever experienced her. Making it unmistakably clear to me that she cares deeply about me, that her being ill was not and has never been my fault, reinforcing all of my strengths and building me up… letting me know that I was the one all along who did all the work and got me to where I am. I have an image of a mother on her knees in front of her little 4 year old kid on the morning of her first day at school – straightening her tie, jacket zipped up, backpack on, socks pulled up, ‘you can do this, little one, you’ve got this! I believe in you… look how much you’ve grown! You’re my big grown up girl… I know it’s scary but I’ll watch you all the way to the gate… go get ‘em.’ And then she sent me off to Linda.

I asked Linda how she would feel about working with me on a more long term basis. I laughed and said it felt like I was asking her to marry me, I felt nervous… I put on a silly serious voice and joked, ‘can you, Linda, commit to me, Lucy, for long term therapy for as long as I need it?’ She laughed and asked if I remembered asking her that in our last session. I told her I didn’t remember (and was actually kind of bemused by this), she said, ‘that makes sense, that’s the crisis mode, you’re not actually meant to remember things in that state, it’s a defence mechanism… that’s okay… well I told you on Wednesday and I still feel it, I am happy to work with you, as far as I’m concerned we are working together now.’ I said, ‘but it was always just going to be short term… I mean… the longer I work with you the more chance there is that I’ll get very attached to you… you know I lost my therapy mum… I’m an orphan now… there’s a part of me that’s desperate to be adopted!’ Linda smiled and said, ‘I’m happy to do that work with you.’ I said, ‘it can get pretty intense with me you know…’ she said, ‘hmmm, interesting, I’m okay with intense Lucy, I can do intense… I can do this!’ with a big strong smile. I smiled back and took a massive deep breath. A little later I asked again if she was up for the challenge of working with me on the deeper stuff (when she asked if I wanted to continue doing twice a week) and she said, ‘Lucy, you’re not too much for me either. I’m okay with this.’ That made me smile.

I told Louse that Anna had replied to my email and I read the reply to her. I talked to her about how I’d declared my love to Anna in my email and Linda said, ‘yeah, love in the therapy room is very real. When it’s there you really feel it, its intense and powerful and real for both of you in the room. I’ve felt it before. I can only imagine what it feels like for you.’ I nodded and told her, ‘it’s the most I’ve ever loved anyone.’ Linda said, ‘wow.’ In a really genuine and active listening kind of way. I said, ‘it’s through loving her that I have grown so much. And I also said in my email to her that I feel like therapy is the act of love. Everything the therapist does feels like love.’ Linda was nodding and smiling enthusiastically. I continued, ‘I never trusted women before. I chose a male therapist to start with for a reason, that was 7 years ago and I grew enough in that work to feel safe enough in myself to try working with a woman but it was very scary… my mum hurt me deeply and Anna was the first woman I ever trusted. I never let myself get close to women before, which is sad really, I missed out on this community of amazing women.’ Linda said, ‘Anna opened that door for you.’

We covered quite a lot in this session. I told her I’d looked her up online and saw the photo of her cats on facebook and she laughed and showed me one of her cats that was sitting beside her. She said, ‘you’ll have checked out my crazy taste in music then!’ and I said, ‘you know, I feel like I might compare you and Anna quite a lot over the next wee while and I hope that’s okay but this right here… I like this… you seem really laid back, like when I told you about the blog you were just chilled about it. There was something uptight about Anna, and I don’t want to criticise her, I really hope it goes without saying that I think she was an incredible therapist and she helped me so much, but I did sense her anxieties sometimes and she was kind of wary about stuff like my blogging and the whole facebook thing.’ Linda was nodding and listening and making agreeing sounds. I said, ‘I know there’s only 5 years between you but you definitely seem more in touch with like relevant stuff and she was maybe a bit disconnected from it, Anna was worried because she knows how private I am as a person and she didn’t want me to put myself at risk of having my privacy violated by putting stuff out there but I feel like you get it and you trust that I know what I’m doing.’

Later I talked about how I could sense a difference in their experience as well. I noted that Linda has over 20 years experience working full time as a therapist and Anna had 8 years experience working one and two days a week around her day job. Again I reiterated that Anna was a really great therapist but there were some things where I felt like I was witnessing her learning on the job, witnessing her newness… like all the note taking and then adapting how she worked because of feedback I’d given her. I told Linda that I could tell she was really sure of herself and her ability to do the job, that it felt nice and safe. I said that maybe I was projecting and it’s only been a few days since the shock of her finishing our work so I am taking everything that’s coming up for me as part of the grieving process, part of the transition process… but it’s all also worth noticing.

I said, ‘you know how we can have different attachment styles with different people…’ she said, ‘uhhu,’ and nodded and smiled. I said, ‘well with Paul, I just fell so hard for him. He was like thirty years older than me and had young kids and I wanted him to be my dad so much, I loved him so much. I knew about his kids and who they were and it hurt like hell… you know, it felt so real, this desire for me to be his daughter. Pure agony, but because he said he didn’t work with transference and I was pushing him further than his capabilities I had to swallow all that and not talk about it. I related to stuff I read about preoccupied attachment with him. Then with Anna, I wanted her to be my mum and she really got it and was ready to work with it. But with her my disorganized attachment was massively triggered you know.. this push pull stuff.. I wanted her to know me and see me but it was terrifying and I tried to hide from her and push her away. That meant our work has been very slow. It had to be. She never told me about her family but in my head I imagined she is married with older kids… and it ached so much, the longing for her to mother me. And we worked a lot on that pain. And with you, because I know your life situation is so different from them, coz I know you’re not married with kids it doesn’t trigger me in the same way… but maybe it’ll all happen over time…’ Linda was nodding and said, ‘yeah, it’s just me, my partner and my fur babies… but yeah I get what you’re saying, it might be also that you have different needs now.’ I said, ‘yes I also have that feeling… I am very different to the girl who walked into Anna’s office in 2017. Maybe it doesn’t need to be a mother daughter type attachment I form… the word mentor comes to mind. I don’t know, I’ll find out in time but right now it feels different.’ Linda said it was really interesting the observations I was making and that it was important to keep talking about it. I said, ‘there are lots of different parts of me and I’m sure you’ll meet them all over time, the more we work together. Yeah, so I guess I wont always come across as this confident and secure…’ Linda said that made sense and she understood and was glad I could share that with her. Linda said, ‘I just want to say here, that I’m hearing how resilient you are in all this. You started therapy 7 years ago with a CBT psychotherapist and then you endured that relationship ending before you were ready. You then had the bravery 3 years ago to try again and you challenged yourself to work with a woman because you knew that the healing opportunity lay there and she was a Transactional Analysis and then that ended abruptly before you were ready for it to finish and now you are here, further along down the road of your therapy journey, with a Person Centred therapist… I guess I just want to have that said, that I see that you are so adaptable. Three modalities, three very different therapists all with different styles. I’ll just leave that there.’ I thanked her for saying that and then I thanked her from my heart for stepping in and working with me like this. I told her how hard it would have been to try to cope with the loss of Anna by myself.

I asked her, ‘do we not need to do some sort of intake session? Like, you only know my name!’ Linda explained that she knows Anna takes a lot of notes and does an intake form but she doesn’t work like that. She said, ‘its all completely verbal for me, I don’t write it down… I have a very good memory and all I need is your name.’ I said, ‘but what if a client dies then they just wouldn’t come to a session and you’d never know what happened?’ she said, ‘well that’s a really good point. That did actually happen very recently.’ I said, ‘to you?’ and she said, ‘yes, it happened recently to me and it was difficult because, you know you can’t tell people who you are…’ I said, ‘wow that must be really hard… well Adam knows I’m in therapy and if anything happened he would tell you.’ She said she appreciated that. She then told me she works in the centre on Saturdays and was curious how I felt about being there without Anna. We talked a bit about how I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it. She then told me she works from her home on Wednesdays and I joked that if anything was going to trigger transference attachment shit, going to her house sure would. I asked her if it felt weird to have clients in her house and did she always feel safe and she said the therapy room is separate from the rest of the flat and she does feel safe.

The session ended fairly abruptly bang on 50 minutes. This all feels very new and different and like I am stepping out and testing for solid ground. But I feel secure as I do it. There are now fleeting moments where I am filled up with the grief but on the whole I feel okay. And right now I think I’m going to leave the overthinking and the self doubting to one side and just focus on the fact that four days after my therapist stopped working with me I am still standing, still breathing, still functioning. Still alive.

The day after we said goodbye…
…sharing my grief with Linda.

I already had a session with Linda for the Wednesday. Anna knew this which is why I think she chose Tuesday to let me know the news. She knew I would have some support.

I stayed up almost the whole of Tuesday night writing the email to Anna and sent it at 11.30am. I was sure my session with Linda was 2pm but noticed an email with a zoom link a few minutes to 12 and suddenly realised I had messed the timings up. I was a total mess. I hadn’t showered. I’d fallen asleep at 4am and woken a few hours later and immediately started crying again. I phoned the doctor and sobbed down the phone at her that my therapist had died and I needed something to help me function. She got the prescription to me later that afternoon.

These are my notes that I quickly typed on my phone after my session before falling asleep.

20.05.20

This grief is the worst emotional pain I have ever felt. I got the time wrong for the session. To be honest I didn’t even know what day it was this morning. I quickly clicked on to the session and had to text Adam to ask him to bring me water and the headphones for my laptop and tissues. I told Linda I’d got confused with the time and sorry I was late (by five minutes) and she said that was completely understandable considering what was going on for me. Fucking hell it’s such a relief to not have to explain everything to her. She’d spoken to Anna. She knew and she was ready to hold space for me.

She has a really kind voice. She said, ‘how you doing Lucy?’ in such a grounded tone. I said I was completely shit and started to cry. I didn’t even hide my face I openly cried. Tears soaking my face. She made some compassionate noises. I said, ‘I miss her so much I don’t think I can survive this.’ Linda said, ‘I know. It’s massive. Lucy, I really am so sorry this has happened. It really is so hard and just so shit.’

I told her Anna had text me in the morning and I knew in my heart that she was going to tell me goodbye. I cant believe its over just like that. Such an open and beautiful connection… now walled up. ‘it’s not fair… she has all the power. She can just walk away. This is agony for me.’ Linda gently said, ‘I don’t think it was easy for her to walk away Lucy.’

Linda sort of took a breath and seemed to want to say something important, she said, ‘I just want to say that I think it’s amazing you’re here talking to me right now. Lucy, it happened 24 hours ago and you’re here talking to me. I just think that’s amazing, that’s the progress right there I mean, wow!’ I said, ‘I don’t feel like I have a choice, you’re the only person in my life that I can talk to about this, no one else understands. Adam doesn’t get it. I can’t even, there are no words…’ (more crying). Linda said, ‘You’ve said that a few times and it’s really struck me that you feel you don’t have the sort of relationship with Adam that you can be vulnerable and emotional with him. I’m sorry you can’t reach out to him… I’m glad you’re talking to me.’

I told her, ‘I’m sad because there was so much I wanted to do and work on with Anna… it’s not fair.’ Linda said, ‘I know, it’s not fair.’ I said, ‘I had things that we were going to go back to you know, like things where I had started it and then we would say we’ll come back to it another time, drawings that I had wanted to show her but never did, memories that I’d started and couldn’t finish… fuck.’ I had a catalogue of topics we’d shelved flashing through my mind like the flickering scenes of an old black and white film. One after the other. Waves of grief followed.

I said, ‘I feel like she’s doing this so she can stop working with me… she is saying she’s closing then in a few months when I’ve attached to someone else she’ll start afresh and she’ll tell me it’s a conflict of interest and she can’t work with me any more.’ Linda had her head slightly bowed slowly shaking her head, ‘She has stopped working Lucy, she’s not working any more. It’s not you.’

I kept saying, ‘I don’t understand why.’

I whispered, ‘I hope she knew how important she was to me. How much I love her.’ Linda left some space then quietly said with certainty, ‘She knew how much she meant to you Lucy and you mean so much to her too.’

I said, ‘and now you’re stuck with me… you never chose to work with you and you said it was short term and…’ Linda said, ‘Yes you’ve mentioned that a few time’s… saying things like ‘when I work with another therapist’ and obviously in your email you said about feeling like I’m stuck with you. That’s not coming up for me at all Lucy. I don’t feel stuck with you at all. We’re working together and if you think about it and you want to continue working with me then I’m okay with that.’ I said, ‘It’s because I don’t want you to feel burdened by me. Stuck with me. Like you didn’t choose to work with me and you said last session this is short term and now I have nowhere else to go. It’s like my mum dying, only that would be less of a loss… she was my therapy mum and I don’t have her any more…’

There were lots of moments of me crying whenever it came up.

I said, ‘I knew this was going to happen. I’m really intuitive I know that sounds stupid but when Paul’s wife was pregnant, I knew before he told me, I had a dream about it, I don’t know, I’m not saying I’m psychic but I maybe pick up on things… and I knew, I knew in March that I would never sit with Anna again. I just felt it…’ I cried some more and she quietly repeated back to me, ‘you knew… and Lucy it doesn’t sound stupid, you can trust your intuition, you had a strong feeling this would happen.’

At one point I said, ‘I just feel like I’m cycling back and forth you know so some moments I just feel like I can’t cope with this, I just don’t know how to get through this and like my go to in my head is to think about dying, like I just can’t see any way out of this… then other moments I think, yeah I’m totally fine, maybe I don’t need therapy ever again I can just focus on my life and family and you know… everything’s great! Then it hits me in my chest and I can’t breathe for crying and I want to end it all…’ Linda said that was a perfectly understandable response to the shock and that it makes sense I feel like that.

I said, ‘She held the hope. Knowing I had Anna made me feel like there was always hope. I would think of her whenever I had something overwhelming happen or I was really struggling I would think – it’s okay, I can get through the next couple of days and I will take this to Anna… and now I don’t have that I feel like I’ve lost all the hope and I don’t know what to do anymore. Having her made me feel like I was worthy and good… like if I felt shit about myself I could say to myself, it’s okay coz Anna said I are okay or Anna said I’m a good person so I must be… you know, Anna said I’m a good mum or whatever… now I don’t have her I just feel like I’m a piece of crap. Just this shitty useless….not okay thing.’ Linda said, ‘and just listen to how you’re talking about yourself I mean god Lucy, it’s just so cruel, so unkind… I’m really so aware that actually, YOU were the one that held the hope. You held on for each session and you’re holding the hope right now. You’ve brought yourself to this session and you are bringing all of your feelings here, hoping that it will help… that takes real strength.’

I told her that the kids had noticed something was wrong so I told them that my friend Anna wasn’t well and I was never going to be able to see her again and I was sad about that. Gracie said she was sad for me and they both hugged me and then Reuben gave me his top and said it was his Reuben top to make me feel better because mummy tops always make him feel better. I started to cry and my whole body felt like it was crying. Linda said, ‘Aww that’s just so sweet, because he loves you, they love you, you’re their mummy.’ And I was sobbing and saying, ‘I don’t want it, I don’t want them, I don’t want any of that… I just want her, it makes me want to not be alive anymore. I can’t stand this I want to end it. I can’t sleep, I haven’t eaten since our phone call… nothing feels right in my body I don’t want to keep going.’

There was some quiet and Linda said, ‘Please don’t do that Lucy. Please don’t hurt yourself.’ It stole my breathe and I looked up and just started at her face and she was looking at me in this silent care. She said it again and I said I wouldn’t do anything permanent. I said, ‘I don’t think anyones ever said that to me before… Anna would ask me if I can look after myself between now and the next session.’ Linda said, ‘to be fair I have said that before too, I just felt compelled in that moment to ask you not to hurt yourself.’ I said, ‘it’s not the right time for this, 4 minutes to go… but I already… well it’s been hard to to avoid old coping strategies and I have since the last time I saw you.’ Linda said, ‘alright, okay. You’ve self harmed.’ I sort of laughed and said, ‘much more succinctly expressed…’ she said, ‘well you know I don’t beat around the bush Lucy, I say it as it is.’ I nodded and said, ‘normally I’m pretty straight talking, the shame steals that from me.’ She said, ‘if you want to we can talk about the self harm next time.’ I nodded and said that would be good.

She checked that I can make 11.30 on Saturday because she has more birthdays this weekend and I said that was fine. She said, ‘Okay, look after yourself, please Lucy. And go eat something. Your body needs fuel okay, like a car. You can’t do anything without fuel… it’s the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you know, basic needs… look after yourself alright?’

I clicked off and got into the shower. Crying the whole time. I imagined never being able to stop crying.

I fell asleep for hours then got up in the late afternoon, went down stairs and had some toast, collected my prescription and let the meds ease it all.