There has been a shift (anger)

Today I am going to write about anger.  Anyone who has followed my posts for a while will know that anger is something I’ve just not felt in relation to my healing process or in therapy at all really.  I mean sure, I’ve got angry; I’m not a saint! but in terms of processing anger in regards to the abuse and the trauma I’ve experienced I had none.  Zilch.  Over the years T has tried to encourage me to find my anger, telling me that I would feel better once I had.  Telling me I was safe to express my anger to or even at her, but I still couldn’t find it.  However I have a feeling that might be about to change.

I have briefly mentioned this already but in  order to make total sense of things for my own sake, I may repeat myself slightly.  A few weeks ago my Dad got pissy with me for saying that I couldn’t attend a family event that is taking place later in the year.  His reaction really pissed me off – an unusual reaction for me.   I thought I was just laughing it off really until I went to my session a couple of days after and spoke to T about it and then the longer we spoke about it, the more pissed off I became! I even said to her, jokingly(?) “God I feel angry about it now – thanks for that!” but in hindsight it was less about my Dad’s actions so much as the fact that his actions triggered me – he had inadvertently triggered me to feel something I have very seldom felt before which I now believe to be anger.

The anger I felt was about more than his actions, although it is true to say that it was his actions that pissed me off initially once I started to dig down a bit I realised there was more to it than that. I was angry with him and his passive aggression.  I was angry with him for sulking, for being what I considered selfish and I was angry with him for making me feel something I had felt so many times before.  That’s when the penny dropped I suppose.

The thing I had felt so many times before was manipulated.  Consciously or unconsciously I have been manipulated A LOT and have been taught to give in to other people’s demands.  It was so automatic that I didn’t even realise I did it.

My mother taught me that I had to please her at all times otherwise she would reject me, humiliate me, ignore me or rage at me which could include verbal and/or physical punishment.

My father spent many years absent from my life when I was growing up because of numerous things, but partly as I can now see, due to the fact he struggles with rejection and disappointment himself and seems to act out passively and give people the silent treatment/take himself and his love away.

So called “friends” whom I am no longer acquainted with used to give me shit if I didn’t say “yes” to their requests.  You may remember one who I used to write about “Tina” who used to really act out if I didn’t have lunch with her every single day at work.  If I was to go to the gym or see my (now) husband, I would be made to feel VERY guilty and she would sulk by huffing and puffing, shouting things at me when I walked past her desk, sending me emails saying she spent the hour crying on her own about this or that etc etc…

I grew up so used to this sort of behaviour that I had absolutely no idea it was happening and no idea that I gave into it constantly regardless of what I wanted.  I didn’t even know what I did or didn’t want.  This does also go as deep as the sexual abuse I experienced – I didn’t, couldn’t, say no.  I just froze.  I had learnt to let people do, say and take whatever they wanted.  I had no rights.  Or so I thought.

This last week or so I have started to feel the rumblings of some anger under the surface.  I told T that this stuff with my Dad had made me realise that actually, I DO have some anger.  I am fed up of people acting like this when they don’t get their own way or when I say I can’t or don’t want to do something.  Suddenly I felt kinda righteous and like “NO!! I SAID NO!!”.  I haven’t actually done that, but that is the feeling.

To repeat myself a little again, Friday morning I woke up for work and I felt perfectly normal.  I got up, showered, put on my make up and then remembered it was dress-down at work so went to the wardrobe to find something to wear.  It all went downhill rather rapidly at that point and as I have already written, I then began to get angrier and angrier and more and more stressed and irritated and wound up until BOOM!!! I exploded and burst into floods of tears and cried and cried for about ten minutes.  I’ve already written about this so I won’t go into it more but it was horrible.  One of the worst things about the thoughts I was having is that they feel so REAL.  In the moment it really does feel like it is about the fact I am feeling ugly and fat and that I have no fashion sense and I look shit compared to everyone else etc… but I have done enough therapy now to know that is not really what it is about.  The clothing/appearance anger is just an excuse, just a little way out for all of that pent-up anger inside me to leak out… it was as though the anger started to slowly leak out through a little hypothetical pipe and then realised it was onto a good thing and so the pressure built up and up and up until I exploded and the pipe burst!!!

It wasn’t until I was sat on the train finally on my way to work (20 minutes late) that I recalled T’s words the afternoon before about not taking my anger out on anyone else OR MYSELF!! Strangely I felt a tiny bit of relief instantly as I remembered that.  I also thought to myself that the critical voice I spent an hour listening to that morning hadn’t been around for a long while and that the critical voice which tore apart my weight, clothes, hair etc was in fact an internalised voice – my mother’s.  She felt the need to constantly comment on how I looked and needless to say, I never looked good enough.  Get your hair dyed, buy some better clothes, get a nose job, lose some weight, put some make up on and… get a boob job.  Not to mention the insults such as how my type of legs (fat) were inherited by my “father’s side of the family“.  Grrrrr even typing this pisses me off at the moment.

I felt delicate and sad and tired all day on Friday after that and work felt like it would never end.  Luckily it did eventually end and in the evening I rushed home to get ready to go out with my sister.  I didn’t really want to go in all honestly, not because of anything to do with her though, just that I felt down and sad and I cried again when I finally got home – just releasing the tears that had been leftover and held inside all day.  However we went and we had a fun night and when I got home I felt glad I had gone and actually thought to myself that going out and doing something which took my mind off of what was in my head entirely was exactly what I needed AND what I should do more often.  I realised as I thought that, that I often want to be alone or at home when I feel down but that perhaps this was a better way. I thought then, and think now, it is a hard balance isn’t it? Giving yourself space to feel and think without wallowing in it, you know?

I headed off to bed Friday feeling much better. I had enjoyed my time with my sister and been able to see the kids when I got home.  I had a night full of dreams again but I couldn’t remember any detail when I woke up, that isn’t unusual for me, particularly after a day like that.

Yesterday I got up and had a normal morning with my husband and the kids.  The plan was that he was going to head off with the kids about 1pm as they had various things and places to go and I was going to spend the afternoon at home on my own.  That had sounded like bliss to  be honest and I was looking forward to some alone time. I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, as they would have my car but I thought I might have a bath, write on here, do some exercise, watch some crap tele…. however when it came to it, I felt a bit lonely at the idea of being here on my own and felt like I would miss them all.  I surprised myself by this!! Giving up the chance of some alone time was so not me.  I thought to myself that last night I hadn’t really wanted to go out and it had done me good and that perhaps I should listen to the part of me that was wanting to go TOWARDS company rather than run away from it and give it a go.  I also thought that I do have a few hours to myself every week after my second therapy session so all was not lost.  So I went, and  I was glad I did as we did have a good time.

On the way back from taking the kids home I asked my husband if we could go to my Dad’s house as we had “wasted the day“.  He was pretty annoyed by this and we began to argue a bit.  He was offended that he had paid for us all to have lunch out that day which wasn’t cheap and that we all kept saying the day had been a waste and were ungrateful.  I had snapped back that I only came along for his sake (which actually wasn’t true was it).  We drove the rest of the way not talking and then he said he was so tired he could barely drive and so we got home and he slumped on the sofa and I stropped around upstairs putting my pjs on.  I thought to myself at the time, why do you want to go out again? You’ve barely been home all weekend! The voice in my head kept telling me that I was wasting the weekend.

This morning I woke up feeling wide awake and went downstairs to make a cup of tea. I felt like we had to do something today, that we couldn’t “waste” another day.  I took hubby a cup of tea up and persuaded him that we should get up and ready and then I would drive us to the seaside where we could go for a long walk and stop for breakfast.  He said we couldn’t afford breakfast (usual argument!) and so I said okay, a cup of tea then which he agreed on.  We did that and it was lovely.. BUT..

Buuuttttt… we went into this lovely café and it was very busy.  I stood at the bar for literally about 20 minutes waiting to order 2 cups of tea and still wasn’t served. In the end I felt irritated and walked back to the table where I told hubby we should go somewhere else. I moaned that it was ridiculous in there. I felt peed and hubby was smiling at me with a “you’re stroppy” look on his face. I hate that look lol.

We started to walk a bit further and then he said there was nothing else for miles and that we would be better to head back the way we had come.  Suddenly and out of nowhere I felt SO ANGRY again.  In my head everything was ruined.  The walk was shit. I was cold. There was no tea (I know, get the violins!).  He said we were having a lovely walk and it was exactly what I had wanted to do and I said nothing, feeling just anger inside my chest.  We walked for about 10 minutes in silence, every now and again hubby pointed something out like the coastguard or a type of car or bike and I raised my eyebrows – totally uninterested.   Anyway, a while later after getting the car and driving to a place that did sell tea, we were sat on the beach and I felt such a wave of something…. kinda anger and sadness and just irritation.  I said to hubby that I really wanted to book a break away and he said we had only just had one. I told him going away with his entire family and all the kids wasn’t quite what I had in mind and that I was craving a few days away just the two of us.  He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was pissed off.  Pissed off that I wanted a break or pissed off because we are meant to be saving money or just pissed off because I was irritable – I don’t know, maybe all of the above.  I then said something else (I can’t remember what now) and he exhaled deeply with irritation.  A moment later he said “what’s wrong?” and I said that nothing was wrong.  He said “you can’t tell me you are perfectly happy right now, can you?” and with that tears started falling down my face.  I said no.  Unusually for him, he didn’t hug me.  He just carried on looking down the beach and at the sea.  I stopped crying pretty much as soon as I had started but I acknowledged there was stuff stirring inside me.  It was there and it was still coming out at random moments.  The clothes thing Friday, the wanting to go out last night, the tea in the café….

A toddler walked by with his parents who was having an almighty strop.  He was red-faced and angry.  Shouting and crying and dragging his feet and I looked at him and thought “you lucky thing being able to express yourself like that! – Go on, give em’ hell!” LOL what a weird thing to think?

Weirdly it passed after that, like almost immediately and I drove us home feeling alright again.  When we got home we cleaned our house which always makes me feel better and then we popped to the shops for food and then had a nap on the sofa.

Writing this out I am thinking that perhaps my need to keep busy this weekend was to avoid the feelings, avoid the thoughts.  Perhaps it is my unconscious fear of anger – even my own.  Especially my own perhaps?

I am writing this out to acknowledge to myself that something is shifting inside. I am feeling anger for maybe the first time.  I am feeling resentful and angry and bitter about the ways certain people treated me. I am feeling those feelings and I think I am entitled to feel that way really.  It is a new feeling for me but it is about feeling I am allowed to have boundaries and opinions.  That it is NOT fair or okay for people to act their aggression and disappointment out on me when they don’t get their own way.  That I can say no, and I should not have to deal with the consequences.

I have spent some time on Google this weekend reading about anger and particularly anger in therapy and anger as part of healing from trauma and it seems that it is exactly what needs to be felt. I particularly liked this quote:

Anger that is associated with trauma is an indication of melting or thawing. It is a positive sign that the energy trapped during the traumatic experience is trying to find a way to be expressed, ultimately resolving itself.  It is also a positive sign that one’s sense of self that was damaged during the trauma is growing back.

It talks about how it is a “healthy need to heal the fight energy inside us“.  That it is a “desire to move upwards on the scale of ones ability to defend their rights“.  “An indication of self-esteem“.  I will add this link as I found it so helpful.

So at least that is all positive, right?  It seems that T was right these last 5 years and that feeling the anger really WILL help me.  Who would have known huh? LOL.

Now I just need to try to find ways that I can feel the anger, release it but without hurting myself or anyone else in any way.  It is unpredictable at the moment but I guess it is new to me so hopefully I will find ways to learn to deal with it and learn it is okay to feel it.

In a strange way I quite like the fact that I can even feel this way. I quite like the fact that I want to have a good sense of self and know that my needs and wants are just as important as everyone else’s.  I like that I have grown this much in therapy that I can feel angry if people overstep my boundaries or do not respect me or treat me properly.  That’s what “normal” people feel like, right?

Ha.  Welcome the shift.

Heinz Kohut – Self-Psychology

Last night I was reading and came across some information about a psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut and his theory of “self-psychology”. I hadn’t heard of him/this theory before and I found it really interesting.

In very basic terms, Kohut believed that for a child d to develop healthily and therefore in order that a child gains a healthy sense of “self”, his or her parents need to meet 3 main needs:

1. Mirroring
2. Idealizing
3. Twinship

Mirroring – This is where the parent (usually the mother) would reflect back at the child a sense that he or she is worthy, loved and special.

Idealiizing – Kohut believed that children need to idealize their caregiver and see them as powerful and knowledgeable. The child needs to feel as though they can turn to their caregiver to meet their needs and to help them make sense of their world. Their caregiver needed to be able to calm and reassure them.

Twinship – Kohut believed that children need to feel they fit in with others. They have a need to be similar to their parents – not too different that they felt “wrong”.  Children mimic behaviours or characteristics from their caregiver and gradually as the child matures, would be able to feel more comfortable with any differences.

I found this really interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, knowing that every single child needs to have these 3 basic needs met in order to gain a healthy sense of self reassures me a little more about my “neediness”.  What I mean by that is that my own neediness in life, and more relevantly, in therapy includes some of these needs. Mirroring is very clearly important to me and the idealizing is something that I am very aware of with my T. I do look at her as a special being in my life – as someone who is more powerful and more knowledgeable – more able to help me with my own anxieties than any other.  I guess the twinship plays out when clients wish they were the only client or the most liked client of their therapist.  Secondly I found this very interesting because it helps me to clearly see the areas my own mother didn’t successfully met my needs.  It helps me to understand what it was I needed, what I didn’t get and why I now feel insecure and crave certain things that perhaps others around me do not (making me feel “weird” or “different”) which obviously causes anxiety.

What happens if all goes well during this early stage is that the child’s needs are consistently and repeatedly met over a period of time and the child is able to internalise the caregiver (known as selfobjects) enough that on the odd occasion the caregiver fails to meet the child’s needs, the child has internalised this enough that it can actually step in and soothe itself. This can only happen if the misattunement is not often and not severe. This helps me to understand what my therapist really means when she says “you are only as needy as your unmet needs”. So, it really isn’t YOU! It really isn’t that you are doing something wrong, that you are fault or weak or whatever else you may think you are – it is very clearly that some of, or perhaps all of, these needs were unmet and so you haven’t been able to internalise that consistent caregiver that your friends have.  Bye bye now shame!!

In psychotherapy, transference is helpful because we relate to our therapist with all our unconscious thoughts, feelings and desires and we see and relate to the therapist through our own lense – not necessarily an accurate one. The therapist’s job is to provide us with an “corrective emotive experience” by providing us with enough empathy, understanding and attunement. The basic idea is that the therapist comes in as the good enough caregiver (selfobject) and provides us with a good enough experience of all those 3 major needs.  They mirror us adequately, we idealise them and our twinship needs are met also.  After this is done consistently enough, we internalise THE THERAPIST (as our caregiver failed) and therefore a healthy sense of self is borne – as it should have been all those years ago when for whatever reason, our caregiver failed us.

Mirroring transference – The therapist helps us by mirroring us – validating our feelings and empathising/understanding our feelings and helping us to understand and work through them to prevent them from being too scary for us to handle (as a child wouldn’t be able to handle their environment on their own). The therapist would praise our achievements and make us feel good enough – possibly for the first time.

Idealising transference – In therapy we often idealise our therapist as being strong and powerful and confident.  We NEED them to be this person because we need to know we are in safe hands.  Eventually in the therapy process, we come to develop a more realistic view of the therapist warts and all (like any human being). This causes ruptures in the therapeutic alliance which is then repaired repeatedly.  We learn we are safe.

Twinship transference – In therapy sometimes we will find similarities between us and our therapist and we will enjoy that feeling. I know for me personally, my T once told me that she also watched some of the same programmes as me and I really enjoyed that. I find myself wondering as I type this, if that is why I have such a keen interest in psychology and read so much into these theories? Am I trying to me like T? For others, perhaps you may enjoy a similar taste in clothes, politics, history etc. As our therapists disclose more of themselves, we find the similarities and feel more “normal” and accepted.  I assume this is why it can be so painful to find out things about our therapist that do NOT match us. It’s why our therapists don’t give too much away about themselves (although Kohut did not believe in the whole blank-screen thing as it wasn’t humane enough).

 

 

Anyway, there is more to say but this is about as far as I have read. I will continue to post my findings in the hope they help even one other person who is struggling in therapy right now with needs and vulnerability.

Any comments would be welcomed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neediness, Lack of Warmth, Fear of Annihilation & Re-experiencing pain

I got to last night’s session not really sure of how it would go, feeling a bit nervous about the fact that the last communication T had from me was me saying I was crying and experiencing a really odd mixture of pain and pleasure at the connection I had felt with her.

I sat down and she smiled at me but didn’t say anything. I smiled back.. anxiously waiting for her to start talking but she didn’t, she just looked at me and I felt really uncomfortable. Why do they do that sometimes? I can’t help but feel its done on purpose to make us feel awkward as fuck!

I told T that I had done a lot of thinking, reading and writing over the weekend and that I felt like I had some realisations. I said that although they were not necessarily new realisations, I felt them differently. T said it was like peeling an onion and said that we have to revisit certain things over and over again, each time we understand or feel a little deeper and that this can only be done as and when we are ready.

I didn’t really know where to start so I started with asking her if she was familiar with Brene Brown’s theory of foreboding joy. She said she wasn’t and so I explained to her in very vague terms that I had learnt it was what happens to some of us when we feel a real sense of joy and vulnerability and explained Brene’s theory that we then dress-rehearse tragedy, waiting for it all to go wrong. T nodded and said she understood what I meant. I told T that I had sat down to write a blog on Sunday evening about this, and had found myself writing something that hit me as I typed the words out and kinda took my breath away. I told her what I had written on Sunday about the link I had made of the feelings of happiness/sadness leaving her office on Sunday and the feelings growing up of having those very random, short-lived moments of connection with my mother and how painful it was when those moments abruptly ended.  Saying those words made me cry again, I found myself suddenly gasping for breath. It felt very deep. I suppose it was the enormity of what I had just said? I don’t know.

T looked at me with empathy and seemed to understand what I had said. I told her that the feelings I had last week were horrible. I told her that I felt physical pain in my chest and said it hurt so much. This made me teary again.  T said it feels like life and death and that when you are in touch with that pain, it is absolutely excruciating. I agreed.  I told her that it is the same pain I felt a few years ago when I had planned to leave therapy and then found myself on the bathroom floor sobbing for hours with this god-awful pain of not being able to survive. Of loss and grief and all manner of other horrible things.

I told T that it confused me that getting what I have always wanted caused me such a lot of pain (and joy, admittedly) and T explained that having deep, childhood, unmet needs – met was VERY painful.  She said getting what you’ve always wanted can cause awful sadness and pain.  I didn’t understand that.  T said that this was one of the reasons that therapists had to be so careful not to “overdo it”.  She said that them overdoing it could cause us more pain! T said “this is why although I understand you want more reassurance and warmth in my emails, it is important that I am very careful”…

(I haven’t written about this yet so this is a good time – I told T last week that I sometimes find her email replies to be “lacking in warmth”. As I said it, she repeated it back to me and I agreed.  Yes. I told her that I knew that the content was fine and that if someone else read them, they wouldn’t see the issue, but for me, they sometimes felt “therapisty” (yeah, I know) and “cold”.  I’ve thought about this many times since saying it and I can very clearly see that the lacking in warmth thing is probably a bit of transference – it probably sums up how I feel about my communications/relationship with my mother – or more specifically, about my mother herself. Lacking in warmth.)

T said that the sadness when I left of not having had enough was completely understandable and expected. I told her, it isn’t quite that I haven’t “had enough” like I had written about once before, because that makes it sound like I didn’t get enough warmth or enough connection or attunement which I DID. She said, she thinks “not having had enough” was less about my session and more about my childhood. That I didn’t get enough.  That went in at a deep level and I agreed with her. I understand that therapy is starting to trigger some things in me which I perhaps didn’t understand or feel consciously before.

I told her that actually FEELING that pain when I left last week was just awful. I just closed my eyes as I typed that because honestly my words do not do that feeling justice. T once again reminded me that a lot of my pain was pre-verbal and may not have words.

I said that FEELING that pain really drove it home to me how very sad that was and I said that whilst I immediately think about my mother when I write these things, the same applied to my Dad of course because well, where the fuck was he? He didn’t try either and although my Dad is a “nicer person”, he hurt me too. T said that just because he is a “nice guy” doesn’t mean he didn’t cause me pain. I agreed.  I said that I had been thinking recently that I would see my Dad every now and again, we would have a nice time and then he would take me home and I wouldn’t know if I would see him again in a week, two weeks or months.  I told T that I still sometimes cry when I leave him as an adult now (only since my therapy got me in touch though!).  I told T that I also used to cry when my Nan and Grandad dropped me home on a Sunday night after having stayed at their house, which I did every weekend. I now understand this – I was crying because I knew that connection was over. I was crying because I knew I wouldn’t have that connection at home with my mother and crying because I never knew how long it would be until I felt that again.

T said that it is as if it felt better for me to feel nothing at all than to feel the mixture of the good against the bad. I agreed whole-heartedly.

I said to T that when I learnt about this foreboding joy thing, I had sat down and thought about how this played out in other aspects of my life. I told her what I had written about my relationships, with job interviews and many other things. T nodded and said how hard I had been working. I agreed that I had. I said I was worried that people seemed to think the amount I thought about these things was a bad thing but said that understanding why I am feeling a certain way actually helped me to have some compassion for myself. T said perhaps it took the guilt, shame and blame away from me.  She then said (not for the first time) “You were capable of feeling that loving connection the whole of your life. It really wasn’t you – it wasn’t any fault of yours that you didn’t get that. It was your mum and dad’s”.  She said how it was only natural that as a child experiencing that lack of connection (ha, of warmth) I would understandably blame myself. It is how I survived because I had to keep them good.  I said that I understood this now and that understanding that was bittersweet. I am glad it wasn’t me, of course. But understanding, truly, how incapable they both were of emotional connection and closeness, of that parental bond is so tragically sad to me.

I then spoke to T about my blog yesterday about neediness. I told her that I had wanted to send my blog from Sunday and told her what I wrote yesterday about the conversations that played out in my head. T said “did you think you would be too much?” and I said yes. I told her how I had these visions of smothering her, suffocating her and – killing her. T told me this was the “Fear of Annihilation”. I heard her say that but had no real idea what she was talking about. I’ve since Googled this and it is very interesting. I attach a link for anyone that is interested. Once I have digested this a bit more, I will write about this as I think it will be very helpful to me, and possibly others. https://healthysenseofself.com/meet-us/terminology-for-a-healthy-sense-of-self/fear-of-annihilation/

Following this “fear of annihilation” conversation I told T that it confuses me that when I am in those moments, I NEED to contact her and only her. I said nobody else would help and that felt uncomfortable for me. T said something along the lines of:

“Of course. Like a child only wants its mummy”.

And with those simple words, it suddenly made sense to me. T said that I am using T as I need to, which is as a mother figure and so when I need containing and attunement or whatever I need, of course it is only her that I want to turn to. She told me that is why I shouldn’t really go against myself when I feel that way, that I need to let myself be steadied by her and that it was okay to do that. T said this fear of annihilation meant that I was convinced either I was going to kill her off with my needs or that she would kill me off. She said that I can’t trust that she could handle her own feelings/needs.

I told T that sometimes just pressing send on an email to her was enough. I said I never understood that either. T said:

“Yes, because sending the email into my inbox is like putting something (the feelings) into mum to deal with”.

She spoke about how as a baby or a child, the mum would try to figure out what it was the baby or child needed. She would speak softly to the baby and try and see was the baby hungry? Tired? Did the baby need a nappy change etc – she said that the child was steadied just by knowing the mother was there and trying her hardest to help.  She said that me sending the email to her had the same effect.  I said but I don’t know if you are even reading it for hours yet and she said no, but you know that it is no longer just you trying to deal with it all on your own. You know that I will, at least, try to help you with it and that knowledge helps you to settle.

Isn’t that interesting? I know I haven’t expressed that very well, but hopefully the general gist is there.

 

Self Integration?

Yesterday I wrote a brief description of a dream that I had Monday night.  The dream left me with a very intense feeling of what I can only describe as maternal love.  Now I have not had any children yet although me and my (now) fiance were trying for about 17 months prior to getting engaged.  Now the wedding is booked we are putting that on hold until after the wedding, partly for practicalities but partly because I/we need the break from the emotions that trying unsuccessfully brought us.

Anyway, to the point – I have never felt a feeling like that before. It was like love on steroids and yet clearly it was only a dream.. yet it felt so important somehow.

A lovely blogger helped me to think about the dream in more detail earlier, we spoke about how the baby could symbolise the child/baby part of myself.. I agreed and then I went into my session and spoke to T about it a bit more.  Here is the dream again with a bit I left out the other day:

I had a baby girl. Her name was Kia. She was wrapped tightly in a blanket and I was either holding her over my shoulder or pushing her in her pram. At one point in the dream I stepped off of a bus and when I looked into her pram, it was empty and I panicked and turned around to see my mother holding her – I took her off of my mother and then my mother pushed the empty pram instead.  Later in the dream I gently rubbed the side of her face and she laughed and “spoke” to me in her baby language. I laughed and spoke back to her in baby language but the feeling it gave me (as I explained above) was just phenomenal.

I find it so weird that a dream can leave me with such a strong feeling when I’ve never felt that in real life – how is that even possible?

T said she also thought the dream was hugely symbolic. She agreed that the baby was probably symbolic of my child/baby self. I said that I felt it important that I “took the baby back from my mother” and that my mother was then “pushing an empty pram”.  T said that my mother may as well have been pushing an empty pram, I agreed.  I said that it didn’t feel like grief processing because there was no element of sadness whatsoever. T said that she felt it was actually a very transitional dream – a sign that perhaps I have fully accepted my child part into myself.

I can’t find the right words right now to really express what I want you to feel as you read this, I’m not sure that is possible but it just feels SO IMPORTANT. So, so important. Madness from a dream!!

Anyway, I read up about self-integration which made its way into my brain because I was re-reading an old blog of mine earlier (Winnicott’s fear of breakdown) and in the paper I referred to by Clare Winnicott, she speaks about how her client had a dream where she picked up her child self and Clare Winnicott thought this was hugely symbolic of her patient integrating – growing and healing and I can’t help but think my dream is a very similar thing. It FEELS like something in my body, my being… there has been some sort of shift or something.

I’m sure I sound a bit weird ha! But there we go.

I think I’ve changed a lot lately, I’ve had to go against everything I know with my ex friend at work (I really need to find a better name for her). Setting such firm boundaries, ending a friendship, not letting the fear, guilt, panic take over – putting myself first and standing strong despite perhaps not feeling it!! Surviving everything that came as a side effect to me doing this, such as the preoccupation with predicting what she would do and say when I saw her, dreaming about her, doubting myself, crying from the fear of it all… and so on and so on…  I am still here and I am okay. It is hard, its tough and I am currently witnessing her in the middle of a smear campaign trying to make herself look like a victim and me look like an evil bitch – its okay. It will be okay. I am okay. And that is huge.

As well as that I had a run in with my younger sister a few weeks ago because I wouldn’t cancel a therapy session which she wanted me to do. Because I wouldn’t do that, she decided I was selfish and her and my mother clearly had a lovely little bitch session about me which wound me up. But I didn’t bite. I WAS angry and yet again, I did doubt myself a lot .. perhaps I was being selfish? T helped me to see that my feelings were justified but not to be acted out.  Yet again, I just had to hold firm. I sat on Pintrest for hours looking at quotes of “boundaries” and reassured myself that I was doing the right thing. She was very angry with me and my mother even made a point of telling me how upset my sister was with me… I told her what I wish I could have told the pair of them really, that it doesn’t make me a bitch because I won’t do EXACTLY as she wants me to. I told her that my counselling (swear word to my mother – physically makes her wince!) was a very important commitment to me and one that I stuck to whatever else was happening. I told her I only get to miss two sessions a year otherwise I have to pay the entire £40 which I couldn’t afford to do and told her that I had offered all sorts of alternatives such as joining for a drink afterwards etc etc…. the very clear message was “I am not being selfish and I don’t care whether you or she thinks I am”.

I held my own. I owned it. And for that I am proud. [Side note: I put a picture of a quote about boundaries on FB today and my sister quoted sarcastically so clearly it hit a nerve].

Aside from all of that, there is the stuff I’ve written about lately regarding my soon to be stepdaughter and some of the struggles we have both been having. There is a hell of a lot of different things at play with this. There is clearly fear of being left behind, forgotten about or replaced by me from her side of things and from mine there is clearly some jealousy which probably comes from daddy issues of mine. I am very aware of all these different triggers and am speaking to T about them all a lot at the moment, I feel very proud of myself for being able to be objective and be able to self-reflect on the whole situation no matter how difficult it might be.

Its funny really, since the engagement I had worried that the excitement of getting married might overshadow my therapy and stall any progress… now it feels the opposite is true.

Sorry if this blog reads as really up myself, I very rarely big myself up but this does feel monumental and I want to document it to be able to look back on.

Random Thoughts: Sense of Self

I hate Mondays. Doesn’t everyone hate Mondays?

They are made even worse at the moment due to the fact that I have no work to do – at work and so my days consist of sitting at a desk trying to keep myself occupied whilst not making it too obvious that I have nothing to do! Clock-watching is painful. The days feel like they will never end.

On the bright side, I feel happy today – contented I guess. Not hyper. I am still quite shocked by yesterday’s revelation and keep replaying the whole conversation over and over in my head to try to set it there in stone. I woke up this morning with a sense of contentedness – a feeling that I usually wake up with on therapy days. As I had only been awake for a second or two I thought that was what it was so that was a shame, but then I realised what that happy feeling was (the revelation) and felt it was a decent trade-off.

The Break So Far

Today is day 4 of not seeing T, although it seems unfair to be counting already because my first session wouldn’t usually take place until tomorrow and as it is Monday, perhaps it should be day 1… but for me, I’m 4 days into a 12 day break. I’m doing alright which is nice, although I have questioned whether I really am doing alright or whether I’m in “self-sufficient repressing all my feelings mode” – that does happen.

But no, I think I am okay actually. How do you really know?

 

Books/Films

I’ve been getting a lot of enjoyment from reading, writing on here, watching film adaptations after reading novels, watching my new fur baby run around and of course seeing Frank sitting on my bed reminding me of T.

This weekend I watched Wuthering Heights, Sense & Sensibility and Emma and I enjoyed them all (although Gwyneth Paltrow was quite irritating in Emma it I have to say). I’ve been reading a book by Nick Hornby and called High Fidelity which is very funny and I only have about 40 pages left so I will finish that tonight and start the next book I’ve brought which is called Hotel Du Lac.

I have this new passion for things like this and I’m not sure where its come from. I read my first classic novel only a year ago, Jane Eyre and I loved it. Since then I’ve read Pride and Prejudice and a book called I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith which isn’t quite so well-known, they have got me a bit addicted I guess. Today I’ve decided to order Shakespeare in Love, Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – all stories that I should know, but don’t. I’m playing catch up which leads me to my next thought…

 

Intelligence

T has been really trying lately to make me believe that I am clever. I don’t believe this and I never have and actually if the truth be known, I don’t really like her doing it. It makes me feel very uncomfortable. I don’t like to sit there disagreeing with her because it just looks like I am fishing for compliments and she just tells me I am wrong, yet I can’t agree with her because that doesn’t sit well with me.

I told my boyfriend this last night and he said, very diplomatically, that I might not know as much “general knowledge” as you might expect, but that he puts this down to the fact that I didn’t have parents around to teach me. He said that the things I don’t know tend to be things that parents teach their kids rather than things you learn at school. I am not sure I agree with him, although obviously I don’t doubt the benefit people have if they have intelligent parents trying to encourage their child’s learning.

This weekend at my mother’s house, we were playing some games and she said “TT won’t get this you may as well take it”.  Well I did get it.  I wasn’t the first to get it, but I wasn’t the last either and my step-brother didn’t get it at all and he genuinely IS very bright. I felt rather smug. We then went on to do answer some riddles and I managed to answer about 6 in a row correctly and she said “blimey, what’s got into you?” so it doesn’t take a genius to work out where that lack of intelligence or that belief has come from.

T means well, obviously – but I don’t want smoke blown up my arse. I don’t want to be lied to, but I DO want to improve my intelligence and so I think that in a way reading these classic novels, watching these film adaptations – the Bronte’s and the Jane Austen’s and now dipping my toe into some Shakespeare I am trying to improve my knowledge(?).  I can’t say I’m ever going to be very good at maths, history or geography or perhaps the things that are more useful in life, but hey – every little helps, right?

On the build up to the most recent election I did study the manifestos to get a basic understanding of who I wanted to vote for rather than just going with the majority or voting for whoever my boyfriend voted for (I actually went against most people’s preference in the end!). These things weren’t encouraged when I was growing up (mainly because my mother isn’t intelligent either and has no understanding of politics at all) and so I hadn’t even voted until 2015. I did however thoroughly enjoy sitting at my mother’s house a few months back reeling off all my new knowledge where I felt smug and as though I was passively saying to her “Haha, I know things and you don’t!”. I know, I am very mature. I have to get my kicks where I can as far as she is concerned.

My mother is a chameleon and tries to fake interest in everything and anything. Whatever people are currently discussing. For example during the world cup she became a sudden fan of football and she basically copies whatever she’s heard other people say and tries to make out she is knowledgeable on the subject and it is rather cringe worthy.  Anyway, less about her, how did she make it here? Go away mother.

 

Sense of Self

I think what I am doing is trying to find a sense of who I am. The real me and not the person that I thought I was, or the person I was told I was. It is quite exciting really. I feel like the world is suddenly offering lots of things which I could have a go at, get involved in.. try….I’ve not felt that before.  I even tried badminton recently on holiday and assumed I would be terrible at it but I was actually okay! Not great, but not bad either and more importantly I guess, I enjoyed it. I’ve never been one to try things for fear of failure I guess.

I’ve just been sitting on Amazon (not literally) and found a “Listography”. Google it, there are loads of different types and as the name suggests, you make lists about whatever subject it is.  There are listography’s for music, films, books etc. I’ve just ordered one called “My Inner Self In Lists” – what better way to get to know myself and watch the transformation as it happens?