The Corona Borealis.

  After a passionate plea. Sent as a voice recording.  I said it was about the past. I had needed to tell him how I felt.  How I felt about my son, my husband, the fear.. But it was in the time of Covid,  Zoom,  I was in the house.  Impossible to speak freely. Now I need to tell him how I felt.  An hour isn't enough time!  I want him to know who I am. I sit in the car about to go..  This is not therapy! I had sent him a voice message full of blurred lines, and five months later the blurred lines had sunk into the mud as trenches surmounted with razor wire...in a minefield.  I had no way to know this as I hit send. As I prepared myself to knock on the door and start this session I believed in him as a trusted companion. I wanted the enormity of my journey, the weight of it, the devastation, all of it to be witnessed and acknowledged. I was trusting him to see. And I needed an emotional, whole, a real interaction.  There had been a bl...

25th July 2021. Notes A day full of physical panic, my body full of crawling spinning electricity.  Not a nice feeling, not nice at all.  Then suddenly I was washed through and through. And the weaving, spinning, churn stopped.  I stood for a precious moment in the still point at the centre of the Sun - and I felt love once more. Mostly the laughing, that we laugh together... And that I am culpable.  It stops the panic.  Stops me waiting for the hammer to fall   Stills my expectation of a coming time, my trial by language. What is my worst fear? More hours, weeks, months of blaming myself for feeling anxiety.  So, more of the same then!  I could tell - when my husband was lying. My anxiety was well founded. Just no information... What do I want to know? Only good and positive things.  I'm beaten up. The greater my need for positive,  the harder it is to accept there can be negative consequences  for honesty...  26th July ...

Plato believed that Eros is the desire that can lead us to a Higher truth wrapped within mystery, and Jung agreed. Meanwhile Freud had grabbed the scissors snipping and was cruelly at Eros... until there was nothing but blood and feathers falling around him like rubies and snow.   I am certain that many of psychotherapy's best theories and explanations are a continuation of much older concepts and ideas - repackaged so as to appear new.  So when ever Kit talked about fantasy 'with a PH '' I was trying to recall Ioan P Couliano's book:  Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.   Of course I wanted our sessions to lead us both to 'higher truths', and encounters with deeper mystery. This is the promise of love after all! But Kit, though seeped in mediaeval lore, and with a comprehensive knowledge of Christianity regarded therapy as disconnected from eros - or he purposefully kept our conversations so. I mentioned Couliano several times in our sessions, and Kit ...

20th July 2021. So, here it is.  The day after.  I'm never going to forget it, seeing you. You were looking up the road, looking for me.  Waving.  I waved back my most graceful wave and slowly raised a hand to shield my eyes from the powerful sun that was fizzling my world into glitter.  That walk. Oh I was slow, considered, graceful, I am beautiful - I try to believe that.  Feel, it. Know it... Trust. It took me hours to reach you. Slomo. Closer . Then I followed you, simply not seeing.  Totally gone.  I wasn't there.  Really!   I went to sit in the wrong place, therapists always sit closest to the door.  But there are two doors? And so I shifted as you said, 'sit anywhere' but I felt you move to the seat closest to the other door - my wordless interpretation is so fast! Outside of here - the hottest day.  Inside - here - your room.  Wooden floor.  We are cool inside an old house.  You asked me if I wanted ...

14th July 2021. Notes: A book on attachment theory glows under the afternoon sun,  by my left knee,  as I sit here on the sofa. The sun hot on my neck.  I'm so sleepy.  Monday is finally face to face, covid restrictions lifted - and I've got used to this safe distance, this abeyance, this kicking it into the long grass, this avoidance!  And I'm overstepping the mark in my own, quiet way . . But I'm still here, having stated very clearly that I am not your client - and I'm reading your  email - saying that you are so glad I have asked for the sessions to be more in line with what I need...  Genuinely I am in a fog.  If I was in your role I would ask 'my client' about her feelings  unless I didn't want to know!  OK. I'm cracking up!  And I've got to be rational, patient and strong.  And right now start practicing what I need to say.  OK, it goes like this.   I didn't realise that you mattered to me until I felt tha...

A conversation via Zoom. And so it began - very well! He told me how much he had enjoyed our conversation in the previous week, and how pleased he was to continue in this way, so pleased that I'd decided to change our contract, that I'm no longer a client - now a mentee. He said -  "you know for a while I thought what are these sessions for really, a piece of paper to pass a course! Could be so much more than that..." Well, my ideas had been steamrollered in the previous dialogue, for sure. But the emotional price I was paying was worth it; he had enjoyed talking to me so my skill in conversing with a person as if from within their world-view is validated! And I had learnt a lot about standard, counselling theory which would be used in writing my assignments. The cost to me, well it felt more like a challenge than actual cost. I felt as I have felt in many lectures or computer games, that I am not good enough, can't do it, I'm not clever, fast, intelligent o...