A star falls in to the abyss. 3rd January 2022

Well I wonder what it's going to be

Progressive, regressive, 

"I'm flattered"

?

I'm sitting in the car watching people go by

Listening to Nadja.

Time to go...

---

3rd January 2022.

His 'Hello, come in' sounds exactly the same as normal. No 'chit chat'...The sound of the spoon, of cups, things. Lots of stirring. Spoon sounds in cups sounds...

I'm talking about it being cold...He says the heating is on. 

And so it begins.

He tells me that he 'hadn't seen it coming' and that he hadn't listened to the recording until yesterday and so he had 'no idea'!

Me - "No, you wouldn't have, because I'm good at containing my feelings. It's an important skill." 

He tells me that our conversation could be potentially. difficult and change a lot of things. 

I agree - and divert it to focusing on what needs to be done, I really don't want to hear any theory...

And as I speak, trying to explain that perhaps what I feel is liminal, that I don't have any clarity he interrupts me to tell me again that 'clients go away and they come back; 12, 6, 18 months later  and if there's been social contact between, then  it completely changes the dynamic. 

And regardless of anything I've said, nothing can change because we have a three-way contract, with my college as the third party...

Metaphorically at this moment I drive along a mountain pass, a thousand foot drop to either side, my ability to see almost nil in the fog, sleet and rain. Who and what am I? I need to hold on to my identity - I am pragmatic, stoic and reality is contracted and constructed between people...so we can make this better, because so far all I've heard is - 'You HAVE TO BELIEVE ME I HAD NO IDEA'! 

Do I believe that?

Am I supposed to agree that he had no idea?

I haven't heard any awareness or kindness in his words or tone of voice regarding my valour, courage in respecting his feelings by dealing with the undertow. 

I haven't heard any apology for not opening and reading my letter and listening to the recording. I was waiting for three weeks. Certainly I didn't expect more than a confirmation that he'd heard. But those three weeks were a very long time. 

I've just heard him say 'This could be difficult' and the question is for who, and why? How difficult must it have been for me to spend over a year thinking that I couldn't possibly feel about him as I do. How difficult must it have been to be honest with him, when I couldn't even say it in the room, or show any sign, clearly the whole thing has been difficult for me!

And at this moment it feels like I have to go limp, no struggling - collaboration is the only way. But I can't do it!

There is a dagger embedded in my heart...I am angry. 

Why would I ever come back as a client? There is no therapeutic relationship to protect! 

Even a negative response such as 'I just don't like you, would have been the precious and necessary missing information - for then the ice would melt, the fog lift and my path would become clear. Instead, I felt that I was still seeking a way through. I felt that I was fighting for my life, pleading for clarity - to see my next step! Feeling as if there is a 1000 ft fall either side of me...And here now? No light, only darkness. 

His non acceptance of my request for open honesty, his tone of voice, the amount of energy he is putting into defence makes me very aware of the danger of his attack. So, I must do what I've had to do so many times for my husband, my son. I'm going to have to disassemble the fear, disgust, rage, panic.

Because of how unsafe I feel. 

He is in a position of power. He doesn't know how bad a state of mind I am in. Or does he know, but he's avoiding? At what point did I know how vital it is not to trust him?

Probably at 'regardless of what you say...'! 

But here and now? 

After all I've said? 

He's telling me about the client-therapist relationship?

So this is just ignorance on my part?

Really!?

I'm ethically bound to step up, be courageous and to be honest. I had to wait until I was strong enough to take whatever outcome. And no, we don't have a client-therapist relationship. 

I can't trust him as a therapist.

He reacts defensively. 

I need to reassure him.

Me - "Yet you need to understand how I do things, I don't do anything suddenly, and I'm an incredibly lawful person. And that's why this has been so difficult for me. And that's why I partition and assess before making any decisions. But again I want to stress, there is a degree of liminality to this"

He doesn't see what 'lawful' indicates - that I feel as if his response is telling me that I've broken some kind of rule. Doesn't he understand the word liminality? Granted I'm less sure this is a liminal state, I think it is pretty real, for me, and he's doing nothing to help me get the whole picture!

At the brittle, rippling edge, fear, pain, memories, loss, threat, grief.. As the words leave my mouth - metaphorically the car is slipping over the edge of the road - it is just balancing on the razor edge of a lethal fall.

I keep my head.

I don't panic.

I gently open the imaginary door and slide out...

And the car lurches sideways, now slipping rapidly and disappearing over the edge.

I'm waiting to hear...

A sickening crash.

Me - "But the three-way contract ends at a certain point". 

He tells me that it never changes for him, that there are all sorts of good reasons for this, and that it can be a real jolt to see a client outside of the therapeutic space.

Me - "yes - you are talking about you"

And my feelings are being portrayed as my ignorance, and as a harmful thing. It would cause a jolt, it would destroy our destroyed non existent therapeutic relationship. I'm being spoken to as if I had no idea that what I said was so dangerous.. 

The pain of this misaligned insanity is beginning to tear into me.

Flashback!

May 23rd 2020, about 6 pm.

I am sitting with my back to a tree - I don't feel despair, I don't feel rage. There is simply nothing left. Psychologically I am being torn open. I know there is pain, but I can't focus on it or feel the livid edges because it is happening. It is real. Nothing can stop it. My family is being destroyed. I know this. I wont feel it. Numbness, disempowerment, loss, and damage. I think I should put myself out of my misery, because if I wake up - if I feel what is happening, no one should have to feel that much pain.. It is the end anyway. So why not take the only thing left in my control...real death. The pain of living - what makes it worth fighting for? It looks too far, too cold, too hard. I have no compass. There is no star to guide me. 

Why not just stop? 

The only reason I accepted the pain of living is that I have a vow not to kill, and as I'm now at this point just another living thing - that includes me in the vow. 

So no Kit, I didn't tell you this in our first session when you asked about suicide. I'd experienced a therapist creating potentially lethal situation before. Because I'd seen what happened to my son when he had got 'help'. Therapy rules state, when there is a risk of, 'harm to self...break confidentiality' I couldn't trust you. Looks like I was right!

Resonance of then with now - lack of truth, I'm being portrayed as someone I'm not.

Back to the tree - I don't feel despair, I don't feel rage. 

Back to the tree, and now, in his room. I have explained this. I have told him this. I'd told him how my husband's refusal to be open and honest dislocated my soul.

He know this!

And so he knows that I have to have truth, raw and real. 

I have to hear his truth and to speak mine! 

My truth is that perhaps I do know who he is enough to know, and that I know love includes accepting that he loves someone else, is gay or finds me boring and too old. 

And I don't see this ending.

But my truth has been excised from the room - it  doesn't fit the monomyth of liberation through understanding childhood trauma. 

Slowly lights go out.

Another star falls. 

Into the abyss. 

One after another - one by one - sinking into the same drowning void, carried away by a rip tide of numbness, disempowerment and loss again. 

Part of me wants to die.

He questions me on how long have I felt this way...

Me - "A year"

And he asks, why tell him now...?

Me - "You want to know why? Because integrity and honesty matter - and always trying to work out what the best path is. Did I answer the question - what was the question? Because I had completed my work of my other Diploma, and was being assessed, because I'd written my account to be assessed to see if I could enter the Ovate grade - so there was a lot of 'this is what I've done, this is me' and this is a levelling, reducing the sharp divides and no-go areas to one plain, balanced, surface. Time for the unspoken things to be said. It was Samhain, the perfect time for feeling the ghosts, feeling the edges, assessing experience and converting it into words "

He describes this as 'crossing thresholds' I hear in this word a lot about how he sees me. Where does his term - threshold come from?  

Me - "No, thresholds are not being crossed. It is volitional. I either step up to the mark and acknowledge the thresholds or I ignore. I don't ignore things"

I have not broken any rule at all, nor have I crossed any boundaries - it was time to name the ghosts, assess, convert to words. To step up! To stop hiding and face the truth. Time for unspoken things to be said!

But there was a feeling of ghosts? 

Is this countertransference? 

Am I reacting unconsciously to something running in him?

Countertransference is often an uncomfortable and a pretty trippy experience! 

The term 'ghost' feels right to describe it.

He asks me if it will be too painful to continue therapy with him. 

I can't actually believe someone would ask that question! To agree that this is too painful for me? How dare you. You want me to end this problem for you? You have added to my pain by avoiding being honest about your feelings, and you ask me 'is this too painful'! No, it isn't. Because I am a person who refused to let the narrative of the psychiatric team condemn her son to a lifetime of Risperidone, to being spoken to as service user. I am a person who kept going with her counselling course despite the violence and fearing for her life. 

No, this is psychically induced pain created through meanings. 

Me - "This makes me laugh because I deal in futures. I am therefore massively cautious in how I use language when I talk about the future with other people. You have just given me an uncontained 'how's it going to be'. Yes I am deferring, maybe I'm deferring while my mind comes up with an answer. Let me think. Rephrase it: what would I prefer is a better question- in a way I feel that I'm being judged, and I want to know what you think. That's why I can't just answer. How would it be for me? I am quite capable of coming here with the way I feel and managing it. I've been doing it for a year.

He - 'It doesn't mean that you can do another one'

The gauntlet again.

He wants me gone.

He doesn't pick up on how I'm feeling judged and ask what that actually feels like, he certainly isn't going to let me know how he feels - thus perpetuating the 'ghosts'.

I'm not having it, I'm not going to be told that going 'is for your own good' when it clearly isn't!

Me - "Does it not!"

His reply to this will never make sense to me, he says that there is a difference between him not knowing how I feel and now knowing...and that this might change things.

I don't understand! 

How will it change him? I don't have permission to explore, I have no invite to ask questions and hold silences and give the eye contact I'd give otherwise. So we won't go there. I will never know what that meant. Instead I'm thoroughly disempowered, on the verge of a mental equivalent to safe-mode.

Me - "Yes, so that's the main thing. I know I can"

He -"OK"

Me - "It's really hard, how can I tell you that I'm a trustworthy person"

At this point - as the lights are going out - it seemed to be all about trust - I felt that he didn't trust me? The sense that I'm apparently breaking the 'law' by acknowledging my feelings. Being told that I was crossing thresholds by telling him how I felt? Something isn't right here as he tells me that he is concerned about my emotional state. 

So telling me to think of never seeing you again is helping my emotional state? 

I'm feeling bloodless, empty, cold. He's asking me to walk away. And yet, I keep my voice steady...it feels as if I have to... 

Grief is a cold hand on my heart. 

Me - "Well I've got grief to deal with. I mean that was part of my assessment for over the year - so how long does it take before my grief wound (from husband, son, daughter...my family being shattered) how long before I can take another dose. And to go back to your question 'why now' well because the scabs, pretty well, the scabs pretty well..well, there's not so much of it left perhaps"

He asks me if this is grief due to the destruction of my family.

Me -"That grief, yes"

And then he asks me if I'm suggesting that his 'holding the boundary' is another grief! 

'And are you suggesting' doesn't sound like a question. 

As I answer I am aware that I must not suggest that his holding the boundary 'is another grief''! His tone of voice made it clear that the only acceptable answer is 'no'! But a part of me can't help wondering if my interpretation of him was wrong? What if I'd answered from the heart? The word I used in the Samhain recording is love, and I do not use that word lightly. And I made the choice to deal with the twisted energies so that we could get to honesty. The worst that could happen, I had thought, would be finding out that he didn't like me! 

I was wrong. 

This is worse, much, much worse. 

I cannot answer from my heart. Instead of any negotiating I am being told to accept this indeterminate state - or to go - presented as being for my benefit! 

No other option remains now...I must play the game by his rules.

I describe what will happen as the task of accepting reality and letting go of potential futures  - and mourning those futures. 

Giving him the message that he has nothing to do with any of this! The tone of voice he used was so clear, too clear for me to risk getting it wrong! He wants a message telling him, 'you have not harmed me, you have no need to fear disappointing me. This is nothing to do with the real you, or how you do therapy. I take total and full responsibility. 

I give an empirically accurate and correct answer tantamount to lying. Because who am I, what am, I without opinions and emotions? 

I cannot risk being real. 

He accepts my language. 

Would I accept such an answer from a client? 

This is grief, I will lose his living, breathing, uniqueness. 

The word is love! 

Breathless, animated, curious, enchanted, fascinated, inspired...

But how will I be able to mourn when there cannot be honesty? Without honesty there is no reality. My feelings will remain frozen, stuck. 

There will be no resolution unless he speaks honestly. 

By that I mean to shift from words and statements that describe thoughts, assessments, and interpretations, into language that conveys feeling

I felt cornered - trapped and confused - into making my 'unacceptable' feelings acceptable, and this felt to me like lying (powerlessness, unnerved!)  So I write the memories and access my  opinions, I switch on and record my feelings, I refuse to be untruthful - and so I write here and now, placing the missing thoughts, and emotions back into their rightful place - and I place them safely in the future.... 

Integrity - feeling secure and alive - is vital. 

But integrity can be broken by the responses of others. Having to lie can be a matter of life and death. As a child I learnt from my mother and grandmother, from television and from experience that it is best for everyone if girls just forget to care that terrible things happen to them. So we agree to smile, to look OK. Because what would our outrage or despair communicate? How dare we suggest that anyone except ourselves can ever be out of order! And having 'asked for it' if we then get upset and don't like it that too has to be our mistake. Obviously we didn't know what we were asking for. 

When the best defence is to agree with your abuser until you can escape, there will be face dislocation, sadness, depression. Until eventually anger floods in to wash the bullshit away. 

In the end I remember thinking that I'd got it right, I'd said the right thing.  I gave something like a psychodynamic mission statement - framing the process of grief as acceptance of reality. This had shifted any sense of responsibility for the situation away from him, and onto me alone. 

But meanwhile, under the surface, within the tone of my voice, he'd heard the truth; he had heard me say what I didn't say out loud; I will be in grief if I lose you. 

 

Truth is I've no idea how accurate my view is - I only know my side of this. But the situation was a mess. And I'm trying to understand - accessing the black box!

He was refusing to say - this is how I feel about you. And therefore he was as good as playing Russian roulette with my life. 

Self disclosure is a difficult thing to get right. But in this case, self disclosure was absolutely necessary. 

I'd go so far as to say that relationship is the only part of therapy that is therapeutic. The modality is no more than a way to structure language. 

But for me to feel as I do about him? 

There have been mixed messages. And without his honesty, the different layers of reality are impossible to disentangle. I can't take any more dissonance...not after being made to feel that I was so out of order by my husband for wanting the truth. Kit is being negligent in not understanding this, and if he does understand, in not respecting it. I have asked directly for his self-disclosure. The absence makes no sense, I'd expected reason. I am falling through the gap where honesty should be, as I hear my request for a straight answer deflected again and again. 

At this point I felt as if he'd found me at the edge of the road. No shoes, lost, cold and bleeding. It wasn't better to be found, just not so bad. As if I'd been rescued, but not given any warm clothes, or kind words. But I was no longer at the fragile edge at the borders of death, I was following him back to 'the therapy room'. 

By the time he starts asking me to hear and accept his feelings it is too late. I have zero capacity to hear anyone else. He tells me that he is finding the situation difficult because normally he would be asking questions about something happening out there. 

But, it is happening in here...

So my reply is now avoidant and dismissive 'Well, what is actually happening here? It is two people drinking coffee, having a conversation'  And all sounds are the sound of the mantra' - the fragile skill of elective detachment - a benefit of 30 years of Buddhist practice.

He wanted me to respond with emotion or ? He tries again by repeating that he is saying 'no' and that there is 'absolutely no question!!!!' 

I remain numb, switched off, dead. My reply when I override the numbness is irritable and from pain, 'Yes, you have already said that' 

Why say the thing that will hurt me the most, again? 

My fragile detachment shatters!

Obviously this really isn't enough for him, so he asks, what this is like for me, what is this experience like? Whilst it must be clear that this is not the right time, and not the right way to talk to me right now?

Isn't my emotional state obvious, from my tone of voice, my physical posture? If I accessed the reality of this moment how would it be? The pain is already a splintering, agony. And if I showed it? I would be described as dysregulated, regressing - angry, or any number of 'unable to cope with the pain of it' behaviours a psychotherapist has labels for; a process similar to someone kicking you and then buying you a cup of coffee and a cake, and then they tell their friends how they bought coffee and cake for someone they found in distress. The only power I have is to hold fast to what I know about myself and this situation. 

And the best we can do now is find a way to talk that avoids crucifying me. I tell him what he should say to me!

Me - "What is it that you know about yourself that means that you can cope with this situation? And how is it that you had the courage to tell me"  those would be the questions. So a question like 'what does it feel like' would drag me into a hurt part of myself and I really don't need to go there. I am perfectly capable of going into it in my own time and understanding myself, and taking care of me. But if you want to go there"

But if you want to go there - the nuclear option! 

Or my invitation for him to play the game of, you tell me how hurt you are and I'll be a nice parent....as opposed to my 'game' of bring the light, find the truth and then recast the narrative.

But if you want to go there?

Is my challenge to both of us. 

And now I notice that he has perfected the pseudo-therapeutic yes. It sounds wise and considered, compassionate even. I now understand that he uses it when he doesn't know what to say in reply to me. 

It sounds like he's heard me, and understood.  But actually I think this specific yes is used instead of saying 'I disagree with you'.

So I step out of the loops again and back to truth. As Silvia Plath put it: 'This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary'. The light of the mind casts weird contours and shadows that can't be seen using the bright light of reason, they are the felt-things, the intuitions at the edge of awareness. The mind speaks in symbol and metaphor. 

Me -"It would need to be in a Gendlin form of metaphor and image, and sensation"

This isn't the answer he was looking for! As he explains that normally, 'nothing is off the table' for discussion. 

Well Kit, let me tell you what I know! People who come to therapy don't want to hear the therapist's views or feelings, a part of being in problem mind, is that nothing except their personal reality matters. 

But people who don't feel that there is something about themselves to understand, have enough mental bandwidth to interact with others. 

Despite our entanglement and the lack of honesty I don't have a problem I can't understand. This problem is between us. We have the problem! But I can't talk to someone who has so seriously missed me by light years...and wont talk about his feelings!

He - "Yes"

That meaningless, empty yes again.

Me - " I think the raw impression of sensation brought to awareness through symbol/ sensation/ felt-sense is far truer, than any already conscious understanding, symbolized in iconic or, indexical words. But then, that's just my observation...

He - "Sorry, you lost me there"

---

Remember this phrase:

'Nothing is off the table really'

Because in 14th February 2022  it will return - when I make one more attempt to get to the truth of all this. 

Original post.