"When you reached the point of overload and handed over to your husband what was that like for you"? 10th January 2022.

Is there a difference in his hello?

We speak in unison. 

Coffee?

The sound of cupboard doors, cups, the clink of the spoon.

He - "So where to today?"

Me -"We could do time travel."

He - "How do we do that"?

Me - "By using music"

He - "I'm still not with you"

Me - "Music is evocative - well evocative for me - we could do that"?

He - "I'm still not with you - oh, you have got some music with you"?

This is a strange session, I am talking about my identity. Talking about identity is what I do now (in 2024) with clients who feel that they are broken. I'm beginning to see it as vital, it is a key to restoring a sense of 'I am', because 'I can do x,y,z'. It is more than confounding the sense of 'I can't do anything' into 'actually I can do plenty'. The question, 'tell me about you, what do you love' often brings the answer 'I used to' - but in remembering, the past becomes present tense, the memories are breaks in the tragedy, specks of gold to be noticed and gathered.

My identity has been shattered in the recent past.

My identity is fractured, not shattering at the moment.

I need to take care of myself!

Meanwhile, he is describing our sessions as 'very word led' - wondering where all my emotion at having my home physically wrecked, and my marriage revealed as a tissue of lies and deceit, is. I wonder what has been said in supervision? Or is he thinking about last week - wondering where was rage, my tears, my frustration, my sadness and grief? But in the light of the dialogue and how I felt during it I've no idea now what it would take for me to tell him! Right now I'm in a room with the man I've told that I love, and I have no idea what he actually feels. He has not expressed his feelings about me, or about this situation. 

And he is telling me that my feelings are missing! 

Right now he is asking me about the past, my catastrophic past. So I explain; about 'it' all that I got through, and my certainty that I got through only because I felt it all at the time - experience had taught me to stay present, don't black out.. The 'it' was my son's psychosis, his suicide attempt, sectioning, drugs legal and illegal and more - and my husband deciding that having sex with someone else would be fine. The statement - I felt 'it' at the time - is important, it is why I'm on my way to OK enough. But also I know that falling in love with him has been integral to my desire to live and carry on. Not because I needed someone. I was loved - still am loved- I feel like Penelope, suiters appear! But it is him I loved then - and he is who I love now - no matter how nonsensical such powerful feelings appear to be, to myself or to anyone else! The beautiful, fiery and electric feelings I have for him have been integral to my healing. The hope of coffee fueled discussions at 3 pm (as 3 am isn't such fun past the age of 50) sustained me through my darker moments for sure, and would certainly be useful. 

Yet here and now he is seeking to get me into emoting, by asking more questions about the end of my marriage? So I explain that I have no problems with being emotional. But it has to be when it is justified by situations, and when I feel safe; not just happening without any awareness of context. And nope, he's not going to pick up on those themes of not feeling safe here, or how it is that I don't feel that this is the right time and place to talk about the recent past.

What I want to ask is, why am I'm being asked to replay my feelings here and now?

Why? 

And he pushes, so this matters to him...so I am talking about how it felt to have my son sectioned when he still had unhealed fractured bones, to see him sitting white as a ghost, unable to speak and locked up in an environment like playschool, and the atmosphere of the mental hospital - no I honestly do not wish to recall. Then how we got him home - and the phone call from the hospital, telling me to bring him back. There was with no consideration at all for what we had all gone through. 

Emotion; rage, disbelief, bewilderment, sadness are in my voice. 

And there is only that 'yes' again. 

And that is all...

I feel as if my feelings have been dishonored...minimized, dismissed.

He asks - "When you reached the point of overload and handed over to your husband what was that like for you"

What!!!

What did I hand over in his view, to my husband? 

I asked my husband to go to the hospital to be with our son when the time came for him to be sectioned - I couldn't be there - my son had pleaded with us to stop them from taking him...I'd have fought to the death to stop that happening.

He is directing me to remember something that didn't happen! 

What was that like?

When my husband took over.... 'took over when I was on overload'? Well, let me see. What a lovely idea, how nice that would have been! 

My husband didn't take over, regardless of me being on overload. 

And nor did I 'hand over' anything - except my phone - once! 

I accepted that I shouldn't go on with a conversation (when I was asked to bring my son back to the mental hospital). And I chose not to be with my son on the day he was going to be taken from the hospital ward after his suicide attempt, to the mental hospital, I asked my husband to go, and my husband carried on without me. 

If he'd said he couldn't do either of these things, I'd have made myself do it! But I was frayed, coming apart. I felt as if I had done as much as I could, I'd tried talking to the mental health home visit team, I'd tried to explain to the psychiatrist...

I explain to him -"If no one else could do it I would just have had to. Like turning a knob on a gas jet to control the flame, to make it more of a laser to guide me..

He - "yes"

Me -"rather than creating a blast"

He - "Yes <pause> I know you have spoken often about times when your husband fell short, but I wonder in this situation.

Untrue. When I first came to therapy I said I wanted to repair my marriage. I spoke often about how my husband and I were friends first and foremost. A part of me believing that his year of gaslighting was understandable in the context of all else that had happened! 

Could it be that Kit is saying; couldn't you be grateful!?

And the answer is no. 

No, I am not grateful. 

My husband didn't share the weight of the situation with me. He didn't step forward to help. On the contrary, I think he resented me for needing support. When it came to the day of sectioning it was our responsibility to be with our son. I was broken, and my husband didn't try to help me - at that time he was mostly feeling 'weird' (he told me!) about the texts he was getting of support from 'her' as 'she had been through something similar...' I later got to understand that weird was his euphemism for erection. 

And here and now I'm being directed to see things differently!

To hell with that! 

I was there and I will never forget.

Is this therapy?

I had said repeatedly that for at least 70% of our time together, in our marriage, our relationship was good. And despite the final violence, despite the final gaslighting and the chance that there could have been more infidelity than I knew of I said that I was willing to repair and work with all of it. 

I valued our marriage!

But that ended, had to end when I knew without any doubt that he was continuing to lie. This point had to be the end! Think of the film  Alien. I can't negotiate with something that has the unbridled instinct and capacity and the desire to destroy in effect me and the whole family, for its own purposes. What he did was beyond, there was no coming back from that! The cold cruelty - the lies...absolutely no more, it had to stop, it was inhuman...Blow it out the air-lock!

Falling short? 

Interesting use of words...

He hit his son, threw him to the floor more times than once, more than an instant reaction that he came to deeply regret. 

He did it again, at least three other times. 

He said he wished that he'd hit him more. 

Falling short of what, my unbelievably high standards? 

On the contrary I was scarily way too forgiving!

But what I cannot understand now as I write this is; didn't Kit know how bad it had been? Hadn't I said this before? Did he think I'd imagined things to be worse than they were whilst at the same time being in denial about how bad things were?

Me -"No, most of the time we were a good partnership, we worked well together. But part of my role was being 'the boron rods' for him - slowing down his fear and anger, restoring his sense of safety and control -  and he could not do that for me."

So, nothing similar is happening here then!

He -"It's interesting to see when you talk about it just how much of the potencies of the events is still around"

What kind of god forsaken language is that?

Interesting, potencies of the events!

Me - "Oh god yes! It will never go, but it is a lesson - it was a ceremony of degradation (turning a person into a 'service user' ) one of many ceremonies people perform, where  a person's status is destroyed. They don't mean it to be, but it is. 'Keep taking your meds, keep turning up, ask no questions'. There is no way out of this because the way out is to face all the things you can't face"

He - "That analogy is very striking - ceremony of degradation - to say, 'I'm the winner, you are the loser' and here is the ritual to show that this is so and so you know that you are defeated. Is that how that situation at the hospital felt - like that? A ritual of defeat?

Defeat? 

Who was defeated - no one. 

Nor could anyone triumph, it is simply a tragedy. 

Mine is an ordinary tale, it happens everyday. Very few of us speak about it because we think that no one wants to hear. I refuse silence, and my tale is powerful and worth telling. People think tragedy and crisis bring family together. They don't. In the aftermath once loving couples can no longer bear to look at each other, the pain and weight of memories proves too much. Yet we didn't all 'drown' in the sea of fear and madness that overtook us. My husband, my eldest son and my youngest daughter were swept away by it. But my youngest son and his elder sister, and I, we held on tight and we got to dry land.

Me -"I think incidentally it turns into that, it isn't meant to defeat or degrade; but it does. And for the people doing it, of course that isn't their motivation, but we are dealing with belief systems  interacting with other belief systems. And the word psychosis has a lot of power, and sectioned, too, the words have connotations and they are stigmatizing....

I talk about how I process memory, how I need to remember, replay, and understand what I felt.

He asks me - "Oh what's that on your laptop, it looks a bit like a flame with an eye in it"?

And yes there is more, so much more. 

But is isn't in the words or dialogue. 

What's missing was and always will be, missing.