He - "Hello, come in"
He talks about heating, I mention the light. And the coffee is there, ready and waiting for me. I am assignment free for a day or two! The assignments make me feel as if I've been locked in a box, unable to think my own thoughts; that I don't know how I'd actually answer the assignments if I wasn't 'writing to pass'. And to remedy this sense of being confined I talk about something I wrote for him last year.
Me - "So we must still have been in lockdown, April last year? I remember saying something about 'Seven Sermons to the Dead'? And I wrote you the first one - and I did write another one - but I didn't read that second one to you. None of this makes sense"
He - "Is that a prequal and you are now saying that you are going to read the second one"?
Foolishly I'm attempting now to describe a semi-shamanistic practice of 'riding' experiences. How feeling tones translate into image...I blame the pressure cooker effect of my assignments, I just want to write my own thoughts - and the effect of the past few years is that basically I am a wreck. I say it again that after what happened, I felt as if I'd taken a bullet to my skull. Things stopped making sense, reference points were obliterated. I stumbled through year one of my degree, in a fog. Yet clearly - by my marked assignments, by my practice sessions, and by my conduct in class - I processed words and wrangled ideas well enough. I'm still stumbling, but my eyes and ears are reconnecting - is how it feels - the path is getting clearer
The songs 'Bullet' by Covenant and 'Bullet train to Iowa ' by Puscifer, helped me to return to a coherent sense of time; so clutching my Bullet journal - Mars in the sky as winter drew close, I walked home each evening after lectures, in darkness and despair.
Music was so, so important for me - the words, especially from Covenant especially so. Their lyrics reminded me that it isn't true...I'm not alone at all.
And I kept writing....I keep writing..
Puscifer reflected the psychedelic twist, the prevalence of inexplicable resonances and intrusions that severe stress enables! But, both tracks express the same sense of unstoppable...
Me - "I felt as if I'd been shot through the head, basically"
He - "By what exactly"?
A request for declarative memory.
What a strange question?
Not 'what kind of feeling is that'?
Or, 'What helped you to keep on studying'
Or 'What you went through must have been really tough then, how is it now?'.
The 'by what' question could be a key to open up the contemplation of the inherent emptiness of all phenomena. A mental protocol to challenge the pervasive sense of problem and difficulty. For there was no gun, I wasn't shot.
I'm being dramatic...
I'm being out-Buddhist-ed'
I could find it funny.
But no, nor do I list the steps, the stages, the way I tried to navigate a path through Hell. Has he ever listened to me? My fault of course. I made it sound as if I'm OK - because I want to be...or he made assumptions that I'm just using words because I like the sound of them, and because I don't sound like a Child. I possibly sound like an Adult stating in a matter of fact way that four years of sleep deprivation; in fear of one's own violent death, in fear of the suicide of one's child - isn't conducive to optimal brain function?
Then suffering betrayal - so, yeah, shot through the head!
That's the right metaphor.
Add Covid and lockdown, it was a strange, dissociated time.
I explain that when a person is in severely stressful situations, there isn't time to stop and feel the wounds. But when they reach safety, they collapse, and the enormity of the situations they faced are a tsunami of raw feeling and impressions. So, I felt as if I'd been shot, overwhelmed by a rush of impressions and flashbacks, panic attacks and despair.
Why am I having to explain this to a psychotherapist?
He doesn't ask for the texture, or quality of the experiences?
This isn't about contact...
He -"That sounds concerning that you were there all that time and were on a course and not learning. Or it could be concerning that you are on a course and you are not learning it"
It sounds concerning because I wasn't learning, that tells me exactly what he thinks of me!
What do I hope I'd have said?
'It sounds concerning that you had to go through this, what is it about you that makes you able to get through terrible things"?!
I don't challenge, and I have an impression of something, like red warning lights on the dashboard. Which version of me to access? To say 'WTF! So you are saying that everything I struggled to get through was a waste of my time? Pray tell, what was the alternative!' Nope, I use a gentle tone of voice, I placate. I plough on, I reassure. I trust my instincts. He has just told me that it - implication is that my lack of learning - is concerning. The problem is I'm in placement - this is not good! He has power, so it is important that I don't say what I'm thinking! Being able to use the steady, calm and kind tone of voice ultimately comes from trusting myself. I've passed my assignments. I wrote my first year assignments whilst my son was asking me to help him avoid MI5/Mossad/ IRA...My assignments passed first time. I probably felt worse when I was in the NHS actually, burn out and vicarious trauma were normal, a kind of debilitating 'background radiation' we all just lived with it. In retrospect it probably helped me to develop survival skills - how 'to switch to automatic and take control' when 80% of me is in shut-down!
He asks me -"What would you like from the course"?
Me - "To just be able to explore ideas properly, without the subjects being directed by the needs of the exam board"
And I end by saying that as we have to have so many references for each assignment (20 minimum) and as I have used possibly every book in the library, plus all the therapy ones in my Kindle, I aim to get a quote from Gilgamesh, or another 5000 year old text into an assignment before I'm done! And yes, I found an opportunity to quote from Gilgamesh before the end of the year!
He - "Does it matter to your clients, Babylonian mythology"?
Me -"You never know what will be useful to form a link, or a bridge, ever."
SAS Who Dares Wins has been useful twice now. Everything we see, feel, and everything that we are is important in the therapy room. Stories help, having a wide range of interests helps. But yes, the story of Gilgamesh certainly added to a conversation with one person who was deep within the failure part of their personal Great Journey. Gilgamesh could not be the king his strength and talents qualified him to be until he'd lost what mattered most to him, and reached his absolute limit - all of us reach our limits and fail. Then the journey back can begin.
There is a reason why this story is still being told.
Then Kit proposes a derive around my future. My future is not easy to see and I don't want to think about it. I'm keeping my head down, I'm doing the best I can with what I have. I tell it as if I'm exploiting my husband's inertia because the other story, the true story is that I'm terrified of him. This is something I don't want to talk about or feel, until I have enough of a wage to live on.
He - "Because one thing you have been very keen on is telling the truth regardless of what it is. and here you are, heading in the other direction because it is financially useful - yeah - doesn't really fit well "
Me - "With your image of me"
He - "Well it doesn't fit your own narrative"
I wonder what he thinks my narrative is? Wasn't it something about becoming the kind of therapist that someone like my son's friend would be able to talk to? And to become the kind of therapist who has skills enough to create the right psychological conditions for a positive change? And training to become a therapist isn't about making money - sure, some make it pay! Who knows how! - the people I'm for wont have money...but for now, I am on this path, and keeping my head down.
But there is a deeper issue, the amount of fear my husband inspires in me. I think it is important for now that I let it be - I will deal with it when I have resources enough. My husband scares me - apart from his violence - because I understand madness, severe anxiety even into psychosis. But I don't understand my husband's calculated and resolute psychic absence. It destroyed me. It was like touching a thing, no longer a person. I found no sensation of soul; within him, when I held him, or within his tone of voice or words. And yet I picked up on his 'transference', I embodied the counter-transference and felt as if I shouldn't exist. He saw me as a threat, if I knew the truth then he would feel it through me...The fear felt alien, it wasn't mine. I don't run. But in this case - my narrative is that I'm Ripley.
Me - "Well it does, because that's the role he puts me in....because the alternative is I have to fight"
He - "See I was wondering more, there is a question there about how you see yourself and what sort of direction you want to head in"
Metaphorically on the Nostromo...Blowing it out of the airlock wont be enough. LV 426 is next!
I read to him:
13 Apr 2021
The first horse was a horse of fire.
Traveling a road of dancing blue flame.
to retrieve spirit.
Now the second horse waits for me.
A heavyweight horse.
A mottled darkness - blue and brown.
A horse made of earth.
I open my eyes in a blasted land.
I am here to recover my body.
Since 2016 I felt as if I was wearing an iron corset, nails on the inside.
I thought it was me…
It began when I felt we had space for me to challenge….
And then I feel the sound.
I hear my son, Josh hit the floor.
The floor is concrete, unyielding, unforgiving.
impact.
I keep my head, controlling my tone of voice.
Aiming my intention between them like a force field, protecting, earthing and disarming.
Feeling sick.
Again, this time in the hall, Josh is on the floor.
Heat, sound, fury.
And I am stepping in between.
This violence cannot be.
I feel so sick…
Time to take the ride.
We are walking down dark corridors
I am in despair, I feel weak and lost.
I need to feel safe.
I don't feel safe, I haven't felt safe for such a long time...
Searching for 'jack trauma',
no one knows which ward he is in.
after 7 hours of surgery.
In the waiting room.
The leaflets are all about brain damage.
So I've found it
I’m where I need to be
The lapis manalis
I meet my husband here in this cold, numb space.
A memory of when I said enough, I can’t take it.
If my son is brain damaged - I feel waves of panic, resentment, despair, anger.
I will always be looking after him.
I won't ever find my way back to the world.
I’m trapped, helpless..
His family's motto “better off dead” yes, I felt that.
My North star shifted too far...no longer a still point.
No longer any guide.
But I’ve seen this so many times before.
I’ve heard this from people at their wits end.
Drowning in exhaustion.
I know
Like an eclipse - it’s only the moon in the way
And a pole star returns
It may not be the same one…
But in my lifetime it’s only clouds in the way.
I open my eyes and I stand beside the river.
He said that I didn't think that he was good enough.
And I didn’t say that I didn’t feel wanted…
Each time I bought myself some shoes or a coat I felt as if I was packing my bags for a long journey
Logic says it was when Donna began work in his room.
I heard it in his tone of voice.
Talking about work, about one particular child, who would bite and scratch and would attack other members of staff
Yet I know that the dagger entered my heart years before…
Back to the beginning.
I came home and he was panicking, didn’t want me to see, but the computer was mine...frozen with a hundred pages of porn open.
No judgment
I acted as if the searing flash, as lethal as that from the demon core, was only bright light.
Yet in that soundless blast my skin died, all my identifying features were obliterated.
There is no sacred bond.
And
He is normal.
I am not.
Where can conflict lead?
So I intellectualize porn as 'liminal', disconnected from me
I know that he loves me.
Be practical: side with friendship, be his partner, just do better
I can hold multiple viewpoints.
And I can't know, won't know.
The horse looks at me as if to say, well...are you going to take this trip?
I pause.
Still thinking.
He was right
He hit our son.
He said ‘anyone would have’
He said he should have hit him more....
He knows what’s in my heart.
It doesn't matter that I ask for repair.
He knows that to my heart and soul, he has become unacceptable.
Doesn't matter that I'm kind.
The clue is in his demand that I don't speak, don't cry, don't show that I'm upset....without me he hasn't 'done anything wrong' and without me he will feel OK and 'normal'.
I drown in a silence as thick as treacle.
The bond between us had been severed...without me knowing.
Donna is 'kin' and
I am not.
I climb up onto the horse of earth’s back, and I ride without a saddle, without a bridle.
I ride in trust.
He - "What's it like coming out of such a bad time"?
Without Eros, I wouldn't have made it, is what I think.. Then here and now, Eros still gets me through - your intelligence and knowledge, your energy - I don't say that. Also, I'm not through it yet. I have a long way to go...
Me - "What is it like - it isn't like anything. It is a still point, a stasis, a disconnected place, not connected to the world, surrounded by dark corridors. It is a horrible place, and I've met many people in that place"
He - "Is it in the past - it sounds very present?"
Of course it is in the present! I've just said it! I climb up onto the horse of earth’s back, and I ride without a saddle, without a bridle. I ride in trust away and out from my marriage. But I have work to do - and getting 'qualified' is where I am and what I'm doing...There is no out of this until I have kept my promise.
Comments