Coercion.
OK, this is hard - I need to dig deep. The pain of it is almost beyond my endurance, and yet at the same time I am above, observing, watching and recording. The pain is like wearing a dress made of nettles.
And so I turn towards it, embrace it and connect.
Holding out my hand I ask into the empty air, 'what is your name?'
In the roiling blackness of the void I hear the words
'I am your intoxication'.
Gently I ask the pain, what do you need?
My hand touches something cold and rough, like shark's skin. And below me deep under an ocean of tears and a crimson gush of my heart's-blood, the words 'love and soul' boil, radiant and poisonous as a nuclear flash. The sun turns blue, a 'vision' of Cherenkov light, 'the blue sun' I'd seen in my semi-psychotic state when I had left the therapy room for the last time.
"love and soul..."
Returning from inside to out, directing my vision to the keyboard, to the soft white light of the screen. And I know, with certainty that I'm once again connected to the layer of ultra-strange I experienced before, way back when this all began. That I am gifted once more with the precious third vision, when songs condense half glimpsed impressions, sensations and knowledge. Telling me more than I wish to know - visions intrude, describing in metaphor something unknown, in a twilight language of image and movement, and overwhelming sensation.
I am returned to a time of warnings.
No longer can I attribute this to stress. I no longer feel as if my mind is cracked into a thousand, fragmenting mirror shards now almost two years away from the last episode in the breaking up and breaking apart of my life. [+]
And the song that has coalesced and condensed, is not a good omen, as I hear it flavouring and echoing what I dimly perceive to be underneath, this is the reality I believe myself to be within - as a consequence of beginning a process of requesting my therapy notes.
Being forced to enact even a true theory, against one's will, is psychologically indistinguishable from - and therefore exactly as harmful as - being forced to enact a false theory.
This is the measure I used when my son was threatened with sectioning by the mental health team if he didn't take his SSRIs and it is the explanation of what is happening when one is sufferings gaslighting.
Coercion occurs when one has to enact a reality that makes no sense - 'or else' something undefined but awful will happen. It happens when there is a power dynamic, one can't easily walk away from...a sense of being trapped by bonds of loyalty, of love, or by threat...Experiencing coercion creates dislocation, a tearing of self rupturing from self. And then erasure - which is probably a safety override...and it feels like that now, again...
And without a shadow of a doubt I'm sure that Kit feels this way too.
The way out of a conflict between incompatible theories requires both people to truly want something better for them both and to really want each other to be happy; to talk, to play and then find a different way for both of them to proceed, one that feels good and works.
The last session felt like he was glad to be getting rid of me. As I left I'd had enough of seeing exactly how powerless I am and I 'kept my dignity' but I left the room feeling psychologically beaten, and bereft of strength and courage. I knew that no one would hear, or catch me if I fell - I left that room hallucinating, almost unable to walk...because I had complied, kept my head, but for whose benefit?
I think overall, there is quite a lot to be said for embracing a full ANS meltdown, when grief and loss really are too much. The pain is real, it deserves to be honoured.
I left 'with dignity' only because there was a threat of worse.
And when ever I've been forced to keep silent, I don't.
Hence this blog.
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