Coercion.
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 suffering gaslighting.
Coercion occurs when one has to enact a reality that makes no sense - 'or else' a threat that something undefined but awful will happen.
The mental health team could not respect my son's justified fears, and threatened him with sectioning for 'non-compliance'. My husband could not bear to see the effect of his lies on me, and so he made out that my pain was impossible to understand.
Because I thought that he was an intelligent man I tried to explain it...but he didn't seem to understand.
So I'd explain it in different words
Which gave him permission to tell me that I was treating him like a child, and that I was imagining things. And how there was something wrong with me because I kept explaining things that didn't make sense, to him, 'over and over' as if he didn't understand.
Coercion will happen 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. It 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...
It cannot be impossible for a therapist to understand that I want to get to clarity, to seek resolution. And as he imagines me reading his email I imagine him saying, 'that's not the answer you were hoping for'
And telling me that I'm not listening.
But I think I did, and I think I really am...
Who knows!
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, I did what I had to do - I appeared to have kept my head.
I think overall, there is quite a lot to be said for embracing a full ANS meltdown (autonomic nervous system - fight, flight, panic, fawn, freeze...) when grief and loss really are too much. The pain is real, it deserves to be honoured - to contain it, to have to act as if it isn't happening is again a safety interlock. It is like putting the experience into cryo, for revival only when things are safe enough to process what happened.
It preserves the pain.
It's stuck, frozen, intractable.
It had to be that way because to demonstrate that the pain is a result of how a 'health professional' has behaved - will not end well. I want this to be understood - 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. And as a therapist myself I will never agree that pain should be treated as if it is inevitably stuck, frozen, intractable.
But - If he choses to behave as if there is nothing: nothing happened, nothing to happen, nothing can happen...what do I do?
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