Here ends Part One .
Autumn Equinox 2024.
Updated Summer solstice 2025.
[+] This blog begins on Glastonbury Tor.
High up - you can see for miles!
It is understood as a magical place, the meeting point of many energy lines and forces.
Many people come to stand there together.
No one single belief system rules, it is free and open to all.
Welcome!
When I wrote the first post of this blog [+] I was in recovery from the therapy I'd received. Let me say that again, after therapy ended - I was in a bad way - because of therapy.
I felt powerless, and silenced.
Again.
During the gaslighting [+] that ended just two months before I started therapy, I had needed to ignore all and any thoughts or feelings that contradicted my husband's version of reality. If I allowed myself to take my thoughts and feelings seriously, I would try to find out the truth. And when I did that....let's just say it really wasn't worth it. The response from my husband would leave me wracked with pain and self blame.
This ended of course once I found out that he had been lying to me. [+] When I found out the truth, I also found out that my feelings had been accurate, and therefore must be pretty accurate. The awfulness I'd felt had not been just my imagination, nothing that I'd imagined had been intrusive thoughts due to severe and chronic stress. But it is so easy to undermine oneself by using that theory.
The A.B,C that underpins CBT is that A = we observe an action (something happens), and we interpret it through B = beliefs, and the consequence of our belief C, may be totally wrong because our belief closed off other interpretations of A. My compelling reason to mistrust myself was that I was suffering from anxiety...I saw anxiety as a something that would create the worst possible beliefs and warp whatever I saw into a living hell.
The paradox was that reality really had been changed. The husband I trusted was not trustworthy. But I could not believe that without proof. When I asked for truth things didn't go well. So invalidating myself was easier to accept. I can find ample evidence of why I am often wrong!
I needed to believe that I was anxious though. It stopped me asking questions. It sent me to the bathroom to sing a 13 minuites song when I felt the panic attacks begin. I could see it as a nothing. And it was better than arguments.
Except.
Except it wasn't all in my mind.
My worst fears were true.
Meanwhile my husband probably felt sick and full of shame as he knew what he was doing, and the distress it caused.
Really?
But his response was what?
To bully me... it was emotional and physical abuse.
I didn't let myself name it as abuse until I questioned why I was trying to hide, asking myself why was I in a black and overwhelming panic. Why was I crawling into the space between the wall and my bed, arms over my head, trying not to make a sound.
I'd always thought it was CPTSD.
Oh really?
When I found the courage to turn inwards and ask myself to name the impulse to hide, and when I allowed myself to say what I would think if I was observing this happening to my child, to a friend, to a dog...when I stopped being brave and trying to manage the situation. When I gave up! I named what my body, heart and soul were telling me, I discovered that I was terrified of this man.
Not my past.
This was my real and awful present.
I understood, but couldn't yet bring myself to believe that I was powerless. I felt that he was capable of harming me when I got it wrong. Therefore I had to get everything right. If I saw myself as powerless I'd be curled up dysfunctional, lost and gone beyond all the time, not just sometimes! But why was this happening? Why was he doing this?
Ah, Factor X.
He bullied me because he was scared of her husband, I had to be silenced, that is, I needed to be so traumatized I wouldn't be able to ask any more questions. I had said that if the relationship with her continued I certainly wouldn't stay around or pretend it hadn't happened. He thought therefore I'd tell her husband. And yes, I certainly would have! Because he would be going through the same deception as me, if I didn't let him know! So my husband's 'compelling explanation' for his behaviour was 'the stress of my son's mental illness', this justified things like sitting up all night messaging - sorry, I mean 'doing paperwork' because his job was so stressful after all the s**t 'he'd been through'. His compelling explanation was supposed to stop me asking questions. Rather like Kit's 'compelling explanation (clients come back) a cliché.
And my questions were a problem because if I found out the truth he knew that this time I wouldn't 'let it go'...In retrospect, Factor X drove much of my husband's behaviour.
The truth is, my distress was useful to him as it made me crawl away. And my need for clarity and honesty was a problem, a danger even (in his mind). But, other than diagnosing myself, I diagnosed him too. At the time I assumed he was playing out his childhood of insecure, avoidant attachment 'after all the s**t 'he'd been through'.
See I would be agreeing with Kit if I hadn't had the benefit of this experience.
And so when I caused the therapist to feel shame, or something I can't identify, by letting him know how I felt about him, my therapy become a continuation of the system I'd just escaped. Almost exactly the same dynamic. I simply needed clear and open dialogue about feelings, about his feelings. And because he refused this, he was doing exactly the same thing as my husband! Kit's inability (worse than refusal somehow) to actually slow down and let me feel my way into describing what had happened between us prevented me from making a realistic assessment of what was going on. When Kit asked me if I was 'suggesting' (his word) that I could possibly be in grief (my word) at losing any hope that he might want our relationship to reconfigure - I spoke as if from 'Adult' rather than be fitted neatly into his concept of regression. I was aware of how he took any hint that he was less than perfect as wounding (therefore we never healed any ruptures and I couldn't trust him as a therapist). I was aware that when I connected to emotion through metaphor, or simply through tuning in and holding the feelings, it confused him. So I changed the word from grief to loss. A careful selection of words was so difficult, but so necessary.
Why did I feel the need to be so careful with my words, why was I attempting perception management even?
Because I felt powerless and under threat of being told that my feelings were 'incorrect'...his language was defensive, generally along the lines of "What makes you think that...about me!" And of course I could not tell why I had thought it, because he'd deny it. That had been my experience so far!
I was careful with my words because anytime I'd said that I'd felt a misunderstanding, he would apologize and then a give an explanation of what he'd intended - because clearly I'd misunderstood him, it couldn't have been his words I'd heard! His phrase was, 'You were hearing things I didn't intend to say' which is an incredibly ambiguous statement! And I'm not saying that I hear accurately (does anyone?) but instead of exploring with me how it was I'd heard what ever I'd heard, he would simply tell me what I should have heard.
I was always left wondering what had actually happened to Kit!
Because I was bringing his bad memories back into the room for sure. And that had been OK - until I named it?
And during this Kit felt...well what?
All I know is that something had happened to him before, something to do with his reputation, and because of it he heard my truth as transgressive. Yet transgressive didn't fit the picture of what was happening in the room, I didn't flirt, I didn't even dare to make eye-contact (our eyes met only once during two years)! And only once did I allow my feelings into my voice, just once...
Kit's memories of the previous threat to his reputation (this is most likely his Factor X) poisoned our sessions.
And I was silenced.
Almost.
Once I'd realized that I had feelings for him I began recording and analysing, to understand, and then much later I began writing the transcripts.
This was therapy for my therapy.
I needed to know what had actually happened.
As I listened [+I I realized that I was still suffering from the consequences. So I decided to contact him and ask if we couldn't try to find a good way through this. I had believed that my request made it obvious that something was wrong.
He told me to never contact him again.
Ethically, a refusal to own one's mistakes isn't an option for therapists.
Overall, I'm extremely angry about how he responded.
So I decided to publish the whole thing. [+]
Here are a few posts that help I guess, to tell the story. You, dear reader are at liberty to copy, paste, quote, laugh at, analyse, dissect, empathize, criticize, sympathize with everything in this blog.
- The session in which he tells me of another client who may have had feelings for him? [+]
- The session after I'd given him a voice message, an mp3, telling him how I felt about him [+]
- The session in which he tries to get me to think kindly of my husband. [+]
- The session where I ask him once more to be completely honest with me. [+]
- The page with the mp3 I gave to him, telling him how I felt - that I'd fallen into limerence, or love. [+]
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