Scattered pieces

So we hadn’t heard from the guy in America for awhile. We’d got used to that. Ok so we had got a bit defensive about the whole thing and eliminated all the emails etc, but nothing too extreme considering the week we’ve had. Then we get an email from him and we’re back to the confusion again! We know we need friends, and have thankfully found a couple of really nice people through places like YouTube. But with him being a guy, it gets confused with the need to please men.

We enjoy hearing his voice and talking to him… Just having someone to talk to who knows what its like to go through the day switching makes us feel a whole lot more normal. So we do get something out of the friendship. But he’s male! He’s funny and intelligent and sweet – it’s dangerous! Wish we had the strength to not contact him, but we don’t. We could intellectualise it away by saying that we need to test our ability to break the patterns of pleasing men and he’s a good test subject :) But somehow I don’t think that’s a good argument. Would make it feel like we’re using him, and we don’t want to do that. We’re just worried about what will happen when we all get hurt – and we know that there will be hurting, just because there is a level of caring involved in being a friend. It just feels more dangerous within that friendship because he is a male.

This entry probably indicates more than anything how messed up our relationships with men really are.

Yesterday our clinical psychologist got a hint of the anger/angry states that are in this mind.

With the craziness over the last few days Sophie ended up calling the Mental Health Crisis Line. They always start off with wanting to know your name, address and phone number – well she could do the name and address, but with us changing our phone numbers so recently to the confidential ones she couldn’t remember them. Instead of the “nice” crisis line worker saying something like “Oh have you got them written down somewhere that you can check”, she said “well how are the CAT team going to contact you?” Now you can quite rightly call us crazy, but when someone calls a crisis line, they’re strangely enough IN A CRISIS… Their thinking is altered… Their logic off kilter… So you can’t expect them to think through how to get those numbers. So Sophie just thanked her for her help and hung up – yes even in a crisis she’s polite :)

So fast forward to yesterday, we get a text from our clinical psychologist asking if we were ok… we were for once honest and said “No”! She said that the CAT team had contacted her because they were concerned about us, and so was she… Well that was not such a good thing to say when we’d been asking for her help for the last month, and the psychiatrist she recommended had been slack with our medication! So Frank decided it was time to tell the clinical psychologist something! Frank is a rather angry part that often comes forward when we’re in hospitals and when our defences are weak. His main language is swearing, with the occasional noun thrown in just to connect the swear words…

Problem is we all have amnesia for when Frank is present. So we just lost the afternoon. The thing that made us realise that he’d sent a text was that the phone settings had been changed – he likes using capitals! So after a rather frantic search we found the honest, but not diplomatic text he sent :( This meant we had to apologise to her for the language… It’s still our brain doing it so it’s still our responsibility to try and fix.

Will be interesting to see what happens when we have our appointment with her on Friday – more than a little worried about it!

Just breaking…
Don’t know where to go or what to do…
Just breaking apart at the seams…

Aren’t organisations meant to help? But no, both ACC and the police are just looking to sweep things under the rug… Who cares if the husband breached the Protection Order? Who cares what your true level of functioning is – they just want to save money…

Just breaking…

We know that these issues are just ones we can focus on rather than the big issues that are underneath… but we can’t face those alone and we just don’t know where to turn. Our clinical psychologist can only suggest hospital…

For some reason this weekend has been a rough one. Wondering if its because we had Friday off to make up some professional development time? Not sure. But we’re now sitting in front of the computer wondering how we can go back to being “normal” or probably more accurately “usual”?

Our coping skills went out the window over the weekend and we ended up getting drunk on Friday and self injuring on Saturday. Haven’t done either in months. We couldn’t call the crisis lines, not sure why, possibly because the fear of either being taken to hospital or just getting bad service. We texted our clinical psychologist and she wanted us to go into respite for the weekend… That’s the equivalent of getting us sectioned as the angry ones come forward thinking they have to protect us within the hospital environment, so lash out angrily – never physical harm to others, but lots of verbal anger and self-injury. Even then they never swear at anyone that I’m aware of.

So how do you get normal back? How do you go back to even the level of dissociation we had before the car accident? We functioned so well… Ok so some of it wasn’t healthy, but we were so “with it”. We could cope with anything… People used to say that in the marriage we were the strong ones, always coping and moving along. Some of the women at work said that they pitied the ex-husband because we were so bossy – little did they know he abused us on every level as soon as their backs were turned.

We kinda like how we coped back then. We now realise much of it was we had coping mechanisms in place that we weren’t aware of – never go shopping when it was busy, always choose the checkout person at the end so no one was behind us etc. But now its a fight to leave the house if it doesn’t involve going to work! We can’t do basic things most NZers do like hang out the washing on the line. We have to build up strength and prepare for a week just to mow the lawns.

We haven’t seen our clinical psychologist for an appointment in a month. It’s now really starting to show. We’re falling apart at the seams. The need to escape is so high and we can’t do our usual thing of going for a drive to the lake – that would involve going over a bridge. We wish we could self-soothe in some way, but we can’t. Mind you while we’ve been sitting at the computer for most of the day we’ve been rocking… Thing is some of us hate the rocking, thinking its such a baby thing to do, so the ones that rock get told off and are told to grow up.

What’s really worrying, is that when we’re like this we’re at the most vulnerable for the ones who need to feel needed through satisfying men to come forward. Thank goodness the ex-husband is gone or we’d be using him for self-punishment now.

Wishing that we could just eliminate the last three years of our life and go back to how it was. We know we can’t. We know there are positives about healing, just some weeks make it seem so difficult and not worth the journey.

We’ve got an appointment to see the clinical psychologist on Friday, hopefully we can make it to then without breaking…