Scattered pieces

Yesterday the safety of the respite house came under question. We left to spend the day with the mother, mainly to test how well we are. It turns out we’re still not all that grounded or well…

When we returned we found that a new client had arrived at the respite house. This was fine, they are female and seemingly non-threatening. So we went down to our room to drop off some things, only to find that someone had been in and used our art supplies. The young ones were so upset about this boundary violation. Little Michelle came forward and looked around in tears. This may seem like an over-reaction considering nothing had been destroyed, but it was the young ones who had their things moved and used. M was prepared for our iPod to have been stolen, and it would have had less impact if that’s what had happened. The iPod is mainly for the teens and adults, we could have coped better than the invasion on the young ones things.

Then at night the new client went on a severe binging and purging cycle. It was awful for her, she’d felt so positive during the day. For us it was a huge trigger. We have food issues as well, not to the level of the new client, but her pain and acting out was enough to trigger us through the roof.

So our safe house doesn’t feel so safe anymore. We know it was the carers grandson who used our art things, we know the mother is trying and we know the new client is trying to work through their problems. But we feel so small and scared. We feel like we’ve taken a huge step backwards.

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I recently commented on an entry of Ivory’s, and included information from an article titled A failure of curiosity by Janet Migdow.  Unfortunately this article isn’t available freely, but I’ll describe the content here for those who are interested.  It’s an article that has stayed with me for many months, it offers an interesting insight into the therapeutic relationship between an intelligent woman diagnosed with DID and a therapist who is willing to examine their own processes and thoughts.

The first part of the article gives the therapists background – her drive to help people, her natural curiosity that was evident from childhood and her desire not to lose that curiosity.  She writes:

“I have always seen curiosity as the quintessential characteristic of a good clinician. I have never thought curiosity alone would make the consummate clinician. I simply think that, without a burning curiosity, becoming a therapist is a useless endeavor.”

(Migdow, 2008, p. 46).

Midgow describes the client as “Dr. B., a Caucasian, fifty-six-year-old, uppermiddle-class, professional woman of mild manners and distinguished bearing” (Migdow, 2008, p. 48), diagnosed with DID.  She had been a client for 6 years and over that time had stabilised to the point of becoming more aware of the parts and increasing her functioning.  Part way through their journey together, Dr. B. starting turning up late for sessions.  This lateness coincided with the topic of the sessions becoming more banal, with Dr. B. deflecting any attempts to probe deeper into the issues at hand.  Migdow describes this sort of deflecting as hypnotic - as a person who has done this sort of deflecting, I understand what she is talking about, it becomes hypnotic for the person doing the deflecting as well.

It was at this point, that Migdow recognised that she was bored.  She had gone from a place of deep respect for her client, to a place of boredom.  Migdow looked for issues within her own life to have brought her to this place, but identifies that the dissociative fragments encourage detachment from the issues.  This detachment allows Dr. B.’s skill with social chit-chat to maneuver the topic away from anything too deep (or scary).

After forcing Dr. B. to be aware of an incident where she is showing obvious signs of distress, it is revealed that it is the dissociative system is protecting both the client and the therapist from the events of the past.  The secrets were still being so carefully protected from everyone, with this chit-chat seen as the best method to continue all diversion from the truth.  Dr. B. had never realised that this was another of the systems defenses and had always associated it with there being “something wrong with my brain” (Migdow, 2008, p. 51).

Migdow (2008, p. 52) explains the sensation as:

“… you feel like a door cracks open in your mind, you experience yourself as noticing something familiar and then you forget not only what you noticed but the fact that you noticed anything at all. You feel frightened of what you glimpsed and frightened that your own mind seems elusive.”

The explanation for lulling both the therapist and client is found… she isn’t bored, or boring… she has an incredibly protective system that thought the secrets and safety of the host must be maintained in any way possible.  This became a turning point in the therapeutic relationship… one where the right road was found, but the telling was hard (butchered Dante quote).

This article has at times given me hope – it helps me to understand that some of the waffle that I do is possibly aimed at self-protection.  I often find myself losing getting lost in the twists and turns of a conversation within therapy, but I’ve always associated this with me being stupid and not being able to keep up.  The article also helps me when I’m in the denial, this could be another diversionary technique to stop me from delving too deep into the past.  I know that my self-injury could be seen as either a diversion or a scream for help…

So much of what we do is aimed at trying to uncover our truth, but that is a hard road that has been protected for many years.  This article shows how one therapist realised that the road was constantly being passed by and only with strength and knowledge can we go down it.

As a note, while this article particularly dealt with the relationship with a person with DID, I think that it could be translated to almost any therapeutic relationship.

Reference

Migdow, J. (2008). Failure of curiosity. Psychoanalytic Social Work, 15(1), 43-52. doi:10.1080/15228870802111781.

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This came through our twitter feed via CakeWrecks today.  It made us smile.

We don’t like the song so much, it’s more about the fun they obviously had making the clip :)

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I’ve just dropped the mother off at the airport.  She agreed to go home last night – so she doesn’t put me through more “torture” (her words).

I feel like the worst daughter ever.  I know she doesn’t mean any harm and she was trying to help, but it wasn’t working.  When we woke up this morning, I thought maybe I’d made a mistake and she should stay…  But then on the way to the airport she was talking about the cold snap that has come up the country and how it would hurt all the lambs (yes, I can’t even type what really would have happened to them).  I don’t watch the news at this time of the year because I know they will show the horrific shots of the lambs in trucks.  In my world, no lambs get hurt…  Most people would realise that you shouldn’t talk about cute animals being hurt to someone who is DID and suicidal, not so my mother.  This is why I’m sure that she really doesn’t understand DID or me.  She doesn’t intend to be cruel or nasty, she just doesn’t realise the implications of her words.

Because of her words, this is how Sophie was feeling last night…  It’s bad when one of our most high functioning and optimistic one does a collage like this.

Untitled by castorgirl on Polyvore.com

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“Unfit for work…” those words sting, they really do.  They’re the words used to explain why I won’t be able to work for the next 12 days.  They’re part of the standard form that the doctor fills in, so it’s nothing personal, but it means failure to some of us.  We know that our functioning at work has been so poor that there was no other choice, but it still cuts us to the core of what many of us perceive as our self-worth.  M in particular, is struggling with being put off work, yet she was the one who made the appointment and mentioned the problems we were having, knowing full well that enforced sick leave was the likely outcome.  M couldn’t hand the medical certificate over in person – it would be like admitting failure and having to face the disappointment of those around us; so we left it on the team leaders desk with an email message apologising for the inconvenience we were causing.  Some of us consider this the wimps way out… failing to face up to our responsibilities and the repercussions of our actions.

This morning we got a text message from our cynical work friend asking how we were.  I wasn’t sure how to respond, I know that in some ways I’m trying to protect her – she’s got enough on her plate without hearing my sob story.  So I sugar-coated what was happening.  No one at work was expecting us to have this time off, so it probably came as a shock.  I suppose this is one example of how we can appear so high functioning, but really be a total and utter mess.  What I fear the most is the reaction when we get back to work… will people alienate us, want to hug us, avoid talking about it?  At their core, the people that I work with are good and kind people, but they don’t understand mental health issues.  This means that I will odds are lie about what has happened when I get back to work, I’ll find some acceptable lie that doesn’t make them squirm.

This week we’ve also seen Jo and Liz…

Jo became quite worried about our safety after we did a collage with her.  It can be quite amusing on one level to see Jo’s art work which is all about love and happiness, while ours is dark and full of violence.  We both had mindless woman’s magazines to use as base material for the collage.  I had words like key, disappear, invisible… Jo had love and rainbow.  I had a picture of a puppet running through a door… Jo had a smiling woman on the beach.  She was concerned about our safety to the point of contacting Liz.  Poor Liz also now realises how much we were testing her when we first started seeing her – with Jo we go with the flow, but with Liz we resisted and argued at the beginning.  This wasn’t deliberate, but rather an unconscious way to see whether Liz was going to be able to help us heal and put up with what we could throw at her.

When we saw Liz, it was what I would consider a disaster.  Little Michelle came forward and made it almost impossible for us to speak.  She has such a problem with words and forming them that it’s like she is stuttering, but I don’t think it’s a true stutter, I think it’s more about not wanting to tell the secrets.  At one point, we were stuck on one sentence, and in particular one word… “I’m not special“.  We were so incapable of saying the word special, that we ended up having to write it down.  Little Michelle stuttered through explaining that she wasn’t “that word” to anyone, because if you were “that word” you then got hurt.  She wanted to runaway so that the pain would stop.  Liz offered to runaway with her, but Little Michelle said that no one else was allowed to come.  All the time this was going on, there were ones in the background yelling that she was telling lies and it’s all rubbish.  This was the first time the messages about it all being lies were so closely tied to someone saying anything.  Little Michelle shared no abusive events, but her presence alone was enough to stir-up the denial and nay-sayers.  That probably means something in psychology land, but to us it just felt crazy.

So we have 11 more days before we are allowed back to work…  We’re meant to relax and unwind…  This is terrifying!  Work is our structure, our safety.  Suddenly we’re meant to do this thing called relaxation and rest.  We’ve actively avoided doing either of those things for about 20 years…  Today we survived by going down to the gardens and taking pictures with the new lens’ we got the other day.  Not sure how we’re going to cope with another 11 days of this.

Here’s a random photo we took today…

Cherry blossom

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Now playing: Shihad – Pacifier
via FoxyTunes

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I have come to a point in my healing where the sometimes dichotomous thinking and advice that I have been given has become confusing and counter-productive.  I said in a previous post that I have become so good at distraction techniques, that they have become another form of dissociating the pain and problems away.  I understand why they were shown to me, during the last two years of the marriage, I was consistently suicidal.  I thought death was the only way out of the marriage, as I knew he would never let me leave.  One of the first strategies they tell you when you are suicidal is to distract.  This makes sense when you’re so overwhelmed that suicide is the only option you can see.  So for years, I was told to distract my problems away.  This was the equivalent of telling me to put the problem in a box and put it in the archives of The Basement – which is exactly how I dissociate bad experiences, memories etc.  I’m pretty good at dissociating, and I am pretty good at using the distraction techniques to the point where they are also a dissociated and sometimes self-harmful experience.

Recently, I’ve heard more and more about looking at the pain.  The exact opposite to what I’ve been told to do for years.  It started off with practising some modified Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) – modified so that the names of the points have non-violent connotations and the taps to the head are not utilised.  EFT uses tapping pressure points on the body in combination with phrases to help ease emotional pain.  The phrases used are what I would consider ones which encourages you to think of the pain e.g. “even though I want to self-injure I fully and completely accept myself”.  So it was encouraging me to accept that this painful fact is part of me and that I’m not a bad or negative person for feeling that pain.  What was interesting doing this, is that it depended on who held the pain as to whether it was helpful or not.  If the pain was buried within the dissociative system, then the EFT often makes the dissociation worse.  Remember – this is just my experience and not necessarily one that others will encounter, or even one that I will continue to experience as time goes on.

Then today I read what was probably the most obvious and moving reason why I need to look at the pain.  It was Shen’s (Reunited Selves) entry in the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse (September 2009) called The Hole in the Soul.  This post shows why we need to heal, the consequences of not healing, the positives that come from healing and acknowledgement of the pain and fear that the process creates.  It doesn’t encourage any particular method of healing, but rather advocates for an attitude, a willingness to do the work and a strength to keep on that journey.  I’m not sure if I have any of these qualities to the point of being able to look at, what Shen describes as, the hole in my soul.  Some of us balk at the use of the term “soul”, but I understand that we have a lightness and a blackness within.  Our internal Basement is in total darkness, while our internal Attic is bathed in light.  The Basement is where the most painful memories and emotions are kept, so I see the correlation.

As an aside, when M draws within therapy, she often does a black swirling circle, I wonder if she is drawing our “hole” and a representation of our feelings about all of this.  She’s our worst artist, so it could just be that’s all she can draw.  But it’s always black and it’s always circular, like a spiral or a tunnel.  This again could correlate to The Basement which is perceived as being bottomless.

So this need to face my pain is what I’m taking to Liz next week.  Liz has asked if we can put aside issues before to try and cope, but this isn’t possible with our current levels of functioning and being in the world.  We must either dissociate or distract it away from existence…  If nothing else, this new possibility for healing has helped to ease the place we have been in for the last week.

Thank you Shen for that amazing story and to those friends who have helped over the last few weeks, it is appreciated.

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Now playing: Dixie Chicks – Wide Open Spaces
via FoxyTunes

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Please note: This entry may trigger.

I’m very aware that I often tell others to “take care” and “be gentle”.  But I have no idea how to do this myself.  I’ve been losing my battle with self-injury more and more over the last month.  It started with the week leading up to the Father’s Day/Mother’s birthday weekend and was easing off, until being triggered again by a potential loss of our ACC funded therapy – they don’t consider that we have made enough progress towards healing.  This all adds up to a total loss of control and a desire to escape.  Even the act of breathing feels disgusting.

There is a desire to keep on distracting, everyone tells me when I get like this to utilise my distraction techniques.  I wonder if I become so good at reverting to these distractions, that it means I avoid looking at the problem.  The distractions become another form of dissociating the pain away.  Yet I’m terrified of looking at the causes of the pain.  The very first time I tried Mindfulness I was doing the usual process of trying to look at my thoughts on an internal movie screen, instead I was confronted by a wild haired alter silently screaming through a window at me.  It was terrifying.  I use the distraction techniques to avoid having to see anything like that again.

I’m hanging on by a thread.  I know I’ve been here before.  I know I’ve gotten through this before.  But how many times does this have to happen before I’m allowed to let go of the thread?

Sorry, I’m not strong enough to cope with comments on this post.  I know the people who usually comment on this blog are incredibly kind, caring and amazing people.  It’s just where I am at the moment.  Sorry.

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Now playing: Brooke Fraser – Scarlet
via FoxyTunes

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Welcome to our new blog.

I apologise for the apparent haste in the move, I made an error in the timing of the importation of the blog from the old account.  This has been compounded by the others not really liking this template, so it will probably change when they find one they prefer.  I’m also still learning the processes behind hosting a blog with the associated joys of file transfers etc.  It’s been an interesting process to get the blog this far – as well as a much needed distraction.

Hopefully the teething problems will be sorted out shortly and they can get back to the much needed release and processing of ideas they achieve through blogging.

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Hmmm going to have to stop writing triggering entries… This might trigger, I don’t know.

Last night was a BAD night. The need to escape was overpowering. We managed to get it down to a level of needing to run with some quick action by Management. So we got in the car and drove. We know we shouldn’t of, but it’s the only way to fulfill that need to run… to escape…

We drove well while in town – there is still the desire not to hurt anyone else. But as soon as we hit the open road it was all on. It was pitch black. There were few other cars on the road and the road had many bends. We don’t know who drove, but we became aware of things again when we reached Cambridge. Just sat on the side of the road shaking. Trying to find some way of grounding us into the present. We pulled into a service station and brought some cold drink to try and snap us back to reality.

Our next moment of awareness is behind the wheel driving at 140 kph straight at a retaining wall at a corner in the road. There was a fleeting feeling of glee as which ever part left and we came back. I think the only thing that forced the switch back was that there were cars coming in the other direction around the corner. If we’d kept going any longer we would’ve hit those cars and killed the drivers at least. We ran off the road as we swerved to miss the cars. But no one got hurt.

We managed to get home. Don’t ask me how, I don’t remember. I know there was panic. I know we called for help – before, during and after getting into the car. I know we could’ve hurt someone. I know we’re going to have to face what is causing us to want to run very soon.

We’re back to the derealisation, the depersonalisation. As soon as we stop talking to anyone, we’re back into the internal world. We’re not coping… We’re angry that we’re not coping…

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Yes, today is his birthday. He is 37 today.
I wish we felt something about him – love, hate, pity, ANYTHING!
Today we’re very depersonalised and having periods of derealisation as well.
Today we’re not really part of anything.
We had a good start to the day by deciding that we couldn’t face work and talked to someone while we played cards online instead. Anything to distract.
Had to take some Clonazepam, but that wasn’t unexpected.

But the worst is yet to come… It will be tonight that we’ll get the nightmares. There have already been flashbacks and just imagined glimpses of him out the side of our vision. The silence inside is disturbing at the moment. Usually there’s some form of chatter or noise internally, and it provides some level of comfort. When things are like this, there’s either the two extremes of overwhelming silence or noise.

Trying to keep us focused in the moment. In some respects we should have gone into work today, but someone was leaving so there would have been lots of people and interaction which we couldn’t have coped with. But we’re really going to miss the person leaving, she’s an amazing person.

One of the other people we can chat with at work is over in Aussie on holiday… I don’t know if she meant to do it on purpose or not, but she sent us an email just telling us rubbishy stuff they’re doing – just the sort of thing we do for each other to distract each other from the bigger stuff and to keep it all normal. We provide the distraction to help her cope with her husband who’s got terminal cancer and she just helps us by making sure we laugh at least once before 9am each morning. We told her last week that it was the ex’s birthday today… don’t know if that’s why she sent the email or not, but it helped SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We know people care… we know we can get through this day… we know we don’t have to go and self injure through sex, alcohol or cutting… But that one email made Sophie cry and that helped us all…

Small acts of kindness do mean so much…

Thank you to those of you who read and comment on our blog… We never meant it to be read by other people. It’s purpose is to try and communicate what is happening for us. We’re not experts, we’re not special, we’re not advocates or good examples of what it is like to live with the after effects of trauma… We’re just us… With all our craziness, stupidity, confusion and when we’re really lucky, humour as well.

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Now playing: Tracy Chapman – I’m Ready
via FoxyTunes

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