Scattered pieces

At least it’s an upgrade on last year’s failure… I purchased a new computer a couple of months ago.  Macs are awesomeness!

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Now playing: Cold Chisel – Forever Now
via FoxyTunes

The activity for this months Expressive Arts Carnival is to:

Draw a wall using any medium, and show what is on one or both sides. Please also write a couple of sentences saying what the process was like for you.

When I was seeing Liz (about a year ago), I created a Polyvore set which I titled Barriers, and showed what my defense mechanisms and walls were…

This shows my walls as being the razor wire fence, behind which hurt and angry ones can be seen.  What’s interesting, is that an abusive event can be seen fairly clearly, almost as if the memory is the defense against looking closer at the hurt ones and their emotions.  A hidden, and shameful part of the wall is sex; while the more obvious things that make up the wall are my education, work, food, perfectionism, alcohol, cutting and the idea/memories of the perfect family.  The protector with the knives, is one of our more heavy handed protectors, and indicates how out of control we were at the time…

Today, I drew another wall with oil pastels.  I love oil pastels because of their tactile nature.  But I also hate them, because they’re not “precise” enough for me… they have this annoying habit of not having straight lines and bleeding into each other.  Ok, so may be I don’t know how to manipulate them correctly to get the blending done precisely… or, may be that’s the point of them, to be imperfect.

This is what I drew…

Wall

The green and purple are the colours in front of the wall.  These are the colours that protect the rest of the system, and the outside world, from the wall and what is behind it.  The purple acts as a warning, and the green as a grounding colour.  Then there is the black wall.  This wall must be strong and impervious.  The bright red, or anger, is the first thing bashing against the wall, then the shame of blue; before the black emptiness of the unknown.  Each of the colours is separated by mini black walls, to try and keep layers upon layers of protection occurring.

I’m struck by the contrasts between the images.  The first is controlled, yet descriptive; while the second is controlled and abstract.  I often describe my internal world behind the wall as either a gaping chasm of nothingness, or a swirling mess of emotions… neither quite fit the image that I’ve drawn.  I’m not particularly grounded today, so that could be the reason for the disparity.

To add to the oddity, I deliberately chose Missy Higgins’  version of Stuff and Nonsense to go with this entry – a song about knowing/loving in the present, but not being able to guarantee anything in the future.

I sometimes wonder if I’m looking for meaning when there is none, or whether I’m missing the point.  One day, I may find out, but not today.

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Now playing: Missy Higgins – Stuff and Nonsense
via FoxyTunes

Note: This entry may trigger due to issues around suicide being discussed.

I’ve been fairly open about my levels of suicidal ideation on this blog over time. But the last week or so, I’ve been dancing around the subject. The reason why… on the 2nd and 3rd of August I tried to commit suicide.

I’m still trying to make sense of the attempts, and the triggers which precipitated them.

The main things I remember about Monday, are that I didn’t work my usual late shift, and that I was very tired… very, very tired. So tired, that it made perfect sense to come home, empty a pill bottle into my hand and swallow them down with a caffeine drink.

I vividly remember looking at the pile of pills in my hand, and thinking… “This will help me sleep”.

This terminology is significant… “This will help me sleep”. Usually, my suicidal ideation and intent is termed “running away”, so I wonder if the change in phrasing was an indication that different ones were driving the attempt, or whether I was just really tired?

In the past, whenever there has been even a suicidal gesture, a protector has come forward and immediately called for help. But not this time. This time, I climbed into bed and waited for sleep. That was at about 6pm. The next thing I remember, is waking in a panic at 2.45. I wasn’t panicking about the pills that were now well absorbed into my system…  Oh no, I was panicking because I wasn’t sure if it was morning or night, and I was worried about missing work!

The details are fuzzy, but somehow we ended up in ER. ER’s always seem so bright… so well lit… super bright… I know this is a medical necessity, but it’s also about our fears. We hate hospitals. We feel ourselves get smaller, younger and more tongue-tied in hospitals… It’s hard to hear what people are asking of us, and we become more robotic.

As an indication that there was still come cognitive thinking happening, we’d remembered to bring our iPhone with us. Hours of playing Boost 3D, Euchre, Hell’s Kitchen… Anything to try to keep calm! Then the unspeakable happened, the iPhone battery ran out… This tipped the scales back to crazy.

• We removed the lure ourselves and went to the nurses station, asking to leave. They took us through to the observation lounge instead. Yay… power points for recharging the iPhone :)
• WPT came and visited us in the ER, and we brushed him off… told him we were fine and not to worry about us…
• When we were assessed by the psychiatric team… I say “assessed”, but to the system, it felt like a grilling.  They asked about family relationships, abuse history etc.
• By the end of the assessment, angry protectors were up front and they ripped up the discharge papers as we walked away from the nurses station.

Yes, we were released with no follow-up or safety options mentioned.

When we got home, there was still the need to sleep. I think one of us called the crisis team, but gave a fake name… I remember the crisis person yelling at us that they were sending the Police around. This was the wrong threat to make, as it gave the protectors hope that help was on the way. They became less vigilant…

We sat down at the table with enough pills for a fatal overdose. It was very mechanical and quick. Again, there was a need to have enough pills to “get some sleep”. Once these were consumed, we went to bed. Again, a panicked waking a few hours later and a ride in an ambulance.

This time it was serious… I knew that because of the number of nurses around. I remember looking over when they took my blood pressure, and saying how good it was (53/45). Usually my blood pressure goes through the roof in hospitals due to anxiety (the next day it was 195/146). I asked if I could go home, because my blood pressure was so good, and it was all just a silly mistake…

I remember the nurses being nice.
I remember them wheeling me down corridors to a ward.
I remember a nurse sitting in a chair at the end of my bed all night.

We called the mother, asking her to come up because we needed help. Our cat needed food…

We were kept in for a couple of days, and again had a psychiatric assessment, this one was much more gentle. They asked about safety and stressors. They gave us options – they suggested hospitalisation, or respite. But the psychiatric ward was fairly full, and the respite place would be different to the one I’ve been to previously. Instead, we were released to the mother (a former nurse) at home.

The thing that blew me away about the medical ward, was their compassion and understanding. I was there for an overdose, but they didn’t judge. They had almost no knowledge of mental health issues (I had to tell them how to spell “dissociative”), but they were respectful of me as an individual…

It’s now over a week since the attempts, and I’m still on shaky ground. Last night, R was very present. I know it was him, because I could clearly see what he wanted – to be wearing just jeans, standing in the middle of the road, in the pouring rain, arms up, yelling (in pain, release, anger???).

I’m very aware that I’m still walking along the cliff edge. One little push will send me over.

It’s times like this that I realise how amazing the people around me can be… WPT came to see me in hospital (twice); while my blog friends have been a steady, calm voice of reason when I needed it desperately… thank you!

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Now playing: The Freshman – The Verve Pipe
via FoxyTunes

The last two days have been kind of rough.

Heading into Thursday, I was feeling good and had managed to pull myself onto some sort of steady ground.  That all fell apart late Thursday afternoon, when I got an email from the other team leader, calling into question the quality of my work.  That email sent me plunging back into self-doubt, self-hatred and all the other associated negative thinking.  My cynical friend told me to forget it; but it was such a back-stabbing insult that I couldn’t brush it off.  To make it worse, my own team leader wasn’t around to reality check the content of the email, and I didn’t want to run to the manager about it.  This spun me out to the point where I knew I wasn’t safe to drive home.  I stayed on at work for a couple of hours, before driving home and losing most of the evening to the dissociation.

Then, on Friday morning during my drive to work, we went past a “hurt” cat in the middle of the road.  I always dread this sort of thing; not only does it stir up the system because an innocent animal has been hurt, but it’s a trigger for some of the younger ones.  Like a deer caught in headlights, we can never look away… we started reciting “it’s just a jumper that fell out of a car”, hoping that this will change how we see the cat… it doesn’t.  This means we now have adult parts smarting from the insult to our work, and young ones upset that an innocent cat has been hurt.

So we’re now driving down the road reciting out loud “it’s just hurt, it’s ok, it’ll get up soon and the people who love it will come get it and take care of it”.  There was also a promise that we wouldn’t drive home that way, just in case it hadn’t been moved.

Work on Friday is mostly a blank… I know we had a morning tea for the two new people, and that the manager made a triple layer banana and pineapple cake (which did a rather spectacular topple over during the cutting process).  I also know I played around with the iPhone app kooaba, as we’re looking at new ways to try to deliver information through technology such as QR codes and visual recognition apps.  This was fun because we were going around the library, taking random photos of books, CDs and DVDs to see what information kooaba would return.

Then it came to the drive home… all the way up the street where we should have turned off to avoid going by the stretch of road where the cat had been hurt, we were consciously thinking of turning.  Then there was this little mind fit, and we were suddenly past the turn off.  I could hear the panic, but there was also this firm voice telling me to stop being so silly, that there will be nothing there, and it will all be fine.

Thankfully the cat was no longer there, but that didn’t matter, the panic had set in.  We were switching all over the place and I could feel our throat closing up.  Little Michelle came forward full force, meaning that we couldn’t really drive, talk and only barely functioned enough to get home in one piece.  Because we live in a high fenced section, no one saw us getting out of the car shaking like a leaf and stuttering about it hurting.

We got inside, fed Winnie, turned on all the lights, curled up in the corner of the lounge and tried to ease the shaking.  I had no real sense of what was happening, but there were obviously body memories.  The throat was closed off, and no matter how hard I tried, I could barely stutter.  I managed to take some anxiety medication and send the following email to Allison…

turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide

hide got to hide
he’ll find us

I think we finally went to bed at about 8am (it was naturally light by then) and slept for a couple of hours.

Saturday had been good… we’d talked to a friend and took some pictures of the stuffed toy we got for the young ones as their reward for going through the divorce proceedings…

This made me think that tonight was going to be easier… the fear seemed to have eased.  But it’s now 1am Sunday and all the lights are on again.  Little Michelle is ok as long as all the lights are on.  We’re also ok as long as we don’t even think about going to bed.

One of the big problems with this scenario, is that it opens us up to further dissociation and self injury.  We’re so switchy and shaky…

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Now playing: Missy Higgins – Where I Stood
via FoxyTunes

Today, I saw the crisis team psychiatrist… it didn’t go well.

He showed me to the interview room, with this pleasant, eager young woman following in his wake.  I was a little puzzled about her presence, but had a sneaking suspicion that she was a training psychiatrist come to sit in on the interview.  Having had this before, I knew that they always asked if it was acceptable for the trainee to sit in, at which point I was ready to politely decline her being there.

We entered the room, and he sat down briefly, flipped through my file, noticing that there weren’t any blank pages, so left to get some.  Saying over his shoulder to the eager young woman (who had scooted her chair up to the desk), to introduce herself.  She was incredibly polite, saying that she was a trainee nurse.  When the psychiatrist returned, I asked if she was studying at the same institution where I worked – she nodded eagerly.  I asked that she not be present as I worked there and didn’t want to discuss the issues I was facing in front of a student from the same institution.  His immediate reaction… “But, she’s here for my safety”.

Apparently I look like someone who would either physically attack this old man, or scream sexual harassment.

What was interesting, was that at no point did he consider my safety.

His compromise, was to sit the student in the corridor just outside of the office with the door wide open.  It was a busy corridor.  At one point a woman stood at the doorway for over a minute trying to close an adjoining door – while loudly talking about her inability to do so.

Then there was the interview…

“So you didn’t show up for an appointment last week with Dr X”
“No, I’ve shown up for every appointment that has been made for me”
“Accusation number 2″
“No, I took care of myself”
“Accusation number 3″
“No, that didn’t happen”

So it went on… “What’s your mood level?” “How are you sleeping?” “What drugs are you taking?” “How much and how many have you got left?” “What do you want?” “Why are you here?”

Then it got worse. “I’ll prescribe X drug”. I asked what that was… he went into a long description about how benzos are addictive and their effect diminishes over time. He didn’t actually tell me what the new drug was, just how bad my current medication is. When I asked what the new drug would do, he said it would calm me down. I asked about another drug that I’d been recommended, and he scoffed. Saying that’s an anti-psychotic and that I’m depressed; and they only give that drug as injections up at the hospital anyway.

As I’d checked about the use of the drug before going into the appointment, I knew that it was also used for PTSD symptoms – my main problem at the moment; so I knew he was wrong about it’s use.  But I didn’t correct him… he was not a person to be corrected.

We’d started the interview pretty low, but this crushed us.  We crumpled.  I asked if it was ok to leave, he said yes; so we got up, thanked him for his time and left.  As we were doing so, he flipped my file shut with a sigh and leaned back on his chair.

I know I didn’t handle the situation well… I know I should’ve taken the drugs he was offering… but I couldn’t cope.

When I got back to work, I put my things down and told my cynical friend that I thought I was going to cry… we went into a spare meeting room and it all came out.  How I dissociate, how unsafe I am, everything…  She contacted the work place therapist who sat with me for an hour talking about things.  When I described the appointment to him, his comment was… “Yes, the psychiatrist had done his job.  He’d mentioned all the right things in all the right ways; but he didn’t care what happened beyond his vision of what you were and needed”.

It was this therapist who gave me the two creative expressions that I put up here today.  I decided to remove one, as although parts of it were powerful, the potential for triggering someone outweighed those benefits.

I’m still at a loss as to what I can do.  The birthday has now past, and that seems to have eased things internally.  I’m back at work, and that has forced a level of functioning.  I also have my cat back home… that always makes life good.

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Now playing: Sarah McLachlan – I Will Remember You [Live]
via FoxyTunes

To put the last week into context, it would help if I explained a little about the past month…  Probably 3 or 4 weeks ago, one of the young ones became convinced that she was an abuser.  We were part of peer sexual abuse from the ages of 3-10 or 12; and some of that included, what she considered to be, causing abuse towards other innocent children.  This was mentioned in session with Liz, but she dismissed it as learned behaviour from adults that was usual for a child with my history.  Our intellectual response to Liz was to agree, it made sense… but not to the young one, as she has no memory of being hurt by adults, only her peers and some teenagers.  This meant that the young one decided that we needed to die for hurting others – people often say that child abusers should be killed, so what made her any different?

Her belief that she was an abuser, was re-enforced by a recent newspaper article that stated children as young as 5 were being picked up by the police as sexual offenders…  Add on top of this, the on-going anxiety about having to go for an ACC assessment; the memories stirred up by the dissolution of the marriage; and hating our current job.  It all added up to a overwhelming mass of conflicting messages and emotions.  The end result was a suicide plan which was to take place yesterday.  On the way to this date, we ended up in the Police Station last weekend…  Sophie called the crisis line and said we were suicidal, which resulted in the Police being called out, and us ending up in a Police holding cell/interview room being assessed by a Police psychiatrist.  He was a very nice psychiatrist, and again tried to convince the young one that she wasn’t abusive, but she had the newspaper article as proof that she was evil…  To make it worse, she now had further proof of her evilness – she had been picked up by the Police…

Last Monday, we went into therapy with Liz needing to work through this belief about us being abusers and the suicide plans for the coming weekend.  Instead, Liz introduced DBT skills.  This isn’t anything against DBT, but it was like throwing a bucket of water on a forest fire… too little, too late.  Liz tried art therapy to try and get us to see that life was worth living, but she kept on hitting a brick wall because she was skirting around the issue and we needed to hit it face on.  Liz’ attempts were frustrating us both, to the point where she said “Do you want to stop therapy”.  She has said this to us on several occasions before, and each time we got the feeling that she was testing us, but this time it was the last straw…  we said “Yes” and left the office.

I know this could be seen as us lashing out with an emotional reaction, and it was in many ways.  But, there was also a feeling that Liz didn’t know what to do to help us.  This was confirmed on Wednesday when we went back for a meeting to see if the relationship could be salvaged.  Our position was that those words and actions made us feel rejected and as if we were too difficult to deal with.  Liz tried to assure us that this wasn’t the case and that she had been there for us.  But her actions and our expectations didn’t meet… that’s not to say that we were expecting 24/7 assistance from her; but many of our reasonable calls for assistance, were met with Liz passing us off onto the Crisis Team or ACC.

So, we’re no longer seeing Liz…

Due to the visit to the Police Station, the Mental Health Crisis Team have again become involved in our care.  This resulted in us having an emergency psychiatric appointment on Friday, where a very intense psychiatrist upped one of our meds and introduced another.  We’re very sensitive to medication – something I forgot to warn the psychiatrist about; so when we had the first night time dose of the new medication, we got about three hours of quite intense akathisia in the legs.  The next day we tried the daytime strength of the med and got about 3 hours of needing to rip our arms up, increased dissociation and anxiety.  The Crisis Team nurse tried to convince us that this was not tied to the medication in any way, and that we just needed to go for a walk…

So this brings us to today… the day after the young one had vowed to take an overdose.  Why are we still here?  Well, it turns out that the reason the suicide plans weren’t followed through was because of needing to fix our car.  I know it sounds silly, but all the motions were set in place for the suicide – house was cleaned, papers put into order and the final thing was to get a warrant of fitness for the car, but it failed.  Because we had to get it fixed, we ate into our savings which the young one had decided was enough for our funeral.  So now the suicide plans are put off until we can save more money for the funeral – she doesn’t want to leave any debt for others to be inconvenienced by.  I know that this is a tenuous reason to stay alive, but I’m hoping it will last us long enough to find some avenue for assistance.

So where to from here?  Well, I’m not really sure.  I see the Crisis Team psychiatrist again on Tuesday.  I was told by Liz that my ACC funding has run out, so the chances of finding a therapist who will accept a dissociative client through ACC is pretty slim.  I’m still waiting for the ACC assessment to determine what assistance I should be getting, and I just got the papers that I have to serve on the ex-husband’s parents to end the marriage.  So I’m in a fairly precarious situation and can’t really see a way out at the moment.  I’m not in any immediate danger – the fear of debt will keep the young one from acting on her plans for probably another few paydays… That gives me about a month to come up with something that will convince her that she’s not the most evil, disgusting thing on this Earth…

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Now playing: Green Day – Wake Me Up When September Ends
via FoxyTunes

Tried a system reboot, but got…

Today we felt good!  The birthday is over and we are clear of some of the pain and confusion that birthdays bring.  We even got a call from the local primary school to say that we’d won a raffle, with the prize being a $50 meat pack.  It’s rather ironic in that we can’t touch meat. What will be even more amusing, is if the meat pack comprises mainly of pork (otherwise known as Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web).

So we were feeling settled and mildly amused by life again.  But then we made the mistake of opening an email from our psychiatrist.  We’d emailed him earlier in the week to tell him that the trial of Buspirone was not working very well as we’ve been experiencing the common side effects of light headedness, nausea and a worsening in our insomnia.  We asked him what he suggested considering this reaction, thinking that he would want to talk over the options.  Instead we got an email from him saying that he wants another trial.  This time of Stelazine (Trifluoperazine) and Propranolol.  They’re rapidly running out of drugs to trial us on.  We’ve already been told by two previous psychiatrists that drugs are possibly not a viable option for us as we’re sensitive to drugs and often experience quite dramatic side effects.

We’re not sure if we want to go through another month of playing around with our brain chemistry.  At the very least we were hoping to have a discussion with him about the options.  But then, he knows we’d just go and research the drug he suggested anyway, so this way he saves himself a half hour appointment.  OK, that sounds too harsh…  He actually is a very kind man.  I think we’re just stinging a bit as it feels as if we’ve been treated as a number rather than a person.

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Now playing: Missy Higgins – Stuff and nonsense
via FoxyTunes

Today we were doing some work on our old blog when we realised something which tells us a great deal about our coping mechanisms and psychology.  Reading through the December entries it is obvious that we were struggling with what Bob was asking us to do – evicting one of us from our internal house.  But what is also obvious is that we were fighting!  We were arguing, trying to learn, working it through.  There was humour obvious in our entries despite the confusion – for example Today’s lesson on how to bang your head against a brick wall… When we compare these entries with the entries over the last few months, it appears obvious to us that our fighting spirit has gone.  Things are no worse than they were then.  In many ways they’re better.  What has changed is our reaction to the things around us.

Potential reasons for this -

• We’ve been trialled on several different anti-anxiety medications, none of which have been effective and have often caused very nasty side effects.
• We haven’t heard from Ellie (affectionately known as the “Irish Bitch” by Carrie) since before Christmas.  Ellie takes on many of the characteristics (and accent) of an amazing Irish uncle who told brilliant stories about his times as a policeman in Rhodesia and running black market flights in and out of Africa.
• Management has been around only sparingly since that time as well.
• The restructuring at work was badly handled and our job was changed to one that we don’t get any satisfaction from.
• Our levels of exhaustion caused by chronic insomnia have not been able to be relieved by any catch-up weekend sleeps.
• We took the risk of caring for Kriss and it proved to be a disaster.
• People around us who knew about “us” mentioned that they wanted to talk to the “real T” and that they didn’t want different ones coming forward to perform their roles.  This told some of us that they weren’t wanted and were being rejected.
• We don’t have anything concrete in front of us to fight.  We don’t have the husband to get rid of, Liz doesn’t generate the anger that Bob did and we don’t care about our job.

What we’re going to do about it…  kick ourselves in the butt.  Remind our collective selves that the reason we survived that kindergarten fort, rugby clubrooms, parties etc is because we are stubborn fighters!  It’s about time we remembered that.

At the moment we need to poke and prod at ourselves to get that fighting spirit back.  We need Management, Ellie, S, Sophie and every one of us to fight back against this apathy.

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Now playing: Iggy pop – Lust for life
via FoxyTunes