Depression has got me tight in its clasp, squeezing all the life out of me. It’s been twelve years of this now with little reprieve. I want to break down and cry. Everything often feels meaningless. My house looks like a bomb’s gone off in it, stuff all over the tables and benches, and unopened parcels, unpacked bags from all my hospital stays and piles of clothes everywhere. I used to find joy in finding and buying unusual clothing, but I’ve even lost interest in this since my psychologist left me. I can’t remember the last time I cleaned my car (there was even a cockroach in it a little while back but I still don’t think it was enough to get me to clean it). I don’t bother to brush my hair and showering is a huge effort as well. I might have a home cooked meal once in a blue moon. I’ve been taking dexamphetamine hoping it will pick me up a bit so I can enjoy going out and seeing people. I saw my mum today, and felt ok for about an hour, then started to get a headache and my depression took hold again. My face is flat, but a lot is going on behind it. I sat in the car and watched two women about my age waiting for coffee at the coffee van. One of them reminded me of my psychologist because of her build. She rested her head on the other’s shoulder, and the other woman rubbed her back. I felt a wave of sadness come over me. My life is completely bare of this kind of affection and care, and while I long for it, I also hate it. I am too numb to feel anything. Continue reading “Depression and attachment disorder”
I finally managed to go back to the café the waitress I wrote about previously worked at. I haven’t been for a few months because I’ve been so unwell. I was hoping to see her again. We’d share snippets of our lives and hardships with each other. The first time I met her she gave me a hug. I felt a friendship with her, and had been working up the courage to ask her if she’d like to chat when she doesn’t have to work. But today, a different waitress was there. I asked her if the other waitress still worked there, and she said no, she’d gone overseas and while she was back now she no longer worked there. I guess the world waits for no one. The place doesn’t feel the same without her warm presence. Continue reading “A world that waits for no one”
I am on a downward spiral and there’s no one to catch my fall. I tell myself I’m the only one who can pull myself out of this, but I don’t know how. I pulled another all nighter. I wasn’t really distressed or anxious, just not tired. I find the sleeping pills don’t tend to work unless it’s anxiety that’s stopping me from sleeping. I fell asleep at around 10AM and have just woken up. It is 2PM. I had a dream about being raped by a therapist. I started seeing ghosts, but people never thought it had anything to do with the therapist. They thought he was helping me. They just thought I was crazy and wouldn’t believe that the therapist was abusing me until I recorded it. While my psychologist never raped me sexually, I feel raped emotionally. She stripped me bare, all my secrets exposed, and then did the very thing she knew would hurt me the most: left me. She left me literally lying on the ground by the roadside before some ladies on their way back from class found me and called an ambulance.
I have no words left for this post. Someone from my therapist’s licensing board has been trying to contact me about the complaint I made about her. The chemicals in my body are all out of whack and the anxiety I feel is like a chemical concoction gone wrong in the pit of my stomach. I doubt anything will come of the complaint. She will justify her bullshit one way or another.
I’m not sleepy but I’m too fucked to do anything except lie in bed.
It is almost 3:30am but I am not tired, so thought I’d begin the post I was planning on writing next about my mother. I don’t know if I’ve written much about my family on this blog, mainly therapists. But one might argue that the reason I cling to therapists is because I’m really just looking for the emotionally nurturing, attuned mother figure I don’t have with my biological mother.
A friend recently added me to a group for daughters of narcissistic mothers thinking I might get something out of it. I’m not sure if I’d call my mother narcissistic, but I’d like to explore our relationship in this post. Continue reading “The Mother Wound”
I get extremely vivid dreams which allow me to experience things I haven’t experienced in my life. I see it as part of my gift of being an empath or highly sensitive person. Today, during my nap, I dreamt of dissociating so badly I lost my hearing. This is a documented thing, as this paper writes about, however I believe it is fairly rare. I sometimes lose my voice when dissociated but never my hearing. There were people around me; they were packing up and selling a house or shop I owned. No one understood what was going on with me. I kept trying to stop them from touching certain fragile belongings, such as my glasses. I didn’t know how loud I was speaking and shouting. I was extremely distressed, and wished someone would get me some help. Then I saw my friend who has a severe dissociative disorder where he also loses his hearing. I was so relieved as he was the only one who got it. He sat me on his lap and I calmed down. I knew the deafness was only transitory and this brought me some reassurance.
I’m not sure how to interpret this dream. Is there something the universe is trying to tell me but I refuse to listen to it? A theme of this dream was people doing things to me, not with me. I immediately think of my psychologist. It is Monday, the day I would usually see her. She told me once that houses in dreams represent the body. It is as though this trauma is not just emotional but also physical. My mind and body feels like it’s going through withdrawal. I am the house, and people are packing me up to sell to somebody else. That’s what it feels like my psychologist has been doing. Packing me up to get rid of me. Continue reading “Update: suicidal ideation, hospital (again), writing and healing”
I dream that I am in a psych ward with the only friends I had at high school. I dream constantly about high school. It was over a decade ago now. I dream that I still have more exams left. My final years were extremely stressful. I put so much pressure on myself to achieve, and it is frightening to feel like those years are not over. On the other hand, I have other dreams about high school where it is not over and I’m glad about that. I’m glad because I still have a chance to do things differently. You might wonder why I would want things to be different when I was school dux. I may seem privileged to you. But beneath my overachievement I was deeply unhappy and lonely. Becoming dux and getting a scholarship to uni didn’t change that. I studied a course I hated and I can’t get a job with. What I wanted more than anything was friendship and love. Being dux and not having any hecs to pay back, while great, has not made life more fulfilling. I have spent the last decade unemployed, single, in and out of psych hospitals and wanting to be dead. I wish I could wind back the clock. I wish I hadn’t of walked away from the school where people (like Sara) did love me because of those who did not. It is something that haunts me to this day.
It is not an easy night. It is 4AM and my grief is keeping me up like a little child. In fact, I believe it literally is a little child. My psychologist introduced me to Internal Family Systems and the idea that we have different “parts”. Within me are parts stuck at different ages. I didn’t always interact with my psychologist as a 31-year-old adult. I attached to her like a child attaches herself to a mother. Sometimes my young part(s) would not only hijack my emotions but they would hijack my behaviour. There was one session I spent on the floor playing with the toys in her office. I put some of her little soft animals in her plastic expandable ball (there is one for sale on Ebay here for reference) and rolled them around. I built block towers out of dominos, and then balanced my psychologist’s little toy hedgehog on top, very impressed that it did not collapse. My psychologist had two crochet otters called “Harry” and “Ginny”. One day when she took leave she let me keep one of them. She kept “Harry” and said she would carry him in her handbag wherever she went so that she wouldn’t forget me. They were like friendship charms. She said it was normally what she’d do for her children, but she trusted me and thought it might help. It did help. I kept “Ginny” by my bed and she was of great comfort, so much so that I had trouble relinquishing her when my psychologist returned. I gave “Ginny” back to her crying and then left abruptly. Continue reading “Sad”
My OCD is bad this evening, and there is nothing I can do to satisfy the compulsion. Instead of taking a bunch of pills and going to bed, I thought I’d try and squeeze in the post I was going to make before my OCD hijacked everything.
We’ve just had a violent heatwave here (I actually just typed heatache by mistake just then, shows where I’m at!). I don’t mind the heat. I missed a lot of summer as I was in hospital, so was glad I could still squeeze in some beach days before the colder weather sets in. Now the weather has changed dramatically, reminding me of the way emotional abusers suddenly turn. Many people start to get Seasonal Affective Disorder during autumn, and with the added loss of my psychologist, the season feels particularly cold and melancholic. “Beware of shapeshifters”, “Trust no one”, “Run away”, “The end is near” are phrases Linkin Park has put in his music video for his song “Final Masquerade”. A masquerade is an event where people wear masks. My psychologist wore a mask. Sometimes I caught glimmers of the cold, heartless person she is behind the mask, such as the day her face for some reason morphed into my old teacher’s. I don’t know whether it was her make up or what it was. This teacher had a nasty side as well. She spread a lot of misinformation about mental health and I don’t believe she had any lived experience perspective. When I started speaking out against the things she was teaching, I was expelled. I was still struggling with depression and was often late to class. One time the staff found me in the bathroom holding a pin which I felt like injuring myself with. The staff used my mental health against me as a reason to stop me doing placement and ultimately remove me from the course. Yes, I was discriminated against, but because I hadn’t openly disclosed my disability to them, I suppose they thought they could get away with it. Similarly my psychologist used my mental health against me to end our relationship. I didn’t think it was possible, but the levels people will sink to continues to amaze me. “Too unstable”, “too much”. Those words haunt me, stinging me like shards of glass stuck in my skin. I feel like I walk around with a sign on my back saying “get rid of me”. But I came across a quote by C.Olavasdaughter yesterday which brought me comfort: “Darling, you’re magic, and people are afraid of magic. 400 years ago they would have called your wildness and beauty witchcraft and burned you on a stake. They don’t burn the magical ones anymore. They just leave them out in the cold and make them feel like freaks.” This is how people with BPD are treated nowadays. We are discriminated against. We are stigmatised. We turn to hospitals suicidal and are not given a bed, dumped on the floor of the waiting room crying with not a single soul stopping to ask if they can help us. Or we are told we will only be given 48 hours in hospital, and if we protest, the staff threaten to use their security to force us out. The private system is only marginally better. We are allowed to stay longer, but if we play up, the hospital can blacklist us and refuse to give us another admission. In the final meeting with my psychologist she brought up all the times I’ve played up in private hospitals and how they struggle to manage me there. She said she is part of the private system as well, and she is siding with the hospitals, agreeing that I am too difficult to manage. Continue reading “Shapeshifters, being believed, and nihilism”
“Cover my eyes
Cover my ears
Tell me these words are a lie
It can’t be true
That I’m losing you
The sun cannot fall from the sky”
Right now I am listening to “Tears of an Angel” by Ryan Dann. The singer apparently wrote this song about their 4-year-old niece who was dying from a brain tumor, but I find a lot of the lyrics give voice to the shock I feel over my psychologist leaving me. In our meeting it took me a while to realise what she was saying to me. She was telling me I need someone, or something, that can give me more support.
“I’m not going to be that person,” she said in a firm voice.
I still didn’t realise what she was saying.
My family and I thought the meeting was about expanding my supports, not withdrawing support.
I understand if a psychologist doesn’t feel qualified to help a client so they refer them on to someone else. But to do this after 4 years? 4 years of building trust, of building a relationship, of building attachment? Continue reading “Shock and sensory meltdown”
hsphaven 