In the Moments After Therapy

Intense therapy session. Intense feelings. Intensity driving me crazy, sparks in the attic smoldering and threatening….not grounded so that the electrical fire in my brain is overriding the switch, there’s no dimmer function and turning it off doesn’t really turn it off it just makes me unaware of the fires burning out of control up there amid the insulation and rafters oh my god what just happened?

After talking about the personal nature of the Chain of Events and how we’re going to discuss it during our next therapy session, and after which Craig suggested I not write it all down, that we should instead verbally discuss it, I made a comment. I said “you’re the savior” with a shrug in my voice and a smirk on my face, but with the intention of pushing a button. That ended the session. It was abrupt. Could be that we had gone over time, or it could be he didn’t like the comment. I wouldn’t like the comment. So I’m busy freaking out about that, with possible reactions that include cutting off my arm or blowing off my head. It’s a nifty way to avoid the terror of having to discuss the Chain of Events next session.

Luke asked me what I was so busy ruminating about. I told him. He responded with a couple of things: “You’re really good at finding a comment that will push buttons.” And “why are you spending your energy worrying about ruining your relationship with your therapist? Either it pushed a button or it didn’t, but either way you didn’t ruin your relationship and Monday is still going to come and you’ll still talk about it. He’ll move on. You should too.”

So I took half a seroquel. Pharmacological dimmer switch.

I explained to Luke, “right now it’s intense enough that I could really hurt myself. I mean, it’s a very real option. And it’s an option because then I could end up in the hospital and the statement made by my actions is that I’m not ready to talk about the Chain of Events and then we won’t. Focusing on whether or not I said something that Craig didn’t like is an effective distraction from thinking about our next session. Hurting myself would be an effective statement that I am unable to deal with talking about the Chain of Events. Or I could just hang on and talk about the Chain of Events at the next session. Or I could get lost in a never ending loop trying to figure out if I’m having a transference experience/if I pissed off Craig/if I’m sabotaging my therapy/if I legitimately can’t cope with those feelings related to the Chain of Events/and on and on and on.”

Luke had such a serious look on his face. He said “Didn’t you learn during this last hospitalization that you won’t die from talking about your feelings? That no one has died from feeling their feelings? That people die from NOT feeling their feelings? So it’s going to happen on Monday, or the next session after that or the next session after that. You said you want to get better, so there is only moving forward.”

I started crying then, because he’s right. But what to do with the panic? The terror? The shame? God, the shame is intense right now, coloring everything in my world. I needed to protect myself from the overwhelming fear all tied up in whether or not I pissed off my therapist and talking about the Chain of Events. I saw myself standing on the edge of the cliff, waving my gun around at the cops, and Craig telling me to put the gun down. I looked good and hard at that gun, pissed off at Craig and pissed off at me and pissed off at Luke and tried to think of what I could put in my hands in place of the gun. I saw the travel trunk, I think they called them steamer trunks. If the System is going to avoid a flame-out right now this very afternoon, then the overwhelming feelings have to go into the steamer trunk.

The Fantasy

So here’s the fantasy.

I’m in my car, parked near a cliff. I’ve been crying and crying and crying. I call Craig, my therapist and ask him to please come and talk to me as I’m “on the edge.” I tell him I’m going to kill myself and need him.

Pause to examine feelings. Powerful, intense feelings flood me. I don’t know how to deal with these feelings I have for my therapist. Yeah, yeah, I understand transference a little. I’ve gone through a number of transference experiences with him. But this feeling, it’s akin to the love I have for Wendi and Luke. I know that it’s impossible to have that kind of love – it’s not the same kind of relationship. He sits over there and I sit over here. But he does know me, he knows me by now better than anyone. Still, it’s a kind of love I feel and I don’t know what to do with it. Back to fantasy.

Craig comes to my car and sits in the passenger seat. He asks me what’s going on and I cry some more. I can’t stop crying and his presence is reassuring and safe. I tell him how much he means to me, how much he has helped me, and how I’ve come to the end of my ability to manage the feelings – all the feelings – from the past and the present. I reach under my car seat and pull out Luke’s 9 mm and quickly get out of the car, as I know Craig has called the police and they will shortly arrive.

The timing is impeccable. As soon as I step out of the car the police step out of the surrounding brush and point their guns at me as I point mine at them. Craig warned them I might try suicide by cop, so they don’t shoot right away. One tries to reason with me, but through my tears and shaking and palatable stress shaking my body I can’t hear anything, I can only wish one of them would pull the trigger and be done with it.

Craig comes over to me, putting his hands on the gun, lowering it, and looking into my eyes. He says “You don’t want to die. This isn’t what you want.” And I know he’s right so I let him take the gun from me while I collapse in my intensity and sobbing. Quickly the cops come and handcuff me, which is my cue to fight. All that pent up grief that has been trickling out in tears and shaking instantaneously turns to rage and I scream and kick. The cops hobble me, restrain me, and that forces the fight out of me even more. The scene fades away with me writhing and screaming and bleeding and hurting and feeling a sense of relief in the exhaustion.

Relief. What do I seek relief from?

Craig, obviously, is the rescuer in the fantasy. And really, he has saved my life both in individual encounters and in general. But this fantasy exists because he can’t be the savior I want him to be in real life. He can’t, from that chair, pull me back from the edge and take the gun out of my hands. He wouldn’t join me out there so near the edge, because that place is unreachable from his chair. Everyone wants a savior, but no savior, not even God, gets off their cross at the beck and call of the lost. One of the criminals sacrificed with Jesus demanded that Jesus save him, and himself, if He was really God. But that’s not what happened. They all had to die.

Craig is no god, I know. But he is trying to show me the path to saving myself – to healing. I know there is no way out, only a way through. I’m not going to get off the cross until the job is done. He seems to think that on the other side is a better life.

How can I experience relief without all the danger? Crucifixion is painful, but in the fantasy, Craig is right. It’s not death that I want. I want relief and I’ve developed this pathway to relief where I can feel it in the face of death. It’s only recently that Craig has appeared in this fantasy, I suppose because I’m becoming aware that I need to put the gun down…I’m hearing him from his chair way off in reality telling me that’s not what I want. In here, in the fantasy, he’s a savior out there on the edge with me, right in the line of fire of my gun and the guns of all the cops.

The cops – are they the overwhelming feelings I have? I taunt them with my gun, daring them to kill me as they could. They are lethal in the fantasy. They also are the tools that ultimately provide the relief I’m seeking – they restrain me and I struggle with them, sobbing and screaming and fighting to exhaustion. It’s one way to feel, but I hear Craig over there in his chair telling me there is another way. I don’t have to get in the car and drive to the edge, armed with my lethal rage. It’s the same message Carli taught me in the hospital when we threw clay balls at a wall, making statements about our anger, but interrupting the process when the anger began to turn to rage. I need a visual representation of the anger. If I am to put the gun down, I want something else to pick up. In the fantasy, once I put the gun down, the cops rush me and I am overwhelmed and it’s violent. I greatly, intensely desire it and yet it’s not quite right in its violence, because I’m not in control. I can envision the process of throwing clay balls at the wall, in control, feeling anger without being consumed by rage. But that’s not internal yet. It’s Carli and Craig off there in reality while I’m in here still holding the gun, still having a face -off with the cops. Only now Craig is in here too, telling me to put down the gun, telling me it’s not what I want.

What do I want? Relief. And how do I get it when there is no savior to jump off his cross or even out of his chair, no savior except the one over there – hanging on his own cross and sitting in his own chair while I hang on mine and sit in mine, having to get through?

Learning to Learn

Today marks my 8th sobriety birthday. I am ok with keeping this as my birthday, despite the fact I took 10 or so hydrocodone in a failed and feeble attempt to OD not too many months ago. I didn’t take them to get high, wasn’t even thinking in those terms. They were all that was available so down the hatch they went. But I lived, and today is my birthday.

I lived. I don’t know how to feel about that.

My dog, Gidget, didn’t learn to “shake” for weeks. It’s weird because she’s a service dog, and in the two years of intense public access training we went through, she learned all sorts of things: how to curl up under a table in a restaurant, how to get on and off city busses, how to down-stay on an airplane, how to walk next to a shopping cart, how to always pass a barrier (like a lamp post) on the same side as me…on and on. It was like every situation I put her in, she would look at me for guidance, do what I told her to do, and flawlessly do it every time after. She’s very intelligent and she learned so quickly people would assume over and over that she had been in these public situations many times over when maybe it was just her first or second time. But I couldn’t get her to shake a paw for nothing. What was the difference? During the public access training I didn’t use treats. All her motivation seemed to come from a place of “Hm, here’s a new situation. How do I behave?” During the “shake a paw” training, if I didn’t use treats, she didn’t seem to even understand I wanted her attention. With treats, all she would focus on was the treat. She didn’t know how to learn the trick. She didn’t know she was supposed to be learning a trick. I don’t think she knows how to learn! Not in a completely fabricated, non-reality based situation.

Today in therapy, Craig and I were getting down to the nitty-gritty of why Prowler wants to saw my arm off. That old compulsion is back, strong, and viciously close. My brain isn’t working right, because there are moments of the day when I go out to the garage and look at the chop saw, pick up the hack saw, practice cutting. I tested the hack saw on my arm, and found it’s going to take quite a lot of pressure to cut. I’ll never cut through the bone. And this kind of reasoning doesn’t seem odd to me – unless I step back from a distant place of Rae – and I realize it’s pretty weird. But then I easily move back into the never-ending loop of how to cut off my arm and how wonderful it would feel and what would happen next…

What, indeed, would happen next? That’s what sticks out in my mind from today’s therapy session. Prowler was explaining to Craig how it would be such a good release of energy to cut off my arm, so satisfying. Prowler knows this from previous self- harm, like when I hit myself with rocks and the bruises and pain come followed by a numbing, or when Sarah broke my arm and there was a peaceful, shocked numbing with the pain and activity that ensued. It doesn’t matter who does the self-harm, there’s release and numbing once it’s done. But Craig is pretty convinced there would be a big risk of death with arm amputation. Luke has said the same thing. I’ve done research on the internet and have to admit that yes, there is a pretty big risk of death. When Craig brought this up, Prowler said that was appealing, too. Then Craig said something that resonated throughout the whole System. He said “but if you cut your arm off and die, you won’t experience relief. You have to be alive to experience relief. If you’re dead you don’t experience anything.”

Prior to the discussion of cutting off my arm, Craig and I had been talking about Prowler’s role in the System, how he’s a protector, and his method of protecting has been to distract with suicidal ideation or thoughts and actions of self-harm. The distraction is necessary so that no one in the System has to feel the pain, sadness, terror, shame, and ‘shattering’ related to LA and/or the Chain of Events. Craig has been trying to reinforce/explain/teach a lesson about how suicide and self-harm are not the only methods of protection, that Prowler can shift to have a new skill set in his role of Protector in which he protects by regulating overwhelming emotions related to LA and the Chain of Events. Much like Sarah, with her rage, is off in her new closet watching the big screen tv and listening to music with headphones, checked out and in the distance, so can Prowler take the emotions related to LA when they become overwhelming and put them off in the distance, perhaps in one of those old traveling trunks.

Prowler learned something. Like Gidget, he’s intelligent and has adapted his behavior in many situations. Also like Gidget he has no mechanism for learning ‘tricks.’ He’s motivated, certainly motivated. His motivation is to protect, to control, to have power. But he hasn’t, until today, understood that he can learn how to do those things. Here Craig has been trying to teach something to someone with no mechanism for learning in such a fabricated situation like a therapist’s office. Prowler, like Gidget, didn’t know how to learn, didn’t even know that learning was what the point was!

The breakthrough, the moment of clarity, was in the statement “you have to be alive to experience relief.” Suddenly, Prowler grasped the meaning in that statement and along with that came a sadness and fear about the feelings that would eventually come from LA. It was like the barrier between LA and Prowler opened and the barrier between Prowler and Rae and Amanda opened and the tears came and the sadness and fear came and we sobbed for a moment right there in the office. Then panic was about to set in, because sadness and fear quickly turn to overwhelming pain, grief, and terror. So Prowler opened up the travel trunk and directed the emotion in there, and shut the lid.

It’s not like that hasn’t happened before. Dissociation is second nature. Like Gidget learning to behave in public seemed completely natural, so dissociation is completely natural to me. But learning to feel, then dissociate in a more controlled manner, that’s a trick indeed! I wanted Gidget to learn “shake a paw” so that I could shape that response into her pawing at me when I am in the throes of a flashback. It’s not just a nifty trick, there’s a purpose behind it that has great applicability in the real world. But first she needs to learn how to learn. She needs to become aware of the very dog-like behavior of pawing, control it, produce it on command (shake a paw), then transfer it to a meaningful task of getting my attention by pawing at me when I am off in another world. In order to do all that, she needs to learn what it is to learn. My System dissociates quite well, just like Gidget paws quite well. But there needed to be more communication within the System so that Prowler could learn to learn.

I think he did that today. He heard the lesson about taking overwhelming emotion and storing it someplace (we envisioned a travel trunk – so that’s going to be it) when necessary to not cause a System malfunction or shut down or melt down. Then he grasped the concept of how we need to be alive in order to feel relief, which caused some powerful feelings to stir. Then he practiced letting Rae and Amanda and himself feel those powerful feelings like sadness and fear. Then he redirected the emotions to the travel trunk when panic started to set in. Controlled dissociation. Control. Power and control.

So I lived through the last suicide attempt. And today is my 8th sobriety birthday. In a way, I’m glad to be alive.

Trust

I trust my therapist. I trust my therapist. I trust my therapist.

I just read a huge, long diatribe detailing human rights abuses, delusions, malpractices, and crimes of the Doctor in charge of the trauma program in the hospital from which I was just released. Why do I do this??? A portion of this article explained how DID doesn't exist and how a diagnosis of it will make a relatively healthy person sicker.

When I was 12 I wrote in my journal about the girl that lived in a room in my head, how I would become her, and how I would not remember things when I was her. I didn't know what DID was back then, I just thought I was insane or possessed. I was not under the care of a therapist at the time.

I don't care if I have a "System" for the rest of my life. I don't care if I process emotions differently than most people. I don't even care if I was abused as a child. I just want to not be depressed and get back to work and laugh sometimes. I just want to not have to fight for my life on a daily basis. If that means I have to have a system to deal with life that includes more than one me, than so be it.

I trust my therapist. I trust my therapist. I trust my therapist.

So before I can sabotage myself, I want to embrace the little girl inside. I want to let her live. I want to let her feelings trickle up through the layers so that I can be done with it - either shatter and become a psycho or heal - I don't care - I just want to be done with it. I can't live like this for the rest of my life. I just can't.

I'm desperate to move forward. I'm desperate to live. Even if moving forward and living means I have to risk a shattering, psychotic death.

I trust my therapist. I trust my therapist. I trust my therapist.

Psych Ward

My roommate came bouncing into the room, so excited about what was given her in the art therapy class. “Look! Look! Look!” she squealed in excitement. I was busy staring at the walls, but decided to interact, no use pissing off a manic roommate. I looked. She showed me a picture of a man, drawn with a pen, on a piece of white paper hand towel from the hand towel dispenser. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she squealed again. Her excitement was not infectious, but quite evident. “It is!” I mustered up a response. “The artist signed it and everything,” she continued. I don’t think my response was even necessary, actually, as she didn’t seem to notice me. “Who is it? Who is it? Who is it? Who do you think this is a picture of? Who?” She rapid fired the questions at me, vigorously tapping the picture with her long, skinny finger. I had to think quick. Who do manics see everywhere? “Jesus?” I answered tentatively. “Yes!” She shouted with glee. “Jesus!!!!!” And off she went to show others.

I smiled. God bless the manics. I wondered if the beauty she saw everywhere, the deep meaning she gleaned from nothing, the bright and beautiful and energetic world that vibrated around her was better or worse or just opposite of the dark, gray, tired, slow, meaningless well of despair and depression in which I found myself. The psych ward, at least in Michigan, is a place of kindness and compassion. The patients and the staff treat each other respectfully in a way that I don’t see in the outside. Outside, one has to ‘control’ oneself, fit in, act normal, behave. Inside, one can stare at the walls for hours or squeal with joy over a drawing or pace or cry or play piano or talk to oneself or sing in the halls or even be so unaware that one’s pants fall right off in the lunch room. The response is acceptance and gentle guidance toward more appropriate behavior, such as pulling up one’s pants before they slide completely off. (No belts allowed in the psych ward, of course.) There’s no teasing, no rude comments, no staring, no pointing. Huge emotional blow-ups over minutia are talked through, as if the staff appreciates that the feelings really are that big, even though the events that led up to the feelings on the outside would be considered every day, common, ‘little’ things. It’s not just the staff, either. The patients are like that – respectful and kind, allowing each other space to work through and ‘be’ whatever needs ‘being.’

A safe place. It was a safe place. Two weeks ago today I went in: suicidal, exhausted, depressed, empty. No, not really empty. I still can’t really wrap my head around it. I’m afraid more than anything. We watched Criminal Minds last night, and the killer in the show was full of rage, triggered by trauma. I’m afraid that I am full of rage, and once I let it out it will never stop until, like in the show, I kill myself or am killed by cops. I had the same thoughts I always do, “Was I born this way? Is my rage a sign that I am evil? Could I snap and become psychotic? Will letting the rage out cause me to snap? Am I already psychotic? How do I feel the pain and sadness and terror inside without also feeling the rage? Where do the pain, sadness, and terror come from? Did I make it up? Did I make up the movie that plays the scenes of sexual abuse that the doctors tell me is real? Is it real????”

I’m supposed to recognize that I am not evil, that I was not born evil, and that things were done to me that caused a ‘locus of control shift’ to occur when I was very young. This locus of control shift caused me to take the blame from the perpetrator, where it belongs, and place it on myself. I have so firmly placed the blame and shame upon myself that Prowler wants to kill the little girl inside as opposed to letting her feelings permeate the rest of the system. Since we’ve all believed she’s bad, then she should die. That also solves the problem of having to feel her feelings. The doctor asked me, in the hospital, if it would then make sense to kill all young children who had been horribly sexually abused, since they were all evil. The absurdity of the statement was shocking, but I see that’s where the logic goes. So I’m supposed to make the shift again, recognizing that the little girl feels bad because evil was done to her, not because she is evil. I’m supposed to put the blame on the perpetrator. That’s quite as shocking.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

I’m so frustrated with myself. I have an opportunity to have lunch and coffee with my friends, one of whom I haven’t seen in ages. When we three get together there is no shortage of laughter and fun. Our visits are a tonic for my soul. But the visit would be a 4 hour ordeal – two hours of driving, two of visiting. This would mean I most likely would not have the energy to clean the house, which is gross beyond acceptable. The work week starts tomorrow, and god knows I won’t have the energy to clean then. I didn’t clean yesterday because I needed a few hours lying in bed staring at the walls. That’s the deal, see? We’ve made a deal with each other that during the work week Rae Is up front and the pain, rage, shame, and ugliness gets shoved down deep and cold. Then, during the weekend, everyone else gets to feel, without a struggle and without condemnation. Keeping all that emotion under the surface takes copious amounts of energy, though with the cooperation of Prowler and Sarah and Amanda and whoever else it’s doable. Feeling all the emotion during the weekend is exhausting and hurts like fucking hell, but that’s the deal – relative functionality during the week for pain on the weekend. This brings me to today, and the opportunity to laugh with my friends. That infringes on the deal. Jovial lunches with the girls is not a part of Prowler’s or Sarah’s agenda. Cleaning the house is okay, because a clean house is appreciated by everyone and vacuuming and scrubbing is mindless physical activity through which we can channel some of the strong emotional energy. We have a fucking deal. True, Sarah burst through the other night and created a little havoc with the breach in the ground rules by him, but that can hardly be blamed. I’m just thankful that when she bit him she didn’t bruise him or make a lasting mark. When she bites me she leaves marks. Regardless, for me to justify going off and having a good time when I have a deal is tough. It would upset the tenuous balance. I would pay. We all would pay. Those two hours of fun and two hours of driving would be paid back with interest in shame, exhaustion, tears, and emotional backlash. This is no way to live, but I can’t figure out another way. I can’t run off and have some fun because I don’t have the energy to have fun, yet fun feeds my soul. It’s another logical loop I can’t quite figure out.

Finding Safety

Sitting in the sauna I realized how like my room it is – a lot of wood, dark, safe….safe? My room exists deep inside the body’s brain, away from the prying hands and minds and penises of others. It is inaccessible to the world, a refuge with an endless staircase and a locked door. I smiled when I heard a voice from one of the other parts saying “how safe can it be if it’s not real?” because I had an answer immediately – I know my room, the floorboards, the window, the rug, the bedposts…I know it intimately and love it and am free to feel in it. How much more “real” is that than someone who never sits mindfully in their physical room? Doesn’t know the feel of the bedspread or the smell of the dresser drawers? My room is real. And it is safe.

But in the sauna, I began to question the meaning of ‘safe.’ I felt safe in the sauna. I knew no one would be coming to join me, or even ask me a question. My sauna time has always been my time, alone unless I invited someone, uninterrupted, sacred. But I stepped out of the sauna onto the little deck with privacy fence my brother built me and thought about the possibilities of intrusion. It would be possible for marauders to storm this sauna and rape me. It would be possible, but quite unlikely. Does this make it safe? Just because nothing bad has happened should I afford myself the luxury of feeling safe in an actual physical place?

I returned to the dimly lit warmth of the sauna, throwing some water on the rocks. I sat on the bench and let the steam roll over my body, at first feeling almost cold until it wrapped around me completely. I could hear the blood pulsing in my ears. I felt safe. Undeniably safe. There are no rules here in the sauna about access – it is simply my space and because it is removed from the house and he doesn’t like sauna then I am safe. I tried to imagine the same feeling in my room in the house, where rules about access apply and have been ignored. Could I feel safe there? Should I feel safe there? Marauders are no more likely to storm my home than they are my sauna. But I share that space with him. And despite the fact that some of us enjoy his company I am not sure I do. I have laid in his arms before and drawn comfort. I have gone to him for assurances and to make sense of difficult and confusing thoughts. Yet he is not my husband and this body I share is his wife and I don’t like it. I feel like I have no say, and that is a huge trigger.

I don’t ever want to experience sex again.

I don’t know if my feelings of safety in the sauna were an illusion. If I can’t feel safe in my sauna, in my room, in my home, then is it an illusion to feel safe in my ‘real’ room in the mind? What really is safe? I can’t think of any place that is truly safe – any place at all could be breached and this body could be ravaged. How do other people feel safe? I know when Rae and Amanda are in the classroom, they don’t think of these things, they assume they are safe and they feel safe and they don’t even question it. In fact, they operate under the assumption that they are to provide a safe environment for the children – physical and emotional. Not only do they feel safe they are providers of safety.

The walls of my room, my ‘real’ room in the mind, have not yet dissolved, but I am not as sure of their realness and protection as I once was. So much has changed. I am so much more an inhabitant of the body, my feelings accessible to the rest of them, their thoughts and feelings seeping through my walls. The poison called shame travels like blood through the body’s veins, the sadness and rage and pain like air in the lungs. I felt safe in the sauna, even knowing I was not absolutely safe. Is that how people live? Is that as safe as it gets?