What will happen to me?

I wanted to say another huge thank you to everyone who has supported me on here and sent messages and emails checking how I am doing. I cannot tell you how much it has helped me feel less alone and crazy this past week. I can’t help feeling now like I over-reacted and am just emotionally unstable and reactive, so knowing so many others know that place and the triggers of the therapeutic relationship has really helped.

Today I feel more stable. There is a definite undercurrent of ‘I want to die’ and young parts are desperate to reach out to K and check she is still there and not so ill that she will have to stop working with us (and is it their fault she is ill because they got so sad?) but grown up me feels more-or-less functional. I got a load of work done in the garden so the week ahead feels more manageable, ate some beans on toast, and cycled 20 miles in beautiful sunshine (fuck you K, I can enjoy cycling without you!). I will do yoga and meditate before bed. My energy feels better, though I’ve still needed diazepam to deal with the anxiety/panic, and my brain feels more able to function work-wise and life-wise.

I am left wondering, though, what will happen to me, to therapy, to K and I. She told me what we had cannot be broken. No matter what. I do believe we, as in grown up me and her, can come back from this, but the parts who have only just begun to trust her, open up to her, believe her that she won’t go away – what will happen to them? She really fucked up last week, she really hurt them and then she disappeared. Trusting anyone is so hard for them and she really let them down. I still can’t quite believe that phone call actually happened, and that she didn’t check we were okay later, though I am trying not to linger on this and to move forward in my thinking. I’m not sure she even realises what she did and why it was so awful. And it makes me wonder if it’s time to be done with therapy, or to move on to someone else and not let the alters get attached to them? And I know there is genuine terror over confronting K when she has done something that is triggering or has made a mistake – even when we’ve saved it to discuss ‘in the room’, it has never gone well. I wonder what to do about this?

I’ve always been committed to staying in therapy for the long-haul, till the parts are integrated/unified and we don’t experience near-permanent depersonalisation because of inaccessible psychic conflicts, till the stories are told and the trauma is processed, till I feel capable of building relationships, a relationship, outside of therapy, till my sexual dysfunction and phobias are not so fucking pervasive that a sexual relationship is impossible. Now I’m not so sure – am I just wishing for the impossible? K said recently, after the huge suicidal emotional storm at the beginning of March, that maybe all that is possible is bringing this stuff into awareness. And maybe she is right, maybe my life will be a series of emotional storms and I just need to learn to wrap myself in blankets and wait for it to pass. Maybe feeling desperately suicidal will always be something I struggle with? Maybe just hanging on for dear life when the storm hits like I did last week is all I can do? Maybe it is okay that self-care went out the window and I felt like dying all week, because I survived it? Maybe I will be constantly enduring cycles of restabilising after periods of being re-traumatised, for the rest of my life? Only I can’t help thinking there is more than this for me.

My life has been more than this, before one of my best friend’s killed herself 3 1/2 years ago and I lost my mind and found my way to K, my life was more than this. Yes, there was a lot of running (partying, dangerous  levels of Class A drugs, ‘inappropriate’ relationships, smoking and drinking and orthorexia), and a lot of depersonalisation and emotional flashbacks that made no sense back then, but I was happier in many ways. It felt like my life had started at last, after all the years of chronic pain and self-harm and fatigue and hopelessness. I’ve read parts of my diary from back then to K, where meditation and acceptance and being in the present moment were part of everyday life for me, and she said I’d reached what many people dream of reaching – ‘enlightenment’. And I wonder what happened to all that? I can see now I wasn’t really okay, I was emotionally numb and plagued by emotional flashbacks and really dissociated, but in many ways things were better and I had weeks and weeks at a time of being genuinely calm, stable, grounded, centred, balanced, and happy. And so I can’t help wondering if I could get back to that if the fucking endless cycle of triggers in therapy were to end?

Except, I can see how far I’ve come and I can see I have work I can do in therapy still, a lot of it. And I don’t want to give up now, or run away, or accept that this is my life. I want to keep working with her to internalise a sense of safety I can carry into the world. I want to work to understand the parts and learn to hold them and listen to their pain. It’s just that I am exhausted from all this fighting. I’m tired of losing it so completely, of worrying about the strain this must put on my physical body and what is ahead for me health-wise, of constantly trying to find my balance. I am tired of being dissociated and having to hold the parts, of worrying because I know I am neglecting them too often but I just don’t have time or energy to treat them with compassion and kindness sometimes.

So I don’t know where I am tonight or what I should do. Probably I’ll sort things with K and things will go back to how they were in many ways, and then in a month or two or three it will happen again. I want to feel I am making progress, but I’m not even sure what I am progressing towards anymore.