The story of us

I didn’t sleep much at all despite meds, and woke up at 5.30 with such intense emotional pain it was hard to lie still but felt equally impossible to get up and do anything. I managed to get up and meditate and shower and get dressed a couple of hours later though, and have arranged for a friend to come over after work to go for a walk. I think she’d feel safe to give me a hug and I know she’s being careful so I would feel safe to have one with her too. I really need that so much – when you have children you give a lot of hugs, but it is a million miles away from getting a hug yourself!

I spoke to my sister and another close friend last night and also to people on here and on WhatsApp. And I have thought a lot too, turning stuff over and over in my mind. I have decided I really do want to try and make therapy work this way, if I possibly can. I think I am in shock that K likely won’t be working in-person again this year as I had really assumed we would at least be in-person over the summer, even if measures had to be re-introduced in the winter. I think (hope) this shock will settle and then I need to see if I can do this work remotely, take in what she is giving me, see if I can take it in at all on a weekly basis or if it is just too hard and painful for me. I am giving myself a month to try and do this and if not I will need to take a break because how things have been are unsustainable.

K and I did a half hour phone session this morning and I managed to share what I needed to and where I’d reached for now in terms of whether to continue working or take a break. I told her I felt if I moved to work with someone else in-person I would just spend the whole time grieving her, which I don’t feel I need to do because I do strongly believe we will work in-person again one day (plus there’s no guarantee that this person would be able to continue to work face-to-face, if we go back into lockdown or there are local outbreaks, plus there wouldn’t be a huge number to choose from because not everyone will be resuming face-to-face (a psychotherapist K knows has said he won’t be working in-person until there is a vaccine, which K agrees is very extreme!)) and not many can work at this depth level and with parts and dissociation in the first place). I said that in many ways knowing a likely timescale helps, because I have been exhausted from scanning the news for information that might determine when we will meet again and waiting for her to tell me. And I said that I don’t think our in-person work is over, I really truly don’t, that I had felt we had as long as I needed to work together now (pre-pandemic) so we didn’t need to rush and I do want to get through this time so we can continue that. I said how it may not seem that way to her all the time, because I’ve still had struggles and some times when I can’t connect or remember her, but for me since around February last year therapy has felt completely different and has not been the torturous process it used to be. It is deeply sad to be back in that place, but I can see myself coming out of things quicker now and I’m able to be open with K about my feelings for her in a way I never could before, I think in large part because I know I’m like this because of attachment wounding and abuse, and not because of her.

And I said I’d been thinking about what someone on my blog wrote last night, about how maybe K and I could really deepen into the work around why not being able to be physically close to her hurts so much, but that it was hard to do that with Nina home all the time and the whole world crashing down around us all. She agreed though, that is where the work is, and that in many ways the pandemic was forcing us to go to a place that we wouldn’t otherwise have gone. So we will do some of that work, but not every week because it would be too much. In many ways we can’t not go there, if we continue working, and I said I need to be able to tell her how much it hurts to be away from her and that there is a lot I need to grieve too, in terms of what I’ve lost from being with her every week, and the Spring and Summer with her, and the time to transition in and out of session, and the holding I got from being close to her. I need to grieve that, even if we are both holding hope that this time apart is temporary. And I need to be able to take in what we have now because if I lose my job, or our pay is cut by more than 10%, I won’t be able to see her at all, so I can’t spend the next 6-9 months (or more) paying to either be triggered or get nothing at all from my sessions.

I said how much I appreciated her telling me about her son, because I wouldn’t have been able to reach a place where I understood where she is coming from if she hadn’t. I said I still feel angry with the UKCP for not issuing proper guidance and accepting they are semi-front line at this time and it was a very privileged position to be in to say they wouldn’t return until it is ‘safe’, but that I could hold that separately from her decision now because I understood. And she did say that most private psychotherapists are just not working with this level of need and so have no sense of what they are doing as being essential at a time like this.

It honestly is absolute agony to be away from her and to know it is many, many months till that will change. I still don’t know if I can do this work remotely, if it will be possible or if I’m just going to keep cycling through endless triggers and attachment pain that make it hard to function at a time when life is throwing up so much and I am not able to be with most other people in my life either. So I guess I just have to see how it goes for the next few weeks. I just hate how fucking broken and wounded I am, because it is obvious just how deep all this goes. What the hell happened to me that I am like this? And it hurts because I thought I was past this stage and now I am finding the time between contact with her complete agony again, and I a dreading the end of June when we won’t have the Friday email to sustain me either.

She has also just given me notice of a pretty massive fee increase from 1st September. She has always given me a concessionary rate that has enabled me to do more than an hour a week, but since she moved further away last year I’ve been doing a double session for £77 when her normal hourly rate is £60. She has lost masses of work due to the pandemic and can no longer offer long term work at such a heavily discounted rate, so it will be £50 per hour for me from September, which is basically an extra £23 a week if I continue with 2 hours a week, which is £100-£125 extra month. At a time of likely pay cuts where I work, and the uncertainty of my job in the medium and longer term, this has come as quite a blow despite clearly knowing where she is coming from and appreciating that she is giving me a reduction still. So even if I do carry on, I will need to decide over the summer if I can afford £100 a week on therapy, or if I need to reduce to fortnightly sessions or 90 minutes per week. I love the safety of double sessions, but if we are not working in-person it makes less difference I guess. It is very hard to justify spending so much money on therapy sometimes, especially at the moment when we are heading into the worst recession for over 300 years, but I just have to try and remember I’ve come so far and hopefully there is still some healing ahead of me despite the horrific pain of being separated from K due to the fucking pandemic, and that it is good use of money while I have it. The thought of having less therapy at a time when I need K every minute because my attachment system is so activated feels horrific and unbearable, but hopefully if that settles I will be able to make an adult decision over what to do.