Red

I am honestly so fucking done with attachment trauma and therapy. I am so tired of being this person – hypervigilant and dysregulated and so sensitive to rejection and abandonment. And I am so bored of living a life where I have to take so much care to not trigger or overwhelm myself. All my energy on Saturday went into stabilising myself and not losing myself in attachment crisis. Over nothing really. Over a short email exchange that, until March, I often really didn’t feel I needed anymore anyway. It is so ridiculous and I hate it. I want to do fun and exciting stuff and actually live. Instead I am living this pathetic and small existence and therapy has become the focal point of my week again, and then leaves me disappointed and alone.

My life is so boring and restrained and suffocating. Lockdown is basically over and yet my life is more closed off and shut down than it ever has been. I cannot keep living like this. It is fucking stifling and killing me. This is not a life. I used to have a life. Where did it go?

My therapy session was pointless because there was a giant elephant galloping around my living room but because of fucking remote therapy K didn’t even know it was there. I kept expecting her to raise the email thing. She didn’t. I didn’t because it’s too fucking scary. So the whole session I couldn’t settle in to what we were talking about or the cutting and sticking we did for young parts because this tension was there, along with a sense of not saying what I actually needed to say, and feeling the session ticking away without attending to the most important thing. And then with less than 10 minutes to go she was reading the parts’ book (which we send photos of each week before our session now, and which for the past two weeks she hasn’t been able to read properly because they are sideways on her new laptop – for fucks’ sake, wouldn’t you work out in between sessions how to download them so they are the right way round, when it is part of your job?) and a young part and teen part had both mentioned the email thing and how triggering it is to be a job, to be hated, to be attached to someone who doesn’t want to hear from us.

She said she ‘hears the hurt’ but seemed to have no real sense of what it brought up when she didn’t reply, or that she has taken away a source of support with little discussion or preparation. She did apologise and said she thought she’d been clear and obviously wasn’t. She apologised that there was a ‘misunderstanding’ and said something about things getting confused around Covid and everything going on. But if it hadn’t been in the parts book would she even have brought it up? How can she think it would be okay to go from contact every week day to nothing from Wednesday to Monday overnight? And it is embarrassing that it is such a big deal, because it really isn’t. I don’t want to be this person anymore.

She said after she’d finished reading the book that we could email on Fridays and she would look at in the Monday session – what is the fucking point of that? That is worse than not emailing at all. She reiterated that she is only working 3 days a week now, and helpfully said that is the case ‘even if you’re in crisis on your holiday’ (I’m taking my two weeks annual leave as time off from therapy this year, which I don’t usually do, but she has said if something bad happens we can work). This fills me with such panic that she won’t be here if there is a crisis between sessions ever again, and we won’t be able to do extra sessions in December this year (which is always needed). It’s not even like I’ve needed many extra sessions in the past couple of years, until the fucking pandemic, but knowing I would have to wait till Monday if something came up is hard. I mean, I think to be honest if something happened with e.g. my mum she would still be there for me, like in February when I heard she was ill and text K and we worked on a Saturday evening, but I don’t know. I hate that.

Anyway, I said it would be worse to email and not get a reply and that having something written was helpful and soothing, and that we like little pictures (emojis – who with young parts doesn’t like emojis?!) so not having anything written would be hard, and she said she understands that and we will think together about what might be helpful written on a Wednesday and talk about it next time. Again – I don’t want to be this person. I just want to turn up to my session each week and just get on with my life the rest of the time. Only my life is shit and isolating and oppressive and I don’t want to live it this way anymore but I don’t know how to make something exciting happen.

It just doesn’t feel as though K is available in the same way now and I hate it. I hate that I need more from her again since the pandemic and she was so available at the start and now that has changed. She said she wanted to support me with Covid, and of course I hugely appreciate that and I understand her thyroid is flaring up and making her unwell, but the worst part of the pandemic is not over for me, and won’t be for fucking ages, because the worst part of the pandemic for me is not being able to get to therapy (and Nina home all the time obviously, but the end of that is in sight now – 9 weeks to go). And it is scary that I might need her and she won’t be available, even though I know I can cope without her. I don’t want to have to cope without her. But also – I don’t want to have to cope without her. I want it to be easy without her. I don’t want this relationship to be so important to me.

I just don’t want this anymore. I am so bored. I want to live and love and to find both of those things easy. I am tired of not knowing who I am, of needing a mirror to make sense of my life, of having to have such clear boundaries and accept my limitations and do so little just to stay afloat. I feel reckless and I want to go drinking and take drugs and just feel alive. I am honestly so tired of therapy, of something I pay for, affecting my life so much. I don’t want my life to be about all this stuff. I want to meet new people but it’s sometimes as though therapy has spoilt me for real connection because nothing else comes close to the way I can feel with K, when we are connected and held and safe. She has taken so much time to truly know us, but the longer we go without meeting the harder it is to remember all that is still there.

I want real people who care about me where I am not just a fucking job, contained in a little box for 166 hours a week, only in existence when I am in front of them. And fucking therapy has spoilt me for this, spoilt me for the real world.

And I want therapy back. I want to be in the room with K, so she knows when there are huge things between us needing to be spoken. I want to be with her. I cannot believe how much longer it could be of this. It is manageable now but fucking hell it is nowhere near what I need, what I want, what I am used to getting from therapy. Even when remote therapy is at its very best it does not come close to being with her in the room.

Everything was working so well back at the start of the March with my double session and the Friday check-in. I knew K was there if I needed extra time and I rarely needed it anymore. Therapy was enough. I was living and growing and healing and I knew I was held in mind and K lived inside me too.

The fucking pandemic has ruined everything and I am so angry after all that work that I had got to a place where therapy wasn’t killing me and it got taken away.