Splitting

My mind has split K and turned her completely bad and it’s honestly devastating. I guess it’s progress I can see this has happened and am aware that it might not reflect reality, but it feels like it is real and I cannot find anything good about her – memories of all the good, connected times have dissolved and I cannot find a single thing that is not scary and threatening about our time together. I cannot remember her at all and she feels cold and hostile and scary.

The waves of grief continued till Saturday evening and then on Sunday there was just this deathlike numbness inside me. No feelings for K at all. No feelings about anything at all. A hollow emptiness that invaded every cell of my body. In the evening I let parts write for the first time in a really long time. Loads of stuff came out about K from lots of different parts, but I couldn’t connect to any of it. It was so disconcerting to have such huge feelings and big process appear on the page from a pen held by me but have no sense of connection to it. And when I went to bed I wrote in my journal and it was so dark and cut off. When I try to find what K and I had all I have access to are her edges – the hardness, the rigidness, the cutting off and pulling back and pushing me away. All I can find is her scary parts, the parts that were cold and inflexible and told me I was tiring and reactive, the parts that took away the Friday email without discussion and refused to see me last summer, the parts that refused to budge and refused to negotiate. She can’t have been like that really but I cannot find anything inside that reassures me otherwise. Her softness and love and warmth are nowhere to be found and I don’t actually think they existed. I think I made all that stuff up. I don’t know what is real.

I keep coming back to the fucking horrible, cold, clinical email she sent me last week, which had some weird attempt to be a human by mentioning sunshine, but really missed the mark. I knew she would respond like that. It was partly why I was braced for being so triggered by her. I knew she would offer me no words of reassurance about me being important to her or her wanting to continue this work with me. R is clear that it actually isn’t okay that she was like that. He says she could have been warm, connected, human. He has promised me he will never send me an email like that, but then I feel guilty for splitting and comparing them. His warmth is an antidote to the cold in me, the cold from K, the coldness that has lived in me forever. His warmth didn’t touch me today though. K has wiped all trace of herself from me and taken R with her. A final fuck you.

It had been 6 months and in that time I had text her once in November when our bunny, Ollie, died very suddenly (and she sent a gorgeous message back almost straightaway), emailed her once at the start of December to say that I was growing and healing but was ready to be back in therapy with her now and hoped she was keeping the light on for us (I said not to worry about replying and she didn’t – but as R said today, how could she not want to when someone she had worked so closely with sent a message like that? I think it made him sad to think of me being ignored like that), and then we text on 6th January to wish her a happy new year and said it was weird not to see her on the first Monday of the year after all these years and she didn’t reply to that which kind of makes sense as it was communication from parts and I guess we are not in therapy with her anymore. But honestly, could she not have wished us a happy new year?

So apart from when I asked if we could do some sessions when I heard about how much my brother was struggling in October, which is a legitimate reason to have emailed her, I’ve contacted her three times in SIX months. What did she think was going to happen if she sent a warm email response to mine, that I would suddenly message her every day? Have I not proved myself this past 6 months? And why on earth wasn’t there some cushioning around her news that she has no plans to return to face-to-face? We were doing depth attachment work when the pandemic hit and she was basically telling me I can’t continue with it, and yet wrote it in the coldest way imaginable. Why not… I know this will be difficult for you but or I’m really sorry that at present I have no plans to return to face-to-face work or I don’t currently have any spaces but if you want to consider remote work I can see when that might be possible. Why did she not feel any responsibility towards me? It was really such an awful, cold, disconnected email. It hurts that she would choose to send that. It hurts that she felt no sense of letting me down or any responsibility for how it might leave me feeling.

I’m scared that’s who she really is though. I’m scared that was the real her. How can I go back to her? How did I ever feel connected to her? I cannot imagine telling her anything ever again. I cannot imagine being met with warmth and understanding again. How did I ever feel connected to her? Were we actually close? I don’t see how we can have been. It feels like there is no warmth in her. She doesn’t and didn’t care. How did I ever dare to contact her via text and share such big feelings with her? How did I ever reach out knowing what might come back?

I feel so disgusting inside. I feel ashamed of myself for having these feelings and ashamed of K and then ashamed of myself for being ashamed of her. I talked stuff through with R today around her and I feel like I’ve betrayed her and our work because I was picking her apart, trying to make sense of what she’s done and why. What does it mean for me? I told R I’d split her and that I shouldn’t be trying to make sense of things while I wasn’t in touch with reality. I don’t know if this will ever change though and I’m not even sure if maybe I wasn’t wrong before and this is real, what’s happening now. I don’t know what is real, maybe this is real and everything before was all in my head?

It feels like K’s emails last week have changed everything that came before. It feels as though she has erased us. After 5 years she just let me go. If I’d not followed up and asked about returning to remote work in the autumn after I got her first email she would literally have let me walk away forever without even an ending. She has let me go. Just like that. She has cut me off and pretended we were nothing and the worst part is she has left me believing her. We are broken and she has taken away from me what we had and left me in this black, dark, cut off place where everyone is dangerous and I am so full of black filth that I make them all go away. I feel completely insane and broken this evening. I feel as though I twist and break everything pure. I will break R too and he will leave me like K has.