Time to Reflect

Tags

growth, kernel, New Year, reflection

I got the email from college to say I had passed my external portfolio. I had to say that I read it four times checking it was addressed to me and that it really did say that I had passed, so much had I assumed that I would have to redo some of it. I half expected to get a corrective email apologising for the wrong communication. I only told a select few until I had confirmation from the awarding body the following week.

So I can now call myself a qualified counsellor. Yay!

It’s an appropriate moment to pause and reflect on how I got here.

My journey towards personal growth started around sixteen years ago when I finally got rid of my abusive ex-partner and became single. I then quit smoking, something he had prevented me from doing as he wasn’t going to do the same. I started putting on weight, which distressed me greatly. Whether it was from quitting smoking, or the natural weight increase from menopause or just a change in stress level I will never no. I still struggle with accepting my size and not wishing to be thinner. I have given consideration to the principles of HAES, Intuitive Eating and the various shades of non-diet mentality and absorbed many of them.

It’s taken me a lot longer, until the past few years to find a mode of exercise that I enjoy and that I can maintain. I’m now in my third year of Pilates with The Balanced Life and enjoy, not just the increase in body strength but also in body awareness. I can see or feel muscles tightening and curves changing shape. I’m aware that I can hold positions better and do some of the more challenging exercised that defeated me on first attempt. There is positive feedback to a small amount of exercise and long may it continue.

Since the first lockdown due to COVID in March 2020 I borrowed my son’s exercise bike and have been doing daily cycles in front of the television, covering some 4,500 km last year, cycling 20km most days.

I spent several years getting counselling from trainees which was a good start for me although the variance in quality led me to quit. A group series on increasing self-confidence prompted me to return to counselling and I found my previous counsellor with whom I worked for almost 4 years. I moved on to my current counsellor where the focus has been on EMDR.

My journey towards becoming a qualified counsellor has taken four years and I am not sure if I would have started had I known how hard it would be. I had not realised how hard I would find the written work and I still haven’t fully understood that. I have learned a lot about myself: I overcame my resistance to creativity to create a mindmap of myself at the beginning of the Diploma which was a valuable and have kept my notes on my personal development essay for further exploration.

What is next? I still have a central kernel, a nugget, a nub, a solid core that is unresolved which is what led me to EMDR. It’s as if I have taken all my insecurities, my feelings of not belonging, of low self-confidence and self-esteem (what is the difference?), of being judged, all the pain, and put them together in this blue mother-of-pearl (or possibly moonstone) and buried it deep inside of me. I have got better at leaving it wrapped up and to one side and getting on with life without looking at it but this has consequences.

I’m not as open as I’d like to be. I still struggle to make friends and fewer people from my course have become friends that I will keep. Job interviews scare the crap out of me. I do not voice my own opinion enough, for fear of having to defend my views. I don’t get angry, or at least not out loud. I never shout. I rarely cry, and never in company. I am warm, loving and open with the people who are close to me but the barriers are still up for everyone else.

I want to do something about this nugget, but it scares me. I’ve taken weeks to get round to writing this and to skim through some of my past writing to connect myself back with all these vulnerable emotions that I try not to dwell on. Dear Mum summarises much of the source of this pain.

I’m also trying to have a break! This is the first time that I have no major pressure on me in 30 years really so I’m trying to relax and that conflicts with doing the work and I am struggling with that conflict.

Three Months Later…

Tags

kernel, qualificaiton, therapy, Universal Credit

It’s not as if I haven’t done any writing. far from it. But all my writing has been for my final assignment, which runs to some forty pages that was finally submitted just before Christmas. It’s been a weight and I’m trying to take this as a short break while waiting for the result to come back. No doubt changes will have to be made as I have no expectation of passing this first time.

Now that Christmas is over and we’re back to just the two of us at home (3son moved northwards before Christmas) I have space to do nothing. Last year when people entered the first lockdown and talked about painting their house, writing their masterpiece or just focusing on fitness, let alone those who just put their feet up and binge-watched every series going, I was trying to finish off my course, like my classmates, and feeling quite resentful that I felt no lifting of pressure.

Having realised that along with half of my peers I wasn’t going to be able to submit my last assignment in July I then took a month or two to relax and really struggled to get back to it and found myself unable to focus on it or anything else much. So the past few months have been a real slog while I’ve forced myself to get on with it. At times I have stared at this screen for hours, writing only a few words here and there. Anyway, it’s done now, and my course is finished, subject to revision and resubmission.

At the beginning of October, when I wrote my last post I was about to speak to a GP. I got a very nice locum who has since disappeared who gave me a sick note for six months and promised to repeat as necessary and anti-anxiety medication. She gave me six months so I had time to finish my coursework and not worry about getting it renewed. That was all lovely. I informed Universal Credit who on request promptly removed the pressure and expectations of 30 hour weekly job search and was sent the Capacity for Work Questionnaire that I had previously filled in for 2son. This is a twenty-odd page document in which you have to detail every incapacity, physical and mental. It is a mind-fuck, as so much of mental wellbeing is considering all the things that I can do and turning that round into considering what do I fail or struggle with under what circumstances is extremely painful and feels like stripping myself naked and parading myself in front of an interview panel. I started off thinking about exaggerating my reality and as I wrote I realised that I wasn’t exaggerating, that I do find anxiety paralysing under some circumstances. It also forced me to consider my physical health, which is something that I pay less attention to as it’s mostly stress based – COPD, high blood pressure, sleep deprivation.

Having sent that in I got an hour’s phone call with someone of dubious qualification who repeated some of the questions on this questionnaire and asked my some others. The only one that flustered me was asking me what my morning routine was. He focused on the physical health as that is easier to quantify, but when I raised this as a query at the end he asked me what I hadn’t mentioned that I felt ought to be included and of course I didn’t know. He then apologised for the length of time it might take for a decision to be made. As UC continue to pay me and not hassle me until a decision is made, the longer the better. I’m still waiting.

The anti-anxiety meds (sertraline) are weird. I had many unpleasant side effects the first week, although they were balanced by solid sleep. My anxiety has reduced but I get disturbed sleep, occasional bad headaches, palpitations that worry me and an internal rise in body temperature that causes the odd hot flush. So when I reviewed it with the GP who was proposing an increase in dose I refused. She said the typical response was to not sleep the first week and then sleep solidly and was not bothered about palpitations. I will have another chat with another GP in a few weeks and get another perspective.

I took a month off therapy over Christmas and am struggling with the idea of returning to it this week.

Lockdowns and my weird way of life in 2020 have meant that I haven’t had to come out of my comfort bubble and therefore anxiety hasn’t hit me (other than when the reality of UC overwhelms me). I even managed to start a third client over the phone without feeling a bundle of nerves. In other words, I am mostly coping with life.

But that kernel of self-doubt is still there. That central core part of me, that feels I don’t belong, that fears judgment, that I am not good enough is there and is undiminished and feels totally untouched. I am just better at pretending that it isn’t there but that isn’t enough. I put in my final assignment that my anxiety over written academic work will prevent me from further academic development unless I resolve it and it is true. It was part of the reason I did a Maths degree and even then I struggled with the small essay based module. Numbers are right or wrong; there is no judgment on quality (not strictly true but close enough). I can set this self-doubt aside most of the time. But when it comes up, or when I think about it, then that pit in my stomach opens up, my body starts to tremble and I feel tears well up (although behind my eyes, not actual tears but pre-tears). I also start to take a step back from my body, to start to disconnect so I don’t feel those emotions quite as intensely as I otherwise would.

I have enjoyed working with my new therapist. We have done some really interesting EMDR, including considering inter-generational trauma. Looking at resources, of supportive people from my past led me to get the old photo albums out of the attic and scan some photos to remind me of the good people in my childhood. I’m just not sure if it’s doing any good.

My previous therapist wondered if she pushed me hard enough. We did at times discuss this. One of my trainee therapists pushed me hard and I’m still not sure whether that was good or not. Is my desire to be pushed about feeling that I “should” be working harder at my therapy, rather than what I need.

Reading through posts from ten years ago shows me how far I’ve come. In terms of understanding connections between now and childhood, how my parents’ stuff affected me and how their parents affected them, I get all that. I understand that it’s mostly about them and not about me. I even forgive. But emotionally that kernel of total doubt is still pristine.

I had hopes of EMDR being a miracle cure which it isn’t. I shall of course discuss this with my therapist and try and plan a way forward. But part of me still feels very lost.

Sticks and Stones

Tags

poem, words

Sticks and stones may break my bones,
But words can also hurt me.
Sticks and stones break only skin,
While words are ghosts that haunt me.

Slant and curved the words-swords fall
To pierce and stick inside me,
bats and bricks may ache through bones,
But words can mortify me.

Pain from words has left its scar
On mind and heart that’s tender.
Cuts and bruises now have healed,
It’s words that I remember.

Coping With Bullying in Schools, Brendan Byrne (1994)

Here’s the Pressure

Tags

anxiety, pressure

Youngest is back at school. 2son is on the train back to college having a difficult journey. 3son is out somewhere and 1son is back at his dad’s. So situation is back to normal and I really feel a ball of anxiety.

I’ve got a water leak in the kitchen that has been slowly getting worse for three months now. Down to the council to fix but for various reasons they are still arguing about it. Not important but I have to mop up every time I walk into the room and I’m sick of both that and the daily phone calls.

Finance is worrying me. I am going to be OK for the next six months having tightened my financial belt but that means doing less stuff which is fun. Plus a bit more saying no to my children and asking them to pay me back when I buy tickets. I know counselling takes time to build up as a private practice let alone trying to find work within an agency so it’s not as if I’ll be going straight into financial safety once I’m done with the course (at least I’m not saying if).

I’ve got my first essay due in three weeks. Haven’t looked at it since before Christmas and am loath to pick it up and keep putting it off. 3son is about to go away for 10 days so will have extra peace at home.

We will start working on second essay when we go back to college next week and I don’t like juggling both simultaneous. That one is then due in March with two more by end of next term.

Then there is the question of whether I can find my way through my client work and actually learn to not fuck up the first few sessions. Which, given that this has been sitting on my mind all Christmas means that is is growing to epic proportions. I had an extra session with my therapist before Christmas and we talked through it which helped enormously. I shall discuss it in solo supervision this week and then see a new client next week and hopefully they won’t run away. I wanted to spend some time after Christmas really thinking about this but I haven’t had the time or space.

I’m also not looking forward to being back at college as I don’t feel willing, ready or open to sharing this difficulty with them which is going to make some aspects of working together difficult and feel false.

My sleep has gone completely to pot. I’m back using sleep stories every night and although I am sleeping fairly deeply I am also waking up 3-4 times a night so am not feeling refreshed at all. I am wondering whether the stress of the course is too much for me to cope with but then I wonder about the lack of alternatives.

I’m onto stable medication for my blood pressure that is so minimal I’m not sure it’s doing anything but am sometimes “hearing” my heart pounding wakes me up in the morning. My GP thinks having slightly higher pressure is OK for the moment. I’m not sure.

So in summary I feel that I’m skating on thin ice and am feeling really incapable of dealing with it. Life seems quite overwhelming at the moment with little to look forward to and no way through that doesn’t involve fighting in a way that I am totally bored with now. Meditation is currently a big struggle too, although I’m not dropping it. I feel as is I’ve gone back three years.

I am however overwhelmingly grateful for my children who are not causing me anguish, and my body which is very slowly changing shape in a good way. Those are the two good things I am hanging onto at the moment.

Intentions

Tags

#DailyCalm, intentions, let go, New Year

I never do new year resolutions and am not quite clear about the difference between resolutions and intentions but would consider intentions to be kinder and more forgiving.

Today’s daily calm meditation invited me to look down on myself from very high up and choose something I could let go of. I shed a few gentle tears as I realised the one thing I really need to let go of is my father’s voice telling me that I am not good enough, that anything other than pushing myself to the absolute maximum and beyond is inadequate. That is the only thing that matters for now.

So my intentions for the year are:-

• let go of inadequacy
• become competent at starting off with new clients
• finish the sodding course
• carry on my Pilates
• focus more on meditation
• self-compassion

That is more than sufficient.

The Walls Need to Come Down

Tags

father, fear, fear of failure, placement, vulnerable core, walls

I have reached a crunch point in my counselling placements. Whilst I have two clients who are both past their sixth session I have lost at least three in the first few sessions because they didn’t feel that I was “contactable”. In other words I am feeling extremely anxious because it’s a first session with a new client (I’m not good at meeting new people outside the counselling room either) and when I feel anxious I put the barriers up, and that makes me unreachable.

The clients I have kept are under 40 and the ones I have lost are over 40. Maybe I find the younger ones easier to reach because I’m not transferring my father onto them.

I suspect it all comes down to fear of not being good enough, of anything less than perfection being inadequate, of my saying less through fear of saying the wrong thing. I then say nothing, or say it badly or just trip over my tongue. I worry about interrupting a flow preferring to wait for a pause that never comes. I worry about how the client is receiving me to the point that she’s not because my defences are up.

More than simply relaxing I need to tear down my walls, to make myself vulnerable. I cannot sit back and wait for the client to come to me; I have to reach out to them emotionally. It’s not that I don’t care or aren’t empathic but that I don’t feel confident or even safe enough with a new client to let my emotions show.

To a certain extent this is where I have reached in my own personal therapy. I have inch by inch over the last few years become more confident, more open and more capable of dealing with the ups and downs of life. I know where my comfort zone ends and push beyond it more. I look after myself better than I used to.

But, and it’s a huge but, at my core, deep inside I am a very vulnerable small person who is scared of being challenged and failing to respond appropriately. I am scared of being judged and found wanting. And all I can see as I write this is my father’s face hovering in front of me telling me that I am failing yet again.

All this fear and anxiety is a barrier to my growth. It’s a barrier to my personal growth and now it’s proving a barrier to my professional growth as a counsellor. I’m feeling as if that slow inching forward needs to turn into a gallop that resolves itself before I get another new client. I’m also aware that these clients are coming in a vulnerable position in need of support that I am failing to give them. I’m not filling the basic core condition that the client must feel that empathy and unconditional positive regard coming from me.

I don’t know how to resolve this. I don’t know how to resolve this at a gallop. I am wondering if the sensible thing is to defer for a year so that I can have a bit more time to work through this but I also know that will feel like a failure and hit me emotionally and also be harder financially. I don’t even want to have to explain to people why I’m taking another year.

There are some practical issues as well. We learn how to be a person-centred counsellor in a purist way, learning with our peers who behave well when they act as clients. The difference between that and real world clients who are much more vulnerable and much more scared and willing to run away from it all is huge. I do not think we spent enough time covering this initial first few sessions and the vulnerability of them. I haven’t yet found my words, my ways of explaining how it all work to the level necessary in those first few sessions, of explaining just enough to keep them going without scaring them off. This I can better prepare for.

I don’t know whether my peers are experiencing or have experienced similar issues They tend to talk about clients they’ve had for longer rather than the ones they’ve lost early on. I do feel that I have fallen behind those who have completed their first 100 client hours and who seem to act with much greater confidence, a confidence which is totally understandable. I do not feel like sharing where I am with this process and opening myself up.

Looking at the worst case scenario rather than hiding from it, I don’t become a counsellor, whether I finish the course or not. I have to find a different way forward in my life and start a serious job hunt for something else that allows me to care for people but without making me so vulnerable. If it required more training there would be additional financial difficulties which would sap my strength but I would find a way. Starting again would set me back and I would have to learn to see these past few years as a journey of self-discovery rather than a failure to reach a target. And yes, I would have to get over the shame.

Body Shame

Tags

body, body shame, father, Pilates, self-love, shame, weakness, Weight Watchers

The Balanced Life, with Robin Long

I am slowly this year coming to terms with a new and improved attitude to my body. And I haven’t got used to it.

Understanding where body shame came from is harder, and this is the first time I’ve admitted to it as shame.

I do not remember feeling bad about my body, as a child, teenager or even young adult. I put on weight with pregnancies and took it off afterwards. I lost two stone when I got divorced. I accepted the ups and downs of weight as part and parcel of being pregnant. I had done Weight Watchers before my fourth pregnancy and achieved gold. I made it to a size 10 and found clothes to buy in the sale.

After I became single, and in a sense my whole life didn’t start until that point I started putting on weight and this time WW didn’t work. I was following their rules and doing 20km a day on a cross trainer and still putting on weight. That was when I gave up on WW, deciding there must be more to weight than this and started exploring intuitive eating and a slow journey to self care which carries on to this day.

I have spent a few years looking for exercise, for a fitness regime that suits me and makes sense to me. I have tried going to exercise classes which I enjoyed but they took up too much time and such a palaver of getting there and back and changing. The same applies to swimming: I love swimming but hate changing rooms. So I looked to home fitness and tried Wii fit, dance mats etc. all of which were fun but not quite right.

Then this year I came across (no idea from where) The Balanced Life, an online Pilates instructor who records her classes on the beach and has a hugely positive bedside manner which encourages me to try rather than criticise me for not doing it perfectly. I started in March doing a free challenge of 10 minutes a day for a month. It took me three months to complete it, after which I went back and did it in a month. Then I signed up and other than a lack of routine over the summer am currently quite faithful, even enjoying those routines that are 30-40 minutes.

What has made the difference and enabled me to commit?

Pilates gets results very quickly. Even with ten minutes I noticed a stronger body and a greater ability to maintain control. Because it’s not about pushing myself to go further or to do more reps it’s encouraged me to listen to my body more and be more aware of what my body is doing and how it is handling the movement. Plus I can feel a physical difference if I run my hands over my self. My waist is tighter as are my hips and bum. So I get positive feedback which encourages me to do it even when I’m not in the mood as I know once I’ve started I will feel better and energised it. I finish it off with my daily calm meditation.

That, in a sense, is all a preamble, explaining where I am now to go back to where I came from.

My first memories of my mother physically is her being young and joyful in sundresses that she spent one year adding length to in order to be more respectable, saying they were no longer decent now she was older. She used to wear backless sundresses on holiday and other similar minimal clothing and these slowly disappeared as she got older and fatter. So did the joy and exuberance. She hated being fat and whilst my father would encourage her to lose weight he also said she was always perfect and he wouldn’t accommodate any change in diet to support her. So she tried and failed every single diet going and I tried to support her, seeing her really struggle with wanting to lose weight and loving cheese and other good food.

My father was always thin and occasionally very thin. If he was busy he would go the whole day without food and it not affect him. I used to think that was useful and eventually I realised that he just shut out sensations of hunger when they were inconvenient. He never put on weight himself so never had to address it as an issue personally.

However, body is more than weight and size. My father had a commitment to long distance walking and rock climbing from his youth and the walking was the physical activity we all had to participate in. Rock climbing was too dangerous and un-ladylike. Walking was never optional. My mother took me to the swimming pool until I was old enough to go on my own but there was never any encouragement or support for other activities, like playing team sports outside of school or any other physical exercise. I do remember a brief dalliance with ballet when I was 12. But I was mostly never allowed to try stuff out or exercise free will.

This extended to being ill. It wasn’t allowed and I often got sent home from school, especially when older, for being too ill with staff asking why on earth my parents sent me in when I wasn’t capable. Illness was something to be ignored, pushed through and dismissed. In a sense I think my father saw it as a sign of mental weakness that shouldn’t be tolerated. When he had an operation on his lungs for cancer in his 70s he refused to listen to surgeon’s expected recovery times and proved himself better by being more active earlier, to the point that he burst his internal stitches and had to have another operation. This is how much illness and disease feature in his head.

At a recent family gathering my sister asked my father whether he was wearing his hearing aid, recently acquired after his gradual deafness in one ear. He told her to mind her own bloody business, which constitute strong words for him. He is in his 80s and his body is slowly failing. He cannot accept the help that a hearing aid would provide because it attests to his fragility and he is ashamed.

This short exchange made me realise that he was (and is) ashamed that he cannot fully control his body, that it does things without his permission and that shouldn’t be allowed. He should somehow be able to dictate strength by force of will.

I once as a child fainted at the dentist. He’d done whatever he was doing and I stood up out of dental chair. As he and my mother were talking I remember thinking that I felt weird and was going to faint but I couldn’t do that as it would be inappropriate. I was trying to work out how to explain that I needed to sit down, even though it would be rude to make a grown up stand up for me, when I just collapsed on them and I remember their looks of horror and surprise as I did. I was trying to dictate strength because weakness was for wusses.

This piece would also not be complete without mentioning my bike crash on the way to school which resulted in seven stitches and almost losing an eye. I lost consciousness and woke up in the back of my parents’ car as they drove me to hospital hearing my mother saying “oh no, she’s being sick again” in a manner that made me feel a failure for making a mess of the inside of the car and the cleaning that she would have to do.

I have suffered multiple years of ortho-dentistry and being strong and unflinching when faced with pain. I used to consider retaining my teeth as long as possible to be my main aim with dentistry and it was not until my 40s that I said I wanted the pain to stop.

I have developed huge resilience, both physical and mental over the decades. After four pregnancies and an unsurprisingly weakened lower back it still took me many years and pain for me to start physio for my lower back which was probably the first act of physical self-care for me. Pilates under this particular instructor allow me for the first time to really explore my body, listen to its abilities and feel it working; to treat it with respect for what it can do and acknowledge what it can’t whilst gently working to minimise the difference between the two. Pilates is becoming an act of self-love and self-care.

My Head is Too Busy to Think

Tags

busy, counselling course, focus, panic, peace, physical health, sleep

I am supposed to have taken a week off work in order to get on with my next counselling essay. I have instead made some phone calls, sorted out some minor issues, done some Christmas shopping, read books (that have nothing to do with counselling), thought about my physical health and wellbeing (there’s a post that needs writing on this), done lots of thinking about all sorts of random shit and spent at least ten minutes looking at my essay and putting it aside. Even now I’m writing this rather than look at it.

I’m finding it hard to focus. My mind is in a panic and it’s getting worse. It’s not just the assignment per se although this one is particularly uninspiring and it’s a huge challenge to get motivated to write it. I am not alone in this and we are all screaming at the dryness of the topic, with only our discussion of our placement experiences to keep us sane. The weight of four such assignments to be completed before July gets heavier and heavier.

I am finding that as winter slowly descends I am cocooning myself at home more than I usually do. Rather than watch the night descend and people walking home quickly from school and work I am closing the curtains as it starts to get dark and ignoring it. I’m not going out in the evening as much, whether locally or into London. One of my peers suggested it was the impact of client work and the need to retreat which is a generous interpretation that I’m not sure if I can accept.

I have spend the last two months trying out a variety of blood pressure medication to find ones that don’t interfere with my sleep and that has affected more than my sleep. We have run out of easy options and I think on my next visit to my GP I will elect to stay where I am for the next six months until I finish my counselling course as I need the stability, even if my sleep and blood pressure aren’t fixed. It has also been weird cutting down on my medication and being more aware of the beating of my heart and how loud and fast it can be sometimes. That is disconcerting and stressful.

I no longer find it easy to go to sleep as my mind races and although I start every evening considering an earlier bedtime in order to compensate it very rarely happens. Then of course I go back to worrying about my lack of sleep. Lack of sleep itself contributes to weight and stress.

If the four main inputs to high blood pressure are weight, stress, salt and alcohol then I have made the easy changes: I have ditched all added salt, which creates cravings for Marmite and salty cheese, and reduced alcohol even more, managing to spend more than one evening in a pub on one pint and it not bothering me. I cannot be doing with weight loss and am ignoring that. I am focused on my Pilates which I am enjoying doing every day, from ten to forty minutes, depending on my schedule. I am aware of a difference in my body shape and strength, of no longer needing a supportive chair at college and of feeling generally healthier and more body aware. This is a huge achievement and change for me than I haven’t really fully acknowledged yet. Doing something about stress seems virtually impossible at the moment with my course taking up so much head space.

It is not just the course though. It is also the awareness of the future beyond the course, the difficulties of finding paid employment as a freshly-qualified counsellor, and the difficulties of going into private practice without any guarantee of income. My youngest will also be making decisions about his future as he finishes school at the same time. His older brother has just changed jobs in a positive way but I have been thinking about all our futures and how intertwined they all are.

On top of all those changes there is the financial pressure of not earning enough this year while I complete the course and have no capacity for anything else and the pressures that imposes on lifestyle. Everything else seems minor with the usual list of domestic pressures and the list of things I would like to do when I’m not finishing this course.

I am therefore reading more, and watching more telly, which are both great distractions but don’t really solve anything. Away from the distractions I have ginormous monologues in my head thinking about stuff but not really in a productive way. I have considered the need for more meditation but haven’t quite found the time to do it, sticking to my ten minutes even though I’m struggling to gently be in those ten minutes.

It feels as if I am fighting myself on multiple fronts and they are all really angry, aggressive and really shouty. Peace is what I want but I cannot find the space for it. And so the assignment remains unwritten.

Juggling and Struggling

Tags

blood pressure, coursework, juggling, placement, pressure, struggling

We’ve almost finished the autumn term and I still haven’t worked out how to manage everything.

I have college one day a week, which I usually follow by an evening event, either a play or music, since I am going to be tired anyway so it’s nice to make use of being in central London.

I have placements on two days a week, neither of which is a full day, although one is 3 clients whereas the other is 1. Add to that another day which includes my own personal therapy and two lots of supervision per month and the week is filling up. I have been used to having my days free for the last five years or so to work in or lay about as I choose, with minimal specific commitments. That is a change.

There’s the college work to juggle and the client work to juggle. There’s paperwork for both to manage. There’s having to do paid work to juggle. There’s little bits and bobs from volunteer work and of course domestic nonsense.

Then there’s self care: down time in which to do nothing, read a book, watch TV, go out with friends, spend time with family, play board games, go to gigs, have leisurely baths etc. etc.

I am firmly back in a routine of starting off the day with Pilates, either ten minutes if short of time, or 30-40 minutes otherwise, followed by my Daily Calm meditation. I’ve noticed a physical difference in myself and I seem to have grown a centimetre.

I have discovered that my blood pressure medication interferes with my sleep so I’ve spent the last couple of months trying different medications to see which controls my pressure successfully without buggering up my sleep. The answer seems to be none which will present another set of problems. So trying to sort that out, with medications that have side effects that may or may not disappear after a couple of days or not has also affected my well being, both physically and mentally.

If the four key elements affecting blood pressure are weight, stress, salt and alcohol then I have cut out all additional salt and reduced alcohol some more. Weight and stress are harder, especially this year.

I have also been for a sleep apnoea test for which I’m awaiting results. If I have it then that is something else to ponder on.

This year is also going to be tight financially. I’m unable to do any more paid work as I haven’t the time and the costs of doing the course are going up, just with extra train journeys, petrol and incidentals. I have cut back, but what I’ve cut back on tends to be the fun side of life, so much of which isn’t free. I’m trying to make better use of cheap theatre tickets and the like. But all that is another pressure.

We have no assignments this term but there is that knowledge that we have four assignments to complete next year along with all paperwork before qualifying. I’m not enjoying the prospect of the slog of getting these done. That hangs over me.

The fact that I was slow to get sorted on placements means that I have very few client hours. I have just about hit twenty and am very aware that those of my peers who are on the 60+, let alone the 100 hours that are required for the course have a greater wealth of confidence in their abilities than I have. I will catch up but in the meantime I’m feeling behind. That hangs over me.

Setting all this out on paper, or screen, makes it all feel very understandable that I am struggling and feeling overwhelmed with not having time to think or to simply be. I am trying to accept that I felt somewhat similar last year and I will get through it, one step at a time. The less I can worry about it the better but it is all so much easier said than done.

A Long Summer Break

Tags

break, course, holiday, relax, routine

I needed that.

I needed to stop feeling that every day was a challenge to be met with work that needed to be done. Whether it was about gainful employment, assignments to be written, counselling books to be read, chores to be done and all that myriad of things that find their way onto my list of Things to Be Done, in my head or on paper. I needed to stop.

Some of it was unplanned. I had a few placement clients who, for various reasons, didn’t last long. So that expectation of client work filling up the holiday disappeared. I also didn’t chase getting new clients quite as much as I could have because I was enjoying the break.

I had a break from personal therapy of a month. I had bought a number of counselling books in the last term which I didn’t pick up. I didn’t look at assignments for this coming year. I did nothing course wise at all.

Instead I had two trips to pick up and drop off 2son and turned them into a week each for me, knowing full well I wasn’t going to get a “proper” holiday. I visited friends I hadn’t seen for a few years and pottered up the east coast paddling at multiple beaches along the way and really enjoying the peace that big water brings.

With those two trips forcibly bookending the summer I did as little as possible in between. I didn’t go for big days out anywhere. I didn’t really go into London for exhibitions and plays that I might have enjoyed. I did potter about locally, going out with friends and a few trips.

My children are all so much more self-sufficient, with my youngest having got a summer job so being out the house all week every week, 2son being much more contented with himself and therefore less of a worry. We were all just getting on with our lives and periodically coming together as a family to be silly, or talk, or whatever.

I got back into reading fiction, abandoning what I was doing whenever the sun was out and relaxing in the garden with a book and a cup of tea. That was my achievement over the summer, just lots of reading for pleasure.

I then spent most of September digging my heels in, not wanting to be back at college, back in any sense of routine, not feeling ready to start again. That’s the trouble with downing tools: sometimes it’s just really hard to pick them up again.

Now, partway through October I am feeling the need to get organised, to have a routine, to build a strategy to get through this year. I have started a second placement so the week is filling up with commitments of college, two placements, therapy, two lots of supervision, plus work, plus all the other stuff. This year feels like an endurance challenge rather than a voyage of exploration. I will get through it but I am more looking forward to having it done.