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.

So Frustrated

Tags

choppy sea, could do better, coursework, external validation, father, fear, introjects, liberation, therapy

I have this knot of fear in my gut and it barely unravels unless I’m really distracted.

Having talked to my therapist about lack of confidence I went back to college this week and talked about it in our triad session. I considered picking some other topic but decided to go with it. It was actually a really good session where she pushed me to say, not what I wanted to say but what I needed to say.

The next day however I woke up with this same knot of tension in my stomach and the same sinking pit in my head that I do not want to try and cross. My heart is pounding just writing this. Although my head has been busy with monologues running through it, now that it comes to putting fingers to keys it shuts up and is lost for words.

I am scared. For the first time in my life, other than having children, I am doing something that is just for me, that is a calling. I want to be a professional counsellor. It feels good and I think I can do well at it and actually help people. It is not a job that will do but it is more than that.

Last time I felt a calling to a career I was a teenager. That was a long time ago. I wanted to work backstage in theatre and went to drama college after leaving school. That all went to pot and it took me over ten years before I could walk into a theatre again, even as a mere member of the audience. I still haven’t got over it and probably never will. It was my dream escape from my father and I still wonder how it would all have turned out differently had I gone to a better college. I didn’t have time or space to grieve that loss, not properly. And here I am again, filling my head up with the idea that I can do something I want to do and be the person I want to be. My parents finally asked about the course, but their onely interest was whether there is a job at the end of it and that was it. If I fell down flat at it they would give that same disappointed sigh and remind me what a failure I am when I stand on my own two feet.

So some of that fear is anticipating a future loss that would have echoes with the past but that may not actually happen.

There is fear over writing the assignments. Because they are not just write 5,000 words on this topic but are broken down into small questions and paragraphs of answers, these are not “proper” essays and aren’t challenging enough, even though I find the idea of working on them quite hard. This is my father’s voice again, telling me that if it’s not as challenging as it could be then it’s really not much of an achievement and not worth investing myself in it. It is also the fact that by revealing myself in the essays I am opening myself for external validation and the result, in the eyes of my father and my last school, is simply “could do better”. External validation was always about showing what I didn’t know rather what I do.

The placement interview really threw me in terms of feeling judged and evaluated and found wanting. I don’t like it. Again it’s my father. His voice ran through our triad session as he kept telling me I’m not worthy for one reason or another.

I felt this session was powerful, as did our tutor who observed the second half of it. I felt, as our tutor commented afterwards, that my counsellor kept my nose to the grindstone and tried hard not to let me wiggle away. As I know from therapy, if I can wiggle away from the painful stuff then I will. I started wondering whether this style of therapy was what I needed rather than the more relaxed sessions I have with my therapist, something I will have to bring up.

There is also the fear of the big unknown. At the moment my life has a routine, however haphazard and a plan for the next two years which consists of getting on with the course, helping 4son finish school, getting a placement and maybe some other work. After that though all I can see is big waves on the sea. Not stormy, but big. And the choppy sea is empty. The future is unknown and a huge blank canvas. Once qualified I will get a job, somewhere and work towards accreditation. But what type and where and all those sorts of questions are total blanks. Yet I want to swim in that dangerous sea.

This whole journey for me consists of:

• becoming single;
• quitting smoking;
• getting therapy;
• blogging;
• accepting that I am a decent parent;
• certificate course;
• daily meditation;
• daily Pilates;
• currently working on sleep;

My listener pointed out that I was terrible at giving myself credit as this is a long list of worthy achievements. Not in my father’s eyes was my immediate thought. All this can be summarised as liberating myself from my parents’ shackles, or introjects, or conditions of worth. It’s about becoming free and I am not yet free.

Space to Think

Tags

invisible, needs, themes, therapy, threads, waiting

I just realised that I haven’t heard what happened at 2son’s funding panel today, which is probably not good news. I am also waiting to hear what’s happening after my super productive benefits meeting. I am waiting for interview results and I am also waiting for GCSE and A level results.

What I am not waiting for is therapy. We had an interesting conversation about food. She said I didn’t have a problem with eating. I understood about intuitive eating and followed it to some extent. We eventually came to the idea that it was more about cooking, the whole process that goes before the eating bit. I still think I eat too much but that’s completely subjective. I lost interest in cooking because of children and I haven’t regained it although I do have occasional sparks. I need to look at what is going on here.

I also have some sort of desire to set out where I am and what I still need. If I am to think of a trauma therapist I really need to think about what is still outstanding.

Making the invisible visible is one thing. It explains the interest in person-centred and also pre-therapy. I need to think about the threads running through and what they affect. What are my life themes that I wish to address?

Where to Next?

Tags

acceptance, forward, let go, progress, therapy

Writing this on a Sunday is too far away from the session and I am struggling to remember what we were doing. More skills practice. I found my observation difficult as I couldn’t quite work out what I was uncomfortable about and the person had given me some very good feedback and I felt that I hadn’t done her justice. She is awfully self-confident but I’m not sure that she’s right. Bearing in mind what our tutor had said last time I tried to say more / make bigger interventions and ended up giving advice.

We handed in our second assignment and our tutor still hasn’t returned our remarked first assignments which I actually find really annoying as she’s now taken longer on the remarks than she did on the first ones and I do want to know. She was going to tell us what we are doing on our residential weekend next week but didn’t do that either. I like her teaching most of the time but when it’s admin or course structure there’s a lack of direction and information.

In PD we returned to the theme of bullying. One of us mentioned the difficulty in being able to forgive herself for standing by and doing nothing so I talked about something I’m still struggling with but am actually a lot more accepting of. I didn’t stand up to bullies because I couldn’t have. While I would respond differently as the person I am now, I was not that person then. If I could have done something different I would have and the fact that I didn’t means that I couldn’t. I need to accept that I couldn’t have done otherwise and to forgive myself. Let it go. I think I have accepted a lot of it but I’m not really sure that I’ve forgiven myself.

There was another occasion like this, I think last week, when we talked about the ability to say no and a few said they couldn’t and I said you have to practice. Both times I felt that I was further forward than them, not that it’s a competition or anything, but I felt this was a lesson I have learned. I felt a bit smug. Although, did I really feel smug or is it that I am just not used to feeling confident about progress and therefore I identify it as a negative feeling. I should feel more confident about myself than I do and this is an issue I will keep coming back to. I am a lot better than I think I am, in so many ways, and I need to be able to acknowledge that. We’ve finished going through our TA questions in therapy so I think it’s time we talked about where we are going next. I am feeling, and I do in triads, that I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to talk about my week or if I do, I try to keep it to five minutes. We’ve talked about my parents endlessly. I don’t know what I need to do or focus on next and we need to talk about that.

2016, a personal review

Tags

bombshell, change, changes, competence, development, driving, job, parents, poetry, sons, therapy

I think, as we enter a new year that I’ve come such a long way and yet still have such a long way to go. I wonder if I will ever make it. I’m more aware of the work yet to do and it scares me. Feeling comfortable with who I am sounds so simple and yet so far.

I’m sitting in the pub starting this while listening to Comfortably Numb which is what it takes to start this post I’ve been ruminating over for the last week. I’m finishing it at home the next day.

Whether 2016 has been a good or a bad year for me I really don’t know. I think it has actually been good but I don’t feel it.

Food Rules (again)

Tags

absorb, food, rules, therapy

Eating glorious twice cooked Belgian chips with loads of mayonnaise out in public (no wonder I like them)

I’ve covered this before but no doubt will have to cover it again until I’m done.

No “childish” foods: mash potato, ice cream, too much gravy, nuggets and the like.

No common / working class foods: the label might be inappropriate but no tinned baked beans, no brown sauce, no salad cream, no fish-fingers.

No pre-prepared foods: I don’t remember ever having any type of ready made food and that includes jars of sauces. My mum lies about using stock cubes to my dad.

No sweets: my mum used to make puddings: stodgy filling crumbles and a superb lemon and meringue pie. Proper puddings for dinners with guests. But that all stopped. My dad likes lemon sorbet (with a shot of vodka), lemon tart and the occasional tarte tatin. But no overdosing on chocolate or sweet stuff or cream. My mum used to make her own yoghurt which again, wasn’t really sweet.

Diet foods: my mum was on endless diets and we definitely had naughty foods. If you’re going to eat empty calories, make them high quality foods. Other than some of the summer fruits my parents always had a fruit bowl with oranges and apples that they forced themselves to eat because it’s good for you.

Eating rules: no eating outside on the street (it’s common); no eating with your hands (it’s just bad manners) and I still horrify my parents by eating chips with my fingers; even picking at bones should be done with a knife and fork; use the correct utensils (fish knives, chopsticks, cob holders, whatever).

I have never known my father to drink more than 2 pints in a pub (other than finishing my mother’s off). He’d exclaim if I wanted to drink beer with a meal out as wine is the proper accompaniment although he did soften to eating beer with Indian food. The last time we went out for a meal my parents had cider and I had a cocktail (two, actually). That got comments. My dad used to prepare a sort of cocktail as an aperitif, but not the sort you’d buy. I stuck to beer when he started including Cinzano.

So these are all my parents rules. I’ve added my own:

• cook from scratch (it’s healthier and tastes better as long as you cook)
• no artificial additives, flavouring, sweeteners
• consider the environment; use up leftovers

I have genuinely lost the ability to enjoy puddings and yoghurts. I love lemon sorbet but I’ve gone off chocolate ice cream. I’ve started forcing myself to have jam or peanut butter on toast in the mornings in the hope that I’ll stop feeling guilty about rule-breaking. I’ve narrowed my food choices down so far that I rotate through a very limited choice which is boring. I have noticed that as I’ve got older I’m loving the vegetables that my mum used to eat for herself and rave about them without trying to force me to eat them: spinach and spring greens. I love courgettes and mushrooms. But these don’t feel like guilty pleasures.

It’s actually quite terrifying how I’ve absorbed some of these rules so much I’m not even aware the rules are there. Which is of course what therapy is there for.

It’s Been a While…

Tags

2son, funding, therapy

Well we’ve had three months of 2son at home. It’s been a long and lonely time. Our social worker has improved. He listens to what I say and acts upon it although it does help if I tell him what to do. But he’s still here.

We finally got 2son back to school with the presence of the social worker, a placement officer for an alternative placement and a call to the police. I then had to take him up to school, stay overnight and come back again.

Relief was short lived as funding for his placement has run out so he is there for 3 weeks until the end of term. The council are not minded to fund him for over the summer. They might fund him again from September.

So a strongly worded letter has been sent.

In other news…

Therapist is lovely and I enjoy working with her. I increasingly come home wanting to write but quite frankly at the moment I haven’t the energy, hence the long gap. We’re spending less time talking about food and more about my parents, which is necessary. She said today that that she heard “I want to break free” by Queen as my song, in that I want to break free from my parents, my children, anything that ties me down.

So life is a bit shit at the moment. There’s so much more to say but I’m really not motivated to say it.

Finally, holiday. Self-hatred comes free.

Tags

acceptance, help, holiday, self-hate, therapy

It’s been a long time coming. It’s two years, if not three since I last had a break from my children. Thanks to conspiring events, I’ve just had 6 nights to myself in Tenerife.

1son had offered a few years ago to babysit and give me a few days away as a Christmas present but it never came off as whenever we are on school holiday that would mean him looking after all 3 of his brothers and I think that would be too much. No doubt it would be fine but I don’t suppose 2son’s social worker would approve. However, whilst entering school dates in the diary this year I noticed that for this February half term 2son’s was actually the week before 3 and 4son’s with him returning to school on the Monday. Coupled with the fact that the following Monday was an INSET day (teacher training so no school) gave me a 6 night tight window. 1son was going away himself but it turned out he was coming back on the Monday so just in time. Trying to book a holiday at the last minute, when I really didn’t care much where to go was difficult and the best deals were all for 7 nights however I made it and left.

Not Going to School

Tags

BESD. ASD, choice, help, school refusal, sleep, therapy

Despite barely venturing out last week, I managed to at least get Christmas put away and the house tidied in preparation for peace and quiet this week. 3son and 4son went back to school on Monday. 2son is still up in bed asleep.

The taxi was booked as usual for 10am. It arrived at 8:30am and I told the driver to go away and come back. A good start to the day, I thought. 9am came and 2son was still fast asleep, not reacting to my voice or to gentle prodding. So I phoned up the transport service and asked them to re-arrange for midday. They did that. I tried to ignore 2son for an hour which didn’t work and then re-arranged for 4pm as he slept on. Now, at 1pm I’m still waiting for him to wake up.

How do I put Me First?

Tags

breaking chains, generations, me first, mefirst, parenting, therapy

I meant to write this after my last counselling session but I definitely need to write it before my next one in a couple of hours.

I do like my counsellor, but she’s been too soft on me, letting me ramble without ever challenging me to stay on target. Last week we actually started to discuss that, with only two or three sessions to go before we finish.

I can see, not so much with my mother, but certainly with my father, how hang-ups are passed from one generation to the next. His mother was dumped by her parents when she was six so she brought up her son to never get too close to people, including her husband, in case they vanished. Self-reliance and independence were taught to the exclusion of building and valuing good relationships with other people.

In turn he passed this on to my sisters and I in different ways. We are all three marred with personal issues, with problems in forming relationships. My father’s attitude inadvertently led to my picking partners that were wholly unsuited to me.Thus, almost inevitably, I became a single parent.

I do not want my hang-ups to be passed on, with whatever variations, to my children. I said to 1son last year that as long as he didn’t end up in therapy when he was 40 I’d think he’d turned out better than me. I have spent an enormous amount of time over the years  thinking how I felt when my parents acted in a certain manner and how I should act towards my children for them not to feel this way. I cannot relax and let them go with the flow feeling confident that they have a solid emotional foundation on which to build.

I want to break the chain that links the generations. I am petrified that my children are going to be as unhappy as I have been.

The trouble is that by not looking after myself properly, by not caring for myself and being able to look after myself and put myself first, what message am I then sending them? What example do I set?

I hide behind my children in therapy. I talk about them, what they are doing and what I am worried about. Last week my therapist said:

I know more about your children than I do about you.

I don’t talk about what I want for me. I don’t talk about where I want to be in 5 or 10 years, what I want to have achieved, what my dreams are, what my hopes are and how I feel about the rest of my life.

Last year my therapist stopped me from talking non-stop about my children. This year’s hasn’t and I need to make it clear when I start with a new therapist later this year that I need someone who can be tough on this issue.

But that’s not the point of this post. This is:

Given that I acknowledge that I need to put myself first, both for my own sake and for that of my children, how do I learn to do so?