Lost for words
We’re at a loss for words. We don’t know what to say anymore, to anyone. This isn’t about writers block, or anything to do with not having anything to say, it’s about not knowing how to say anything. As a way to try to break out of this pattern, we did some free thinking/word association and came up with the following Wordle image…
It was interesting to see how often we repeated some of the words – we wrote one word per line for two pages. While the words could be taken several ways, they are all an indication that we’re getting closer to the edge. We’re trying any way to distract and find ways to cope in the moment.
Small and scared
Yesterday the safety of the respite house came under question. We left to spend the day with the mother, mainly to test how well we are. It turns out we’re still not all that grounded or well…
When we returned we found that a new client had arrived at the respite house. This was fine, they are female and seemingly non-threatening. So we went down to our room to drop off some things, only to find that someone had been in and used our art supplies. The young ones were so upset about this boundary violation. Little Michelle came forward and looked around in tears. This may seem like an over-reaction considering nothing had been destroyed, but it was the young ones who had their things moved and used. M was prepared for our iPod to have been stolen, and it would have had less impact if that’s what had happened. The iPod is mainly for the teens and adults, we could have coped better than the invasion on the young ones things.
Then at night the new client went on a severe binging and purging cycle. It was awful for her, she’d felt so positive during the day. For us it was a huge trigger. We have food issues as well, not to the level of the new client, but her pain and acting out was enough to trigger us through the roof.
So our safe house doesn’t feel so safe anymore. We know it was the carers grandson who used our art things, we know the mother is trying and we know the new client is trying to work through their problems. But we feel so small and scared. We feel like we’ve taken a huge step backwards.
Expectations & art therapy
School is out for summer in New Zealand, for us that means a change in our work hours and therefore the times we see Liz. During semester time, we work one evening so that we can have a morning off to go to therapy and try to recover before heading into work; while during the semester breaks, we have late afternoon appointments so that we minimise our time off work. I’m not sure which is better – the afternoon sessions mean that I arrive wound up from work, and the morning sessions mean I have to quickly recover from therapy so that I’m ready for work. Yesterday was our first afternoon session, and it was challenging for several reasons:
- Our summers are humid and the building isn’t air conditioned, so her office smelt like previous clients.
- We’d had a bad day at work, with lots of in-fighting amongst the staff about a staff member who isn’t doing their fair share of the work.
- We were worried how Liz would interpret a piece of writing we’d sent her that one of us had done.
- We had self-injured recently and were worried how Liz would react to that.
It was the piece of writing that worried us the most, possibly because it was the first time we’d shared something like that with Liz. To us, this piece was a clear warning to the daily functional ones that we are hated and will be destroyed if we continue down the path we have taken. We went in with the expectation that Liz would see it in a similar way… but, she didn’t. She saw the piece of writing as a warning to her from some young ones. This threw us. We didn’t see Liz within the writing at all, but I wonder if that is because we don’t really consider Liz part of our healing… Sometimes it seems as if she is part of the “healing hoop” we have to jump through in order to heal, rather than a real person who can help us along the way.
Leading on from this, Liz asked us to play a game where we took turns drawing a line on a piece of paper. We’re deeply suspicious of Liz and her art therapy abilities, so we were worried about what this would show her about our state of mind, but went along with it. It was terrifying… absolutely and utterly terrifying… Liz was drawing on the same piece of paper as us… we couldn’t control where she put her lines, we couldn’t keep her to one corner of the paper while we had the opposite corner… At several points we froze in total panic. Having just read about the technique, it’s often used in Gestalt and art therapy with difficult clients, where the “typical therapist-client interaction can often be distant, demanding, and frustrating”. Great, I’m a difficult client… Sometimes I really shouldn’t research! I know that I should take from the technique that Liz is trying to find new ways to build a relationship and interact with me… but all I see are the words “difficult clients”.
One thing that got stuck in my mind from the session, is Liz saying “it concerns me what you are doing with all of these repressed emotions”. I know what I’m doing with them… I’m systematically sabotaging and destroying myself.
Collages for healing and understanding
I’m trying something new – I’m submitting some artwork to the latest Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse. The works below have great meaning for some within the system. I’m a little hesitant about submitting them, but want to support the carnival and the cause it is paying attention to this month – World Day for the Prevention of Child Abuse.
This is one of our common nightmares… trying to escape from a feeling of drowning and being pulled toward a monster or clown.
Layers of dirt, abuse and pain pile up to create a warped view of the world.
What story do the abusers see in their victims eyes?
Do they see anything, or are they scared to look?
I wonder if the look in a victims eyes has ever haunted them or kept them awake at night?
Alone again
I’ve just dropped the mother off at the airport. She agreed to go home last night – so she doesn’t put me through more “torture” (her words).
I feel like the worst daughter ever. I know she doesn’t mean any harm and she was trying to help, but it wasn’t working. When we woke up this morning, I thought maybe I’d made a mistake and she should stay… But then on the way to the airport she was talking about the cold snap that has come up the country and how it would hurt all the lambs (yes, I can’t even type what really would have happened to them). I don’t watch the news at this time of the year because I know they will show the horrific shots of the lambs in trucks. In my world, no lambs get hurt… Most people would realise that you shouldn’t talk about cute animals being hurt to someone who is DID and suicidal, not so my mother. This is why I’m sure that she really doesn’t understand DID or me. She doesn’t intend to be cruel or nasty, she just doesn’t realise the implications of her words.
Because of her words, this is how Sophie was feeling last night… It’s bad when one of our most high functioning and optimistic one does a collage like this.
Unfit for work
“Unfit for work…” those words sting, they really do. They’re the words used to explain why I won’t be able to work for the next 12 days. They’re part of the standard form that the doctor fills in, so it’s nothing personal, but it means failure to some of us. We know that our functioning at work has been so poor that there was no other choice, but it still cuts us to the core of what many of us perceive as our self-worth. M in particular, is struggling with being put off work, yet she was the one who made the appointment and mentioned the problems we were having, knowing full well that enforced sick leave was the likely outcome. M couldn’t hand the medical certificate over in person – it would be like admitting failure and having to face the disappointment of those around us; so we left it on the team leaders desk with an email message apologising for the inconvenience we were causing. Some of us consider this the wimps way out… failing to face up to our responsibilities and the repercussions of our actions.
This morning we got a text message from our cynical work friend asking how we were. I wasn’t sure how to respond, I know that in some ways I’m trying to protect her – she’s got enough on her plate without hearing my sob story. So I sugar-coated what was happening. No one at work was expecting us to have this time off, so it probably came as a shock. I suppose this is one example of how we can appear so high functioning, but really be a total and utter mess. What I fear the most is the reaction when we get back to work… will people alienate us, want to hug us, avoid talking about it? At their core, the people that I work with are good and kind people, but they don’t understand mental health issues. This means that I will odds are lie about what has happened when I get back to work, I’ll find some acceptable lie that doesn’t make them squirm.
This week we’ve also seen Jo and Liz…
Jo became quite worried about our safety after we did a collage with her. It can be quite amusing on one level to see Jo’s art work which is all about love and happiness, while ours is dark and full of violence. We both had mindless woman’s magazines to use as base material for the collage. I had words like key, disappear, invisible… Jo had love and rainbow. I had a picture of a puppet running through a door… Jo had a smiling woman on the beach. She was concerned about our safety to the point of contacting Liz. Poor Liz also now realises how much we were testing her when we first started seeing her – with Jo we go with the flow, but with Liz we resisted and argued at the beginning. This wasn’t deliberate, but rather an unconscious way to see whether Liz was going to be able to help us heal and put up with what we could throw at her.
When we saw Liz, it was what I would consider a disaster. Little Michelle came forward and made it almost impossible for us to speak. She has such a problem with words and forming them that it’s like she is stuttering, but I don’t think it’s a true stutter, I think it’s more about not wanting to tell the secrets. At one point, we were stuck on one sentence, and in particular one word… “I’m not special“. We were so incapable of saying the word special, that we ended up having to write it down. Little Michelle stuttered through explaining that she wasn’t “that word” to anyone, because if you were “that word” you then got hurt. She wanted to runaway so that the pain would stop. Liz offered to runaway with her, but Little Michelle said that no one else was allowed to come. All the time this was going on, there were ones in the background yelling that she was telling lies and it’s all rubbish. This was the first time the messages about it all being lies were so closely tied to someone saying anything. Little Michelle shared no abusive events, but her presence alone was enough to stir-up the denial and nay-sayers. That probably means something in psychology land, but to us it just felt crazy.
So we have 11 more days before we are allowed back to work… We’re meant to relax and unwind… This is terrifying! Work is our structure, our safety. Suddenly we’re meant to do this thing called relaxation and rest. We’ve actively avoided doing either of those things for about 20 years… Today we survived by going down to the gardens and taking pictures with the new lens’ we got the other day. Not sure how we’re going to cope with another 11 days of this.
Here’s a random photo we took today…
Cherry blossom
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Now playing: Shihad – Pacifier
via FoxyTunes
Gift from a friend
Today I went onto Polyvore to do a set as a coping mechansim, and found this gift from LostShadowChild instead…
for castorgirl by LostShadowChild on Polyvore.com
Thank you… Thank you so much.
LostShadowchild, I hope you don’t mind me adding it here. If you want me to take it down just let me know :)
