Scattered pieces

It’s become obvious that I’ve been withdrawing from everything lately.  It always starts slowly… I’ll sit at my desk, rather than go out with the others for breaks at work; I’ll leave the car out with the intention of going to take photos, but end up putting it away a few hours later because I’m “too tired” or it’s now “too dark” to take photos.  I wasn’t really sure why I’ve been withdrawing, or rather, which particular stressor was causing the withdrawal.  I only knew that is was happening.  Yesterday, I moved one step closer to eliminating one stressor – the dissolution of my marriage.  The laws in New Zealand require you to have been separated from your partner for two years before you can dissolve the marriage (get a divorce).  That milestone was up on 14 February of this year.  So we took the papers to the Family Court to start the official process… it was an interesting trip which caused the activation of ones that hadn’t been present for quite some time.

We took two hours off work to take the papers to court, thinking that would be plenty of time for the fairly simple matter of handing over some papers and paying a fee… how wrong was I!

It started off well… we went into the Family Court reception and were served by the nice lady who took our Protection Order application nearly two years ago.  She checked the forms, notarized them where it was appropriate and double checked that none of our personal details appeared on the forms to protect us from any contact from the husband.  Then we asked some seemingly innocent questions about what would happen next… in particular asking about how he was to be notified of the dissolution when we didn’t know where he lived…  This is where the smooth operation came to a screaming halt.

“What do you mean you don’t know where he lives?”  The slightly stunned clerk asked…
“Well, we actively try to avoid knowing anything about him because of the Protection Order.”
“So, what’s this address here…” as she points to the address we’ve listed.
“That’s his lawyers address.”  We reply, thinking it makes perfect sense to serve the papers to his lawyer.
“You can’t serve the papers to his lawyer, it has to be him in person.”
“But… I have no idea where he is.”
“You need to try and find him.”

At this point, the clerk confers with another worker about the situation and asks what my options are…  Meanwhile we’re dissociating, spinning and trying to keep it together despite the internal chaos… we can’t find him… don’t make us have to find him… don’t make us talk to him or his family again…

After a rather convoluted discussion, the clerk comes back to tell us that we have to try and find him through any means necessary; but if we can’t, we can fill in another form to say that the papers can be served on his parents…  But we still need someone to serve them… Someone over 18 to serve the papers to them in person…  Someone would have to go to his parents house, knock on the door and give the papers to them…

This news brought another round of dissociation and internal noise… we can’t go to the witch’s house… she hates us… she’ll yell at us… please don’t make us!

Thankfully another woman yelled out that we could pay someone from the court where they live to serve the papers on our behalf…

This just left the problem of trying to find him!  So off to the public library we went, looking for electoral roles…  We walked there thinking it would be quicker than taking the car, but on the way there was all sorts of activation by different parts… Can we buy a toy?  Oh look, a sale!  Can we go see that movie?  That’s a pretty dress. The desire to get sidetracked was immense… there was so much panic about trying to find the husband.  With each comment, suggestion or pull, M tried to assure each one that we would go back later, but that we really needed to find the husband to make us all safe.

We found that the husband hadn’t changed his details official details from when he lived with us.  We tried telephone directories and the Internet, but couldn’t find him.

There was another round of attempted distractions on the way back to court, but M deflected each one.  When we returned to court, we filled in even more paperwork to say that we’d tried to find the husband.  All the while, the internal noise was getting louder and louder.

It was only when we were driving away that the noise quietened.  So much so, that by the time we got to a toy store, to keep the promise of buying something later, all the young ones had gone quiet.

On the surface, I can see the noise and chaos was an indication of our stress about the situation.  But, I think it goes deeper than that.  It was about our fear of having to do anything to do with him, fearing possibly having to see him again, fear that he will react when he gets the papers…  It’s also about dissolving the marriage, and therefore admitting we made a mistake in getting married… it’s an indication of our failure.

I still feel the anxiety, disconnection and withdrawal from life… I don’t quite know how to ease that.  I’ve tried making an appointment with my psychiatrist to get a review of my medication, but need ACC approval and funding before I can go – which means it could be several months before I get in to see him.  This week, I’m wanting to quit therapy…  I cancelled Jo and have come close to cancelling Liz several times.  Everything about therapy annoys me at the moment – trying to talk, all of Liz’s responses, her making us draw when we retreat and can’t talk…

We found this photo called Just Red by Burning Image… it’s a good representation of how we’re feeling…

A good friend recently mentioned that she felt like she was going to fall, and fall deeply.  Part of her was expecting, and almost wanting the fall to happen.  Thankfully, her fall hasn’t happened, and I hope it doesn’t; but what she describes is a feeling I know all to well.  It’s like standing on an edge, waiting for that last push to send you over into a mental health free-fall.  The scary bit about standing there, is that you have an awareness about where you are.  You know that one more negative thing is going to push you over, and part of you wishes that it would come so that it’s over with; but another part of you hopes that you can still claw your way back to safer ground.  It becomes a tug of war between different parts of you…  This alone is so tiring that it can be enough to tip you over…

I know I’m also moving closer to the edge.  The stressors in my life have kicked into high gear and I can feel the pressure building.  At the moment, I’m far enough away to know that I’m in danger without being too close to it.  A part of me niggles that I’m thinking myself into moving towards the edge – why do I think of my ex-husband, why worry about the ACC assessments etc.  But the rational part of my brain knows that I’m experiencing PTSD flashbacks and my worry is justified based on past assessments.  This is the beginning of the tug of war that intensifies over time.  Soon other issues will come in to muddy the waters – denial, and a need for validation have already started to appear.  All of this increases my anxiety levels.  I’ve experienced this often enough in the last few years to notice the pattern…  It becomes like a dance, to and fro… ever closer to the edge…

The problem becomes, how do you stop the dance?  If I called a crisis line, they would take me through the individual stressors I am facing and encourage me to break them down into solvable chunks.  This would work for some of the issues I’m facing, but they can’t help with the PTSD symptoms.  I saw Jo today, and she was recommending trying to ground in the present, and while I agree with her reasoning, I also know that I can be very grounded in 2010 and still keep on dancing towards the edge.  Some of the grounding work can make the situation worse – repeating “it’s the 26th of January, 2010 and they are just memories” can morph into a denial statement about the memories all being made up.  The most effective way of keeping the anxiety at bay is to consciously breathe deeply – this also tends to by one of the first things I forget to do.  Like many survivors who experience anxiety, I have a form of hyperventilation syndrome, with my breathing being short and shallow.  It takes a conscious effort to alter my breathing pattern to a healthier depth and pace.  Changing my breathing will temporarily ease the anxiety, but often this isn’t enough to stop the dance towards the edge.  I’m not always sure what moves me away from the edge, I think this time it will be the formal dissolution of my marriage and completing the ACC assessment.  If this is the case, I’ve got about another three weeks of doing the dance around the edge.  I don’t think I’ll fall, but a part of me thinks I will…  A part of me wants to fall, because they think that this is what I deserve…

And so the dance continues…

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Now playing: The Feelers – Stand Up
via FoxyTunes

I’ve just come from an appointment with Jo.  Jo is a physically similar to us in many ways, which made it hard when we walked in today and found her with her arm in a sling, a foot brace on her right foot, bruises on her arms and a black eye.  We were already a little fragile, but that sent us over the edge.  It was impossible to stop transferring her injuries to how it was with us when we were with the husband.  She assured us that she had been hurt in a fall caused by her wearing high heels which she was unfamiliar with…  But inside the young ones were screaming that someone had pushed her.  Even after further assurance, they still didn’t believe her – we used to make excuses and say that the bruises were for all sorts of reasons.

We couldn’t cope with her in all of the bandages, so blocked her from our vision.  When we get particularly stressed about something visual, that object becomes blurred in our vision.  So Jo became a dark blur in the upper left corner, of what became a narrower and narrower field of vision.  We had to leave, we couldn’t stay.  We were dissociating and switching all over the place.  M was trying to bring a sense of calm to the system by blocking out and stamping down the memories again, but it was too late… the memories were triggered and running rampant.

We felt so guilty for making her injuries about us and our triggers.  We were worried for her, but the overwhelming message came about us being hurt.  Feeling so pathetic and weak for not showing someone the care that they needed.

We’re now sitting at work freaking… we usually wear our headphones and listen to music when we’re like this, but each time the cords touch our neck we’re triggered into thinking his hands are around our neck again.  We can’t stop shaking and jumping at each sound or flash of light.  Only four more hours before we can go home to the safety of the house…

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Now playing: Brooke Fraser – Lifeline
via FoxyTunes

“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