Scattered pieces

The activity for this months Expressive Arts Carnival is to:

Use any visual means (e.g., drawing, painting, photography) to represent, in an abstract way, your experience of all or part of your internal world. The key to the activity is to focus on an abstract representation. The reason for this focus is that it helps us to describe our experiences in a way that is not so familiar to us.

First off, I’m not good with abstract thinking or art, let alone putting the two together; so this activity has proven to be a bit of a challenge.

Saying that, here are our  attempts to represent what our internal world looks like…

Internal World: Part I

This one was heavily influenced by M.  It’s a very structured view, and I think comes from her place of being a little apart from the rest of us.  I think it’s possibly more of an abstract system map, rather than a representation of our inner world.

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Internal World: Part II

Well, our internal world according to Aimee and K (with help from Sophie)… They like the baby moose playing, and the mother moose always watching to make sure nothing will hurt them :)

I’m not sure if this is really a representation of our internal world for a majority of us, but I think it’s accurate for these two young ones… or how they’d like it to be???  They also love the clip, so wanted an excuse to put it on the blog…

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Internal World: Part III

In the shadows, waiting.

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Internal World: Part IV

Which leads to the final representation… the one that all of us agree to some extent represents our internal world, or a very important part of it…

Shadows…  The lower left corner represents areas which are in total darkness, while the upper right corner represents areas which are flooded with light. These two extremes are linked by varying degrees of shadow intensity.

This was an interesting exercise to do… Thank you Paul for providing the prompts.

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Now playing: Five For Fighting – 100 Years
via FoxyTunes

The last two days have been kind of rough.

Heading into Thursday, I was feeling good and had managed to pull myself onto some sort of steady ground.  That all fell apart late Thursday afternoon, when I got an email from the other team leader, calling into question the quality of my work.  That email sent me plunging back into self-doubt, self-hatred and all the other associated negative thinking.  My cynical friend told me to forget it; but it was such a back-stabbing insult that I couldn’t brush it off.  To make it worse, my own team leader wasn’t around to reality check the content of the email, and I didn’t want to run to the manager about it.  This spun me out to the point where I knew I wasn’t safe to drive home.  I stayed on at work for a couple of hours, before driving home and losing most of the evening to the dissociation.

Then, on Friday morning during my drive to work, we went past a “hurt” cat in the middle of the road.  I always dread this sort of thing; not only does it stir up the system because an innocent animal has been hurt, but it’s a trigger for some of the younger ones.  Like a deer caught in headlights, we can never look away… we started reciting “it’s just a jumper that fell out of a car”, hoping that this will change how we see the cat… it doesn’t.  This means we now have adult parts smarting from the insult to our work, and young ones upset that an innocent cat has been hurt.

So we’re now driving down the road reciting out loud “it’s just hurt, it’s ok, it’ll get up soon and the people who love it will come get it and take care of it”.  There was also a promise that we wouldn’t drive home that way, just in case it hadn’t been moved.

Work on Friday is mostly a blank… I know we had a morning tea for the two new people, and that the manager made a triple layer banana and pineapple cake (which did a rather spectacular topple over during the cutting process).  I also know I played around with the iPhone app kooaba, as we’re looking at new ways to try to deliver information through technology such as QR codes and visual recognition apps.  This was fun because we were going around the library, taking random photos of books, CDs and DVDs to see what information kooaba would return.

Then it came to the drive home… all the way up the street where we should have turned off to avoid going by the stretch of road where the cat had been hurt, we were consciously thinking of turning.  Then there was this little mind fit, and we were suddenly past the turn off.  I could hear the panic, but there was also this firm voice telling me to stop being so silly, that there will be nothing there, and it will all be fine.

Thankfully the cat was no longer there, but that didn’t matter, the panic had set in.  We were switching all over the place and I could feel our throat closing up.  Little Michelle came forward full force, meaning that we couldn’t really drive, talk and only barely functioned enough to get home in one piece.  Because we live in a high fenced section, no one saw us getting out of the car shaking like a leaf and stuttering about it hurting.

We got inside, fed Winnie, turned on all the lights, curled up in the corner of the lounge and tried to ease the shaking.  I had no real sense of what was happening, but there were obviously body memories.  The throat was closed off, and no matter how hard I tried, I could barely stutter.  I managed to take some anxiety medication and send the following email to Allison…

turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide
turn all the lights on an hide

hide got to hide
he’ll find us

I think we finally went to bed at about 8am (it was naturally light by then) and slept for a couple of hours.

Saturday had been good… we’d talked to a friend and took some pictures of the stuffed toy we got for the young ones as their reward for going through the divorce proceedings…

This made me think that tonight was going to be easier… the fear seemed to have eased.  But it’s now 1am Sunday and all the lights are on again.  Little Michelle is ok as long as all the lights are on.  We’re also ok as long as we don’t even think about going to bed.

One of the big problems with this scenario, is that it opens us up to further dissociation and self injury.  We’re so switchy and shaky…

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Now playing: Missy Higgins – Where I Stood
via FoxyTunes

I took this photo awhile ago now, but today it means something to us… We call it “Journey”…

Journey

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When we look at this picture today it means many different things to us -

• Journey into the light from the dark – a journey of hope
• Journey of danger as a child is lead away to disappear with the man beside him
• Journey of death, with this light at the end of the tunnel being what you see upon your death
• Journey of innocence as the child plays happily beside the safe man
• Journey through the holding pens, ready for death at the meat market.  People before these two have left their last messages on the walls, only for it to be covered up like graffiti…  If you look at the image large size on black, you can see the hand marks made on the ceiling as a last attempt to leave something behind

This jumble of messages is how we are at the moment, a messy jumble of thoughts, both good and bad.  We’re not sure where our journey is taking us, but at the moment it feels like things are shifting internally.  I’m not sure of the reason – maybe it’s returning to work, maybe it’s the two year anniversary of the attempt on our life by our then husband, maybe it’s our healing work…  I’m not sure, but I wish we were more settled and safer.

I noticed a very odd thing yesterday while playing FarmTown on FaceBook…  My issues with having a large personal space, seem to translate to my online avatars.  In FarmTown, you can go to market to sell your produce and see if someone wants to hire you to harvest their crops or plow their fields.  If you’re waiting to be employed, your avatar can be “standing” with a number of other avatars for a period of time.  There is a certain amount of psychology that goes into the strategies behind being hired – the “spammer”, where you repeatedly ask to be hired; the “dancer”, where you move around or get your avatar to dance on the spot; or the “loner”, where you get your avatar in a spot alone so they’re easily noticed.  I’ve always adopted the “loner” strategy, and have always attributed this to my game strategy.  I now realise there might be something more to it.  I can sometimes cope with another avatar being near or overlapping mine for a short period of time, but never long – even my ugly little avatar must have a large personal space.  For those of you who think I’m being cruel about the relative ugliness of the avatar, you obviously haven’t seen FarmTown graphics – they’re UGLY!

I wonder if this is an indication that I’ve been playing the game too long and are therefore personalising it too much, or whether I have extreme boundary issues.  When Carol (previous therapist) asked me about arranging the room in a way that I felt comfortable, we did an exercise about personal space.  In order for us to feel even mildly comfortable, we had to be in one corner of the room and she had to be in the opposite corner.  We would’ve preferred for her to be outside the room, but that wasn’t feasible.  During therapy with Carol, we’d often end up on the floor tucked around behind a cabinet that she had – this was mainly when the young ones were present.  They often felt a need to hide and create physical barriers between us and Carol.  During sessions with Liz when the young ones are present, there is still a pull to sit on the floor in the corner, but we’re too scared to do it in case it makes us look too odd.

We felt that need to sit in the corner today during our session with Liz, Aimee and SO were strongly present and felt like hiding.  It was a rough session in many ways – the main topics of conversation were denial and self-injury.  It brought up a very odd concept of how to cope with the denial.  We’d tried to construct a basic timeline of events to try and create some order out of the memories, but had found it too difficult to write them down.  We got about four events written, but then the derealisation started.  As this way of coping and “getting the memories out” hadn’t worked, Liz suggested something which is too bizarre for my very literal brain – think the memories or whatever is bothering me onto a piece of paper, fold it up and give it to Liz to keep.  This will mean that we don’t have to worry about those pieces of information again as they are being kept safe and separate from us.  To us this didn’t make sense…  How do you “think” something onto a piece of paper without writing it down?  How does giving Liz that piece of paper signify anything?  It was all too abstract and alternative for our very concrete, narrow way of thinking.

A therapist once told us that our education was lacking because we hadn’t studied any of the Arts.  That’s true, we don’t understand the beauty in art, music or philosophy.  In many ways we deliberately avoid studying them, because if the intellectuals amongst us get hold of the ideas they have this tendency to strip away the magic and enjoyment.  So we take photos because they’re fun… we listen to Beethoven, Foo Fighters, Brooke Fraser or any music because it moves us at the time… But when it comes to having to think through an abstract idea, we need the intellectual ones to come on board with some assistance.  This is fine, unless they get faced with something which they can’t dissect or reason through logically, then it sort of gets lost in their cynicism…

“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

I’ve struggled long and hard to understand what is meant by the term “healing” within a mental health context.  I’m familiar with healing that can be quantified (e.g. a broken bone mending), but how do you quantify healing from childhood abuse?  Is it possible or desirable to do so? What time-frame should we look at as reasonable when we’re considering the healing process?

I’m very aware that this is the intellectual side of me asking these questions.  The questions are born from frustration at what is seeming like a very long journey that hasn’t got us very far.  I know that many survivors experience a decrease in functioning with the start of therapy, but how long can I expect this to continue?  I do what I can to hasten the healing process – I do the homework I’m set, I try to be as open as I can within therapy, etc.  But is this enough?  I’ve been told by therapists that I’m “working hard” within therapy, but I often feels as if it’s another part of my life that I’m drifting through.  There will be a moment of clarity surrounding why I do a certain behaviour, but it’s then lost in the confusion and dissociative memory gaps.

I’ve yet to fully understand what the term “working hard” refers to within therapy.  Yet, I often come out of a session absolutely exhausted or on an adrenaline high, both signs that I have experienced something extreme for what I sometimes dismiss as “sitting in a chair for 60 minutes talking”.  I have a great deal of respect for those who are working on their healing as a full-time endeavour, it’s not something that I have the strength for.  But I have no respect or patience for my own healing.  I’m still caught in dismissing and minimising the memories.  Liz has offered to assist with this process by using her as a sounding board to test out the feelings and potential accuracy of the memories.  There is a certain attraction in doing this, we could finally prove what is real and which memories have potentially been influenced.  But there is also a fear that Liz will say nothing about the validity of the memories, but rather ask us to look at them and analyse our feelings and emotions about the events.  This is my greatest fear, having no way to prove or dis-prove the memories and still having to do the work of recovering from the toxic mess they generate.

Part of my anxiety is generated from the proposed changes to the ACC scheme (check out the ACC category at Gudrun Frerich’s site for some of the issues surrounding the changes).  As an ACC client, the changes will mean more reporting, increasing need to measure the healing progress and the threat of my cover being stopped at any time.  There is no way that I would be able to afford therapy without ACC assistance, so this is  a huge issue.  This is not because we are attached to, or reliant on Liz; but rather I have a fear that if we can’t release the thoughts within a therapeutic framework, we will self-destruct.  Yes, I realise that I’m contradicting myself – how can therapy be “sitting in a chair talking for 60 minutes” as well as one of the things that keep us sane…

In totally other news, B entered us into a photo competition which we have absolutely no chance of winning or even placing in.  This goes against every single strand of perfectionism that runs through our body.  I do realise however, that it’s going to be an great deal of fun for them deciding how to photograph 100′s and 1000′s creatively.

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Now playing: The Feelers – Stand Up
via FoxyTunes

While growing up, I tried very hard to be the perfect daughter.  I was polite, quiet, obedient, a good student, tidy, shy and seemingly happy.  This is the daughter my mother knows and loves.  She doesn’t know the daughter she is now faced with.  She doesn’t recognise the woman who can’t go outside unless it’s for work; the woman who will stand in the middle of the kitchen and start scratching her hand while staring into space; the woman who says that she can’t serve up dinner because the food has suddenly become dirty and disgusting; the woman who sits on the Internet until 2am because the idea of sleep is too scary for her and she needs the distraction.

This week, the mother has been faced more and more with the daughter she doesn’t know or recognise.  The session on Monday with Liz stirred up all sorts of issues internally and I’ve been struggling to cope with the reaction.  It got to the point on Tuesday night that there was going to be some fairly serious self-destructive behaviour occur if there wasn’t some intervention.  That intervention came in the form of someone coming forward to take photos.  They realised we were too unsafe to drive anywhere, so the usual routine of driving somewhere to take photos was out.  Instead they decided to use some props from around the house to see what they could do.  The mother could tell we weren’t well, so she ended up helping by having a look for different props to photograph and holding the torch we used as a light source.  This is one of the results…

Apple

Because the mother helped us with all of this, she could monitor us more closely.  She said that it wasn’t until after the photos had all been taken and we were putting them onto the computer for processing that we sort of “came back”.

Awhile ago, Sophie tried to apologise for the not being that perfect daughter the mother remembered.  The mother said that we were probably never that perfect daughter, but she didn’t see it.  She didn’t see what that perfection was hiding.  I think she really does want to help sometimes.  But her own dysfunctional thinking and lack of healing, mean that she will never really be able to help us.  I don’t resent her inability to help us, but I do wish that she would seriously look at her own need to heal.  She went to therapy for a couple of sessions, but then stopped as she thought it wasn’t going anywhere.

I’m aware this makes us sad or uncomfortable or something.  I’m not good at naming or understand emotions, but I noticed that the body was feeling very cold and I need to do up the jersey we wore to work.

Time to go back to being the perfect working daughter…

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Now playing: U2 – Running to Stand Still
via FoxyTunes

I’ve seen 4 therapists in the last 5 years.  That seems a high number.  M was told by Liz that we have very high expectations of therapists, maybe they are too high?  Here’s a brief run-down of what happened with each -

Debra seen for 6-8 months.
Worked part-time from home.  Her methods were based on Mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.  She was intelligent and studying towards her masters.  Reason why we stopped seeing her was because of boundary issues and she was stopping therapy work to concentrate on her masters.

Carol seen for 2.5 years.
Worked part-time from offices.  Her methods were based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy with some influence from other methodologies including Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. Reason why we stopped seeing her was because of boundary issues and her fascination with our dissociation. She loved playing with Aimee. She wasn’t helping us move forward in any meaningful way and we’d started to become convinced that she had planted the whole idea of DID in our head.

Bob seen for 6-8 months.
Worked full-time from her extremely busy offices. She came highly recommended and we saw her to try and find out if we were making this dissociation thing up. She had extensive experience with abused teens and children. Things went a bit haywire with Bob when she was trying to force an integration of personality states to counter what she described as a “fragile personality structure”. We stopped seeing her when the short term contract was up with ACC.

Liz seen for about 6 months.
Works part-time from offices. She was the only therapist willing to take on a client that came with warnings about dissociative issues. She has other dissociative clients and came recommended from another therapist. We don’t know if we can go back to see her.

Earlier this week we posted a rant that was fairly quickly deleted.  It covered the issues we’d had when seeing Liz on Monday and problems we’d seen throughout the time we’d been seeing her.  Some of these include:

• Turning her cell phone volume down during sessions.  It has rung during session, so you get the noise of a vibrating cell phone dancing across the desk as you’re trying to talk about something important.  She has also looked at the cell phone to see who is calling while in session.
• She has a habit of clearing her throat when being asked something difficult or is faced with challenging ones within the system.  Mickie is generally silent during sessions when fronting, which prompted much throat clearing and a conversation about us living alone meaning that we don’t know how to socialise and make conversation.
• On Monday there was a discussion about our night-time photography trips and the reason why we’re doing them – to get hurt.  Liz suggested that the reason why we hadn’t been hurt was because of someone or something looking out for us.  She was meaning a higher power of some sort.  Any talk of religion is a huge trigger for us.  It felt more like the focus of the discussion had moved from helping us, to preaching to us.
• She is unable to remember our basic biographical information – we’re the youngest of four, get on alright with the oldest brother and have minimal contact with the entire family.  This is the sort of information that she has asked several times, including constructing a sociogram with us.  If the information was important enough to ask several times, it’s important enough for her to remember or to write on the front page of our file for easy reference.

Monday’s session was particularly bad.  The religion trigger set off a negative reaction with W.  M came forward to protect W when she realised what was going on, but it was too late.  This meant that M came forward annoyed that Liz was talking religion without checking out who was present and their beliefs about the subject.

It was after Liz again asked M about our basic biographical information that things got particularly tense.  M asked why Liz had to keep asking about this information, Liz responded that she might get a different answer one day.  M pointed out that we would always be the youngest of four children and unless something major happened, we’d still feel the same about the family as we do now.  Liz said our expectation that she would manage this information was too high, M asked what a reasonable expectation would be…

To be fair, M was defensive as Liz had challenged one of the young ones she protects.  But Liz was helpless to find us all a way through that defensive mechanism.  We left without making a further appointment.  If this has been a one off bad session we would have had a cool-off period and made another appointment.  But it isn’t, it’s the latest in a series of unusual sessions.

Now we’re stuck.  We don’t trust Liz and don’t know if we can go back to see her.  But if we don’t, are we doing so because our expectations are too high?  Are we being unreasonable with our expectations that a therapist will manage basic information, silence their cell phone and not talk about sensitive issues without checking who is present?  Maybe our reaction is off the scale because of our dysfunctional thinking and reactions?

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Now playing: Audioslave – Cochise
via FoxyTunes

We’ve started to go out at night taking photos.  When we first started doing this I took it as being a simple distraction; now I’m starting to think there is more to it.  The photo below is one of our favourites and was taken on a busy night in town under one of the bridges.  Under this particular bridge is quite busy – there is a road where cars tend to speed down and the homeless and drunk often gather nearby.  Put into this mix a dissociative woman walking into this area with a $2000 camera.  Are we asking to be robbed, attacked or both?  All of the places where we’ve taken photos at night have been in similarly risky areas.  Our neighbourhood is a rough one, yet we go walking with the camera knowing we won’t be able to take good photos because of our essential tremor (shaking hands and slower shutter speeds of night photography don’t mix).  I had sort of relaxed about our night expeditions as I thought they were innocent distractions.  Now I have to try to monitor them more closely…

Bridge reflection