If you’re like me and you have been looking, searching, actively, furtively, seeking “better” then I am appealing to YOU – “better” does not exist.
I am writing this as a warning to those of you on this search – a search I have been on for 10 years; maybe longer. A warning, basically to be prepared that your “better” may well be where you are now; the search may lead to “worse”. WILL lead to worse. So be a good cub scout and “be prepared”.
My background and reasons for writing this diatribe. Obviously this is purely MY experience, yours WILL be different; but keep your eyes and ears open, be prepared and STOP before it’s too late.
In 2007 I moved away from my home town, my old “life” – I use the word “life” lightly, I was almost 40 and I hadn’t lived, I honestly felt I’d never lived, had a life AND 10 years later, after a hell of a lot of hard work I still feel the same and, at this present moment in time, WORSE. AND there was a lot WORSE along the way
I moved almost 300 miles away, I had to escape my old existence, shed my skin and inevitably that would never be possible. No matter how many times we change our environment we will ALWAYS take our self with us. I wasn’t that niaive – I KNEW that. However, I also knew that I needed to move in order to start the process of finding myself. My “me” that had been forever lost, the “me” that had never seen the light of day, the “me” I never knew.
The town I moved to didn’t feel like home, I wasn’t expecting this to be immediate but, almost 10 years later, it still doesn’t feel like “home”. And, on recently visiting my “hometown”, that didn’t feel like home either. “There’s no place like home” – that saying makes me wonder whether I ever, indeed, had one – had a home. I NEVER really felt as if anywhere was home. No home, no tribe – alone in the world. A wanderer that had never done a great deal of wandering.
Basically I feel as if I have spent my whole “life” merely treading water. Not swimming, sometimes drowning, but predominantly only treading water.
I embarked on the journey of therapy. I’ve never really taken to the word “journey” so I use that word reluctantly but I cannot think of an adequate alternative. I hate its overuse and misuse; ie: when a “celebrity” uses a toilet that is a journey (NOT!). Alas, therapy really IS a journey. A horrible, terrible, shocking one. A blind journey, tree-roots and darkness everywhere, marshes and deep, deep fly-swarming bogs. No named destination, no route plan, a journey that if I had seen an itinerary for I would NOT have booked myself on. A trek through a jungle with no guide and countless wild predators along the way – a number of which could have easily made me their dinner.
I wanted to turn back so, so many times but I am NOT someone who gives up. I’ve never been someone who gives up; although there have been many, many occasions (especially in the past year) when that has been ALL I could think of; and giving up in the most literal sense that any of us can.
I also found that during the process of therapy there simply comes a point when you CANNOT turn back. When you have taken one step too far; the point of no return.
I actually HATE my therapist for not warning me, not shouting at me – “turn back NOW; this is your last chance”.
I don’t know if she saw, if she could see what I hadn’t, all I KNOW is that I couldn’t, I DIDN’T see, I was blind. I couldn’t see for 8 years. I walked and ran blindly into “something”. I was so desperate, absolutely desperate, that last-ditched attempt at trying to establish a life, a footing, I had no idea that what I was galloping into would actually be WORSE not BETTER.
This is why I am writing, I NEED to warn those of you about to start on this journey, and I KNOW that if you are anything like me you won’t heed any advice or warning because you will think that NOTHING could possibly be worse than what you have already experienced. So if you don’t read this then there is nothing I can do or say. But actually that notion is bollocks. There is always, always WORSE to come.
The human condition shuts us down from seeing the worse. What I never actually got when I started, was that therapy is a way of revealing it. Revealing what you have shut yourself off from, revealing worse NOT better. The older you are when you start this process, the more years of practise you have had at shutting down and hiding yourself; not only from others but also from yourself – actually “selves” would be a more appropriate word to describe this.
The “shutting down” is not a deliberate act. I didn’t even know I did this, had become permanently “shut down” AND no-one would learn to shut-down without damn good reason. Again, I didn’t know this, I wasn’t aware, I was blind and deaf come to that.
When I started therapy back in 2008, I literally couldn’t talk (well it felt literal). I walked into the counselling room and my mind would go blank (it had been continually buzzing beforehand). There was loads there beforehand, but as soon as I got into the room and had an opportunity to start “unloading” my mind would blank, words wouldn’t come out, my legs would fidget and I wanted to flee the room. A voice in my head would tell me to sit tight, this went against every grain of my being, sit tight because I was doing this for me, I was doing this for a better life, I HAD to do it, it was my last chance to learn to walk, walk through a hellish life, in order to find a more heavenly one. Again – BOLLOCKS. If I’d known then what I know now I WOULD have ran, never to return.
I was constantly “outside the room”, I remember that I had literally stopped talking when I was very young, I cannot remember how long for or at what age. I would occasionally look up and glance at the therapist, see her eyes looking at me and then hide again. Retreat, cover my face and push myself as far back into the chair as possible, push the chair in which I was seated as far back to the wall as possible, as far away from “her”, as far out of her sight as possible, without actually leaving the room.
When I left the room my mind would start buzzing again, all the stuff I needed to say would deliberately flow back when I had no chance to off-load, no-one to off-load it on/to.
I “remembered” not having any memory before the age of 9, 9 was the age when I moved from my first home. I remembered nothing of my first home apart from when I visited that area after I’d moved the whole area filled me with dread; even when I visited it in my mind I couldn’t even open the door to the house. I also had a very firm, non-negotiable script that I “couldn’t speak”. Anyone who knew me from the age of 20 onwards would not have known that about me. I wasn’t exactly perceived as “the quiet type”. I was chatty and very good at starting conversations. I had also, very early on, learnt to deflect the conversational focus away from myself, firmly onto the other person/people; plus I was also INTERESTED in the lives of others. No-one needed to know about me and I didn’t either. Thence – not one person in my world ever got to know much about me. Even my own mother. The same now, all bar one person, knows sod all about me. This one person, over a course of 8 years, learnt more about me than I have ever revealed, to myself included and my script of not talking – well I broke it. This person helped me dissemble the wall. But actually, I was RIGHT, my talking is leading to my own downfall. I should NEVER have spoken. In fact I DIDN’T SPEAK; it wasn’t me – the me that did speak will kill me because we both have to live together in the same body. The me that is typing this today CANNOT live with the me that spoke, we both have to go. She is a murderer.
The thing I had learnt from an early age NOT to do is the thing that has come back to bite me. Words that I actually uttered, although these words NEVER came from MY mouth, when heard back, sent me into shock. Full blown all body, corporeal, mind, everything SHOCK. This happened majorly somewhere around 2011 (exact chronological memory I do not have). “I” was exploring a feeling out loud to the therapy person, she relayed it back. BAM!! Shock flood. NO. This is NOT mine, this is NOT what I said. And I disappeared, I don’t know how long for, maybe a year. Total shock, couldn’t walk, talk, eat, too scared to leave the house for months, the black sky fell in on me, I was probably contemplating suicide (although I don’t remember) etc etc etc. I hated the “therapy” witch. Therapy, ha ha, big joke, some therapy this is, some witch feeding me a story that in no way was mine and in no way came from MY mouth. Witch, bitch.
I hated her, I was going to put a complaint in about her but couldn’t even function enough to be able to do this.
I was in a state of terrified, mortal, shock – I couldn’t see any way to continue walking and I cannot remember how long I stayed in this state for. I did, however, stupidly go back to the “witch bitch”. She never apologised though, I don’t think she even SAW what SHE had done, it was at least a year later before she did; though I doubt it came as an apology – more an acknowledgement. I LIKED her, I accepted all humans make mistakes but I didn’t see or feel that she accepted that she had made a mistake. The mistake was that she had relayed something back that I hadn’t seen, she had joined up the dots and made a picture that I didn’t have. For one or two years after I continually, day and night, had HER words in HER voice so actually what I felt I had was HER story being transposed onto ME. This was NEVER mine, had never been mine, it was hers.
I decided to forgive and carry on but I could never forget; and actually, my experience is, that you cannot DECIDE to forgive either. Forgiveness also has to be “full-body”; it cannot be driven from mind and mind alone – so every time we had a mis-communication; this event would come back and smack me in my face. We had many “arguments” and mis-communications over the next 18 months but, on the whole, I knew she was a “good-person”. We were BOTH in a process of learning; it wasn’t one-sided. Any “good therapist” will know this. Many think once they’ve done their training that’s it – “I’m qualified, I’ve learnt all I need to know”. If you get one of those you will soon know. Don’t bother with them. No-one ever knows everything, anyone who thinks they do is not doing the work on themselves, is hiding, blocking, isn’t authentic. Tell them and quit.
This incident kept resurfacing; it was 3 YEARS before I could forget it. And I DID forget it, totally FORGOT.
What I didn’t realise until this year – 2016 – 5 YEARS AFTER THIS ORIGINAL INCIDENT; was that I said things I didn’t realise I had said. It was as if a part of me was speaking and the other part couldn’t hear the conversation. Basically, how I look at it now, is it was as if there were 2 or 3 of us in the room, not one and NONE could hear the other. I hadn’t twigged that and I’m not sure when the therapist did but I’m pretty sure she didn’t when she relayed back MY words (that weren’t), I don’t think she’d make that mistake again. It was a MAJOR lesson.
Anyway 2016 – WHAT A FUCKING YEAR! That’s what I mean – never EVER think that you have already been through the worse. I remember blogging about how awful 2015 was, how nothing could get worse. BOLLOCKS. IT DID!!!
I don’t know, exactly, how much I want to reveal so I won’t go into all the minutiae; I want to get back to my original purpose of writing this – “Better”.
The catalyst for “worse” was that in March my mother died. Grief ha ha. Not exactly the grief that people purport to. I’ve hardly shed a tear for the life that gave me mine. I do, now, feel sad, loss, I can’t “believe” she has gone; however; the sandstorm of disbelief that her passing confronted me with I think tops my grief scale.
The words “you will die”, “your mother will die” came to me, came back to me, after my mother did indeed die. My mother’s denial of me when I uttered the immortal words “I think I might have been sexually abused”. Something I never believed and only told her because I was actually staying at her house one Christmas (a time when this sense was actually at its strongest). Her denial of the remotest possibility that there was any “truth” in this statement. “Your mind can play tricks on you” (her). “None of this came from my mind” (me). This must have been about 3 years ago. The matter never came up in conversation again. I continued with my life-long hiding from my mother, keeping my inner world firmly “inner” and indeed became easily forgotten.
Death, death, death, I had always, as far back as I can remember, been obsessed with death. I remember waking up every morning knowing that that day was going to be THE day. A violent, sudden, death; the dark fear, all-consuming “death gloom”. The death that I walked around with and in for all the life I remember. When I was 20, three people close to me died. All in one year. I completely “went”. That was the first time I ended up sectioned on a psychiatric ward – put there by my mother. I “recovered” memories of physical abuse at this time. I was told by ward staff to “forget it”, I was talking constantly, “manic” I was labelled. I had never spoken and then, suddenly, I couldn’t stop. A cork had exploded out of my mouth and this “stuff” was pouring out – day and night. I didn’t sleep I talked. I was then drugged up and out, induced sleep. And fed the line that this was a “false memory” which I took in and believed. It was only during therapy 19 years later that I was told “false memory” was actually a myth. It exists on the internet so I believed the internet, I NEVER ever believed ME.
I walled myself up again, I re-corked, I went travelling and I made many suicide attempts; some meaningful, some less so. The last real “attempt” being in 2005. After becoming a “revolving door” psychiatric patient, after being sent to a “therapeutic community” which I found confusing and far from “therapeutic” I realised I was getting absolutely nowhere. I was a hamster running round the perpetual wheel, getting nowhere fast. The psychiatric system didn’t work, I didn’t want drugs. It was then, somewhere around the beginning of 2006, that I knew I needed to move, I needed to get away from the area I lived in, away from the psychiatric system, away from the “service users” I knew and didn’t want to become, away from the “hanging tree” and away from my friends; from all the people that “knew me”; the me that wasn’t me. No-one would want to see or know the real me – if I didn’t I knew no-one else would.
I needed to shed my skins but the biggest shock was I didn’t know just how many skins there were to shed.
Back to the present, well to 2016. Loads of other “stuff” started emerging. Memories. Recent memories and older memories. Memories I could never be sure were actual “memories”. Stuff I had been saying for the past 8 years to “therapy therapist” started coming back to me, I was hearing this for the first time. And NO I didn’t BELIEVE it. I started stomping around my house with my hands over my ears, later over my eyes, literally screaming in my best Victor Meldrew voice “I DON’T BELIEVE IT”.
“Abuse stuff”, images, sensations, eyes, being strangled, dying. Horror, terror. Then shock. Again shock. I remember travelling the 12 miles to see my therapist probably a month or so after my mother died and I got completely lost afterwards, trying to find my car. It took me 2 hours to find it, it was as if the last 8 years of my memory had been completely erased. I was back in the 70s, I didn’t recognise this new geographical area I now found myself in. I was 6, I was 3, I couldn’t see over the steering wheel on my drive home, traffic scared me, I couldn’t remember where the brake pedal was, driving scared me; I was 4, 5 or 6 and I was driving a car. Dreams came back to me, dreams that I couldn’t decipher whether they were dreams, memories or now. I felt tiny. Very, very young. Sometimes, in the house, I couldn’t even walk, I was crawling around the house. I couldn’t remember how to cook, I couldn’t reach the kitchen cupboards, I was hungry but I couldn’t “remember” how to feed myself. I kept getting lost. I would leave the house and not remember how to get back.
This is HELL, this is WORSE. Now I am getting images as well. I have never ever had images although my therapist this week told me that these are there. NO they are imaged they aren’t real, they aren’t me, they aren’t mine, they have been put there, they cannot be real, they cannot be memories. I NEVER NEEDED TO SEE.
I had learnt enough, I didn’t need anything else, I stand by that I didn’t NEED any of this. SEEING that’s it, all this year I have KNOWN I CANNOT live with this, with any of it, the sense, the notion, it will lead to my death.
IF any of this HAD happened it would have been between the ages of 0-8.
I DON’T BELIEVE IT
IF any of this happened I strongly believe someone would have known.
IF any of this happened the someone “LET” it happen
IF any of this happened the person that I have in my head that COULD have been the perpetrator is long dead. Wrong person – guilt.
I fear I will die, I’m in the “gloom shower”
I have to die.
This year I have been getting eyes, more than one set of eyes, three pairs of eyes, glints of a face….. BUT I think I’m making it all up now. This has to stop. Someone fed me a lie, the who? No the IF. I think I have now made pictures to the sensations that were only ever feelings, were only ever “just” sensations. I don’t, didn’t, never needed pictures.
We’ve all been mistaken; taken for a ride. My previous CPN fed it to me. I took myself for a ride, my therapist turned the ethereal into a reality, into a story, into a fact. NO. NONE OF THIS IS, OR WAS EVER, A TRUTH. NONE OF THIS MATTERS.
I DON’T NEED IT. JUST GO TO HELL AWAY.
So now – back to “better”. Ha Ha Ha. “better” be damned.
2016 – confrontation, lies, illusion, fake, false, wrong, death, guilt, shame, confusion, can’t, death, worse, death
Anyone still with me? Maybe you will get “truth” but is “truth” REALLY what you want. Does “truth” really exist. The REAL YOU won’t be “better” because you adapted for a reason.
So my view is that you’re starting out “better” what you end up with is “worse”. I started out “better” I should have stuck with that better rather than look for a better better (and buying a bit of bitter butter!).
For me I would rather be oblivious, even if I could turn the clock back 35 years that might help but I can’t; let alone 46 years.
If I live this won’t be the end, there will be more WORSE. I HATE my therapist because she KNEW I was heading for worse. My reasons for starting on this shit journey cannot be realised. There is no such thing as better.
“Better” is what we start out with – its worse from thereonin.
When I embarked on a therapeutic journey I was looking for “better”. Not perfect, not ideal, not happy – I don’t believe a human life can ever be any of these things. That wouldn’t be human, that isn’t what we are here for. What I was looking for was a way to live, a reason to live, connection with me, the world, people around me, a sense of belonging, a purpose, a way to manage or shed the weight I felt / had always felt, a pressure release, a sense of worth etc. I have found none of this. In fact I have LOST everything.
As well as shedding my skins I have shed friends, family, my dream world, the world that gave me some fun, my ways of coping, my interests. I have found NO new friends all I have done is lost friends. The ones I left behind in my home town are the only ones that are still friends AND I have lost 2 or 3 of those since I moved. I have 1.5 friends in the whole county wherelies my “new” town, which is not new anymore, and is still not home. I’ve lost my mother, my illusion of a “mother”, my carer role. I have not gained a, forever lost, sense of identity. I have been stripped bare. To nothing. But still I exist but exist ONLY in pain and illusion.
I would much prefer to be how I was to this, I actually DID manage to get the occasional holiday before with my false friends. Now I have no-one to go with, no energy to go, fear, fear, fear, dread and shit pictures in my mind, transposed on to my temporal and parietal lobes. Pictures that weren’t mine, that I never needed.
Instead of finding myself I have found someone I cannot bear to be with; someone I don’t see as myself. The aloneness I feel now is as immense as the aloneness I have always, always felt and on top of that this aloneness is now LITERAL. The nightmares now have pictures and a few shades of colour, are more intense, when I have a need to shut my eyes the pictures are still there. There is nowhere I can look. I have reverted to my old ways. I had given up smoking for 4 years before I moved here so I have now been smoking for another 8. This year I have gone back onto alcohol, drugs and I even started cutting again (only once or twice though). I still don’t “live”.
No-one gets it; no-one in my world gets it. If this has always been there how is this better now, how am I better off for seeing?
I’ve had a longing during the past year to pick up the phone to someone at 3/4am but who? Someone who might get it. Someone who thought they were one person and have found a whole different “them”, someone trying to grasp the intangible and then not wanting to grasp it at all, someone else who has the “knowing” that this confrontation will be the death of them, someone who KNOWS the confusion – truth, lie, imagination, does it actually matter – no it doesn’t, but actually it fucking well does cos my whole life has been one fucking lie, I was not the abused child at school, everyone knew who they were, THEY knew who they were, the young women on the wards in the psychiatric hospitals who used to tell their stories of abuse KNEW who they were, they knew their story, they knew in their 20s they didn’t just find this out in their 40s, if it was “true” I would have known.
I avoided my own death all these years without knowing, by NOT knowing.
Now I just HAVE to die – so HOW can any of all this actually be “better”. Better and be damned. Bollocks.
Fucking therapists; I’m 100% positive my therapist doesn’t get it, I’m 100% positive she cannot possibly have found out in her 40s that this shit may have happened to her. Fucked up the arse, in the gob and fanny as a baby, baby sex. With pictures. That baby wasn’t me honey. Why build a picture that we never needed to see and call it “THERAPEUTIC”. Therapeutic how exactly? Go on tell me in 10 words or less how is this therapeutic?? Even if I hold a knife to your throat you couldn’t tell me.
They’re used to hearing this shit – therapists; sexual abuse yes it happens, since the beginning of time its happened, is happening, will always happen BUT NOT TO ME. But to them its words, they don’t FEEL it. They don’t feel things happening in their body, to their body, smells, puke, throat blocks, being watched, strangled la la la. “Stay with yourself” bollocks I am one and only one; one child, another child, no adult; I cannot wake up, I cannot be kind, I cannot be curious. IT IS me, I am it. What don’t you get?
There is no-one I can say this to that gets it. They would have needed a similar experience to get this, a therapist won’t and can’t; no matter how good/empathic or human they are. They may have shit, we ALL have shit, but I bet they also have a partner, friends, work colleagues – not no-one because they have hidden all their life. Not confusion, secrecy, isolation; not untrustworthy, recently discovered, alleged memories, everyday disbelief in an unreal world.
And all these people that have husbands, partners, children, friends, “support groups”, “support network”, community – how the hell did they ever get any of these?, where from?
I am looking through a teeming rain-misted, triple glazed panel, from at least 3 metres away. No vision. Only pain. I’m fast getting too old for “yet”. I was 27 when I stopped working and wanted to start working on me; that was 20 years ago. I have been retired for longer than I actually worked. I’m looking old, my body is shrivelling up – a body I never inhabited. I hate waste and that is what I am – waste. I hate myself for starting this and I hate my therapist for not telling me to STOP.
False moments of enjoyment are better than a lifetime devoid of enjoyment – false or otherwise. Blind ignorance versus the open pores of toxicity, letting in the negative vibrations of the closed and angry that will always walk the earth. There are more of those than the ones that have “done their shit”. So why did I bother, what exactly has it got me?
I wanted to lift my head up, but I’m back to blocking and walking with it down, if I walk at all, and I periodically stop talking again – talking leads to trouble.
“Better” hasn’t happened and I’m an Aries, I cannot wait for “yet”.
That’s exactly it shit.
Some shit passes through almost unnoticed, some shit floats, some shit stinks like hell and leaves an odour you can’t easily get away from, and some shit – shit that has built up for a while – really hurts your bottom and you can still feel it after its out – like it is still in your arse for hours after the event.
No – this isn’t “better”. Be prepared for worse that’s all I can say. Therapy room doors should have a sign on them “ENTER AT YOUR PERIL”.
awakeningpanda 