Under (re)construction

This week, I completed my eighth and final session of online Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. My teen years spent chatting inanely to friends on MSN instant messenger trained me well for this strange but hugely positive eventuality. Given the lengthy waiting lists - 13 months, I was told in September - for talking therapies, I was offered live messenger sessions that are more experimental and have a short waiting list. I was tentative because the idea of typing everything out was daunting. But I considered it realistically. Since having a prolonged breakdown four years ago from stress caused by workplace bullying, I have struggled with speaking. If you're aware of my podcast, you might think this strange, but I'm a damn good editor. I salvage decent slivers and piece them into something coherent. In a way, that's what I've always done as a child and now as an adult maker of things and stuff. Maybe I'm in the process of becoming the Hollis Frampton or Chris Marker of podcasting and crafts!

A challenge for me this year has been my confrontation with my own past, dredged up and made ever present by various factors including increased solitude, existential dread, more time to think and domestic tensions. I have always experienced intrusive memories, unprompted flashes or clips of traumatic recall that flare up the fight-or-flight reflexes or induce panic attacks. I have always been a high-functioning coper, and when I have witnessed others in these modes, it is much more obvious and external than what happens to me and, I presume, other introverts with generalized anxiety disorder and its ilk. I break into cold sweats in places where people don't seem to notice. I start to feel hot, but my blood pressure drops and colour drains from my face. I lose the power of speech, but I'm pretty quiet anyway. My heart thuds in my chest and my breath quickens, but no one has ever noticed, or they have assumed that I am unfit and out of breath if they have. Because of this apparently calm exterior, I am considered aloof or harsh or focused, so I'm told, while I feel none of these things.

A couple of times earlier this year I was feeling myself becoming ill in the same way I had when I was employed by University of Salford. I never want to feel that depth of depression or hopeless debilitation ever again, so I started looking around for proper help. As a freelancer with no access to any of the government support schemes and a tinier income than usual this year, paying for therapy wasn't an option. I listen to Jameela Jamil's I Weigh podcast on which she has detailed the benefits of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. It sounded like just what I need. I've had counselling in the past, but it has made things worse. My last counsellor found me to be an interesting case - actual trauma, not just overwork stress, wayhey - but their attempts to psychologize me with a lack of appropriate training left me so raw and vulnerable that it took me to the brink. I nearly didn't make it. I'm only here because there are people who love me and I couldn't hurt them. Now I'm learning to feel that way for myself. 

In looking into EMDR near me, I found a mental health clinic to which you could self-refer. I had initial review calls with them and was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was referred for CBT and took the typing option. I knew I couldn't wait another year. It took me four to be well enough to have the awareness and ability to know I needed help. It would be hard, but I'm currently capable and determined. I might not be in a year. How people carry on while stuck on the waiting list, I do not know. Many do not. It is shocking that people are pointed to charities who cannot actually help, just listen. People are in a far worse state than me, and it was pretty bad for me. It's high time our mental well-being was treated as equal to our physical well-being. 

While I'm feeling much better and more in control, I know I'm not out of the woods yet. Like Beckett, I feel I am always ever accommodating the mess. But I suppose I'm going beyond that to embrace the mess and create from it. It's a bit like Howl's Moving Castle where salvaged bits get bolted on to the point of bloating excess and somehow the whole place functions under its accumulated baggage. It doesn't necessarily function well, mind you, but it functions. And eventually we must push through our resistance and admit to needing the help of a Sophie to process the mess in a way that shows you you're worth more and gives you the impetus and tools to look after yourself better.

The therapy does not change what happened, but it has helped me gain control over the traumatic recall that's been holding me in stasis. It has shown me how to creatively confront those memories so that they cease harming me. They're still there, I still carry them, but I call them up now rather than them intrude on me when I'm trying to do other things, and I know now that I can temporarily alter their narratives so I can put them back in their corner and get on with my day. And my days lately largely involve re/building my identity/career/life/purpose and general way of being using the still useful salvaged scraps of who I was to make who I am and who I might become.
 

festive scrap something in the making

 

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