Conversations with my head

The Worst Thing

2011-12-18T15:24:00.001Z

***Warning this will probably be triggery***

Last week I told the serial killer the Worst Thing. Something that happened to me in care. Something I cannot possibly cope with. Something that led to my first suicide attempt.

Fifteen years old. Sitting in the living room of a children's home on my own reading a book. Four boys come in, 13, 14 years old. An argument starts. They start to lay into me. Lying on the floor unable to protect myself. Kicks, punches, stamping on my head. The pain immense, overwhelming. The fear even more so.

Then it happens. They take turns to rape me. My body splits from my mind and I sit across the room watching what is happening to my semi conscious body. I fear I am about to die.

They go. Some time later an ambulance is called. None of the staff come with me to the hospital because they are short staffed. I'm in hospital three days. Three broken ribs, difficulty breathing and a chip from one of my cheek bones. You can literally see the pattern from one of their boots in the bruising on my face. Nobody comes to visit. Nobody cares.

I get out of hospital and am returned to the children's home. The boys are still there. I am rigid with terror that it will all happen again. I am utterly defenseless. I go back to school. Every time someone comes close to me I freak out. Mr H, my guidance teacher, asks me what happened and I give in, cry and tell him. The one time I cried when I was in care. I cry all the time now. I couldn't cry then.

Mr H phones my social worker and the police. The police come to the school the next day and talk to me. I refuse to give them a statement. I know the boys won't be remanded, I cannot face them in the home with them knowing I went to the police. It's too dangerous.

My social worker doesn't care. Nothing happens. I still have to go back to the home. The weekend looms. There is no school, no escape from the terror of being in the home. I sit and think of my options and realise the only one is death. I buy shit loads of paracetamol and vodka. I take them all. I have to die - its the only way I'll be safe.

Someone finds me. I am taken to hospital. My stomach is pumped. I am kept in for a couple of days. Nobody visits. Then I'm returned to the home. The fear rises again.

Only a couple of days after that am I put in a new foster placement. The fear subsides.

I had decided to never talk about this again. The Worst Thing. The most awful. Then it slipped out to the Serial Killer. Now the nightmares and the flashbacks are horrendous. I seem to spend half my time back there. I cannot cope.

I hate sex

2011-11-29T12:33:00.002Z

*** This post contains far too much information and is horrible. It also may be triggery***

This is a difficult post to write and one I've been pondering over for some months (which might partially explain why I've not written anything on here for months, although most of that is just sheer bloody laziness). Its something that has come up in discussion a lot over recent months with the serial killer but no firm conclusions have been reached.

A few years ago I couldn't bear to be touched at all. I'd flinch when my blood pressure was taken, panic if I had to shake someones hand. One of the people that has helped me greatly with this is Fr S who is very tactile and likes to hold hands etc.

But that sort of touching is one thing. Sex is altogether another. I cannot handle sex. I hate it with a passion. I am a frigid bitch. As soon as sex is on the horizon, I want to run away, hide and cry. This does not make me a good person to be in a relationship with.

Talking to the serial killer about this I realised that the vast majority of sex in my life had been abusive. Whether that was sex with my dad, sex with people in care, sex with people I didn't care about or sex with the whole fucked up I want to be hurt bdsm thing going on. This doesn't make me feel good.

I've realised I'm far more comfortable being coerced or forced into having sex than I am having 'normal' consensual sex like other people seem to do. Having loving, consenting sex seems terrifying. It means admitting I'm a sexual person. It means giving something of myself to another. It means actually relaxing and letting go. None of these things I am comfortable with what with being a frigid bitch and all.

I have had loving, consensual sex. When I was with N we had sex. A fair amount of sex. But I was almost always the one who tried to give her pleasure rather than the other way round. I would do almost anything to divert her from (this is making me feel icky, I hate writing about this stuff) being sexual with me. It worked because she had a much stronger sex drive than I did and was, to be honest, remarkably selfish about sex.

This leads me on to another issue. What am I? I mostly self identify as a dyke but with the exception of my thirteen year relationship with N, most of the sex I've had has been with men. And most of the sex with men has been abusive. I wonder if I would have been gay if my dad hadn't abused me. Is the fact that I can cope better with sex with women because I've been abused. Is my sexuality and my trauma so closely intertwined? Am I actually a dyke or am I just a scared off straight person who has used women because its safer? All these questions make me hate myself. When I was with N it was easy. We were dykes and that was all there was to it but now life seems much more complex.

In some ways I've been lucky - years of different SSRIs killed my sex drive for so long it wasn't really an issue. If that counts as lucky. It is a bit fucked up that I think like that. But now I've been off antidepressants for seven months so that excuse doesn't work anymore. When I first came off the venlafaxine I was a wee bit horny for a couple of weeks which I found really disturbing but thankfully my sex drive has disappeared again. In fact I could count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times I've masturbated for my pleasure in my entire life. I struggle to bear touching myself down there even to keep clean. I hate that part of me.

So it's fair to say I'm really screwed up about sex. Is this normal? Is it normal post abuse for sex to be such an issue? Am I a frigid bitch?

A letter to my dad

2011-07-11T13:54:00.003+01:00

I have written a letter to send to my Dad because I want things to be different. I've got a few weeks before I have to post it so it can be altered if anyone can think of any changes I should make to it. Advice would be gratefully received.

Dear Dad,

This is a difficult letter to write to you and I’m sure you won’t appreciate receiving it but it is important that I write to you. Over the last couple of years when I have visited you, you have behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner towards me. This has to stop. It is wrong, abusive, illegal and unhealthy certainly for me and I think probably also for you.

So this letter comes as an appeal to you, and also to some extent, as an ultimatum. I am not going to put up with this any more. I am not going to collude in behaviour that is just wrong. I am not going to put my physical, spiritual and psychological wellbeing at risk. I just cannot do it. Your behaviour has left me broken and hurting and I just cannot do it anymore.

I want to have a relationship with you. You’re my dad. I love you. But it cannot be a sexually abusive relationship. It has to be a nonsexual familial one. If you cannot abide with this then there can be no relationship. I don’t want that to happen but your behaviour has given me no choice.

I’m coming up for a fortnight in August. If anything remotely untoward happens when I am up, you will not see me again ever. This is not what I want but this is what your behaviour has driven me to. I can no longer be your bitch.

You need to reflect upon and consider your behaviour. For the past thirty years you have caused more pain, brokenness and sadness than I can bear. You have left me with a legacy of mental illness that I still struggle with. Only now am I rebuilding my life to be what I want to be, not to be the broken consequences of your behaviour. I am not going to jeopardise that. If you were Catholic I would suggest to you that you make your confession but you are not and I know the concept of confession is anathema to you. But you need to examine your conscience and take responsibility for your actions and their consequences.

I hope this letter acts as a warning call to you about your behaviour and the consequences of it. I hope that you are able to behave in an appropriate fashion. I truly want you to be my dad and to behave as a father should. That is all I’ve ever wanted. You can do it; you can overcome the temptation to behave inappropriately. You just have to want to and I’m begging you to want to.

Giving up the Meds Fail

2011-05-01T13:51:00.002+01:00

On Thursday last week I decided to stop taking my medication. I'm on 225mg a day of Venlafaxine and 2mg twice a day of Risperidone. God was talking to me and saying, 'you feel good, you don't need them.' I had an appointment with JC on Thursday morning and told her I was giving them up. She said I should do it gradually but I decided to stop straight away that night.

I told C (or the Mysterious C as he now wants to be known) and he told me it was a very bad idea. My mate D also told me I shouldn't as did @serialinsomniac but I was determined.

Day One

On Friday I stopped taking them having not had anything since the previous morning. I felt fine. It was Good Friday so I was fasting so I put my lightheadedness down to that rather than the lack of meds. Everything was going ok.

Day Two

The head shocks started on the Saturday morning and I began to feel really ill. I was much better off in the prone position so I spent most of the day lying on the sofa not really doing anything while feeling dizzy and sick every time I stood up. I also began to cry a lot about nothing. I would be sitting at the computer reading my twitter feed and absolutely sobbing. I didn't go out to the Easter Vigil because I was concerned about driving with the head shocks and dizziness. I also continued not to eat or sleep.

Day Three

Sunday I started to feel really shitty. I phoned Fr S up in the morning and sobbed down the phone to me. He told me to take the tablets. I refused. By this point I was convinced that I would go to hell if I took them. He offered to pick me up and take me to church but I was paranoid about leaving the house.

I got through the morning but by the afternoon was feeling seriously shite. I phoned the Mysterious C and spoke to him. He kept telling me to take my tablets and if I refused to take them to speak to the out of hours GP and get some valium. I refused. He was with a friend who was a GP and I spoke to him and he suggested I phoned the crisis team.

I phoned the crisis team and they told me to take the tablets. They couldn't seem to understand that I would go to hell if I took them. After I spoke to them I cut myself on my arm. A couple of hours later God told me to kill myself. I took 50 Perindopril (blood pressure tablets.) After I took them I very calmly phoned NHS Direct and asked for advice. They called an ambulance and it took me to hospital.

At the hospital they put me on a heart monitor and wouldn't let me go and smoke. This pissed me off royally. I kept having my blood pressure taken and they put a cannula in my arm. I'm not sure why because I never had anything injected into it. The A&E doctor was very sweet and asked why I'd taken them. When I explained that God had told me to and that I was off my meds she patted my arm and said, 'looks like you've had a relapse.' But this is what God wanted. I didn't understand why it was all going wrong.

They kept me in hospital overnight attached to a heart monitor. I was lying awake all night in a ward filled with old ladies who snored and talked in their sleep. I felt very out of place and stupid and I couldn't understand what God was wanting from me. In the morning I went out for a smoke and discovered some calls from Fr S on the phone worrying about me so I phoned him up and told him what was going on. He was lovely to me.

I saw the doctor that morning and he said that I was still tachycardic but they would let me go home after I saw the psychiatrist. I phoned up the Mysterious C and panicked about what would happen if they sectioned me. I eventually agreed with him that if it came to it I would accept going in as a voluntary admission to prevent sectioning. C said that he would probably section me.

Eventually about half past one the A&E liaison guy came to see me. He works as a liaison between the cmht and A&E. He asked me why I'd stopped taking my meds. I told him and he asked if I would continue not to take them. I said I didn't know. He asked me if I wanted to die. I told him no, I just wanted to do what God wanted. He eventually said that I could go home and speak to the cmht the following day. Fr S came and picked me up and drove me home.

I got home and I took my meds. I feel like a complete failure for taking them and every time I take them I think that I'm going to hell. I want to be off them but I don't want to be in hospital. I don't know what to do. I am however confused about whether it was God or Notgod that was speaking to me when I was going mad.

I'm scared now of what to do for the right thing. I'm going to discuss it with JC on Thursday and we shall see.

A Photo

2011-04-19T13:08:00.003+01:00

When I was up in Scotland my father gave me a photo. It was a professional photo taken by a proper photographer of myself, I and A when I was about 6, I 7 and A about 4. We're wearing matching jumpers and we've all got broad smiles across our faces. It's quite a cute photo.

My father gave it to me and said, 'you were very attractive at that age.' Yes, well. No further comment required.

I took the photo to show the serial killer. We've discussed it at length over a few sessions. In the photo we look happy. I've got a big gap toothed smile. The happiness confuses me. I don't recall being happy when we were children. I recall the bad times but not the good times. Were there any good times? I remember being happy when I was with my Gran but that's about it. The photo shows this to be a lie. There must have been happy times because I am smiling and so are my sisters. There is a gap in my reality somewhere. The serial killer says that going to the photographer to get the photo taken must have been an exciting event in itself. Maybe that's what made us smile. I wish I could remember the good times though. I wish I could have a more balanced view of my childhood.

I keep looking at the photo and trying to see evidence of my evil. I know I was an evil child, I remember being told I was an evil child, I can remember being an evil child but I can see no evidence of this in the photo. I'm just a stupid smiley kid. I showed the photo to JC at the cmht and said that I couldn't see the evil. She said that there was no evil. She said that everyone she had met who had been sexually abused believed it was because of something bad they did or something inherently bad in them. She asked me if I'd ever met anyone else who had been abused. Of course I have but apart from my twitter and blogging friends who I don't know, I've never talked to anyone about it. Maybe it's not unusual to be evil.

In the photo we all have very long hair. I remember having long hair. It was down to my bum, I could sit on it. My mother used to plait it every morning. I hated having my hair plaited, I hated the pulling at the tugs and the slapping with the hair brush if I squirmed. I also remember the day my mother cut our hair. We were playing out in the garden and my mother called us into the kitchen. She was angry but I didn't know why. She got her scissors out and cut off our plaits so we had short hair. Nothing was really said about it and we went back outside to play. The serial killer says that that was brutal. I don't recall it as being particularly brutal. I remember my dad coming home from work, us showing him our hair and him hitting my mother. The serial killer said, 'he liked playing with your hair didn't he?' I squirmed, I don't like talking about what my father liked doing.

We discussed how it bothers me about how unbothered I am about my father's violence towards my mother. I should be shaken by it, angered by it. Instead it makes me shrug. It was minimal compared to the violence meted out against us by both of them. That was real violence. What was a stray slap or punch when compared with that? I know that that's a wrong belief and that all domestic violence is bad but there's a little bit of me that thinks she deserved it. See, I am evil.

We talked further about the beatings. How I can talk about them relatively calmly compared with the other stuff. What does bother me is how shocked the serial killer is about them. Yesterday she said, 'it's horrific to think of a small child being kicked or punched.' I never thought about that. I never thought about myself as a small child. We discussed how children never see themselves as small. How they live in a constant present where they have no faculty for working out that they're little. Where everything just is. Where for me, everything was just terrifying and overwhelming. We talked about my memories of my mother beating me with her wooden crutches and how big she seemed to be standing over me beating me. How that shows how little I was because my mother is shorter than me and I am 5'0.

The photo has confused me and moved me and has raised important questions in my mind. I'm glad my dad gave it to me, even if he did do it in a slimy pervy way.

I have an Image

2011-03-15T18:33:00.003Z

*** Trigger warning - I wouldn't read on if I was you***

Last night I woke up about 2am with a nightmare. This is not an unusual occurrence. What was different this time was that the electricity was off. I ran down the stairs, tried to look in the electric box to see what the problem was and ran back up the stair to my bed when I couldn't see it. I sat upright in my bed shaking with fear until it got light enough for me to see that I had just run out of electricity. A quick visit to the local garage to purchase some more led to me being able to see again. I am absolutely totally and utterly terrified of the dark.

I phoned in sick to work - how could I possibly go to work after such a terrifying night. My heart was still racing and my body was exhausted with the hours of tenseness. I went to mass instead and it hurt that I couldn't receive communion. Really hurt.

I went to the serial killers this evening. We talked about a lot of things but mainly about how I switch so quickly from believing that I was a vulnerable abused child to believing that I was utterly evil and a slag. At one point I said, 'I have an image...' then shut up. She responded with, 'you almost said something spontaneous there.' to which I replied, 'it's a dangerous thing.'

But then I decided to tell her the image. The image that I woke up to at 2 this morning. One of the images that haunt my nights:

I see a young girl, four or five years old, kneeling naked on the bedroom floor. She has long hair hanging down over her face. She is shaking. She has blood and sticky stuff between her thighs. She is hurting. Hurting inside from being invaded. Hurting outside from being beaten. A man stands behind her striding back and forth. Evertime she senses his approach she cowers a little. She is praying. Praying to the God she half believes is the man striding behind her. She is begging God for forgiveness, knowing that if she prays badly she will be hit by the God/man behind her. She is terrified. She stutters the words out just loud enough for the God/man to hear her.

She is little, broken, innocent and scared. She is a victim. She is vulnerable. Her vulnerability makes me cry. But the other half of my head screams that she is evil and a slag. The other half cannot forgive her for being involved in this.

And so it bounces back and forth between positions ad nauseum. No wonder I'm fucked up - I believe two opposing things at the same time. To quote the serial killer - it's problematic.

Slag

2011-03-14T18:32:00.001Z

I am an evil, hateful slag. I contaminate those with whom I come into contact. I turn good people bad. I am all powerful and am a SLAG.

I cannot explain how much of a slag I am. To get a good Christian man and warp him until he fucks me. For that I am a slag. For me to lead him into sin and to spread my evil contamination to my sisters and make him fuck them too. I am a slag that destroys families. I am a slag of great evil.

There is no other explanation for my life. I am evil and I am a slag. The two things are the only things that explain what I am. Evil slag. Evil slag. Evil slag. I can go on like this forever. I just can't break the cycle of being an evil slag. There is no way back. I am the worst of sinners. I am the worst of humanity. I am scarcely even human. Everything about me is detestable, hateable and destructive.

Ignore me. Ignore my evil. Don't let it contaminate you. Don't let it touch you. Keep away from the excesses of the slag.

I disgust myself. I am black with sin. I am impossible to love. I am truly corrupt. The Catholic church would do better then to let me in to contaminate it. I am evil.

SLAG SLAG SLAG SLAG SLAG SLAG SLAG SLAG SLAG

The Ordinariate

2011-03-02T17:12:00.002Z

Everything is changing at church. I knew it was going to change, I opted into the change and I'm completely struggling to cope with it.

I belong to an Anglo-Catholic parish. It has a Catholic theology and way of doing things but is part of the Church of England. I love my church, I love (most) of the people, I love the masses and I love being part of it. I go to mass about four times a week and it forms a huge part of framing my week. Most of all St P's has become a safe place for me to be when things are bad.

Last year the Pope offered Anglo-Catholics an opportunity to become part of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham - to be part of the Roman Catholic church but retain our Anglican patrimony and heritage. Being part of an Anglo-Catholic parish, this was seized upon and a lot of people took an interest in it.

Now it's coming to be. From Ash Wednesday, a week today, I will no longer be attending St P's. Myself and probably about half the congregation and both Fr S and Fr J will be attending OLHoC Catholic church for Lent and to be educated on what it is to be Catholic. In Easter week we will be confirmed into the Catholic church and hopefully at Pentecost Fr S will be ordained a Catholic priest.

What happens after that is not decided yet. We may be able to share St P's building with those remaining or we may have to set up on our own. That depends on many things including the thoughts of the diocesan bishop. I hope and pray we will be able to share St P's because I love it but we shall see.

So that's the factual bit. The real bit at the moment is my complete inability to cope with this. I cried on Fr J last week. I told him I didn't want to deal with the stupid Ordinariate, I wanted things to go back to what they were before it was invented. And that's the truth. Although I've spent many weeks and much prayer on my decision to join the Ordinariate, at heart I don't want it to happen. I want things to be safe like they were. I don't want to have to be brave and go to OLHoC. I don't want to enter a new church and deal with it. I don't want to have to cope with all the fear and uncertainty that goes along with all of this.

I'm being selfish. I know I'm being selfish. Others have a lot more to lose than me. Fr S is losing his home and his income. I'm just losing my church maybe. I should be able to deal with this. I cried at Benediction last week because it was the second last one before we go. Fr S reminded me that it was only for 100 days. These 100 days seem impossible to deal with at the moment. It's the massive unknowns of it all. It's losing my much loved place of safety.

This week is going to be difficult. My last week at St P's as an Anglican. The last time I can receive communion until Easter time. (A Eucharistic Fast has been asked for from those entering the Ordinariate). I'm going to have to hide how much this hurts because I know it hurts just as much for other people particularly for those that are left behind.

I was speaking to the crisis team about this today and they seemed to understand why I was so upset about it. For someone who doesn't cope with change very well at all this is a massive one. I'm horribly tearful every time I think about it. For all that I know it's the right thing to do, I hadn't realised how much it would damn hurt. I don't want it to be real and the reality of it is screwing massively with my head.

Notgod is bothering me about it as well. He seems to take the whole thing as a personal affront to his rule. Today he wants me to cut off my thumb. Which I know would be a bad idea and I'm trying to not do it but I have to admit that I've looked out the saw just in case. I don't know if it's my mentalism that's causing a problem with me coping or the fact I have to cope with this that's causing my mentalism. Either way round I'm struggling.

If you do such things please pray for those of us entering the Ordinariate over the next few weeks.

Everything is wrong

2011-02-19T13:20:00.003Z

I suppose it started happening a few weeks ago. When I got completely furious with the serial killer and screamed at her that I wanted her to love me and she didn't. Which sucked.

Or it may have happened when they announced that there was going to be 50 redundancies at work. I don't talk about work on my blog for various reasons but I know I'm near the top of the list of people they want out due to my attendance. So the stress is building up.

It definitely happened at the birth of E2. My niece who was born four weeks ago today. My sister phoned and said she had given birth and Notgod started up. It wasn't just the usual 'hurt yourself, kill yourself' he was saying. He was screaming at me to kill E2. I kept telling me to strangle her, drown her, smother her and smash her head against the wall. I couldn't get away from him. He was taking over my head.

I managed to work for a few days but my concentration was impossible because of Notgod. Eventually I phoned JC at the cmht and cried on her shoulder. She told me to come in and talk to her. I went in and was honest with her. I told her the Notgod was being horrible and that I was terrified that I was going to kill the baby. I told her I'd taken a small overdose (just half a dozen tablets) the previous night to satiate Notgod and that I'd been cutting myself badly. She called out the crisis team. Fail.

The crisis team came round every day for more than a week. Some of them were good. Some of them were shite. For some reason the men were better then the women. The women tended to be more patronising. The men were just straight with me. I'd stopped sleeping and eating and was just existing.

I made a terrible mistake. I phoned up my mum because I had a pathetic needing my mum moment and told her that Notgod was telling me to kill the baby. On the Monday my sister phoned up and demanded to speak to the crisis team. I got JC to speak to her and on Tuesday she phoned back and told me that I wasn't allowed to go and see her kids. I had been meant to go up on the Saturday. I was completely gutted and rejected by this. I knew I wasn't going to kill the baby I just knew that it was what Notgod wanted. I can't explain how evil this made me feel. I've photos of my dad with the baby. So it's ok to be a paedophile and see your granddaughter but it's not ok to be a bit mad and see your niece.

I suppose I'm being a bit unfair because my sister has to protect the baby but I feel completely overwhelmed by my sister's decision. She hasn't got back in touch with me since either and this was almost a fortnight ago.

Even worse was to come. My mum phoned back and said that she was coming down to visit. I told her I didn't want her to but she said she was coming down anyway. She turned up on the Thursday and stayed til the Monday. She didn't stay with me thank God. This was the first time that she had known the extent of my madness and she kept pushing me and pushing me, asking me questions and then telling me it was because I was evil. It also meant I had to spend what little energy I had trying to entertain her instead of curling up on the sofa crying.

All the time the crisis team were coming round and I had to keep making up excuses to get away from her so I could see them. They told me that they were concerned that my mother was going to 'exacerbate my negative thoughts.' Which was precisely what she was doing.

Another issue was that I knew that on Sunday she'd want to go to church with me. My mother is deeply protestant and I'm an Anglo-Catholic, shortly to become a Roman Catholic as part of the Ordinariate. My mother takes deep exception to my Catholicity (if that's the word) and I knew it would be deeply awkward for both me and Fr S if she turned up at church. She insisted on going. I went with her and cringed at the more Catholic parts of the service. I cringed even more when someone came up to us afterwards and started talking about the Ordinariate. I even took her to Evening Prayer and Benediction which is about as Catholic as it gets. She didn't say anything at the time but I've since had a bollocking about idolatry. Which I expected.

She eventually left me to it. Since then the crisis team have stopped coming to see me, thank God and I'm on my own. I'm very full of suicidal thoughts and I'm struggling not to take an overdose. The serial killer is now on a fortnights holiday and JC is away for a week of that and I'm dreading that. I have to go back to work on Thursday and I'm dreading that as well. The whole thing about my life is it is stupid, pointless, worthless and evil and I'm struggling to find a reason to continue it.

An apology

2011-01-07T16:11:00.003Z

I went to the appointment with the cmht today with a great deal of trepidation. I didn't want to know whether I'd been let down or not. I did consider not going but realised that I had to face it somehow.

I went in and waited and then JC came to get me. As we walked to the room she said, 'Am I to be lambasted?' and I replied, 'quite rightly.' We went into the room and the first thing she said was, 'I must apologise.'

To cut a long story short basically the procedures had changed and she had discussed me with APS but without knowing that that automatically meant the police would become involved. She said I wasn't the only person this had happened to and the first she knew about it was when she had got an email from APS saying I didn't want to press charges. Ho hum.

So I know now it wasn't JC screwing me over which makes me feel better. She did ask me if I still trusted her and I said I'd have to think about it. She said I could be transferred to someone else if I wanted it but I didn't really.

So now it's over I think and I can get back to normal panic mode not extreme panic mode.

An Unwanted Visitor

2011-01-06T15:05:00.002Z

This post should have been written about three weeks ago but my interwebs wasn't working and then I went to Scotland for Christmas so I'm only just now catching up.

I had an appointment with JC at the cmht at 0845 one morning. I went along to it and we discussed various things including things that were going on at work and my plans to go up to Scotland. She was not impressed that I was planning to stay with my parents but I'm an adult so I can stay where I want.

After the appointment I went to Tesco and on my way home my mobile went. I picked it up while driving (I know, I know) and the voice at the other end said, 'hello my name's DC whatever and I'm from the Adult Protection Service. We're at your house now and you're not in.'

My heart completely stood still. I know I just replied with, 'oh fuck.' which wasn't very helpful. I told her I'd be home in a couple of minutes and hung up.

When I got home I went into the house and unpacked my shopping, waiting for the knock on the door. Eventually it came and the copper came in. She told me she was on a welfare visit to check if I was OK. I told her there was nothing wrong beyond the fact that I wasn't entirely impressed with the fact that she was there. What I should have asked her was who had told her to come round but I forgot. She gave me a piece of paper with her name and phone number on it and told me to contact her if I needed to. Of course I didn't need to.

The next time I went to the serial killer's I asked her if she had called them. She seemed very shocked at being asked and totally denied it. The only other person that could be responsible is JC. I've thought about contacting her and asking her about it but I don't want to know. I don't want her to have let me down like this. I don't want to think that she handed out my mobile number and address and personal details to the police without telling me at the appointment that she was going to do it. I don't know what to think. I have an appointment with her tomorrow and I'm going to have to ask her about it but I don't want to have to fall out with her.

There only seems like two options. One, I ignore it, pretend it didn't happen and pretend everything is normal at the appointment tomorrow. Two, to have it out with her and demand to know why she thought it appropriate to send the police to my door. If I do two it will mean I have to never trust her again. If I do one it means that I'll never find out who sent the police round.

I'm quite upset about it really. I've always had my problems with the whole concept of the adult protective thing - I think it's patronising bollocks. But I never expected to have the police at my door like that for fucks sake. I don't know what to do. Advice please.

Wriggly

2010-12-08T11:11:00.002Z

**Trigger warning - you probably don't want to read this. I certainly didn't want to write it.**

I've been putting off writing this for a couple of weeks because it is so damn shameful but I want to get it down because it's part of the therapy and I vaguely want to record my therapy here.

I've been talking. Really talking with the serial killer about various things and I'm finding it difficult to cope with. It started with an honest discussion about how it felt to be beaten. I told her about the fear and, humiliatingly, how I used to wet myself when I was little and I was being beaten up. I asked her if she'd ever been beaten and she replied 'no.' That really moved me - that she felt able to admit to me something of her to help me. It also made me feel really inadequate.

We moved on to when I was a bit older and when beating was a natural part of life. When the time between the beatings was worse than the beatings themselves because of the endless waiting, the anxiety that I would say or do something wrong and the fists would fly. How I couldn't bear the waiting, knowing it would happen again and not knowing when. The constant arousal was impossible to bear.

We talked about the glee I felt when I was actually being beaten. This overwhelmingly strong sense of power that would swell up in me when I was at my most powerless. I would lie there feeling the blows, the kicks, the punches and roll with it. Part of me degraded, terrified and hurting, the real bit of me exploding in a sense of strength. The feeling that they couldn't kill me and no matter what I would survive and win. It's massively counter intuitive but true - being beaten made me feel strong. Maybe that's where my desire to be beaten now comes from. Maybe it was just the sense of every nerve ending wakening up and pulsing through me. I can't explain it now, I just know what it feels like.

The next week we moved on to do more talking. Scary talking. For the first time I was able to recall the sexual abuse and what happened without experiencing it at the same time. However it has devastated me. It has left me feeling such a sense of evil that it overwhelms me and does not allow me to function.

I talked about his hands, how they would move over me, taking all of me in. How they would move between my legs and start playing with me there. I can hardly write this. How for a time they made me feel pleasure. The only word that I could think off that fitted with my child like being at the time was 'wriggly.' How his hands made me feel happy and wriggly. The disgust that causes to me now - that I gained pleasure from this makes me feel sick. How evil am I that I liked it. It makes me feel sick. How the pleasure made it all worth while - made me come back looking for more of his love and his hands.

We moved on to other things he did - how they were painful rather than pleasurable. How I didn't like them. How they became the cost for the pleasure. What I endured to get the bit of pleasure that I received. How they were worth it.

I feel sick as I write this - overcome with disgust with myself. How I hate myself for my evil acceptance of what he did. How it wasn't a case of putting up with it, I fucking enjoyed it. Dirty, stinking, evil little bitch.

I've stopped receiving communion. How can someone so evil take part in something so perfect? How can someone so stained by their actions, so overwhelmed by the awfulness of themselves receive something so good? I miss it with an endless yearning but I can't. I'm too horrified with the images and snapshots of a perverted sick part of myself. I want to beat myself - to get the horribleness to go away but I can't. I hate myself so much. I am vile.

Battling with Notgod

2010-11-15T14:23:00.002Z

Well here I am again battling with the demon that is Notgod. On the side of light - half the anti madness people of Kent, on the side of darkness - the voice in my head. Guess which side is winning.

Recent events have been busy so I will try to update you but my hands are freezing so this could be a very badly typed missive. Last Monday, (God is it only a week ago) I was meant to see CF at the cmht but he was off sick so I saw JC. While I was there the serial killer phoned to say she was poorly and cancelled the session. JC agreed to come with me to see scary new psychiatrist on Wednesday.

The serial killer cancelled Tuesday's session too because she had a cold. I've been to see her when I've had a cold and frankly I don't think a cold is a good enough reason to cancel appointments in the middle of a client's crisis but then I'm demanding like that. I can't talk either though because I phoned in sick for work on Tuesday as well. If it hadn't been for C I would have killed myself on Tuesday night, Notgod's demands were that strong.

On Wednesday afternoon I had to go and see scary new psychiatrist. Who shall now be renamed Dr Tache for the luxuriant nature of his moustache. JC was there which was good because I was absolutely terrified. He asked me lots of questions about Notgod and about what he was saying and then he asked me what had happened when nasty guy came round. I didn't want to tell him so I didn't. He said to keep taking the risperidone at 3mg twice a day until Notgod went away and then to reduce it. In short he didn't have any clever ways of getting rid of Notgod which left me somewhat frustrated.

I phoned in sick for my night shift on Thursday night as I couldn't face work with Notgod breathing down my neck and shouting at me all the time. He told me I had to kill myself so I took a small overdose of various things I had in my stash drawer. (Does anyone else have a stash drawer or is it just me?) I made myself sick soon after, thinking that that would trick Notgod into leaving me alone for a while. Did it hell.

I had to see the GP on Friday morning and I went in and went bleurgh at her. I didn't tell her about the overdose but I did tell her that I was struggling to ignore Notgod when he told me to do things. She signed me off work for a week and mentioned the evil crisis team of doom. I came home and got a phone call from JC to come in and see her and someone from duty. I duly went there and they filled in the inevitable risk assessment. I love being asked whether I have any weapons, whether I'm a sexual threat and whether I'm a threat to children. It makes me feel so lovely. The duty person told me she was going to call in the crisis team of doom and I wilted. I hate the crisis team.

The crisis team duly turned up that afternoon and I didn't want to talk to them because Notgod was being so loud in my head that I didn't have the energy to deal with both him and the bothering botherer types. They left fairly swiftly having got an agreement that I should phone them before I take an overdose again. How humiliating to have to agree to that.

On Saturday the mother phoned and I stupidly told her that I was mental and that the crisis team were coming out so I got both Notgod and her telling me it was because I was evil and sinful blah blah blah. I should be more careful about what I tell les parents. The crisis team of doom turned up at half past seven (having told me they'd be there between 2 and 4) and had a pointless conversation. One of them was someone I actually quite like but he heard the dripping in my bathroom, asked what it was and on hearing that my roof leaked had to be dissuaded from coming round and putting some plastic down. He kept on and on about it until I put my hood over my face and wouldn't talk to him anymore. How grown up am I.

Yesterday Notgod started on and on and on again about getting someone to hurt me. I spent most of the day trawling the bdsm sites trying to find someone who would do it. I couldn't find anyone who would travel down here to hurt me which was really frustrating. I told the crisis team about this and ended up having a stupid 45 minute conversation about theology about which they clearly knew nothing. Arguing with stupid people is not my idea of fun. Eventually they pissed off.

They've not turned up today yet. I don't know when they will. The serial killer hasn't phoned to tell me she can't turn up because she's got a paper cut so hopefully she'll be there when I head up the road in a wee while. I hate having the crisis team because I'm always waiting for them to turn up and I can't relax in my own home until after they've been. I make a huge effort to appear normal in front of them to prove my sanity because I don't want to get locked up in the local bin. But it's not easy.

Bugger the lot of them and bugger Notgod.

Notgod and screwing up my life

2010-11-03T17:51:00.002Z

Notgod appeared again in the middle of a therapy session last Tuesday night. I've no idea where he came from but he was his usual persistent and malignant self straight away. He told me I was evil and that I had to be punished for my evil.

I came home on Tuesday night and immediately went on a bdsm chat site to find someone to punish me. Eventually I found someone who was willing to come down from London, come to my house and hurt me and who agreed that no sex was ok.

He came down from London, waited until I was in a vulnerable position and raped me. He didn't hurt me at all, he just raped me and left. I needed to be hurt and I wasn't. Instead I was hurt in the wrong way. I don't want to discuss the specifics of what happened.

I tried to phone the cmht on Thursday to help me out but nobody phoned me back. Notgod has been demanding since that I be punished for failing to get someone to hurt me. I've been cutting but that only placates him for a short period of time. Today he is demanding that I kill myself because of my evil.

I saw my GP yesterday and she said that this was the 'most mentally ill' she'd seen me. She faxed the psychiatrist for an appointment. I finally saw the cmht yesterday too and they also are trying to get me a review with the psychiatrist. However I don't know how long I can go on with this.

Fr J said at mass this morning that if you hear something from God you should test it to see if it is from God. I don't know how to test what Notgod says. It feels like he's God and he behaves like God but I keep trying to remember that he's Notgod.

This sucks. I don't know how long I can keep up with this.

The first six months

2010-10-13T22:54:00.002+01:00

I've been thinking for a couple of days as to whether I should post this. I'm not sure why but it touches vulnerabilities I'm just learning about but there you go. This week at the serial killers has been very difficult and I've discussed things I've never mentioned to anyone before.

On Monday for some reason we began to talk about the first placement I was in when I was taken into care. I was separated from my sisters and placed in a children's home where I was one of the youngest (I was 10) and it was mostly boys. It was the worst six months of my life.

I told the serial killer what happened the day the social worker arrived at the house with a couple of coppers and told us to pack a bag and that we would be going somewhere better. There was just I and me there, A was in hospital. We went with her and drove somewhere when she told me to wait in the back of the car and then took I into a house with her. Sometime later she came back and drove me to a big house and introduced me to a man who took me to a room with yellow wallpaper and told me to relax and he'd come and get me at tea time.

I told her about the yellow wallpaper and the plastic mattress on the bed. About the sink in the corner of the room and about how I sat there needing a pee and not knowing where to go or what to do. She said to me, 'That must have been unbearably lonely' and I cried. It was lonely, it was confusing and it was horrible.

We talked about how I was taken from what was an essentially closed environment at home where I didn't go to school, I didn't really interact with other children apart from my siblings and I didn't even have a television. How I was an utter freak who didn't know how to behave, who saw it as my role to convert all the other children in the home to my parents version of Christianity. How I was a freaky little ignorant zealot who was completely out of my depth. We talked about the constant air of tension and about to eruptness that inhabited the place and how the grown ups seemed invisible. I can no longer remember a single one of them, although I remember the other children.

Then we talked about the big boys and how sex became my way of fitting into the hierarchy and power structures. We talked about one particular big boy who came into my bedroom every night and did what he wanted. We talked about how much of a slag I was letting him do what he wanted to allow me to fit in.

Then she said it. 'It must have been horrible to be in this place, so lonely and being sexually abused.' I completely freaked out. I'd never thought of it as sexual abuse before. It was just something that happened. Nothing particularly special. I started hyperventilating and crying, slapping myself around the head. I wanted her to take these words back and not make them exist any more. I couldn't bear to listen to them and to have them reverberating around my head.

I came home and they still shook me up. I couldn't sleep and I cut which I hadn't done in several months. The events went from being just something that happened to something that happened to me, a vulnerable ten year old which were outside my control. I could see myself as this child, weak and needy and scared and I could see him as I saw him then - grown, almost an adult. Yes, he was needy and vulnerable too. The chaotic thoughts bounced around my head as I tried to make sense of them.

I phoned in sick yesterday to work because I couldn't deal with work and what was going on inside my head. I felt ripped to shreds internally because of all the movement of structures that I required to keep me going. I went to the serial killers and we discussed it more. I told her I couldn't handle it and she told me that I must be angry. I was angry. Not at him but at a system that allowed it to happen. I wondered aloud whether it still happened knowing that I've been instrumental at taking other children into care professionally.

I got angrier and angrier and sadder and sadder. For the first time since I started therapy I felt I could touch the child I was then, there was no boundary between us, I was that child and that was now and this was then and I couldn't bear it. Eventually I lost it and begged the serial killer to hit me. I needed her to hurt me to take me away from that moment and allow me to be free of the anger and sadness. She refused of course and I continued to beg her. It would be the only way that things could be made better. She said that she couldn't hit me and the reason I wanted to be hit was because it was one way I'd learned to pull the pain and sadness away from me. I needed to become close to the pain and sadness to live with it and to understand it to reduce it.

I couldn't bear it then and I can't bear it now. It's horrible and I want it gone. I know I have to go through this but it's so horrible and evil and fucking necessary. I hate therapy.

Jealous? Me? No, not at all

2010-09-08T12:15:00.002+01:00

I spent a week with I, K and E in Glasgow last week and I've come back feeling completely demoralised, very inadequate and overwhelmingly jealous of my big sister. She is perfect, she has the perfect life, everything she touches turns to perfection. I don't. Even how we live our lives is utterly different.

A day in I's life: Get up, play with baby, feed baby, dress baby, take baby to nursery, go to work saving people's lives, come home, feed and bath baby, put baby to bed, go for a run, cook delicious and healthy meal from scratch for family, eat meal, go on cross trainer for an hour, do a baking, create a delicious cake for family, go to bed.

A day in my life: Lie in bed all night trying to avoid sleep, get up, go to work, ponce around all day at the office doing sod all trying not to be mad, come home, make toast, lie on the sofa watching shit on the telly until it's time to go to bed again. Repeat ad nauseaum.

Our lives just don't compare. She is just better than me. I feel jealousy of this.

But most of all I feel jealous of the biggest thing ever. I is pregnant again. She is going to have another baby in January. I should be pleased and delighted at this. Part of me is. But the biggest part of me is torn apart at the fact that she can have children and it's all light and wonderful and everyone is pleased about it, it brings the family together and makes everyone happy. I get pregnant and it's a dark secret to be avoided and hidden and if shown it would tear the family dynamics apart. She gets pregnant and produces a wonderful child. I get pregnant and have an abortion or a miscarriage.

Over the last couple of days since coming home I have screamed my jealousy in therapy. I have wept at the sheer unfairness of her pregnancy. I have felt overwhelmed with my evil because of my jealousy. I have cut because I can't cope with the vortex of emotions I feel when confronted with the reality of my sister's life. I fail, she wins. It's just not damn fair. And no matter how often I say that it will never be fair. Her children will always be wonderful. My children will always be dead.

It was also difficult being with E. I see him and I see how vulnerable and tiny he is and it makes me think of how vulnerable and tiny I was when I was little and I was being hurt. I can't handle this. I try to push it out of my mind but it comes back when I spend time with him. I also find I try not to ever be on my own with him, I'm terrified that I'll hurt him. I don't know where the fear comes from, maybe it's just an amorphous fear that I'll turn into my parents and start being horrible. I can't stand how it makes me feel, this terror of myself, this shocking worry that I'll abuse him or hit him or hurt him in some way. I know I won't but I'm terrified that I will. It's irrational but it's horrible.

Since I came home I've been having nightmares. The same nightmare over and over again. My father cuts into my sister's belly, removes the baby and rapes it. This I can't handle. I don't want to sleep, I don't want to even think about sleep. The images flash across my eyes when I think of them, which is all the time. I can't not think about them. It's too horrible.

Frustration

2010-08-22T16:50:00.002+01:00

I went to the doctor on Friday for a monthly review and prescriptions for Zopiclone, Venlafaxine and Risperidone and she asked me how I was. I told her that I was being followed and I was very stressed about it. She asked me how it started and I told her that someone was leaving nasty notes on my car and they had started following me wherever I go and spying on me. She asked me if I had the notes with me. Of course I don't. I don't usually carry nasty notes to the GP in case they ask for them for fucks sake. Then she told me I had to increase the Risperidone to 2mg twice a day and she was going to fax the psychiatrist.

WTF? How the hell is increasing the risperidone going to stop people spying on me and following me? Does she think I'm lying? Does she think I'm making things up? Does my taking the medication suddenly stop other people from doing bad things? If so then bloody hell that's miraculous and should be reported in the BMJ.

She obviously doesn't believe me. It's a good thing I didn't tell her that people are reading what I'm writing on the computer either. Apparently just because you're mad, you're no longer to be trusted.

Yesterday I was meant to go to the #mentalmeetup and I had a complete collapse at the thought of going. I knew someone would follow me on the train, I knew I'd have to get the tube and then I'd spend the whole time I was there trying to see who was spying on me. I ended up in such a state that I called the Samaritans. What a twat I am. The woman asked what was wrong and I told her I was being followed. She asked if I took any tablets, I told her I did and she asked me if I thought it was maybe time I should be in hospital.

How the fuck would my being in hospital stop them spying on me? They already spy on me and follow me when I'm at work and they went to France last week when I had a shift there so clearly they're going to spy on me in a hospital.

I'm beginning to think nobody believes me. Even C suggested that the Risperidone would help. Yeah right. How is it going to stop these people from bothering me? I don't understand. Is it some sort of magic pill that's going to make everything better?

The only good thing about this is that I got another prescription for Zopiclone from the doctor so I now have 65 x 7.5 mg tablets to take when I run out of patience with these people tormenting me. It can't be long now but at least that's a final solution and not some bullshit made up things from everybody else.

Why does nobody believe me?

Being Followed

2010-08-18T13:11:00.002+01:00

I've not really kept up with the blog over the past few weeks because everything has been a blur of shitness. I went up to Scotland and the high points were a) being ill and b) having a shite time and when I came back I quickly realised there was absolutely no way I would be able to cope with going back to work. So I was signed off for a month. #fail.

I went back to work yesterday but things are still pretty shite. Suicidal ideation is uberhigh as is the desire to destroy everything about me. I've realised what a huge failure I am. I can't cope with work, I can't cope with life, I can't cope with anything.

Things with the serial killer have been difficult. There's been some talking, some looking at how I live with fantasies, some dealing with the miscarriage and yesterday there was me exploding at her and being a horrible brat. For which I'll have to apologise to her next week. #fail.

Worst of all is the fact that I'm being followed all the time. Every time I leave the house people follow me. I've taken to driving weird circular routes everywhere to try and avoid the people. I see them every time I go out and I can't escape them. They've moved into the house with the green door down the terrace so I can't get away from them. I spoke to the serial killer about it and she thinks it's just anxiety. I thought they were people from work following me because I was sick to check if I was telling the truth but they were still following me yesterday when I went back so that can't be right. I don't know what to do about it. I can't go to the cmht because JC's on holiday and I don't want to speak to duty about it. I'll maybe speak to the GP on Friday.

I know it sounds paranoid and mad but I really believe these people are following me. They're reading what I write on the computer which is another reason I haven't been blogging much. It's really scary.

Catching up

2010-07-07T14:53:00.002+01:00

I've not been blogging much recently, mainly because I've been so damned depressed that all I've been doing is working, sleeping and crying. Not the most exciting way to spend an existence. It's not a life - just an existence.

The GP wrote to JC asking to make an appointment with the psychiatrist but I got a letter last week from JC telling me she'd spoken to the psychiatrist and he's agreed to increase my venlafaxine to 225mg a day. So now I'm on an increased dose of the horrible stuff and I'm still feeling very low. Her letter was interesting because it said, 'Living and coping with the reality of day to day life is clearly difficult for bourach.' I'm not sure what that means. Most days I get up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner and watch telly. Yes I know it's not the most exciting life in the world but it's all that I've got. How is it difficult. I know I'm sleeping all the time and crying all the time but I actually feel quite offended by that. I'm quite proud of the fact that I'm still managing to work full time in a difficult and stressful job. Grrrr. I've got to see her tomorrow and I might comment on this but I don't know if I can be bothered. Depression and trying to sort out things like this don't go together.

Things with the serial killer are weird. I hate the new building. I hate everything about it. I hate the waiting room where I have to be with other mentals, I hate the stairs because they're not a number divisible by eight, I hate the room because it's so counsellery (pastels, dried flowers bleurgh) and I hate the chair because it's not upright and I'm terrified I'm so fat I'll fall through it one of these days and then I'll be banned from the building. I'm struggling to think of anything to say at all in the building which is odd for me because usually I can think of stuff to say even if it is utter dribble. Things haven't been helped by the fact that since we moved there in mid May there's been one four session break and I've just started a five session break now. Admittedly that's partly my fault as I'm going to Scotland at the weekend but it feels very disrupted.

Even despite this there has been some interesting things going on in therapy. The serial killer has taken a much more direct approach, mainly because I've been too depressed to say anything much. She's come away with the following that I've found difficult I've had to think about. (This should have been half a dozen posts so excuse me if it's a bit bitty.)

My parents came down for a couple of days and it went ok. She asked about it and I told her it went ok. She then questioned me about in tedious detail and I admitted that it wasn't all shiny lovely but that I hadn't been hurt physically or sexually so that made it ok. Writing that down has made me think that I've got very low expectations of what makes things ok. Which is odd to think about. She then accused me of not talking. I was quite surprised by this as clearly I had been talking to tell her it went ok. She told me that I regularly just summarised things in as quick and inoffensive a way as I could rather than talk about them in depth. I've been thinking about this since she said it and it's true. I use a kind of internal short hand that allows me to avoid thinking or talking about the things that truly hurt and only let her see glimpses of it. I feel like I've been caught. That now I need to make an effort to stop doing this. She thinks it's a trust thing - I don't trust myself or my feelings and I certainly don't trust her or anybody else with them. This is probably true but how do you trust?

The next day she asked me if I always lived in the past. I told her I do most of the time but a lot of it was inadvertent as I was unable to control the flashbacks and nightmares that to a certain extent I have to live in the past because regularly turns out of nowhere. We had a discussion about the eternal present when I don't want to deal with the past and have no concept of the future so everything is just now. Endlessly now. She asked me if I had plans for the future and I had to admit that I didn't. She asked me if I'd ever had any. I thought about it for a while but again I couldn't remember ever having made any plans beyond the necessary like booking annual leave and planning for an MOT and practical stuff like that. She asked me if I'd ever made plans to get into a relationship or to improve my job or anything like that and again, I haven't. I didn't realise how little I looked at the future. I don't really have a sense of the future at all. It's just something that will happen and I cannot control it or change it or do anything with it. I just wait and see what turns up. It's not something I have any control off at all. I didn't know you could control the future, I thought it just was. I have some contempt for people who think they can wish things into their future, it feels all fairies and angel dust somehow. I wish I wasn't so cynical. Maybe I do need to reclaim my future *laughs in an entirely cynical fashion* Something else to discuss with the serial killer in future - see I have a concept of the future. Sort of.

Last week we got into a discussion about my baby. It stemmed from the fact that JC thought my depression was related to 'recent traumatic events'. I accused the serial killer of not wanting to talk about her. I don't know if that's entirely fair as it's not my favourite subject either but it is something that is on my mind day in day out, almost every minute of every day. I can remember sitting there crying telling her I should be six months pregnant right now and I'm not. I can't explain the loss that I feel. She reminded me that I'd decided I was going to have a termination. I hate being reminded of this. I hate it so much. I know I'd decided to have a termination but that doesn't mean the miscarriage was some sort of lucky escape. I still want to mourn my baby. I'm always going to mourn Rosie for as long as I live. And I'm always going to feel tremendous guilt about what I decided to do. Then the serial killer completely freaked me out. She asked me if I was mourning the baby partly because I was mourning a relationship with my dad that the baby could have engendered if I'd been honest about her father. I almost choked when she said this. How disgusting and perverted is that. As if my father and I could walk off into the sunset with the baby between us and live a perfect life together. The idea makes me sick. I don't know if she meant it the way that I took it but she knows I live a lot with my fantasy of a perfect family and maybe that could have fitted in. I still don't really know how to think about this. I'm still a bit sickened by it. She could see she'd upset me and sort of backed off then but the damage was done by then.

Another result of the parental visit was how important my fantasy family is. The day after they went home I spent the day literally lying on the couch recreating my fantasy so it was seamless. In many ways my fantasy is more important than the reality. It has become my reality so when I have to deal with my family in reality it becomes impossible. The conflict between the two of them is too great, too gross, too large to overcome. I first created my fantasy family when I was in care and trying to cope with the reality of the loss of my real family and it's continued since then. When I can't sleep I weave endless threads of perfection together to make a family that love me and where I fit. I know it's not adult. I know it's not healthy but it's something I do to cope. I think it probably gets in the way of therapy because I have to retain it at all costs even when something healthier should be replacing it. The problem with fantasy families is that they leave you very lonely. They're not real. They can never be real and the effort spent trying to make them real are wasted, futile efforts. I desperately want to be loved but I can never be loved the way my fantasy family love me so it's pointless. Also, as the serial killer pointed out, I desperately needed to be loved then. No matter how much I am loved now, it won't be then. I'll still have spent my childhood years being unloved. That hurts.

Another subject that's come up is my desperate avoidance of sadness. I feel sad when I look at the gap between my fantasy family and my real family. I will do anything to avoid that sadness. I cannot cope with sadness. The avoidance flows through the therapy and stops it short because I cannot deal with it.

At the last session I had with the serial killer on Monday she said that after the break when things start going back to normal she wants me to start talking again. Talking about what actually happened, what actually was done to me. We started the process when I was seeing her at the university but then it got taken over by the move and the weirdness of the new place. I don't want to talk. I hate talking, it hurts far too fucking much. I hate the preparation I have to make to talk, the feelings I feel when I talk, the fear that I experience, the overwhelming awfulness of it. I don't want to talk. I'm scared.

So that's whats been happening with the serial killer. Other things have happened as well. On Monday morning I woke up about 4 o'clock and decided I had to kill myself. I took a rope, went to my car and drove down to the beach. I tied the rope to a lamppost and was going to put it through the sunroof of the car and round my neck and accelerate until the weakest point, my neck, gave way. The rope was already tied round the lamppost when I realised my new car doesn't have a fucking sunroof. In a way it's quite funny but I was so overwhelmingly gutted that I couldn't make myself dead. I sat in the car for a couple hours and cried. Then I drove home, phoned in sick and went to bed. I went to mass later and told Fr S what I'd done. He said, 'the angels are laughing.' which made me smile and then told me I was inventive. He hugged me tight and made me feel better. He's a good thing. He was an even better thing this morning when we were talking before mass and I admitted I was feeling bad and wanted my mum. He said, 'you want loved and hugged don't you?' I admitted that was exactly what I needed. He then said, 'I'll be your mum.' and hugged me for ages. I made a joke about his having a beard which wasn't particularly mumesque but in reality I was hugely and deeply touched by this. Fr S is a star.

And so thats whats been going on in my life. I should blog more often so you don't have to wade through massive amounts of disjointed shite. I'm going to Scotland on Saturday. The idea was to go to the highlands with K, I and baby E for a few days and avoid my parents but unfortunately my aunt has died today so I'm probably going to have to cope with the family for the funeral. The best made plans and all that.

I can't cope

2010-06-09T12:45:00.002+01:00

Things I currently cannot cope with:

my car needing a new head gasket. I can't make the decision whether to get it fixed or to buy a new car. I can however cry.
my bathroom roof leaking despite the fact I forked out money to get it fixed recently. I'm too scared to phone the builders to get them to come back. I can however cry.
my filling falling out. I hate the dentist with a passion and I'm terrified of him (not him as an individual - the idea of anyone having to touch me). I can however cry.
The mouse in my kitchen. I can't get it together enough to put down a trap and deal with him. I can however cry.
People kicking off at work. I had a nasty sweary shouty man at work last weekend and I'm terrified of going back to the place where it happened which I have to do on Friday night. He really upset me. I can however cry.
Changes at work. There are proposed changes at work that will completely fuck up my ability to attend appointments with mental people including the serial killer. Although they're not due to be introduced until 2011 I'm still completely stressed by them. I can however cry.
Increased feelings of depression. I spoke to JC about this yesterday and she's phoning the psych today to see about changes to my tablets. I can't face more months of awfulness and my depressive episodes last months. I can however cry.

I want a grown up to take over my life because it's out of control and I can't cope with it.

Abandoned

2010-06-02T15:09:00.003+01:00

The serial killer has abandoned me. She is not back until the fourteenth. It's not enough that she moves into a new place that I don't like because it's not the old place but then she buggers off and leaves me on my own. Fr S is away for a fortnight as well so I'm pretty much strung out.

When she told me last Monday to my horror I burst into tears and begged her not to go. I'm mortified about this now because it's deeply shameful. It must be remarkably good for her ego though, having me begging her like a mental. How shameful.

We then had a lovely session discussing the many times I've been abandoned or feel I've been abandoned and how that makes me feel. Well it makes me feel shit. That's how it makes me feel. It makes me feel like nobody wants me because I'm a worthless pathetic sack of shite. That's how it makes me feel.

We started with my parents. Their abandoning of me when I was pushed away when I needed love and affection. I was abandoned by them from the very beginning. They didn't want me. They just wanted to hurt me. But I wanted their love, I still very much do. But they withheld it so they could play games with me. Games that destroyed me and left me unlovable and unloved. The ultimate in betrayals.

And then I was abandoned into the care system. Abandoned by endless reams of people who didn't give a fuck about me and just moved me on when they could no longer thole me. I gave up wanting to be wanted. It was easier to think 'fuck it' then it was to break my heart when they gave up on me and threw me out. The worst of these was R who made me leave when N and I got together. That was the only place I've been where I ever felt loved. But she didn't want me in the end. I know that's not absolutely fair but it's how I feel at the moment.

The endless moving around between people who didn't want me. My breaking up placements because it was easier that then believing that people could want me. I was horrible and abusive and ignorant. But really I was desperate to be loved but nobody wanted me. I turned a face to the world. A face that didn't care about what I was going through but the face wasn't real, it just hid the endless aching of a heart that needed to be loved and desperately didn't want to be abandoned.

I was abandoned by the church when they didn't want me because I was gay. I was abandoned by God. I wasn't but I felt He didn't want someone as evil as me as part of His family. I was just completely abandoned eternally as well as in this world.

It's no wonder I get upset when the serial killer goes away. No wonder my pathetic remnants of sanity go ping and abandon me. No wonder that I'm feeling the way I do now. Today I got a bill from her. She's too busy to see me but not to busy to send me a bill. Bitch. I'm close to hating her which is a bad thing and is me just trying to push the fact that she's not here away so it doesn't hurt.

The voices are back. NotGod and the baby and the other one who doesn't have a name. They keep telling me that they've killed E. I keep phoning up I to check he's ok. She's getting pissed off at me and won't answer the phone anymore. More abandonment. But my fault because I'm pushing her and irritating the fuck out of her.

I don't take well to being abandoned and I wish I could just fucking grow up and stop being so damn borderline.

All change and evil

2010-05-20T14:20:00.002+01:00

Everything changed at the serial killers' this week. She now costs £20 a session and it's in a different building. It's also now therapy Monday and Tuesday not therapy Tuesday and Wednesday. This I don't like. None of it I like. Fundamentally I just don't like change.

We used to meet in an office in the university where the serial killer was studying for her Masters in Psychotherapy. It was a typical uni office and I liked it because it had a purpose other than mentalism. The new place is in a building that's entirely devoted to psychotherapy and counselling. It means the people I see there won't be staff and students, they're mentals like me and those helping them. I don't like this. The new room is yellow with chairs I don't like (they're all rocky and wobbly and I like to sit up straight and these lean back). I don't like this. The old office had sixteen steps up to it which is a multiple of eight which made it safe. The new office stairs aren't a multiple of eight therefore do not provide safety. I don't like this.

I was really nervous on Monday because, as the serial killer only existed in the previous room, I was unsure that she would exist in the new place. I smoked like a chimney as I was driving up and went and sat in the waiting room. She turned up, so she does exist in the new place. We climbed the wrongly numbered stairs and sat down for me to burst into tears and say, 'I don't like this.' Eventually I calmed down but it was a bit of a wasted session to put it mildly.

I went back on Tuesday and I was still nervous in case it was a one off that she existed in the new place but she was there again. We ended up talking about my childhood self harm, a subject I find deeply disturbing. I admitted to her that there had been a ritualised, sexual element to it and then I completely closed down. I was evil and couldn't possibly discuss it any further. She said that I believed I was evil because I couldn't handle that I was sad.

And so we left it with me being evil. And evil I am. Yesterday was a bad day for the evil. I cut quite a lot, including the word evil into my arm. I was meant to be going out to a confirmation that evening but I couldn't go because I'd convinced myself that the bishop would know I was evil and would shout at me. I couldn't have a bath because evil people can't be clean.

I still feel evil but I had a bath today and went to mass. I cried a lot but Fr S said the bishop wouldn't have shouted at me and that I'm not evil. I feel it very much though.

sex, lies and no video tapes

2010-04-15T18:15:00.003+01:00

On Tuesday I was fairly honest with the serial killer. I told her I was pissed off after last Wednesday's session when we had had an endlessly circular discussion about what would happen when it goes private at the end of May. This discussion was at her behest and I wasn't interested in it in any way shape or form and it made me feel that the whole therapy thing was pointless. She accepted that it hadn't been the best of sessions and we moved on.

We talked about how I was feeling and how self destructive I was being. We talked about how I'd ended up phoning my father a couple of times because I wanted to feel close to him. Yes, I'm a fucking nutjob. We talked about the dissociative episodes and how they freaked me out and I lied to her about something. Of which more later. The one thing that really struck me happened towards the end of the session when she was asking me why, when things had been relatively stable, I had started being a mental now. The discussion went on for a while and then I admitted that I craved the excitement of what had happened to me as a child. What sort of freak am I? But I spent my childhood having large amounts of adrenaline pumping through my system and I miss that. There's something about being on edge all the time that leads you to want it. Or at least it leads me to want it. I must be some kind of freak. That thought has been bothering me for some time. Did I like what happened to me? Did the excitement of it make it all right? Am I some kind of pervert?

On Tuesday night C phoned. He'd read the blog and my twitter feed and he wanted to remind me that not all my support people had gone away, he was there. He's right and I was wrong. He's such a good friend and so knowledgeable about mentalism and I forgot him. I'm sorry C.

On the Wednesday morning I had an appointment with JC at the cmht who had come back from holiday. She was twenty minutes late for the appointment (a record although she's never actually been on time for an appointment yet) and I was sitting in the corner of the waiting room doing nothing really and the serial killer walked in. I did know that she had her supervision at the cmht building so it wasn't really surprising but that all happens in a weird place that doesn't exist really because the only place she really exists is in sessions. She's not real apart from that. Was really quite freaky to be hit with your own insane beliefs.

When talking to JC I lied to her as well. She asked me where I was cutting when I was dissociated and I said 'various places' which isn't actually true. Which was bad. She was quite sane and helpful and talked about how I clearly wasn't completely out of control when I was dissociated or I would have done some severe damage to myself by now. She thinks there is a bit of me there who has some sort of control over what is happening. However she understands that being dissociated is horrible and scary and she's going to support me as I go through the difficult period of therapy.

I then went to therapy and after admitting to the serial killer that I'd seen her and she might just exist outside the therapy I decided to be honest. I told her what I should have told her the day before and what I should have told JC. I told her that when I was dissociating I was cutting myself really badly between my legs and my groin (like so many people I don't like using the words) and that I was finding this really disturbing and fucked up. It's quite a perverted thing to do isn't it. Dirty and that. The other thing that's bad about it is that having pain 'down there' (good use of euphemism thankyou very much) is in itself triggering as, although it's a different kind of pain, it still reminds me of the severe and horrible pain I endured down there thanks to my beloved father.

I was trying to talk about how the pain was when I was a kid when I completely stopped. My mind went blank and I couldn't talk about it at all. I was very freaked out but desperate to control it as I didn't want the serial killer to know how stressed out I was. I managed to bluster past it and then I said that I was scared that the scars from the cutting would be obvious to any future sexual partner. Then I was suddenly overcome by a moments honesty and spouted out, 'I don't ever want to have sex again.'

We discussed for a while how much I hate sex. How much I was desperate to have someone to be with but I saw sex as a punishment you have to undergo to experience love. The only time I have sex now is with people who don't like me, who treat me with contempt and who hurt me. That works for me in a sort of a way because it means I'm being punished for having sexual needs. I hate the fact of being a sexual person. If I could obliterate the sexual part of myself I would be very happy, something that I worry my dissociated self is attempting to do. I admitted I feel like a complete freak because of my attitude to sex. Sex is something people do for enjoyment, for love, for lust, for whatever. It shouldn't be something that causes a meltdown in the internal coping mechanisms. It's just horrible. Freak, freak freak freak freak.

So since then I've been existing. I got some sleep after the busiest shift of my life on Friday night but I dissociated on Saturday and cut myself there again. Which is making today painful and difficult. I can't see my way out of this cycle easily.

Destruction

2010-04-12T16:29:00.003+01:00

Things aren't very good here at the moment. I've been trying to talk more to the serial killer and the side effects are getting to me big time. The week before last I managed to be quite open with her about some things but ended up a hyperventilating heap of mentalness smacking myself around the side of the head which wasn't ideal. She seemed quite calm about it.

Last week I spent ages thinking about what to talk about on Wednesday and I was shaking before I even got into the room but she ended up talking about something else so I left feeling that everything had been interrupted and her agenda was more important than mine. So got a big bleurgh feeling about the serial killers at the moment.

What has changed is how I'm reacting to the things that are going on. I find myself panicking an awful lot. I keep having panic attacks and hyperventilating and feeling like I'm going to die. I know I'm not going to die but I can understand why I'm having them because they relate to specific feelings about specific memories discussed in therapy. It doesn't make it any easier to cope with them though, in fact it makes it a lot less. I'm managing to hide things at work mainly through going for an excess of cigarettes but this isn't an ideal solution particularly as I'm trying to do a phased return to working abroad which is stressful enough.

I've even started having panic attacks in my sleep. They don't seem to be connected to the nightmares, I just suddenly wake up completely unable to breathe. I'm gasping for air and it's taking me ages to be able to calm down. As a result of this I'm back to being scared of going to bed so my exhaustion is now apparent to all and sundry and the voices are beginning to eddy around my unconscious. I can feel them whispering to each other but not, as yet to me, but it's only a matter of time.

Yesterday was a weird day. I had a couple of dissociative episodes where I cut myself quite badly although I have absolutely no memory of doing it whatsoever. This scares me. Then last night I braved a zopiclone about ten o'clock and went to bed only to find myself sitting in my jammies in the car about half past twelve. I've no idea where I was meant to be going but dissociation like that scares me as it means I can do dangerous things without any idea what's going on. I hate this. I feel like such a mental freak and that things are definitely not safe.

I phoned up the cmht today to see if I could see JC or CF but both of them are on leave. Fr S is away also so there's only the serial killer left and she isn't exactly useful at these things and I don't really want to waste sessions with her - I have *talking* to do with her. I have to delve deeper into the awful abyss. I know it's making me worse but I feel compelled to do it. So the only option I have now is to contact duty who are less than fucking useless but I know I should do it because I'm on the cusp of losing it big time and disintegrating and I don't know what else to do.

I wish I could recall these memories without it destroying me but it's apparent that I can't. I worry that if I involve the cmht in any way they'll walk all over it and suggest a break from therapy which is exactly what I don't want to do. To get better I'm going to have to get through this and get out the other side and that means dealing with the consequences. It's just the consequences are terrifying and I don't know if I can do it, especially when all my support people have buggered off on holiday.

Trying to talk

2010-03-29T14:35:00.002+01:00

I went to the serial killers last week with the intention of talking about some of the things that I discussed on my last blog. There was a real sense of trepidation as I did so because I knew it would be impossible for me and probably really difficult for her.

On the Tuesday I didn't really do it. We talked around the subject for some time because that's always easier then talking about the actual subject. At one point I found myself coming close to the head space where I can talk about it but I felt so physically uneasy that I ran away. Not physically but my whole body moved into a position where it was safer. I know that sounds pathetic but I just couldn't face it.

We then got on to talking about how I had stopped talking. She said that I'd moved like I was trying to get away from something physical which was almost the case. She reiterated that she would be here for me when I was able to talk about things.

I went in on Wednesday feeling even more nervous. I knew I had to talk or otherwise I would never ever do it. I know that sounds ridiculous but that's what it felt like. At the start of the session I prevaricated endlessly and obviously until I was annoying myself more than anything so I took a deep breath and forced myself to talk.

I can remember talking about him kissing me and what he said and him saying I was a good girl. Then I asked the serial killer, 'Am I a good girl?' which at the time seemed a reasonable question but looking back is devastating. There is something so childlike and naive about it that makes it incredibly painful. She reiterated that I was a good girl and I'd had to do what I'd done because I hadn't been given any choice. At that point I started feeling sick so I got up and stood at the window and watched the trees opposite for five minutes before sitting down again.

After that it's a bit of a blur. I can remember talking about his hands and hyperventilating. I can remember her saying as if she was miles away that it was safe and I was here and nothing could hurt me. I can remember feeling his hands on me and not being able to get them off me. I've no idea if I was saying anything at all just feeling and being scared. She kept telling me that I was here and safe but it didn't feel it.

At one point I realised I was sitting curled up on the chair with my hands between my legs and my legs tightly clamped shut, I was leaning over so I was curled up in a wee ball. I could still feel his hands on my body and my face and I was feeling really sick. I couldn't breathe very well because he was on top of me and squashing me. All I kept saying was 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' The serial killer said that I didn't need to apologise to her but I needed to apologise for bringing this situation into her world and forcing it on her.

It felt like I was existing in two places at once. My primal, animalistic, child self was back then and unable to handle it and my adult self was pretty much there as well. Only a little corner of me was still with the serial killer and it felt as if I couldn't thole it. I can remember rocking back and forth and crying like a little girl. The whole thing was so overwhelming.

She reminded me that we only had a few minutes to go and I tried to bring myself round to reality but it was so different. I was feeling sick and cold and shaky and desperately trying to impose some sort of order on my internal system. I had to prove that I was better than this, that I could withstand this.

I left and sat in the car. It felt like I'd been raped. I had been raped, just in a different dimension from the one I currently existed in. Things felt different, to touch something seemed like an exploration in a different existence. I took a swallow from a bottle of water and the water seemed to not exist in the same world as I did.

I'm dreading tomorrow. I don't want to go through that again but I have to if I'm going to talk about this stuff. That wasn't even the most difficult stuff, it was the stuff I could talk about. I don't know what to do about the impossible stuff.

Silence and writing: A dissection

2010-03-22T16:20:00.007Z

*** WARNING - THIS POST COULD BE TRIGGERY***

It's what isn't talked about in therapy that hurts more. It's the things that cannot by their very existence be fitted into the conversation that devastate me. It's the things that don't have words, or at the most grown up words that break my heart. They are too painful, too humiliating to say out loud. I can maybe write about them but I can't talk about them. I sometimes wish I could but I know it's impossible. I want to write about them to see if I can. To see if I can make some sense of the things that I know are in there but I don't dare to talk about. The things that aren't safe to say out loud.

I can't talk about what actually happened. I can talk round it but I can't talk about it. I can speak about the surrounding events but not about the actuality of it's occurrence.

I can talk about what he used to say to me, how he used to act. I can use the word 'fuck' but not the word 'rape'. I can no more talk about how it felt to have him inside me, his hands all over me, fucking me, raping me. The pain, the abandonment, the closeness. His hot breath on me. The smell of him. The taste of his tongue in my mouth. The feeling of choking, that he was going to eat me up, swallow me from the outside in. The way his sweat use to suddenly go cold before he orgasmed. That moment when I knew it would soon be ending. The feeling of his chest hair rubbing against me. Being imprisoned by his weight, unable to escape. Enduring such intense pain it took my breath away. Digging my nails into my hands to deaden the pain of each thrust. I can't go on.

These and more are the things I can't talk about. Writing about them now has made me feel like I want to vomit. I cannot separate the words from the sensations. It's the sensations that are so bad, so unbearable. I can feel my stomach turning over, sickness rising in my throat. I want to curl up so badly but I have to see if I can do this. Between each moment of typing my hands curl up desperately towards me to try and stop me writing, to protect me from this feeling. I'm rocking back and forth trying to deal with this sensation. I need to cough but I can't cough because to cough would be to vomit and I don't want to vomit. I'm suddenly cold. I can feel goose pimples under my clothes. I am trying to exist in the now but I cannot, the now is too much.

Why am I forcing myself to do this? Why do I want to stab my psyche so repeatedly? So hard? So dangerously? I know I need to talk about these things or they'll always remain just outside my grasp. Intangible but threatening. Intangible now, but tangible then and now in a way. As a child I was so matter of fact about things. I would analyse what was going on at the same time as enduring it. I would almost laugh at it until I was rescued by the music that took over my head and saved me. I need music now, to be a distraction from my internal souls scream. But what music will allow me to feel less and more?

Music is on. Leonard Cohen can touch these places of utter lowness like nobody else. I put some on and instantly started sobbing. My desperate body trying to release the pain inside. But crying won't solve it, talking will solve it and I can't talk. I can't talk. I can't talk. I need to force myself to continue to experience this. Walking away and cutting would be the easy route right now but I'm going to finish thinking about this. I need to.

What is finishing this anyway? I understand I cannot talk about this. I have discovered I struggle to write about it. That I have given up the struggle and gone onto a self indulgent description of how this makes me feel. I'm sorry but I need to do this. I need to understand the triggers, the escapes, the somatic reactions. I need to know this, to learn it so I can deal with it and maybe speak out loud.

I'm stopping writing this because it hurts too much and because, as always, Leonard Cohen has just said it better than I ever could:

'Your story was so long,
The plot was so intense,
It took you years to cross
The lines of self-defence.

The wounded forms appear:
The loss, the full extent:
And simple kindness here,
The solitude of strength.'

Kicking shite out the Serial Killer's office

2010-03-10T18:40:00.002Z

Today was my first session with the Serial Killer in a couple of weeks as I was in Scotland for a week and she was away yesterday. It didn't come at the end of a particularly pleasant day. I saw JC at the cmht this morning for the first time since the police incident. She was actually quite helpful and sympathetic about how things are at the moment. She said I seemed to be coping alright considering what was going on.

I then went to mass which was good and then I had to go up to the hospital to get an ultrasound scan to see if there was any gunk left over from the miscarriage. I had to drink a shit load of water before I went so they could see things. When I got there I could have cried - the waiting room was full of conspicuously pregnant woman rubbing there satisfied pregnant stomachs and holding ultrasound photos of their children. The walls of the room were covered in cute baby posters and there was a television on in the corner advertising baby stuff. Didn't I feel joyful.

I went into the ultrasound room and they tried to look for my uterus but seemed to have a few problems as they sent me away to go and drink some more water. Like I wasn't already about to burst. Fifteen minutes they got me back and then they started asking questions that showed they hadn't read the card the GP had filled out telling them I'd had a miscarriage. So of course, to my humiliation, I cried. Because at the moment I'm not doing very much else. Eventually they said they thought I had a retroverted uterus (it's hiding in some distant corner somewhere) and they pretty much gave up so I could go off and pee like I'd never ever peed before. The relief was palpable.

And so to the Serial Killers in not the best frame of mind. The first thing I said to her was that I hadn't expected her to turn up tonight. I don't know why but I was sure she wasn't going to. Then I told her that I was really struggling at the moment and started to cry. I told her that I wanted my baby back and cried an awful lot. She said that it wasn't just my baby I wanted it was the idea of a family that would love and cherish me. Which is probably true. I was getting increasingly upset and she kept talking about how this meant in therapy at which point I lost it for a second and called her a 'coldhearted bitch.'

What I wanted her to do was not therapise what was going on but to comfort me. I really don't need told to think about things, I need someone to stand with me, hold me and let me cry. I told her this after begging her frequently not to get angry with me for being rude to her and apologising over and over again. She told me I was getting the roles of therapy confused. I told her I didn't care about the therapy at the moment I needed to be comforted. She told me she wasn't there to be a friend or a family member or a mother and that she had to remain a therapist.

Fucking woman. Cue significant numbers of tears. And the rest. For some reason she started saying something along the lines that although I wanted my baby back, I should remember how I felt when I was pregnant and how horrified I'd been at the idea of keeping the baby (something I think I toned down on the blog). I told her I'd been trying to cover up the fact that I was utterly desperate for the baby and wanted nothing more. Which is sort of true. She said the fact that I both wanted to keep the baby and wanted to have an abortion showed how much conflict I'd felt. Which was true.

She then said something about how slowly we could unpack all of this stuff during the sessions and then I was absolutely open with her and told her that I no longer cared about the therapy but that all I wanted was to kill myself. She said that I just wanted not to feel anymore because I cannot handle the feelings of pain, sadness and loss and that death would be an unfortunate side effect of that. I sort of laughed at that then realised for that split second that death would not be an unfortunate side effect but at that precise moment it was exactly what I wanted.

Part of me then exploded inside and I started punching my arm off the wall. I stood up and I can remember clutching my head in my hands and making a sort of groaning noise before I punched the bookshelves and started kicking the desk. I've got absolutely no idea what I was doing, just I could no longer express myself verbally, the emotions inside were so overwhelmingly awful. I remember her saying, 'Bourach, remember we've got a rule about how much punishment the furniture takes,' so I walked over, threw myself down on the seat and started hyperventilating and apologising over and over begging her not to be angry. I could see her almost laughing, I'm not sure if she was amused or relieved or something about the whole situation had struck her as funny and I tried desperately not to scream at her that it wasn't. She quite gently said that there were rules about hitting the furniture and I wasn't meant to do that and she knew that I'd run out of words and it was very difficult.

All this time I was hyperventilating and apologising like a complete arsehole. Then something inside me completely collapsed and I just put my head down on the back of the chair (I was sort of curled up in a strange position) and cried and cried and cried. All I can remember after that is her saying we only had a couple of minutes left and me trying to grasp some self control to apologise to her again. What a cow I am.

I left and I've driven home. The suicidal ideation is still tremendously strong. I've got 30 perindopril I could take which is for high blood pressure so surely if I take enough of them I'll have no blood pressure which is a way forward. I can feel myself reaching for them now and I suppose I'm trying to write this blog as a way of putting it off. I can't really be arsed realising I've fucked up and ending up in hospital so it would be better if I didn't do it in the first place but the need is so overwhelmingly taking me over at the moment I don't know what else to do. I suppose I could stick to cutting myself or maybe doing one of the eternally fucknutted 'how not to self harm' suggestions but I don't want to. I WANT TO DESTROY MYSELF.

Aftermaths

2010-03-08T12:38:00.002Z

My baby was called Rosie. It wasn't an it, it was a she. She was called Rosie. She would have been beautiful. I decided to kill her. But then she died anyway. Rosie is dead. I can't handle that. I want my Rosie back more than anything. But I can't have her.

I suppose a miscarriage was the best option. It stopped me from doing something unforgivable. It stopped me killing Rosie. But it leaves everything so empty and cold. The awful thing is that once I started to bleed I prayed that it would be a miscarriage. I prayed so hard. But the moment the doctor confirmed it, I didn't want it. I wanted my Rosie. Desperately. But I can't have her, she's dead.

I went up to Scotland a few days afterwards. I purposely didn't see my dad. I spent an awful lot of time with E, just holding him, wishing I was holding Rosie. I love E but he's not mine. He's alive and Rosie is dead. It hurts so much. He is lovely and he made me laugh and smile and play baby games with him and I loved seeing him but it hurt so very badly.

My jealousy with I is through the roof. Why does she have E when both my children are dead? It's not fair. But it is because it's me who's evil, she isn't. She deserves good things. I don't. I love E so much but not an nth of what I would have loved Rosie if she wasn't dead.

It's the fact that she's dead that keeps hitting me. Over and over again. I fall asleep and dream of her, nice dreams for a change, but when I wake up I feel the pain again, the massive loss. I don't want to wake, I want to live in the dream where my Rosie is alive again. I cannot handle the pain of the reality.

The voices are back, telling me that its my fault that Rosie's gone. They're telling me that if I kill myself I'll be with her and my other baby. The whole thing is so tempting. But I'll be in hell and my Rosie will be in heaven. I can't even kill myself and be with her. But I so desperately want to. The voices want me to punish myself for my evil. The evil I feel because she's dead. It's my fault. If I wasn't such an evil whore, a slag, if I wasn't so overwhelmingly awful she would still be alive.

I want my Rosie back so much.

Fuck the cmht

2010-02-10T14:17:00.002Z

Warning: rant

I went down to the cmht today as I had an appointment with CF. I walked in and he utterly screwed my life over. He asked me how I was and then without waiting for an answer he said, 'I've had to tell the police about what's going on.' At that point the bottom fell out of my stomach and I had to sit for a second to stop myself throwing up.

I have to admit I then called him a bastard several times at fairly high volume. How dare he come into my life and fuck it up even further than it is already fucking destroyed. If I wanted the police in my life I would have gone to the fucking police and spoken to them. I don't want the police involved. I don't want to get anyone into trouble. How dare he presume that he knows best and go behind my back without even fucking discussing it with me. I'm not some sort of stupid child. I'm a competent adult who is more than capable of making my own decisions. They may not be the decisions that CF likes but fuck him he doesn't live my life.

I told him to tell the police they could bugger off as I didn't want anything to do with them. I asked him which particular police he spoke to as having been seconded to the police for a number of years I know most of the local officers and I really don't want my personal life becoming canteen chat at the local nick. He said it was the Adult Fucking Protection Fucking Service. I should have fucking known, CF seems to think the sun shines out of their arses. I've told him before I don't need APS, that I'm not fucking stupid.

I'm furious that they didn't deem it necessary to discuss this with me first. How hard would it have been for them to phone me up and say 'I want to grass you up and screw your life up, do you have anything you want to say about this?' For fucks sake I could have told them that its completely unnecessary for them to waste the polices time because I am NOT going to take anything further.

I asked him if he'd thought of any other means of making things more difficult for me because its not as if my life is fucking easy at the moment. You know, maybe they could contact my work and tell them. Or maybe get an advert out in the local paper. I don't know but I'm sure they could think of a means of fucking things up further. Just to tick the right cover your arse boxes in my file.

Then he went and got JC. I swithered for a while about just leaving because I didn't really want to talk to either of them but I figured I'd wait and see what other evil they had up their sleeves. She came in and they were all 'so how're you doing? Have you made a decision yet?' And I had to tell them that I wasn't really prepared to discuss anything with them because they were clearly a pile of untrustworthy bastards who could fuck off and not screw me over anymore. I tried to stay reasonable but I wanted to scream at them and tell them that I hated them but that would hardly achieve anything.

The conversation continued in a desultory fashion as I had nothing I wanted to say to them. They asked when I was seeing the GP and I told them I had an appointment on the 23rd. They asked if I wanted to meet with them again before that but I said no on the grounds that at the moment I don't want to ever see them again. Ever. They said they would provide support. I tried very hard not to laugh in their two sided fuckmuppet cunty faces.

I kept asking what the police were going to do and they said they didn't know but they would go back to them and tell them that I didn't want anything to do with it. So God knows what that means. Do I wait until some stupid fucking copper contacts me and fucks with my life? Do I hold my breath and hope everything goes away? Do I have to get a solicitor involved to protect my interests? I don't know.

So there we go. I'm furious. I've lost one of my main sources of support because they're clearly untrustworthy just at the time when I need every single fucking piece of support I can get. And to cap it off JC said something about 'you seem very alone at the moment.' I managed to bite my tongue and not tell her it was because she had just screwed me over royally. And I left. To seriously consider never returning.

CMHT: CUNTS

Scared and Sick

2010-02-07T13:51:00.002Z

I'm pregnant. There you go I've said it. I'm pregnant. Not only that but pregnant by my own father. Things don't get much worse than this. I've known it for a couple of weeks but was only brave enough to do a test on Monday thanks to the saneness of a friend from work.

I saw the GP on Tuesday. I have another appointment on Wednesday coming to tell her what I want to do. I don't know what I want to do. I have four choices - termination, adoption, keeping the baby and killing myself and the baby. Of course I want to do the last one. Of course I do. Stopping myself is the difficult thing.

I need space to think and reason with myself, space to work out which is the best option for me. But I can't think. Every time I open my eyes the word 'pregnant' in big black letters is in front of them stopping me from seeing anything else. Every time I close my eyes the word wanders through my brain like an old fashioned screen saver. I'm pregnant. Oh shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.

I told Fr S. He was so supportive. I'm going to speak to him properly on Wednesday to discuss things. I told a couple of friends at work. One told me I had to get it 'dealt with' straight away. I told JC at the cmht. She told me it was a 'massive mindfuck.' I agree with her. She was good. She's organised me to see the psychiatrist tomorrow to discuss my drugs in case I intend to keep the baby. I wish I knew what I intended. I told C. He said he'd be there no matter what.

I keep crying. Crying and throwing up. I go to work and just about cope with it. I come home and cry. I lie on the sofa and cry and cry and cry. This is beyond overwhelming. It makes other overwhelming things look like a fucking joke. This is to big for me.

It feels cruel. Everything about this feels cruel. All the options feel cruel. If I have a termination I'll have killed two children. Two of his children admittedly but two children. That is a horrifying legacy. I don't want to kill the baby, it's not the baby's fault that this is happening. But I can't bare the idea of growing bigger, of something of his growing inside of me, taking me over, becoming a thing of its own. I know that's not fair to the baby but I don't want it. If I have the baby I'll be constantly reminded that it's his. And I'll have to keep the baby safe and I don't even want to keep myself safe. If I give it up I'll have the horrific pain of walking away from a baby that's mine, even if it is his too. If I kill myself I go to hell.

It feels preposterous to me that this should happen again. Twenty years, almost exactly, to when it happened before. The anniversary of my abortion is the 26 February. And that still hurts with every atom of my body. To be in this position again is too much. Too much. Too much.

Going mad

2010-01-25T13:06:00.002Z

Over the last few days I have been sitting in a corner quietly going mad. Or more honestly, sitting in a corner, whining on twitter and going mad. I like to share my madness with one and all, for their own good you realise.

The voices have been persecuting me for a week now. And when I say persecuting I actually mean it. They have been behaving in an utterly hostile manner. It's almost impossible to live with something in your brain screaming at you to hurt yourself, to kill yourself, to destroy yourself because you are evil, hateful, worthless, sinful, unwanted etc. etc. To me that's persecution.

It's really hard if not impossible to fight against the endless tirade. Sleep is impossible, thinking is impossible, conversation is impossible, concentrating on anything that isn't Notgod is utterly impossible. Even listening to music is impossible because Notgod has a habit of screeching along with the music making it utterly intolerable.

I'm still calling him Notgod but at the moment he is God. I need that to stop. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm possessed by Satan or a demon or something. It feels so awful as to be demonic. I spoke to Fr J about this on Saturday because he preached about demonic possession (well mentioned it in passing) and I got all paranoid. He thinks I'm not possessed but what does he know he's not living with the constant barrage.

I saw CF at the cmht on Friday and he got me to double the amount of antipsychotic I'm taken. So far this has been of sod all use. Notgod is still blasting away at me like he owns me and I feel completely fuzzy with the drigs now. So thats an all round success. If things don't improve I shall go back to the normal dose in a couple of days. The fuzziness just makes the shit worse.

I've been cutting a lot over the last couple of days. My arms, legs and breasts are covered in cuts now and none of them are deep enough or sore enough to take the pain away. Notgod likes it when I cut though - it quietens him for a few minutes. I can satiate him with my blood but he always wants more. He's a vampire consuming me cut by bloody cut. He wants all of me gone. Dead. Finished.

I've been thinking about suicide a lot. Or more accurately trying not to think about suicide because Notgod is forcing me to think about it. Different methods and thoughts are going through my mind but the top one is still tablets. Surely I've got enough different kinds to stop this for now. I saw JC at the cmht today and told her I wanted to die. She seemed to understand it but then banged on about distraction techniques which are fucking useless because I can't distract myself from whats in my head. Tis impossible.

She thinks it's because I'm struggling to process what happened in Scotland and I'm stressing about the next visit. No shit Sherlock. But the truth is she's adding it by putting this intolerable pressure on me to do something about it which I don't know what to do. She thinks I can't cope with thinking about it so I'm just breaking out all over the place emotionally. Which is possible but it doesn't make it any easier to cope with. Grrrrrrrr

I have to believe this will pass but it's been a week now and I'm struggling to believe that it will. I think this is the future and I can't face a future like this. Suicide seems like the best way forward. The only reasonable solution to this overwhelming pain. But I'm scared of suicide - I need to find a way past that fear and into oblivion.

Torn in Two

2010-01-20T12:11:00.002Z

On Friday I had an appointment with JC at the cmht. The reason behind this appointment was to discuss practical ways that I could organise my life so I'm not at risk from my dad. This was always going to be a difficult session.

To be honest, we talked around the subject more than we talked on it. We talked about the pressures that lead me to be at risk. How pathetically desperate I am to be loved my family. How I feel I have to protect my sisters and E. How I have this fantasy perfect family that I manage to convince myself I'm part of and how the reality never matches up with this overwhelming fantasy I've created over the years.

She said I could go up there and not stay with my parents. She doesn't understand the sheer, monstrous pressure that I feel to fit into my family and to act out the scripts that have always been mapped out for me. How for me to say I didn't want to stay with them would mean them emotionally abusing me for months and telling me how shit I am. How I cannot thole this emotional abuse any more than I can thole the other forms of abuse that comes from them. How weak and scared I feel when presented with the reality of my family.

She brought up Adult Protective Services again. I kept asking her what they could actually do to stop me going to see my family and she wouldn't reply which suggests the answer is 'not very much.' I hate being threatened with APS - it makes me feel like someone who has no control over my life and my destiny. Someone who needs to be protected from themselves, someone who is pathetic and incapable. That is not me in my head. Yes, I fuck some things up but surely I am able to have autonomy over myself. It reminds me of being in care and having other people who I didn't know and hadn't met standing over me telling me what was best for me. To put it very mildly - it makes my hackles rise big time.

Nothing was resolved in this session, nothing at all. I have to go back in a fortnight and go through it all again. I want to pin her down on what actually APS can do. I need to know what I'm fighting against to prepare for the battle properly.

I said my confession on Saturday to Fr S. After I confess the priest has an opportunity to offer advice. He echoed JC in a lot of ways. Said I had to find a way to exist with my parents which didn't include this because it broke me. Said what was happening was no good for my father either and if I wanted to honour him, I had to find a way to stop it happening. He's right. But he gave me absolution which is what I so desperately needed.

Notgod came back with a vengeance on Monday night. I fell asleep in front of the telly for half an hour and had an incredibly violent nightmare in which I was being eaten alive by a man who wanted to kill me. He kept eating chunks of me and punching me and kicking me and I couldn't escape. When I woke up I was greeted by Notgod telling me that I was an evil cunt and I deserved to be treated like this. I agree. He has been there ever since telling me of my evil and how much I need to hurt. I'm trying to hold out and not cut but it's becoming increasingly impossible. I cannot step through Notgod's speech into a world where I'm safe. I cannot do it - it is too intense and overwhelming. He takes my head over and plays with it, plays with me, my emotions, my needs, my desires. He tells me the negativity of myself that I know and increases it ten fold with his shouting. I hate Notgod and I wish he'd go away.

Last night the serial killer was very difficult. I told her how hard it was feeling torn apart. On the one hand there is my family pulling at me, yes in an incredibly impossible way for me to deal with, but pulling at me nonetheless into a world that I understood and although I hate it I fit into it. On the other hand are the grown ups in my life - JC, Fr S and the serial killer - telling me that I cannot be part of that life, that if I want to be me I have to recognise that I can no longer be that person. So I have one of these on each hand pulling at me and I'm being torn into two bits. And all the time this is going on Notgod is making it difficult for me to fight either side.

I don't know where to go from here. I spoke to the serial killer about having a break from therapy, about trying to reduce the pressure from that side. I spoke about moving back to Scotland and just giving up the fight and dealing with the pressure from that side. I spoke about my truest desire - the desire to completely give up and kill myself and stopping the pressure all together. I cannot handle the pressure.

Getting through the days

2010-01-14T14:43:00.002Z

At the moment I'm running on a barely functioning level. Too much of my head is taken up with thoughts of things I don't want and can't cope thinking about.

I went to mass on Saturday and the reading was from 1 John. I was the only person there and when Fr S read:

'We are quite confident that if we ask the Son of God for anything and it is in accordance with his will, he will hear us; and, knowing that whatever we may ask, he hears us, we know that we have been granted what was asked of him'

I freaked and shouted out, 'That's not true.' I begged and pleaded with God before I went to Scotland that it be ok. I know Fr S prayed too because he told me he had. Surely not being hurt is in accordance with God's will. Surely it must be. Why could it not be? What sort of God would have my being hurt as part of his will? I was explosive with anger. Either praying didn't work or God wanted bad things to happen to me. I know this is the age old mystery of suffering and nothing new but it hit me so acutely at that moment.

I'm angry with God. I'm furious with Him. All my life I've tried to be what He wants and I can never be it because of my humanity. But I try. And every time He lets me down and allows others to hurt me. I know this is puerile and stupid but it bothers me. I don't understand what He wants from me. I don't understand what to do. I remember as a small child trying to stay up all night praying in the hope that bad things wouldn't happen. But they still did. Over and over and over again. God didn't listen to me. I believed it was because of my evil. He still doesn't listen to me now.

Fr S was quiet for a moment and then he just continued gently while I completely sobbed in the pew. I was desperate, absolutely desperate and full of grief because I felt so abandoned by a God that at times seems capricious in His behaviour.

I managed to hold it together at work until I got home when I spent the evening curled up on the sofa with my jumper over my head like a two year old, crying. I cried most of the night - I felt so abandoned by God, so abandoned by the one entity who supposedly never leaves or forsakes you. I understand the saying on the cross, 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?' I understand it with a depth and intensity beyond bearing.

On Sunday I completely lost it. I didn't go to mass in the morning. I curled up on the sofa with my jumper over my head again and cried instead. In the afternoon Fr S phoned to see if I was coming to the service that night as I was meant to be reading at it but I couldn't stop crying to speak to him. All I could say was that I was too evil to go into church and I couldn't read there. The reading didn't help either. It contained a line about sinners not entering heaven. I can't remember the exact context because I ripped it up into pieces on Sunday afternoon because I couldn't handle it.

I must have been a complete mess on the phone because Fr S phoned back later on to see if I was ok. I wasn't. I'd just cut myself for the first time in ages and was beating myself up over it because I was gutted that I'd messed up. I just wanted to give up and not exist any longer. I couldn't handle the pain I was feeling inside. All the hatred and evil squirming around inside me, destroying me, hating me , taking me over. Overwhelming awfulness.

On Monday I had to phone JC at the cmht which I did. She was actually very reassuring and told me that it wasn't the end of the world to cut myself as I was trying to cope with something that most people would struggle to cope with. We talked about the week coming up and what I would have to cope with and how I would do it and if I didn't manage it completely it didn't really matter. Except it did. I got through the day in work mode - desperately stopping anything real from bothering me by being the chirpy bright person who makes people laugh. It worked to some extent.

I went to the serial killers on Tuesday and just sobbed. I sat there for fifty minutes and pretty much did nothing but cry horribly and hopelessly. I tried to talk but I was crying so hard I couldn't really. Pretty pointless session really unless she understands just how hard I'm finding things at the moment.

After the serial killers I went to mass. (This is turning into quite a religious post isn't it). Going was probably the most helpful thing that's happened this week. The reading was the story of Hannah being desperate for a child and praying so hard the priest thinks she's pissed. Fr S talked about how Hannah was 'praying in the bitterness of her soul' and how we should also feel about to approach God from the bitterness of our souls. That immediately made me sit up and think. That was how I was feeling - my soul was infested in anger and bitterness and I didn't need to hide it from God, I could be honest with Him and pray of my grief and sadness and hopelessness and abandonment. A very good thing.

The serial killers on Wednesday was much more difficult. For some reason we got onto discussing what actually happened in Scotland. She kept using the word 'rape' and I kept responding very negatively to it. I was begging her not to say it because I couldn't handle hearing it or dealing with the repercussions of it. She said 'rape is what it is when someone holds you down, stops you from breathing and forces you.' I was hyperventilating and crying and begging her not to say it because to hear it out loud made it true. I snapped then and shouted, 'he raped me thing, he raped me now and he raped me then. He raped me over and over and over. Are you happy now?' before running out the room and throwing up. Great, what a mental. I had to go back in because my stuff was there and she looked quite shocked. I think she understands now how difficult I find that concept. I hate the word, I can write it down but I really struggle to say it out loud. It overwhelms me with its connotations and thought structures. I was really angry at her for forcing me to say it and for forcing the thoughts and the word.

I had to do a reading at a funeral today and I was very nervous but it went ok. I'm glad I went actually because it calmed me down a lot in my head. I'm beginning to think maybe God can be trusted. I don't know where that thought has come from but I think its time to go to confession and let myself take part in the Eucharist again.

A difficult week. And I still have to face the cmht tomorrow. I'm exhausted and emotionally completely worn out. I wish I could have some time off to cope but I can't. I have to keep going at work until my next leave at the end of February.

What is rape anyway?

2010-01-06T12:07:00.002Z

Is it when you acquiesce because in your head you can't believe there is an option anymore?
Is it when you acquiesce because you've turned into an abused four year old in your head and are utterly terrified?
Is it when he holds you down and puts his hand over your mouth and stops you from breathing?
What is rape anyway?

What word can I use to describe what happened? Is rape the right word? It seems too big, too strong, too offensive a word to describe it. But it may be the right word. I don't know. All I know is how I feel now.

I want to die. I want to exist no more. I don't want the whirling of thoughts in my head. I want to escape from this. This hell of the making of him and me. It wasn't only me. It was him as well. I think. I don't know.

I can't look back further than what happened. I can't look forward. I can't bear the present. I can't exist in this explosion of pain that is ripping through me. I can't fit in my head anymore.

I hate me. I hate me beyond hating. I hate what happened and I hate what I did in response. The response to being raped (if it is rape) should not be to go and get beaten and sleep with a married man. I am a sinner beyond excuse. Beyond redemption. Beyond existence.

And I don't even know if it is rape.

Christmas is Coming - Panic

2009-12-17T15:04:00.002Z

On Christmas Eve I'm driving up to Scotland for a weeks holiday. I will be staying with my parents. Yes this is a stupid thing to do. No I don't feel as if I have a choice. I'm already big time stressing about it and have been for a wee while. I don't know if I'll be able to cope. We shall see.

Last weekend the stressing got really bad. I wanted to cut myself but I'm refusing at the moment because its a bad thing to do. I took the weekend off work and took a lot of tramadol. Not an overdose nor because I was in pain and required serious pain killers but because it left me feeling out of myself enough that I didn't feel anything. Not feeling is the way forward. I know this is a bad way to behave and I shouldn't do it but it worked for a couple of days and it made things bearable.

I knew I really needed the serial killer this week to work my way through the complex and difficult thoughts I'm experiencing about going up to Scotland. I was gutted on Tuesday when I got caught in an accident and only arrived at the session with four minutes to go. I needed that. I desperately needed that and instead I was stuck in the car staring up the arse of a tanker that wasn't going anywhere.

I went on Wednesday and it was a really difficult session. It was the last session before she goes on a fortnights break and I desperately didn't want her to go anywhere. Even if I'm away, I wanted to know that she would be there for me to keep me safe. Stupid cow. This is after I begged her last week to come up to Scotland with me to keep me safe. She can't keep me safe. Nobody can keep me safe.

I realised I was terrified that she wouldn't come back after the holidays. I kept asking her and she refused to say 'yes' instead settling with, 'It's my intention.' That wasn't good enough for me and I had a complete panic attack on her. Why couldn't she promise me she would come back. Is she intending to be eaten by a giant dinosaur next week or something. I need to know that she'll come back or I'll probably start believing she's dead again which was a bad position to be in.

She thinks things have moved on since I last went to Scotland. I'm not so sure. She thinks because I now have a memory of what happened to me as an adult I can use it to protect me. I think that's not true. I know that if it comes to it I will be utterly and completely unable to say no. I don't think I realise saying no is an option in these circumstances. I keep replaying over and over in my mind what happened last time I was up and trying to make sense of it. There is no sense to it, just a horrible pornographic abuse tape playing constantly in my head. Bleurgh. Horrible. It makes me want to vomit. It was bad last night. I was in bed and I couldn't escape it. Result - another day off sick for me. Fail, fail, fail.

We talked about how I'd met a man online that I was tempted to meet up with on Saturday so he can hurt me. She thinks this is a bad idea. So do I but I know I need it. What does she care? She's going away anyway. She thinks that my decision to meet him is to do with her not being there. Probably it is but its also to do with my overwhelming need to self harm and my utter refusal to do so. I need to hurt. Please God let me hurt. Also its good preparation for what will undoubtedly happen in Scotland.

I feel so confused and alone. She doesn't care - all she wants is a happy little Christmas with whatever happy little family she has. She doesn't care about the fact I'm absolutely terrified about whats going to happen. I need her and she doesn't want me. Irrational I know.

I keep deciding to cancel going north but that means I won't get a chance to see E and I desperately want to see him. It's been more than three months since I've seen him and I don't want to miss out on this so important part of his growing up. I also need to believe that he's safe and if I see him maybe I can believe that.

Anyway I know this is a completely whining blog and I'm sorry - things are just getting on top of me at the moment.

Well that was weird

2009-11-26T18:07:00.004Z

Today I had an appointment with a social worker who works with both social services and the cmht to discuss the situation with E. I found it really quite weird and depressing.

It started off with her telling me she had to report what I was going to tell her to social services. I responded by telling her that I had no intention of giving her enough information for her to be able to do so, something I managed to keep to.

We discussed why I was so fearful about social services and I told her that I thought they were crap. We had a discussion about how a lot of that was predicated on my experiences of care but I managed to persuade her that that wasn't entirely the case being that I used to work for the social work department of a council and that I currently have close contact on a professional basis with social services. I told her I knew they were overworked, underfunded and on many occasions burnt out and cynical and that I didn't feel that people in that position were best able to deal with the circumstances.

Unfortunately I also lost it and told her I was terrified that they would take E into care. By this point I was crying and trying to persuade her that I wasn't being emotional about this but trying to be as objective as possible to which she replied, 'I can see that.' Bitch.

I told her what I had done - the letters I had written, the conversations I'd had and attempted to have with I, what happened in Scotland and the fact I'm planning on phoning my brother in law tonight to discuss this. I didn't mention that I'm terrified of the conversation. I also told her what the solicitor had said and how I wasn't prepared to go to the police.

I said I wasn't prepared to speak to social services without a guarantee that they would behave minimally and appropriately. She said that there were no guarantees. She talked about when she was persuading someone to go into hospital because she thought that would be the best place for them but that she knew the chances were they would be medicated against there will, harassed by other patients and possibly raped. At last someone as cynical as me. She said even if I went to social services there would be nothing to stop E being raped by a teacher. Great. I know she was trying to say that there were no guarantees but I just found it horrible.

One thing she did say was that I couldn't stop something happening entirely. I could only do my best. I told her that that wasn't good enough. She said that was my emotions and my history talking and that I had to do what I could and then walk away because I couldn't go on like this. I know this to be true but I don't know if I can do this. I'm always going to be terrified.

I can't remember how we got on to it but we discussed the fact that one of the things stopping me is my desire for the perfect family. She said I had to choose between what I wanted and protecting E which upset me as i thought that was somewhat unfair considering I've been trying so fucking hard to put something in place to protect E and I was fucking raped trying to protect him. Ho hum.

Then she started banging on about the Adult Protective Service and asking me about the referral. I got very cross as it wasn't what the meeting was meant to be about and its something that makes me feel deeply vulnerable anyway. She kept asking what my problem was and I admitted that I didn't want to be thought of as someone who needed a referral. I also told her I was angry because I know the police are involved in APS and I thought it was up to me whether the police found out about what was going on rather than someone elses. I said the whole thing made me feel very emasculated and I didn't want to discuss it further.

So now I have to talk to K tonight. I currently feel really low, vulnerable, worthless and overtaken with the uselessness of what I'm going to do. I can't protect E. Nobody can protect E. I don't know why I'm even trying to except because I'm a selfish fuck who wants a family. Not even just a selfish fuck - a selfish fuck who needs social services involvement herself because she's too much of a mental to be allowed her own autonomy. And I have to phone K and tell him his wife was abused for years, that E is potentially at risk and that she left him with dad to go for a run. A conversation I can't wait to have.

An A to Z of my Mentalism Part Four

2009-11-20T15:45:00.005Z

And finally I get round to writing this. I'm so lazy it hurts.

S is for Self Destruction

A lot of the time I want to destroy myself. This is not in the self harm, killing myself way, but in a more overwhelming destroying everything that's good way. I don't know if that makes any sense or it's just another way of self harming with a bit more imagination. I do it quite a lot and some of my life is built around it.

A good example is when I went up to stay with my parents in September. I knew if I went to stay with them something bad might happen. I don't know if I had it exactly in my mind what did happen but I knew it wasn't a good idea. But somehow I got completely fixated on the idea that I had to stay with them or something terrible would happen. It's just a way of causing my life to be in crisis and I'm not exactly sure why I do it. It may be a borderline fucking up your life type of thing I don't know but I don't like it.

It means I'm constantly checking on myself to attempt to work out whether I'm doing something because I want to be doing it or whether I'm doing it in an attempt to self destruct. And whether wanting to do something and self destruction are two different things because I know that they're often the same.

Another area in which I am constantly self destructive is in relationships with men. The only thing I really want in a relationship with a man is for him to hurt me. I need men to hurt me. Physically, emotionally whatever. I know this is stupid and when I'm relatively together I avoid relationships but when I'm falling apart I cruse bdsm websites looking for someone to hurt me. Yes, I know that this has probably got deep roots in the past but it's still there and somehow it's important to me. I justify this in all sorts of ways but really it's my self destructive attitudes shining through with bells on. I let them do things to me and then I hate myself. I suppose it's a sort of third party self harm but it can't really be all that healthy. It's one of the reasons that Adult Protective Services got called in to my eternal shame.

T is for Therapy

I've been in therapy since August 2007. First with Paul and now with the serial killer. I honestly think its the hardest thing I've ever done. Spending two hours a week dredging the impossible horribleness of the past to make sense of the impossible horribleness of the present and the inevitably impossible horribleness of the future sucks. I have been known to behave badly in therapy. I've only recently realised how badly I behave after walking out on the serial killer a couple of weeks ago. It feels like therapy is the only place I can go where I can safely be myself and show the horrible side of my nature.

Does therapy work? That's the never answered question. I think it does. I'm certainly making more forward progress at the moment than I ever have but its so damn hard. Part of the problem is that I have huge problems trusting anyone and its only in recent months after almost a year of seeing the serial killer twice a week that I've felt anything close to trusting her. Maybe that's why things are moving on now.

The difficult thing about therapy is the transference. As I've recorded before my transference with the serial killer is distinctly maternal and this is a very difficult thing for me to process. It means that I'm never going to get what I want from her which is for her to be a mother to me. I need her to replace the inadequate excuse for a mother I was provided with at birth. I never really experienced that with Paul. He seemed much more like a mate I could talk to. The serial killer is different.

One of the things I've discovered a problem with at therapy, and indeed this was discussed last week, is that because bad things started happening to me very young, my memories of it are pre or semi verbal. Therefore I find it extraordinarily difficult to verbalise things that to me are just terrifying sensations and emotions that don't have words. This makes the verbal world that is therapy difficult to manoeuvre because if we push any distance into these experiences I become flooded with sensation and emotion I just cannot talk about so it becomes overwhelming. This is the current impasse and I'm unsure where to go with it from here.

My therapy with the serial killer technically ends in May when she finishes her course. I am terrified of this even though by then I'll have been seeing her for eighteen months. May just seems way to close and I don't feel strong enough to face the things I need to face before then. We've discussed this and I think the intention is to continue privately with her after May. This worries me both financially and for the strange feeling I will have that I've failed therapy. Somehow having to extend it really does worry me. I must be quite odd.

U is for Unending

I don't think my mentalism will ever end. I don't know if I want it to. It seems to be as much a part of me as my hair or my eyes. I can't imagine a life without mentalism and I can't imagine me without it. Does that mean that I want to stay mental? I don't know. I don't know who I would be without mentalism. The idea of waking up one morning and being sane is bizarre, it would be like losing a lot of my identity.

Does that mean that I want to stay mental. Definitely not. I wish I could keep the good bits (or that bits that in bad moments I perceive as good) and lose the awfulness. But I don't believe that that is the case.

I know I'm never going to forget the bad memories, the awfulness that happened to me when I was a child. Without forgetting these, the current position must be unending because they will always be there. I'd love for them to go but they're so much part of who I am and how I perceive life. It's weird. I desperately want it to stop but I know it's unending.

V is for Voices

Notgod speaks to me. He used to speak to me more but since the Risperidone has been increased he tends to be there less. Which is a good thing. Notgod pretends to be God and tells me I'm evil and wicked and that I have to destroy myself. Notgod is horrible. I've been told that Notgod is a psychotic reaction to extreme stress and that he's just a part of my thought process that has somehow become externalised and I do know that both of these things are true but Notgod still takes over.

He's called Notgod because I have to work hard to remember that he isn't God. When I'm really mad I believe he is God and if I don't obey him I'm going to go to hell which seems a strange thing to believe when Notgod is busily telling me that I'm going to hell anyway.

He is very insistent as he's inside my head and he can take over my head without me being able to escape from him. I've tried music but even that doesn't block him out entirely. He screams at me constantly and nastily in that type of voice that is absolutely unbearable. It's impossible to ignore him - he's too vociferous.

I hate Notgod with a passion. He's one of the worst aspects of being a mental. I want to curl up with my hands over my ears and scream when he's around. He makes me feel overwhelmingly mad.

The other voice that turns up occasionally is my dads. He doesn't work on his own like Notgod, he can only be there for other peoples voices. People I'm talking to and the television can turn into my dad while still continuing to say what they were saying anyway but my dad cannot talk in my head on his own. I hate that too.

W is for Work

I try not to write about work on here because I recognise that it isn't a good thing to do as a result of the nature of my work. I find work hard and I find consistently going to work difficult. I also find specific people at work extremely difficult particularly my line manager which makes things awkward.

I'm desperate to remain working no matter what because I don't have a fall back position and I cannot pay my mortgage if I don't work. But it isn't easy. The main problem at the moment is that I had to fight very hard to persuade them that I couldn't do certain parts of my job because I'm mental. Now I'm feeling less mental they won't let me go back and do them even on a phased return which means I'm very frustrated. Bleurgh. I hate work.

X is for EXhaustion

Being mental is exhausting. It takes up a ridiculous amount of your head time just to function. Other people seem to do things in ten minutes that can take me all day. I have to run over every single possible outcome of every single possible choice before I can do anything at all which is pointless and extremely time consuming.

My mind is always active trying to cope with the additional nonsense I have that sane people don't. Other people don't have to battle with voices and flashbacks, don't have overwhelming desires to destroy themselves, don't have God whispering in their ear that they have to kill themselves, just don't have to put up with the myriad of shite that comes from being mad. They also don't have to second guess every single bloody thing they say or do. I can't have a conversation without worrying that I'm sounding mental. I can't do anything in public without spending time before, during and after to work out if its a normal healthy thing to do or if I'm close to shouting at the cheese at Tescos.

And that's without the appointments. On a quiet week I have a minimum of two appointments with the serial killer which require an hours driving either way. I know that's not much compared with some people but it means a minimum of six hours physically a week to be mental not including the endless hours of thinking beforehand and panicking and trying to work out what was being said after. And that's not taking into account the cmht, the gp, the psychiatrist and at times the crisis team who all eat up into my time. It's not unknown for me to have four mental health related appointments a week. And trying to juggle them with a full time job is hard work too. Being mad is a full time job. No wonder I'm exhausted.

Y is for Yearning

All my life I've had this fantasy of a perfect family. It informs everything. When I was a kid, particularly after I was taken into care, I used to lie in bed at night and dream of this perfect family; where we were going, what we were doing, who would give me a cuddle and tell me they loved me. I love my perfect family. It has the same people in it as my family does but without all the horrible abusive nonsense.

I yearn deeply for this perfect family. This is reflected in all my dealings with my real family. I go to see them because a tiny point of hope in my subconscious believes that they will behave like my perfect family. Then every time I see them I get hurt and I retreat into my perfect family in an attempt to recover. Therefore making the cycle worse.

I know my perfect family is a stupid thing to have. I know it makes things worse but I so badly want it to be true. I hurt so much to want it. All I want is for them to love me. I can't have that so I pretend they do. It sounds pathetic coming from an adult in her 30s but its true.

The serial killer has become part of that perfect family. She would love me, she would look after me, she wouldn't let anyone hurt me. That's probably why I begged her to come to Scotland with me last week. She would be safe. But its not real. She can't do that. It's all an illusion.

Every time I bang up against the reality I retreat into the fantasy. A few years ago I was in hospital and I texted my mother to tell her and got the reply, 'I would come and visit you but I've got to walk the dog.' I was gutted beyond gutted. I was devastated. So in my admittedly morphine addled mind, my perfect mother was there stroking the hair of my face, telling me she loved me and wanted me. Except she wasn't and that hurt beyond hurting.

I know I'm going to have to stop this yearning because it isn't healthy, it makes things worse. But I can't turn off my perfect family because I have nothing to replace it with. That's the current problem with the serial killer - I can't replace a lifelong yearning for two 50 minute sessions a week. How can I?

And finally Z is for Zzzzzzzzzzzz

Sleep is a problem. A big problem. My sleep is plagued by nightmares and I have to admit I'm terrified of falling asleep. This has gone on for so long that I now habitually don't sleep. Which would be fine but when I'm not sleeping I'm more prone to going psychotic which is a bad thing.

I fight sleep to a ridiculous point. I have sleeping tablets from the doctor but I'm currently whining about not sleeping but refusing to take any tablets because I don't deserve them. I use sleep to punish myself for being evil and worthless. I use it to reward myself on the rare occasions I do something worth rewarding myself for. I have an utterly stupid relationship with sleep which means I need a slap.

I hate last thing at night. That point between 10 pm and 1am when I could realistically go to sleep but I don't want to. I go to bed and read and then I get up again. I wander round the house getting increasingly agitated through lack of sleep and my frustrations and fears. I cut. I hate myself and I want to destroy myself.

I try to be sensible about it and have different things to do at night rather than by day. For example I rarely go online at night because otherwise I'd spend 24 hours a day on the computer. I play on my nintendo ds instead, well when I'm not too agitated to do so. I eat a lot at night too. Which in turn doesn't help my diabetes. I go for long drives which is a stupid thing to do with no sleep. I lambast myself constantly for the stupidity of my relationship with sleep.

I feel I need permission to sleep and I'm too evil to be able to give myself permission and if I do I'll only have nightmares which makes the situation worse.

Sleep is indeed a problem.

There may be trouble ahead.....

2009-11-16T17:08:00.002Z

I promise I will finish the A to Z of at some time but other things (mainly work and tiredness) seem to always get in the way.

Last week with the serial killer was a disaster. Well that's not entirely true. Tuesday went ok, Wednesday definitely did not. Not God was being very disruptive and the serial killer kept asking me what he was saying which I was finding really frustrating because I was trying desperately to ignore him and I can't ignore him and talk about him at the same time.

I deal remarkably badly with frustration. I just get more and more wound up. She kept telling me it wasn't Notgod, that it was my own voice that was saying it and I got even more wound up. At one point I grabbed a cushion and hid behind it while crying because I couldn't deal with the pair of them winding me up at the same time. I know she wasn't trying to stress me out but I couldn't get out of it. I was desperately trying not to throw the cushion at her. I admitted that to her and she reminded me that one of the rules is that I can't throw things at her. Well no shit. What a shock that was. I wouldn't have actually thrown it at her. I just felt like it.

All the time she had this stupid smirk on her face. It probably wasn't a smirk, just a kindly therapist smile thing but I don't like kindly therapist smiles they piss me right off. Eventually I started begging her to be angry with me because that's what I desperately needed. She kept smiling and said something about the fact I find people being angry with me comforting because it's what I understand. That was the final straw. I just stood and walked out. What I needed was for her to be angry. What I didn't need was her to therapise that with stupid smile on her face.

I'm dreading going back tomorrow. I know I will go back but I'm dreading it.

I also got a copy of the letter nice psychiatrist wrote to the OHS doctor. It gives my diagnosis as borderline personality disorder with symptoms of related post traumatic stress disorder and depressive symptoms and transient psychotic symptoms. Frankly I don't think that's going to help my fight not to be redeployed at a job that I can't afford to do. If I get redeployed I'll lose about a third of my salary and will be unable to pay my mortgage. I've asked to return to my previous duties but I don't think I'll be able to. I don't know what to do about that either.

On Friday I phoned my sister and found out she'd left E with my dad on his own for an hour whilst she went for a run. I'm profoundly shocked and horrified by this. I don't know what to do but I'm becoming increasingly close to making this official. I've been thinking about all the options again and writing down the pros and cons of each of them and it's still a bloody mess. I've got an appointment with Fr S on Wednesday to discuss it because I need an external mind that isn't fucked up to help me to know what to do.

Life feels a bit of a mess and it's clear that more mess is coming up soon. I still feel remarkably chirpy - must be the increase in the Risperidone - but I'm quite scared of the trouble ahead.

Back at work

2009-11-05T16:36:00.002Z

This is my 100th blog post and I was going to use it to complete my A to Z but now I'm back at work I don't have as much time as I did or anything like enough energy so I shall do it next time I feel capable. Instead you get the joys of the last couple of weeks.

I was dreading going to the serial killers after the last appointment. Seriously mind screwing and scary. It was also my first day back at work and I knew it was going to be difficult. But I went. It was actually not as difficult as I thought it might have been.

I was straight with her and told her how upsetting I'd found the previous session and how I was struggling to cope with the emotions that had arisen as a result of it. We discussed how I felt rejected because she couldn't be what I desperately wanted and needed and how that had led me to beg her to be angry with me. It was a difficult and very squirmy conversation that lasted both of last weeks sessions and I think was an important to have.

She said, and I agree with her, that something has definitely changed since the events that happened when I went north of the border (something that has been shorthanded to 'Scotland' which is a shame because Scotland is a fab place and not entirely about shitty things that happened there). I think I've realised that I'm trapped in this most difficult position and I have to get out of it and I can only do that with her help. I have to be honest, brutally honest and trust that she is safe.

It's not only in therapy that things have changed, it's also in my head to a certain extent. I'm moving further over to Position B where I'm not entirely to blame but I hurt so fucking badly I can't describe it. This is a sea change and probably (possibly?) a good thing but it currently feels impossible to deal with. Pandora's Box has been well and truly opened. This terrifies me.

I made it through the week and even went to work every day which gets me work points. I actually held it together remarkably well except being utterly and completely exhausted. Going back to work after a month off is difficult enough, doing it on top of all the therapy stuff and the endless thinking that it requires is even harder, doing it while still constantly worrying about E and not knowing what to do, doing this while not sleeping makes life very very difficult.

I made it til Tuesday without losing it but on Tuesday to my shame I had a complete wibble. I think a lot of it was tiredness more than anything but I ended up in tears at work twice over something that should be within my ability to cope with even though it is a difficult situation. I went to the serial killers after and discussed it with her. On the way I realised that my problem with the person at work was related to the fact she reminds me horribly of my mother so every time I have to have any dealings with her I'm scared of her. This all came to a head because I have to work a shift with her on Saturday.

We discussed the fact that she won't actually physically harm me and that my reaction to her is not a reaction to her but a remembered reaction to my mother. I actually find this quite humiliating because I wish I could deal with people on their own basis not with all the past looming down over me. But it also means that I've now worked out what a significant part of the problem with her is and I need to find a way to cope with it. Still means I'm scared about Saturday though.

I also realised I need to make some big decisions about work and how to deal with my position in the work place. I've made a couple of thoughts on this and we shall see how they work out. Being sensible for once I discussed them with wise people and left it for a few days so hopefully I haven't dived in for no apparent reason.

On Wednesday the nice psychiatrist phoned to discuss his report for OHS. He'd put my diagnosis down as 'borderline personality disorder and post traumatic stress disorder with depressive and psychotic features.' I'm not entirely sure what to think about that. It's probably true but it seems really black and white written down like that. I'm also unsure how work will perceive the psychotic features bit - it might scare them off a wee bit. But at least it's a diagnosis. He was very supportive and made some changes to his report to reflect the decisions I've been making at work this week. I'm glad I've got nice psychiatrist.

At the serial killers it was an enormously difficult session. I'd decided as a result of something that happened on Tuesday night - a flashback followed by similar nightmares - that I needed to discuss some of the specifics of what happened to me. When I got there I discovered that it was almost impossible to do. I didn't have the words for what I was experiencing so instead I ended up having panic attacks every time I tried to speak. What I was trying to say was so intensely triggering that I was partway here and partway far away in the past.

At one point I completely freaked out when she said something about it being in the past and I tried to say that it wasn't just in the past, it was in the very recent past too after what happened with my dad a couple of months ago. I completely lost it and I was in such a dark place I couldn't see anything and hear anything except what was going on in my head. Suddenly I could hear the serial killer saying, 'you're safe, nothings going to happen to you. You're hear and you're safe.' That allowed me to have something to grab hold of to permit me to pull my way out of the place where I was. When I'd calmed down a bit (still hyperventilating and losing it generally) we discussed that she'd just realised how important 'anchors' were to me when I was overwhelmed and that she would know in future that I needed her to remind me that I was safe and where I was. It moved me hugely because it meant she cared that I didn't end up down in a place of darkness and overwhelming horribleness. She wanted to do something about it.

I went to the Bible Study after the serial killers but a lot of it went over my head because I was thinking about what had gone on. I spent most of last night thinking about it as well. There was something about her realisation that I needed her when I couldn't cope that I found sad and disturbing but also hopeful. Strange.

Then I went to work today and discovered they're holding a hearing to discuss my absence history on the 1st of December. I really do need to find a way of coping with the motherlike person before then because I'm determined to do this in a sensible and rational way instead of wibbling like a loon. I'm scared about it though.

An A to Z of My Mentalism Part Three

2009-10-26T15:16:00.002Z

After a few days break to get my head around last weeks session with the serial killer I return to the A to Z:

M is for Mass

I don't just mean the service of mass in this, I mean the role of religion both as a child and as an adult now. Religion is intertwined with my madness in a serious fashion. The voice in my head masquerades as God, I dream of going to hell. When I was little I was brought up in an extremely conservative fundamentalist church. I was brought up to believe that I was intrinsically evil and that God wanted to punish me. That has stayed with me to a great extent and informs my thinking a lot.

I stopped attending church when I was in my early twenties, which didn't stop them taking formal action to remove me from membership because of being gayer than a gay thing. At the time the irony of my father chairing a kirk session which threw me out for sexual immorality was evident. So to was the pleasure my father took in asking me details of my sex life that I refused to answer.

For many years I avoided church to the extent of having a panic attack at the thought of going inside one. A couple of years ago this changed and I started attending the church where I'm now a member. There I found a priest and a group of people who accepted me as I was and have been deeply understanding and supportive. I don't always find going to mass easy, there are parts of the liturgy that resound in a horrible way with things that were said to me as a child. There are moments when it feels like it's going to crush me and overwhelm me but I keep going.

Why do I keep going despite the fact it's hard? Partly its because I feel like I have an obligation to attend every mass that I can attend. Partly its because I love the place and I love the people. Mostly its because I see something in the people there that I want. I see that Jesus can be part of a group of people, that they can reflect something of him in their behaviour and attitude. I see the potential for a relationship with God that isn't soured by the pain and heartbreak of my childhood. I want to be a part of that and I know that one day maybe I will be.

One other thing I need to say is that I have nothing but praise for Fr S the parish priest. As I've recorded on here before, he's one of the most encouraging, caring and understanding people I've ever met. He really does care what happens to me and how I feel. I find that astounding.

N is for Nightmares and Flashbacks

Yup, now you know - flashbacks being with the letter N. Well not really but the two things sort of go together. I hate nightmares, they plague my sleep and they terrify me. I find it very different to talk about them because even that can pitch me back into the place where I'm overwhelmed by the feelings I feel when I have them.

When I have a nightmare they feel more real than real things so when I wake up afterwards I'm never sure what is actually real. I'm left in this limbo like land where I'm completely terrified and unsure what happened. I have a number of ways I attempt to cope with them, some of them more sensible than others. The commonest way I choose to avoid them is to not sleep which doesn't really work as a practical solution in the long term as lack of sleep tends to make me somewhat psychotic. I burn myself sometimes when I wake up to reorient myself towards reality, other times I use a sheet of paper I have beside my bed which tells me a list of facts about myself, including the fact I'm safe to try and make me feel better.

The most common nightmare I have is that there are hands on me. To begin with the hands are just running over my skin and I'm trying to get them off me but I can't. Then they work their way under my skin and start to run all over my body inside me. Eventually they end up in my brain taking it over and controlling it. I can't explain how terrifying this is because every part of me is taken over by these repulsive hands that are taking me over. I also dream a lot of suicide and I'm so destroyed when I wake up and realise that I haven't killed myself. I hate my nightmares.

At the moment because of recent events in Scotland my nightmares have been somewhat overwhelming, the same is true of the flashbacks. These happen, sometimes for reasons that I can understand, someone has said or done something, I've smelled or heard something, and sometimes for no apparent reason. Suddenly I'm back in the midst of something that happened before and I can't escape from it. The emotions and the feelings are the same as they were originally and I can't find my way out of it. They don't last for a long time I don't think but they're truly horrible.

Sometimes it feels that the flashbacks don't happen so literally, it seems they only happen with emotions. I can feel something and suddenly I'm overwhelmed with an emotion that doesn't entirely relate to whats going on in the present but is something from the past. I don't know if these are flashbacks or something else but suddenly I'm filled with an emotion that is so strong I cannot deal with it. I hate them. I hate all the nightmare and flashback type ptsd horriblenesses.

O is for Overeating

I am very fat. Not fat in a size 14 oh how fat am I way but fat in a can I safely sit on that chair type manner. I am exceedingly fat. So fat I've managed to develop high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. I'm fat because I eat too much and exercise too little. It's not glandular, it can partially be explained by SSRI's and antipsychotics but I'm still very very fat.

I comfort eat and I overeat. I'm ok during the day. I manage to eat three relatively healthy and reasonable meals, it's at night that I binge. At night I feel overwhelmingly lonely and alone. I get stressed out and agitated. I get nightmares and I waken up feeling terrified. I hide these feelings by binging and chocolate and crisps and all sorts of shit. I feel completely unable to control this. Sometimes I don't even know I've done it til I see the wrappers or I start to feel sick. Yes, I binge so much I throw up sometimes. I'm not bulimic, I just eat too much.

I hide behind my fat, although it disgusts me, it keeps me safe. It makes me unattractive so that to an extent I don't have to deal with my sexuality. I can hide myself away under rolls of unpleasant fatness. I don't know how to deal with this. It's not something I've ever discussed with any of the mental health people. I'm too ashamed of the obviousness of my fatness.

P is for Psychiatrists

The first time I was seen by a psychiatrist was in August 2006. I had been to the GP that morning and she asked me to go and wait while she chased up an earlier referral. She called me back in and told me I had an appointment with Dr Evil that afternoon. I was terrified that I was going to be sectioned because of the urgency of the appointment.

Dr Evil was the first psychiatrist. The first time I saw him he took a history and seemed reasonable enough. After that every time I saw him he seemed to undermine me and leave me feeling completely worthless. The two most obvious things he said that upset me were firstly that I couldn't be suffering from PTSD because to have PTSD you had to have been traumatised 'with guns and things'. I walked away feeling that I was just putting on what was happening to me. Another time I saw him I told him about the nightmares and about the hands and about how I dreamt of violent sexual acts and he told me that that was because I was gay. Not happy.

My first therapist sent me to see him when I talked about suicidal feelings and what I got was a twenty minute rant about how he was tired of psychologists making patients worse and then sending me to him to sort out. I tried to patronise him by saying, 'yes I understand you deal purely with psychopharmaceuticals' and he agreed. He then offered me a stay in hospital 'if that would make you feel better.' Yeah right.

After that and discussing it with C I contacted Rethink and asked for their advice. They wrote to him and asked for me to be allocated another psychiatrist. He wrote back justifying himself (in a letter containing a multitude of inaccuracies) but agreed to transfer me to the psychiatrist in the next town.

That psychiatrist is Dr Nice. He's a lovely man, very supportive and understanding who constantly tells me that what I'm going through isn't my fault and that he just wants to help sort me out. It's very reassuring. He also put me on Risperidone the wonder drug. I like Dr Nice I just wish I hadn't had to deal with Dr Evil first.

Q is for Questions

I have so many questions that are never going to be answered. That cannot be answered, that I don't even know how to ask. There are the endless ones that get raised all the time in therapy that I'll never know the answer too.

Questions like, 'who would I be if the things that happened to me hadn't happened?' There was no before and after for me. There was no before, only a during and after. Who would I be if these things hadn't happened, if the child me hadn't been crushed under the oppression that I experienced? Questions like, 'why did it happen?, what did I do wrong?' I know I'm meant to believe I didn't do anything wrong but it's difficult to do so. My doing something wrong fits into my Position A world of everything being my fault. It allows things to make sense. If I didn't do anything wrong then why did the bad things happen? There is no answer to this impossible question.

'Am I ever going to get better?' Nobody can tell me if there is hope from me or if I'm constantly going to be in this twilight world halfway between reality and mentalism. Does God hate me? I don't know but it feels like it.

I hate the questions without answers because they can never have answers. There are no answers. There are also the questions with answers but I will never know the answers. 'Why were we eventually taken into care? Why was I separated from my sisters?' The answers were there in a file but I couldn't read them because the carbon copies had got smudged and illegible with age. Some of the biggest questions of my life will never be answered. I hate that too.

R is for Relationships

In my life I've had two relationships, the first with my ex N which lasted from when we were 14 to when we were 27. The second was with a man and didn't last any more than about a year. Both were a bit fucked up surprise surprise.

N and I would never have lasted anything like as long if it hadn't been for my desperate desire for a family. She is the daughter of my foster mother and I wanted to be a part of something, something that would be whole and good and lovely. There were times when it was whole but it became very bad a long time before we split up. N has drug and alcohol problems and those combined with my mentalism made for a dangerous concoction. I still love her and if she was straight would love to be back with her - she is the missing half of myself in some ways.

The second relationship was a bit of an odd one. He lived some distance away so by necessity it became more of a phone relationship than anything else. He struggled to cope with my mentalism and tried desperately to solve everything which just frustrated me and made me feel like a complete failure when it didn't work. It got to the point when we were both avoiding spending time with each other which is somewhat fatal to a relationship.

I would love to be with someone - I miss so much the times spent just being with someone, but I know that I'm not in a fit place to be in a relationship. I would be a disaster. I bounce too much between a desperate desire to please and to be loved and the need to self destruct which inevitably breaks things down. I also hate sex and detest being touched which isn't helpful in a relationship. I cannot at the moment imagine ever loving or being loved again which is an intensely lonely place to be.

Transference, psychiatrists and so much pain

2009-10-22T13:44:00.002+01:00

I'm taking a break from my A to Z to write about my experiences in therapy and with the psychiatrist this week. It's frankly been another doozer.

Serial Killer on Tuesday

On Tuesday I was feeling really low and instead of making a huge effort to hide the fact and talk about 'therapy things' I was just straight with her. I talked about Sunday night when during evening prayer I had seen my father sitting in the church. I've never been more grateful for a priest that understands these things then at that point. I just asked Fr S if he could see him and he said no without freaking out and let me go out via the sacristy so I didn't need to pass where my dad was.

I spoke about losing it at the bank on Monday when the bank teller was being a bit stroppy and telling me I couldn't pay a check in at the counter but had to fill in a form and use a machine and I lost it and started begging her not to hurt me.

I talked about my fears about going back to work next week. My fears that I know the union haven't taken my resignation particularly seriously and I'm going to come back to their expectations. My fears that I'm going back to a horrible industrial decision with a strike due to occur a few days after I return. I talked about my boss phoning me and bothering me about when I was due back to work and how hard that was.

I just talked about how little things in my life seem almost impossible when the big things are raging at me like a tidal wave. When I don't have the time or the energy to rebuild my defences between each waves arrival and every time they get destroyed that little bit more.

I was able to talk about how alone I felt and how my suicidal feelings were growing, not in the angry,desperate way but in the endlessness of lowness can't see any other way out way. How I felt like I was standing on the flattest place on earth and needing something to get me on to safe high ground.

It was a difficult session because it meant being vulnerable in a different way from usual. Being vulnerable about the minutiae of my life, not about the big things that threaten to swamp me, but in the myriad of little things that are rising past my knees and over my thighs and I can't escape them.

As usual I went from the serial killer's to mass and I really struggled. There are big things going on in my part of the Church of England at the moment which could involve real scary change so everyone was quite excited except for me. I don't like change, I'm deeply unsure about this and I just don't know. I felt utterly alienated from everybody. Fr S asked me if I was alright and I just shrugged. We talked and I said how lonely and unloved I felt. He told me he loved me which confused me so much. I can't handle the idea of being unloved and I can't handle the idea of being loved.

On Wednesday morning I went to mass. I was the only person there and we discussed the potential changes in the church and I was able to talk about my fears which was useful. He then went on to say that he had told his wife that I didn't think anyone loved me and she loved me too. That completely freaked me out. I want to be loved so much but I want to be loved by the people who withhold their love from me. I want to be loved by my mum and dad.

The Psychiatrist

I had my four monthly appointment with the psychiatrist yesterday. As usual I completely wound myself up and convinced myself I was imminently about to be sectioned. Stupid cow that I am. As usual he was a lovely bloke. We talked for a bit about work and then I told him what had been happening recently. He was sweet about it but he did want to know what had actually happened in Scotland and I was determined to not tell him because I didn't want to fall apart. I wish the cmht and him would talk about things so I wouldn't have to tell everybody the same things. He said to increase the Risperidone to twice a day for a while to see if that'll help with the voices.

Serial Killer on Wednesday

I went straight from the psychiatrist to the serial killer which is a very difficult thing to do because they both need different types of heads on. With the psychiatrist I try to be matter of fact and able to cope because he can lock me up and with the serial killer I can be a bit more open.

We discussed this and why it was difficult and then we moved onto why I find therapy so difficult. I don't want to talk about the ins and outs of it because frankly I can only remember a few things. I can remember talking about my constant need for reassurance and that she won't reassure me because after a while it sounds hollow and that would be worse.

Then we moved on to the hardest part of the most difficult session of my life. She talked about the limitations of what we're doing. I was quite for a moment then completely out of nowhere spouted out, 'I just want you to like me.' I was glad I managed to censor the sentence because initially it was I just want you to love me which would have been utterly unbearable to say. I was really crying and feeling completely vulnerable when she very slowly and deliberately said, 'I can't be your mum.' at which point I completely lost it.

I want her to be my mum. I want her to hold me and stroke my hair and tell me she loves me. I want her to reassure me and make me safe. I want her to wrap me up in love and care and warmth. But she can't. She can't. She can't. She can't do what I so desperately want from her. She can't be what I need. I know this is transference and all that but it hurts more than anything. Why can't she love me?

I sort of got a bit freaked out and was quiet for a while then I started to plead with her to be angry with me. I needed her to be my mum and if she was my mum she needed to be angry with me. I know all of this sound completely mad but at the time it was just how it was. It's diametrically opposite from what I want from her but at that moment in time it was what I needed. I needed her to push me away like mothers do so then I wouldn't want her to be my mum and I would be safe. She steadfastly refused to be angry with me and I begged and pleaded with her quite desperately. At which point the session ended with her looking like she was desperate for me to go so that she could burst into tears.

Now I don't know where I am. I don't know what I think. All I know is that I feel really shaken by it, totally physically shaken, and I feel quite bereft, lonely and overwhelmingly sad. I'm dreading next week, I don't know whats going to happen. Is she going to love me or is she going to reject me?

An A to Z of My Mentalism Part 2

2009-10-19T16:20:00.002+01:00

To continue where I left off...

G is for Grey Areas

I don't cope well with grey areas. They confuse and concern me. I much prefer living in a world of blacks and whites. I imagine a lot of people do but for me it takes on an almost pathological nature. Sometimes I have to believe things even though I know them to be wrong because they allow me to live in a world of certainty.

A lot of my life has been spent in uncertainty. That's especially true of my early life. The uncertainty of living in a volatile violent home. The uncertainty of being in care. I spent years craving certainty, needing it desperately and never finding it. I had to create certainty in my life and the only way I could do that was by creating certainty in my head. I did that by creating a world that was entirely black and white, where I could line up evil on one side and good on the other and could bounce between the two without having to consider anything beyond this. Any tiny misdemeanour was evil, anything else was good. There was never very much on the good side.

Therapy is trying to unlock the grey areas, trying to allow me to see things are not as straight down the line as I would like to believe. I find this difficult. I find this almost impossible as it not just challenges my thinking, it challenges the reasons behind that thinking - that black and white thinking provides safety. I know it's a very childlike response to the world but for many years it has sort of worked for me and challenging it is difficult.

H is for Hope

I wasn't sure about including hope in this because a lot of the time I don't have very much of it. Sometimes I don't think I want any hope because it just confuses me. I live so much in the past and in the present that the future doesn't seem to come into things particularly. I see it as a place of more past and present. But if I think about the future I have to either have hope or despair.

I don't know if having hope is rational. I don't know if I'm ever going to heal, if I'm ever going to be the person that I should have been. It's not a case of being the person I was before all the bad things happened. I wasn't a person then, I was an unformed human being, a toddler. My persona has been created by the impact of life as has everyone elses and that persona includes the mental things that creep in.

I want to feel hope. I want to believe that this won't last forever. I read the literature and I see that borderline personality disorder can be cured and that it lessens over time. I also see that curing it is a very difficult process and time is a difficult thing to wait for when the here and now is so unbearable.

This should also include hope in God. I wish I had more than I do. I struggle to hope in God. I struggle to see him as anything other than a malicious presence wanting to smite me. I believe he's not intellectually and I see other people relating to him in a different way so I know it's possible but I need to have hope in that. I'm just not very good at hope.

I is for Injury

Self injury, self harm, cutting, being a twat, whatever one calls it, self harm is a significant part of my mentalism. I vacillate between hating my cutting and loving it. I've posted more about it here and I don't want to get into the deep and meaningfuls about it. At the moment I'm trying very hard not to cut. I'm struggling with not doing it and I'm finding it very difficult. The only time in the last year when I didn't cut was when I successfully gave it up for Lent earlier in the year and managed to keep that going for a few weeks afterwards. I was gutted the first time I cut after that.

I used to self harm when I was a very young child. I don't know what age I was but I know I used to do it in a house I lived at until I was nine. I find this distressing to contemplate but I know it's not normal behaviour for a child in single digits. The manner of my self harm then was very ritualised and horribly violent. I think it was the only way I had to control anything around me. So I controlled hurting me. That's a difficult concept for me to cope with now.

I wish I didn't self harm. I wish I didn't cut. I'm not that bothered about the burning because that's functional but I wish I didn't cut. I'm aware of how addictive cutting is and I'm disgusted that I started. It hasn't achieved anything. But then there's something inherently beautiful about cutting. Something about the ritual of it - getting the knife out, getting some tissues, kneeling, bearing whatever part of the body I've decided to cut and then depending on my mood either slashing violently at myself or slowly, deeply cutting words into me. Then the moment of release when I've done it, when I can put my head back, close my eyes and breathe slowly. I love that moment. It's a moment of clarity, of freedom from the horribleness that surrounds me. Then pressing the tissues to the cuts, pressing hard so it hurts. The pain purifying, cleansing. Then the guilt, the shame and the self hatred. It works, for those few moments it's beautiful but that never lasts.

J is for Jealousy

It wasn't until relatively recently that I realised what a jealous person I am. This jealousy is mainly directed towards my sisters. A lot of it comes from our separation during the years we were in care when they were together and I was apart from them. I thought they didn't want me and I was desperate for them. I was horribly jealous of the fact they had each other and of their (probably inadvertent) exclusion of me.

This jealousy has got stronger since I got pregnant and since the birth of her baby. The perfection of her wee family has parts of my heart ripping each other up in the strength of my jealousy of her and of what she has. The reality is that I wouldn't want to be her nor would I want what she has because I couldn't cope with them but I'm extraordinarily jealous of her.

This is a regular subject with the serial killer and she often reminds me that sibling jealousy is normal. I hate it when she does this. It doesn't feel normal to me, it feels overwhelming. I'm not one of these people that's jealous of other things. I don't really care about people who earn loads of money or have perfect partners or anything like that. I'm vaguely jealous of sane people but I'm just so enormously jealous of I at the moment.

K is for Killing Myself

Suicide is always at the back of my mind. Sometimes it's at the forefront but it's always at the back. When I was about seven I remember the police coming to the door and talking to my mother about a friend of hers who had attempted to commit suicide. That was the first time that I understood that suicide was a possibility - that it was possible to have that level of control over your own existence. Since then I've always presumed that that is how I will end up dying. That's a lot of years of suicidal ideation on whatever level.

Suicidal thinking is a comfort to me. It's a way of reassuring myself that all this shite is temporary, that I can move on that day that I'm brave enough or reckless enough to do so. It's a difficult thing to talk about because mental health professionals tend to get a wee bit stressed when you talk about wanting to kill yourself. They don't realise that as well as being an imminent project it's also a sort of metaphysical yearning. A yearning for the cacophony of the internal being to stop.

The only suicide attempts I have made have been while I was dissociating so I'm not entirely sure what let me to them beyond the sheer fact that my head had been overtaken by complete stress and I was no longer in it or a part of it. This scares me. At these times I came round into a more sane space in enough time to phone a friend or make myself throw up quickly enough to prevent any damage being done but that's not a good thing. It means that I'm not in control when the suicidal ideation takes over and I cannot prevent it. As I said once to the cmht 'what happens if I come round next time halfway between the top of the cliffs and the bottom.' I worry about this - not about my dying but about my realising it's the wrong time at a point that it's too late.

People talk about suicide being the most selfish thing someone can do. I disagree. I can understand why they say it but when I want to die I know that my continuing existence is making life worse for other people and my no longer continuing is an improvement for them. Suicide is therefore the most selfless thing I can do. I do realise that this is probably an attempt to justify myself but at the point of that much hopelessness it's how I feel. I can't change that. I do have friends and family members who have committed suicide and I know how it feels and I've mourned. My best friend from school killed herself about six years ago and I've never felt closer to her than I did when I heard. Suicide is part of me and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing.

L is for Love and Loneliness

The two go together. My endless craving for love and the loneliness that comes from never feeling that love being fulfilled. If my parents could only love me then that would make everything ok. But they don't so nothing is ok. The lack of love I feel is such a strong part of who I am, a lot of the reason behind why I am the way I am. I wish I was loved.

My granny loved me and I loved my granny to distraction. She was the one person in my childhood who regularly and consistently showed me what love was. Unfortunately she lived 200 miles away which made her love irregular. But love it was nonetheless. She's been dead many years but I miss her every day.

Love is too difficult to write any more about.

An A to Z of My Mentalism Part 1

2009-10-18T16:40:00.005+01:00

I've been thinking about this for a few days after reading some of the posts in this blog. Some of it may well be nonsense and some of the time I've just grasped at concepts that vaguely fit the letters involved but there you go. Here's my attempt.

A is for Adult Protective Services

A is not really about APS at all. It's more about what they represent which is my vulnerability. I tend to refuse to see myself as in any way vulnerable but the cmht calling in adult protection services recently has caused me to think about it quite a lot. I tend to see myself as a bit mental but getting on with things, sometimes better than others. I was really shocked when CF and JC felt that I was vulnerable enough to open a case with APS. It meant that they thought I wasn't always able to protect myself. This may or may not be true. I have always had a bit of a self destructive streak (see S) and sometimes I do things which are seriously against my better judgement but I tend to see these things as somehow happening to me as opposed to me having any control over them. So maybe that does make me vulnerable. I was even more shocked when I discussed this with Fr S and he agreed with them. He agreed that at times I was vulnerable.

The reality is that I hate to see myself as in any way vulnerable. If I do that then I can find it difficult to keep up the pretence of Position A - that everything is my fault. If I'm vulnerable to the extent of requiring a case with APS then maybe I am not always able to make the best decisions in my life - maybe I am vulnerable. I refuse to admit it to myself but I'm deeply, deeply angry that I have to face the fact that other people believe that I am.

B is for Borderline Personality Disorder

After six or so months of refusing to believe I have BPD, I'm beginning to think 'what if it's true, what if I do have it.' I'm certainly no longer so sure that I don't have it as I was when I wrote this post. I do recognise that certain of my behavioural characteristics are representative of someone with BPD. The self harm, the attention seeking, the constant bouncing around of my emotions are all signs of BPD. The fact that I have others symptoms which aren't part of the BPD spectrum could just be co-morbid BPD. I don't know.

I still feel some of the stigma of a diagnosis of BPD and it's something I would prefer if work didn't find out about. I don't want people to know that my whole personality is disordered especially in such a way that if they randomly looked it up online they would find a whole host of negative information about it. That would be crushing. I read some of the things people post on BPD and I don't recognise myself. This means either I'm completely crap at being introspective or that I'm not entirely typical of someone with BPD. I don't know. I'll discuss it again with the psychiatrist when I see him again but I'm not as intent of proving him wrong as I was after my previous appointment.

C is for the Community Mental Health Trust

At times the CMHT have been the bane of my life and at others they've been really useful. I've had contact with them since May 2008 which seems a remarkably short time considering all the interaction I've had with them. I first spoke to curly girl who was a really skillful and helpful person who taught me a lot of the more practical stuff on how to cope with being mental. She was extremely sane and supportive. Unfortunately she went of sick in September 2008, the same week as my original therapist left, leaving me in bits all over the floor. There was major cmhtfail after that with my being mucked about with between the crisis team, the duty team and the horrible case worker. It wasn't until May this year that I finally got allocated JC and CF as my case workers. JC is the head of occupational therapy and CF is the unit manager of the place where I see them so obviously I've worked my way up or I'm a difficult case. I neither know or care I just know that I need someone to support me when necessary.

The pair of them tend to see me together and I try to be open and honest with them although after the APS thing I'm no longer so sure about that. I can give them a call in the reasonable expectation of an appointment within 24 hours if things are bad. I've been seeing them quite a lot recently as a result of being quite mental and they've been very helpful. Both of them are quite blunt which I find helpful as I don't like people faffing about with me trying to be pleasant. CF talks like a complete wanker. I can't explain how bad he is but he has a habit of making quotation marks with his fingers which is a sure sign of talking like a wanker but he's straight with me and once I've dewankerfied what he says it tends to make sense.

So at the moment the cmht is working.

D is for Drugs

I'm on far too many drugs. Not just for being mental but for all sorts of things. At the moment I take Salbutamol, Atrovent, Serevent and Becloforte inhalers for asthma. I also take every day a vitamin pill because I'm not good at a balanced diet, Folic Acid because apparently my levels are horrendous, Cetrizine for allergies, Metformin for diabetes, Perindopril for high blood pressure, Ranitidine for constant acid reflux, Venlafaxine as an antidepressant, Risperidone as a mood stabiliser and Zopiclone to help me sleep. This counts as far too many drugs.

Here I'm discussing mentalism so Venlafaxine and Respiridone are the important ones. I was first put on Venlafaxine in September 2008 after going mental when curly girl and the previous therapist left. The crisis people put me on it at 150mg as a change from citalopram which was in exchange for mirtazipine which was in exchange for fluoxetine. It appears most people go through half the dictionary before they find an antidepressant that works for them. Personally I'm unsure whether venlafaxine does work or not, I'm just terrified of the side effects of coming off it. I don't want to take any higher a dose because that would mean even worse side effects when I want to stop taking it. Like I'm ever going to stop taking it - I've been on antidepressants permanently since I was 19.

I started the Risperidone in June and it's been the best thing the psychiatrist could have put me on. Even only 1 mg a day has made a huge difference to my ability to manage my emotions. It's been obvious enough for other people to notice as well. I really don't know how I would have coped with the last few weeks without it. I never ever want to stop taking it. Risperidone rocks.

E is for emotions

I'm not very good at having stable emotions. I either don't feel anything or I'm completely overwhelmed with how I feel. I prefer not to feel anything because I then have space to cope with everything else that's going on like the rest of my life. However, sometimes my emotions do get turned on and I get completely swamped by how I feel. I tend to get very tearful because I don't know how to react to my emotions. The chief ones I feel are sadness and anger.

I never want to admit to the anger because I'm terrified of it. I'm scared of how I feel when I'm angry - that sense that I have to destroy things. I hate the way it takes me over and fills me with a sense of being out of control. I'm terrified that I'll turn into my parents and become a violent person who wants to hurt someone. The last time I tried to hurt someone was when I was about twelve but that doesn't mean that it won't happen again. It means I back off from confrontation because it's too much for me. The only place I ever let myself even be a little bit angry is with the serial killer and then I end up punching walls and freaking out on her so its not a good thing. Someone at work used to call me Miss Angry because he said I was an angry person. That really used to freak me out.

F is for Family and Forgiveness

Family and forgiveness really go together. I am confused about my family and I'm confused about forgiveness. If there was one underlying reason for my mentalism, it's got to be the way I was brought up. The violence, the abuse and the lack of love have had a huge contribution to how I am now. When you experience these things from a very young age they become part of you.

I love my family very much. I love my parents deeply. I don't like them but I love them. That makes life very difficult. I would like to be able to forgive them but at the moment that's beyond me. I know it makes no sense for me to blame what happened to me on me and my evil and need to forgive them but I've never been able to have logical emotions. My inability to forgive them also makes me feel evil.

My family also consists of A, I and K and now E. This is hard for me at the moment because I feel so stressed about everything that has gone on recently relating to the birth of E and the events when I last went up to Scotland. I love them all. I find A impossible to get on with because she is the stroppiest person in the world (a fact accredited by my mate who's met her twice and calls her 'your stroppy sister'). I and K have the perfect life. There are a lot of past hurts relating to my sisters as well. I need to forgive the people who separated me from my sisters when we were in care - something that separated us for years and makes me feel very isolated at times.

In a way my family also includes the baby I terminated so long ago. He (and its always a he) forms part of my fantasy family which has been of importance and still is much of the time. It's difficult because having this fantasy family precludes my being entirely honest about my relationships with my real family and it haunts me. It makes everything seem not real and allows me to get in difficult positions because I pretend everything is ok. I really need to grow up.

GPs, Serial Killers and Hurty Hands

2009-10-15T16:35:00.002+01:00

I went to the GP on Tuesday and got signed off for another fortnight which feels like a bit of a fail. I do need to work to pay my mortgage and I don't like sitting at home being mental. I also forgot to ask the GP for Zopiclone (wonder sleeping tablet). I realised when I went downstairs to pick up a repeat prescription from the receptionist and thankfully the GP had another free appointment in 15 minutes so I went back in and got some. Different GP from normal and thankfully didn't have to argue. I was just given them. I'm so glad I got some, a whole month without sleeping tablets doesn't bear thinking about. I only get 7 tablets to do me the month anyway but none is impossible.

When I got home I had a brain fart and phoned my sister and asked if it would be possible to come up to Scotland for a few days while I was signed off. I said I would stay at the parents but it would be good to see E. Yes, I do know this is a remarkably bad idea. Yes, I do know that I'm stupid but at the time it seemed like a sensible thing to do. Thankfully she's really busy over the next fortnight so it wouldn't be worth going up as I wouldn't see E. I really don't know why I did that because going to Scotland and staying with my parents is hardly up there with the world of common sense.

When I got to the Serial Killers I mentioned the phone call and we got into the deep and meaningfuls of why I did it. The Serial Killer was being horribly intuitive and started asking me if I was seeing I and K and the baby as being a perfect family. She knows I had fantasies as a child about being part of a perfect family (and still do sometimes) and that it's something I would dearly love. She also asked if I was feeling lonely which I am due to I and K and A all being close in Scotland and me being down here. Also not being at work and interacting with people, the continued pathetic feeling of abandonment I feel because the cmht haven't made a new appointment with me, the fact the psychiatrist cancelled his appointment and Fr S being away. I admitted that part of the loneliness was the fact that I wasn't pregnant after what had happened in Scotland. I don't want to be pregnant, I would have been horrified if I'd discovered that I was pregnant but if I had been there would have been a sort of synchronicity with what happened when I lost the baby and I could have maybe made a different decision now. I almost didn't write that down because it sounds sick to say I was upset because I hadn't become pregnant by my dad. How fucked up is that.

I was surprised at how much it hurt to admit that I was lonely and craving a perfect family. It was the cue for much tears. I hate how distressed I get when it comes to facing the hurt. It's humiliating to cry like that in front of anyone and somehow it's even more humiliating to do so in front of the serial killer. I'm always terrified that she'll start crying again.

One entertaining thing she came away with in the midst of all this raw and horrible emotion was how being taken into care had 'not allowed [me] to get slowly disenchanted with my family as other people do'. For some reason that really cracked me up.

Wednesday's session began with me asking her how she had managed to be so intuitive and make so many connections the previous day. She told me that she listens to me and she thinks about things that are maybe only in my subconscious. I got a bit stressed by this because of my constant fear that I'm contaminating her and my evil was taking over her head. She denied this but I can never entirely trust her on the subject.

We then moved on to my favourite subject, which we'd covered to some extent the day before, my horribly desperate craving for a family that loved me. We discussed how it was probably not the adult me that was so desperate for this, instead it was the pathetic stupid child me inside who had missed all of this but needed it desperately. Even if I was in a position now where I was truly loved, I would still crave it because the child me inside would still need it and it's that child that's got to heal. I fucking hate that child.

We also discussed the moments amongst the abuse when my father behaved in a loving way towards me. We discussed how tantalising these were, how much they were shiny brightness amongst a hell of a lot of darkness. How distressing I find all of this now. At one point I mentioned how as a child I used to flirt with him to try to get him to do bad things to me so he would love me. I suddenly got a sensation of seeing this from outside like a film scene and I couldn't bear how painful it was. I started smashing my hand against the wall as hard as I could. I was hyperventilating and smacking and punching the wall and completely overwhelmed. It took me about quarter of an hour to calm down enough to tell her what was wrong. I hate it when everything gets that overwhelming.

I had to go to a Bible study afterwards and it was awful. Fr S wasn't there so it was Fr J who is really into all the charismatic stuff that I find it difficult to cope with. I was sitting there still quite shaken from the session with the serial killer and my hand was throbbing. For some reason I kept arguing with him because I couldn't let things drop. Eventually he introduced the subject of God giving messages to people. Not a good subject for someone who hears the voice of Notgod when she's mental and believes it's God. I didn't mention that but I found the whole experience exhausting.

Today Notgod is here is spades bothering me. Intellectually I know it's because I've had two really hard sessions with the serial killer and I'm wiped out. Emotionally I believe it's because I'm evil and I have to be destroyed. My hand is swollen and bruised which is my own fault so I've had to strap it up to try to calm it down and I just feel like shite. This is all supposed to make you feel better isn't it?

Confession and all things subsequent

2009-10-12T14:26:00.002+01:00

Confession

I'm sorry there's been such a delay in my drivel in recent days but my head has not been altogether as with it as I should have liked. It doesn't suggest there's a limit on whats been going on, just on my ability to put it together in a coherent fashion.

Since coming back from Scotland I haven't been receiving communion. I was firmly installed in Position A which deemed me unforgivable and unwanted by God. This wasn't helped by the voice (now termed Notgod) which has been telling me of my evil almost consistently for the past couple of weeks now. Not going to communion is crushing. I hate kneeling there watching the others going up and receiving the sacrament, knowing it's a means of grace, knowing it to be a gift from God and being unable to take part in it. Kneeling there overwhelmed with the awfulness of my shame, guilt and evil.

I kept like this for about three weeks I think until it got to the point that the bell ringing was the sign for me to cry like a girl whilst watching the others going up, my brain whirling with too many emotions. It wasn't a good place to be. After one mass I asked Fr S if he could find some time somewhere to hear my confession. He agreed to do so immediately which discombobulated me somewhat as I therefore had limited time to prepare (about the time it takes to cross a small church). Fr S heard my confession and I was absolved and reconciled to God. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

Before I became an (Anglo) Catholic I didn't really trust the whole idea of confession. I had no concept of the reality of it, of how going through such a ritual in a prayerful and thoughtful way actually changes things. I was more used to my deeply protestant praying my sins to a God who at best ignored me or at worse was just hanging back momentarily from smiting me. But confession does work. It does take the burden of my shite and places it with a God who has overcome shite. It's amazing but it really does. Maybe it's the ritual aspect of it that is important, I'm unsure. As you can tell from my slight inability to write sensibly about this, I'm no great theologian.

However with the removal of the shite comes the other shite. Confession in this case moved me from being in an acute place of Position A to just an acute place of Position B. Probably less damaging but infinitely more painful.

The CMHT

I had an appointment last Monday with the cmht to discuss those things which we have been discussing without any solutions for what seems like an eternity. It was a difficult appointment because it was the first time I'd seen them since my humiliating falling apart on JC the previous week. The first thing I did when I got into the room was apologise to her which she refused to accept so I got huffy - yes I'm a grown up. Maybe.

We talked about all the other things going on and about the level of stress which I'm under. The one thing the two of them do seem to appreciate is that I am extremely stressed and it's this rather than some sort of psychosis which is causing me to hear the voices and see the visual hallucinations. Which is reassuring but I still wish that Notgod and my dad would stop bloody appearing.

We discussed potential ways forward. I admitted for the first time that part of the issue for me was that I didn't want to lose contact with my sisters and E again like I did when we were in care. CF said quite gently that if I went ahead with things I might have to accept being persona non grata for a while. Which I desperately don't want and can't handle thinking about. I do know there is a degree of selfishness in all of this but I can't stop it, I want my family to love me.

JC brought up social services and I repeated how I was desperate not to have any contact with them unless absolutely necessary. They asked me how old I was when I went into care and how old my sisters were and what I knew about the reasons. I know sod all really about the reasons despite reading my file some time ago. CF asked difficult questions about whether we were 'battered', a term that makes my stomach turn for no real or apparent reason. I suddenly got very angry that none of this was sorted out the first time round. Why did my parents get away with the abuse when we were the ones that were punished by being in so called fucking care? There was no answer to that but CF did say that this was a reasonable question.

We did fall out at one point after CF admitted they had got in touch with Adult Protective Services about me despite my fury at the idea the last time we saw them. I have to admit I was furious about it. I said that I didn't know quite what to say to them in response to that and CF said, 'how about thankyou for caring and wanting to protect me when I'm vulnerable' which made me laugh with the incongruity of how we see it. CF said they'd raised a case and closed it down so it was on record. Now I'm unsure what the point of it was. I don't want it on record, I don't want anything to do with Adult Protective Services because I don't feel, mental or not mental, that I'm vulnerable enough to need adult protection. Nor do I feel that it was appropriate for them to raise a case despite telling me the previous week that they wouldn't.

A week on I'm still not sure what I think about it. For the record I have read the Councils website and looked through some of the protocols relating to adult protection and I'm still not happy that I've been fitted into this position. Part of me wonders if this is because I'm mental and don't want to admit to things. Do I not need to be part of the Adult Protective Services remit in the same way that I refuse to have borderline personality disorder? I don't know. All I know is that I'm very confused and unhappy about it.

However CF did come up with one excellent idea. He suggested I track down a solicitor in Scotland who has experience in the area of child protection and ask their advice. I genuinely thanked him a lot for that because it's the first new idea to come out of this morass of confusion in recent months. So I did do so.

Another thing that concerned me about the meeting is that they didn't offer me another appointment. I know that that's a stupid thing to stress about but I've been relying on them a certain amount since I came back from Scotland to be people who can't really do anything but who gave a shite. Knowing I could spend an hour a week with a couple of people who knew the score and gave a shit was actually quite important. And to be honest what I'm trying not to admit to in writing this is how abandoned I feel by them not making another appointment and how ludicrous this abandonment actually is being that if I phoned them now I would have an appointment by tomorrow at the very latest. But then my fear of abandonment is very real, very strong and very pathetic.

I was very confused when I left the cmht and I went straight to mass where I completely lost it on Fr S. Thankfully nobody else had come to mass so it was cancelled to allow me to cry my eyes out which I do feel guilty about. I was just gutted. It wasn't even discreet crying it was complete bawling my eyes out sobbing crying. Position B was definitely kicking in.

Serial Killer 1

I went to the Serial Killer on Tuesday night and cried a long time. I couldn't explain just how much I hurt. I can remember sitting at one time curled up forward holding on to my knees and rocking back and forth sobbing incoherently. I couldn't say anything or think anything beyond just how much I hurt at the moment. Even writing this has me in tears which isn't a good thing. I was trying to explain why things hurt so much. It's going to be difficult to think it through.

When I was a kid and my dad fucked me afterwards he held me for a few minutes and told me I was his little girl and he cared about me and he loved me. This only lasted for a few minutes before he began to lose it and kick the shit out of me for leading him into sin and into adultery etc etc but looking back these few moments are the most precious of my childhood. These are what made the abuse ok. These are the moments that still provide the hold he has over me. They were the only time in my childhood that either of my parents were in any way kind or loving. I cannot explain the significance of these moments to me as a child or as an adult looking back. Deeply tainted though they were by the abuse they are all I've got.

That was missing when things happened last month. There was no love. There was no feeling of being wanted. There was nothing. That has absolutely gutted me and left me bereft. I could cope with what happened when I was a child because of those few minutes of love. Without it I can't. I just hurt too much.

Serial Killer 2

I wasted Wednesday's session. I had something on afterwards and I didn't want to be in a mental when I went to it. I had not to fall apart. We sat for about ten minutes at the beginning with me refusing to say anything, just squirming. Literally squirming. At one point it reminded me so strongly of being a teenager and being called in to see the social worker. I didn't want to say anything so squirmed so I didn't have to. Epic #serialkillerfail.

Solicitor

I had a phone appointment with the solicitor on Friday. It was a disappointment. He basically thinks that I should go to the police which is the one thing I'm desperate not to do. I don't want to see my dad in trouble, I just want my nephew to be safe. And I'm trapped. I suggested getting an interdict (injunction) to stop my dad phoning and harassing me which he's still doing but the solicitor didn't seem keen on this because he thought my dad could be a threat to me when he found out about this and because the police haven't been involved they wouldn't be aware of how much of a threat he could be. I don't know. My dad phoned on Saturday night when I was on my way out the door to Aylesford Priory to attend the vigil of the relics of St Therese which I didn't go to as a result. The solicitor wants me to write a history of whats happened and keep a diary of the phone calls so I'm going to have to start that this week which I'm dreading.

I'm just completely torn now. I hurt so badly and I still don't know how to move forward. My sick note runs out today and I don't feel ready to go back to work. I hate this so much. Notgod keeps bothering me and I'm struggling not to deal with how much I hurt by self harming.

Does anyone what to swap lives with me for a couple of days just so I can get a break?

Overwhelmed

2009-09-29T09:33:00.003+01:00

This last week I've become completely mental. I'm going to try and take a step back here and record the things that have happened to attempt to make sense of them.

On Thursday I started to hear God talking to me again. It was almost ignorable but this incessant voice of God telling me I had to destroy myself, that I was going to hell, that I had to die was quite difficult to ignore completely.

On Friday I went to work and went to the dentist. People who follow me on twitter (@bourach) will know that I was fairly (completely) terrified of going. I went and I coped ok. Cried a bit, shook a bit, hyperventilated a bit, but I did it. Then I drove back to work. I walked into the office and my dad was sitting on the seat I'd vacated. Except he wasn't. He wasn't real but he was sitting there. Then one of my colleagues started to talk to me and he was speaking in my dad's voice. God was still talking to me.

I didn't know what to do so I called the cmht, spoke to the cow and got an appointment with JC straightaway. I went to the appointment and completely lost it. I had to warn her that I was so evil that I was going to contaminate her with my evil. God kept telling me how evil I was. I must have been completely incoherent. She kept trying to reassure me and tell me that I couldn't contaminate her because she would stand up to it and I was just experiencing this because I was stressed out. She went away to get the cow to decide what to do about over the weekend. When they came back the cow started talking in my dad's voice so I had to shout at her to tell her to shut up because I was scared. They kept asking me what I thought should happen to keep me safe and I kept telling them that I shouldn't be kept safe because I had to go to hell because that was what God was telling me to do. Eventually they decided to call out the crisis team for over the weekend.

Friday night was horrible. The crisis team phoned and said they wouldn't come out til 9 on Saturday morning so I had to withstand God til then. He kept harassing me over and over. My dad kept appearing and disappearing, both of their voices kept morphing from what was on the telly. I can just remember curling up on the sofa, putting a blanket over my head, holding my hands over my ears and rocking back and forth trying to stop their voices. I knew the voices weren't real but they were so insistent that I couldn't ignore them eternally banging on and on about my evil and how I had to destroy myself.

I went to mass on Saturday morning and lost in on poor Fr S. I kept asking him if I was possessed and he kept saying no. He was really calm and repeatedly told me it wasn't God that was speaking, it was my being overwhelmed with what was going on. But it is God, I know it's God.

The crisis team eventually turned up about three and sat for an hour being useless. I managed to hide how mental I was which I'm unsure was a good thing. I told them what was going on and they said I was traumatised and extremely stressed. No shit. They were full of good advice like try to get some sleep, try not to think about it, try to get in a routine etc etc. Then they discharged me. Fucking useless bastards.

On Sunday morning about 5 I was lying on the sofa watching a remarkably dull discussion about the Irish referendum when great weirdness happened. I suddenly couldn't move. God was screaming at me that it was time for me to go to hell. I could feel hands pulling me towards hell but I couldn't fight back. Inside I was screaming and crying but because I couldn't move at all nothing was happening. I was absolutely fucking terrified. I cannot explain how scared I was. After about half an hour of this the alarm on my phone went off and I was able to break it. I don't know what was going on but it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

At mass on Sunday morning the reading was the bit about if your hand offends you cut it off. It wasn't Fr S that read it out, it was God's voice. It meant that I had to destroy myself. As I walked out, Fr S told me I had to ignore that bit of the reading. I made a joke about it but God was still telling me that because I was so so overwhelmingly evil, I had to kill myself. I managed to get a couple of hours sleep on Sunday afternoon without God harassing me too much. Then I went to evening prayer and benediction at church. I kept seeing my dad sitting on a row of chairs. I couldn't escape from him, I couldn't say anything. God was telling me I had to be punished and I shouldn't be there because I was contaminating everything about the service and everyone present.

I've made it through Monday and to today. The weirdness continues. There have been no overwhelming experiences but God is constantly there keeping up this constant background noise about how evil I am and how I have to destroy myself and go to hell. Sometimes it pushes into the foreground and freaks me out. It's stopping me from concentrating on things and from thinking. I'm cutting a lot to try and destroy myself a little bit, sacrifice a little bit of myself to God but it doesn't work. I need to destroy myself completely and the energy to fight it off is reducing steadily as this goes on.

I'm completely overwhelmed.

Running out of cope

2009-09-23T13:04:00.002+01:00

I'm getting to the point of meltdown, the point where I can no longer deal with whats going on. I hate this. I hate the weakness in myself and I hate feeling that I'm hanging on by my fingernails to nothing.

Yesterday I had an appointment with the cmht. CF and JC were there and it was all very stressful. I saw CF last week and told him what was going on and had a reasonably useful conversation about how difficult things were. Yesterday was more difficult.

I was honest about how hard things are at the moment. How I'm trying to juggle stressful things at work and all that's going on in my head at the moment. I'm bouncing between the two but just not at very useful times. I keep having flashbacks at inappropriate moments, even someone being too close to me is enough to trigger a flashback at the moment. I'm also feeling incredibly self destructive. I want to destroy myself. I'm trying to find someone to come down here and hurt me badly just to escape how horrible it is to be myself. JC responded with, 'that's not normal'. Well no shit JC, none of this is normal. But I desperately feel the need to be punished. Maybe it's because there was no violence involved in what happened and it feels so desperately unfinished. Even processing what actually happened seems impossible at the moment.

CF raised the issue of adult protective services and how he has had to consider whether I should be referred to them. I'm horrified at the thought. I've looked them up since and it appears that they're the people who investigate things like elderly abuse. I'm not some demented auld wifie that needs to be protected. I'm an intelligent, articulate woman who has screwed things up dramatically and horribly. After my freaking out and begging him not to lock me up he finally said that he'd decided that as the perpetrator of what had happened was 500 miles away he wouldn't but I had to bear in mind that it was an issue.

They both repeated that they don't know what to do either. They're there just to support me and be there while I fall apart. One useful thing CF said last week was when he talked about his divorce and how he kept going for a certain amount of time then something triggered him (a discussion with a client) and he completely lost it and ended up having to take a long period of work. That's what I'm desperately trying to avoid. I can't afford to crash and burn at the moment. I need to hold it together. At least they're going to offer me regular appointments at the moment so we can sit about and discuss how stuck and powerless we all feel.

The serial killer felt pointless last night. Just banging on and on about the same things as we always bang on and on about. She described progress as 'very slow', I think nonexistent would be a better word. It feels remarkably hopeless.

There's going to be a point, probably in the very near future, where I just stop coping, where I completely run out of what resources I have left. I don't want it to happen but I can feel it rushing up to me quickly and overwhelming me. I have a meeting with my boss tomorrow and I'm terrified about it. I'm not terrified about the meeting but my boss and I don't get on and I'm terrified that the stress of the meeting will use the last dregs of my ability to cope and I'll lose it. I don't want that to happen. I feel humiliated enough at the moment.

Maybe I don't want to cope. Maybe I do just want to collapse in a corner and cry about the overwhelmingness of whats going on. The hurt, the fear, the hopelessness, the powerlessness, the ownership he has over me. It's not stopping, it wasn't just a couple of incidents in Scotland; it's the continued phone calls, the fact I feel alone and unprotected and very very scared.

God is gone

2009-09-15T09:42:00.002+01:00

Last week has destroyed me. I feel shattered into tiny pieces of hate and evil. I am disgusting, fetid, evil, hateful, wicked. God has gone. He hates me, He is delighted to turn his back on me.

The one sentence I never wanted to hear. The one sentence I heard. 'If you let me do what I want, I won't do anything to E.' What choice did I have? The right one or the wrong one. I chose the wrong one. I let him do what he wanted.

I am so full of hatred towards myself. How can anyone be so evil and wicked? There are no words for the depths of my depravity. I am evil. I am EVIL. The word burns itself into me. It meets the burning evil inside and fuses together into an overwhelming creation of sheer filth. I disgust myself. I look at myself and I want to destroy myself. It is all I deserve.

I cannot receive communion in my rancid state. I cannot ask confession of a God who is no longer there. Who walked off when I needed him. Who disappeared with disgust at me. I kneel and watch and cry and dissolve with the strength of my hate for myself. But I can't receive God's grace because he doesn't want me to.

God hates me but nothing close to how much I hate myself. There are no words at the moment. No words awful enough to describe me.

Being an Auntie

2009-09-03T15:49:00.002+01:00

My nephew was born on Saturday. He is called E (he's not really - he's not just an initial but I don't want his parents to google his name and find there way here). I've not seen him yet but I've seen photos and he's an absolute wee sweetie. I'm going up the road on Sunday to see him and to be the big far away auntie that spoils him outrageously.

Since he was born my emotions have been in a complete whirlwind. One moment I'm over the moon and the next I'm incredibly low. I know I've whined on about this particular event for a long time (could it be around 9 months perhaps) but please bear with me while I whine some more.

When I first heard and for a couple of days after I was just the happiest person going. I am genuinely overwhelmingly joyful at this little person that has become a part of our lives. I smiled at his photos and his little perfections - baby hands, tiny fingernails, little squished up face, massive eyes, limbs all over the place. His sheer beauty, innocence and loveliness. It is a joyful thing.

Yes I knew there were things that were worrying me, black things at the back of my mind. I managed to keep them there. On Monday Fr S had a thanksgiving mass for his safe arrival and he prayed for his continued safety and protection. I coped with it. I smiled. I was so happy and grateful that this tiny person was here and perfect.

On Monday night I went to bed and slept for a while. I dreamt of my own child. Not nightmares, dreams. I was so happy holding this little bundle of warmness, this package of humanity that was part of me and other from me. He was beautiful and he was mine. His smell, the taste of him when I kissed him, the feel of his heart beating next to mine. His breath against me. His hands and feet stretching and snuggling and exploring.

Then I woke up. He doesn't exist. He is dead. I didn't let him live, I didn't let him breath and snuggle, I made his heart stop beating. He was ripped from me before he got the chance to grow separate from me. He never was a little person. He never had that opportunity. I stole it from him.

I used to dream like that a lot in the period following the abortion. Every night I held him and rocked him and loved him. That's probably when I first started trying not to sleep. Now these dreams happen much less frequently and almost never with the same power and feeling that I dreamt of him on Monday night. It wasn't a dream it was more real than reality.

When I got up on Tuesday morning I switched my computer on. I forgot I had saved a photo of E to my wallpaper the previous day. When I saw the photo I started to cry and I continued to cry all day. I went to the serial killer and cried. I came home and cried. I couldn't go to work because I couldn't stop crying. The loss I constantly feel became crystallised and became painful beyond bearing. I was overwhelmed with grief, a grief I try to avoid because of my guilt.

By Wednesday my fears were becoming more distinct. The behaviour of my parents was now pushing itself into my mind. My terror of E being hurt has grown immeasurably. It is no longer a question of the baby potentially being hurt, it's a question of E being hurt. E, that tiny perfect person. Everything has become solidified in E.

About 4am this morning I got a phone call. I ignored it and then checked if there was a message. There was. My father. 'I've been thinking about you. I can't wait to get to know E really well.' I listened to it and threw up. I don't know if he's trying to wind me up or what. All I know is that I'm horrified at the thought. Horrified in it's true sense - filled with horror. All day I've been crying again. Feeling desperately impotent and crying.

I'm going up to Scotland on Sunday. I'm going to stay with my parents. I'm going to try not to turn into the passive me who can't stand up to them. It's no longer about me. It's about E. I'm going to try and fight the self destructive urges. I'm going to try to be strong. But I'm very scared.

Discombobulation with the cmht

2009-08-27T16:12:00.002+01:00

The session with the serial killer last night was, in her words, 'fraught'. Moving to Position B requires dealing with the hurt. We did some of that last night. It wasn't pleasant. It was extremely tearful, squirmy and horrible. The word 'shame' came up a lot. I don't want to deal with the shame of what happened. It's too disgusting, degrading, too overwhelming. She always lets me know when there's a couple of minutes left of the session and I attempt to calm down by being a smartarse. Yesterday I said that I must exhaust her. She didn't deny it but she told me I looked about ready to drop. I was. Not pleasant at all.

I had a meeting with CF and JC at the cmht today to follow up from this appointment. It was meant to be to discuss the STEPPS programme and methods to prevent me throwing a mental but we didn't end up discussing either. JC managed to be late again. She hadn't run out of petrol this time, it was some other excuse. If I was her boss I'd bollock her for this. Or maybe it's just me. CF asked me how work was and I said ok and then he asked me about the rest of life. The only word I could come up with was 'difficult'. When JC came in it was clear that she knew about the fact I'd seen the cow and about the phone calls and that CF didn't.

We ended up talking about the baby and about going to Scotland in a couple of weeks. It was a difficult conversation but there were a few things that were said that confused me a lot. The first was that after saying in May that it wasn't my responsibility, now they were taking it very seriously. I'm not sure what caused the change, I can only surmise that it was that they got their heads out their arses. It slightly freaked me out though because I can pretend I'm not stressed about it if nobody else is but I can't pretend that if I am. At one point JC said that it was entirely reasonable to be frightened about all of this and that anyone, even someone who referred to themselves as 'a mental', would be reacting in exactly the same way. Which is oddly reassuring.

The first thing they asked was if I felt safe going to Scotland and staying with the parents. I didn't know what to say so I just shrugged. JC talked about having another client in a very similar situation and told me that I needed to formulate an escape plan if things go wrong. I haven't thought about this at all and for some reason I'm loathe to because the more self destructive Position A bit of myself sort of wants things to go wrong. I did admit this and they didn't seem completely freaked out. CF used the word sacrifice which I discouraged strongly because that makes it sound sane and brave etc when really it's just self destructive. At least they didn't try to argue me out of it.

They asked about how my sister's reacted to my parents and I said they were closer to them then I was but I'd never managed to discuss properly with them what had happened when we were kids. CF (who talks sense but has a deeply irritating way of doing so) asked if they had had the same experiences as I had and when I answered yes started to bang on about denial. Which I'm aware off. He then completely threw me and freaked me out when he asked if I thought there was any way that my sisters would collude in the abuse of the baby. That freaked me out because I'd never thought of it and it just completely blew my head off. I managed to hold it together to say something sarky to him about adding even more stresses before crying like a girl. I don't think they would but the idea is just too awful to contemplate. Too horrible.

When I calmed down he asked me what my sister was like. I said that she was intelligent but really really naive which was what worried me. I explained that because we'd been split up when I was 10 I didn't really know them all that well as it's just in the last 4 or 5 years that we've been in regular, if superficial, contact. It's the fact that I don't know them that well that worries me.

JC asked if I'd thought about telling my brother in law and I told her that of course I had but it was a huge thing to be told and I didn't know if he'd discussed it with my sister. CF seemed to think that it was a reasonable position to hold in the circumstances that getting between them with my size sevens probably wasn't the best idea.

JC asked what my mother's reaction to something happening to me when I was up in Scotland and I said I thought she's say I was an evil adulterous slag. They seemed slightly taken aback and asked if I'd been called that before and she sort of sighed when I told her it was a normal way to be addressed.

CF then managed to make my brain hurt again by saying, 'you do realise that this is an abnormal way for a family to be?' I'd never thought about that before. My family are normal to me. My experiences within my family are normal to me. I hadn't thought of it as being abnormal. I don't know why this has made me so confused but when I think of it I get that funny feeling at the pit of my stomach. I'd never thought of what happened as abnormal and I suppose it is and the fact that I see it as normal is because I'm evil (Position A)/gutting (Position B). He also banged on about how I was as innocent as the baby is which is something the serial killer says a lot (alongside suggesting that one of the reasons I'm so stressed about the baby is that it reminds me of this) and which always causes me to get upset.

CF asked what would happen if I knew something had happened to the baby and I got irrationally angry and snapped at him. By that point it's too fucking late. If something has already happened to the baby everything has gone wrong already. He seemed to understand that but then I calmed down and said I would go to the police and social services and I'd written to them to explain that. JC asked what I thought about going to the police and I admitted to her that I was terrified and really torn about it. CF said that sometimes people need to get in trouble to stop doing things but he doesn't realise the massive impact it would have on so many people. Because of my father's job it would be all over the papers and (I know this is selfish) we have a relatively unusual surname so everyone would know about me and I'd be so ashamed. And there's all the fear about the police and courts and all the rest of it so I am terrified of it but if it gets to that point I have no choice.

On more than one occasion I allowed my frustration that there was nothing I could do slip through and they were quite reassuring in that both of their responses seemed to be that they were frustrated too. What they did say was that I could see them before I go or afterwards if I want and I can phone them from up there if I need to. I'm not keen on doing that because I tend to want to separate both worlds when I'm up there and avoid confusing things. I think that was a good offer to make though.

JC said she'd sent a letter about the STEPPS thing but I wasn't to think about it because clearly I had far more important things to worry about and we could deal with it when things were a bit better. Both of them also said that I was using the service responsibly and appropriately which makes me feel like I've just been awarded a chocolate medal for services to mentalism.

I'm now left very confused as a result of some of the things that were raised. I have new things to think about in my already completely overloaded brain and I have new ways to think about old things. I am a bit shook up by it but I'm glad they took me seriously. In some ways I'm glad they share my fears and my frustrations and I'm very glad indeed that they've offered to be there the way they have.

Doesn't stop my brain churning away at a massive rate though.

Positions

2009-08-26T12:21:00.002+01:00

Position A

Everything is my fault. All the bad things that happened happened because I'm evil. If I was good then they would love me but they don't because I'm so evil/worthless/scummy/disgusting etc. It works as a position except it doesn't. It is a relatively coherant position which I have held since I was tiny.

Position B

I am not evil. Things happened because the people who did them did them. It wasn't anything to do with me - I was the victim. Not a position I want to hold because it hurts too damn much.

Position C

My current position. I believe both at the same time. I am evil and I hurt so unbearably. I can go from one to another in a single sentence. It overwhelms me. I long for the certainty of position A, I cannot handle the pain of position B. I am all over the place. If I go to Scotland and something bad happens then I will be back in position A and although unsafe I will be safe. If that makes sense. If I believe in position B I am utterly vulnerable. Instead I am just horribly confused.

Hell

2009-08-19T16:06:00.002+01:00

Things are hellish at the moment. I cannot bear it. I'm all alone with my thoughts of excessive madness. CF and JC are on holiday, the serial killer is on holiday and Fr S goes on holiday on Friday. I have endless awfulness circling my brain which I can't escape from. I just want to give up but I can't because I'll go to hell.

I saw duty at the cmht on Friday and it was the cow. She wasn't particularly offensive, she was just useless. But she did fill out a risk assessment so her arse is covered. There is nobody I can go to and say that the world of sanity has completely disappeared.

Today I sat in Fr S's kitchen for hours and cried. He just got on with what he had to get on with and told his wife I was there because I needed somewhere safe. I do need somewhere safe but there is nowhere safe. I take my brain with me everywhere I go.

I have so much going on in my head at the moment and nobody to vent it at. Nobody to sit down with and tell how much it hurts. Nobody to care about it. I know this is temporary but it feels everlasting. I can't bear it.

God has gone. God always goes when things are bad. Where is he? Why does he hate me? Why does he want me to destroy myself? How can I make it better? What do I do?

I feel so desperate today.

A Conversation with C

2009-08-11T11:26:00.002+01:00

Today I'm not at work which I'm not proud of. Things seem to be squirming horribly in my brain and I had a conversation last night with C which has stirred things up somewhat and I'm really not in a good place at the moment.

We discussed the serial killer and her being a big wuss and crying on me. His take on it is that the reason I'm so uncomfortable with it is that it cuts through my bullshit and hits me where I'm vulnerable. He says seeing that has shown that my dissociation and anger and compartmentalisation and all the defences I have aren't real and I'm really very, very sad and she's given me a step into that. He also said that maybe it's time I started mourning stuff. I was very uncomfortable with that and started to literally squirm on the sofa.

Then the conversation got worse. Over the weekend my father phoned twice - 2am on Saturday morning and on Sunday afternoon, both conversations where he perved at me and left me feeling particularly rancid. I discussed it with Fr S a couple of times because I was really stressed out about it and happened to be at church not long after both calls. He made the clearly obvious point that I could hang up the phone. To be honest that sounds easy and feels next to impossible. This is partly because of the stupid reason that it's wrong to hang up on my dad because he won't love me anymore (like he ever did) and more importantly because I'm in such a state of flashbackiness during the conversation I don't even know what age I am, where I am or anything else, I only know what I'm experiencing happening as real. Dealing with the phone isn't possible in that state.

So I mentioned this to C and he get really stressed about it. I've talked some shite over with C and he often gives me advice but he never tells me to do anything, he just suggests it. Last night he was really quite tough. The term he used, which is a horrible term and I don't want to admit it to myself, was 'regrooming.' I don't know if that is the case but it scared me. C was very against me going and staying with the parents next month. He seemed concerned about what will happen. At the moment I don't feel I can not go up and if I do go up I have to stay with the parents. This may seem quite irrational but it's the position I'm in. I'm trying to balance the family and keep it in some sort of safe mode.

The other thing C was asking about was if I'd made some sort of deal with myself that it was better I got hurt than the baby. I've probably written this somewhere before but of course I have. How could I not? What option could I have but to? I don't want to get hurt but I can handle it, how could the baby? C seems to disagree I can handle it.

Is this all just some self destructive thing I've cooked up because I fucking hate myself. Probably. But then it isn't just me that's involved it's my dad too. Although I feel overwhelmingly guilty about the phone calls fundamentally I didn't make them. He did.

I'm really struggling at the moment. I feel really vulnerable. I cut while I was talking to C and I've cut pretty regularly overnight. I cannot handle whats in my head. I've not gone to work today because I would clearly fail at that but now I've failed because I've not gone in. I should talk about all this shite with the serial killer but now I don't trust her. I just want to hide under the bed and it all to go away. I don't have the energy for this battle.

Now I'm Really Bewildered

2009-08-06T18:32:00.002+01:00

Last nights session with the serial killer really left me completely bewildered, confused and discombobulated. It was a difficult session but what was so horrible was the fact that I made her cry. I didn't want to and I didn't mean to but I hate the fact that it happened.

We were talking in depth about some of the things that happened. It's the first time that I've talked about it in that level of depth before and it was horribly uncomfortable. I don't want to discuss what was said here particularly because I don't think that would be of any value and it would just be disturbing.

During the session I was walking a very fine line between my ability to speak without having a panic attack and trying to fend off flashbacks. It was one of these moments when I could feel what I was talking about, when I could taste it, when I could hear it, when it was happening right then. It was very distressing and confusing anyway.

I don't tend to look at the serial killer when I'm talking. There's a cushion which lies on the bed, which i refuse to lie on, and I tend to focus on the way the light reflects off the different coloured threads. It's important to focus on something real as opposed to what's going on in my head - something to hang on to to stop me falling into the pit of memory. Occasionally I glanced at her but she just seemed to be as normal.

There was one point when things got really overwhelming. I can remember shuffling about and trying to get rid of the hands that were on me, hurting me. I know I was just on the verge of completely losing it and I was desperately clinging to the reality that was now as opposed to the reality that was then. I was begging her to make it go away, to make it better, to make it stop. She kept saying 'you're here, you're safe, he can't hurt you.' But he can.

I calmed down and asked her if I was being stupid. Normally she just nods and doesn't say anything leaving me wondering if she really thinks that I am. This time she said very vehemently, 'No you're not stupid.' I looked up and I could see her brushing tears from her cheek and looking really upset.

That completely freaked me out. I started apologising over again asking her please not to be sad, not to be upset, that I was sorry that I'd made her cry, that she shouldn't let herself be upset by me, not to be angry with me. I was quite frightened by her reaction. I desperately didn't want her to be upset by me, I didn't want to hurt her. I felt overwhelming guilt that my words had caused that.

The session was coming to an end and all I could do was beg her not to be upset and she kept saying that she was just sad and that it we were discussing very difficult things. I eventually got up and left because I couldn't face her knowing that I had caused her to cry. Ever since then I've been really quite stressed out by this - feeling quite overwhelmed by it.

I'm trying to work out why I'm so upset. I think there are a number of reasons. First, I genuinely don't like to see anyone upset. I'm one of these people that feels very distressed by other peoples emotions and I have a hatred of seeing someone crying, especially when I feel responsible for it. I hate the fact that I upset her and I feel enormous guilt about it.

Secondly, my mother often uses tears as a method of emotional manipulation. This is particularly strongly used since she is no longer able to be so violent towards me. For me experiencing someone crying as a result of something I said is a precursor to a usually nasty and wounding attack, sometimes with violence sometimes not. Other people's tears are dangerous.

Thirdly, I'm very uncomfortable about the fact she got so distressed by what I was saying. I don't want her to react, I need her to be able to have that degree of objectivity that will allow her to help me. For her to give way to her emotions is a sign that her objectivity is not entirely there. That scares me. She's the one that has got to be safe while I'm losing it, otherwise there's nobody that's safe.

Fourthly, and I know this isn't nice, I'm angry with her. How dare she cry when I'm talking about this. How dare she get upset. If I had to live through it in reality, if I have to continue to live with this, the least she can do, her that is supposedly there to help me, is listen without it affecting her openly. For fucks sake it's harder for me in there than it is for her. She should be able to control herself and allow me not to have to fucking protect her from my pain. I can't be open and honest with her if she can't cope with it. How can she help me if she can't cope with some of the bad bits, and believe me, if I ever feel safe enough, there's going to be worse to come. She has to cope with it otherwise I'm screwed.

So now I feel even more ambivalent towards her and her ability to help. I feel really guilty for hurting her and I feel even more of a freak - that I can't talk to someone about the things that were normal for me as a child without her getting upset. Normal, yes fucking normal. I didn't cry then, how dare she cry now.

Thoughts on lostness

2009-08-04T20:37:00.002+01:00

I feel a bit lost tonight. I can't really explain except my brain feels like it's floating away from everything - probably just post serial killer depersonification or summat like that.

The last couple of sessions have been really odd with the serial killer. A couple of weeks ago there was the completely explosive one where I lost it and last week there was this horrible sort of anguished desperate crying about which she said, 'I'm glad you're beginning to feel you can show your pain', so I had to stab her.

Tonight was odd. I had a horrible nightmare last night (don't ask it involved my father and some nasty baby peeling behaviour) and this morning I was completely encased in a feeling of impending doom. Was a crying in the bath morning and a real lack of desire to go to work. Once I got there it was ok but because I was so tired I got a bit manic and did a fair amount of work.

By the time I got to the serial killer I was really jumpy and told her I felt great and I knew that that wasn't true but I was practicing bullshit CBT. She laughed and said, 'CBT isn't like that in certain circumstances done by an extremely skilled practitioner.' I think that's Serial killer for 'CBT is a load of auld shite.'

Eventually I settled down a bit and started talking about a programme I'd watched last night about two girls who were in and out of the criminal justice system. I was saying that they reminded me so much of so many people I'd known in care and I didn't understand how I was being all false and pretending I was together with the job and mortgage etc while they were being honest with themselves. She seemed to think that was a slightly odd take on things. I feel so guilty that my life is outwardly successful. She seemed to think that maybe they were just acting out the constant things that go round in my head. I dunno.

I'm not sure how we got on to the subject of the parents. Well, inevitably we always do. I was honest with her for once and said I know that things didn't happen because I was bad but it's the one relatively coherent structure I can place on things that doesn't require me to face the yawning endless gap of the pain of being completely unwanted.

We got onto the more humiliating, squirmy things of my fantasies about the perfect family that I inhabit a lot of the time and how every time reality smashes up against them it destroys me so completely. We discussed how my happy family fantasies are the fantasy of a child and how what I so desperately want now is what I so desperately needed then. How pathetic (in the original sense of the word) my fantasies are. We also discussed how much it frustrates me that she can never be what I want - the transference is distinctly maternal. It's true she can't be. And most of the time I don't want her to be because it's not her I want to be it's them. If that makes any sense.

Just as I had to go we started discussing the other fantasies - the more violent ones where I'm punished horribly for my sense of evil. Fr S thinks that's because I've ended up confusing love and violence. I don't know - the 50 minutes was up. Tomorrow's pleasure.

Then I went to mass. Tuesday mass is always a bit of a mess because all the serial killer shit is birling around in my brain. Today I got a bit fixated on a statue of the Virgin Mary. Maybe she could be the perfect fantasy mother. I don't know. Feeling all a bit lost and confused.

Crap BBC Response

2009-08-02T17:24:00.001+01:00

Dear Introspective

Thank you for your e-mail regarding 'Panorama' on 27 July.I understand you were unhappy with the portrayal of fibromyalgia on the programme and that it was identified as a "psychological" disorder.The matter was raised with the programme and 'Panorama' are apologising for this. They have posted clarification on their website here:http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_8174000/8174823.stm

I hope this information is helpful and thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Regards
BBC Bloke

I'm sure you'll agree that didn't have anything to do with my complaint. Don't quite know what to do now.

Confused

2009-07-30T16:55:00.003+01:00

Last night and today I have been confused. Partly this is the normal post serial killer confusion when lots of emotions are wandering around in my brain and refusing to settle in acceptable places to allow me to retain control of them. Last night was really quite an emotional session and I am quite shaken up as a result of it but it's not primarily that that's bothering me today.

Fr S is away. He's had a family wedding and funeral over the past couple of weeks and so he's not been about. In his place Fr J has been taking the services. Fr J is a retired priest who moved to the parish about five or six months ago. I don't know him very well at all having only spoken to him less than a dozen times in passing, only once at any length.

Last night there was a message on my phone, it was left on Tuesday but I only picked it up yesterday. It was from Fr J asking how I was and saying he hoped to catch up with me to discuss things in Scotland and how I was doing since I came back down.

I'm quite freaked out by this. I didn't know Fr J knew my phone number and I'm quite careful of who gets my details. Only Fr S, his wife and my Godmother at church have my number and all of them have been away. More importantly, I don't know what Fr J knows about what was going on when I was in Scotland and what he knows about the situation and about my past. I do know that I don't want him to know anything about it because it's shameful.

At the moment I have to presume that Fr S gave him a heads up before he went away so that Fr J could provide some sort of pastoral care to cover the period because Fr S knows how stressful it's been. But I don't want to presume that because I thought when I was telling Fr S stuff I was telling him it in confidence. I don't know what Fr J knows about me now and that stresses me out. I find it really hard to trust people and if Fr S told Fr J anything I'm going to feel really let down. I know he may have done it for the best of intentions but I'm still going to be upset about it if that's the case. As nobody else at the church knows anything about it, that has to be the presumption.

I want to talk to Fr S about it. He comes back on Saturday I think, but the man has just buried his mother so it's not fair of me to dive in and be all paranoid on him. Also at the moment I don't really want to go to mass because I feel quite hurt about this, even though a lot of it at the moment is surmise. I may be surmising wrongly but I can't think of any other way this situation has arisen. I avoided mass this morning by falling asleep on the sofa knowing full well that it would mean I'd miss mass and not have to see Fr J. Which is not a good excuse.

In a way it's quite sweet that Fr S has seen fit to ensure that I have support while he's away but in another it's quite freaky. I just don't know what to think or whether I'm being paranoid and stupid. I don't know whether to feel angry or upset or nothing. Instinctively I'm upset but I don't know if I'm reading too much into what Fr J said on the phone.

Am I being paranoid?

Ranting to the Beeb

2009-07-27T23:13:00.003+01:00

Tonight the BBC's Panorama programme was about PTSD. It was hideously biased, horrible and made me cry. The following is the complaint I have just sent to them. I await to see if they'll reply with interest:

The Panorama programme on tonight (27/07/09) was purportedly about PTSD and how it is misused for claims by solicitors and people attempting to make claims after incidents which had supposedly left them with PTSD.

In the programme it appeared to suggest that the only people who suffered from genuine PTSD were those who had been in war zones either as soldiers or as journalists. All the other featured cases were as a result of seemingly minor incidents which people were using to claim large amounts of money in compensation.

At no point was there any mention of the fact that large numbers of people who suffer from PTSD have no desire for compensation but spend their lives coping as best they can with a hugely debilitating disorder for which mental health treatment in the UK is deeply inadequate.
Nor was there any mention of other factors that can cause PTSD which wouldn't fall into the category of minor incidents. A significant proportion of those who are diagnosed with PTSD (not an easy or quick diagnosis to be provided with) have developed it as a result of rape, assaults or childhood sexual abuse. This did not fall into the two very divisive categories the programme covered.

The diagnosis of a mental health problem can be a stigmatising and difficult thing to happen which can have a major impact on one's life and work. It is difficult thing to live with and understanding of PTSD and it's impact on every day life can be incredibly difficult to explain. To suggest that people look it up on the internet and immediately put in a claim for compensation is ridiculous and offensive.

One of the case studies that was shown on the programme which took up a significant amount of time and allowed the interviewee from the insurance company to show some grainy hidden camera images wasn't even of someone suffering from PTSD but was a claim of fibromyalgia, a completely unrelated physical health problem.

This programme made no attempt to show an unbiased view point as relates to PTSD which would clearly be that some people who claim to suffer from it are not telling the truth, instead it insinuated repeatedly that this seemed to be common practice. The rise in PTSD was attributed to this and not to other factors such as better diagnosis and treatment.

The discussion as to why the DSM-IV criteria had changed was unclear and irrelevant as the DSM categories are not used in the UK.

The programme also seemingly suggested that PTSD is one single type of illness, where everyone is affected the same and where everyone can be treated the same. In fact the journalist doing the programme seemed to believe that most people would get over it in time as he had done. Every single person who has suffered from PTSD will experience it differently, will have a different level of severity, will require different treatment and will have a different prognosis.

All in all this was an extremely disappointing programme which undermined the many people who genuinely suffer from a terrible illness.

The Darkness Beckens

2009-07-27T16:19:00.002+01:00

Last night I discovered a problem. I went upstairs in the evening to put something in my bedroom, switched on the light switch and discovered to my horror that the bulb had gone. To anybody else this is something of an annoyance, to me it's the start of the terrors.

I am completely, utterly and overwhelmingly terrified of the dark. The thought of having to spend the night in a dark room makes me feel sick. As soon as I realised I could feel the panic beginning to rise and I had to force myself to breathe slowly to calm myself down.

I then had options. Option 1 - to sleep on the sofa. This is a bad option as it is against the rules. I'm only allowed to sleep on the sofa in daylight hours. This rule came about after I realised I hadn't even been to my bed in months and that this was not doing good things for my body, particularly my back. Option 2 - to sleep in the spare room. Now that is something I don't want to do for a number of reasons. Firstly my boiler is in there and it makes funny noises. Secondly there are piles of clothes on the spare bed that would require moving and sorting out into the bedroom of no light and thirdly, and most importantly, my parents sleep in that bed when they come to visit. I don't want to sleep in that bed. Option 3 - sleep in a dark bedroom of terror. There was no option 4 of buying a light bulb as it was that time on a Sunday night when no bloody shops are open.

I did it. I braved it. Admittedly I took a sleeping tablet and propped the door open with books and left all the other lights in the house on but I slept in a dark room. I'm so glad it's July and the sun was up early but I did it.

I am immensely proud of myself. I know how pathetic and stupid it sounds to say I slept in a room without a light on and I'm proud of myself but it's true. I lay in bed for a while really tense and tearful but eventually the sleeping tablet took over and knocked me out. I couldn't have done it without it.

It made me think about when my fear of the dark started. I don't remember it when I was really young but then I shared a room with my sisters so I wasn't on my own. I've always been scared of going to bed though because it's in bed where the never ending overwhelming thoughts start that screw with my head.

I remember the day I was taken into care. Going into the big house with the yellow door. Getting shown to my room. The one with the sink in it. I remember going to bed and someone coming in and switching the light off and me getting up and switching it back on. I think that was the first time I slept with the light on.

After that it became more important. I was moved about a lot. I hated waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to orientate myself. That moment of sheer panic, head racing, no idea where you are. The light had to be on so I could work that out quickly. A bugger for other people when I had to share a room with but compromises were always vaguely possible. Doors propped wide open, bedside lamps on but shaded off. I used to get picked on for it but it was safe.

N put up with it. She had to - it was a basic requirement of being with me. And over the years the reasons changed. The nightmares began. I don't like writing or talking about the nightmares, they overwhelm me. I especially don't like thinking about them or experiencing them. Having a nightmare leaves me completely disorientated and unable to work out what's going on and what's real when I wake up. The nightmares feel more real then reality and I the need to re orientate myself is tripled from normal. The light has to be on. I can't bare it otherwise.

I'm glad I didn't have a nightmare last night but I still feel brave. Not going to risk it for another night though - went out and bought a light bulb and a spare first thing this morning.

Mornings with the cmht

2009-07-24T17:20:00.002+01:00

I had an appointment with CF and JC this morning at nine. I asked for the appointment when I had my handover from the crisis team to the cmht a few weeks ago with the desire to set some rules in place to try and stop me getting in that state of mental again.

I arrived in the pissing rain at 9 to be told that JC had run out of petrol on the way to work and was going to be late. How incompetent do you have to be to run out of petrol? It's not hard - if gauge is low, put petrol in. Never mind.

CF took me to a room then started asking questions about Scotland. He knew I'd been because he'd wanted to make the appointment last week and I told him I was going up north. He asked if it was relaxing and I laughed. I told him I'd sent the letters and there was a fair degree of shite as a result of that. He asked what the best bit was and I said the drive. The scary thing is that that's true.

After about 10 minutes it was clear that JC wasn't going to turn up imminently so he asked what I meant by rules. I told him that it was irresponsible for me to keep going mental and I needed to have some form of sensible structure to avoid that. I told him that it frustrated me that I used their service and the crisis team when I was completely doolally and it would be a significantly better use of their resources and my emotional energy to find some way of heading this off before it happened. It took a while for him to get his head round it and work out what I was saying but then he seemed to take it on board and think it was a relatively good idea. At one point he told me that I'd really grown up over recent months. It was a good thing I was surprised by this and was in growed up mood because I would normally have eaten him from the toes up for patronising me like this.

Then JC turned up and there was a bit of taking the piss out of her for being completely incompetent. The poor soul looked like a drowning rat. CF then summarised for her what we'd discussed so far and the she brought up the dreaded STEPPS program. The psychiatrist had mentioned it and I'd spent some time reading about it then so at least I had an idea about what it was all about. The whole idea of it makes me want to hide under the bed. I hate being patronised, I hate doing things in groups, I hate people telling me what to think and what to do, I hate people thinking I'm stupid, I hate people presuming that because I have borderline personality disorder (which I dispute) so therefore I need to be treated like a pain in the arse fuckwit. I mentioned my reservations about this to them and JC said she'd speak to the other person leading it. Another pissy thing about it is that it'll be on a Wednesday from 1000 - 1200 and as I have the serial killer on a Tuesday and Wednesday evening, that's a whole load of mentalism for 24 hours. And I don't want to spent my Wednesday session with the serial killer bitching about the stupid stepps thing. (Stepps stands for Systems Training for Emotional Predictability and Problem-Solving which is enough to show it's a bunch of wank).

We agreed to meet up at the end of August so an appointment was made. I have to discuss this with the serial killer (I already have - she thinks it's a bunch of wank) and think more about the stressors that cause me to start deteriorating. We shall see.

Since I've come in I've been feeling increasingly depressed and low. I even texted a friend to ask him to come round sometime next week to beat me up because I need it. He's coming on Friday hopefully. Don't worry I don't mean kick the shit out of me, just someone to hurt me in a controlled manner. It's necessary sometimes. But it is something I do when I'm low as opposed to mental. I don't quite know why I've reacted like this. I just know the stepps thing freaks me out.

Little Miss Angry

2009-07-22T11:35:00.002+01:00

Last night with the serial killer was fun. I ended up tying myself in knots trying not to lose my temper because she completely wound me up. Even thinking about it now I'm getting increasingly angry and pissed off and I have to do it all again tonight. Wonderful.

It started off with her clearly wanting to know what happened in Scotland and me being a brat and not wanting to tell her until she asked. Which she eventually did. I've got limited power in a therapy session and it pisses me off when she gets all therapist and won't ask things and just lets this expectant silence reign and expects me to fill in the blanks. If she wants to know something she should ask. [/minirant]

I got quite upset about stuff because last week was quite upsetting and also I can't sit in that room for more than 4 minutes with turning into a soggy snotty mess. We discussed things for about twenty minutes and then got onto the subject of my baby which is clearly my favourite subject. I was very upset by this point and was trying to tell her I shouldn't get upset because it's my fault and if you kill a baby you can't turn round and stop blaming yourself. She banged on about my being very young and being alone. That is no excuse. I hate it when people try to evade responsibility for things. If you do something you should take responsibility for it and not try to weasel out of it. By this point I was getting a mite pissed off.

Then I said that I wish I'd waited til the baby was born before killing it because then at least I'd have been locked up and punished for it. She said I was punishing myself and that if I'd been punished by the courts it would have been a finite thing and it would be over. I started arguing about the point of a life sentence being that although you were released you could be recalled at any time. Stupid argument, stupid me, stupid, stupid.

I don't know how we got onto this but it came into a conversation about therapy. I hate these conversations with a vengeance. What's the point of going to therapy to talk about therapy? And yes I do know there is a point because how I relate to therapy is relevant to how I relate to life but I fucking detest these endless navel gazing exercises. They just wind me the fuck up.

Now I pretend that I don't do anger. I say it all the time but the truth is I'm full of the fucking thing. Angry little bitch. Then I said something about failing therapy and she responded that maybe I was meaning that she was failing me. No, I wasn't meaning that. It really frustrated me because I'm perfectly capable of saying that if I mean that but I didn't. So I got even more angry about her putting words in my mouth. I wanted to tell her it wasn't all about her and she shouldn't be fishing for damn compliments.

Then I asked her if she hated me and she said, 'you often ask that.' To which I had to repeat the question to which she answered, 'why do you think I hate you?' To which I got even more angry and repeated the question. Why can't the stupid bitch answer a straight question? Eventually she sort of said 'no' but I knew it was a lie and I knew she hated me.

I got more and more wound up. By this time I had my fists clenched really tight and I could see her eyes flicking from my face to my fists and I wondered if she was worried that I'd hit her. There is no way in a million years that I'd hit her so instead I punched the wall. I got up and packed about for a bit stopping only to stand next to the wall and smack my head against it a few times as hard as I could. She asked me to sit down and I did.

I was so wound up by this point. But I wasn't angry at her I was angry at me and about how shite I am and how worthless I am. I asked her if I was going to hurt her because I know genetically that that's what I'll do and she said, 'you worry about that don't you?' Off course I worry about that. If you were in my situation you'd worry about that you stupid cow. By this point I was very close to exploding. I was trying to calm down but I had to hurt myself to stop myself getting angry. I was slapping my head and punching my head and pulling my hair and trying to calm down. She said something stupid like 'you're finding this difficult.' No fucking shit Sherlock. Have you thought about becoming a therapist?

So now I've turned into an angry freak who's trying to hurt herself as hard as she can with no tools present. No knife. I couldn't cut. I needed to cut. She keeps banging on about therapy and stuff and I'm getting more and more frustrated to the point that I'm shouting 'fuck' over and over again. Part of me was completely humiliated by being in this position and the other half was wound up so tight that I had no control over me.

Then the session ended and I left. I walked out and went to the car. I had to sit in the car for ten minutes and try to calm down because I knew I'd drive like a fuckwit if I started it straight away. I was still very wound up though.

I went to mass. Fr S is away so Fr J was taking it. He decided to preach about how important it is that the church is like a family. I don't want the church to be like a family. Families fucking suck. I want the church to be the exact opposite of a family. I was getting more and more wound up and desperately forcing myself not to walk out. Every bit of me wanted to walk out.

Eventually it was done and I walked to the car and sat there for a bit before driving home. I put the CD on and the first song was this:

Which suited my mood fine but didn't help with the whole avoiding self harm. I could see the word ANGRY on my calf. Cut neatly, hurting, bleeding. I could feel it. I wanted it. I needed it.

I've spent all night trying to avoid it and I've managed so far but I'm going to go and do it now. I don't have a choice.

Last week = #epicfail

2009-07-20T17:21:00.002+01:00

I've been finding myself going over the events of last week in my mind trying to work out if anything worthwhile actually happened or if I put myself through what was an immensely stressful week for fuck all. My aim for the week was probably unachievable - to ensure that the baby is safe. I no longer think it's possible to ensure that the baby is safe. I don't think anyone else seems interested in this.

I tried to speak to my sister. I really tried. She just didn't want to know. She changed the subject incessantly and at one point walked away so she didn't have to hear what I was saying. I can understand that she doesn't want to hear it. I don't want to say it. But she's got a responsibility to hear it. She's got a baby inside her. She's got to hear it. But she didn't. The one thing she didn't do, which I am pleased about is that she didn't deny it. She didn't want to engage with what I was saying but she didn't stand there and say that I was talking bollocks.

Sometimes (ok a lot of the time) I wish I was her. I don't know if its entirely fair or rational but I feel that she doesn't have the past biting at the contents of her head in such an overwhelming way that I do. I may be wrong but her life isn't a complete mess the way that mine is. It's perfect - how can you have a perfect life and deal with the contents of your head too? And if she doesn't have all this shite swamping her I'm jealous. I wish I could be in that position.

I don't think my feelings towards my sisters are in any way sane. Of course there's the usual sibling rivalry going on but there's also the pain of our separation whilst in care which does tinge things. I don't want it to but the hidden rejection I feel about those years explains a lot of my perceptions of them, as does the fact that their experiences of care were much more settled than mine was. There's also the remnants of some of our experiences as young children which divided us in horrible ways. But I need to grow up and put that past me. For fucks sake I'm 33 now and I shouldn't be stressing about something that happened 20 years ago.

I just wish that we could be honest with another. That we could stand up there together and be united but that's seemingly impossible. It appears that I'm the only one who can touch the child part of me and face the hurt. Or maybe I'm just the pathetic one who can't hold it together.

I also saw my parents. I got stressed out about it big time. I ended up agreeing to drive down to their new house and meet them there. Just before I headed off I got a text of my father saying they wanted to meet in a cafe just outside Glasgow instead. I was all for that because it's a public place and safer.

When we met up my dad sat down next to me which freaked me out. My mother disappeared to the loo and he spent the time she was there stroking my leg whilst I sat bolt upright and tried not to throw up all over the table. When my mother came back the pair of them got in my face and told me what a worthless piece of shite I was and how much they hated me. How nothing had happened that I didn't deserve and that I should be grateful to them for still being in contact with them. I just sat there and took it. When my dad disappeared to the loo my mother told me in a greatly hissing fashion that I would kill him and if I did that she would make sure that she destroyed me.

After about 25 minutes my dad said, 'I don't wish to spend any more time talking to an unrepentant sinner' and they left. On the way out my mother said, 'and don't think stirring up all this trouble means you're not staying with us in September.' I sat there for a while vaguely trying not to panic while a tornado went round in my head. Now I just feel hurt. The usual. Why did I bother? And I've now definitely got to stay with them for a week in September and I so don't want to. In fact the idea terrifies me.

I know I should be able to say no to them but it feels like my no button has been turned off. I'm probably coming over as completely pathetic but it feels as if I have no choices when it comes to them, saying no to them is utterly impossible. How can I, they own me? At the last session with the Serial Killer she said that we have to discuss this which I agree we do but I can't explain how much there is just no choice for me.

The impact of the baby stuff shocked me. Being dragged round bloody Mammas and Pappas made me want to cry. There was a moses basket at the corner of the room I was sleeping in and at night it seemed to loom over me growing bigger and casting huge shadows over me in bed. I need to find some way of mourning my baby - of letting it out so that my guilt and pain doesn't overwhelm my relationship with my nephew or niece but part of me doesn't want to. Part of me needs that guilt and that pain to function. The guilt and the pain is better than the reality. It's still inside me; my baby isn't.

While I was up there I also saw R my foster mum. I wanted to see N too but for whatever reason she refused to see me. R has deteriorated greatly. Her speech is almost impossible to understand, she has even less movement then before - functional movement of one finger now, and her cognitive skills are deeply impaired. She got very frustrated with her inability to think and speak and ended up screaming at me telling me that I shouldn't come to bother her and I didn't love her because I won't get involved in a difficult thing that I've told her endlessly I won't get involved in. (A scam relating to her care which I can't do because I'd lose my job and it's wrong). I was gutted. I know it's not really R who's talking - it's the MS and her frustration with it but it still hurts. I can't cope with losing her and the reality is that she's already gone and when I see her it just emphasises that. The R that was R is no longer there and what's left is very sad. I can't mourn her because she's not dead. There's no wonder that N is a complete mess.

So that was my week in Scotland. It sounds very negative and the reality was that it was shite. The two good things were making sushi and going out for a meal on Friday. The rest of the time was pretty sucky. I'm completely emotionally exhausted now and I have to deal with the fact that for all I did up there I completely failed in my objective. The baby is no more safe now then it was before I stirred everything up.

I no longer know what to do. I don't know what God wants. I don't know what's right.

Reposting this

2009-07-16T10:30:00.002+01:00

I'm reposting this that I wrote several years ago because at the moment the thoughts behind it are playing on my mind.

There is beauty in evil which tears at my soul
As I raise my eyes upwards
And look into His
The power of His need to force me to please
The power of His force as He destroys
My pitiful remnants of innocence.

There is beauty in dichotomy, the shapes of my face
My hideous grimace disguised in a grin
My wish to show pleasure
To gift Him His joy
Disguises confusion and anger and guilt
The trinity of despair
Which was His gift to me.

There is beauty in guilt and in the huge shame
That blankets my heart and reduces my soul
My culpability enforced
Through His consuming anger
My horror of His pain
‘Beat me, please beat me, take this away’
My sacrifice useless
My meaningless crucifixion.

There is beauty in anger that grasps at hell
My body distorted by the
Sheer immensity of hatred flowing
His hatred of me,
my hatred of me
(my hatred of Him itself distorted by love)
No outlet for my scream
It echoes endlessly through my mind.

There is beauty in fear both then and now
My dread of His hands, His power, His need
The physical horror and incapacitation
Of a child unknowing;
The mental terror of retrospection
Of feeling His hands
No longer invading my body
Concentrating instead on my mind.

There is beauty in pain which I still feel today
The physical, fading, the mental tearing
My tiny body’s shock as He
Rips me in two
The force of His orgasm rending
And rendering me unable to create
His pain stealing my future
And my futures future.

There is beauty in mourning, in the tears that reflect
The overwhelming nature of what occurred
I mourn that Man, I mourn a Father
My loss shared with my sadness at
His loss. The corruption of my love
The distortion of my emotions
I am not the only one who should mourn
But I am the only one who understands this.

I am; I inhabit
The beauty of rape.

Inadequate on so many levels

2009-07-15T09:30:00.002+01:00

Well here I am in Scotland in my sister's spare room typing on her laptop, which may explain why my typing is bad - not used to laptops. The last few days have been a bit of a roller coaster of emotions and thoughts. Which I suppose was inevitable in the circumstances.

On Sunday I went to mass before I drove up north. On my way in I saw Fr S who said straight away, 'don't stop off to see your parents.' I had a panic attack (in my defence I was up high doh and had been throwing up all night with stress) so he stood for a couple of minutes with his hands on my head praying for me. This makes it sound like a mental charismatic church but it's soooo not. I calmed down a wee bit. After mass I was just getting up from kneeling when he sat down beside me. He anointed me with oil and prayed that amongst other things I'd have wisdom, strength and know the right things to say. It was very moving and exactly what I needed.

I drove up north. As I got further and further up the M6 I got more and more panicky about seeing my parents and what I'm going to say to them. Eventually I chickened out, stopped and texted them to say I wasn't going to make it which makes me the biggest wuss under the sun. My mother phoned back and I've now had to agree to meet up with them when they're on their way home on Friday. So instead of preventing the inevitable I've just postponed it. Fr S said that I've got to stop accepting their summons as being law but I so much just want them to love me. I haven't heard from them since.

Now I'm in Glasgow and I'm struggling. I tried to talk to my sister on Monday night when we went for a walk round the botanics. She clearly didn't want to discuss it and tried to change the subject over and over. I don't know whether I got what I needed to say said or whether it just went into a big ignored bit of nastiness. I can only hope that it did and that she took notice of my fears.

I feel so inadequate around my sister. She's perfect. Her house is perfect. Her husband is perfect. Everything she does is perfect. I just want to rock back and forth and admit defeat. When I'm at home I know things aren't great but I can delude myself that things are at least adequate. I work, I go to mass etc etc. But when I'm here I can see how useless I really am and how little I have going for me. How pointless my existence is and above all, how she's got a baby and I killed mine. She got me to feel her bump when it had hiccoughs last night and I could feel my insides completely collapse with hurt. It's not jealousy I don't think, it's just sadness of a huge untouchable kind. I want my baby, I can't have it and it's my own fault.

But I still have to keep going. I can't let myself be taken over by how hurt I'm feeling. I can't. I have to socialise with them and I can't run away. The rules don't work here so I'm in a complete mess of not being able to live the way that's safe. I have to live by her rules and they're not safe. Pathetic amn't I.

Today I'm 33 and I look back on last year and it's been shite and I don't believe this year will get any better. And I can't sit and humph about it, tomorrow I have to go to Edinburgh to see my foster mum and on Friday I have to see the parents then go out for dinner and to the pictures with my sisters and brother in law. I've got an overdose of genetics linked to me.

I need to be at home where it's safe.

More Phone Calls

2009-07-09T10:35:00.005+01:00

On Monday night my father phoned. My mother was clearly out. He started a lengthy, disturbing and distressing in depth discussion about some of the things he did to me. He was masturbating at the time. I feel sick. He was really enjoying what he was saying to me. I sat there and listened and didn't put the phone down because I'm pathetic. Evil, evil, evil, evil. I feel completely disgusting and fetid and overwhelmingly filthy. His voice and the things he said are going over and over in my mind. I keep throwing up thinking about it. I should get a grip, stop being such a stupid fuckwit. But it was horrible.

I'm left with lots of questions. I don't want to think about them. I don't want to know the answers. I feel disturbed by what happened. It was horrible, like sharing the worst of flashbacks with someone else. At the same time it was horribly compelling. It was an admission that my memories are correct and it was a different subjective view of what happened that I have to process to go along with my subjective view. But it felt horribly abusive.

Last night my mother phoned. It wasn't quite such a disturbing phone call, just more of the same endless hate filled bile. I'm going to kill my father apparently. His father died young and if I don't stop with my evil I'm going to kill my dad. At the moment that feels like a disturbingly good idea but only if she goes too. She is disgusted with my evil. She hates me because she thinks I destroyed the good things in her life. She thinks I'm worthless. The usual.

I want to crawl under a rock and not exist any more. My desire to see them on Sunday is evaporating. Which makes me evil.

The explosion

2009-07-06T16:30:00.002+01:00

Waiting was fucking awful. I emailed the letters and waited and waited and waited. I kept checking my email - no new emails or some stupid new piece of spam. Not something I needed or desperately didn't want to hear. Waiting, waiting, waiting. I picked up the phone and checked if the dial tone showed there were messages. Then I had to check if one had been left whilst I was checking, then check again and again. Over and over. I didn't get any work done while I was waiting. I couldn't concentrate on anything. Waiting is hard.

On Sunday my sister phoned. I was at work so the conversation was stilted on my side as this type of thing is not something I wanted overheard in the office. Circumstances meant that she had other things on her mind (brother in law broke his arm in Spain and has to have surgery this week) which in some ways was good for me but not really for her and definitely not for him.

Anyway, her first response was something along the lines of, 'You're just jealous.' That really did upset me mainly because I am completely, overwhelmingly and horribly jealous. And she doesn't even know or understand the real reason for my jealousy. But I'm not just jealous. I do have genuine fears. Why does fears seem so small a word? Genuine complete and utter terrors. I didn't send her the letter because I was jealous. The fact that I'm jealous is irrelevant to the letter. At least I hope it is. But then I'm never entirely sure about my motives in relation to anything. And this isn't anything, this is everything. But now I'm questioning my motives big time.

The conversation did move on from that but in sort of desultory way. The upshot was that we'll discuss it when I go up there next week. Well, we can't really avoid discussing it when I'm staying with her and her husband. So now I need to think in my head the best way to do this. I just find these things so very difficult to talk about. If I talk about specifics I get very distressed and flashbacky, if I talk about generalities I get all tongue tied. I'm ok at writing things down but when it comes to saying things out loud it becomes overwhelming. I have to find a way to do this, whether it's getting pissed or writing things down in advance. I want to do the right thing and I need to do it well but it's just so fucking hard. How can I disconnect the words from the feelings and experiences? How can I disconnect myself from me?

When I think about it now I'm still drawn to the 'you're just jealous'. There's something horrible about that. I'm not blaming her for it, I can understand all the self protecting instincts that kick in. It's the fact that it hits so firmly in the bit of my stomach that goes cold and curls up and retches at the thought. It's the amount of closeness to the truth that hurts. Not the truth of my jealousy but the truth that every single second of every single day I want my baby. And that's a dangerous truth to come close to, that's a truth that hurts so overpoweringly that it can't be touched. It can't be faced.

Then I went to Evening Prayer and Benediction. I came back and I was happily watching Top Gear and the phone rang. Yes it was my parents. Both of them, one on each extension, two against one which isn't fair odds. I don't really want to think about the conversation but it touched pretty much every single raw nerve I own plus a few extras thrown in for good measure.

I don't know what it's like to bring up three hateful children. Actually, I don't but that doesn't justify what you did to us. The scary thing I just realised is that up until this moment I haven't questioned the fact she believes that. I just presumed that, yes, she did bring up three hateful children. I do believe it. I am evil, therefore I must be hateful, therefore everything must be my fault.

They're very tempted to discuss defamation with a solicitor. This I actually found funny. Their solicitor is a leading light in the church. The thought that they would ever dream of letting him see the letter is ridiculous. Unless they believe that he would think I was lying. And that's a massive risk for them to take for no matter how deluded they are they know I'm not lying, they know it all happened and they don't know what evidence I can provide.

I'm evil and disgusting and they despair at me being related to them. So what's new. I've heard this so many times before. I know this is true. I feel it. I am it. I've had it beaten into me more times then I can remember. It fucking hurts.

I'm not honouring my father and mother. I know I'm not. You have no idea how sad and fearful I am about it. I know I'm going to hell. It's one more example of my evil. I wish it wasn't so. I want to honour them. I want to love them. I do love them. I want them to love me. I wish I could honour them but it's difficult with this enormous fear I have of what is going to happen with the baby. I want to honour them but I can't and it's not me that's made it currently impossible to do so it's them. I believe it's me but I have to know it's them at the moment because this isn't about me it's about the baby.

There was a lot of other things said. Things that hurt, things about how they've always hated me and how I'm a worthless person and how I'm trying to blame them for my own evil. They seemed to be on the phone for hours and all I could do was say sorry over and over and over and over again. I didn't want to apologise but my terror of them made me want to appease them. The same old pathetic behaviour endlessly repeating. I hate myself.

The upshot of it is that they want to meet me next week. They're on holiday in the Lake District and they want me to stop by on my way up to Scotland. I don't know what to do. I don't know what it worse - going or not going. I don't know if it's safe to go. I don't know if it's safe not to go. I don't know anyone in the Lake District so going and taking a third party is impossible. I don't know what to do.

After throwing up (yeah typical stupid reaction) I phoned Fr S and he didn't know what to do either. He was remarkably sympathetic to me crying down the phone 'What did I do wrong?', 'Am I bad?' and 'Why don't they love me?' because at the precise point it wasn't about the baby it was just about how much I was hurting. I'm going to try and chat to him sometime in the week before I have to go. I can't make this decision.

So there you go. It's in the open. The explosion has happened and the next couple of weeks will be the fall out. I feel incredibly hurting and vulnerable. I want to curl up and cry and not be part of this. Part of me thinks I've done nothing because no matter what I do the baby will always be at risk. Part of me thinks maybe I've reduced it. I don't know. It just hurts so badly.

bubbles and scary letters

2009-07-02T15:30:00.003+01:00

I went back to work on Tuesday after having calmed down significantly from the mentalism of the previous week. Got through the first day back and then headed up to the serial killer of doom.

I'm not sure how we got on the subject but we ended up discussing self harm I did when I was a kid. I'm not sure what age I was but I know it happened in a house I lived in until I was nine so I was quite wee. I don't want to discuss the ins and outs of it because I feel quite disturbed by it. I've literally not thought about it for about twenty years so it's impact has been a shock.

It's not just the physical memories that I've found overwhelming. It's not even the memories of how I felt. It was looking back from now and seeing me then. There's something heartbreaking about the idea of a child, any child, harming herself in such a visceral and sexual fashion. It's tragic. Tragic is a big word that I hesitate to use but there is something tragic about it. It confuses my set position that things happened because I was evil - I feel compassion for that child. That is odd. It also scares me how cold and calculating I had to be to allow myself the freedom to do this. I realised also that this was the only time I ever cried when I was a kid. I know that sounds ridiculous now when I cry when I do a typo let alone anything else but when I was little I absolutely refused to cry at all. I suppose it was one of the few areas of control I had.

When I left I was in my bubble. I don't know how to describe the bubble, it's probably some sort of depersonalisation or dissociation type thing. It feels as if I'm completely wrapped in a bubble. I'm aware of the external world and what's going on but in a way that doesn't touch me, doesn't affect me . We just exist in mutual avoidance of one another.

I went to mass. All the way through mass I was in my bubble. I was sitting, kneeling and standing at the appropriate moments and sort of mumbling some sort of responses but I wasn't there. I was somewhere else in my bubble and mass wasn't real. Afterwards a couple of people spoke to me and it felt like they were talking to me underwater and it took me ages to work out what they wanted and how to respond. No wonder people think I'm nuts. I've noticed that I'm often like that on a Tuesday mass, which always follows straight on from the serial killer.

I don't know how long I stayed in my bubble but it seemed like ages. Certainly most of the night. Mass had been cancelled the next morning so I had the whole day to myself to think about things. By the time I got to the serial killers my head was very much back there and we talked about it for a while. She tells me that when I talk about the past my voice rises and gets quicker and more Scottish. (We argued when she didn't understand the terms I was using because I didn't realise they were Scots and thought she was taking the piss.) Also I tend to use childish words. I hadn't realised that. I know that yesterday I was experiencing a lot of what I was talking about. I remember at one point screaming at her to stop it and make it all go away. It doesn't work like that. I also remember at one point I grabbed my hair as I was talking about how my mother used to and instantly I was back there. I hadn't realised how much of a trigger that was. But then I don't tend to grab my hair.

She told me that she's changing days next week so it's Wed and Thurs next week. For some reason this is making me irrationally stressed for no apparent reason. Then I'm off for a week and go up to Scotland so even more changes and oddnesses.

I was ok after the session yesterday, just a bit bubbly but certainly better than Tuesday. But then Wednesdays are easier because I've not been at work and I don't go back to mass afterwards. I felt almost like I was buzzing.

I couldn't sleep last night and then about four in the morning I decided to email the letters to my parents and sister. So I did. I emailed it to both parents so neither of them could say that they hadn't got them. They were slightly altered - Fr S offered some really useful advice - but in essence they went as they were here.

Now I'm terrified. I've spent all day checking my inbox about every 5 minutes. I had to go to a meeting for about an hour that was really important but all I could think about were the letters. I've still not received anything from any of them yet. I've just realised my sister's in Spain for a wedding so won't get hers. Shit shit shit bad timing. Now I'm running scared. I phoned Fr S about 10 mins ago to tell him I'd sent them but he wasn't in so I left a message. I'm scared. But I think it had to be done. Did it?

The Rules

2009-06-27T14:38:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I was having a discussion with fromthesamesky on Twitter about the rules and what they consist of, how they're made and why they exist. It's a complicated subject to discuss in 140 characters or less so I said I would blog on them so here it is.

The rules are rules I have to follow every day to ensure that bad things don't happen. There are a number of them relating to different situations. Here's a few of them:

The Book Rules:

If I start a book I have to finish it no matter how awful it is.
If I start a shelf of books I have to read all of them without either missing any or reading anything else. This was recently a problem when I discovered one of the books on the shelf was in French, which I don't read. I had to buy a dictionary and try to work it out. It's a good thing it was short.
I have one bookshelf of books I inherited (mainly 1930s travel books). These have to be read downstairs as do any new books I purchase or are given. My other bookshelves contain books I've already read and they have to be read upstairs and then the decision made as to whether I should keep them of give them away.
I don't read books by my mother ever, no matter what shelf they are on. I just glower at them for taking up shelf space.

The Car Rules:

If I'm driving to mass or work I have to listen to a certain CD from a certain point. The CD can change but it generally stays the same for several months at a time until the rules clearly show me that listening to that CD is wrong.
I have to drive one particular route to mass and work (which are both in the next town). This route is longer and slower but I have to do it.
When driving to mass or work I have to count the number of cars that are waiting at a particular junction. If the number is 8 I know it's a good day (8 being the best number). A dangerous number will make it a bad day. (Dangerous meaning an odd figure in double digits.)
When driving to the serial killers I have to listen to Radio 2, when driving home it has to be Radio 4.
If I'm driving to somewhere locally there are certain points where I have to have a smoke. If I'm driving long distance I have to smoke every 45 minutes.

The Work Rules:

The work rules aren't as strict as they used to be. When I worked abroad and commuted through the Tunnel every day they were incredibly strict. I used to have to see rabbits in the UK Eurotunnel site and see the lighthouse at the other side or it would be a bad shift. This was to the extent that I've had to come home sick because it's foggy and I can't see the lighthouse. (Not the reason given to the bosses). On the way back I had to count the number of freight vehicles parked up on the side of the road to prevent me being stuck in the Tunnel.
Now I have to do files by threes. If I've done two files and my shift is finished I'll stay on to finish a third.
If I start a pen I have to finish it, therefore I get deeply, deeply stressed if someone else borrows my pen just in case they don't give it back.
I have to go for a smoke every two hours maximum, usually every hour.

The Time Rules:

I have to have a smoke every hour on the hour. I've been doing this so long that my body knows when it's time instinctively without looking at a watch. At night I can also have one on the half hour but only three times a night.
My alarm clock which I set even when I'm not sleeping has to be set for 7 or 37 minutes past the hour.
If I'm not at work I have a smoke on the hour, then play on my DS for half an hour then try and read for half an hour. My day does tend to be broken up into half hour segments. I check my email, twitter and various other sites after my hourly fag.
If I'm going to start a new thing it has to be on the hour or on the half hour to fit in with this.
Dinner has to be begun at 7pm.

The Counting Rules:

8 is a safe number and has to be used all the time. I count my steps in groups of 8. I count pages in books in 8s. If I'm at mass and stressed I count the words being said in the readings and sermon in groups of 8 (which is actually incredibly difficult).
8s are important.

The Religious Rules:

I have to read the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer and pray the Rosary every morning first thing.
I have to read Evening Prayer at 1800 with the mass readings for that day if I haven't attended mass.
I have to read Night Prayer at 2300.
I have to attend every mass that I'm can.
If I don't follow the religious rules I'm evil and I'm going to go to hell.

I can't really think of any other rules of the top of my head but written down it seems like I have far more rules then I realised and it's actually quite scary.

The rules seem to have developed over time. A lot of them I'm not aware of how they developed, it seemed that habits have become set in stone over time and become rules. Some of them make sense. For example when I'm very stressed I tend to smoke a lot so having a rule about only smoking on the hour reduces that.

Some of them may have developed because I happened to do something once and it worked and therefore has to be repeated. I think the rules about counting HGVs at work was like that. (1500 time for a fag). Others make some sense when I think that up until relatively recently I was working a very strange shift pattern so eating at certain times was a useful way of keeping myself to some degree healthy.

Some of the rules have been around since I was a child. I think the 8s one is like that. I can remember counting steps when walking when I was very little. It's so back in the mist of time that I don't have a clue how they developed.

Some of the rules have clear results. If I don't read evening prayer, I'll go to hell. If I don't count HGVs, I'll get stuck in the Tunnel. Others are covered by the even more terrifying 'bad things will happen'. Bad things are amorphous demons of awfulness. Not literal demons just swirls of sheer terror that will take over my life and make it all bad. The idea of bad things sort of reminds me of the dementors in Harry Potter. I can't explain how terrified I am of bad things happening.

I've discussed the rules with the serial killer, particularly as they've been getting worse in recent months. She thinks they're child like responses to the fear that I experienced. I had no control over what was happening then so I put some sort of pseudo control procedures in place instead. Now that therapy is bringing up old issues and I feel out of control again, the rules have grown again in an attempt to control what's going on in my head. I've an inkling she could well be right.

Most of the time they don't make a huge difference to my life. I have always liked routine and these are just routines that have become fixed. Sometimes they're a pain in the arse, but I think it's more the consequences of my fears that are bad then the actual rules themselves.

So there you go - there are the rules. Clearly I'm a loon.

Anatomy of a mentalist

2009-06-26T11:20:00.002+01:00

Today I feel bad and I'm going to try and explain how I feel in an attempt to work it out myself. In a fit of stupidness I took a sleeping tablet last night so I slept for a few hours and now I'm awake and I wish I hadn't slept and I wish that I didn't exist.

I'm very jumpy. My hands won't keep still. As I type this they're shaking between every letter and getting faster and faster and faster in a somewhat manic fashion. While I think between sentences they can't just stay near the keyboard they've got to jump all over the place and not stay still. If they stay still they're bad. Too much nervous energy. They want to jump up and slap me across the head.

Inside me there's this immense pain. Not physical pain, just the enormity of hurting that's threatening to come up and engulf me. It's going to take me over. I want to curl up in a ball and be taken over by the hurt. I want to scream and cry with how much I hurt. I want to explode and hide and not be the way this is.

My brain feels like it's jumping all over the place. Concentration is minimal. Ability to think in straight lines is abhorrent. Random thoughts jump in and disrupt everything. Twitter thoughts - short statements of overwhelmingness - has my head been overtaken by Twitter? Hurt yourself, destroy yourself, you know where the tablets are, you need to no longer be, stop the hurting, the tablets, the pain, huuuuuuuurt.

I lay in bed because I couldn't face not lying in bed then I jumped out of bed because I couldn't face continuing to lie in bed. I'm not safe in my surroundings. My house is not safe, it wants to reject me. It wants nothing to do with me. I am not safe. Nothing is safe. Take it away, swallow it, leave it, destroy it, destroy me, destroy, destroy, destroy.

There's probably words for describing this. I don't care what they are. I just care that it hurts too badly. Too much hurt. I don't want this. Tablets, no bad thoughts, stop the bad thoughts, tablets, no no no.

I know this is irrational. It just is. It's how I am, how I feel, how I exist. Stop it now.

Pure mental

2009-06-22T16:07:00.004+01:00

The last few days have been very odd and very, very scary in some ways. I've still not pieced it all together but I'm going to make an attempt. Also a lot of it I don't remember properly.

After seeing the cow on Friday the crisis people phoned up. They told me that the night shift would be round at some point after 2230. However at about 7 they phoned up and said they were on their way round. It was a bloke I'd met before a couple of times and liked due to our mutual enjoyment of sitting discussing philosophical shit for long periods of time, and another woman.

When they turned up we sat and chatted for a bit about the overdose the previous night and about various things. We discussed our mutual dislike of risk assessments and their utter pointlessness. Nice bloke and I went out for a fag and I said that the cow didn't like me and found me difficult to deal with. He said that it was probably because I wasn't subservient enough and I should take a cap in specially to doff it at her. He doesn't like people like that either. He understood that I really believe the serial killer is dead and it's not just me being odd, although I don't believe it a tiny bit as well. I can't really explain it. It was a relatively good visit because they didn't tell me to have a nice cup of tea or any of that bollocks.

That night was really difficult. I was very agitated and spent a lot of it wandering round the house unable to remain still for more than a couple of minutes. There are bits of it I'm not sure about and I have lots of cuts on my legs that I don't remember doing including a particularly fine 'worthless' down my left calf.

On Saturday I went to mass and then on to work. Before mass I had a wee chat with Fr S when I showed him my arm which had 'evil' on it and he didn't say anything just sat with his hand over where the cut was and prayed which was weirdly ok for someone who doesn't like physical contact. Then I went to work.

Work was a bit of a mess because I came in and there was no one to cover the bit I find endlessly stressful to cover. I found the duty boss and he asked me to cover it and I asked him to do a back to work interview. Then I burst out crying like a twat at which point a mate was summoned to take me outside for a smoke. He did the back to work thing and seemed completely out of his depth and panicked a bit but agreed that I could go at any time if the crisis team phoned and that I could have today off as a medical day. I left work early because it was clearly obvious to the boss who told me to leave that I wasn't coping. At one point I was hiding under the desk but I've no idea why.

The crisis team came round in the evening. It was the same woman as last time and another lass who I remember from the last time I was mental. That night we ended up talking about borderline stuff and how I was upset about it and didn't feel it fitted me but if it did it left me endlessly evil. She said that the majority of the people they deal with were borderline. I said that that fact didn't reassure me and she asked if I was being sarcastic. That worried me slightly but I'd already cottoned on to the fact she's a bit thick.

We discussed sleeping and I told her I wasn't allowed to sleep because I was evil and didn't deserve it. She then offered to take my sleeping tablets away to which I responded with a distinct no. She then asked, 'have you ever thought about tidying your house?' which lets you know what a bourach my house is in. I said no and told her not to be rude (but I was quite nice about it). I mentioned I blogged about what was going on in my head but neither of them knew what a blog was. I did tell them I kept it anonymous. Which I do I think.

I don't know what happened that night. I remember getting more and more agitated around 11ish and a bit later. The thought of going to Scotland became more and more compulsive. After that I don't remember anything until about 3am when I found myself sitting by a duck pond near Cambridge holding a silver coffee pot which I hate, wearing my jammies and crying. Which was odd. Somewhat more than odd. I turned round and my car was parked there so I went in it and sat for a while trying to work out what was going on. I think I must have decided to drive to Scotland. I've no idea why the coffee pot was there. I switched on the car ignition and discovered I only had half a tank of petrol which isn't enough to get me to Scotland from Cambridge. I didn't have my bag with me or any money, just the coffee pot, fags and my inhaler. I did the reasonable thing and drove home. I really don't know what was going on there but a) it cracks me up completely and I find it really funny for some unknown reason - something to do with it being so completely fucking mad and b) it's not normal behaviour and is indeed quite mad.

Once I got back home I had a bath and went to mass. For various reasons (not involving me) mass was a wee bit disconcerting. I came home and I'm not sure what happened that morning. Usually I sleep after mass but I didn't. I know I watched the grand prix but I couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the race.

The same woman as the last two days and an Irish bloke came round from the crisis team in the afternoon. For some reason the stress about the baby came up. I think it was something to do with the reasons behind my ending up in Cambridge. I got quite upset about it but again nothing was resolved. Nothing ever will be. It's unresolvable.

The night was long, agitated and cutty. Not all the cuts I can remember doing. Really quite scary.

Today I went to see CF for the appointment that was made on Friday. He was actually remarkably useful. I just went in and said, 'my head's gone weird' and we sat and talked about it with adults. He thinks that the combination of lack of sleep and the extreme emotional stress I'm under at the moment is leading to severe depersonalisation and dissociation and severe anxiety related fugue states when I do things that I'm not sure what I'm doing and don't really remember it. We discussed my fear of doing something stupid like realising I'm doing something odd halfway between the top of the cliff and the sea. He was honest and said that he couldn't guarantee that I would be safe. I appreciated that.

I said that the cow had said I was difficult to deal with and he said that I wasn't. He thinks that she wants to fix things and I'm difficult to fix so she gets frustrated whereas he's more interested in just sitting talking about things. Made sense I think. I agreed with him that if the serial killer is dead there'll be a replacement standing in for her so I should go on Tuesday anyway. He asked me why I, as an intelligent and articulate person (blush), found the crisis team and the helpline so difficult. I said the helpline was crap because it was not anybody that knew me or my history or anything and they were time limited to 20 minutes so by the time I'd explained things they wanted to wind up the call. I said the crisis team was very limited by who the people were, although to be honest they've not been so bad this time, and there were a significant amount of 'have a nice cup of tea people' working there. He also agreed that I didn't use the service inappropriately and that telling me to try to distract myself was pointless if I wasn't phoning them until I'd got to the point where I could no longer do so.

Anyway, apparently the crisis team intend to get rid of me towards the end of the week and there'll be a meeting between them, me and JC to handover. Which is fair enough and means I only have to deal with them for a couple more days.

I came home and spoke to C about what CF had said. He seemed to agree with him and thought he'd talked sense. He did warn me that in his professional opinion I was veering relatively close to the point of sectioning or at least voluntary admission (which would be sectioning because I'd never agree to it) because of the risk that I'd do something stupidly dangerous (like driving to Cambridge perchance) when not in full control over what was going on. I can understand that but I'm desperate to avoid it. I've got a GPs apt tomorrow and he recommended that I get signed off for a week to give myself time without the stress of work to try to get myself together a wee bit.

So I've been good. I've sorted out the urgent union stuff and spoken to another rep asking him to take it on which he's happy to do. That's a big load of my shoulders to be honest because it would have been a busy week. I only hope now that the GP will agree to sign me off because I do think C's right and it's a good idea. C is very keen on me getting sleep and thinks I've got a made up condition called sleep anorexia where I know I'm desperate for sleep but I refuse to have any because I feel evil in the same way that an anorexic refuses to eat despite being starving because she feels fat. Tis made up but makes sense.

So now I'm waiting for the crisis team to phone to tell me when they'll come round. I'm very scared about whats been going on because to a large extent I can't verbalise it or explain where it's coming from, what the problem is and how to fix it. I just don't want to do something terrible without remembering. I feel like a freak. I'm very down and self hating at the moment but I'm not distressed much compared with my usual freak outs. During the days I'm exhausted and slug like without the energy to do anything except think and the occasional twitter. At night I appear to be roaming the planet in an odd fashion without much connection with whatever else is going on. It's the potential for catastrophe in the nights that worries me.

Tis really odd.

The cow

2009-06-19T15:28:00.002+01:00

You might have noticed over the last couple of days that things have not been very good in my head. I tend to dwell on bad things when things aren't good (D'oh that's a bit obvious) and I've ended up feeling very mental indeed.

Over last night and today I've cut 'evil' into my arms, legs and breasts several times which isn't a good sign. I also took a load of tablets before throwing them back up. Genius fuckwit of the week.

I phoned in sick to work and phoned the cmht. I spoke to CF's secretary who said he wasn't available at the moment and JC wasn't in. About 11 CF phoned me and said he was at the other unit this afternoon on duty so couldn't see me but JC would be in later and would phone. She phoned about 1ish and said she couldn't see me today either but she'd made an apt with CF for Monday. Impressive.

She phoned back a wee bit later and said she'd made an apt with duty for 2. I asked who the duty person and she told me it was the cow - a woman who I detest and who was the duty person who was on the time I tried to kill myself. But hey mentals can't be choosers as the saying clearly says.

I duly went down there at 2 and met with the cow. I told her what was going on in my head and she asked me what I wanted her to do about it. I told her I didn't know but the current position was not good and I couldn't cope with it and all I could see was the weekend spreading out endlessly in front of me and my being fucked. I told her how compulsive the self destructive urge was and how I didn't think I had the resources to deal with it. She thinks I do. She doesn't know me very well. Nor does she know the fact that I avoid the cmht at all possible costs because of people like her. In fact she remarked that this seemed to happen 'all the time' which I thought was ignorant.

She asked me what triggered it and I told her it was a mixture of apt with nice psychiatrist and serial killer being away. I said about the borderline diagnosis and how it meant that the me part of me was completely broken and she said, 'that's a very good way of putting it.' I don't think she understood what I was saying. Thick cow as well.

I can't remember much of what was said. Unlike Serial Insomniac I can rarely remember what's said by whom and when. I know I said some stuff that was weird because she called me on it. I remember saying that the sane part of me was disappearing and that the mental bit was taking over and I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to stop myself from doing something permanent. She told me that that clearly wasn't the case or I wouldn't be there now. I couldn't be arsed explaining any further.

At one point she said, 'You really are very difficult to deal with you know, what do you want me to do?' I refrained from responding, 'your job' and went for the sensible route of having a panic attack. I spend all my time having to be persuaded that going to the cmht is a good idea because I think I'm being difficult and wasting everybodies time. I eventually said that I needed a grown up.

She asked me over and over again what I wanted her to do and I kept telling her I didn't know because, strangely enough, I DIDN'T FUCKING KNOW. She kept saying that was me trying to avoid making a decision. I tried to think it through but she kept interrupting me to say fuckwit things so I was just ignoring her.

Eventually I agreed to cover from the crisis team over the weekend. I don't particularly want cover from the crisis team over the weekend but I suppose in some ways it's someone there if I need it. If only they didn't harass me and bother me and come to my house.

So I left, delighted again by the impressive nature of the cmht. Every visit another steaming pile of shite. And now the joy of the crisis team. Can they beat their previous stupid record of turning up at 4am on Christmas day and discharging me without telling me? We shall see.

Today is shit

2009-06-18T16:36:00.002+01:00

Today I'm on a union day so I'm meant to be doing union things and working hard. Admittedly I have done some union things and I did some yesterday on my day off but I've not done the thing that needs doing most urgently because I'm shit.

Overnight I managed to persuade myself that the serial killer was dead and the mail would come with a letter saying that she was dead and my therapy was therefore at an end. No mail came so the letter will probably come tomorrow. I got completely stressed and upset because I knew I'd be fucked over by the cmht and everything would go wrong the way it did when Paul left and nice social worker got sick.

I eventually managed to calm myself down a wee bit and do some of the aforementioned union stuff and then I went to mass. The readings were the Lord's prayer and the wee bit after about forgiveness. I'm shit at forgiveness. Particularly those who I really am secretly angry with so I ended up feeling like shite despite the fact that Fr S didn't talk about that, instead concentrating on how good God is for forgiving us. But then as you know, that in itself is an issue.

After mass I went round to Fr S's place for a chat. We discussed the whole borderline thing and he thought it was a stupid thing for the psychiatrist to say because 'everyone's personality is fucked.' I bleated on about how it means that what happened to me happened because my personality was fucked and stuff. He doesn't agree. We also talked about the serial killer being dead and my strange ability to believe in two things which I know are clearly mutually impossible and how this would be a useful skill in a future career as a spy.

I tried to talk about how difficult the whole God thing is as I wrote about yesterday but I ended up being all tearful and pathetic and unable to make sense of anything except how evil I was. I think he gets angry at how the love one's meant to be taught about had been warped into evil and how that shouldn't have happened. I got frustrated at him for not realising that it's me that's evil because I am.

Then we talked about the baby. He's one of only about 3 people who knows one of the major factors of why I'm so upset about the baby. But deep breath. When I was 13 I ran away from my foster placement and went to my parents. Bad things happened and I got pregnant. The social worker presented termination as the only realistic option and I killed my baby. I cannot explain how I feel about it. There are no words for the aching bleakness of grief and the enormity of the guilt I feel. My baby. My poor baby. One of the difficulties of my sister's pregnancy is that her dates are almost exactly the same as mine were. She had her 14 week scan the day before the anniversary of my abortion at 14 weeks. This means that as well as all the fear, the love and the normal emotions there's an incredible amount of jealousy. And a weird feeling of this is a chance for my baby to exist in proxy. But it won't be. It won't be my baby. It cannot be my baby.

I said that because of the baby and my foster mum's care plan falling apart (she has severe MS) and my ex's drink problem I'm feeling more and more as if I should go back to Scotland. I could sell the house and move in with my parents. The profit from the house and being paid to care for my foster mum would keep me going for a while. (Not that I particularly want to be paid for it but it's complex). There's also this weird feeling of this being a kind of redemptive thing to do for the enormity of guilt I feel. Also a sacrificial thing - if I go to Scotland and move in with the parents and offer myself for whatever they wish to do to me maybe the baby will be safe. That would be fair. I'm evil already, let the baby be good.

Fr S and I discussed whether this was actually me thinking straight or if this was a big massive self destructive fuck up your life thing. The truth is I don't know. He also said he didn't want me to move in with them because I would have all the life I've built up and the me that exists sucked out of me and it would leave me with nothing. Then he fell asleep.

(Don't worry it wasn't rude falling asleep, it was knackered quick nap and I had a smoke and read a magazine until he woke up.) When he woke up I was talking about spinning plates. I have work, union, mentalist, family, foster family and church plates to spin and at the moment the only one that's sort of working is the union one but as I've said I've already failed the union one big time today. If I went up to Scotland there would only be the family, foster family and church plates to deal with, admittedly they would all be much much harder. His missus came in at that point and I asked her if she thought I should move to Scotland, and her not knowing any of the situation said 'if it'll make you happy.' Which it won't but being down here is hardly a shiny ray of light either.

We also discussed the letters. Initially he had said I should post them but now he doesn't think I should because of the risk to me from my parents. I'm going up to Scotland next month to stay with my sister and torture myself with her bump so maybe I'll discuss it with her then. I have photos of my sister's scans and I didn't have a scan - there is nothing of my baby left. Is moving to Scotland just an attempt to try and relive my baby through my sisters. If it is then that's not fair on either of them.

I hurt so fucking much. I can't explain it or describe it. I don't want to keep going.

When God becomes bad

2009-06-17T12:18:00.003+01:00

This is going to be a difficult post to write and probably a difficult one to read. You are warned.

Over the last couple of weeks certain memories have been going through my head and I need to make sense of them. I want to get them out of my head and onto here in an attempt to quiet them down and give me some space to deal with my life.

My parents are very religious people and unfortunately they used God to further their abuse. This is making it more and more difficult for me to find my relationship with God and to work out how He really is and what He really thinks. It's also a difficult thing to talk about with the Serial Killer. From what she's said sometimes it's clear that she's not particularly knowledgeable about religion and doesn't really get whats going on in my head in relation to this. That's why I find talking to Fr S useful sometimes. But the overlap between my faith and my mentalism is difficult to deal with.

When I think back to my childhood vision of God He is oppressive, capricious, uncaring and abusive. Now I sort of know He isn't really but that's still my default position in a lot of ways. I can see clearly why I perceive Him as this - it's entirely due to how my parents presented Him to me as a child.

I recall that when my mother beat us she used to scream over and over again, 'evil, evil, evil, evil' at us in time to the blows. The concept of being evil was literally beaten into us. After she was satiated she used to make us kneel in front of her and pray. I can still exist in that experience. Kneeling there, shaking, hurting, scared, not wanting to make mistakes and praying absolutely desperately for forgiveness. Having to pray out loud knowing that if it wasn't good enough I would be hit. Believing that if I prayed hard enough God would forgive me and he would stop me doing it again and I wouldn't get hurt again. But no matter how hard I prayed, how desperately, how needfully, it still happened again. Over and over and over and over again. God had abandoned me. I had committed the unforgivable sin. I was not His. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

And the way she used to warp the Bible for her own needs. 'Suffer the little children means that God wants you to suffer.' I knew that must be right. She was my mother. She knew the Bible better than me. God clearly wanted me to suffer. How can He be good and loving? But I have to believe that because the Bible says so. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

She used to get angry with one of us and beat another. 'If Jesus can suffer and die for you, you can take this for your sister.' Divide and conquer. Make us beat each other. Evil, evil, evil evil, evil.

My father was just as good at this sort of behaviour. During the last couple of months I've found the liturgy almost impossible. His use of 'take eat, this is my body' makes it a reality I cannot handle. The taste, the smell, the fear, the touch is what I experience, not the wonders of the Eucharist. I resent this, I hate this, I feel overwhelmingly guilty about this. I shouldn't have these thoughts in my head. How dare I. I should be concentrating on what's going on. I shouldn't be thinking like this. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

And the worst. After my father's abuse of me. Being beaten for being evil. Leading him into sin, making him commit adultery. Cheap whore, slag, slut. Taking a man who is Godly, senior in the church, who understands the Bible and making him bad. The evil is overwhelming. How can I have done this? How can I contaminate someone I love so hugely? Then his forcing me to pray for forgiveness. I've given up on that idea. I am unforgivable. But I pray still because I cannot not pray. I have no hope in God but I have no hope but God. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

When I go to mass, when I say the Office, when I say the rosary, when I read the Bible, when I pray, all these things come flooding back. God has been polluted by them. Sometimes this happens in an almost tangible manner. More than once my insomnia related psychosis has had my father speaking to me during these times even at mass. God has been made bad. Well no He hasn't - my perception of Him has been made bad. By my evil. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

Why do I stay in the church? For a long time I didn't. I spent years away from the church. Years were even going past one caused a panic attack. But in all these years I couldn't escape God. I knew that God was there and my running away from Him was nothing more than a Jonahesque strop under the vine. And my non attendance was evil too. I was evil no matter what I did. My sins of commission and omission. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

I can't ever imagine not struggling with this. But I can no longer stay away from the church. I need the church. I need the food it offers. I need the hope I can perceive there. The idea that God can love me is there. I don't feel it but I feel that one day I might do. If it wasn't for my evil. I confess my sins. They are absolved but my inherent evil remains. I have no choice but to remain within the church. But it's the hardest thing there is. Evil freaks when confronted with good. Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil.

A few weeks ago I was speaking to my mother when she came away with a storming line. 'Aren't you glad you were brought up in a good Christian home?' What does one reply to that? Being evil I just affirmed her nonsense. Evil. evil, evil, evil, evil.

Who am I?

2009-06-10T17:37:00.004+01:00

On Monday I had an appointment with Dr O the psychiatrist. I hadn't seen him since just after the overdose in January and all my notes were missing so he didn't really say very much. I asked CF last time I was at the cmht to sort one out so here it was.

I was quite nervous but he's a nice bloke so he managed to calm me down fairly well. He asked how I was doing and we discussed how my mood is completely all over the place, the fact I amn't sleeping and the therapy. Interestingly he discussed his experience of group therapy whilst he was training and how hard he had found it but how looking back it was one of the most important experiences in his life. That made me impressed by him - not exactly sure why but never mind.

He brought up the letter I wrote to my old case worker. I really frustrated myself by saying something like, 'yeah I had a strop' instead of sticking to my guns and saying that she behaved inappropriately and badly. I could see the copy of the letter I copied to him in my file and could see that parts of it had been highlighted which interested me. I then burst into tears. He told me that she'd since left the department and seemed concerned that I was so upset about it. I wanted to tell him that I had been completely gutted by most of what the cmht had done since nice case worker went off sick but I blew that opportunity too.

He asked me how I spent my spare time. I couldn't think of anything. I said I went to work and mass but that was about it. He asked me about my social life and I had to admit that beyond the occasional meal out with friends I didn't really have one. He did tell me that it was important to have a life outside the house but I argued that my house was safe and nobody could hurt me there which was a stupid thing to say.

He asked how I spent my nights if I wasn't sleeping and I talked about how agitated I became at night and how I was finding it harder and harder to get through them. He asked again what I did and I said, 'pace, cut and smoke.' He then asked to see my cuts and I showed him the ones on my arm because they're the ones that look best at the moment. He seemed quite sympathetic and talked about what an awful thing self harm was and how difficult he found it to deal with people who were self harming because it was such a painful issue.

And then he moved on to the scary bit. 'It's a common thing for people with your diagnosis.' Of course I jumped on that and asked him what my diagnosis was. He didn't seem to wish to discuss it and prevaricated heavily along the lines of, 'well sometimes it's not a good thing to discuss a diagnosis with people because they see it as defining themselves and that's not the case but it can be very distressing blah blah blah.' I knew where he was going immediately and forced him to admit that he was talking about borderline personality disorder. Being a twat then after telling him it wouldn't upset me etc, I burst into tears again.

He spent about ten minutes talking about the fact that for him a diagnosis wasn't a label, it was just part of the entire humanity and it was the person as a human being that mattered. (See he is a nice guy) and all I could think was 'borderline mental, borderline freak, evil borderline mentalist, evil evil evil evil. Then I managed to get my head together and argued with him. I told him that I didn't think I fitted the criteria for the diagnosis as I understood it and that I felt that I fitted the complex ptsd criteria better. He agreed that I didn't fit all the criteria but that I didn't have to and it was a continuum anyway between complex ptsd and bpd. I'm not entirely convinced. Anyway this subject was left with him telling me to research further and at my next appointment (in October) we would argue the subject properly which was fine with me.

I can't remember how we got back onto the subject of self harm but he said he'd been to a lecture last week run by two people with bpd discussing treatment options. At that point I jumped in and told him that I thought CBT and DBT were a load of wank. He seemed to take that on board and said he was hoping to set up a group therapy thing for people with bpd and asked if I would be interested. I said I would think about it and he's going to contact me when it gets set up.

The appointment finished with me admitting that if things don't improve I only have a couple of weeks left at work maximum because I'm running out of cope. He asked a few questions about work and when I told him what was happening with my boss he told me to get her to write to him and he would sort her out which amused me. He then asked me how I imagined my future and I admitted that for me the future ran into the next day at a stretch but usually a couple of hours. He told me I need something for my future to look towards. He then gave me a prescription for Risperidone (anti psychotic and very scary for me) and a weeks supply of Zopicone (sleepy of joy). He admitted that he shouldn't prescibe either as NICE didn't think he should but then NICE didn't have me sitting in front of them.

Afterwards I drove for miles randomly round little country roads thinking. It feels like I no longer know who I am, that for years I've thought that it was things that were done to me that have caused the problem but now it appears that it's part of who I am which is a real fucker to get my head round.

It's also really frustrating because now I see why the cmht treat me like I do - they read the words borderline personality disorder and instantly think 'manipulative cow - avoid' when I desperately try not to behave like that with them.

There's also the issue of work. Borderline personality disorder doesn't sound like the sort of illness you can have in my job. And anti psychotics don't seem like the sort of drug you can take doing my job. I wanted to have a chat with the union people I dealt with before about boss to discuss it but one was busy at the meeting today and the other wasn't there. I'll try and phone him tomorrow. There was an email from the boss asking me how I got on at the appointment and I don't know what to say.

It's strange but I notice I've been really binge eating since I got the diagnosis and I don't know if it's stress or if it's the drugs. I popped in to a garage to buy petrol and came out with a 'dinner' of seafood linguine, big packet of sour cream and jalapeno pepper crisps, 4 yum yums, 2 boxes of caramel crispies and two packets of jelly beans. I hope I manage not to eat all that though or I'll be an even fatter bigger minging bitch then normal.

I also want to die. The suicidal ideation is really really strong today. I just want to be dead. Apparently 8 - 10 % of people with bpd kill themselves and I desperately want to be one of them. Not good thoughts.

So here's my thinking on how I fit into the criteria and doing exactly what I told Serial Insomniac not to do.

Borderline Personality Disorder:

Apparently you need to fit five out of the nine so I'm going to be really honest and see which I fit.

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

I don't like feeling abandoned and I'm getting paranoid about my feelings around the serial killer not being there. But then I've coped relatively well with that so far. My abandonment by ex therapist and nice case worker is a much more complex thing. But then this could easily be ptsd related as I've suffered a lot of abandonment in the past particularly in care.

2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.

I don't think this describes me at all. My relationships with people, excluding my family members, tend to be relatively laid back and long term. I'm 32 and my two meaningful relationships with partners have been 13 years and 2 years, neither of which sounds particularly unstable. I also tend not to idealise people very much but nor am I particularly judgemental of people I care about.

3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

I think my sense of self is stable just extremely negative. I've hated myself beyond hate to complete contempt and disgust for as long as I can remember. If that's unstable then yes but I think it's stable and negative.

4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving).

Thinking about these I'm not sure. Compared with a lot of my friends I'm one of the least promiscuous person I know but I when I do screw up I tend to do it in dangerous fashions - finding someone random of line to hurt me for example. I don't have an eating disorder. I do binge eat as discussed above. I don't abuse substances and I never have. I do drive fast but not recklessly and I've had a number of people saying I drive well and they don't mind me driving and nobody has ever asked me to calm down. I'm not sure on this one. Jury is firmly out.

5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.

I can't argue with that at all. I do fit here.

6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).

Again I've got to hold my hands up to this as my moods are all over the place.

7. Chronic feelings of emptiness, worthlessness.

Again that fits me down to the ground.

8. Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).

I would say I'm the opposite of this. I'm terrified of anger and rarely allow myself to get angry. I'm a horribly passive person. The lass I work with said recently that she'd never seen me angry, I just cried instead.

9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms

I do dissociate sometimes but that can be a response to trauma. I don't think I experience the others.

I spoke to C about this on Monday (him being a psychiatrist and all) and he said that he doesn't think I fit this either and that a lot of the symptoms I fit are as a result of complex ptsd and my reactions to how I cope with trauma. So here we go with that.

Complex PTSD

1. Difficulties regulating emotions, including symptoms such as persistent sadness, suicidal thoughts, explosive anger, or covert anger.

I'd go along with this. My moods are all over the place, I do experience suicidal ideation and I'm crap at dealing with anger as noted above.

2. Variations in consciousness, such as forgetting traumatic events, reliving traumatic events, or having episodes of dissociation (during which one feels detached from one's mental processes or body)

Again this describes me. (You can tell I'm getting tired and can't be arsed to write screeds can't you).

3. Changes in self-perception, such as a sense of helplessness, shame, guilt, stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings

Scarily accurate. Accurate enough to make me want to go and hide under the bed.

4. Varied changes in the perception of the perpetrator, such as attributing total power to the perpetrator or becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the perpetrator, including a preoccupation with revenge

Well anyone who's read my blog will be aware of how obsessive I am about my relationship with my parents. There's also the fact that when I'm with my parents or even one of them, I'm completely at their mercy and they can do anything they want to me. I don't particularly want revenge though.

5. Alterations in relations with others, including isolation, distrust, or a repeated search for a rescuer.

This is me too. I isolate myself. I trust nobody which has been one of the major issues with the serial killer. The rescuer thing bothers me because it makes me think of my relationship with Fr S but then I don't think of him as a rescuer, he's my priest and he's a mate and he cares about me. I don't know.

6. Loss of, or changes in, one's system of meanings, which may include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair

I do feel hopeless and despairing a lot of the time. But this leads to my moaning about a primary failure in these criteria. My first memory is of my mother breaking my arm. She was pregnant at the time, I remember that, My sister is 2 years and 1 month younger than me. My father first raped me when I was 4. I don't know whats changed in me. I don't know what I would have been like if these things hadn't happened to me. How the hell am I meant to know what I would have been like if I'd grown up normal.

Anyway this is quite long enough and I still don't know who I am so I'm going to shut up. Congratulations anyone who's made it to the end of this.

Saints days of confusion

2009-06-03T12:50:00.002+01:00

Today it is the day of the Ugandan Martyrs who were young lads converted in the 1880s in Uganda. Some were in their teens, others in their twenties. The King Mwanga II didn't like the fact they converted and was also a paedophile. They died under torture rather than go against their faith and allow themselves to be sexually abused by the king.

St Maria Goretti was a child who when someone tried to rape her, struggled against him telling him it was a mortal sin and was subsequently stabbed a number of times. She forgave him before dying in hospital. Her saints day is 6 July.

There are other saints with similar stories. Since becoming an (Anglo) Catholic last year I've learned a lot about the saints. Some of their stories are inspiring, some perplexing and others like these about just very very very difficult.

Mass this morning was odd. Only Fr S, one other woman and I were there. The reading was from the book of Tobit which is a bizarre and fascinating story well worth a read. We giggled quite a lot over it, which is par for the course when dealing with Tobit. Then things got serious. Fr S talked about the Ugandan martyrs and their story. Then we had the intercession prayers. We prayed amongst other things for the tragic family who died at Beachy Head a couple of days ago. After the prayers Fr S said that we should sit and pray silently for a while which is something we don't usually do but it was clear we were all quite upset.

I found myself getting increasingly upset. The stories of the Ugandan martyrs and other saints like Maria Goretti upset me. It doesn't just upset me to hear about what happened to them, although that's disturbing enough. It hits this incredible mass of guilt that I carry around with me. Some of this is irrational - I was not responsible for what happened when I was a child. The fact that my parents chose to dump their blame on me is not my fault. But it still feels that way. A huge part of the child in me thinks that if I'd been good none of this would have happened. That I would be an intact person. If I had really loved God he would have helped me to be good.

This is particularly so in relation to what happened when I ran back to my parents when I was in care. I knew what was going to happen but I still chose to go there. Last night with the Serial Killer we were discussing this. How I feel utterly responsible for every single thing that happened because then I had a degree of choice.

I had the same choice that the Ugandan martyrs and Maria Goretti had. They chose what they chose and have been beatified by the church for that. It makes me feel that because I was weak and evil and at times almost sought it out, I have to deal with the load of guilt, shame and disgust that piles on me as a result. I'm aware that there's a degree of irrationality in this. I was still a child and in a very difficult position but for me that's no excuse. I feel lesser and guilty and crap.

I understand why the church beatified these saints but at the moment I just can't bear it.

Letters

2009-06-01T18:20:00.003+01:00

I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing here at all. I'm posting these because I need advice. I'm not sure if I'll send these. I know the one to my sister sucks but I can't bear writing it and I don't know what to say. If anyone has any thoughts please share them.

For clarification I is my sister, K her husband and B the baby.

To the parents

Dear Mum and Dad,

This is going to be a difficult letter for me to write and a difficult letter for you to read. I apologise if it upsets you, I don’t wish to do that but I need to write this.

I remember what you did to the three of us when we were wee. I remember the violence and I remember the abuse. I know the impact it had on me at the time and the continuing impact it has now. Your actions, words and behaviour towards me over the last year do not suggest to me that you have changed. I hope I’m wrong.

You may not have changed but the family situation has. As you know in September you’re going to be grand parents. I have spent the last twenty years terrified that you have hurt another child. I am not prepared for you to hurt B. That cannot and will not happen.

It feels unpleasant to write this but if I have even the tiniest suspicion that you are behaving in any way inappropriately towards B I am going to take action. It’s only fair that I spell out to you what that action will be. I will go to social services and I will go to the police. I will not only tell the police about my concerns about B; I will tell them my experiences also. I’m sure you are aware that historic abuse cases are taken very seriously. You retire in August. Do you want to take the risk that you spend your retirement in prison?

These are not meant as threats. I don’t want to threaten you; I just want to know that my nephew or niece is not going to experience what we went through. B is far too precious to be hurt in any way.

I imagine you will write this off as my being sinful and evil or any of the myriad of ways you’ve chosen to write me off before. I don’t care. Last year your threats to cut me off left me distraught, this time there’s a much bigger issue at stake. I would rather have you never contact me again then have B hurt. This is not about my lack of forgiveness either. I am trying to work towards forgiving you, it’s an ongoing process. But it’s irrelevant to this – this is purely about protecting B.

You need to sit and think very carefully about what you’re going to do. You have to make the decision to keep B safe. You need to put into place whatever procedures you need to allow this to happen. Whether this is never being alone with him or her or whether it’s sitting down with I and K and honestly discussing the issue I don’t know. That’s something you need to think about. I really hope you do. There are people who can help, agencies who deal with issues like this. If you need to, use them please.

I’m sorry I have to write this letter. Please don’t think for one moment that I don’t love you. Despite everything, despite the fact that it isn’t reciprocated, I love you dearly. I don’t want to see you hurting, I don’t want to see you in trouble but you are adults, B is a baby. The responsibility lies with you.

I’m going to write to I as well to discuss my concerns with her. This can no longer be a family secret: no matter how much it hurts, it has to be out in the open now. There is too much at risk.

I love you, please please think about this.

To my sister

Dear I,

I’m so sorry to be writing this. I’m not doing it to stir shit up or to cause you pain. I’m doing it because I’m concerned for B.

I don’t know what you remember of what happened when we were children. I don’t know if you recall the abuse and the pain Mum and Dad inflicted on us. I’m torn between wishing that you don’t remember but dreading this being the case because by writing this I’m reminding you; and hoping you remember but you’ve dealt with it. We’ve never discussed it. I don’t know.

My fear is that Mum and Dad will hurt B. I’m so scared that he or she will go through the same pain that we went through. I know you don’t want that to happen. I’m definitely sure K won’t. I don’t even know how rational my fear is.

I hope that K knows about all this shit and you’ve talked about it and discussed it with him. I hope he is aware of the potential threat B faces. I hope the pair of you have dealt with these issues in a way that works but I don’t know.

I’ve written to the parents telling them that if I suspect at all that B has been hurt then I will go to the police and tell them not only my fears for B but what happened to us when we were weans. I know that’s an appalling and overwhelming thought but the need for them to behave appropriately has to outweigh whatever forces cause them to behave inappropriately in the first place.

This letter sounds so cold and hard. I don’t want it to. I just want B to be safe. Please call me to talk about this if you need to.

I’m so so very sorry.

Frustration, stress and terrible grammar

2009-05-29T15:48:00.002+01:00

Today was an odd day. I was actually feeling ok going to work except overwhelmingly and utterly exhausted. Got to work, logged on, email from boss telling me she's decided to change what shifts I'm on. Now boss has been told over and over and over again by myself, a union colleague and by the head of casework for the whole union to back off me. She's been told that if she needs to change things she discusses it with me. She doesn't issue an email edict. She's been told this over and over and over again because every single time I get one of her email edicts I collapse in a big wibbly pile and struggle to get up again.

So guess what? I collapsed in a big wibbly pile. I'm in a difficult position because I need to be sensible about what I can and can't cope with at work but I can't disable myself out of a job so I'm walking a tight line and every time something tiny like this happens, it really discombobulates me. Anyway I thought 'fuck it' after crying for half an hour, forwarded it to my union colleague and went for a fag.

When I got in I remembered to phone JC from the cmht. As soon as I got through to her my wibble was obvious as I completely lost it on her before we've said anything. I ended up having to hang up and phone her back once I'd had (another) fag. Stupid bitch that I am. I phoned her back and we discussed what I needed in the letter for OHS next week. I mentioned certain financial issues and she said I maybe needed to look at what was more important - my lifestyle and my health. I don't have a lifestyle, I have a mortgage, fags, petrol, food and the occasional book. I'm not Martha fucking Stewart. It's difficult to explain the situation at work but I tried and she said she'd email me a letter for me to amend as required.

OH. MY. GOD. That woman cannot write any recognisable form of English. Can someone translate the following:

Life events that happen regularly, most people have ways of coping with these,
however for Introspective, she is just beginning to understand why her coping
mechanisms can be detrimental to herself and she is working in Psychotherapy at
present to understand in order to change these.

Because I hadn't a clue what it meant. There was a whole page of this dribble. Now every day as part of my job I read lengthy letters in pseudo English from all round Europe and the level of crappy grammar was similar to them. I think she was meaning that things that other people wouldn't stress about make me lose it, which is true but put in the context of what I discussed with CF the last couple of times, makes me worry that she sees my fears of the baby being abused as a 'life event that happens regularly' that most people can cope with? She also didn't mention the cover that she and CF are meant to be providing when the serial killer goes on leave for a fortnight after next weeks sessions which is not something I'm stressing about at the moment. Oh no not at all.

Myself and my mate spent about an hour going through the letter and trying to put it into English and into the sort of sense that works in the environment where I'm employed. Fingers crossed it'll be helpful; we'll see.

So skived off early and got home to find a letter with an appointment with the psychiatrist a week on Monday. So now I have this to panic about as well. I think this may be as a result of CF on Tuesday. I hope that he'll be reasonable on the subject of sleeping tablets. (I won't mention petite overdose attempt on Tuesday). Last time I was there he talked about anti psychotics to regulate my mood and maybe that's what I need at the moment being so all over the place. We shall see.

So anyway a bit of an odd day. Why do I find everything so damn stressful?

Yesterday's travels through madness

2009-05-27T12:06:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I had a lot going on and I went a bit doolally so here's what happened so I can attempt to make sense of this. I'm not sure why I write this blog - I don't think it's for affirmation, I think it's so I can sort my feelings out and being of the generation I am, doing it online makes sense.

Anyway, I had an appointment with the GP at 0850, which is a horrible hour of the day to have to be together enough to deal with the GP. Ostensibly it was so she could tell me what was wrong with me last month when I got all sore. The ultrasound apparently was normal and the only thing wrong with my blood test was I was low on folic acid so she's given me some tablets. I've got another blood test in a couple of weeks so she can check. I asked for some more antimadness tablets which she gave me. Then I asked her about sleep. I told her I was struggling to get any, that I couldn't get to sleep and when I did I had horrible nightmares. She asked what they were about and of course, being a twat, I couldn't talk about it and started shaking and being useless. She asked who I was seeing at the mental place and she said there was nothing she could do but I should speak to the mentalists about it.

I came home and got organised for a union meeting. I tried to write a letter to a manager about something but gave up because everything had to be in groups of eight letters and these didn't make sense because most sentences aren't made up entirely of eight letter words. I'm going to have to try and sort it out later. The union meeting went ok but I left early because I had to go and see CF at the cmht.

Last week when I saw CF I told him how stressed and scared I was about the potential of my parents abusing my sisters baby when it's born. He told me he was going to go and think about it and speak to JC (my other case worker) and get back to me at this appointment. So I was sort of hoping that they'd come up with some sort of practical solution to it or at least something vaguely useful.

Instead he said that he'd spoken to her and they'd decided, 'that it's not really your responsibility.' I completely froze at that because in a million years how could he think that that was going to be in any way useful, helpful or sensible. I just shrugged, I couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't extremely rude or abusive. He kept saying, 'we've gone judge and jury on this' and I kept wanting to tell him that what he was saying was completely useless and making everything worse. I wish I had said something but for some reason all the pseudo relationships I have had with the cmht apart from E (off sick social worker) have broken down and I'm terrified that it's my fault and it's because I'm evil and if I fall out with him or JC there's nothing left and I'm all alone.

I managed to control my complete losing it and told him what the GP said and he asked when I last saw the psychiatrist. I told him it was in January and how much of a problem sleep was to which he replied, 'well that's something I can completely understand.' So you can understand that not sleeping is a bad thing but you can't understand that being stressed about my nephew or niece being abused isn't? Last time I saw the psychiatrist he talked about changing my drugs but my notes had been lost and I haven't heard anything since. He also said I couldn't have any temazepam after my bid to get rid of the evil I am in January. So CF said he'd try and speak to his secretary to arrange an appointment. He also agreed that JC would write something for the occupational health appointment next week.

I came home and I just felt completely empty. I had hope that CF would come away with something which would at least be a way forward, I wasn't expecting a solution, just something practical. Definitely not a 'it's not your problem.' (Although admittedly he did 'acknowledge my distress.' Yehah he gets prizes for that. I cut and cut and cut. I needed to feel something that wasn't just sheer nothingness. I was still bleeding when I left to go to the serial killers two hours later which isn't good.

Drove up to the serial killers and just sat there. It wasn't that I couldn't think of anything to say, I just felt overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all. If I'm going to hurt so badly talking about things and people aren't going to listen or help why bother? Eventually I told her what was going on. I told her things I'd decided to never tell anyone. I told her about the hallucinations, about the people on the telly talking to me (not that I'd ever admit that one), about my terror that I was possessed, about how G gets turned on by my cutting, about how I'd spent a long time trolling the perv sites looking for someone to beat me up, about how I needed to hurt so badly, how I needed to be punished, about how I was terrified that my brain was fracturing and that there was nothing left, about how scared I am of being locked up if I tell anyone else about all the mad stuff, about how agitated I get at night, about the music that comes into my head and takes me over and won't let me go, about how everything had to be in 8s, about how I had to pull over on the way to work a couple of days ago because I thought I was going to drive into a truck. About all the mental things in my head.

She thinks it's my head is desperately doing all it's strange and weird defence mechanisms to avoid dealing with things in therapy. I don't know. All I know is that sanity seems to be slipping through my fingers. Scarily she also told me not to do things. It's the first time she's actually stepped into telling me what to do. I'm not to let G see me cut, I'm not to find someone to beat me up. I sort of felt like I was getting a bollocking from a teacher. It was very strange.

I went to mass. H touched my shoulder during the peace (which I kneel through to try and avoid due to my dislike of being touched) and I had a panic attack, kneeling there hyperventilating like a loon. Afterwards she tried to hug me and I pretty much pushed her away and had to restrain myself from punching her.

While the others were leaving I sat right at the back of the church and just stared at the altar, the tabernacle and the stained glass of Jesus. Everything was flying round my brain at high speed. Fr S sat down in the pew in front and I just completely sobbed for about two hours. I told him that I was desperate to die and I've been praying and begging God for so long to kill me and I can't understand why God won't kill someone so desperately evil. We talked about the fetid morass that is my head and how desperate I am to be punished. We talked about how I want to go to hell because that's what I deserve. He just sat there and listened and we discussed finding a place where I could go to escape and just be when things get so hard. He talked about trying to find a way of taking God from the darkness of the past are re experiencing in the sacraments and the church and the people there. I can't remember all that we talked about but I can remember just crying and listening to him and looking at the altar and Jesus behind the altar and on the altar as the sun went down behind the stained glass. (Which sounds really cheesy now but at the time was a good thing.)

He asked me to come into his house to show off that he'd tidied up his books but his wife had made dinner for him and she was really pissed off that he was two hours late back from mass so I headed away fairly swiftly because other people's family disputes are way outside my coping capacity. He phoned later in the evening to see if I was ok.

During the night the music started. I can't explain the music, it's this not normal music but it takes over my head and completely overwhelms me. I can't escape the music, I can't get away from it. I just have to have it screaming through my mind. I can't keep still my fingers move and intertwine with the music and it swells more and more in the head. Eventually it left about 3 am and I completely broke. I did what I've been trying not to do for so long and started to take a pile of tablets. After I'd swallowed half a dozen I completely freaked and realised that I'm scared of hell and God would be disgusted at me. And although a huge overwhelming part of me wanted to keep going, I forced myself to swallow a glass of salt water to throw them up again. Lovely. Then I just felt completely empty. Curled up on the sofa wrapped in a blanket rocking back and forward for the rest of the night. Alone, very very alone.

Don't stress, I'm no more likely to kill myself now then ever but it was such a compulsive moment. I told Fr S about it after mass and he says God's not angry but I'm not sure. I think God is furious with me. Fr S said he was also thinking about talking to CF about yesterday because he doesn't think it was an adequate response.

So here I am today, trying to pick up the pieces of yesterday. So scared of the overwhelmingness of whats going on in my head. Knowing that it's so much bigger, more real and stronger then the reality of what's going on outside. Feeling it in all it's jaggedy little pieces.

I have to see the serial killer tonight. I don't know what I'm going to say. I have to work tomorrow and part of me thinks I should be getting back in touch with the cmht and asking for help because this is no longer a tenable place for me to exist. We'll see.

Further adventures from the land of the mentalist

2009-05-21T12:54:00.002+01:00

As you probably noticed from the last blog, things are not going well. I went to the serial killers on Tuesday then probably fairly stupidly went on to mass. That was enough to leave me a complete mess. I phoned C who kept reminding me that I wasn't evil and told me to phone the case worker at the cmht on Wed.

Being brave I did. I called them and the male one CF asked me to come in straightaway so I had to run about getting dressed and organised before going down. When I got there he kept calling me 'love' which annoyed the hell out of me. I was in a complete state and all very panicky and hysterical which didn't make things easy and is very shameful. I wish I wasn't a freak. I had things I wanted to discuss with him but I instantly forgot them. Particularly the lack of sleep - four hours sleep in the last 18 days is just not enough to keep functioning.

We did discuss the reasons why the flashbacks are so frequent and why none of the techniques are working to help me. We also discussed all the stress about the baby (well the stuff I was prepared to discuss with him) and various other things. He was sympathetic and did acknowledge without prompting just how much the cmht had let me down before. However it was left with him saying he would talk to my other case worker and get back to me in the next couple of days. Which frankly is not great.

Stupidly then I went on to mass where I arrived very late and cried my way through. Fr S was away so it was Fr J who I don't really know and it was very humiliating. It wasn't helped by H being all huggy and suggesting I see a homeopathist for about the 3045239572957629th time. My telling her I wouldn't because it was bollocks should hopefully put an end to it. Then she started asking Fr J if he knew any good ways to get sleep which pissed me off endlessly because the problem is not entirely that I can't sleep it's that I'm fucking arseclenchingly terrified of sleeping because of the nightmares and when the flashbacks are bad the nightmares are worse. And frankly it's none of her or Fr J's fucking business.

I went to the serial killers. It was odd. Thankfully I was able to manoeuvre her away from talking about the stuff we were talking about on Tuesday because I didn't want to talk about it. I ended up getting really upset because (and this is just weird and irrational) I don't want her to give a shit about me because she's not the person I want to give a shit about me and whether she gives a shit or not is irrelevant because she's not my mum or dad. Something weird going on there. I don't really understand my head anymore.

So today I had to represent someone at a hearing which I did despite the fact the person I was representing is off work with mental health problems but is actually at the moment in a much better state then me. Then I came home to discover a letter from OHS saying I've got an apt on 04/06 which is scaring the living shite out of me. I can't face talking about stuff with someone I don't know.

Then CF from the cmht phoned to tell me he'd talked to the other case worker and he's made an apt with me for Tuesday which is all very well but I'm currently losing it now and Tuesday is an eternity away. And its Ascension day today which is a day of obligation and I can't cope with going to mass. If I don't go I'll go to hell and God will hate me even more and I'll be even more evil but if I do go I can't see myself coping and then the flashbacks will come and that will make me evil and God will hate me even more.

I have to make it til Tuesday when I see the GP, CF and the serial killer as well as making it to a union meeting. Exhausting. The days are ok except I'm beginning to hallucinate slightly due to lack of sleep and my ability to work is questionable. The nights are another issue. I get so completely agitated and unable to settle to anything that I just pace around all night with occasional pauses to smoke and cut myself. My brain feels completely fractured and coherent thinking is almost impossible. The desire to die is overwhelming and last night I walked over to the drawer with the pills and took them out about a dozen times. So far I've managed to put them back again but I don't know how much longer I can do that for.

I cannot cope.

Worthless

2009-05-19T20:01:00.002+01:00

I am fetid, I am disgusting, I am contaminating everyone with whom I come into contact. I need to be destroyed. I am evil evil evil evil evil evil. I need to destroy myself. God hates me. He wants me to got to hell because I'm evil. If I don't destroy myself I'll continue to contaminate the world with my endless evil. I have to be punished. God please punish me. I need this to stop please God let this stop. Let things go. I'm tired. I don't have anything left to fight with. If I fight I'm evil for fighting. If I give in I'm evil for giving in.

Please just let me be, God. I'm so so sorry. I can't explain how much I wish that I wasn't like this but I've tried so hard. I've tried to be good but I can't be. Every cell of my body is infused with filth. I make myself feel sick thinking about how I hurt everyone. I shouldn't be allowed. I don't know why I'm still here.

Please God please help me. I've got nothing left.