(Un)Reasonable November 15, 2012

With this whole therapist drama going on, I’m really struggling to sort out whether my expectations are reasonable or unreasonable.

My highly fallacious line of thought is this:
My last 3 therapists haven’t worked out. Three in a row is a lot, so it must be that my expectations are unreasonable. If I had reasonable expectations, I wouldn’t have failed three therapists in a row.

With Fake Therapist, the frustration was her lack of experience with severe trauma. She usually changed the subject. When she did let me stick with the topic, her responses were mostly limited to “I can’t relate to that” (great, now I feel like even more of a freak) or “That’s helpful for me to know” ( fine, but that’s not helpful for ME).

NT2.0 didn’t respect my boundaries. I told her I didn’t know her well enough or trust her enough yet to talk about a very triggering interaction with Ex. I thought that was pretty clear, but she spent the rest of the session interrogating me about the event.

NT forgot to show up for one of my sessions, and her basic response to my distress was, “It’ll get better when you’re older, in 30 years or so.” Then I had a dissociative episode, and she sent me to the ER by ambulance, completely alone. When I saw her the next week, she shifted the blame to my Windhorse team and didn’t understand why I didn’t trust her anymore.

Part of me feels very strongly that these are acceptable, valid, reasonable causes for dumping a therapist.

But in another part of me, my mother’s voice echoes, telling me I’m too needy and demanding, I expect too much from people, I’m just looking for reasons to write off relationships.

I want to believe that first part. But how do I reconcile that with the knowledge that there are parts of me who do want more than anyone can give us? They want a redo of our childhood where we have parent-substitutes who do love us and take care of us. They want somebody to fix all our problems so we don’t live with this pain every day.

And knowing that these desires are unreasonable stirs up a lot of anger in me. It’s not MY fault I’m this screwed up and in this much pain! So why does it have to be MY job to carry it every day? I don’t want to save myself! I want someone else to do it! It’s not fair! Somebody else should fix me because it’s not my fault!

And that’s unreasonable. I know it’s unreasonable. Maybe I’m firing my therapists because I am being unreasonable on a subconscious level, wanting them to fix me. Or maybe I just had bad luck three times in a row. How do I sort it out?

Too Needy September 8, 2012

I’m feeling way too needy right now.

This is a feeling that comes up every time I feel too overwhelmed to deal with it on my own. If I need/want anything from other people, I feel like I need too much, like I am too much.

NT offered twice a week therapy as a regular thing. I desperately wanted it, so of course I said no. So I’ve been struggling to get through the week, counting the days until my next therapy session.

I hate that I can’t let myself need anyone. It’s such black and white thinking. I know logically that I should allow myself to accept the support other people offer. I know it’s the therapist’s job to set boundaries, and she wouldn’t offer to see me twice a week if it was too much for her.

But I still can’t let myself accept the help. I just sit at home, desperately lonely and wishing my next therapy session was sooner.

“You don’t have to be brave.” July 13, 2012

I asked for help.

 

This is not something I’m good at doing.  I feel like I should be able to manage everything in my life all by myself, and I feel like asking for help burdens people, bothers them, makes them angry.  For years, I convinced myself that I didn’t need anything from anyone, didn’t need anything at all.  I even convinced myself I didn’t need food and water, the very most basic things, and that almost killed me several times.  I thought if I could kill off my needs, it would let me live.

 

Obviously, that didn’t work.

 

I haven’t been sleeping.  I thought I could handle going off the meds suddenly–after all, it was recommended by someone with a PhD in psychology who’s also board certified in sleep medicine.  And I do think I could be on fewer meds or smaller dosages, but doing it so abruptly was really bad.  I was okay-ish for the first few days, but once they were all out of my system, I was not at all okay.

 

This morning, after barely sleeping and having nightmares about my mother when I did, I woke up having a panic attack.  I tried to weather it on my own, but that wasn’t working.  My heart was racing, and I couldn’t stop hyperventilating.  I called my nurse, and she came over and had me take some gabapentin.

 

“You don’t have to be brave,” she told me.  “We’re here.”

 

The gabapentin then tanked my blood pressure, so she fed me lunch, got someone else from Windhorse to take Winston out for a walk, and put me back to bed.  I did, luckily, get a few hours of sleep, but there were more nightmares.  They’re trying to find someone who can take care of Winston for a few nights so I can get some sleep.  I’m going back on the meds at a lower dose.  The no-med experiment failed, but I still do want to try a more gradual, controlled reduction.  I go back to the sleep doc on Monday, so we’ll see what she recommends.

 

I’m just grateful that I have people to take care of me.  I’m also grateful that I’m finally able to accept it.  Today I didn’t feel like I was a burden or I was overwhelming people or I was a black hole of neediness that would swallow everyone and everything, and that’s how I usually feel about asking for help.  It’s a pretty drastic shift for me to be able to accept it like this.

 

And Winston is doing MUCH better with the biting.  He still does it when he gets really excited, but he’s learning.  I’m going to be able to keep him.  I still think it was really irresponsible for the rescue organization not to tell me about the biting, but I’m  glad I have him.  I think it was just bad timing, when I got him and went off the meds at the same time.  But Winston and I are gonna make it, which makes me happier than I can tell you.

Orbits June 6, 2012

I’m a sci-fi geek, so I conceptualize things that way.  Relationships with other people are, for me, like a really complicated solar system.  There are all these chunks of rock and ice and metal whizzing around, and if one of them varies even a little, the whole thing will fall apart spectacularly, with explosive planetary collisions.  Even a small piece of space junk can have huge consequences.

 

In this metaphor, I am (of course) the space junk.

 

I always feel like I don’t belong, like a deviation.  Everything’s all nice and systematic and functional, and then I come along and knock an asteroid off-course, and the asteroid crashes into a planet, and the planet careens into another planet, and the whole solar system just goes up in dust.  Even if I don’t cause multi-planetary disaster, I’m lurking there in orbit, just waiting to tear a hole in a spacecraft and kill some astronauts with explosive decompression.

 

It’s not intentional, but there are times when intent just doesn’t matter.  Like when planets (or people) start imploding.

 

And being space debris–that’s on a good day.  On bad days, I’m the black hole at the center of the galaxy, swallowing everything but still feeling empty and in need of more, more, more.  (Melodramatic much, Sara?)  This is why you can’t have nice things–you’re a black hole of neediness, and no matter how much people give you of themselves, you swallow it and demand more.

 

I do a good job hiding it.  My mother was a black hole, and I refuse to swallow people whole the way she does.  I’m so committed to not needing things from other people and not “bothering” them that I come off seeming distant and aloof.  I don’t call, I don’t write.  I want to, but I’m convinced beyond reason that I’d just be annoying people because they’d all be much happier if I just left them alone.

 

The way it ends up, I basically take the stance that if someone really cares about me, they’ll initiate all the contact.  When I write that out, it sounds manipulative–“PROVE you care!”–but I don’t think it’s that.  I’m just so sure people really don’t want to deal with me, but I end up sacrificing a lot of potential relationships that way.  It’s stupid, and it annoys the crap out of me.

 

For instance, the woman who was my 3rd nursing care coordinator at Riggs, through a lot of the worst time, works in Northampton now.  She got in touch with me a while after the both of us had left Riggs, and we got together for coffee once around Thanksgiving.  She works right around the corner from my apartment, and I have her e-mail and phone number.  I e-mailed her a couple months ago when my phone number changed, but I never heard back from her.  I know full well I’m reading too much into it, but now I’m convinced she didn’t respond because she doesn’t want to talk to me.  For the last six weeks or so, I’ve been trying to get myself to e-mail her again, but something in my brain tells me that e-mailing her twice in 3 months is annoying, inappropriate, and bordering on stalkerish.  My birthday’s Friday, and I’d love to see her and just go get coffee or something, but I’m too freaked out to e-mail her.

 

It’s stupid, and it frustrates the hell out of me.  I am NOT important enough to cause interstellar devastation, so why can’t I convince myself of that?