I thought it was safe to let you know how I was doing. I thought it was safe to email you about what my thoughts were regarding brief psychosis –v- depression (which is something I have finally made sense of and wanted your opinion on because I trusted you). I told you what my current working life was like and I felt as though I got a rubber stamp response because nothing in your email referred specifically to what I had actually said or achieved.

In therapy once, you asked me to always let you know how I was doing because you didn’t want me to move on and disappear out of your therapy life. You also once told me you loved me and trusted me deeply and that you would never abandon me.

With those bold statements comes a considerable amount of post-therapy responsibility to clients, even to the most adjusted but vulnerable client who has left your therapy and your rooms. With that comes a duty of care to accept that sometimes the client who wants to move on feels much dissonance, ambivalence and an overwhelmingly disproportionate sense of obligation and responsibility to her former therapist to keep her informed lest she feels abandoned by her.

This is my fault for thinking you miss me as much as I miss you. This is my lack of “theory of mind” and mentalization that I take full responsibility for. You do not feel what I do, I am rarely in your thoughts (if ever) and you can easily disregard and delete my emails and remain in an internally emotionally appropriate and functional manner because I am no longer on your radar.

Last November when I let you know what I was doing you sent me an email telling me I was sending you too many emails, but your previous wishes about keeping in touch is concretely ingrained and reverberates too deeply and this time, in February, when I caved into that irresistible urge to contact you (against my better judgement) you are now ceasing to even acknowledge my emails.

This makes me feel very sad, somewhat confused, upset, retraumatised and abandoned again and again. It hurts way low down in my stomach. I feel regressed and child-like. Because of what you said last year about loving me, never abandoning me and always keeping in touch I feel as though I can’t move on properly. This is my responsibility, something I have to control and something I need to radically accept and place tight boundaries around.

However, you too need to remember my history and my situation, one of the longest therapies ever and my incredibly intense feelings, both negative and positive, surrounding how I feel about you and how we interacted in therapy. Only you can decide what your contribution to my current situation is. You sent me an email re Better Access without comment and when I commented back you are most conspicuous by your lack of response. Ditto email re psychosis –v- depression. It would appear ignoring me and hoping I will go away is the easiest most desired outcome and the path of least resistance for you.

I hope you are comfortable, safe, well, prosperous and happy with your life. I wish you all the best. I am very sad to say but you are not safe for me and I doubt you ever will be. I do not intend to repeat this mistake a third time. But this email releases me from any further interaction, tractor beam urges, gravitational pulls and dumb, dumb decisions to ever email you again.

If you wish to find out how I am you know where my blog is, you know where my website is and, if the desire is truly overwhelming (which I doubt), there is always Google.

Sonia

Computer photo available from Shutterstock.

Over the years, I’ve been fired, resigned or walked out (before I was pushed) on more jobs than there are symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder.  I never understood why this was happening to me and I always thought it was the company’s fault, the other employees fault or that the Universe hated me.

There was always a honeymoon period where I fitted in for a couple of months, then came unstuck when the first small drama occurred.  This was always followed by a huge behavioural reaction from me.  I had not learned how to accept the vagaries of how companies operated, the diverse range of personalities concerned and my own borderline reaction to real or perceived workplace situations.  I reacted before I reasoned.

The most distressing part of this was not having a clue as to what my behaviour was, how it affected other people and how I was perceived throughout the companies I worked for.  But I did my best.  I behaved as best I could with the limited emotional tools I had and the maturity I did not have.  I could not comprehend that other people did not share the same reality I did.  I thought I was right and they were wrong.

It’s not easy getting fired from fifteen jobs in thirty years.  It’s heart-breaking, soul destroying, self-harm inducing and can put a family into severe debt.  I would need years between jobs to recover from the previous one because I had no insight into what was happening.  This is even though I was in therapy and my therapist tried her hardest to instill in me that I needed to learn the cognitive, emotional and behavioural tools to fit in – and accept the world as being imperfect.  I could not do that, I was looking for perfect employment, the same as I was looking for the perfect mother.  Neither exist.

I have been in my present job working in the mental health field for nine months now.  During that time I have had several potential major meltdown moments.  However, this time I have always reacted differently.  I have not agreed with what my supervisor has said at times but my replies have been along the lines of – seeing her point of view – sitting in those awkward dissonant feelings and weighing up the pros and cons of what she has said.  I am reasoning before reacting and realizing that both sides of the coin are valid.  When I do disagree with her, my therapist has pointed out, when you are a supervisor, Sonia, then you get to make the important decisions.

Recently my role in my organization has changed.  I have been given extra very exciting duties to perform of which I am in charge (to a certain degree under supervision).  I feel I was able to obtain this because of my new-found ability to fit in, to belong, to harmonize, to see others points of view and to work together as a team.

This has not always been a bed of roses.  I have made mistakes and crossed boundaries and when this has been pointed out to me, I really have to do some mindfulness and meditation and respond appropriately with a smile on my face and an apology.  Then I move on. I move forward and I get involved, engaged and engrossed in my special projects.  There are no lingering borderline after-effects, no rage-filled revenge fantasies or debilitating physical symptoms of anaphylactic rage response. Even with these restrictions, I feel a sense of new found freedom.

For the first time in my life I have a career path rather than a job.  While I work in a very validating environment, I also recognize that the Universe does throw obstacles in my path, every day in every way and it is my job to negotiate these cognitive boulders with my newly discovered emotional skills.  I will continue to make mistakes.  I will continue to take responsibility and apologize for those mistakes.  My star will, I hope, continue to rise.

Pictures:  http://www.lrp.usace.army.mil/lmon/signif2.htm and http://www.graphicshunt.com/clipart/search/1/stars.htm

Ahh, the Erotic Transference!  The question is do we want to have sex with our therapist because of a deep-seated oedipal complex, primary attachment gone tragically awry, a pre-verbal object relationship that cannot be unified or do we simply want to shag an attractive, empathic person who sets our genitals on fire?

Much psychological literature is written by Sheldon Cooper types (The Big Bang Theory) who are socially autistic or have Asperger’s syndrome and are desperately trying to quantify the unquantifiable by using terms such as “erotic transference” instead of “lust or love” because by using wholly scientific terms it distances themselves from their own primal and lustful urges.  That is why Amy Farrah Fowler (Sheldon’s girlfriend) cannot understand these sinful longings she gets when she is around men.  It greatly distresses and frustrates her.

Admitting you have sexual feelings for your therapist to your therapist can create shame and disgust. We are all sexual beings, it’s how we relate beneath the superficial veneer of expected manners and mores of society. 

Civilization as we know it would break down if we all gave in to our primal urges, so we stifle them down until we get into an intimate relationship with someone. Unfortunately that someone can be a professional business person in the form of a clinical psychologist rather than a hot guy/girl at a nightclub where both parties know that the end result of the night in question can end up with a roll in the hay.  That is not an expected outcome of the therapeutic relationship, yet the feelings can be there –  from both sides of the couch, the other side of which is known as erotic counter-transference.

Just because you want to have sex does not mean you should have sex, but does acknowledging these feelings help the situation any?  Is it the man or woman of the therapist that turns you on, or is it the warm intimate association of sharing secrets in a cozy, isolated office?

If you saw your therapist at the beach in a pair of baggy bathers or sitting at the pokies in the local casino, or face down in the frozen chip department at the local supermarket would that not shatter your illusion that they are some sort of Greek God sent down from Mount Olympus just to save you from yourself?

Many if not most therapists are very uncomfortable with their client’s “erotic transference” and find it difficult to talk to them about.  This is understandable.  People with Borderline Personality Disorder with serious boundary issues and greatly heightened emotions and high sensitivity tend to fall in love easily with anyone who shows them small tender mercies.  I know this equation so intimately.

My therapist gave me space and time to explore these feelings and never made me feel ashamed of them.  I just had to own them knowing she did not feel the same way.  She made that crystal clear in a sensitive, caring manner.  Thank God she did.  I am a better person for her boundaries and ability to enable me to take responsibility for my feelings and deal with them without involving her.  It was a long and messy process but one that clarified our relationship, gave it a framework and created guidelines for healing and moving on so I could live my life fully.

Dealing with this is something that desperately needs to be addressed in the training process of future therapists.

Picture:  clipart

My life started to give me much needed and valuable freedom of choice when I finally put major emotional, cognitive, behavioural and physical boundaries in place. Previous to that I was forever delving into people’s private lives, hemorrhaging at emotional paper cuts, having concrete, rigid and inflexible ideas on everything and having anger management issues at lampposts and letterboxes.

Other People’s Boundaries:  I used to think if you were my friend you would tell me everything about yourself simply because I had this uncontrollable urge to spill my guts to you.  Now I choose to tell certain people certain things in a certain way and when I get that warning signal in my gut, I know it is not a good idea to share that particular story.  I finally learned this from sharing a story I should have left well alone during a peer workers course I undertook for my employment.

Your Therapist’s Private Life:  I learned the hard way about this.  If you want therapy to succeed within a time frame, then stick to your own agenda and don’t get entangled in your therapist’s life. That of course, means your therapist must (and not all do) understand boundaries and carry them out in a firm but gentle manner.  I asked my long-term therapist a personal question and she got angry, shouted at me and bit my head off.  That was six months ago.  My stomach does flip flops whenever I think about it, but I also know it is single-handedly the main event that keeps my boundaries water-tight.  I do not define our long-term relationship by this one event; I have an overall holistic view.  Her lesson worked but it still hurts.

Concrete Black and White Thinking:  “You could be right,” “I got that wrong,” and “I’m sorry, I made a mistake.”  These are the most liberating statements I have made recently.  There are many multi-layered perspectives on different levels to any one question, and I do not have the definitive answer.  I used to think that “every woman would be unfulfilled if she did not give birth to a least two children” (I can hear some of you laughing out loud across the Pacific Ocean – including myself).  But that was how I thought and there were no exceptions to my rule.  That was until I gave birth myself and as they were growing up I changed my mind and realized I was wrong – very, very wrong.  And if I could be wrong on that I could be wrong on many other things as well.

Personal Boundaries:  Recently I had a major disappointment within my job.  I felt flat and out of sorts.  Someone had said no to part of a project I was developing and I was very disappointed.  So I bought some chocolate ice-cream and went home.  I knew I was disappointed and out of sorts, but other ideas were bubbling in the back of my head and by the next morning plan “B” had taken effect and I was happier.  This is how normal people approach setbacks in life.  There was a time when I would have ranted and raved (and called it healthy venting) for the next six months, eaten, drugged, drank and smoked myself into oblivion and not have been able to enjoy the luxury of letting go and moving forward.  I would have taken a professional decision personally.

Anger Management Issues:  I used to think venting anger by screaming, smashing cups, plotting revenge and having a meltdown was a healthy and liberating way to express sadness, disappointment, hurt, fear and frustration.  Now I truly believe in not getting angry in the first place regardless of the provocation or situation.  It allows my headspace to remain crystal clear under intense pressure (thank you yoga).  I have learned to stand back and observe proceedings in an objective manner so that when the situation is later endlessly debriefed, I always come out smelling like Chanel No. 5 and the local psychiatric hospital has had an extra spare bed for the night.  Ahhhh, I love the smell of personal boundaries in the workplace.

For the major part – my life now works.

Pictures:  http://nancymorris.com/2011/11/10/brick-wall-busted/ and http://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/05/rozapoppin.html

At what point in therapy should an experienced therapist tell a long-term client with a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis, in an unsolicited manner, that they love them?

This is what my therapist said at the last session I had with her.  I do love you.

It was a major catalyst, amongst other things, for my decision to leave therapy back in April.  Our email relationship limped along for few months until I finally pulled the pin.  That occurred this morning.

The overwhelming sense of freedom, relief and empowerment is tinged with much sadness, grief, loss and longing.  I loved her dearly and she said she loved me, but only in the context of a therapy client within her four walls.  It was not a marriage proposal and we are not going to walk off into the sunset and live happily ever after in a house with a white picket fence.

I can live with that.  Finally.

I asked if we could have our photo taken together (with a camera on a timer) and she finally, after a long argument, conceded with much reluctance.  I have not looked at that photo since.  I believe I may have saved it to my hard drive before my laptop crashed, burned and died but I have not checked and have no inclination to do so.

I said my final goodbye this morning via email and told her that this last interaction was not the sum total of our relationship, but I knew it was never going to end prettily unless I made the final decision to break ties, move onwards, upwards and forward.

I could not have a last final session with rituals and a ceremonial ending worthy of a cheesy Hollywood movie, I just needed to keep a stiff upper lip and walk out.  Having a last session would be like having a wake for a living person and I could not do that.  Luckily, I did not know that would be our last session back in April, it just was.  For that I am truly grateful.

I could not have moved on, and she would not have let me, until I was completely satisfied with my current job in the mental health field.  My job and my new life has replaced my relationship with my therapist.  She is now surplus to requirements in the unfolding of my universe.  I will always remember her with a smile on my face and she will always occupy a place in my heart.  I have many fond memories of the past 15 years, and the not so fond ones have receded below my memory line.

So that is what I am leaving therapy with, a feeling that it was messy and difficult at times, rather like childbirth and parenting, but incredibly rewarding and ultimately healing.  It was not linear or chronological and there were times I told her I was quitting therapy to find a different therapist because I could not handle the intense feelings I had for her.  It’s as though a chapter of my life has ended and now I have the rest of the book to complete.

It’s a united sense of self that I am left with, rather than the split fragmented one I arrived with.  I have integrated all my intense feelings, all the good, the bad and the downright ugly, into the context of my life.

She told me she loved me because she felt it was safe to do so.  That I was healed enough to accept it without regressing.  She was right.  And she was wrong.

It was not perfect therapy – it is what Donald Winnicott would call, “good enough.”

Picture:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset

When I listen to the eerie, haunting music of Sigur Ros, an Icelandic band, it takes me to a place of yearning, grief and loss and longing that I cannot identify and don’t understand. This is what my children would call Mum’s sad, weird, drunk music.  I used to listen to it in 2004 when I was not a well person.

How can you yearn for something that you don’t know exists?

How can you identify something when you are unaware of its existence?

How do you grasp onto something when it appears to have no substance?

If I discover and hold onto what it is will I be happy?

Do I really want to find out what it is that I am looking for?

Living with and taming the beast of uncertainty is something we all have to live with.  We are never quite sure how the day’s events will pan out.  At the end of the day when I review the timeline of what happened, I need to come away with a sense of, yes that went well, or no it didn’t go well, but tomorrow is another day.  The day after that I have to let go of the day before with all its sadness, badness and guts and glory and move forward.  This is called mindfulness, being aware of only the present moment in a non-judgemental way, because ultimately that is all we have.

Certain foods, textures, smells, voices, sights, sounds and the music of Sigur Ros puts me in a headspace where I am not sure where mindfulness lies.  I have to constantly bring myself back to the present moment because I find myself drifting off into outer space and I need to concentrate on more earthly requirements such as finishing that report I have to do for work, or picking up my children from school, cooking, cleaning, gardening and ringing my parents.

This is called staying grounded.  For people who suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder also known by some as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, visiting the past is either an easy floating journey; or an unceremonious and graceless catapault, yanked back in time through a sudden flashback.  This requires the mindful ability to pull out of the quicksand of traumatic memories and love lost; and out of the place of yearning, grief and loss and longing for something that happened or never happened 35 years ago.

Overcoming this feeling is called acceptance.  I accept that what happened was not my fault, I accept that I still have flashbacks from events not under my control and I accept that not everyone who purports to be my friend is my friend and that not everyone is a potential enemy waiting to sabotage my life.  That is called trust.

I still have nebulous trust issues that surface during times of personal stress.  Nowadays I recognize that my trust in good people can waver due to past events and I am quick to rectify the situation.  My past is not my future and my future is still uncertain.

And of that, I am completely certain.

Pictures:  http://techiekids.net/cartoon_pics.htm

Ten years ago, I went to a David Cassidy concert in Perth and pressed myself up against the stage for him to come down and hold my hand, which he did.  But apparently I held on for so long he had to scream in my face, “LET GO!”

That was the best advice I have ever received.  I have finally taken David up on his offer and would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his insight and wisdom.  I have let go.  I have let go of all that emotional baggage I have been carrying around with me for nearly fifty years.

Imagine carrying fifty kilos of rubbish on your back, an amount that has accumulated with every year you have lived on this earth, then picture yourself dumping it forever down a deep, deep shaft.

After embracing mindfulness and acceptance I have done that and the feeling of freedom that entails is quite an intoxicating experience.  That is not to say my problems have vanished in a puff of blue smoke; quite the contrary, they are still there only now I have a different attitude towards them.  I am not carrying them on my back.  They appear to have taken on an amorphous, abstract quality whereby they exist somewhere in space and time but are no longer part of me.  They are a separate entity that has no power, no legitimacy and no control over my thoughts, feelings, actions and behaviours.

This was achieved by embracing the Buddhist idea of impermanence.  Everything is impermanent, including this conscious life.  At (almost) fifty I am young enough to have the physical capacity and some original energy to achieve my latest goals and old enough not to care what other people think of me in the process.  I have spent the first part of my life learning in order to fully enjoy the next part of my life.  I see ahead of me at least thirty years of living in the moment, being present to every sensation, every thoughtful reflection and a mind that has learned the value of highlighting only the great stuff I have achieved.

One of the buzzes of my life that I think about a lot, is the people who read my blog.

Who are you?

What are your lives like?

Have I touched you in any way?

Have I annoyed you?

Angered you?

Given you a new reason to live your life more authentically?

There are many of you whom I have engaged with in email conversation; People from America, Bahrain, Sweden, Holland, France, England, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, Australia (my home town) and many other countries.

I feel honoured and privileged to let you know that you have all been part of my healing process.  Even after three years I still get excited when I post a new blog and watch the numbers of people who have read it climb to over a thousand overnight.  I love your comments, the good and the bad, but the ugly I either delete or pass them onto John Grohol.  I have only ever done that three times.

No-one in my real life reads my blog because they do not know about it.  I do not give out the link because this is a part of my life that is private and confidential and that is why it works.  In my real life I do advocacy as a peer worker and I tell a different story of despair, hope and recovery.  Especially the recovery part.

Therefore I have boundaries around my blog.  Having strict boundaries around parts of my life is a new concept to me.  I always thought everyone needed to know everything.  Now I am very selective about who knows what.  This means that I no longer have the urge to pass on toxic information otherwise known as gossip.  As a result I have been trusted by sensitive, vulnerable people with their life history and many secrets.  This does not trigger me, but it empowers me to hug and hold onto who they are and the trust they feel in me.  The power of a secret is in how to hold it so the container does not get damaged.  It’s about holding on and letting go at the same time without feeling weighed down by the sheer magnitude.

I held onto David Cassidy’s hand for too long and he wanted me to let go.  And I did.  I still have the body memory of his hand.  I also want him to know that I have let go, of the past, of all those excruciatingly poisonous memories, of people who were not there for me during traumatic times, who did not understand my sensitive, vulnerable self and who chose to ignore me when I reached out.  I have let go of all of you and now live my life without the restrictive, invisible, self-imposed forces that ruled over me like a tyrannical despot.

In the words of Viktor E Frankl:  Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Photos: http://www.davidcassidyfansite.com/InPrintPages/DCNewsletter2006Nov.html and http://www.apeculture.com/music/cassidy.htm

It occurred to me the other day that I had not thought about myself in terms of excessive guilt, shame and disgust for many months.  This coincided around about the time I started my new job working with self-actualised people in the mental health field and making long overdue decisions about what sort of people I surrounded myself with in my private life.

I never seemed to have the discriminatory powers to know who was good for me, who was not good for me and who was perfectly evil in my life.  I also put strict boundaries around certain family members.  There are people in my life determined to make me feel shame and guilt because that is what they do best. 

Guilt is behaviour focused.  I feel somewhat guilty because I have not returned a phone call, cleaned up the back garden, paid a bill or shouted at my teenagers.  That is fine.  But when I feel guilty for simply existing and taking up too much oxygen, when logic tells me I am a good person – that is self and other induced shame and that is when I feel self-disgust and loathing.  It is this feeling that (for me) leads to smoking, drinking, binge-eating and taking drugs.  A certain amount of guilt spurs me into action.  Shame makes me withdraw into the fetal position where I cannot function and disgust leads me into self-destruction and suicide-ideation.

I needed (with the help of a good therapist) to separate myself from society with all three emotions until I could work out what they meant and how they affected me.  I am learning that people I used to be friends with, people I worked with and random others are not nice, happy people and no matter how hard I tried I could not win their approval.  There are certain people in my life who have told me they have long-standing issues with me.  I told one of them that that was their choice, it didn’t affect me anymore and I was long over holding ancient grudges.

I choose (and it is a healthy choice) to emotionally and psychically separate from them and live my own relatively guilt free, shame-free and disgust-free life.  The issues, grudges and problems they may have with me originate from them and belong to them.  They cannot project or introject their thoughts and feelings into me anymore.  I feel strong, liberated and empowered.

Nothing has actually changed in my life except for me.  I cannot change the world, nor can I change what the world thinks of me.  I live my life without the shackles of negative self-hatred.  When I make a mistake, or fail to do something, I finally understand that these guilt feelings will pass, that shame and disgust is no longer a part that I identify with and that satisfying, healthy, consistent, reliable feelings of the goodness of who I am is here to stay.

Pictures from:  http://www.health-reply.com/borderline-personality-disorders/ and http://xtrahealth.com.au/

Emailing and texting your therapist can be (for some) more addictive than cigarettes, alcohol and drugs.  The reward neurotransmitter dopamine floods your brain and motivates you to do more of the same. This is the same neurotransmitter secreted when you snort cocaine.  Even a simple email exchange can do this for some.  It’s not what drug you take, it’s the effect that drug has on your brain.

Until recently I had full email privileges with my therapist which led to gross feelings of narcissistic entitlement.  I haven’t seen her in therapy since April and I still expected her to be available electronically 24/7.  I would get upset when she didn’t reply within 12 hours.  If she did not reply immediately, I would get rude and hostile and she would apologize.

This relationship was not healthy for either of us.  We were merged and sometimes not in a healthy, nurturing, supportive, way.  Partly because of her availability, I would lurch from one crisis to another expecting her to resolve my life with a few words on an electronic form of communication.  Eventually she emailed that this had to stop and that I could email her, not every day, but every once in a while, and not to expect an immediate reply because quite frankly she was feeling overwhelmed.  She also said I was welcome to come back to therapy any time I wanted to.

While I didn’t interpret that as abandonment or rejection, there was a definite seismological shift in the Universe of Our Relationship.  I could have gone either way, I could have felt pushed and shoved from the therapeutic nest or I could consider myself launched into life with love, rather like what happens when a teenager/young adult leaves home.

I decided what she did was an uncommon act of kindness so I went cold turkey.  One email is too many and a hundred is not enough.  I cannot smoke one cigarette without being hooked again.  I had a good therapeutic cry and sent her one email back thanking her for her patience, her long term email support and that I understood where she was coming from and that it must have been hard for her.  I also said that I did not expect to resume therapy but you could “never say never.”

That was four weeks ago (but who’s counting?).  The first week was the hardest.  After that I felt truly liberated and empowered and no longer feel the urge to share my every thought and feeling, panic attack and flashback, good times and bad times, conniptions at work or arguments with my mother.

So how did this come about?  Two years ago I started getting involved in my own life.  I weeded the garden, I planted some plants.  I took advantage of the fact that I live five minutes from the beach.  I joined a gym and took up yoga.  I started walking the dog, bike riding, picking wildflowers, collecting rocks and photographing every duck that I saw.  But the greatest epiphany was making the executive decision to change careers.

After spending thirty years typing, filing, photocopying and answering the phone for indifferent bosses and uncaring corporations, I started studying in the mental health industry; pursuing a certificate in mental health and a degree in psychology, doing unpaid work experience and then I got a job in the mental health field working with people with a mental illness who want to give up the tobacco.  Instead of working for psychopathic supervisors, I got a fantastic, fabulous woman who is not just my supervisor but my mentor as well.  I have made mistakes and she has helped me correct those mistakes.

But I have to be so careful not to turn her into my therapist.  I email her at work with work issues only.  I have learned deeply in a most visceral manner about personal and professional email boundaries and I keep them in place at all times with all people now.  Emailing my therapist was not about the emails, it was about wanting to be with her and having her take care of my life for me.  My beloved therapist of fifteen years did a wonderful job with me.  She chose the exact right time to approach my email issues with her.  She waited till I was in the right job with the right support.

But this separation process has caused me much pain.  Growing up with boundaries is emotionally and sometimes physically painful.  I had grown up very much under my therapist’s warm wings, but I could not develop my skills, cognitions and emotions any further until I totally severed, not just the email connection, but the invisible umbilical cord that attached me to her.

I am balancing steadily on my own two feet now and dealing with all the issues and problems that life throws at us.  I am helping other people, instead of being the helped which is empowering for me.  I am giving back what I have had to take and that is how the Universe works for me.

How easy it would be to turn my supervisor into my therapist, but that is not her role.  My role is not to be dependent on anyone except myself and that is the goal of the therapist in therapy.  The process is small, incremental, painful and traumatic but with strength and support can change your life around.  This includes teaching you how to live your own life independently.

I had to embrace the chronic pain and heartache of falling in love with my therapist; and then I had to fall out of love with her, but still love her for what she has done for me as well as acknowledge the immense hard work and effort I put into myself.  No mean feat.  Mental illness is not an easy thing to recover from.  I am never cured, only recovered, and part of getting better for me was having a great supportive therapist.  Recovering from addiction is difficult regardless of what the “substance” is and therapy is always a means to an end and not an end in itself.

Freedom from addiction is the most powerful drug on earth.

Pictures:  http://www.watoday.com.au/polls/small-business/smallbiz-tech/email-addiction-20110504-1e7o0.html and http://trywalkingonwater.com/2011/03/02/piwteens/

I was recently at a social function and eagerly went up to this woman I work with, touched her shoulder and said, “Hi, how are you?”  She stared at me, looked very uncomfortable and frantically searched around for either someone more interesting to talk to or someone to rescue her from me.

This is a woman I have found curt, abrupt, dismissive, snappy and abrasive in the past.  I have never had an interaction with her where I have left feeling as though a warm breeze has blown through me, but rather a cold, icy wind that has left my whole being feeling fractured and discombobulated.

I knew this and yet I still went up to talk to her because, as a chronic masochistic people-pleaser, I unfailingly seek approval and acceptance from totally wrong and inappropriate graceless women.  I cannot bear the pain of rejection and abandonment from anyone even though I did not like her and essentially had split her into the “bad” part of the good and bad.  I always had an intense negative emotional reaction to her, felt deflated, empty and questioned who I thought was, and after an interaction with her I wanted to throw myself off a cliff. 

I would get angry and paranoid all out of proportion because she had an unconscious, emotional stranglehold on me that was exciting, frightening and intensely stifling.  All this from a series of unpleasant interactions from a woman one colleague wryly described as: “takes a long time to warm up.”

I was so upset I rang my mother who told me in no uncertain terms, “you are such a slow learner, Sonia.”  So I emailed my therapist and said maybe I was a slow learner after all.  She replied, not unkindly, that perhaps my mother was right.

My experience with my therapist has been that she never says anything to me unless I am ready to hear it whereas my mother just tells me whether I am ready for the truth or not.  But the fact of the matter is, that yes, I am a slow learner.  After fifty years I still expect frozen, rude and caustic women to instantly warm to me because I am attracted to them.

So if they are not going to change then who has to do the changing?  Why me of course.  I am the only person I can change.  After years of transformative therapy I knew this social blanking incident was not about me, it was about her.  I knew her reputation as being “hard to warm up and hard to warm to” yet this strange part of me felt compelled to turn her from Evelyn Harper into Carol Brady.

Luckily, I have education, knowledge and insight into why I want to turn every cold-hearted ice-queen into my warm, nurturing therapist.  It’s this repetition-compulsion Freud talked about where we unconsciously (and consciously) want to master our environment and change the past into something more palatable to our cognitive and emotional limbic system.

So what did I do at this social function where I was overtly blanked for ten seconds by this woman?  I stood there uncomfortably and realized she was not going to utter a single word; so I pivoted on the balls of my feet, made a 180 degree turn, walked off in the other direction, decided it was about her and not me and found someone else to talk to.  I did not look back.

That is until I saw her again, but I did not acknowledge her till she said hello to me and I may have nodded in her direction.  She said hello to me again the next day and the day after that and again, it is alleged I may have nodded in her direction.  I got on with my job and to my surprise rarely thought about her for the rest of my week.

I am finally cured of my unconscious desire to change crabby, fractious, rude people into happy, smiling, polite people unless I gave birth to them and they are between the ages of 16 and 18 and live in my house.  Self-empowerment is self-respect, self-esteem and self-confidence.

The refreshing and liberating power of radical fundamental change from within when it comes to imposing strict personal social boundaries on oneself regarding hostile others cannot be underestimated.

NB:  My computer crashed, burned and died recently – along with some email addresses.  Could “D” whom I have had a long-term email relationship with please email me?

Picture from:  http://sadaf-fayyaz.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html