What does overeating mean to me?

Food is my best friend and my worst enemy, an evil entity that stalks me in unsuspecting moments. Food is a drug, not unlike heroin. Food is life. Food is death. It is why anorexics deny it and why I try to fill myself up with it. I panic and think I will die if denied food. When I eat I’m in my own little world where no-one can hurt me. I am a child in my mother’s womb. It’s safe and protective and for the duration I can block out the terrifying world where I just don’t fit in. Not unlike my therapist’s room.

If anorexics suffer guilt, repulsion and feel a sense of non-entitlement to eat even the barest amount of food, then I as an overweight person with a compulsive eating disorder feel a gigantuan sense of all-encompassing authority and empowerment to eat whatever I want, whenever I want and in whatever quantities I desire and f**k you if you get in my way.

We are working together to see if I can gain control of my eating. To eat the right food, in the right quantity and at the right time, three times a day and with a moderate amount of exercise thrown in is something I can only fantasise about. My doctor tells me it is part biological and part psychological.

Body-wise I was of normal weight till I was ten. Psychologically and emotionally I am still ten years old. I am now learning perspective taking, discovering internal strategies to manage intense emotions, recognizing an improved ability to reflect on thoughts and feelings and finding my sense of empathy and connection – all socially approved ways of managing intense emotions. Over-eating is not an acceptable pastime or hobby. In a world that equates thinness with success, then I am a failure - and yet I am the worst when it comes to being most scathingly judgmental of fat people.

My mother said to me, when I was a decade old, that I was putting on weight and needed to go on a diet. I reflected upon this as I made my way to the shops for yet another bag of lollies. Looking back at photos of that era they reveal a smiling, happy child of normal weight with a bit of a pot belly.

My mother is a good woman. She fed and clothed me, educated me and gave me shelter. For that I am truly grateful. But as mother and daughter we were emotionally incompatible. I wanted a clingy, affectionate, adoring mother who would carry me on her hip forever. She wanted a quiet, independent, undemanding, studious child who would obligingly and silently fly under her emotional radar. My sister, who does not have an eating disorder or any other disorder for that matter, filled the role of compliant child more than adequately.

My mother would berate me for eating food I was not entitled to. The more she berated the more I ate. I overeat to compensate for the longings and losses in my life. For the fantasy mother who did not exist. To fill that empty void that not even therapy can fill sometimes. I was so overwhelmed by negative thoughts and emotions that I lost sight of who I was. I had no identity, just an aggressive, fragmented sense of no sense. I only felt good when I was eating. It numbed the ever present internal pain that I could not identify or describe.

Sometimes especially during my 14th summer I would experience a sense of longing and loss I could not explain, only feel, of something so intangible, so near yet so unobtainable, and so far out of my puny reach it was warming my heart and breaking it at the same time. I wanted a relationship with a special person. I wanted to fly to the moon and reach the stars. I wanted to swim in the deepest waters and climb the highest mountains. I wanted connection. I wanted love. I wanted to experience the sheer intimacy of raw sensuality and sex which combined with the Australian summer heat was an utterly irresistible sensation of being nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

What I ended up with was an eating disorder. Because I could not identify this curious, mystifying poignancy I overate so I wouldn’t have to feel it. It was so private, it didn’t occur to me others felt it as well. Psychologists have a name for this strange sensitivity - it’s called puberty.

Food became my best friend, but no matter how much I ate I never felt full. I was hurt, angry, bewildered, sad, lonely and feeling strange bodily sensations that I could only identify as sexual longings. But for those glorious heady moments when I ate everything and anything in sight, I didn’t have to feel fat, inadequate, lumpy, stupid and friendless. I might have felt enormous guilt after I ate, when I was full and stretched out on the couch, unable to breathe, let alone move. But it was all worth it. Then came the descent into the depth of darkness, the self-loathing and the vows of nutritional chastity to only eat a lettuce leaf every other day. My internal critical voice was screaming in my head that I was taking up too much space on the planet, breathing precious oxygen destined for special more deserving others. My one fear was that I would not get enough to eat and then I would have to feel all those painful feelings.

I am much older now and I have filled that existential unidentifiable sense of loss and longing and disconnection with my beloved husband, my gorgeous but somewhat annoying teenage children, my work, my studies, my writing and yes, with my mother. But I still overeat. I’m not sure what I am trying to fill now. I don’t ever feel hungry in my adored therapist’s room. Carrying that warm, loving, connected, entitled to live life to the fullest feeling into the real world is the biggest challenge for me.

The best days I have now are ones where I have a structured routine. I get up, make the bed, have a shower, get dressed and face the day. I learned this in a psychiatric clinic where they teach people with mental health issues living skills. Days when I eat three correct meals a day without alcohol are the ones when I feel mentally and physically clean.

Then there is the biological side of overeating. There is only a very tiny amount of brain neurotransmitter chemicals between anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating and normality. I recognise this now. Living cleanly and knowing when I am too hungry, engulfed in anger, overwhelmingly lonely and simply too tired to cope that I need to retreat to my psychic cave, lick my wounds and spent much time concentrating on what my body is feeling. Hunger will not kill me, over-eating will.

When I get hurt, thwarted or slighted I regress in primitive fashion to a child. I eat to make that internal child feel good about herself. But when I am in adult mode, I use other soothing techniques – reading, listening to music, studying or simply sitting, reflecting and looking out the window till the feelings pass.

I spend more and more time in adult mode now.

Only this time it was with Brother School Mazenod - or Spazenod as we used to call it. This is the fourth I’ve been to from the same school and I have to say they get better and better.

I grew up in a very snobby, isolated rural area, went to a girls Catholic boarding school run by nuns in the Seventies (for the Australians think Picnic at Hanging Rock without the haunting music, Anne Lambert, the picnic or the Hanging Rock and for the rest of you think Dead Poet’s Society without Robin Williams) with limited access to boys, a Victorian mother and emotionally-absent father and much younger sister I just didn’t get. All the necessary ingredients to make a future long-term, fixated and obsessed psychotherapy client.

At the ten-year reunion everyone had fabulous careers, slim figures, natural hair, a one drink limit, sensitive and caring partners/husbands, a huge house with matching mortgage, no regrets, no wrinkles and a fantastic future.

At the twenty-year reunion, we were pretty much working mothers and wives with primary school aged children and a side-lined career, but life was still great, the house was a work in progress, our children all well-behaved geniuses, a two drink limit, one or two minor regrets, but the future was still looking mighty sweet.

Come the thirty-year individual and combined reunions and it’s a level playing field where insecurity and pretension was conspicuous by its absence. Most people were divorced, careers were slumped or dumped or reconfigured and reinvented, children were surprisingly normal and sometimes disappointing, our hairdresser was our new BFF and the mortgage had blown out along with our credit cards, weight, emotional baggage and alcohol bill. But everyone there without exception displayed a philosophical maturity that only comes with age and experience. It’s not how our life evolved but how we viewed that precious process of evolvement because we were the lucky ones – we were still alive.

After taking a minute’s silence to remember those that could not be with us, we got down to the serious job of reminiscing or as psychologists would like to call it – trauma bonding. Those were the days when Nuns wielded absolute power and a steel edged ruler with gay abandon. One girl reminded us that a fallen sock was enough to get a good whack on the back of the knees and another girl reminded us that a fallen reputation was enough to incur the wrath of God (or Sister K - well same thing really).

One nun in particular, Sister P. was very quick in dealing out knuckle raps (Kevin Rudd style) for uncompleted homework. I was scared academically straight from basic to intermediate in algebraic equations under her tuition – Suddenly an apple plus a banana DID equal an orange.

I was about as popular at school as a three-hour maths test. In fact I told one or two people there that I should have been a school shooter (I became a writer instead). I was bullied at a previous school and so had the walls up from day one. I never spoke to the cool girls, went to the groovy parties, muck-up day, schoolies week or even the graduation dinner. I was terrified of boys, thought I was an alien from outer space and spent most of my teenage years staring longingly at my Bay City Rollers posters. But as I discovered even the in-crowd had their fears and hang-ups. But that’s not to say I’m now suffering false memory syndrome. I simply remember all the good times, selectively, for self-protection purposes.

For me the highlight of the evening was watching WMB tell DP that she had a crush on him all those years ago, because earlier on in the evening I had told JT I mooned after him at the post-Oliver party (Oliver Twist being the senior school play) but that he only had eyes for JG and didn’t know I existed. I was under the impression none of the boys would remember me, but I was very surprised to find out a lot of them did, including my secret crush.

Oliver Twist is my most everlasting and dearest memory. MC made a spectacularly wistful Oliver and all the girls fell in love with him. AB made an awesomely menacing Fagin but it was BS who embraced the role of Nancy Sykes who stole everyone’s heart but missed out on the Best Actress award because she kissed a boy on stage on the last night of production when she shouldn’t have. This was deemed so racy by Sister K (it was 1979) that she was not allowed to receive the Oscar for best performance. But we all knew it was BS that rocked the Kasbah that night.

My dearly loved mother’s parting words to me as I went out the door for the night was that if I had to sneak a boy in through the bedroom window to do it quietly and not to wake her up. But I brought all the boys back home with me that night, and the girls too.

All will remain in my heart forever.

Childhood is a precious memory.

Therapists, psychologists, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are business people. First and foremost they have bills to pay, mortgages to negotiate, children to put through college and the myriad of other expenses we all have to deal with. That’s life.

I loathe being reminded I am paying someone to take care of my mental health issues. But that is the reality of the situation. I am handing over tens of thousands of dollars and in return getting a brand new personality – but unlike a car or a new washing machine, there is no twelve month guarantee. The therapist gets paid whether the client gets well or not and when he/she puts their fees up, that pay-rise increment over a week can equate to my entire wage. If I said that didn’t make me feel a bit bitter I would be lying.

My father, not a fan of the psychotherapy industry, gleefully tells me the story (over and over again) of someone he knows who spent his not inconsiderable inheritance seeing a psychiatrist for a recognizable mental condition and after watching his legacy dwindle away year after year ended up in a far worse condition. When this person ran out of money, the psychiatrist refused to see him. As I pointed out to Dad (over and over again) this health professional is running a business, albeit in the caring industry, and he still needs a certain amount of income in order to survive. I would not expect an electrician or a plumber to work for nothing.

What are the financial ethics and personal morals and values of therapy? I have read where some well-known psychotherapy authors and practitioners feel guilty about charging so much money just for some talk-therapy. I applaud their guilt. I wonder if medical doctors, lawyers, accountants and politicians feel the same amount of guilt, humility and anxiety when they charge more for an hour than I make in the entire day. I also know of therapists who means test their clients charging on a sliding scale, giving discounts and even working pro-bono. Personally, I think a frequent therapy scheme or “buy ten, get one free” as standard practice would be a fabulous idea for people in long-term therapy.

So what do you actually get for your money?
A new mother?
A caring friend?
A warm and fuzzy feeling of connection and intimacy?
A depleted bank account and self-destructive tendencies whenever someone asks you, “How do you feel?”
A total mind f**k? (yes that happens), or
A better life with richer future earning potential?

I could have bought a second house with the money I have spent on the mental health industry (not just my personal therapist) and if I weigh up money spent -v- mental health received, I would go with the latter. While I still resent forking out bucket loads of cash, the alternative is worse. When all is said and done, it is only money. Thanks to my therapist I am earning a living and studying for a degree which will put me in a higher earning bracket.

Life wasn’t meant to be fair, equal or easy and mental health is a genetic lottery.

It’s quite simple for me. Without therapy, I would not be here.

Sometimes I just want someone to put their arms around me so I can cry uncontrollably and wipe my nose on their sleeve. I don’t want to be told to pull myself together, pick my socks up, get a life, move on, build a bridge and get over it or take a spoonful of cement and harden up. I just want someone to validate and recognize my long-term pain and acknowledge it.

2. A Horse With No Name.

As a child of the Seventies this was my third most hated song ever, after Car Wash and Chuck E’s in Love. Now I am almost into my dotage, I am hearing this song in a different light. My take on it is that it is about solitude and/or depression, the desert being a sucking life-force, the horse being solitude or depression and the rider being the solitary or the depressed. Maybe it wasn’t what the song-writer had in mind but to me it’s all about finding myself again.

3. Behind Closed Doors.

In therapy behind closed doors no-one can hear you scream (or laugh). And that’s the way it should be. Family, friends and work colleagues don’t have the same tolerance level for my problems as my therapist does. I’ve finally, FINALLY stopped thinking that the check-out-chick and the garage attendant are my new best friends as well as spending my entire lunch-hour treating my indifferent work colleagues as a Psychological Health Support Management Team.

4. Remember (Sha la la)

This is what you have to do behind closed doors. Remembering the past in particular which is painful, regressive but kind of feels good in a masochistic way at the same time.

5. Bend Me, Shape Me.

The idea of talking to another person who is qualified to contort and twist your grey matter is so that they can bend and shape your mind into one that isn’t malfunctioning and sending off sparks at the wrong time, with the wrong person and in the wrong place. My head is a completely different shape from fourteen years ago. There’s only one person (ok maybe two, all right three if you include my mother) fighting for space. Between my therapist and I we have evicted the cast of thousands that used to squat for free.

6. Looking Through the Eyes of Love.

Otherwise known as the transference song. We look at our therapists through the eyes of love – puppy love. When you’re in love with someone they have no faults. I’ve hit the highs of transference and come down the other side and am starting to see my therapist as a wise old crone, but do I love her anymore? I used to think I was in love, but the honeymoon ended a while ago and mature loving/kindness has set in. After a decade and a half I finally feel our relationship is more egalitarian.

7. When Will I See You Again?

This is kind of self-explanatory. I’ve been known to count the days down till Therapy Day arrives and then get as anxious as an ant around a hungry ant-eater and just want to not turn up. Once I sat in her waiting room, in my usual seat well hidden from the reception desk and my therapist’s door until the receptionist leaned out and spied me and asked me how I was and I replied in an over-jovial voice, that I was wonderful and that my weekend was excellent and wasn’t the weather fabulous? I want to see my therapist again, but not the receptionist.

8. The Morning After.

When I see my therapist it takes me till at least the morning after to process all the information, integrate it into my life, have a good cry and then get back to doing whatever it is I was doing before I went to therapy. This can take three days. The night before the morning after is spent thinking about what I’m going to say; all these perfect conversations in my head, her insightful answers and my aha understanding of how to deal with an old problem in a completely new way. It never seems to go quite by plan though. However, psychotherapy is incremental and I always come away with a nugget of gold at the end though.

9. Look for the Hero Inside Yourself.

Your therapist is a means to an end, not an end in his/her self. This means checking inside your body to find out who you are and what you are capable of. I wrote and had mainstream published two books, a radio series and a freelance writing career. She facilitated my head-space and nurtured my potential, but I did the hard yards. I am my own hero.

10. I Can See Clearly Now.

That is what therapy is all about - seeing your life, your family, your friends, the rest of the world and most importantly yourself through new eyes. Rather like when I got glasses for my short-sightedness. I had gotten so used to seeing a grey, fuzzy, underwater world that I came to think of it as perfectly normal. Now I can see as clearly as possible. I don’t have to be perfect. My faults and foibles can actually endear me to other people and vice versa. When my therapist spilled hot candle wax over herself and the couch, missed her mouth with a cup of tea and drowned her laptop with a glass of water, I didn’t think she was a stupid idiot, I just thought she was normal like the rest of us. It’s not what happens; it’s how we handle what happens. Previously if I did something like that I would be flaying myself with a cat-o-nine tails for weeks to come. I can see so clearly now that I can forgive myself for not always getting it right.

It is a cliche when clients fall in love with their therapists. But many movies seem to get the client/therapist roles all wrong. Movies often deal with transference lust rather than love. Most notably Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte, who consummate their transference issues on the big screen during Prince of Tides, before going back to their respective partners and boring lives. The scriptwriters got around that particularly awkward, ethical situation because Nick Nolte was not officially Barbra Streisand’s client, he was the brother of her client, which, although sails perilously close the edge of the world as we know it, technically manages to navigate its way through the tidal-waves of legal and moral violations. Just.

The Sopranos also managed to neatly satisfy an audience’s vicarious voyeuristic transference tendencies when Tony Soprano had a sexual fantasy scene which involved violently sweeping all accoutrements off the therapist’s desk except for the therapist Jennifer Melfi herself, and going for it in an unbridled, finally requited, sexual transference.

In a nutshell, erotic transference is where the traumatized client wants to have healing sex with the nurturing therapist. Eroticized transference is where the delusional client thinks the caring therapist wants to have healing sex with their irresistible self. However, if your therapist is suffering from erotic or eroticized counter-transference (for everything there is an opposite) and wants to have an unethical, illegal quickie with you, leave their office as rapidly as possible, preferably leaving a small whirlwind of dust in your wake.

Sexual fantasies however (on both sides of the couch) are apparently normal. A peer-reviewed journal provides evidence based research that 95% of male therapists and 76% of female therapists have sexual feelings towards clients. In real life a dual relationship (and not just of the sexualized sort) has vast potential to harm the client and puts an almighty question mark over the therapist’s ethics and standards. While therapy sex makes for great TV viewing, it tends to reveal more about audience expectations than the therapy profession itself. However, never mistake Fantasyland for the excellent work done in a real-world therapist’s office.

There is a reason I have stayed with my therapist for fourteen years – she is a most ethical person with self-restraint and well-defined boundaries - and that niggles, irritates and gets on my nerves greatly at times. I would like to go to the movies with her, share a café cappuccino, go for a walk along the beach, take her out for dinner or move in together and live happily ever after. It’s what Sigmund Freud called transference love which is not about sexual feelings but rather the more ubiquitous sensual fantasies of merging, enmeshing and being engulfed in the mother/child symbiotic relationship. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a male or female therapist, whether your therapist is fat or thin, attractive or has a face like a smacked bum, or whether or not you (or they) are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or asexual; these transference fantasies always come from the same deep primitive place – your parents and the way they related to you as a child.

Transference love is crucial to the therapeutic process. It allows the patient to explore all manner of parental feelings in a safe, trusting and respectful environment.

Here are eight ways to know you are in love with your therapist:

1. Shopping with your therapist is not retail therapy, but…..

You go shopping for clothes and visualize what your therapist would look like in them rather than yourself. I’ve had to actively remind myself on many an occasion that I have my own sense of style and taste that differs from hers. My therapist once wore a blood-red and sunset-orange frilly, ruffled skirt that looked like an out-of-control bushfire on a hot Australian summer day. It felt like it was alive and breathing fire. I didn’t like it but I wanted to go out and buy one anyway.

2. You have your therapist’s voice in your head.

You have your therapist’s voice in your head; a warm, honey-toned, well-modulated one that says, “You are very special! You can do this! I believe in you!” This mellifluous chant has, over the years, slowly replaced the harsh, angry, scathingly judgmental rant that used to scream, “I hate you and I wish you were never born.”

3. Sharing synchronicity and relationship through books.

Books are connection points for like-minded people. You read a book about mothers and daughters and immediately want to post it to your therapist so she can share your experience. And she would except for the time factor. She has her own set of books she hasn’t got time to read. I’ve just read “Waiting Room” a memoir by Gabrielle Carey, about her very private, distant, unknown and emotionally unavailable elderly mother who was diagnosed with a brain tumour. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to send it immediately to my therapist or my own mother. During therapy, I will sometimes give her a brief synopsis of the current book I am reading and explain my feelings on the subject for a deeper and more penetrating awareness and understanding of what the themes, motifs, symbols, plot and characters mean to me. Sometimes we do swap and read each other’s books. Once she gave me a book that I was already reading at the time.

4. When your therapist gives you a gift.

I have two roses, one pink, one yellow, dried and pressed in a wooden frame sitting on my bookshelf (see above photo). My therapist gave them to me when I had cancer. It is a potent symbol of her on-going care. It has more meaning to me than a thousand fresh roses from the world’s most expensive florist. This is because it came from her garden. She told me that one of them was her mother-in-law’s favourite. If our house ever catches fire, after the photo albums it will be the most treasured item I will grab.

5. You don’t have to agree with her all the time in order to connect.

Just because my therapist is a yoga freak, doesn’t mean I will ever like yoga (or Pilates). I went once, passed wind, snored my head off and was too embarrassed to ever set foot in the place again. Yoga is aerobics for the elderly and Pilates is yoga for people who have a fetish for plastic and bondage. However she has instilled in me that exercise of any and all sorts (and good eating) is important for both the brain and the body; by example rather than nagging and threats of love withdrawal.

6. A good therapist’s wisdom affects more than just the client.

If my therapist is my substitute mother, then she is a surrogate grandmother to my children. She passes on her worldly wisdom to me and I pass it onto my teenagers who tell me in no uncertain terms to, “Stop talking like a psychologist, Mum.”

7. Your therapist cares for you even when you don’t.

I remember a defining moment twelve months into therapy. I found out I had Type 2 Diabetes and was really frightened, angry and wanting to retreat into denial. My therapist leaned forward, looked me in the eye and said that she “cared about my kidneys.” Eight years later when I was diagnosed with a malignant kidney tumour, she gave me a bunch of roses, two of which, one pink, one yellow, I dried and pressed as a permanent visual reminder not only of her loving/kindness, but that I need to care for my two kidneys, one pink and one yellow (and the rest of me) as well.

8. You admire and respect your therapist so much you decide to become one yourself.

Some children want to grow up and be just like their mothers. I am no exception. Eighteen months ago I embarked on a psychology degree, love it dearly and am doing very well. Passing on her love of education in general and psychology in particular is, I consider, a legacy of her great therapy to me among many other things. Like caring for my family, my house, my garden, my health, my self-respect, my respect for others; thus instilling in me an overriding wish to help other people who have suffered from any form of mental illness.

Michael G. Conner, Psy.D, author of the internet article, Transference: Are You a Biological Time Machine? gripes that “Transference is really difficult to recognize, deal with and understand, but it is incredibly interesting. I tend to avoid people who are “oozing” with transference potential.” His attitude is not uncommon as Borderline Personality disordered clients, seen by many as the cane-toads of Therapy World, tend to “ooze” transference. Seen in another light - dramatic, intense, super-heated, fierce and impassioned, but controlled and regulated thoughts, feelings and behaviours where you have easy access to powerful emotions can be an amazingly vital and life-giving source of art; think Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, Brian Wilson, Patrick Swayze, Marilyn Monroe or Heath Ledger.

Borderlines in therapy are hard work, and their recovery never follows the straight, narrow and linear path from problem to solution in twelve Medicare-covered insurance appointments that the Australian government would like us to believe. It took me fourteen years to learn that the Art of Borderline is in mindfulness, not madness. It’s in the knowing, harnessing, concentrating, focusing and sitting in the moment long enough to capture, guide and mold the lingering essence of the raging storm into something creative and constructive. Overweened therapy is not part of this process. When an emotionally intense person gets hooked on therapy, it’s hard to give up that dependency and become your own person; you just want to get legally adopted by your therapist and walk together hand in hand towards the quintessential sunset. So while those emotions don’t just disappear overnight, they do have to go somewhere else.

Here are ten methods I have found helpful.

1. The Perfect Person.

Your therapist is not perfect. But just because she doesn’t remember the name of your favourite teddy-bear when you were six years old doesn’t mean she doesn’t care for you during the therapy hour or even sometimes outside it. Like electricians living in houses with blown light globes, non-working ovens, and live wires hanging out of random walls, dentists with cavity-ridden children or psychologists with badly behaved teenagers (actually they are the worst) and nurses who hate looking after sick family members; your therapist, when she leaves her office for the night does not want to deal with her family, her friends or anyone else’s problems, let alone your extra-curricular 3am emails, phone calls or text-messages. She just wants to chill out with a bottle of wine in front of Desperate Housewives or South Park like everyone else and have a long hard bitch about her day.

2. Literal -v- Symbolic

Therapy is role-playing. Your beloved therapist is role-playing your symbolic mother. She is not your biological one. This is a phenomenon I’ve had trouble coming to terms with. Therapists get quite frightened and tend to mutter the “T” word (termination) ominously when this happens. I get angry when she is not available 24/7 but I do have to remember I am not two-years-old and pre-verbal. I am a grown-up woman who can look after herself and her family.

3. Exorcise dependency needs from your therapist.

And I mean that in the nicest possible way. Ritualize the exorcism if you like. Light a scented candle to symbolize the removal of dependency and transference needs, at the same time building up and retaining the not-so-subtle nuances of the nature, spirit and intense oxygen-giving, red-cell life-blood of being that was once you and her merged in a symbolic relationship, and use that intensity in other areas of your life. Internalize the lessons learned, re-experience the warm, rich, acute brain feelings of those aha moments. Un-enmeshing and un-entwining, but remembering with loving/kindness takes time, patience, motivation and practice. Instead of thinking what my therapist would do in a certain situation, I think what I would do, with the knowledge and power I now possess, thanks to her tender care and kindness.

4. The Internalized Therapist.

I have to remember always what I have learned, in a healthy, healing, mindful manner. That is the embodiment of good emotional-regulation. Sitting in those brain-storm moments of overwhelming feelings, working out what they are, where they came from and finally realizing I do not have to act on them. I can have Grace on one shoulder and Dignity on the other and my Internalized Therapist sitting, Buddha-like, in the middle coalescing and fusing with my highest chakras, harmonizing with what I have learned from her to make me who I am today. I know, in that respect, she will always be with me.

5. Move On.

When you feel as though you have learned everything about yourself and you are wondering if you are just seeing your therapist for coffee and a chat, it’s time to reassess why you are still going to see him/her. Are there issues you have not dealt with or do you just enjoy a loving, motherly chat? I had to sweep aside with an iron broom the self-deception, repression and ultimate denial as to my reasons for still ringing up and booking those appointments. I sometimes forget I am well now.

6. Keep yourself busy.

Plan your day as best you can. I hate routines and boundaries but they work when I adhere to them. I learned that in a psychiatric hospital. Physical, emotional, mental and spiritual busyness can keep your mind off the fact that therapy is no longer available. When I’m at work I’m finally me, without the lingering therapy-ghost hanging around Drop Dead Fred style. There are plenty of times I no longer feel umbilically attached to someone who is not a huge part of my daily physical life now.

7. Replace therapy with something you love.

I love writing, it gets me into the zone, a space where I can recreate myself, discover my potential and create a vibrant headspace where I fully believe I am ok and fit into the cogs and wheels of a rapidly spinning world. Some people knit, garden, paint, crotchet, make china dolls, play guitar, cook new food recipes, fly model airplanes, get a dog or a cat to pour their love onto (just don’t call it by your therapist’s name). It doesn’t matter what you do as long as it gets you “into the zone” where your mind slows down to a set-point where some form of balance, rationality and stability kicks in. Sometimes for me, cleaning the bathroom and toilet calms me down.

8. Enlighten yourself with education, intellectualism and rationalism.

You don’t need to enroll in a psychology degree to educate yourself on the role the amygdala and hippocampus play in your Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or permanent hyper-vigilant state. Google search for insightful articles on anything psychologically related, although I guess if you are reading this you have already discovered the power of the internet. Anger, rage and hostility are the biological reactions where stress incites our amygdala to produce copious amounts of cortisol, the stress hormone which can cause us Borderlines to go postal. Falling Down, anyone? I have an overactive amygdala which means when someone gets in my face or thwarts my goal, I channel bunny-boiler Glenn Close and think my head is about to explode. Learn about your brain, educate yourself in alternative behaviours other than smashing a cup or a plate on the floor and watching and feeling the subsequent dissociated, unflinching nothingness as the shattered rippling effect of china shards fly all over the place; followed by a feeling of high justification. I was always mindful enough to use the cheap china. I never once smashed a piece of Wedgwood or Royal Doulton.

9. Forgive yourself for having extremely harsh and protracted emotions.

This is a tough one, especially if you set high standards for yourself. It wouldn’t occur to you to need to forgive yourself for diabetes, kidney cancer, a stroke, a heart attack or a broken leg. So forgive and be kind to yourself for having a biological pre-disposition towards unholy emotions but know that there is something you can do about it.

10. Cold Turkey.

When all else fails there’s cold turkey. Hot turkey is something I have once a year at Christmas - hot, smelly, dry, and stringy and for some reason has a most repressive and foreboding taste. So you can imagine what cold turkey tastes like. But sometimes it can be a most palatable dish when the alternative is to mainline that infected needle of endless therapy and wait for that warm, nurturing but ultimately self-destructive rush to kick in.

It would be horribly devastating to me if anything happened to my therapist. Thank God she is alive and healthy. Although a bit older now, fourteen years more than when I first met her; with a few more wrinkles and laughter lines, slightly greyer hair and with a vaguely stiffer slightly arthritic countenance - although gravity (and genes) have been very kind to her. Over the years I feel she has gained a much younger, albeit more philosophical, existential outlook on life, an increased tendency to eat well, exercise regularly and look after her health in a big way which she is role-modeling, somewhat successfully, for me. In other words there is nothing ancient or doddery about her yet. She is aging well with much grace and dignity. She once told me she plans on retiring when she is taken away in a coffin.

So the chances of her falling off the perch (or should I say couch) is very minimal. I have arrangements with my long-term, highly-valued therapist in case that happens. I know who to contact in case the unthinkable happens. I know where my records will end up. But how do you do effective therapy with someone else when you are grieving your mother figure/supportive mentor/internalized role model? Are you allowed – is it ethical - to attend their funeral?

What are your rights if your therapist ends up with ill-health, in hospital, a paraplegic, a quadriplegic, has a life-threatening disease, or more likely, if she/he retires or moves to another state or country or simply gives up the therapy profession altogether? This happened to me once. My therapist of eight sessions decided I was cured, dismissed me and reinvented herself as an artist. Luckily I had still viewed her with ingrained suspicion and there were no transference issues. A therapist I know of gave two years notice to her clients that she was retiring. This allows time to work through important concerns - transference problems or anything else. Will the retiring therapist allow post-retirement email/phone/fax/text message contact and for how long? Does the umbilical cord get slashed, cleaved, and lacerated immediately with a pounding iron fist leaving a bloody mess the client has to clean up. Or is it gently and slowly whittled away, reduced, reshaped and reformed with healing, caring hands till it is possible for the client to build up a nourishing life support system of their own?

Therapists are not like lawyers, accountants, dentists, lawn-mower men, posties or video-outlet consultants, where you would be sad if they passed away, but who are highly replaceable. If anything happened to my therapist I would feel as though my world had been rudely shoved off its axis and was heading at light-speed towards a rapidly looming sun and instant disintegration. In some instances clients feel more for their therapists than they do their own mothers.

According to Nancy McWilliams, author of “Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy”, therapists owe it to their clients to stay as healthy as possible. She says that patients need models of adults who take proper care of themselves; that therapists must take care of their health in the long as well as the short term.

This also means not being so exhausted you have to be propped up during the day to function. Too much exercise can be just as detrimental as not enough exercise. There’s no point doing therapy with a traumatized client if your body is aching and craving to lie down and sleep. A good therapist is also an Oscar-winning actor, breaking through that physical barrier to look alive and alert even when catatonic with exhaustion. I have to admit I have never seen my therapist in this state but I do know she has given me a few heart-stopping moments of existential grief.

A few years ago she told me she had gone for a mammogram and then never actually got around to telling me the results. Meanwhile I took her lack of response as meaning she had received a negative outcome. Because I am hypersensitive to emotionally-loaded information from her I panicked and got very upset. A few sessions later, she randomly told me what would happen to my records should she one day shuffle off this mortal coil. I put two and two together and came up with terminal breast cancer. Lack of resultant information about the mammogram made Chinese whispers look like a fully-documented, highly-evolved mission statement. Not that I blame her. She had no idea the association patterns I was forming in my head. She felt the two pieces of information were unrelated.

It’s hard, very difficult for client and therapist to talk about these things. It’s not a topic I bring up in therapy because something always jams in my throat at the crucial moment. It’s an unthinkable thought, but it’s always there lurking under the surface. There’s an inherent vulnerability that simply being alive brings out in all of us. The inevitability and the fear of death is what Irvin D. Yalom, psychotherapist and author of “Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Dread of Death”, believes is the cause of most anxiety. On the other hand, Adolph Meyer, Swiss psychiatrist and President of the American Psychiatric Association wrote over a hundred years ago, “Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch.”

The trouble is, I’m starting to get that prickling, irritating, crawling skin sensation more and more of late. But it’s not that itchy – just yet.

Personally I like to wear my favourite Chanel slingbacks between my lips because that way there’s no room to say anything I will never regret in the first place. Plus a full mouth means a pair of ears that’s not only listening intently but progressively learning in a very astute and meaningful manner.

My psychotherapist, whose black flatties are firmly planted on solid industrial-strength carpet, has been listening and learning very carefully for several years now. To her credit never once have I seen her stifle a well-deserved yawn, watched in dismay as her eyes glazed over or seen her slowly fall to one side suffering from stultifying sleep-inducing boredom as I tell the same old story over and over and over and over again.

She’s done such a good job on me that I now find myself wanting to study and collect books on psychoanalytic psychotherapy pretty much in the same way Angelina Jolie collects other people’s husbands and overseas orphaned offspring.

Psychotherapy is all about active listening and active listening is inherently exhausting. So is trying to promote and sell the “open ears, shut mouth” concept to a household of strongly opinionated teenage boys and men who start off every other sentence with “Just listen to ME………” accompanied by aggressive finger-poking in the general direction of the errantly perceived non-listening party.

Enduring long, pointless and quarrelsome arguments is part and parcel of parenting teenagers. Taking a leaf out of my therapist’s book I close my mouth and open my ears and let them rant and rave about what ails them at this particular point in time and space, without interjecting with:
“What you SHOULD do is this….” or
“What you MUSTN’T do is that….”

My parents once said about my younger sister that if she would only listen to what they had to say then she would never make any mistakes.

Boys and their fathers can argue loud and incessantly about who’s not listening the most but I was rather taken aback and secretly thrilled to hear my teenage son say to my husband, during a very recent argument, that HE never listens to me, but Mum always does.

Looks like I might have a career in psychotherapy after all and I should be qualified to practice just in time to help my beleaguered progeny make sense and recover from their own tortured and traumatized upbringing.

Last week I started a new job and came face to face with someone I used to work with whom I had an overwhelming number of unresolved workplace issues. Immediately I was caught up in the fight or flight response and wanted to run out of that building screaming. Only when this happens to me I freeze like a deer caught in the headlights or am transfixed by the menacingly collective beady, narrowed, yellow eyes of a pack of hungry lions. I get so frightened I cannot think or move to save my life. I had run into an old nemesis for whom I had so many revenge fantasies it consumed a greater part of my life.

This woman was number one on my hit list of enemies I needed to self-destruct upon.

I stayed in this new job for a few days and got so engrossed in frantically working as hard as I could and hiding from this woman so much so that it was noticed I was not interacting with the rest of the girls. But they knew her and liked her and so they were the enemy, right?

On the way to work, I would pick off a small stem of white fragrantly scented flowers from a random garden and place it on my desk. It was my guardian angel protecting me against any evil spirits.

My therapist created an emergency appointment for me. I instinctively knew it was going to one of the hardest I ever had to face. I called her a people whisperer once because she has this uncanny natural ability to make me face my inner demons at the right time, in the right place, at the right moment and in the right manner – and with the right amount of compassion and understanding. With her more regressed clients she intertwines her personality with specific techniques.

She rattled my cage as gently as she possibly could and took me back to a place buried deep in my mind with correlating overtones of a similar situation, and then took me back even further to a much more scarier place; to what therapists call a preverbal state where language literally ceases and body sensations and feelings speak louder than words. A good therapist can do this, but a fantastic, brilliant, attuned people whisperer holds your hand, wraps her aura around your body and travels back in time with you. She cries with you, shedding tears of kindness and empathy as she literally takes your embedded pain from you and puts it in her own body. It’s not a solo event, it’s a shared journey with someone you trust and feel safe with.

My therapist, Joanne Woodward to my Sally Field, then gave me a small stem of white fragrantly scented flowers that she had picked from a random garden on her way to work that morning. It was the exact same flower I had picked the previous day to protect me from evil.

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon with our relationship. When I am preverbal, in other words my head is operating in a space it used to occupy somewhere from birth to two years old – the preverbal stage of children - my therapist and I share an exceptional amount of synchronicity to the point where I believe in telepathy. My mother-in-law and her daughter are very close and have often shared telepathic moments. Mothers and daughters who enjoy close relationships often do.

I saw the light in her office that day. I saw why I over-reacted, I saw the clay and the putty and the less than subtle brush-strokes that made me who I am today, but I also saw the golden outline of the future and it wasn’t as scary anymore. I had tuned in to this other woman’s pain. My therapist can achieve more with her calm, serene, soft, tender and sensitive emotional wisdom than all the bulldozers in the world can. It’s like watching a butterfly move a mountain.

So when I got to work, the situation resolved itself so quickly my preverbal head was spinning. Three years of pain disappeared that afternoon in a flurry of extraordinary closure. This woman has brain cancer and has suffered more than I ever have. So I decided to indulge my primeval revenge fantasies by buying her a small flower arrangement and a card to wish her much health and happiness in the future and she, who had moved on three years ago, welcomed me aboard and said that it was great to see a familiar face. She then gave me a big hug, which was the second hug I’d received that day - the first being from my therapist.

If my past made me who I was, then my therapist has made me who I am today.

A good friend sent me this:

This issue is fundamental to Buddhist psychology. In his book THE WISE HEART, Jack Kornfield writes, at the beginning of chapter 16, “Suffering and Letting Go”:

“When I first became a monk in the forest monastery, [his teacher] Ajahn Chah welcomed me and then said, ‘I hope you’re not afraid to suffer.’ Taken aback by this greeting, I asked him what he meant. He continued, ‘There are two kinds of suffering. There’s the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and in doing so become free.”

(pp. 241-242)

One of the girls who works there and is currently on annual leave till Monday is someone I worked with in a previous job three years ago. This woman and I were good friends because she has a degree in counselling and I was studying psychotherapy. We would stop after work and talk about our favourite subject, helping people, psychology and how the world works. I thought I had found a great friend with similar interests. I had no inkling of what was actually happening at the same time in a parallel universe.

One day without warning, I was called into the manager’s office. This woman had written an email to management stating I had threatened to kill her and resigned, effective immediately. She did the maximum amount of damage she could before disappearing in the ether. During the three months we worked together she was, to my face, a good friend, but behind my back she was spreading gossip and rumours. There was no way for me to predict this. There were no hints or suggestions of her two-faces. I had no idea.

I think, although I am not sure, because no-one actually told me any details, that the death threat was when I said in a laughing voice, “We work in such an enclosed space, sometimes I feel like killing you and so and so and I’m sure you feel like killing me sometimes as well.” Innocent things we have all said at one time or another. Management took this off the cuff remark very seriously and questioned me at length. I was very scared because this sort of stuff can end up in a tangle of litigation.

My therapist said she is a bully, and appeared to know that she was twisting my words around to suit her purpose at the time. The subsequent fall-out caused me much depression and I ended up engaging in some self-harm. I am now working with my therapist on strategies so I am not emotionally overwhelmed by her presence for 30 hours a week because as of this Monday when she gets back from annual leave she and I will be working ten feet from each other.

Now here’s the bit that adds a ghastly twist to the story. This woman has a brain tumour, secondary to her original cancer. When I knew her she had had breast cancer three times and a double mastectomy. Ordinarily I would have a lot of sympathy and compassion for someone in her position. Perhaps it explains her previous behaviour two years ago - or perhaps not.

I have to work with a small group of people who are friends with this woman and they have a lot of sympathy and compassion for her. I have to find a correct balance of civility, politeness and reserve in order to function effectively, do my job, get on with everyone else, not gossip or mention the past and go home at the end of the day feeling as though I handled myself with grace and dignity and not fall into the trap of self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes.

Life truly is stranger than fiction.