When Everything Fractures

Fracture. Rupture. Shatter. Puncture. Breach. Rift. Tear. There’s so many words to describe having the ground break open beneath you, to paint a picture of having everything you have built split in two in a single instant. Those words never quite manage to really describe the pain of that moment, or the agony of the aftermath, though, do they?

Things are not okay with Hubby. Truthfully, from where he sits everything is fine and as it always is because I’ve given up talking to him about the turmoil and questions and doubts swirling around in my brain like a tropical storm. There’s too many threads all tangled together for me to even begin to really sort it all out. I can’t tell what is the past being triggered and what is present day adult me.

Therapy lately has been about that, and nothing else. It’s been about trying to sort out what is past feelings being triggered, what stuff belongs to the parts, what stuff belongs to Adult Alice, and about anger. Anger has been a major theme, starting with trying to figure out if I am angry. I think some parts of me are very angry.

I don’t have a great track record with anger. I don’t like anger, and no one really ever modeled anger for me. The times I remember my mom showing anger were not examples of healthy anger. I remember her giving the silent treatment a lot, and I remember once she threw a glass punch bowl at my Dad (it hit the wall and shattered). Throwing the punch bowl was extremely out of character for her. She didn’t do feelings, even happy wasn’t really acceptable, unless it was a little happy with calm on top. There was no jumping around screaming for joy in my childhood home. There was also no yelling, or crying, or moping about. My relationship with anger was simply to push it down, bury it, pretend it away. The flip side to that, of course, are the moments where I get triggered and scared (usually in regards to not being seen or heard, or feeling like I am being abandoned) and anger pours out of me like fire. Rage, Bea calls it. I hate that word, but she’s not wrong. So, we have been talking a lot about anger, and what does healthy adult anger look like when it is expressed? What does it look and feel like to stay within the window of tolerance and be angry? Spoiler alert, I still don’t have an answer to that.

In our last session we touched on something else. If Hubby can’t -or won’t- own his stuff, then how do we even begin to repair this rupture? Bea’s answer was something about how all I could do at that point was to own my stuff, and control what I could control. She went on to say something about how what I could control was knowing where I stand, what I believe, and being firm in that and not allowing hubby to change it.

“How does that help anything?” I asked her.

“Well, it’s a boundary,” she said.

“But how does that change anything, or make anything better? How does that help? It doesn’t fix anything,” I argued. I didn’t want to just set a boundary of what I believe and move on. That doesn’t feel right to me. Setting a boundary like that doesn’t solve any of the hurt or betrayal that hubby’s words have caused. It doesn’t stop me from feeling like he’s not the person I thought he was. It doesn’t stop any of the triggers that come with that.

“Well….” She said it slowly, like she was thinking, and then she finally told me she wanted to give an answer, but she needed to think it through more.

I suggested she email it to me because at that point we had run over a few minutes so time was up anyway.

Bea emailed me her answer, and as I read it, my heart sank into my stomach. That’s all it took, a few minutes to read an email and the ground caved in, yet again.

What punctured my trust and safety with Bea was this: I guess the “how will that help” boils down to the sad fact that we can ultimately never depend or rely on another person, even our spouse, to make us feel okay. We ultimately have to be okay standing alone. We do expect our spouse to share our values and basic beliefs, so that is hard to compensate for.  I don’t really have answers for any of it—it seems like you have to land in a place with it that lets you find some peace.  It still seems right, though, that the ultimate goal is to be okay within you—that you can’t control anyone other than you and your parts, which can be frustrating and disheartening, but unfortunately real.

Why then, has she spent years telling me it is okay to need people? Bea is the one that taught me I didn’t have to be alone in Miss Perfect’s world or in the dark and twisty place. She showed me I could trust people, and let them in; that people could provide support and help create a sense of safety. She is the one that pushed me to tell hubby about my past, for the sole reason that he could support me, that I deserved to be seen and loved and supported by him. She taught me about healthy boundaries, but also that letting safe people in was a good thing. I was great, I was amazing at being alone, at needing no one. My entire life was structured around keeping others at a distance, at never letting anyone in. Bea changed that, she showed me there was another way to live. So what the hell is this? Because it sounds like, to me, that she is saying Miss Perfect had it right all along. If that’s true, then what was the point of all these years of therapy? If that’s true, then what was the rest of it?

I feel like I am on the edge of a crisis. No one is who I thought they were. First Hubby. Now Bea.

Crack. Fissure. Burst. Separate. Divide. Schism. Split. Rupture. Not one, but two relationships I so carefully built have shattered.

Repaired: part six

On Wednesday, July 11, I walk into Bea’s office, feeling scared, but not as scared as I have been. I feel vulnerable, too, and it shows when I walk in, unable to look at Bea. Today, she notices, she sees me.

“I was really glad to get the teen’s email this morning. To know that she is able to feel some of those things. And I want her to know that she is right. I do care.”

I don’t say anything, just sit down, my face reddening. Bea already has my blanket sitting on the couch.

“You know,” she says slowly, as I grab a pillow to hide behind, “Let’s just notice for a moment we are safe. That nothing bad is happening. Maybe feel the pillow in your arms, hear the birds. Just take a moment. We aren’t in any hurry. We don’t have to rush into anything.”

I try, I really do, but it’s hard. I’m so scared that I have made a bigger mess.

“We don’t have to do anything today, we don’t have to talk about anything. Maybe we just need to focus on safety and being here this morning. That’s okay. Take a moment, think about what will help you feel safe. What do you need?”

I do think about it. At first, I don’t know, I’m uncertain. But then I relize what I do need. “I need…..I don’t….I need for…….. this to be fixed…..if….I can’t do nothing today because until we talk about it and it’s…..resolved, I’m going to stay worried and anxious.”

“Okay. We can talk about things. I think to do that though, you have to stay here, at least here enough to talk. What is the anxiety connected to?” Bea asks.

“I don’t know. Something bad is going to happen.”

“Okay, good. That’s a starting place, right? What are the things you worry about happening?”

“There’s no list, not…I guess it’s like nothing, no things to write down, not something I can tell you. I’m not worried about anything…..just something bad is going to happen.” I stumble over words and explanation. This is difficult to describe.

“Is is more of a feeling, just a general sort of thing?” Bea gets it.

I nod. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“So, I think that sort of generalized worry that we cannot pinpoint is our trauma brain. It’s normal, and the feelings are real. This is again where we have to tell ourselves, feelings aren’t facts. I can’t promise you nothing bad will happen, because bad things do happen, but we also have to realize that it’s not likely. Right? I mean, what are the chances a plane is going to crash into my office?” Bea’s voice is sympathetic, but she isn’t going to let me worry about things unlikly to happen.

“No……it’s not that……..not like that……I don’t worry…..it’s not worries about accidents. More….it’s maybe more about people.” I don’t know how to say what is in my head. I don’t know that I have the words or the language to really define it. I just know that the general something bad is going to happen worries aren’t about accidents or things like that.

“Okay, Okay. That’s good. This is helpful. Is it more worries that people will let you down somehow, or is it more worries that people will hurt you?”

It’s too much, and overwhelmed, I hide under my blanket, hugging cloud pillow to me. “I don’t know, people……. leaving me, rejecting me, not wanting to deal with me.” I wish I had the words to explain the fear I have surrounding my relationships.

“So, attachment stuff then. When attachment stuff is triggered…..that fear, that worry that something bad will happen, it’s very real. Attachment trauma, there really isn’t a list of worries. It’s very young, such early stuff, it’s from this time when we were too little and too helpless to care for ourselves, and so any rupture, any sign that our people were leaving us, that would have meant…anniliahtion back then. Developmental trauma, attachment trauma, this is all to do with very early years, so young we probably have no memories of it. With you, I think the trauma of sexual abuse compounds and even confuses the issue, but…this, what you are describing, it is attachment trauma.” Bea is speaking slowly, but with certainty.

“So….not crazy then?” I ask.

“Not crazy. This is a real thing, and when it’s triggered, it is incredibly scary and incredibly painful. I’m not sure I realized how deep…..well, how deep your attachment trauma runs. I see now I wasn’t seeing that, and I’m sorry. I’m aware of it now,” she tells me, and I think how well I have hidden this from her. I know when my impulse to freak out over a relationship is not *normal* and most offen, Ms. Perfect is really good at stopping those reactions.

We sit quietly for a moment, and then Bea asks me if I am here. “Here enough,” I say.

“Are you here enough to talk?” She checks.

“Yeah….it’s just hard. But I am here.”

“Okay. Then we will talk about all this scary stuff. Slowly, and as safely as possible.” She is using the voice that she uses when she is speaking to the little girl, that gentle, soothing voice.

“Okay. I can do this.” I hug the pillow and I feal my stomach twist in fear, but I mean what I am saying.

“I want to start by saying I am sorry I didn’t recognize your cry for help. I think, well, I know my own stuff got in the way. You are right about that. I was hurt, and I reacted from that hurt place. It doesn’t make it okay, but I was really struggling with how you could think those things of me after all this time, given our relationship, and I reacted from that place. I chose to ignore it, because in my hurt, I read it as rage.”

“But I— the teen doesn’t have a relationship with you! You don’t know her anymore than she knows you. I mean…that’s unfair.” The words jump out of me, frustrated and slightly angry.

“You’re right. We were building a relationship when all this happened. But you are right, we don’t have a relationship. Not yet. I didn’t think of that. It also….well, as I said, I was expecting coping skills like reality testing, to kick in. But I don’t even know what coping skills the teen has. We need to spend some time on the relationship, working on that safety and trust, maybe building some skills.” Bea sounds….well, like she means it when she says she wants to work on a relationship with the teen.

“There were no coping skills. That’s why I emailed you! I just wanted…..” I trail off when I realize what I was about to say, horrified that I had been about to admit to wanting anything.

“Wanted what? You just wanted…..?” Bea prompts me after several seconds tick by and I don’t continue.

“I…well, I just….ugh. I told you thing get all twisted in my head. I told you I go to the dark and twisty place where everyone hates me and……I mean, I thought…I just….I wish you had just said, *Alice stop. You’re in the dark twisty place. Those things aren’t true.* Or something.”

Bea is silent, thinking. I can hear her fingers tapping on her chair. “I don’t know that I could have done that. I don’t want to presume to know what is going on in your head, or to impose my reality on you as the true reality.”

“Maybe ask me then? If I’m in that place? I don’t know. I mean, sometimes I know I’m there, sort of, but…….it’s too risky to say it or ask someone, I just…I don’t know. But you not acknowledging those feelings, that just made them true in my mind. And then I did rage. Before, if you had just been able to say, “Those things aren’t true. I know they feel bad, but they aren’t true, I don’t think those things. I think you are in the dak and twisty place, you need to come out and I’ll be here waiting. I think that would have changed this. That’s all I wanted. Not….logic and explanations.”

“You wanted me to help you stop the distortions. Which is what my boundary of not responding to them was meant to do. It felt like responding to them would reinforce them.”

“Ignoring them reinforced them.” I tell her..

“I see that now. I think….I was feeling this need to set a boundary, but I set the wrong one, and even when I was clear that a boundary was needed, I maintained a boundary that was unhelpful.”

“I get not wanting to reinforce distortions, but can’t you acknowledge them without doing that? Can’t you just reassurance they are not true?” I don’t understand.

“You know, that’s a boundary. You wanted a boundary set. I just set the wrong one. I’ve never felt a need for boundaries with the little girl. I think the teen wanted a boundary set, and I was picking up on that.”

“No….I didn’t want a boundary. Boundaries are mean, they mean go away, you are a bother, I don’t want to deal with you….. no! I don’t like boundaries. And I don’t want you to change everything.”

“I’m not changing anything. Anything that changes we will do together. I’m not going to spring a bunch of changes on you, okay? But we need to talk about boundaries. Boundaries aren’t bad. They don’t have to feel bad to either person. Like right now, you have set a boundary. The blanket is a physical boundary. But even with the boundary there is a connection between us, there is attunement and a feeling of us both being present. I don’t see the blanket as a go away….it is what you need to feel safe, and so I feel glad you are taking care of yourself, that you can set a boundary and feel safe. And, dare I say, that boundary making you feel safer…… perhaps it makes it possible for us to feel more connection than we would without the boundary.”

I shake my head. “I don’t like boundaries. Boundaries are scary.”

“They can be. But I think once you feel, experience healthy boundaries, well, then they aren’t so scary.” She says gently.

“They are. Well, I guess I don’t really know about boundaries. My Mom’s boundaries are…..I weird. Maybe just all over the place.”

“Like your therapist’s have been lately?” Bea sounds, disapointed in herself, or something.

I think about what she has said. “No… not like that. Hers…..either they didn’t exist, I think….like, I just….I did what she wanted, dressed how she wanted, acted like she wanted, I was…like I just was part of her…I don’t know.” I sigh, not sure how to explain this.

“There’s a shrinky word for that. Enmeshment. It means your mom viewed you as extension of herself.”

“Yeah…..and I was loved and accepted and we were close as long as I was…..well, being like her. But if I didn’t….if I diagreed….she just……I don’t know. She would be upset. Then she set these boundaries….over silly things. Like really, truly, silly things. Like one time, I didn’t like these one shoes that she liked and so I just like got a different pair and she was really not happy with me. There was a boundary set then. Well, I think anyway. Silent treatment.” I blink away tears. It still hurts now, thinking about it.

“That is a boundary. Wow. No wonder me ignoring your feelings about me expressing anxiety over insurance was painful. It felt like I was giving you the silent treatment.” Bea’s voice has that sound in it, the one that means things are falling into place and she is making sense of things.

“You know….I don’t….I mean….well, you know what, never mind.” Words tumble out of me, a mess of them, blocking what I really need to say.

“Whatever it is, you can say it. I’m listening. It’s okay,” Bea reassures me.

“I don’t like it when you say it was just about you expressing worries over insurance. That’s not the story, not at all. I wish you would get that.” I whisper the words, cringing as I say them.

“You’re right. That’s not the whole story. But I do want to say, it’s important that we discuss insurance…that the adult and I talk about those things.”

“But it wasn’t a conversation! It was you freaking out and not even aware of what was going on for me! You can’t say it was us having a conversation, because you were talking…..at me. And it wouldn’t matter anyway, it isn’t about insurance! It’s about how you were talking!” I feel like I am shouting, but really, I am speaking firmly, and louder than usual.

“You know….what you wrote, asking me to imagine the situation, and describing it from your viewpoint, I….well, I have been that client before. I have had my therapist not be as present as I needed, and I have left sessions feeling unseen and unheard and hurt.”

“Except this wasn’t even my session! Not really. You can not compare the two. We have had sessions where you weren’t as attuned as I needed, and I’ve left feeling bad. But this, no. Wednesday was something else. It wasn’t my session, because I never….this was nothing about me, it wasn’t a case of I shared where I was at and you weren’t super present. This was you talking and spinning out from the moment I sat down. It wasn’t even a session! I mean, I don’t even know why I was there.” I’m being blunt, but I can’t, I won’t sugar coat it.

“You’re right. The two things don’t compare. Which I was going to say, that I have experienced the unattuned sessions, and so I can imagine how painful this was, how scary. I am so sorry, I really am. I knew the it was bad, I wanted to stop, to erase it, to have a redo, because I knew it was bad. And I am so sorry,” Bea says, sadly.

“I know. I know you are sorry. It’s okay. It was a bad day and a bad mistake, and I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, or call it something it’s not, but I’m not mad or upset or hurt anymore.” As I say the words, I realize they are true.

“If you were, that would be okay,” she reminds me. Bea worries that I forgive to make sure people don’t leave me.

“No…It’s okay. Honestly, I was more hurt and upset that I was ignored when I was hurting and scared. I just wish you had said to me, from the first email, *hey, listen, those things aren’t true. I don’t feel that way at all. You need to get out of the dark twisty place so we can talk, because I can’t help you when you are there. So come out now, I want to help you.* You know?” I say.

“Now that, that sounds like you are channeling your Grandma.” Bea sounds like she is smiling.

“Yeah….that is something she would say. She didn’t….well, she would just tell me what was and wasn’t okay. She didn’t….she made things very clear. I guess that is boundaries?”

“Yes. Your Grandma had good boundaries.” Bea agrees.

“She really did, if I think about it. She didn’t….not like mom. Grandma didn’t ignore me when I messed up or didn’t agree with her. She just, well, she just said it. Jusf plain, just like that.”

“And I’m thinking that while I was feeling it would be harsh or feel cruel to just say, hey you are twisting things, maybe that sort of bluntness feels safe to you because your Grandma set boundaries in that way. Straight forward, honest. I need to channel your Grandma, not your mom. Because in my concern of behaving like your mom and trying to avoid it, I did exactly what I was trying not to do.” Bea sighs.

“Well, you definitely don’t remind me of my mom. More of my grandma. Not age wise, but just….you feel the same, sometimes.” I shrug. It’s not something I have words for. “Like hubby feels the same as my grandpa sometimes. He reminds me of him, he always has.”

Bea laughs. “That is a very big compliment. I know how much your grandma means to you. Thank you.”

“Am I right in saying that what I was wanting from that first email was reassurance and to be told I was in the dark and twisty place….which you said was a boundary. And you felt it was me raging and so there was this feeling of needing to set a boundary……so we both really wanted the same thing?”

“Yes, yes, you are. We both did want the same thing.” Bea chuckles again.

“So….next time….maybe you can set a different boundary sooner?”

“Yes. I can do that,” Bea agrees.

I break the silence by saying what pops into my head. “Hey, you did what you said you would!”

“What do you mean?”

“When……when we talked about Kathy, and I asked you what you would have done…..and you told me? Do you remember?” I ask.

“Yes. I remember that.”

“Well….this rupture, you did what you said you would do.” I smile. Something about that feels right.

“I did? Well, thank goodness I did what I said I would!” Bea laughs, but she is sort of serious, too.

“Yeah….I’m glad you did what you said you would.”

Her tone lignt, Bea says, “You know, that brings up the whole question of enactment. Maybe you needed to see if I would do what I said I would, or maybe I needed to see if I would do what I said……it’s so interesting……”

“Don’t get shrinky,” I say, cutting her off. “And I definitely didn’t cause this mess on purpose.”

“No, enactments aren’t a concious thing. It’s all completely unconscious. But it is interesting, especially in this situation…..”

I cut her off again. “Don’t be shrinky!” I recognize this as a boundary, a need for her to not be shrinky so I can feel safe and secure knowing that Bea is Bea and not a cold analytical shrink.

“You brought it up,” she laughs.

“Just talk to your shrinky friends about this,” I tell her. It’s such a teen response, that I laugh, too.

Laughing, she agrees. “Okay. But the grown up might want to talk about this one day, and when she does want to, we can. It will be okay.” .

“Maybe. Not now.” I am stubborn.

“No, not right now. When you are in it, it’s the wrong time for shrinky. I get that. So not right now.” She is so calm, so sure, so caring again. Bea is herself again, she is really back.

“I think it’s okay. I feel okay, this is okay. Nothing bad happened and you did what you said you would.” I breathe out relief and fear and anxiety and anger as I say the words.

“Yes. Nothing bad happened. Actually, something good happened,” Bea says kindly.

“Yeah. And it’s new. Something new. And it was ok.”

“Yes. I think you grew a lot, even if it’s not something we want to happen again, I think there will be more growth and learning, more felt experience from this. I think there was a lot of new things in this for you.”

“Yes. You listened. And didn’t want me to just agree and be…whatever you wanted.” This….this means so much to me. I don’t have words for it, but there is a lightness where the fear of not being what she wanted used to be. The fear isn’t gone because it is old, old fear, but there is less of it there.

“No! Never. I want you to just be you. You are enough. Just like you are, you are enough and you deserve to be seen and heard and cared for just for being you.” Bea is adamant, and while I think she has said this before, everytime she says it, it sinks in a little more.

“Is that….is what I wrote, what you said true?” I ask quietly.

“That I care?” Her voice is neutral, maybe curious about what part of what I wrote.

“Yeah.” Shame floods me as I confirm her guess.

“Yes. Very much so. This is a real relationship. Just because it is therapy doesn’t make it not real. If it weren’t real, and I didn’t care about you, you wouldn’t have been able to hurt me. What you wrote, all of it, is true. Absolutely. I care.” She means it, I can hear it in her voice.

“Okay,” I say. It’s all I can say, because I don’t know how I feel about this. It’s….I want her to care, and I care about her, but I don’t….well, I guess I don’t want to matter. I’m afraid to matter, and there is something painful about having the whole of me accepted so openly. I blink back tears.

After a while, I ask Bea to tell me something regular, and so we talk about dogs and coffee and clothes. When I leave her office, I feel drained, but also more present and peaceful than I have felt in a while.

The wound will never be erased, the scar remains, but it’s not a bad thing. There is beauty to be found in the scars that make us who we are.

Repaired: part five

I felt some relief in the very fact that she had read it and was responding and still sounding like herself. Bea replied in depth later that morning and I responded back late that night. Below is the full email conversation.

In order: the strikethrough is the email I’ve already posted, the third person explantion of the stuck thing. Next comes the underlined which is Bea’s response. Last is the italics which is my response to Bea.

Hi Bea,

Okay, here is my response. I didn’t, well, it’s not in third person, and not as detached sounding, and I don’t know, I haven’t thought and thought and edited and changed and deleted and made it pretty and perfect and so this is a bit nerve wracking too. Because it might not be written so it’s how I am supposed to say things, it isn’t careful, I didn’t monitor my thoughts and I just wrote and responded with how I felt. But there it is. I answered under your response, so there is a bit of scrolling you will have to do. But I thought having my third person explanation might still be helpful…..so it’s all color coded. So, the third person writing is in pink, your response is in black and my response is in blue. Then I put the original email that ruined everything in green. So. Here goes nothing, again.

Can  👱‍♀️👩🏻‍🚒🙈 🐢🚫🐚🕸🌪💣⛈➡️ 🗣👂🗣✍🏻✍🏻👀👂➡️✍🏻✍🏻👀👂✍🏻👂🗣🗣👀✍🏻👂🗣 ➡️🐵🐢🐚🌈⛅️……🤝? I’m trying to believe it can.

So, here it goes, I guess. 🙈🙈🙈🙈🙈

The teen feels like she understands the difference between a hitting screaming child who needs to be told “I’m here and I will sit here next to you and wait for you to be calm, but you may not hit me to express yourself ” and the emotionally swamped child that is crying out for help who needs a hug and reassurance.

Using that analogy, she feels like her therapist misinterpreted a crying out for help child as a screaming hitting child. The teen is scared, though, to even try to talk about this with her therapist. She doesn’t want to make things worse, and she doesn’t want to make her therapist upset. She also doesn’t want to disagree. She doesn’t like disagreeing, and it does not feel safe or okay. The teen feels like she would rather just agree with her therapist and let it go, but for some reason she can’t. The teen knows her therapist feels very strongly that she is right, but the teen feels just as strongly that her therapist’s interpretation is not fully accurate. She feels like it won’t matter, though, that her therapist’s opinion and feelings will carry or hold more weight than the teen’s opinion and feelings.

It sounds like the painful, crying out for help part felt very obvious to the teen, but not so obvious to me, huh?  I don’t feel any need to be “right,” honestly.  I think what I misinterpreted was the ability for you to use your coping resources—I know now my expectations were beyond what you were able to do in the moment. That surprised me, I remember—I didn’t lower my expectations to where you were.

Ugh. This feels awful. Like I failed or something.

The teen knows she did behave in a rageful way in several of her emails. She knows she was also rageful in her notebook, although it doesn’t feel fair to her to have that judged because her notebook— by definition of what it is— is messy and raw and unedited and not pretty. It’s instanous thoughts and feelings, and it’s the working through of things and the very formation of her thoughts and comclusions and feelings. It’s the first place she goes to when things are hard and she needs to get the scary things out. She had thought that her therapist understood that although it had never been explicitly discussed, and she shared her angry notebook because she wanted so badly for her therapist to see the mess of confusion and pain and anger she was stuck in. This part of things feels worked through to the teen. She believes her therapist understands that she was in a lot of pain, and that her therapist understands why she behaved as she did, and the teen also knows she was raging and not able to have a constructive conversation, hence the boundaries. It’s important to the teen that her therapist know she understands that.

I didn’t feel any judgement about the raging journal. I just didn’t see any way to productively work with it.  You’re right that the journal is your place to rage, vent, and put down all of your anguish. I believe that’s very important!

The sticking point is in that very first email. To the teen, calling that first email raging, mean, brutal, distorted, accusatory, blaming and out of line feels inaccurate. It is not how she felt, or how it was meant.  She knows that she distorted what she heard, but she can’t help how she interpreted information, and she believes that how she interpreted things that Wednesday makes some sort of crazy sense, given her history. She wants to learn to not distort and twist everything people say to her, but she is terrified of people. She’s aftaid to be even a little bit close or vulnerable with them. She can understand that her email could be read as blaming and mean, but it wasn’t that way in her mind. It wasn’t even that way in the adult’s mind. (Which adds another layer to this, because the therapist keeps saying the adult can help the teen communicate appropriately, but the adult did try to help before. The adult helped by making sure all the information of where the teen was emotionally was included in that email, and she helped by telling the teen it was okay, she could trust the therapist, the therapist had made a mistake but she wasn’t gone, and that this couldn’t be fixed if the teen didn’t explain what she was feeling, what she was afraid of, if she didn’t explain why she felt like she didn’t even have the right to be there. So, the adult did try to help but she just managed to help mess things up more. Both the teen and the adult feel as if the adult must be more broken, more crazy, more screwed up than either of them or the therapist thought. The end result is the teen doesn’t trust the adult, and the adult doesn’t want to help, anyway.)

I think it’s great that you just clarified how the adult helped—that’s really awesome to acknowledge.  I need to look more at that email—and can we talk about that in session tomorrow? That might be the best place to start tomorrow if it’s okay with you?

I don’t know. We can try. Maybe. You know that distance feels safer. As much as I don’t want to be alone, it feels safer to be alone when I feel hurt or upset. I’m not even sure that makes sense. But yes, we can try. I’ll hide and you can talk and I’ll try to talk.

I feel a need to set boundaries with the distortions because I don’t want to reinforce them. That would be very unhelpful!

I guess this just doesn’t ring true for me right now, for this instance. I was, in my mind at least, hoping you would correct them, hoping you would reassure that “no, those things aren’t true, I’m sorry you ‘heard’ that and felt that, but they aren’t true. I don’t think those things at all.” Or whatever. I think there must be a way to not reinforce distortions that doesn’t involve choosing to ignore the emotion piece. Ironically, it was the very ignoring of the emotion piece that made the distortions, well, bigger….to my way of thinking, if you weren’t acknowledging those things to say “this isn’t true”, then they must be true. It was the ignoring of the feelings and distortions that caused them to become this huge thing that had to be true. And yes, at that point, those distortions couldn’t have been easily, if at all, reasoned with.

When a person is in emotion mind having the distortions pointed out is only going to cause a huge rage—pouring gas on the fire, so to speak.

But what caused the rage was feeling ignored and unseen and unheard. What caused the rage was trusting you and feeling abandoned again.

I think this is a generalization about emotion mind. Really, pointing out and reassuring and helping is less likely to pour gas on the fire than ignoring the feelings. Ignoring the feelings pours gas on the fire everytime. Even saying that the feelings make sense given what was heard, but that things are being twisted and asking if I’m aware of that, would be better than ignoring the feelings. Or however you would approach it. But I genuinely believe that a real response to my first email, and responding to my feelings would have been better than the rational reflections. You still could have said that I was distorting things, or that I needed to try change my approach in what I’d written, or whatever you needed to say. Ignoring the feelings is going to trigger me and upset me eveytime. (Maybe that can be changed, but in the meantime, it will trigger me more than telling me I am wrong ever will). I will say that after the first email, anything you said was probably going to upset me and escalate me, aside from maybe going back to what I was seekinf in the first email and reasuring me. It was when you finally said “none of it is what I was trying to say, or anything close to what I thought I said. Or nowhere close to what I think……….I’m sorry that this is what you heard and felt because truly that is awful. We will have to figure out what to do with it—but please know that there is none of the actual me as I know myself in those words you wrote.” There was relief in that, that you didn’t feel those things or think those things, and that hearing what I heard was awful. Of course, the relief and the calm didn’t last long and the next email spun things up again and sent Ms. Perfect into the captain’s seat. But just that, even as out of control as I was feeling, just those sentences of you not feeling that way, and that not being you, was enough to bring a bit of relief, to feel like maybe I could find solid ground again.

In a calmer place and with some distance, however, I think we can talk about them, which I think will be helpful.

You have distance, but I am not sure I do. This is still so painful, and it still hurts so much.

The teen wrote what she emailed, almost word for word in her notebook, using an analogy her therapist had used earlier that day. As her therapist had talked, and said, “I took the boat away, I drove off in the boat and left you in the water, but I’m back with the boat now.” the teen thought, “But it’s not just that you drove the boat away and left me. It’s that I feel like you don’t think I should even be in the boat. It’s that I don’t know if you will leave me in the water again. It’s that I feel like I broke you and you had to leave me in the water and drive off because I’m too much, too crazy, so of course it will happen again because I break people. It’s that on Wednesday I felt like you thought I should be better, or more capable, or not need all this support to function.”

I will admit, I had a hard time empathizing with this. The reason is that it just felt so extreme, and as I said at the time, so uncharacteristic of anything I know about myself or my intentions. I  found myself asking, “How does me expressing worries about insurance coverage lead to any of this???”

I think you are looking at this….I don’t know the right word. What you are saying doesn’t really tell the whole story, its sort of a skewed viewpoint. That’s why the other day, when you said your therapist group jumped on the insurance thing, I said it wasn’t fair to have said I got upset because you talked about insurance. That’s not really the whole truth.

Yes, you expressed worries over insurance that day. But that statement would be like me cooking a 5 course gourmet meal and saying “I cooked dinner.” Did I cook dinner? Well, yes….but calling a 5 course gourmet meal dinner is sort of, well, misleading. I think you did express worries about insurance, but it was your anxiety and a very worried part that was expressing those worries. They weren’t expressed in a grounded, calm, controlled way. That worried part used me as an example multiple times, and also spent a lot of time talking about people who deserve therapy or not, and what criteria insurance uses to judge that and how insurance would view me and my therapy. But it wasn’t made extremely clear that this worried part was talking about how insurance views things, at times it seemed like that part was judging and weighing me against the criteria. My therapist wasn’t present that day, from the moment I walked into her office, she didn’t see me. Because of what had recently been being worked on, combined with the triggered state I arrived in, combined with this worried part of my therapist seeming to judge and weigh me against insurance criteria, plus this anxious part of my therapist talking about dropping to once a week (out of the blue, completely unexpected and very jarring) and how there wasn’t really any deeper work left to do combined with this belief that I need too much and break people, and this very new, very tenative trust I (meaning the teen) was starting to have in my therapist, along with my therapist not being present and not seeing me……..all of that would need to be included in the story, and probably your view point of what you said and what made you anxious and how you just couldn’t control that worried part would need to be added to really be the whole story. It really was the perfect storm to form that bad Wednesday. If anyone of those things hadn’t been present, then maybe it never happens.

To me, none of this is even about insurance coverage. You could have been talking about trying a different way of doing therapy, and had the same circumstances and I would have probably been just as triggered. It’s never been about what you were discussing; it’s always been about how you didn’t see me (there was no checking in, no how was your weekend, nothing, just this jarring jump into this anxiety driven place about insurance) and how things were discussed. This will probably make you defensive, but I’m going to say it anyway. You ended my session in tears, telling me you were going to go to the bathroom and try to get your shit together before your next person. I ended my session so far away that I could barely function, and you didn’t see that. It has been a very, very long time since I was so out of my window. I actually texted Abby and told her I was going to be late to school because my appontment was running late. And when I got to school, I still wasn’t present. What I remember most about the rest of that day was everyone asking if I was okay, and two friends checking in on me that evening because I had seemed “off” when they saw me at school. I claimed the weather had given me a migraine and had me feeling off.

Maybe you just can’t empathize in this situatuon. Maybe it is too hurtful to you that I felt like this, and knowing yourself and our relationship, it’s just too hard to understand how I could have felt the way I did. I guess what I would say, is you are thinking about your relationship with the adult and the little girl, and even Ms. Perfect, not the teen. The teen really doesn’t have much of a relationship with you— she has some ruptures that were sort of just set aside because the little girl needed dealing with, and she has that month of working on trust and finally sharing a little with you the week before this rupture. And maybe, what I can say, is imagine this and think about how you would feel in this situation. Last week, you worked on some very hard things, and you are having a lot of worries over being too much. You are also worried that your therapist won’t be herself because it’s been a whole week since you saw her and things were rather intense that week. You spent Monday triggered and had a flashback. You have spent the last two nights having nightmares, and are just generally in this hyper aware triggery scared state. You can’t email your therapist or reach out because you are gripped by this intense fear that you are being too much, and so you are just treading water until Wednesday. You show up on Wednesday, relieved that you didn’t drown, and in desperate need of a container. Only, when you walk into your therapist office, she doesn’t see you. She doesn’t see how triggered you are. She doesn’t see that you are dissociated and struggling. She tells you she just finished reading an email from her therapist and then begins to anxiously talk to you about insurance— in this very nervous, jumpy, jarring sorf of way, like she is trying to sort out her worries. This doesn’t feel like a discussion the two of you are having, this feels like your therapist is anxiously speaking at you, even maybe just voicing all her thoughts aloud. You can’t breathe, or even think. And then your therapist is using you as an example in how insurance companies don’t like long term twice a week therapy. She doesn’t explicitly tell you that she doesn’t agree with them, and while you have always thought she thinks insurance rules are sort of bogus, she is suddenly sounding like maybe she does agree with them. She is saying how you are proof therapy works, because you function so well and she is telling you how you don’t have a lot of twice a week sessions this summer anyway, and so it makes sense to go to once a week, especially because she doesn’t think there is all that much deeper stuff to work on, really there is just this stuff that is being worked on now. She is seeming to get more anxious by the moment, and you can’t handle it. You really needed her today, and she isn’t here. She left you. So you go somewhere far, far away. When session is over, your therapist is crying, and telling you she is going to go to the bathroom to get her shit together, and sort of runs out of the room. You feel awful. You broke her. You did this. And you can’t handle it. In a fog, you leave. A little part of you knows that if your therapist had been present, she would never let you get so out of your window, let alone leave like this, but you can’t be here right now. Everything is broken.

Maybe this wouldn’t upset you, or hurt you or send you spiraling into a dark overwhelmed place. I don’t know. I just thought maybe setting out what happened that Wednesday, from my viewpoint, might be helpful. I don’t really think this is about you as a person, or about your relationship with the little girl or the adult. But what I wrote above….that is my memory, my experience of Wednesday, without adding in my thoughts and what was said or felt brought up or made me feel.

I get that it triggered all of these worries, but here’s where I was expecting some coping resources to kick in, and they didn’t. And I think I was hurt that after all this time you could think those things of me.

The adult honestly wasn’t thinking those things about you, and she did her best with what she had to work with, by encouraging the teen to reach out and share the mess in her head. The adult wouldn’t have been able to do that if she thought bad things about you.

When I reflect on that, I know I had to depersonalize it to find empathy.

So I really was expecting that there were more coping resources there based on how well you’d been functioning over the previous several months. That was why I had those expectations—not because I needed you to have them, but because I genuinely thought they were there. This just turned out to be way too much for them, and it took time for me to get that.

I think all my coping resources were already drained from what we had been working on, combined with being so triggered two days before. There was legitimately nothing there to kick in to help. Also, I think, or rather, the adult knows she can function well because she has support, because she has therapy twice a week, and emailing and can reach out if she needs help. So, no therapy that Monday, plus the trigger, plus the Wednesday mess….it was just too much. All the parts were left unsupported and alone and scared.

Sort of how you try out being firm with a kid to see if they really can handle something, but once you see that the challenge is too big you modify your expectations.  For clients to grow, I try to stay on that edge, if that makes sense?  I was way off the edge in this instance:(

Later, the teen wrote in her notebook. The adult, feeling overwhelmed and struggling to deal with all the feelings of abandonment from all the parts (including her own feelings of hurt and disappointment and anxiety over the bad Wednesday and the stress of trying to cope with the triggers and flashbacks and emotions) knew that the teen needed some reassurance and help before things got completely out of control.

So the teen copied her notebook entry into an email and sent it. She wasn’t mad. There was no anger, or rage. Was she probably in emotion mind? Yes. But the emotions were terror of abandonment, and deep. deep sadness. She was heart broken and afraid, and confused, but not mad.

The adult— while admittedly not really on board the ship at all with all the emotion and panic and overwhelm happening— believed that the teen explaining in the email how she felt too vulnerable, that all of this was too much, that she had written this in her notebook (so, messy, raw, unedited), and that this was too painful to talk about face to face (the reason, which was not included is because there was a fear— however irrational— that her therapist would say yes, that is how I feel) was enough to let her therapist know the teen was in a very bad, very frightening place, and was overwhelmed emotionally. The adult thought that the teen signing the email, instead of the email being signed from the adult, was also helpful in showing who was writing, and had thought that would help her therapist to understand where the feelings were coming from.

The teen sent the email and she did her best, in her terrified state, to explain that this was what she felt like, this is what it had sounded like to her (distorted yes, but still the message she heard). She knows that her words did not land with her therapist in the way they sounded and felt in her mind, and she doesn’t really understand why. The teen feels like this vulnerable part (maybe the vulnerable teen?) of her was crying out for reassurance and help, and that cry was misinterpreted as rage.

I want to look at this email again for sure—we need to look at it again together.  I realize now that once it felt to me like things were so distorted that I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do, I had reached the point where I had to stop and reflect and wait for clarity—and that’s where the need for boundaries arose.  I know we need to revisit this, and we will.

The teen has this theory (before her therapist shared about criticism and her own stuff) that something was triggered in her therapist by the teen’s feelings and words that caused her therapist to view her words as if the teen were pointing her finger and screaming at the therapist.  In the teen’s reality, she was hiding in her closet, under a blanket, with her dog and her teddy bear, feeling utterly devastated, alone, and abandoned, just sobbing for her therapist to come back and help her. The teen feels like the therapist didn’t see that she was crying out for help because her therapist wasn’t “her normal self”. The teen really thinks that if her therapist had been in a different state of mind, then she would have read her email as it was meant. The teen has read all the emails from the rupture, and she feels a difference in the way her emails sound. The first email sounds and feels scared and anxious and defensive. The following emails sound angry— this amount of anger that scares the teen, if she’s honest. She doesn’t like that she has all that anger in her. The emails after the rageful ones sound numb, detached, polite, cold, appropriate—totally Ms. Perfect’s  voice.

I’m sure it did touch some of my stuff—absolutely.  I think I’ve sorted through that. I know by the time it got to the “boundaries” emails I felt pretty clear about things. I’m not sure that I would have read the teen’s email as the teen intended—let’s look more at that too!

Maybe between it touching some of your stuff and coming right off of this major anxiety and worry about insurance and you expecting more coping resources to be present, it made it impossible to even have a chance of reading the teen’s email and seeing where she was and how much she needed help. I don’t know. I’m not saying that I didn’t screw up, or that I couldn’t have expressed myself better, but I was so far past capacity to even be able to say, “Hey Bea, I know I twist things and get confused and right now I’m feeling X, Y, Z because of Wednesday.” I literally had nothing left in me to cope.

The teen is still so hurt. She feels like she was abandoned twice; once on the Wednesday, and then again after reassurance that her therapist was back, and that it was okay to talk to her therapist about the therapist. On the verge of spinning out, and with the adult’s insistence it would be okay because the therapist had said she was back, the teen took a risk. Sometimes the teen thinks this can’t be fixed. She’s just not sure that talking to her therapist about her therapist is ever going to be okay. Her therapist asked the teen if she felt like the therapist gets defensive, and the teen couldn’t really answer, but the word she used was “defended” when she wrote about this in her notebook. The teen wonders if she should just let this go, or if she can’t let it go if it would be easier and better all around for everyone involved if she tried to talk to Kay or Hubby about this rupture. She’s even had the thought that she needs to find a therapist to deal with her relationship with her therapist, because she doesn’t know what else to do and she wants everything to be okay again. She doesn’t want a different therapist, she just wants her therapist, but she also needs to talk about this and work through it, to process it, and it doesn’t feel safe or okay to do so with her therapist. The teen doesn’t think this is all, or even mostly because of her therapist, she’s pretty sure that most of the feeling it’s not safe is because of her past. This is scary and hard for her, and the idea that this will be okay one day feels like a fairytale. She wishes it could be true, but she can’t believe it, no matter how much she wants to.

I hope we can make some progress in the way the teen feels about things. I think going through the emails and sharing what was meant and what the reactions were/are could be really useful. I hope that feels like it would be possible face to face?

I dont know right now. I can try. I’m really, really scared. But I can try.

I put the original email below, in green. I didn’t copy anything else, though.

And that’s it. It’s pretty much the whole of the stuck thing. I am definitely, 100% sure that emailing this is a bad idea. I feel like I have no good choices left….I can box it up and pretend it away, or I can share it and blow everything up. I am once again hiding in my closet, hugging my dog and my teddy bear, hiding under a blanket. I’m scared. I am very, very scared and vulnerable feeling.

I don’t know—I think emailing this was a good idea:). And it was very brave!

~the teen👱🏼‍♀️👩🏻‍🚒

The (original) email ——— (I’ll bold it)

I feel like this is a very big risk, like I’m taking a scary chance by sending an email, but I can’t do this in your office. It’s too much. It’s so….what I wrote, how I feel, I’m too vulnerable. I feel like a turtle who lost her shell. And I’m scared.

I wrote this in my notebook, but then….well, I’m not sure I can deal with this one face to face. Because it’s….painful. And I’m so afraid for so many reasons that this is going to make things worse. I don’t want to upset you, I don’t want to break things further. I don’t want you to read my words and get all shrinky. I don’t want my words to make you feel bad. I don’t want you to read them, and then be mad with me for feeling like this. I don’t want to end up in a worse place. I just don’t know.

I should have said—

On Wednesday……….You said, you sounded like, it felt like you thought I didn’t really need to be here anymore, like I wasn’t deserving of therapy, should not need to be here twice a week, like you should not have to deal with me twice a week anymore, like you believe there is nothing major left to do, like whatever is left is not enough to warrant being here twice a week, to take up that much of your time.

You didn’t just take the boat away, you made it sound, you made it feel as if I deserved to have to boat taken away.

You took the boat away and made it feel like I shouldn’t even be in the boat, and that makes all of this impossible.

It’s impossible because I can’t schedule appointments to make things twice a week when I feel like that is needing too much, when I feel like you don’t think I should need to be here at all.

It makes it impossible to talk to you. To trust that you even want to hear what I’m saying, and to trust that you won’t decide the boat got too heavy when I let all the crud out of my bag and take the boat away again.

It makes me so angry because I’m left on my own, treading water. And sure, okay, I can tread water really good for a long time, maybe even forever, but I don’t always make safe choices when I’m alone treading water. It’s not easy, I don’t go on really living and being present in my life, I don’t function well when all my energy and time and brain power are being used to tread water.

You see this all as one tiny part of the whole, but to me, it is the whole. Or maybe more like Wednesday broke the whole, and this is all that is left. And I don’t want to make it worse. What I’m saying feels like it will make things worse. It feels like Wednesday broke us because I broke you. Just call it wrecking ball Wednesday.

—The teen

And then, as I got ready for bed, a thought struck me.

Hi Bea,

I had this thought, and I guess I just wanted to tell it to you. Which is sort of…not regular for me. But it hit me all of a sudden, you really do want to work through this and help me be okay again. That’s why you are doing this, the emailing and the talking and the waiting and not pushing and letting me take my time with talking about the stuck stuff. You really do want to be an anchor for me, even after all the raging. You aren’t gone, and you are making a point to work through this again, and you aren’t mad at me that we have to keep talking about this or that I’m still struggling to trust you again and just be okay. You aren’t angry that I can’t just let this go and agree with you. I don’t think you would even want me to pretend it away and and agree with you, even though that might make things easier for you. This isn’t easy for you, or comfortable for you, but you are doing it anyways because it matters to me, because I still feel hurt and pain over it and you don’t want me to keep feeling like this. Or, maybe I’m just being crazy, but I just, I don’t know, I guess the way you keep responding and being there and actually listening, like you want to hear what I have to say, even if it isn’t all rainbows and sunshines and unicorns, and I think you are listening to listen, not to appease me to make me be quiet or because you have to listen so you can prove you are right and I am wrong. You aren’t leaving because I wasn’t perfect and you don’t even prefer Ms. Perfect to me. This is new. A new thing for me. It’s not easy. It’s scary. New is scary. But it is new and different. 

I guess I just wanted you to know this because I think you have been trying really hard to show me it’s okay to talk to you, that you aren’t leaving and that all my twisted thoughts are just that— dark and twisty thoughts that are not true. And I guess something sort of clicked in my crazy head and I get it, I feel it. I believe it (at least in this moment). You are here. 

So, I’ll send this (and it took me almost 40 minutes to decide that yes, I should send it), but you know, two seconds after I send it I will feel vulnerable and mad at myself for telling you that you maybe matter to me and that I maybe am trusting you again. I’ll hate that I made this a thing, and I’ll hate that I told you this was new, something different and I’ll be embarrassed that I took another step closer to the halfway point of this dark cave I likeso much. The teen 👩🏻‍🚒👱🏻‍♀️

Repaired: part four

And so, very late Monday night, a third person explanation of the stuck thing was sent.

Okay. Let’s try this in third person. I want to put a caveat here, though to say that although I will say “the teen”, for me, writing this, saying “I” or “the teen” is the same thing. There is some adult here, but the adult is not very here, and the adult is just as twisted up and confused as the teen is.

The teen feels like she understands the difference between a hitting screaming child who needs to be told “I’m here and I will sit here next to you and wait for you to be calm, but you may not hit me to express yourself ” and the emotionally swamped child that is crying out for help who needs a hug and reassurance.

Using that analogy, she feels like her therapist misinterpreted a crying out for help child as a screaming hitting child. The teen is scared, though, to even try to talk about this with her therapist. She doesn’t want to make things worse, and she doesn’t want to make her therapist upset. She also doesn’t want to disagree. The teen feels like she would rather just agree with her therapist and let it go, but for some reason she can’t. The teen knows her therapist feels very strongly that she is right, but the teen feels just as strongly that her therapist’s interpretation is not fully accurate. She feels like it won’t matter, though, that her therapist’s opinion and feelings will carry or hold more weight than the teen’s opinion and feelings.

The teen knows she did behave in a rageful way in several of her emails. She knows she was also rageful in her notebook, although it doesn’t feel fair to her to have that judged because her notebook— by definition of what it is— is messy and raw and unedited and not pretty. It’s instantaneous thoughts and feelings, and it’s the working through of things and the very formation of her thoughts and conclusions and feelings. It’s the first place she goes to when things are hard and she needs to get the scary things out. She had thought that her therapist understood that although it had never been explicitly discussed, and she shared her angry notebook because she wanted so badly for her therapist to see the mess of confusion and pain and anger she was stuck in. This part of things feels worked through to the teen. She believes her therapist understands that she was in a lot of pain, and that her therapist understands why she behaved as she did, and the teen also knows she was raging and not able to have a constructive conversation, hence the boundaries. It’s important to the teen that her therapist know she understands that.

The sticking point is in that very first email. To the teen, calling that first email raging, mean, brutal, distorted, accusatory, blaming and out of line feels inaccurate. It is not how she felt, or how it was meant. She knows that she distorted what she heard, but she can’t help how she interpreted information, and she believes that how she interpreted things that Wednesday makes some sort of crazy sense, given her history. She wants to learn to not distort and twist everything people say to her, but she is terrified of people. She’s afraid to be even a little bit close or vulnerable with them. She can understand that her email could be read as blaming and mean, but it wasn’t that way in her mind. It wasn’t even that way in the adult’s mind. (Which adds another layer to this, because the therapist keeps saying the adult can help the teen communicate appropriately, but the adult did try to help before. The adult helped by making sure all the information of where the teen was emotionally was included in that email, and she helped by telling the teen it was okay, she could trust the therapist, the therapist had made a mistake but she wasn’t gone, and that this couldn’t be fixed if the teen didn’t explain what she was feeling, what she was afraid of, if she didn’t explain why she felt like she didn’t even have the right to be there. So, the adult did try to help but she just managed to help mess things up more. Both the teen and the adult feel as if the adult must be more broken, more crazy, more screwed up than either of them or the therapist thought. The end result is the teen doesn’t trust the adult, and the adult doesn’t want to help, anyway.)

The teen wrote what she emailed, almost word for word in her notebook, using an analogy her therapist had used earlier that day. As her therapist had talked, and said, “I took the boat away, I drove off in the boat and left you in the water, but I’m back with the boat now.” the teen thought, “But it’s not just that you drove the boat away and left me. It’s that I feel like you don’t think I should even be in the boat. It’s that I don’t know if you will leave me in the water again. It’s that I feel like I broke you and you had to leave me in the water and drive off because I’m too much, too crazy, so of course it will happen again because I break people. It’s that on Wednesday I felt like you thought I should be better, or more capable, or not need all this support to function.”

Later, the teen wrote in her notebook. The adult, feeling overwhelmed and struggling to deal with all the feelings of abandonment from all the parts (including her own feelings of hurt and disappointment and anxiety over the bad Wednesday and the stress of trying to cope with the triggers and flashbacks and emotions) knew that the teen needed some reassurance and help before things got completely out of control.

So the teen copied her notebook entry into an email and sent it. She wasn’t mad. There was no anger, or rage. Was she probably in emotion mind? Yes. But the emotions were terror of abandonment, and deep. deep sadness. She was heart broken and afraid, and confused, but not mad.

The adult— while admittedly not really on board the ship at all with all the emotion and panic and overwhelm happening— believed that the teen explaining in the email how she felt too vulnerable, that all of this was too much, that she had written this in her notebook (so, messy, raw, unedited), and that this was too painful to talk about face to face (the reason, which was not included is because there was a fear— however irrational— that her therapist would say yes, that is how I feel) was enough to let her therapist know the teen was in a very bad, very frightening place, and was overwhelmed emotionally. The adult thought that the teen signing the email, instead of the email being signed from the adult, was also helpful in showing who was writing, and had thought that would help her therapist to understand where the feelings were coming from.

The teen sent the email and she did her best, in her terrified state, to explain that this was what she felt like, this is what it had sounded like to her (distorted yes, but still the message she heard). She knows that her words did not land with her therapist in the way they sounded and felt in her mind, and she doesn’t really understand why. The teen feels like this vulnerable part (maybe the vulnerable teen?) of her was crying out for reassurance and help, and that cry was misinterpreted as rage.

The teen has this theory (before her therapist shared about criticism and her own stuff) that something was triggered in her therapist by the teen’s feelings and words that caused her therapist to view her words as if the teen were pointing her finger and screaming at the therapist. In the teen’s reality, she was hiding in her closet, under a blanket, with her dog and her teddy bear, feeling utterly devastated, alone, and abandoned, just sobbing for her therapist to come back and help her. The teen feels like the therapist didn’t see that she was crying out for help because her therapist wasn’t “her normal self”. The teen really thinks that if her therapist had been in a different state of mind, then she would have read her email as it was meant. The teen has read all the emails from the rupture, and she feels a difference in the way her emails sound. The first email sounds and feels scared and anxious and defensive. The following emails sound angry— this amount of anger that scares the teen, if she’s honest. She doesn’t like that she has all that anger in her. The emails after the rageful ones sound numb, detached, polite, cold, appropriate—totally Ms. Perfect’s voice.

The teen is still so hurt. She feels like she was abandoned twice; once on the Wednesday, and then again after reassurance that her therapist was back, and that it was okay to talk to her therapist about the therapist. On the verge of spinning out, and with the adult’s insistence it would be okay because the therapist had said she was back, the teen took a risk. Sometimes the teen thinks this can’t be fixed. She’s just not sure that talking to her therapist about her therapist is ever going to be okay. Her therapist asked the teen if she felt like the therapist gets defensive, and the teen couldn’t really answer, but the word she used was “defended” when she wrote about this in her notebook. The teen wonders if she should just let this go, or if she can’t let it go if it would be easier and better all around for everyone involved if she tried to talk to Kristin or Ryan about this rupture. She’s even had the thought that she needs to find a therapist to deal with her relationship with her therapist, because she doesn’t know what else to do and she wants everything to be okay again. She doesn’t want a different therapist, she just wants her therapist, but she also needs to talk about this and work through it, to process it, and it doesn’t feel safe or okay to do so with her therapist. The teen doesn’t think this is all, or even mostly because of her therapist, she’s pretty sure that most of the feeling it’s not safe is because of her past. This is scary and hard for her, and the idea that this will be okay one day feels like a fairytale. She wishes it could be true, but she can’t believe it, no matter how much she wants to.

And that’s it. It’s pretty much the whole of the stuck thing. The teen is definitely, 100% sure that emailing this is a bad idea. She feels like she has no good choices left….she can box it up and pretend it away, or she can share it and blow everything up. She’s once again hiding in her closet, hugging her dog and her teddy bear under a blanket. She’s scared. She is very, very scared and vulnerable feeling.

Bea responsed first thing Tuesday morning, “You did it! You sent it and nothing terrible is happening and things aren’t getting worse.  Of course I haven’t answered anything yet, but I don’t imagine having anything to say that could make things worse. I think it’s very brave to make yourself this vulnerable when you were so hurt by this.”

Ruptured: part three

Monday, July 9, I walk into therapy nervous and sick to my stomach. Bea sets my blanket next to me as she says hello.

“Where did you want to start today?” She asks gently.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s take a minute, just sit here and feel this moment, feel safe. Notice that nothing bad is happening.”

“But…it will.” Stubborn as always, I am insistent that something bad is going to happen. I feel it.

“I think this is where it is useful to use our feelings aren’t facts saying.”

I groan. “Ugh. Maybe.”

“Well….what about this? What happens if it does blow everything up?” She’s asking in that curious way she has.

“I don’t know. We end up back where we were, or worse.”

“What’s the worst case scenario?” She asks.

“You….you quit dealing with me.” I mumble the words.

“That I can guarantee won’t happen. And if we end up where we were, or another bad place, then we start from there. That’s how I see it. Right now, we have to start where we are at. If that path leads us somewhere else, then I think we have to start in that new place.”

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Let’s start with my response. I brought it.” I dig out my ipad and pull up my response. She takes it, and I hide, burying myself under the blanket and my face in a pillow.

You don’t sound shrinky. This just sounds like you, trying to understand something I don’t really understand. Both are “not here”, is just a different kind of not here. Remember when we made a list of different far aways? I think it’s like that. The here not here isn’t “me the adult grounding functioning Alice” but it’s not far away out of the window can’t talk and can’t think, frozen and hyper aware scared….it’s just that Alice not being here. It’s like some part is “here” but grounded Alice “is not here”. And the effect of things being a bit foggy and the emotions and feelings being blunted and even numbed, things not feeling quite real, feeling safer because of the detachment, is the same. Ms. Perfect definitely gives the here not here feeling, but I think because she ran the ship for so long, that feeling is more detached, functioning on auto pilot, and numb, but not so foggy. I don’t know. It’s complicated. Does that help at all?

“Mmmhhmmmm…yes…..okay….” Bea talks as she reads. I hate that she does this. I mean, I know whatever I have written is making sense to her, but I also hate it because I always wonder what part she is *Mmmhhmming*.

“Well, I am glad that wasn’t shrinky! And this does make sense. It is different kinds of not being here, although I still think that having a part running things so completely that you, the adult you, can’t….well, I guess remember the experience is still what I would consider being out of your window. I don’t know, for sure. I guess we will have to think about that. Maybe as parts feel safer, then the adult won’t have to be so far away.”

“Okay,” I whisper, mostly because I want her to know I am listening.

I’m not saying that is how things are, or that this is how you would handle things. I’m not accusing you of anything, just writing what this feels like to me (teen) and I am so afraid to say anything at all because I probably won’t say it in the right way for you and I am just going to mess everything up again. It feels like you get all the say so in this. Like, if you feel strongly that Z is what happened, then even if I am sure X happened, my viewpoint/feeling/worry is a distortion. And how can I even argue with that? Because clearly, I am distorting things and can’t even trust what my heart and mind are telling me. It’s like when I say you did not contain anything for me because my feelings felt ignored and you tell me you did contain things, it feels like the “final word” and the “reality” or “true version” is that you contained things. In that instance I think it might be more correct to say “Bea felt very confident she was containing things and feels that keeping things contained was never an issue, but Alice (teen) did not feel that containment on any level, so for her things were not contained.” I don’t know if this is even making sense. I don’t know how to explain it. But to me, it feels very much like the final say about what is reality lies with you.

“You’re right,” Bea says.

Wait…what? She is agreeing with me? I’m surprised.

“This is a perfect example, and as you said before, who decides that things were contained— the person who needs to feel contained or the one who is holding the container? I’d have to say it is the person needing the container. If that person doesn’t feel contained, then the container isn’t really doing their job.” Bea pauses, but when I don’t speak, she continues. “I don’t think the final word is mine, I can be wrong. I know there is a power dynamic, a power differential that can really make it seem like I have all the power. But I don’t care about being right, or about my reality being the true one. I’m not sure there is a true reality, I think what we need to do is find a common reality. And that is exactly what the example is that you gave. I did feel like I was containing things, but you didn’t feel contained, and I would add that ultimately, that means the container wasn’t working as it should.”

“I…okay….I didn’t expect you to agree….I mean, I really am not saying that is how it is, it is just how it feels. But I didn’t think….okay. Okay. This is okay.” My words are messy and scattered, but Bea gets what I am saying.

“I know. But it makes sense for it to feel that way. And I want to make sure you know I don’t care about being right. I care about finding a common reality.”

This is a hard part for me to respond to. (Bea’s explanation of negative feelings) Right away, reading this, I just feel sick and anxious and like I should just give up on working through this stuck thing— that the best that can be done is to agree to disagree and move on. And yet, I don’t think I can do that. But I also can not say what I am really thinking or feeling. I’m too scared to express what is in my head. You didn’t even say anything that is all that scary or upsetting, really. It’s just…… a mess. This whole thing is just one big mess that keeps getting messier. I don’t know if I want to share the writing below. We should talk about that first. It’s written in orange.

“Okay, I’m not going to read farther unless you give me the go ahead,” Bea says.

“Okay,” I say. I’m unsure what else to say.

“Is there something specific you want to talk about, before I read anymore?” She asks.

I shrug. I just don’t know. Finally, I tell her, “It’s…..weird…to talk to you about you. I mean, I would not talk to hubby about hubby, or to Kay about Kay. If I was upset or hurt by hubby, I would talk to you. I wouldn’t try to work through all the mess and feelings and fears and distortions and hurt and pain that he is involved in by talking to him. So it’s just….I don’t like this.”

“It is different, isn’t it?” She agrees.

“Yes. And I don’t know how to talk to you about you. Maybe I…maybe if would be better if I didn’t….I mean if I talked to someone else about this. I feel like maybe I need a therapist to deal with my relationship with my therapist.”

“Do you feel like I get defensive?” Bea asks me.

“I don’t know.” The words are automatic, because I can’t tell her yes. But I think it is yes. “Maybe?” My voice shakes. She is not going to like this.

“I might. I need to think about that. I don’t always handle what I feel is criticism well. My parents were very critical of me, so having my mistakes pointed out can make me defensive. It’s one of my triggers.” She is speaking very softly, very carefully.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her.

“No, you don’t be sorry. Being upset with me, or having criticism to give, you are allowed to do that. The….responsibility is on me to recognize if I am triggered and becoming defensive. I need to be aware of it, and I wasn’t aware of it this time. I’m sorry because that is on me, not you. Thinking about it, I was hurt by your words, and I did react emotionally, and become very defended. It took me time to sort things out, and clearly, there was still more to sort out.”

I’m not sure what is happening, but it seems like she is really back, really Bea again. She’s here, really, fully, authentically here. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I say.

“I know that, but I am responsible for my feelings. This isn’t on you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you think you would be willing to try sharing the stuck thing with me? Giving me a chance to work through this with you? I still believe this can be repaired.” Her voice is soft, steady.

“I….I don’t want to upset you,” I say honestly.

“Well, first, it is on me to manage my feelings. Second, now that I am aware of my defensiveness, I will watch for it. So much of these things are just about being aware of what we are doing. Therapists are supposed to be aware, so we can sort out what is our stuff, and not react to that. Sometimes we mess that up. And I am very sorry I messed that up.” She really is sorry. I can hear it in her voice.

“Okay. Maybe….I think maybe I will rewrite it….I think I’m going to write in third person, using the teen and her therapist. That seems….better.”

“I think you should write it however you want to. Don’t change to third person because of me, okay?”

“No…it’s not that. It’s…less weird talking to you about you in third person. And its……better. Easier.” I sigh and pick at my fingers.

“Third person it is then,” she says.

“Can….can I email it?”

“Yes. I think that is a great idea. You email it, and we will work through it.”

When session ends, I’m still struggling to feel grounded, but the wound has been cleaned and is beginning to be stitched shut.

And so, very late Monday night, a third person explanation of the stuck thing was sent.

Repaired: part two

Between Thursday and Monday, we emailed about the stuck thing. First it was me worrying and seeking more reassurance that this wasn’t a terrible idea, and then I finally wrote out a part of it. (Mine is in italics, Bea is underlined)

So, Monday, you should read what I wrote about the stuck thing. I guess it’s just a matter of feeling like it’s okay to tell you about the stuck thing. I was feeling like maybe it was okay, maybe you got that this was this stuck thing and I can’t let it go but I’m really not sure if I’m over reacting and being silly and I am so afraid that you will put up a wall and leave, or not be there emotionally or be upset that I’m not over this or that I am making a thing out of if or that I am bringing it up again. I know that this rupture feels like it’s in the past for you, but I feel like it’s just right there, right behind us and could easily swallow us both up again. I feel like me being upset or confused or hurt or not over things that happened during that rupture is sort of keeping it alive and I need to let it go. It’s disconcerting to have something be so stuck and be so upset and scared and worried because of it, and to feel like more than anything, all I want it to not have to deal with the stuck thing, for it to just not exist. 

Yeah, it definitely seems that we need to address the stuck thing. It doesn’t seem like we’re going to move on without doing so.

I think you are right, this is a new thing for me, this idea of bringing something up again after it is done and over with, and….question another person’s feelings about something. I mean, really, the way to deal with a situation like this stuck thing is to just, well, forget about it. Shove it to the side, bury it, let it go. Pretending like that does work because eventually you sort of forget about it and the feelings just go mostly numb around the thing you buried, and before you know it, it really is no big deal. And questioning someone’s feelings? Disagreeing with them? No, no, no. That is not how these things are dealt with. The thing to do is to agree with the other person’s feelings. Then nothing bad happens. I know that is not how you do things, and so it probably seems crazy but it is how I have done them almost my entire life. I hope that by writing about small bits of it, it won’t feel so bad to give you the few pages of writing describing the stuck thing. Or, just this little bit could blow everything up and then I guess…..well, I don’t know. I think there was a plan for if that happened.

Well, we’ve all developed our various strategies for coping with things and getting our needs met. They work until they don’t, right?! That’s why we usually get to a point where we’re ready to give them up, scary as that can be.

What can I write or say that will tell you a little about the stuck thing without ruining everything? I don’t know. Everything feels like a risk. Maybe we talked about this already, but I don’t think so. Maybe I should have you give me a summary of what we did talk about (joking…sort of).  I mean, some things I know we talked about…..really, all of our sessions since (and probably including) the bad Wednesday, it’s all bits and pieces because I was having a lot of trouble being present enough to really remember. I know one session you said something about the teen being very present and here and not far away, and I wanted to laugh because I was in that weird here but not here space that I’m so good at seeming very grounded and present in, and sort of going between far away and that weird space. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for me to show up at all. I don’t even want to tell you that because I know you have this thing about me being present and in the window, and I get that, but I am so scared and so anxious, I just cant be super present right now. Well, Ms. Perfect can. Her sessions I remember pretty much in full. And like today, the grown up can be present as long as it’s all just surface stuff. Which is pretty much using Ms. Perfect’s coping skills. But anyway. Please just let this be. The teen can’t be all that present right now, and well, I need to be able to be far away to even show up. Maybe, if being more far away starts to feel safer, then I can be less far away. I’d say I have been less far-away than I was. So there’s that.

I’m beginning to think there’s a real physiological difference between the not here when you’re out of the window and the “here but not here” when you can talk and really be engaged, but be “not here” in a detached way.  What I mean is, it looks completely different from the outside. I don’t want to describe the physical ways they differ because I don’t want that to be a trigger.  The day I thanked the teen for being present I could see it was not the adult, but whoever it was had the language thing online and expressed herself without difficulty. She had a bit of an angry, defiant vibe, and spoke her mind in a defended sort of way. I guess I wouldn’t have said you seemed grounded and present as you, adult Alice, but it sure felt like this part was functioning well. You know how cut off parts can feel like “not me?”  I wonder if that could be part of “here but not here?” I’d sure like to talk more about this so I can understand it better. (Sorry if shrinky—just trying to sort this out)

There’s so much worry.  Worry you will think I am making a big deal out of nothing. Worry you will be upset with me for bringing this up again. Worry you will decide I am acting out, or being a drama queen. Worry that you will decide the stuck thing is just me distorting things yet again and displaying borderline behavior. 

If it’s a worry it needs to be brought out.  If it’s a distortion we’ll talk about why that is happening. We’ll work through it.

So, maybe first I should let you know that even though I have access to some reasoning right now, it’s a very thin grasp. This is emotional for me, it is painful and terrifying and all of the abandonment fears and attachment nonsense feel really triggered because of how extremely scary and vulnerable making even writing this much feels. I can say without too much worry that the stuck thing is about our rupture. I can say without too much worry that it is about me not understanding your feelings about something. You already read those things and didn’t get upset, so there’s not a lot of worry about saying those things again. There is some worry though. And I guess that the worry goes along with the stuck thing. Well, it is part of it….I mean, I guess the stuck thing is a lot of worries or fears combined with me not understanding something you feel and maybe disagreeing with you about something all sort of mushed together. So is this worry the stuck thing in real time? Ugh. I don’t know.  But maybe I could explain the worry, and we could start there.

The worry is that you told me you had no negative reaction to anything I said, but then later, you said you did have a negative reaction and it was very clear that you did. That makes it so hard to talk. In this current instance, maybe on Thursday you had no problem with me not understanding why you feel a certain way about something  but today you might have a negative reaction to it. I’m so afraid of saying the wrong thing, or of saying it the wrong way, all my words are trapped. It’s like I can’t express anything without having an anxiety attack. Just the thought of sending this makes it hard to breathe and makes me light headed and I feel like I need to go hide right now. 

Negative reactions—where to start?!  I think there are several things I want to say, some of which I already explained. There are a lot of things I have to factor in when I have emotional responses to things that come up in therapy—and realistically, I’m always going to have emotional responses on some level, whether I’m aware of them or not. When things are complicated I have to take the time to figure out if I am having an emotional response.  First and foremost is always, why am I having this response? Is it my stuff? It’s probably in some part my stuff, so what stuff is it?  I can’t respond until that is figured out.  Usually these responses aren’t giant, so when I say I can contain your stuff, or I’m not having negative emotions I guess it’s more accurate to say that they aren’t “emotion mind” level responses. Then—and here’s where the wall and boundary thing comes in—if I’ve sorted through the “my stuff” part of the reaction and there’s still feelings there, I have to look at what was sent my way. This last time, as I’ve said, it took me a while to know what to do with that, and my negative reaction became part of the wise mind understanding that boundaries were needed.  So it wasn’t until after I had sorted through the “my stuff” piece that I could choose to use some of my real, post-reflection reaction to let you know what the negative impact was.  Does that make sense? I wasn’t trying to be dishonest about the negative reaction at first—I was trying—in my mind—to do my professional job of offering containment and doing self-reflection on “my stuff.”

Does that make sense at all? I guess the truth is, I always have some sort of reaction to most things, which is normal.   It’s okay if I have a negative reaction to something you say—it’s not really different than a neutral or positive reaction in my mind. It gives us information. I admittedly—like most people—have less negative reactions when I’m trying to work with a struggling part that’s not being mean—I don’t feel any mean from you (teen) right now. Even if I have a negative reaction I will take ownership of it, and I’ll still like you and won’t leave.

I write Bea back, but then I can’t send it. Instead, I write her to let her know I am working on a response but it is taking me longer to process this than I expected. She writes back that that is okay, that thinking and taking time is good.

Repaired: part one

Repaired. Things are fully, and truly repaired. Not erased, not magically all better, but repaired. The wound isn’t just covered with a band aid, it has been stitched together and healed. It is still tender and sore, and there is a scar. The scar is okay, though. It’s evidence that Bea stayed, and I stayed, even when it was hard. Its evidence that she didn’t leave, that she truly listened, that she wanted to see me and help me. It is evidence that she cared enough to help me stitch the wound.

The last two weeks have been about painstakingly stitching together the wound. They have been rough. I’ve been in this constant state of feeling like something very, very bad is going to happen. I’m okay, though. I got through it.

Early Sunday morning, on July 1, the teen had a bad nightmare. She woke up, and couldn’t calm herself down. She was overwhelmed and alone, and badly needed an anchor. So, she sent Bea an email, with only emojis.

😴🧟‍♂️🐍😈☠️🌪⛈😱😢🙈🙈🙈🐢🐢🐢. 🤝? ⚓️?

Bea responded:

🤝⚓️🏄🏼‍♀️🏝🌞🌈

And that paved the way for Monday, July 2. It was enough of a tentative connection that I reached out and wrote to Bea in my notebook. Bea read everything I wrote, and we talked. I told Bea there was this stuck thing and I was struggling, but afraid to even try fo talk about it. Bea suggested to the teen that the adult could help her when things feel intense, and that would help the teen not rage at people, and not push people away. The session is foggy, because I went so far away at that point. The problem was that the adult had tried to help before, and it only messed everything up. After therapy, I went for a walk, and I wrote a lot. I wrote about the adult doing the best she could to help teen, and how it still messed everything up. I wrote about feeling like Bea’s stuff was all mixed up in this rupture and how I wasn’t sure she was seeing clearly.

Between Monday and Thursday, we emailed and talked a little bit about the belief everything would be ruined, if I talked about the stuck thing. It was tentative and careful, and lots of emojis were used, but it helped some.

I didn’t see Bea until July 5 because Wednesday was a holiday— the fourth of July. I had a lot of writing, but had simply pared it down to 1/2 a page, describing the stuck thing. It takes over half of my session to hand Bea the writing. I’m anxious and scared that this is a bad idea.

I’m trapped. I can’t really talk to you because of X, but to be able to talk, we need to deal with X. There are no good choices. I could tell you the stuck thing has to do with our rupture. I could tell you that it’s partly something I don’t understand about your feelings. I don’t even like saying that much. It’s too vulnerable making, too scary. If I tell you about the stuck thing, it’s going to blow everything up. I can’t do it.

“It has to feel awful to be stuck in that place.” Bea is gentle and present and she sounds so kind. I’m hiding under the blanket, shaking, because I am so afraid something bad will happen.

“You know,” she says slowly, “If there are things I have said or done that you don’t understand, I’m happy to explain them to you. If this is stuck, we need to deal with it, it is stuck for a reason. That’s okay. We can deal with it, together.”

But she won’t want to deal with it if I tell her. She will go away again, and having a sort of here secure base is better than no secure base at all. “I just can’t. Everything will blow up. You won’t like it.” My voice is teary and quiet, but my words are sure and certain.

“I don’t know what it is, so I can’t promise it will be okay, but I can tell you that I am here, and I feel very centered and present. Whatever it is, I don’t think I will react emotionally. Actually, that is a promise I can make you. I won’t react emotionally to the stuck thing. I will listen, and I will do my best to explain and help you understand.”

“But I don’t want you to not be here, to be shrinky. That won’t help.” I’m almost whining. The idea of Bea going back to the detached shrinky place, it’s distressing.

“It is important to you that I am here and attuned. I feel very here, very attuned, very aware that this is the teen’s experience. Maybe I should explain that this rupture, it feels in the past to me. The recent past, but the past, and so I don’t think I will react emotionally because I have some distance around it.”

“But I don’t,” I tell her.

“I know that, too. And that is okay,” she reassures.

“I just can’t. I hate that this isn’t okay.”

Bea is quiet for a minute, and then she asks, “Is this a new experience for the teen? Maybe a new feeling or experience for the teen to not pretend everything is okay?”

I shrug. I don’t want to say yes, or no. Maybe it is, but if I tell her that then she is just going to make this all about my past.

Bea continues offering all the reassurance she can give me, and just as I am feeling like maybe it is okay to give her the written explanation of the stuck thing, our time is almost up. Bea says she will read it before I leave, or I could email it (which prompts a loud “NO!” from me) or we could wait until Monday. I can’t decide, and Bea tells me it is okay to wait. Before I leave, she says if I want to email small pieces or even clues of a sort, or even if I just want to email to check in, that is okay. Basically, whatever I need is okay.

Ruptured: one month later

I’m trying to sort how how I feel, and I just don’t know. Its been a month now, simce that awful Wednesday. I’m still hurt and scared and sad and mad and comfused and upset. Sometimes, I still believe that this is unfixable.

I’m afraid that Bea still isn’t seeing our rupture clearly. I don’t think I am, either, exactly, but she is supposed to be able to see things clearly and she seems to think she is. I think she is just as lost in the muck as I am.

I’ve honestly thought a lot about finding another therapist to talk to, to tell this rupture story to, to get a clearer perspective on it. On one hand, I think that’s crazy, I shouldn’t need a therapist to deal with my therapist. On the other, I feel like I won’t be able to trust Bea again without finding some sort of resolution to this. Then again, she is my therapist, so shouldn’t I just be able to tell her what I’m thinking? And that brings us back to the crux of the problem: I can’t really trust her.

I know I have lots of stuff, I know I am “crazy”. I know old beleifs pop up often and that I react to things because of that. I know that my husband can think I’m done talking and walk away, and I will be in tears, raging at him for leaving me and not caring about me and not wanting to listen to me (major over reaction). I know that I do these things, and I am embarrassed by them later, when I’m not being overwhelmed by this feeling that something very dangerous and bad is happening. I know that. I also know there are times when I feel those same things, and that even though I might want to react, I won’t. Usually I don’t react because reacting will make me more vulnerable than I am already feeling. For example, when I first started seeing Bea, I wrote an email about negative coping behaviors. I think I wrote something about earning gold stars for listing out all my issues, and Bea responded by saying no gold stars from her, that she would be doing me a real disservice if she reinforced the childhood message that I must be good, perfect and performing well to be valuable. She said that I should recognize the hard work I had done and think about how this could be helpful moving forward. I was hurt and mad by her words. I had needed to know she cared, that she wasn’t judging me not wanting to work with me because of all that I had written. I wrote an email (unsent) back to her, sayimg that she was mean and she didn’t care about me and that she didn’t even see how hard or scary this all was and that I should just quit and I hated her. I didn’t send the angry email, though, because that would have made me more vulnerable by letting her know she had hurt my feelings, that she was starting to matter to me. So, I pretended it was all fine, ignored the feelings about the email and went on as if nothing in her email had upset me at all. So, clearly, I only react towards people who already know they matter to me, or who don’t matter at all. Maybe. That seems to hold true when I think about times I have reacted (or wanted to but didn’t) with that “borderline rage”.

So what does this mean? Anything at all? And is it really Ms. Perfect that has a secure attachment? If so, what does that mean for the rest of the parts? Is that why most of me seems to be so afraid of abandonment? (And yet, I mostly hide those fears because of the ingrained need to act normal and to never give others power over me by letting them know they matter to me.) I don’t know. I’m incredibly confused.

I’m still not sure that my first email was raging or mean. I felt scared and sad and just completely abandoned when I wrote it, but mad wasn’t one of the things I was feeling. I’m afraid that Bea read it and heard rage in it, read and decided I was asking her to soak up my rage because of her own stuff. After her ignoring my feelings, I did get mad. And I did lash out. But I still think that she was responding from her own stuff. I think that my stuff and her stuff got mixed up together and created some awful muck, and we are both stuck in it. I’m afraid that she is unable to really hear my feelings around her actions/words starting with that Wednesday and continuing on with her emails because she can’t handle the fact she hurt me.

I have a feeling if someone she didn’t know walked into her office and said, “my therapist was really anxious and upset one day and her anxiety drove my session. I walked in triggered and she wasn’t even emotionally present enough to see that. Her anxiety drove her to talk about insurance matters in a really scary way and I feel so abandoned right now, and like I can’t trust her at all. I’m triggered just walking into her office, I feel like she doesn’t even think I should need to be there, like I should be over all my stuff by now and that she is just tired of dealing with me. I feel like I broke her and everytime I try to talk to her, I just get these very logical rational responses that make her seem even more gone than she felt before and I am afraid this is never ever going to be fixed ” her reaction would be completely different to the one she has shown me.

Then again, maybe not. But I have a feeling that making her choice to not deal with things emotionally all about my inappropriate, raging and mean reaction is more about her not being able to cope with her behavior causing hurt, pain and anger in me. I don’t know. I’m lost.

Maybe none of this matters. Bea realizes that the bad Wednesday was a big deal, and did hurt me alot and did cause a lot of fear and anxiety and abandonment issues to come up. I realize that I lashed out in some of my emails, and also that the bad Wednesday did trigger past hurts and fears. Maybe that’s enough. I just don’t know. Things feel largely unsettled and unrepaired. It still hurts everytime I am triggered and afraid when I realize I have no safe container right now, when I realize I have to deal with the trigger as best I can with no secure base. I still feel like Bea is someone I wish I could trust but can’t. And how can I trust her if I feel like I can’t talk to her and have to hide some of my feelings and thoughts from her?

Ruptured: Ms. Perfect

Wednesday. I get to Bea’s office right on time, despite not sleeping well the night before and waking up late. I feel steadier than I have in weeks. Things don’t feel repaired, and I’m still unsure of Bea, but I don’t feel like the ground is falling away under my feet anymore.

When I walk in, we chat a little, just normal stuff, nothing serious or deep. This feels normal, familar. It’s me and Bea talking about regular, boring life stuff, and it feels like an oasis from the storm we have been in for weeks. I start to realx, and feel like Bea is really here and herself.

Before long, though, we are discussing teen stuff, in a weird random way. It starts with a conversation about clothing, which seems beign and random. We’d been discussing small town life and ideals as compared to the larger area Bea I live in now.

“I never worried about having the *right* clothes growing up. My mom always just knew the popular brands and that’s what she bought.” I shrug. It’s not strange to me, it’s just how things were.

“Did you ever want to wear something different?” She’s curious.

I think. Did I? I’m really not sure. “I don’t think so. I was so….I mean, Ms. Perfect was just so in charge back then, and that’s what I was. Blonde. Cheerleader. I looked and dressed like everyone else who was……I don’t know. Popular.” I could say well off, or in the in crowd, or something else. But it boils down to popularity. All of our parents were friends. We all went to the same church, were members of the same country club, had vacation houses in the same small touristy towns on small lakes, we all participated in the same activities, we had known each other since we were in diapers. It was also very clear what was expected of me, and I performed perfectly. There wasn’t really a wants or needs about it. I was who and what I was expected to be.

“No part of you wanted something different?” She asks again. This time, I’m sure that she is going somewhere with this, or looking for some sort of information. It’s the slight change in her voice, maybe.

“Well, no. I don’t think so. I’m not sure there was another option, anyway. Once, my brother tried to shop….what is that store, the more edgy punk store….”

“Hot topic?” Bea asks.

“Yes! He wanted to shop there. My mom threw out his clothes he had bought and replaced them with her choices from the gap, banana republic, j crew, the buckle. He was not going to look anything but perfect.”

“That seems extreme to me, to control your teen’s wardrobe like that.”

“Really?” I’m surprised. “It’s just how it was. Part of the presentation of how we looked. You know, that sort of thing matters to her. I don’t know.”

“Yes, I can see it mattered. I guess I just didn’t realize that your mom’s need to control things and present a pretty picture extended that much.” Bea says slowly.

“Once I had light pink streaks put in my hair,” I tell her.

“How did that go over?” She asks. She is back to being curious again.

“Not well. But it was acceptable. I was still mostly blonde and the streaks were little and baby pink, so it was a girly choice, so it was tolerated.”

“Why did you put streaks in hair?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. Now, as I write this, I think I wanted something that was just mine, not something my mother chose for me. But wheh Bea asked, it was just a thing I did.

“Teens usually havs reasons for doing what they do. Especially with hair.” She pushes a bit, maybe trying to see if I am willing to dig underneath.

“I really don’t know. It was just something I did.” Thinking about it now, my mom wasn’t at the salon with me that day, so when I went for my usual highlights, it wasn’t a big deal to add pink.

“And your mom was okay with it in the end?”

“Well, it washed out quick enough. So then, it was fine. I mean, she just liked things to be how she liked them.” I feel sort of odd. Not far away, just sort of, going through the motions of this conversation.

“Like what?” Bea asks.

“I don’t know. How we behaved, what we did, what we wore. She just wanted things to be normal, I guess. She doesn’t deal with things outside of that box of normal very well.”

“No, she really doesn’t.” It’s an agreement, but maybe something more, a question or a prompt to keep talking.

“She would just….ugh…I don’t know, ignore me if I didn’t behave how she liked. Everything from not picking up my room to I don’t know what.” I sigh. I’m in a weird mood. “You know that she would just ignore me if I was talking too much, just literally walk away. She didn’t like feelings either. Some feelings weren’t allowed. Well, it wasn’t really a rule, not something spelled out, but I knew…..she made it clear. I suppose now I would say she dissociated.”

“Really?” Bea sounds surprised and, in my mind that surprise means she doesn’t agree with me, so I backtrack quickly.

“Well, maybe not, maybe that is the wrong word. I was just thinking like, if I was crying, so upset, she would just sort of check out until I stopped. She just wasn’t there. It was so obvious that certain things wouldn’t be tolerated. Sad, tears, mad, hurt, anxiety, she would just zone out.”

“Not be there, not really interact with you? Just be sort of robotic, spaced out?” Bea asks.

“Yeah.” I nod.

“I would call that dissociated,” she says. “So you knew when she was not there, and that was a signal you were being too much?”

“Yeah. Or she would just tell me, you know, I’m a drama queen, I’m overly sensitive. I don’t know. She would send me to my room until I could behave appropriately.” I blink back tears. Even now, this stings.

“It’s such a shame that being sensitive it seen so negatively, instead of helping kids understand they are sensitive, and that is okay.” Bea says.

“But it was okay, mostly, because I knew what was and wasn’t allowed and so things were okay. I didn’t get sent away very much. I knew how to behave right.”

“That makes me sad for the girl who had to hide her feelings to be able to fit what her mom needed her to be.”

“Buf then she didn’t go away or send me away, and it wasn’t so bad. I mean, it just….ugh. I don’t know.”

“So the teen never got to express herself for fear of being unacceptable.” Bea’s voice is sad.

“I guess. But I knew how to be what I was supposed to be. So it was okay, my mom didn’t….” my voice trails off. I was about to sound so melodramatic, I can’t believe it.

“Didn’t what?” Bea prompts.

“Didn’t have to get away from me.” Now I am really blinking back tears as I hide my face. “Can I have the blanket please?”

Bea covers me up, and I cry.

“Can I say something that might be a little shrinky?” She asks.

“I guess.” I’m wary. This tentative okay-ness between us feels like the smallest thing could shatter it.

“When we talk about attachment, and being securely attached, I always had this….well, it doesn’t matter. The more you are telling me about your mom and how she interacted with you, her expectations and her reactions when they weren’t met, I’m wondering if Ms. Perfect was around before Kenny. If maybe she was what some mignt refer to as a false self.”

“I wrote about parts like you asked. I wrote about Ms. Perfect…maybe you should just read it.” I get out my notebook and hand it to her.

When I wrote about Ms. Perfect, I wrote that she was maybe a little girl at first, a little girl when I was a little girl, and she just grew up with me, excpet I still think she is an older teen. I’d written that Ms. Perfect was the one my mom always liked, even loved.

“So, what I am thinking is a bit like what you wrote. I’m thinking that Ms. Perfect was…. created to be this part that your mom could accept. Ms. Perfect was the part that was able to be securely attached because she was what your mom could accept.” Bea is speaking very cautiously, very carefully.

Writing this now, I think Bea is right, my mom couldn’t accept any part except Ms. Perfect, and it’s Ms. Perfect that is securely attached. I wonder if Ms. Perfect has controlled things at times when I would have acted out with Bea, because, well, she didn’t want to have Bea go away or send me away. I need to think on this more. My thoughts are muddled right now.

“Okay….that makes sense,” I agree.

“And that leaves the rest of the parts…well, with more of an insecure attachment. Which is why we have this teen part with the borderline rage acting out when it feels like you were too much and I am leaving.”

“Because the rest of me didn’t get secure attachment because the real me wasn’t acceptable to my mom? So then I had to be Ms. Perfect so that she would….accept me?”

“Well….in a nutshell, yes. Having Ms. Perfect run the show meant that you could get your needs met. The real you, or even the parts couldn’t get attachment needs met because your mom had very specific things she could handle and stay emotionally present for.” Bea says gently.

I don’t say anything. I’m struggling to wrap my head around this. There must be some secure attachment for the real me because of my grandparents. I don’t know.

“This is all separate from the kenny piece. This is all developmental trauma stuff. Of course, already being capable of separating things and having this false self to run the show and be accepted would have made it even easier for him to take advantage. But this development attachment trauma stuff, talking about this now, I can see so many parallels between my behavior that bad Wednesday and your mom.”

“That’s what you mean by it being about the past?”

“In part, yes. We react to things that may be happening in the present, but it triggers old hurts, old beliefs, and we react like those old things are true, even if they are true of the present situation.”

“What parallels?” I ask.

“Well, your mom went away when your feelings were too intense for her to cope with, or accept. You came here that bad Wednesday feeling pretty triggered, and I wasn’t really here. And then in our email when I told you that I was making a choice to avoid the emotional piece, that mirrored your mom, too.” (I think there were other parallels she drew, but I can’t remember now.)

I don’t think I said more, and can’t remember what else Bea said. I was busy thinking what it means if parts of me are insecurely attached, and Ms. Perfect is securely attached. Where does that leave the whole of me? I have no idea.

We wrap up the session by looking at our calendars and scheduling an extra session for Thursday. Wednesday is July 4, so next week would have been a one session week otherwise. Bea’s schedule is tricky, she doesn’t have mornings open on Thurdays or Fridays, but I decide to take an afternoon appointments and ask a friend to watch Kat. When I text my friend, she tells me that she would be happy to take Kat that day and that she is glad I finally took her up on her offer to help.

Ruptured: Unconditional

Monday morning ,I wake up earlier than I need to, with a black hole of anxiety surrounding me. Bea and I had continued emailing all weekend. I had managed to sort out that I was still confused over what she thought was mean. I understood that many of my emails after the first one were angry and lashing out, and could be described as raging or mean. I couldn’t figure out what about my firsf email was so mean; was it because I had phrased things “you made me” or because she felt it was a brutal distortion, or because of something else? I questioned this in an email, and Bea sent back a scary response.

Alice,

I actually need to get my thoughts together before I can think about what I want to say.  So what needs to be addressed at this point is the “mean” part and what I think about that, right?  I want to talk about why this is a “special kind of mean,” and I want to do that very carefully.  I’ve been this kind of mean before too, so I feel like I can explain this without pathologizing it, and I can empathize with it, but it is an actual “thing” clinically.  

So in this explanation there won’t be any blaming or any threat to abandon the teen or any of the parts. There will only be an effort to make sense of all this and try to find some common ground.  What I’m not sure about is how you’re going to feel about this being a “thing” that happens to traumatized people rather than about your personal experience. I don’t want to take away from your personal experience, but I feel like you have to understand how I see this “thing” before we can turn to your particular experience.

I wonder if it would be helpful if I talked about my experiences first? If we didn’t address any of your stuff in session, but if I talked about my experience and explained the “thing” in terms of me?  Then you can see if you want to talk about your stuff, or email about it?

Bea

Yikes. Her response made me so scared. I just knew it was going to be something bad and that she was going to turn back into shrinky Bea and I was going to end up more upset. I asked her to please just email the shrinky thing and let me read it. She said that she would try, but she wanted to do so when she had a good chunck of time to sit down and explain it, and that she wouldn’t have time until Sunday night. We emailed a bit more, me worrying about it and Bea reassuring that she had nothing bad to say, and that this didn’t change anything about her and me. In the end, she didn’t email about the shrinky thing. She emailed to let me know that she was very tired and didn’t want to explain something this sensitive when she wasn’t at her best. She said she knew that this wasn’t helping my anxiety but she felt it was more important that she be well rested and able to be fully present with me in the morning.

All of that didn’t feel as terrible to me as you mignt think. Bea stayed in contact with me, she responded to my emails, she reassured me that it was okay and she didn’t leave. I was scared and anxious Monday morning but I still walked into her office without too much difficulty.

I said hello, and Bea said hello and I sat down on the couch, curling my knees into my chest. I was shaking from all the anxiety.

“I know this wasn’t easy to walk in here today. I know that your anxiety is making it really difficult, so I want to follow your lead. You tell me what you would like to do today. Would you like to color? Would it help to just sit and talk about safe topics? Do you want to talk about stuff?”

I reach over and pick up the cloud pillow, hiding my face. I can’t be here, I can’t do this. I can’t breathe. Something very, very bad is going to happen. This is dangerous, I shouldn’t be here.

Gently, Bea says, “I’m going to grab your blanket.” I hear her get up, and then she is standing near me with the blanket. “Do you want me to cover you up or just set it next you?”

I can’t even answer her. Finally I manage to whisper, “I just want to hide.” So Bea drapes the blanket over me before going back to her own seat.

Now that I’m hiding, I feel a little safer, but not much. I’m still shaking, still having trouble slowing my breathing.

“Take a minute, okay? Can you notice that you are safe? Nothing bad is happening or is going to happen. Listen to the birds outside. You aren’t in danger. You’re here in my office and you are safe. I’m here. Nothing bad is happening.” She says slowly.

“It doesn’t feel like that,” I tell her.

“I know. And that is where we have to go back to our ‘feelings aren’t facts’. I know this feels scary and dangerous, but it isn’t. We are just sitting here, in my office, listening to the birds.”

“But something bad is going to happen. You have scary things to say.” I squeeze cloud pillow tighter.

“It really feels like that, doesn’t it? This feels very scary and dangerous.” She says.

I nod, even though she can’t see me.

“I think, maybe we should just spend today working on safety.” I can hear her sit forward in her seat, and I can picture her face because I’ve seen how kind and caring she can look when she wants to make sure I am feeling safe.

I sit in silence for a long time. It isn’t easy to figure out what I need or what will help me feel safer. Hiding? Not talking? I’m not sure at first, but then it dawns on me that as long as I am filled with anxiety that Bea is going to say I am mean and terrible and she hates me and I cannot see her anymore, I’m not going to feel safe. “I think I need to know what you want to say.” I blurt the words out in a rush, and then I sit there hugging cloud and waiting for something very, very bad to happen.

“Okay,” Bea says. “I can do that. Before I do, though, how will I know you are still here? If we are going to talk about this, you have to be here.”

I think about it. If she can’t see me, she can’t know for sure that I’m present, and if what she says upsets me, I could be silent because I am hurt and upset, or I could be silent because I am very, very far away. I sigh. “You could just ask me,” I finally suggest.

Bea lets out a little laugh that seems to say *well that was simple. Why didn’t I think of that?* “Good idea. Are you here now?”

“Yes. Mostly. Enough here, I think. Just really, really scared.”

“I know. This isn’t scary, I promise. And it doesn’t change anything about you or how I feel about you.”

I bury my face in cloud. This is going to be bad. I know it. I can feel it. Very bad things are going to happen.

“Okay, I want to be very careful about explaining this, and I want you to know I really, really get it. This is a special kind of mean. I have been this kind of mean before, and I know how hard it is to feel like this. I know that it isn’t really an intentional mean. It’s almost a hijacking of our wise mind, and this emotional mind takes over. Well, it is more than emotion mind taking over. For you, it’s a part, one that gets hijacked with intense emotion when this part feels threatened with abandonment. This part reacts with intense feelings, and rage. There is no logic when this part is feeling taken over by emotion mind. This kind of rage, this sort of lashing out, the distorted thinking that goes along with it, clinically we would call it…..and I know that this word is not one you like but I am going to use it anyway. Clinically speaking, this would be a borderline trait, this reaction would be described as borderline rage. That doesn’t mean you have borderline personality disorder, or change anything about you. It means that the teen part reacts to those feelings and fears of abandonment with borderline rage. This is something that happens to traumatized people. Alice, are you still here?” Bea has been speaking slowly and carefully to me.

“Yeah….I……here.” It’s hard to get the words out, not because I’m far away, but because I just don’t know what to think. I might have distorted what Bea had said that Wednesday, but I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been spining out with anxiety and if she had been present. If she had realized I walked into her office dissociated and triggered. And I was only telling her what I heard her saying, what conclusions I drew based on her behavior, and how that felt. Why was that mean, exactly? Why was she calling it borderline rage?

“Do you know where the term borderline comes from? It comes from this idea that people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder were on the border of psychosis. This is out dated thinking, and you already know that I don’t believe that BPD is a personality disorder, I believe it is caused by trauma. But this idea of psychosis, or what I would call an extreme distortion of reality….it’s part of this lashing out, it is what leads to the rages.” Bea pauses for a moment, and then checks in with me again. When she is satisfied that I’m still here, she continues, “I don’t want you to feel I am being shrinky, and I very much want to explain this in more human terms. I think it might make more sense, that way. But I want to make sure you are comfortable with me sharing my experience of this special kind of mean?”

“Okay.” I whisper the word.

“When I first went to therapy, way back when I first started school to become a therapist, I experienced this. My therapist had an office set up and appointments scheduled where I didn’t typically see his other patients. I had been seeing him for about a year at the point of this experience and I had never seen another one of his patients. One day I did see one of his patients leaving. It triggered something in me, and all of a sudden, in my mind, my therapist had made sure I saw his other patient because he liked her, he cared about her, and he did not care about or like me at all.” Bea pauses here and asks, “Now, does that really make sense logically?”

“No,” I tell her.

“No. It doesn’t make any kind of sense. But at that moment in time, in my mind, he hated me, he didn’t care about me, he had wanted to hurt me. I walked into his office mad. More than mad, really. In a rage. I lashed out at him and all he would say to me was that wasn’t his experience. I emailed him after my session, still in a rage. It took a long time for me to calm down and come back to my wise mind. I couldn’t see beyond my distortion of reality, and my emotion mind had taken over. My therapist refusing to engage with me just made me more angry; I wanted him to soak up my rage, to be hurt by my lashing out because in my mind he had hurt me purposefully. There wasn’t much he could do but wait for me to be calm enough that I could hear what he was saying. That’s where setting a boundary comes in; the boundary of not taking on that rage, and the boundary of waiting, standing next to the person who is raging, until they can really listen, until they are no longer completely hijacked.”

I can’t imagine Bea in a rage. I can’t imagine her lashing out at anybody.

“Does that make sense? Maybe? Sort of?” She asks me.

“I guess. I don’t know. Enough.” I want to tell her that I hadn’t wanted her to soak up any of my feelings, rage or otherwise. I want to tell her that I could see the parallel, and maybe agree with most of what she was saying, but that unlike her therapist who had done nothing wrong, she had done something wrong. I want to tell her that unlike her, I had only wanted her to understand what I had felt that day. I’m confused. This sucks.

“I’m going to stop talking now, unless you have questions or something else you want me to speak to. I’m sure you have a lot to say, and I want to make sure I give you that chance. If you want to wait and write, that’s fine, too. Whatever feels best to you.”

I sit there for a while, quiet and unable to even find my voice. Finally I tell her, “I can’t talk.”

“Because you can’t find your words? Or because you are too frozen? Or is it because you aren’t sure it’s okay to talk?”

I stick my hand out from under the blanket, holding up 3 fingers.

“Okay. I really do want to hear what the teen has to say. I want to know what she is thinking. Can I tell her it is okay to talk? I’m here, and I’m listening.” Her voice is soft and kind, warm and understanding.

“I can’t….I won’t say anything right.” I don’t exactly feel safe with Bea, or trust her right now, but I am still very afraid of making things worse. And there is so much in my head, I don’t know where to start, or how to say it without having it all blow up in my face. I want to tell her that the bad Wednesday was a big deal, even if she doesn’t think so. I want her to understand how and why I heard what I heard and came to the conclusion that I did. I want to tell her that I’m (the teen) is terrified she really does only want Ms. Perfect because it wasn’t until Ms. Perfect stepped in to smooth things out that Bea said she felt very much here, present and engaged in the conversation. I want to tell her she really hurt me when she compared me to a tantrumming toddler. I want to ask if she even remembers why that would hurt me so badly. And I can not say any of these things at all.

“Can you try to say one thing, and we can go from there?”

“No. No, because what I want to say is still just going to sound like *you made me* or some version of that and then you will just decide I am being mean again and ugh. I can’t do this.”

“Okay. Could we talk about this is third person? So instead of *I* you could say *the teen*. That would give us a little bit more distance from this.” She suggests.

“But….I might as well be saying *Alice* then,” I argue.

“Yes, but this isn’t Alice, this isn’t all of you. This is a part. I know it is a little weird to talk in third person.” Then she tells me how in Sensorimotor therapy, you always refer to a part in the third person to help keep some distance. There was more about the why that she said, but I was getting a little far away because I was feeling frustrated at the fact Bea didn’t understand what I was saying.

“No…it’s not that….I think you misunderstand what I’m trying to tell you. If I were to say *the teen* then I might as well be saying *Alice* or even *I*. It’s all the same right now.”

“Ahhh. I didn’t get it, but I get it now. Do you think that we could try using third person, for me? To help me keep keep in mind that this is a part, and that all of Alice needs me to stay emotionally here, so you can express what you need to express?”

“I don’t care if you say the teen. You always do anyways. But I always just say I.” Writing this now, I think Bea was trying to see if there was any adult onboard because the adult always says *the teen* and *the little girl* whereas if the teen or the little girl are running things, they always say *I*. I also wonder if she was trying to distract me from my anxiety and show me that she and I could still work out challenges between us.

“Okay. See, we have an ageeement and some common ground. I’ll say the teen and you will say I. Do you think you can share a little of what you are thinking now?”

“I…I feel like…..like you don’t think Wednesday was a big deal.” My voice breaks on the last word, and I start to cry.

“I do think it is a big deal. I know it is a big deal.” She takes a breath and continues, “On the surface, I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? I was talking about insurance, and I had a lack of awareness of my anxiety over that and my anxiety surrounding insurance was brought into your session. But, that isn’t really the whole story, is it? My anxiety made me not be here, and that was terrifying for you. I didn’t see that you were triggered and not present when you walked in, and it was as if I had abandoned you. Not being present, not seeing you, letting my anxiety run your session, all of that was very, very bad. It was a big deal, it is a big deal. I knew that day, this little piece of me knew that this was going to make it very, very hard for you to trust me, to feel safe with me for a long time. I do think what happened is a big deal, I know it hurt you very much, and I am so sorry for that.”

I’m surprised. She does think it is a big deal, she does understand that it was bad. “I was really, really scared. You didn’t see me. You weren’t here. I didn’t know if you were ever coming back.”

“I know. I also know that you can’t trust this right now, but I did come back. I am here.”

“I….do you….I mean, I know you didn’t say the things I heard, or sort of….assumed…..but do you see how….why I did? Because I had needed and needed and needed the weeks before with working so hard to trust you and believe you and then I got here and I needed you again and you went away. I thought, I think it is my fault, that you went away because I needed too much and then you were saying, talking about insurance and it felt like you agreed with what you were saying and that you felt that way because I was too much and you used me as an example to the insurance company and I really thought I broke you.”

“I do see how things got so distorted. Given your history, and your beliefs about yourself and needing too much, and me not being here, yes, I can see how things got so distorted. I want to make sure you hear this, okay? It’s important. You can not break me. You will not break me, you are not too much. Okay?”

“Maybe.” I whisper the word, really not sure if I can trust what she is telling me.

“Can I tell you what I meant when I said we had just the teen stuff left to deal with?” She asks.

“No. No. I can’t…..” I react immediately, and slam a wall down around her words. I don’t want to hear her tell me that I don’t need to be here for much longer. I don’t want to hear that its not much left to sort out, that it’s not a big deal.

“I know you are scared. I know. I really believe that if you will allow me to explain you will feel better about this, not worse.” Her tone says that she will follow my lead, no matter how much she would like to tell me.

“I…okay.” It’s almost a whine, and I should probably be embarrassed but I’m not. I’m too busy being scared.

“I spoke very generally, and that was not helpful to you. When I said we had just the teen stuff left, I think of your journey as climbing over mountains. The little girl stuff, all the work we have done with her memories and her feelings and her thoughts and beliefs, that was one giant mountain we climbed over. Now, we’ve climbed some smaller mountains, too. Your grief over your grandparents’ deaths. The mom stuff— that might be multiple smaller mountains. Learning to be grounded. Learning that it’s okay to say no and nothing bad will happen. Those are all things that took time, but they are smaller mountains. I see this teen stuff as the other very large mountain we have to climb. I don’t think it’s a small task, and I don’t think it’s going to be quick or easy. I expect it will take a long time. But I don’t think there are any other giant mountains for us on this journey. Lots of smaller ones left, and more will crop up, but the last big mountain to get over is all the teen’s stuff. And this is an important mountain.”

I let out a breath. That doesn’t sound bad. Not at all. “You aren’t leaving? Or makimg me leave?”

“Nope. Not at all. I know it sounds hard to believe, but there will come a time when you can take me or leave me.” Bea tells me.

“And then you will leave me?”

“No. Even then, I won’t leave. I’ll be here.”

“You really won’t leave?” I ask again.

“I really won’t.” She says with no trace of frustration in her voice.

“You said my behavior was like a toddler tantrum. That hurt my feelings. Do you know why?” It’s an abrupt change of subject, and I’m numb and far away as I ask it.

Bea follows the change of subject, although she sounds a little bit confused. “I did, yes….that…can you tell me?”

I’m even farther away as I start to tell her. “You know. I….the shrink after Kathy, he told my parents that my behavior, my—…”

Bea interupts, “Yes, I do know. He told your parents that the suicide attempts and the self harm and the eating disorder behaviors were nothing more than a toddler throwing a tantrum and should be ignored. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean you should be ignored. I meant that when we are raging like that, there isn’t really anything anyone can do, except wait it out. Much like when a toddler is tantrumming, and all a parent can do is stand next to them and wait. The raging isn’t to be ignored, but it can’t be engaged with.”

“I…it….you did leave, though. You said that you were ignoring the emotion part, you were disengaged emotionally because of me lashing out.”

“Yes….that’s true. I did disengage emotionally because I needed to set the boundary that I wouldn’t soak up that rage.”

“I didn’t ask you to soak up my rage. I never asked that of you, or even thought….that isn’t what I wanted!” My voice is louder, now, and my tone suggests that I am frustrated. I can’t believe she got it so wrong. “Just because that is what you wanted when you were raging, that doesn’t mean it’s what I wanted!”

“You know what? You’re right. That very well could be my stuff, and not yours. I’m sorry. What did you want? Will you tell me?” Her voice is earnest and authentic. She really means what she is saying.

“I wanted to know you were there, that you weren’t leaving, that I didn’t break you, that the way my crazy brain twists things wasn’t how you felt. That’s all.”

“Do you remember when I did tell you I was here, and you said it didn’t feel like I was?” She asks carefully.

“Yes. It didn’t feel like you were there because you gave me a bunch of shrink talk and then said *I’m here.* That’s…..all the shrinky stuff is like you hiding behind this wall of shrinky stuff so of course you aren’t here, there is a wall between us.”

“Okay. Okay. I get that. I think I assume writing more will give you more of a sense that I am here.”

I roll my eyes. “Not when it’s shrink talk. That only negates anything empathetic you might have said.”

“Thank you for telling me what you wanted,” she says softly.

“Will you please not call me a tantrumming toddler again?” I ask.

“Did I call you that?” She questions me.

“Okay, can you please not compare me to a tantrumming toddler again?”

“Okay. I won’t do that again. And I am sorry it hurt your feelings.”

I ask her if she knew when she had said she was emotionally present during our email back and forth. She doesn’t know. “When Ms. Perfect took over. Then, you were willing to talk to me.”

Bea tells me that I sound very accusatory and blaming.

“I’m not…that’s, I’m not trying to. But it is what happened and it feels a little like maybe you…well, maybe you do want Ms. Perfect.”

“I don’t have a problem with Ms. Perfect, she is very good at her job and she serves her purpose, but she’s not the part I really want to talk to.”

“Why not?” I counter. “She’s easy. She doesn’t ask for anything, she is entertaining, she isn’t difficult, she doesn’t have big feelings, she doesn’t need anything.”

“I know. And that’s sad.”

“Why? Why is that sad?” I don’t understand. Ms. Perfect is not sad.

“Because real people need people, they need a secure base, they have feelings, sometimes big ones, they are difficult af times and they can be entertaining and they are boring at times. Real people are multifaceted. Ms. Perfect, she came about because she is what your parents needed, and she ran the ship for a long, long time. Which means, relationships felt— and often were— very conditional. This relationship, our relationship, it’s unconditional. That means you don’t have to be anything except who you are.”

“So you don’t like Ms. Perfect best?” I ask. I’m trying not to focus on her use of the word unconditional, because…..well, because it is a big concept to wrap my head around right now.

“No. I don’t like her best. Look, I don’t not like Ms. Perfect, but I wouldn’t have a beer with her. But teen, if you were old enough, I would have a beer with you. Maybe we could go out for a root-beer.” She sounds genuine, and I’m speechless. She doesn’t hate me, and she doesn’t want Ms. Perfect.

We are both silent for a moment, and then Bea says, “My setting a boundary with the teen isn’t about me not liking or wanting her. It’s about keeping her safe and about not allowing her to behave in ways that are unhelpful to her. It’s about me caring enough to try to help her change behavior that pushes people away. That might feel like I’m being firmer than I usually am, but this isn’t because I don’t care.”

“Did I do something wrong?” My voice is teary.

“No. No, not at all,” she reassures.

“Then why are you telling me……boundaries?” I ask quietly.

“Because I wanted to make sure the teen knows that me being firmer than I offen am is not about me getting rid of her. It’s not because I don’t like her, or because I don’t like any of the parts. I care about all of you. The little girl doesn’t need to worry, she didn’t do anything wrong. No one did anything wrong.” Bea explains.

“It’s not the little who is worried.” I don’t bother explaining that the little girl is hiding from Bea, convinced that Bea is going to leave.

“What part is it?” She asks.

I think, and I try to sort through things. “A different part of teen?” It comes out as a question, but as soon as I say it, I’m positive that’s right.

“Ahh, yes. The vulnerable teen. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Boundaries….they mean go away, you are being bad, I don’t want to deal with you. Boundaries feel bad.” I tell her.

“Those sorts of boundaries do feel bad, don’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“Your mom set boundaries like that, right?” She asks.

“Yeah. She didn’t want to deal with me when I was being bad, when I was a drama queen and needed too much. It’s not okay, to be like that. So she pushed me out, she went away, she ,ade boundaries.” I’m crying, again. Ugh.

“That hurt a lot. But my boundaries aren’t like that. They aren’t to make you go away. They are to help keep you safe, and to help me be the best secure base I can be. Modeling good boundaries and keeping myself healthy so that you can learn how to have healthy boundaries is part of being a secure base. I need to be able to sit with you in the muck, but it would not be helpful for you if I got stuck in the muck or started to drown in it. Good boundaries make sure that doesn’t happen.”

We talk through that a little more and I calm down some.

At this point, Bea tells me that we need to wrap things up. “It’s 11:00,” she informs me. “I’m really sorry to let things go over so long. This felf important to get through, though.”

I’ve been here for 2 1/2 hours. I start to feel guilty, and then remember that Bea made a choice, and it’s her job to manage the time. Then I only feel grateful that we had time to sort through some of this. I don’t think I could have stopped this talk halfway through and picked it up later. I don’t think I would have felt okay stopping this halfway through. Nothing is fixed, but I have some hope now that it can be repaired. This no longer feels like it is a certainty that this is the end.

“Do you think you might be able to write about this other teen part for Wednesday?”

“Okay. I can do that,” I tell her.

It takes me a bit longer to really be ready fo leave, and when we say goodbye, I ask her one more time, “You really aren’t leaving?”

“I’m really not leaving,” she says.