The Break

Not the palm tree and cocktails kind but the therapeutic kind. Less sand and sangria more sadness and sobbing.

You know that feeling when our friends go on a ‘break’ and spend a week spamming social media with images of sunshine and happiness? I’d describe that as irritation, tinged with a jot of regret and, on occasion, mild hatred (I’m easily annoyed).

Well, when my therapist takes a break the feeling is the above, on steroids and with the addition of someone stamping on my chest telling me how wrong I am to feel like I do until I agree. It’s not pleasant.

In the same breath it is important to say that, in part through therapy, I now have some of the tools to survive this emotional onslaught. I have the knowledge that I’ve done it before, the assurance that my therapist will return and some level of ability to be kinder to myself through the process.

I’m trying very hard to process the feeling and the impacts it has. When a break is coming I’m confronted with it in the most overt way. I think if I were reflecting on it in reference to how someone else felt I would say that it's a totally natural part of therapy, particularly if you're in long-term treatment and if you’ve had trauma in your childhood. The feelings are intense, like nothing I've experienced before and that's scary. However, if I look at the way I feel towards my therapist in context of attachment, it's really the Child version of me that's learning to attach to a safe person, the only time I’ve allowed myself that since losing my dad when I was 8. That's actually really special and not something to feel ashamed about – how could I feel ashamed of that scared little girl? It comes back to the realisation I’ve had more and more that a bulk of the work to be done on me is to pick up the pieces of myself I left behind at 8, at 13. The things that have happened which have allowed me to create such a rhetoric of hatred about myself. To hold those versions of myself tight, to love them, get them support and accept that the feelings that come with that are OK.

That’s the positive bit. The tricky part now is surviving the next week intact and maybe even the hope that after that all the parts of me will make it into the room and back to work.