When the words don't come

Fear definitely fear. Fear I can’t move through this that my therapist will forever have to say I’m in a ‘difficult bit’. Can difficult bits last 40 years? 32 years? No, I’m difficult, it’s not a bit of difficult time, it’s me.

Not speaking

I cannot turn 40 behaving like this. Like this crazy delinquent. In my teens it was OK, in my 20s even. Being a little bit unhinged makes a young adult almost interesting yes? A troubled genius maybe? OK so I’m pushing it there. It became less OK when I became a mother myself but the idea of a 40 year old struggling to regulate emotions this much, needing this much external emotional support to function, relying on ridiculous ‘acting out’ risky behaviour like self-poisoning and self-harm. At 40! No, I can’t. But I can’t stop. The shame is horrific. The shame about me on every level, how I think, how I feel, things I’ve done, how I look and what I need. Yup, the world’s smallest violin is definitely playing just for me!

It’s frustrating to reflect on because I manage really good thinking and planning on how to move through the ‘difficult stuff’. I can articulate what I hope to achieve and even how I plan to do it. I am capable of all the prep work but never the action. Like me in so many other walks of life, I guess you can’t be a different person in therapy no matter how hard you try! Weeks now I’ve avoided doing anything constructive to get started on the master plan – the things I was going to face up to, talk about and tackle. I lined it all up, had great support in place, a safe person and safe place who was willing to stand with me and yet nothing, nada, zilch on the action front. Like a lazy bear struggling to emerge from hibernation I’m foggy and inert.

Because I’ve let myself, yet again, be afraid to show this stuff. The really crap things seeps around the edges like a ready to explode like an overburdened pressure cooker. Today, for instance, full blown plans to end my life, to self-harm, to indulge the hideous voice in my head but then I am desperate for respite and reach out but immediately go looking for a seal for that lid again because I’m ashamed of what started to seep out. And when it does so under the pressure it is so much more intense. I look crazier than I would if I’d just done what I planned and talked.

So again, here we are on why I can’t talk when I was (I thought) so ready.

• Shame directly – some of the stuff on that list of ‘tough stuff’ is going to trigger a lot of it. The stuff around what I let happen to me as a teenager, the way I feel about my appearance, it’s not easy stuff to share

• Being too exposed – because of some of what’s happened in the past I am scared of what someone might do when they see my vulnerabilities and I confess to how they affect me. I need no evidence that anyone would hurt me and am more than capable of twisting evidence to the contrary to back up this particular fear.

• How I want to be seen – this is the hardest to explain and definitely the one that I cannot verbalise. I don’t want this stuff to be me. The version of me I present to the world is palatable and this will not be. And, in building the trust and safety I need to consider navigating past the first 2 hurdles I have created a relationship with my therapist that somehow I want to protect from this stuff. I know this is my doing. I don’t mean any boundaries have been crossed, I know he isn’t my mate (I don’t pay my mates to spend time with me for one…usually anyway!) but I know when I reflect on it that I want him to respect me, like me, think of me as fun and engaging. I know 100% that is not how it should be and not even necessary. I don’t want someone I like (not in all the wrong ways fear not!) to have to listen to me whine about the ‘tough stuff’, have to listen to details about how I repulse myself, or about what happened to me when I was younger. I don’t want the pity, the mirrored disgust, or, worse still the impression of selfishness and over dramatization. I don’t want that version of me to be what he sees.

Of course, like I said, in avoiding starting these conversations I’m sitting on all sorts of thoughts and feelings and, like a hiker without a map I’m circling the mountain at the same height, rarely making it towards the summit or any closer to base camp. The loop does damage too.

• Puts me at risk – the aforementioned pressure cooker is too much, and I go back to old coping mechanisms and ways of thinking

• Delays the work further – because time is lost processing the risky twittery above

• Damages the therapeutic relationship – the part of me that is most scared of my therapist and the potential we have for saying more than she is ready for uses the loop to push away hard, reject care and support and generally try very hard to sabotage any chance of getting through it.

• Makes me feel hopeless – like a work project that never delivers, where excuses are made, and deadline extended time after time I feel like a failure. I decided over 2 years ago I wanted to stop all this and have decided to push on, to replan and buckle down on countless occasions since. But these plans do not deliver.

And here I am again, struggling, in a ‘difficult bit’, pushing away whilst simultaneously being very needy. I’m tired. Whilst I know climbing the mountain is hard, this many laps are slowly sapping my desire to reach the summit and robbing me of the resilience to try.

And whatever I say here, whatever I resolve to do, I have to be honest and admit that I’m likely to loop again. And that, in itself today feels like the end of the world. I’ve already got no map; my shoes are wearing out and my Sherpa is probably soon to be ready to head down the slope and pick up another climber.

What I’m going to try to do is, again, is be brave, choose courage over comfort (thanks Brene Brown!) and accept that you can’t always choose how you’re seen and maybe for once I can accept someone seeing the truth whatever the consequence.