The University of the Self #102

High Intensity Therapy Session 5

High Intensity Therapy Session 5
This article follows on from number 4, which can be found here.
Part 6 can be read here.

Content warning - this article discusses mental health issues.

“My own head is my greatest asset and my most formidable enemy,” says Cecilia Fiorucci here. The rest of the article I couldn’t access because of the paywall, but what I did read really resonated with me.

Image description: this is a piece of my fluid art. The background is white and there is a flower-like shape flooded onto the canvas. It has five petals. The petals are swirled and patterned with various shades of blue and assorted blue lines thread from the ragged petal ends to the edge of the canvas.

Before I even leave the house, I am running massively late. Major stress with the parking today. The car park around the back is chock-a-block so I pause and panic for a minute, then start shouting to myself. So, I am going to have to reverse out of here and then where am I supposed to go? Oh that’s just great. Car park round the back my arse. I continue to chunter and curse for another few minutes. Then I thank my lucky stars there is nobody waiting, irritated at the delay. I reverse in increments, tortoise slow. The miniature Bavarian castle-style house is still as lovely as it was the first time I saw it – at least I got to see that again. I turn back onto the road and take the turn for the front car park. Immediately I see that it is full. I start yelling again. Oh, no, no, no! Where the bloody hell am I supposed to go? There is a lot of what I call selfish parking – gaps half a car wide between cars. Then I mentally kick myself. Maybe the people need that space around them for accessibility reasons. After all, if I can’t park and shove the car door fully wide open, I really find it hard to get out of the car these days. Every time I drive, it leaves me in a mental and emotional wreckage, which is why I try and do it as little as possible nowadays. Yes, it is impacting my independence. But what else can I do? I am going to end up late for the appointment and I don’t want to have to walk for ages from wherever I manage to park on the restricted streets around. I wedge the car at the far end, up against a wall on the passenger side and abandon it there. There is space for the other drivers to fiddle out around me, and I have had enough. It is imperative I get out of the car now before I start to scream.

In the foyer, there are piles of clear plastic bags containing apples – not the bizarrely perfect supermarket ones, but windfall-looking ones with eyes, spots and bruises. Beautiful gatherings of pink, red and green grown in non-uniform shapes and sizes. Cookers or eaters? I can’t decide – they are not particularly massive as cookers often are. But you can cook with both cookers and eaters so that doesn’t matter. I hope the people who get them have the means to stew them and turn them into pies, sauces, chutneys and cakes, otherwise they might remain inaccessible, just a load of apples, and so many of them don’t get used this time of year for this reason. Houses everywhere have ‘Help Yourself’ boxes outside. Apples under trees jewel the grass with their dropped bodies. The other box has a lot of pretzels in it, drizzled with something – maybe icing. Apples and pretzels. My heart keeps breaking and breaking. I dream of winning the lottery so that when I am in the supermarket, I can skip merrily from till to till going ping, ping, ping, doing contactless payments for people before they can stop me, like a giant shopping fairy. I don’t even buy lottery tickets – they are too expensive now to justify the waste of money. I know in my soul that I am not one of life’s lottery winners, so I may as well save the £s.

A quick scan of the interior tells me that the box of silicone baking moulds has gone, to be replaced by a display of small, square, plain grey frames holding white ceramic heart-shapes with mottoes stamped into them – mottoes about nice grandparents and good mothers, which immediately make me want to shove the table over as that is something I never had, and feel eternally robbed of. Of course I don’t, though I quickly play the fantasy out in my mind – I come in dressed like She-Ra, booming YOUR MOTTOES ARE MEANINGLESS TO ME, before upturning the table like Jesus in the temple, and chopping all the frames up with my sword. She-Ra has a unicorn called Swift Wind. It is parked outside waiting for my quick get-away.

Where the bric-a-brac box used to be, there is a cardboard box with toy Halloween witch’s brooms standing neon-plastic-bristles-upward in it. There is a person in the computer room – the exact same person who was there when I came for session 3, when the lift was broken. They watched me (as the doorway and the chair they were sitting on faces the stairs) making my way down the stairs and when I got to the bottom, they called out loudly, well done! Now, they are staring at me again and I am sorry, but I don’t want to engage at all. Here is one of my constant dilemmas. The reception staff really, really want you to wait in the computer room, and come out of the office to look at you if you don’t, and ask you if you are all right, which really means hey you, pain in the bum, just go in that room won’t you? So I go in the room, sit on the opposite side, make no eye contact, rummage in my bag and pull out my armour of notebook and pen and write ‘lots of clear plastic bags of apples’ at the top of a page. I don’t have to wait long in the computer room as I used a lot of time up with the parking malarkey. X comes down to fetch me. Lift working. Someone is walking down the corridor so I yell SORRY at them and pass.

X was on annual leave the previous week, so it has been two weeks since my last confession. They ask me how I have been. I have not been great. I explain that I am really struggling at the moment to recollect what I have been up to. A close friend messaged me around that time to ask me how I was and I told them, ‘some things I can remember doing, some I can only half remember and the most I can’t remember doing at all.’ I tell this to X and explain that this last fortnight feels like forgotten time, with loads of missing pieces. I don’t know where I’ve been for so much of it. Is this what blackouts are? We discuss that I am obviously currently having a major issue with shutdowns – I am shutting down to cope with myriad traumas and the result of this is missed jumps in time. X explains how the hippocampus writes stories with a beginning, middle and end – when one shuts down due to sensory overload, things become jumbled and there is no logical map to my days. I struggle to know what has happened, or why or when, and feel uneasy. To put it mildly. The brain, X says, is always looking for patterns and with my Visual Processing Disorder, this becomes much harder for me.

I tell X that I almost didn’t make the session today as I couldn’t seem to get out of the house. I couldn’t remember everything I needed.

Out, lock the door. Get in car. I have keys but no bag.
Out of the car, unlock door, get bag.
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I have keys, bag but no phone.
Out of the car, unlock door, get phone.
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I have keys, bag and phone but I’ve left the oven on.
Out of the car, unlock door, check oven (which is off).
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I’ve left the oven on.
Out of the car, unlock door, check oven (which is off).
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I’ve left the oven on.
Out of the car, unlock door, check oven (which is off).
On the 3^rd attempt, I accept that the oven is off. I have forgotten my notebook.
Out of the car, unlock door, pick up notebook.
Out, lock the door. Get in car.

I always try to leave time contingencies wherever I must go but this used that up and more. I already felt tired and sick of myself, sick to the bottom of my heart of myself. I ask X what on Earth the leaving-the-oven-on thing was about – it was as if my mind had grabbed onto what some people see as a compulsion cliché. I wouldn’t mind so much if I had actually been using the oven.

Before X can reply, I blurt out that I haven’t told them everything about this attempt to leave the house. I go bright red. And add the thing to the list I now feel most embarrassed about.

Out, lock the door. Get in car. I have keys but no bag.
Out of the car, unlock door, get bag.
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I have keys, bag but no phone.
Out of the car, unlock door, get phone.
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I have keys, bag and phone but I’ve left the oven on.
Out of the car, unlock door, check oven (which is off).
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I’ve left the oven on.
Out of the car, unlock door, check oven (which is off).
Out, lock the door. Get in car. I’ve left the oven on.
Out of the car, unlock door, check oven (which is off).
On the 3^rd attempt, I accept that the oven is off. I have forgotten my notebook.
Out of the car, unlock door, pick up notebook.
Out, lock the door. Get in car.
Out of the car, unlock door, and write husband a note explaining that I am sorry but the house is full of smoke, so I have had to leave all the windows open. Love Jane xxx.

I slide my gaze around X’s face and I do not detect laughter there, or disbelief. It is the same still, careful, expressionless face as it always is. And was the house full of smoke? X asks. I believe that it was. I think. I could see it, coiling in the beams – you know – the shafts of light that come through windows, I reply. I really want to tell X about the times I have tried to vacuum sunbeams by holding up the cordless cleaner and angling its foot along them. But I don’t. I think to myself how lovely it would be to be able to suck a bit of the light out of them to keep for yourself in a bottle, so that you could hold it up like the Phial of Galadriel when you found yourself in darkness – unpleasant darkness, not lovely darkness. For there are many kinds of dark, and not all of them are bad.

X explains that I might not have wanted to leave the house; leaving the house was making me incredibly anxious, so my brain quickly formed one of its emergency patterns to attempt to prevent me from doing so. I can now take some sort of comfort in this pattern. I am trying to anchor myself as all I want to do is float away like a kite or a dinghy out to sea. My head shapes illusions of control – I feel out of control in everything so I make these small areas of control. These are some of my safety behaviours. The hallucination of the smoke a part of autistic psychosis maybe? I describe the smoke – swirling like smoke in an oil painting around the room, especially concentrated in the sunbeams.

Anything else? X wants to know. I don’t have the energy, or the subtlety to introduce it carefully, so I lob the comment out there like a stone. I’ve seen another ghost this week, I blurt. The smallest flicker of surprise, barely perceptible, shimmers over X. They ask me what I mean – whether I have seen them before.

I’ve seen them as long as I can remember, I say and I begin to explain. Not all the time, but sometimes. And they always appear in the same way. I slowly become conscious of a presence behind my left shoulder – always the left shoulder (any coincidence that the new onset of retinal migraines I am suffering from are in the left eye too? Is it my ghost eye? My gateway side? My second sight side? Has it stopped fighting and opened up to whatever wants to enter? Am I talking complete nonsense?) I catch a glimpse of them suddenly in the corner of my eye – I never turn my head – that is not part of the deal with them – they like that I have acknowledged them, that much I do know for sure. Their presence is definite, powerful. I have no clue why they are there - they just are or they aren’t. I don’t get the impression that they are restless and need me to solve something for them, like in the movies.

The ghosts never come forward of where I am, though sometimes they are further behind or leaning right over, as if they are interested in what I am doing (if I am doing something) and the feeling of them prickles like needles into my shoulder and neck, as if they are resting their chins on me. I am never afraid – I think for a minute about how the apparition is feeling – the sense of emotion I get from them is not subtle. Are they happy, sad or mad? I wait until we have decided this between us. Sometimes they stay for a fleeting moment – sometimes they stay for up to fifteen minutes-ish. They don’t have features or defined form – they are a column of shadow that once held a human inside. I take my pencil and sketch myself and a shadow to help me describe it to X.

I drew the sketch a little better when I got home.

Image description: on a white piece of lined paper I have drawn a simple figure stading on the left with their hands at their sides and a neutral expression on their face. Behind them to the right is a scribbled shadowed dark quite formless figure.

They explain from their CBT standpoint, they have to say that ghosts don’t exist. Prove that they don’t, I say – or prove that they do. Both are impossible. I am not afraid of them – I simply have to put myself on pause and wait for them to vanish. X then coaxes me into describing some of my other – my other what? Delusions? Hallucinations? Visions? I mention some, but will write about them later as right now, typing this, I am pretty much wiped out.

X asks me how I am feeling after allowing this information out. The best I can say is I dunno. I don’t have a clue how I feel about that. By the time I get home, I am freezing cold and shivering. I am lightheaded. Exhausted. I feel as if my head is full of a white, empty obliteration of light. Slowly, shame starts to nibble at my edges, as does sadness. I have, as I often do, the feeling that I have just said way too much.

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