The University of the Self #97

High Intensity Therapy Session 3

High Intensity Therapy Session 3

This article follows on from number 2, which can be found here.
Part 4 can be read here.

Image description: I have made a linocut print on a piece of white paper. The linocut is created using teal ink. There is a sun/moon in the top left corner and a landscape beneath created using wavy lines of different widths and lengths.

Content warning: this article discusses a therapy session, stress, mental health issues such as Passive Suicide Ideation, life and death.

Oh yes. Oh yes. Who is Queen of Car Parks right now? That would be me. Last session, as I got myself out of the Car Park of Nightmares on the edge of nervous exhaustion, I looked again for where the entrance to the Car Park of Myth Round the Back might be. Yes – I see it now – a few yards before this entrance, is another entrance - both of these entrances come at you much too suddenly - both you only see when you are literally on top of them, and in fact have just driven past, and the traffic is too aargh to imagine turning around to go back to them. But there it is – quick, quick! Look for a point of reference for it, otherwise you won’t find it again. Its like an elusive portal to Narnia. Long red wall. Long red brick wall and then it’s there. I tap the right side of my head with my right index finger sharply a few times and repeat again, twice, longredwall, longredwall.

This is a method I often use to try and knock a piece of information in. I do not know if it works – I sort of found this method in one of the jumble-sale books I loved and treasured as a child. The main character was an extremely efficient, unsympathetic girl who just got on with stuff, won all the prizes and got everything mostly her own way. There was a scene where she had to get up early in the morning for a pony show, and she had a method which comprised of banging her head on the pillow the same number of times as the hour she wanted to get up at – i.e. six head bangs on the pillow for six a.m. Please don’t do this at home – it might be very bad for you! I never did it, because the giddy banging of my head would have left me incapacitated with dizziness and nausea, which might well have stayed with me for a fortnight, or triggered that awful spinning sensation that I lived (and still live) in fear of.

Instead, I translated this method into tapping the side of my head for remembering, and/or tapping the side of something when I experience relief that something I do has worked out (like tapping the dashboard of the car on the right side of the steering wheel when I have completed a manoeuvre and am by some miracle still alive).

The car park round the back is a whole new world. The car park is one street back from the main road. It is just as fiddly to negotiate as the front one, and no larger. In fact, it might be smaller. There is one space between the other cars, so I take my time fitting myself in. What bliss to have the time to creep back and forth like a tortoise with nobody beeping, tutting, gesticulating, giving you the stink-eye, or otherwise being unnecessarily impatient. OK. Before I get out, I close my eyes and shut down for a while to shrug off the journey’s stress. Then I perform my initial check-around. The car park is a rough, potholed and cracked Tarmac rectangle with the building around three sides of it (the back of the building where I am having my therapy sessions). To my left (as I sit) is a long canteen-looking hall which is empty. Leaning on the side of the hall on the outside are two legless rectangular table tops. The hall has fire doors toward the end, and a bit of brick wall adjoins it, protruding a few feet. Against this wall are a few (maybe four) generic hall chairs, abandoned to the elements. Then the car park gateway. Then more brick wall, and a patch of weedy scrub, next to which is a very rusty oil drum which has had holed crudely drilled into its sides, allowing it to be used as a burning bin. There is a general impression of depressing run-downedness.

There is a single-track road running past the gateway. Opposite the gateway is a delicious fantasy of a house, which I immediately fall in love with. It is squashed into a tiny space and is white rendered and very smart – it is an unusual rhombus shape, with a proper grey slate roof and little windows. It kind of puts me in mind of a miniature Bavarian castle. I don’t think it had turrets – I assume my mind has invented those. It has a FOR SALE sign upon it, with a SOLD sticker blazoned over it. I am immediately disappointed to have missed out on its purchase, as I certainly would (I tell myself) have bought it. Which is ridiculous as I couldn’t afford to buy one brick of it. And nice as it is, it isn’t my Dream Home. But still, I waste a couple of minutes grumbling at myself – see? If you kept up with things, you could be living there right now. Like Rapunzel. Kept up with what, I don’t know. A laminated note is stapled to a lamppost, bemoaning those who go into the building while leaving their cars parked in the street.

I make my usual meal of getting out of the car, spilling bags and stick, sorting out the stuff I need to bring. I loop my handbag’s strap across my body, slip my hand through the loop I duct-taped beneath the ergonomic handle (I was given this at one of my physio appointments, as the straight handle of my other one was really hurting my palm) because I got sick of dropping it and having to pick it up. I have brought a carrier bag’s worth of clothes for the clothing bin. See, I tell myself – that’s progress. A little less junk to feel guilty about. My old layers fall into the clothing bin with a soft thump. In I go again.

Through the first door, where the perishable food bank food is kept, I see that the boxes are almost empty – in one, just a couple of old doughnuts with ghosts of grease beneath them. In the other, one very large sweet potato – it is covered in white blooms of mould and areas of weeping spoil. The sight of it makes me want to cry out. In fact, I do utter a quiet oh! This is the Grief Potato. It fills me with intense sadness and futility. It epitomises loneliness, and so much of what is wrong with our current age. I almost cry. Instead, I pass through the next door and sign in.

I notice the box of primary-coloured silicone baking moulds is back. So is the bric-a-brac box – now there is a fake bunch of Lily-of-the-Valley poking from the rubble, and the three decorative but pointless balls I saw last time are still inside. I am very early indeed (an overestimation even for myself), so I decide to go into the café. A nice person behind the counter makes me a pot of tea.

The huge flat-screen TV is on, so I sit in a nearby sofa and turn my attention to that. Dickinson’s Real Deal is on. On the programme, a person is attempting to sell a collection of German Lava Vases from the 1970s. They are either bright yellow or cherry red. The pot of tea comes, with a cup and saucer. There are two Malted Milk biscuits on the saucer which I didn’t ask for but which was a kindness. I don’t want them but neither do I wish to appear ungrateful, so I quickly stuff them in, feeling cross with myself for doing so. Back to the screen. A person is now attempting to sell a bundle of 1950s – 60s horror magazines, lurid with gaudy, overexaggarated illustrations. The man called Dickinson pops up like an orange mushroom every now and then, to yell industry-jargon catchphrases at the buyers and sellers. After that, a person attempts to sell their grandfather’s gold watch – it has a Prince Albert chain and a cracked glass, and it makes me think the person is selling a sad broken eye of history. I don’t know the result of this sale as I get worried about time and leave the café to go and sit in the computer/waiting room. I read a couple more signs. Ability. Motivation. Attitude. Think Positive. No Food or Drink.

Five minutes after, X comes down the stairs to get me, and I head to the lift. I waste ten minutes poking my finger at the up button before I notice the small digital panel is flashing ‘lift out of service’. I head back up the corridor (huge blown-up photographs of nice bits of the North East), take a deep breath and take myself slowly up the stairs (my leg braces make climbing stairs difficult – I have to do it sideways). I get to the top, where X is staring at the lift with a baffled expression on their face, wondering why I haven’t materialised from its silver sliding doors like a robot emerging from its metal chrysalis. Five minutes of awkward explanation ensues.

I am a little more confident in this session with regard to taking notes. Not taking notes has been a great regret of the last two sessions. If I am taking notes, then I am a normal, efficient, going-about-my-business person. If I am taking notes, then I have two things around me that are a great comfort – paper and pen. I have secreted a tiny notebook in my bag (about four inches tall) and sneak it out with my hands while looking at the wall. Then I sneak back in and draw out a pen. I place both surreptitiously on my lap in a manner that lets me fool myself into thinking I have done this with amazing sleight of hand. Then I panic and ruin the whole effect by yelling I AM GOING TO TAKE SOME NOTES. X says fine.

(The trouble with taking these notes is that this setting is stressful, and I already feel like a giant ball of wrong, so I persist in the surreptitious note-taking pantomime – I write notes with only the occasional half-glance at the page, as I am trying to write without looking. So when I get home, a lot of it is like some sort of code written by hallucinating spiders with ink on their feet. Compor. Disper Block. Afflewhile. Rumpertating.)

I have questions about identity. How can you ever know what your identity is, when you are a different person every single day you are alive? It might only be the smallest differences, but they are changes nonetheless. Tomorrow we will be different people again. Circumstances alter us. Experiences alter us. Interactions with other people or other creatures alter us. What we read or view or ingest through the various medias alter us. Time tilts us forever toward change. X comments that Jung had ideas along the same lines and I make a note to point me toward that future rabbit hole.

I tell X that I become more afraid of terminology the more I learn – at first, I was gaining tools with which I could learn about me, and describe my experiences, my body and mindscapes. Find points of identity. Now I feel lost in wordscapes – neurodiverse; neurodivergent; neurodivergence; neuroqueer; neurospicy. I keep trying and failing to learn and define myself, then I become terrified of getting something wrong. So instead of become freer, I hide away from the world more and more. My struggles with reading massively impact on my ability to wade through the articles I need to read in order to learn. I drive myself into complete exhaustion. I cannot undo the knots. So I try and learn more. The circle drives me to burnout. Then I hate myself a little more.

X makes lots of notes, then gets up to write on the whiteboard. Again, they try to pin me down to what exactly I want from these sessions. And again, I say that I do not know. X writes three possible topics on the board. The photograph I thought I had taken of the whiteboard isn’t on my phone, so I will attempt to recall it as best I can.

One – trying to make the everyday tasks I struggle with less of a complete nightmare. Is it possible to break the cycles of behaviour that make every task a thousand times more difficult than it needs to be? Is there a way of easing the way that I become so bound up in the setting up of the task, that I, more and more, end up not even beginning the task, let alone completing anything. It’s a bit like procrastination by self-sabotage.

Two – ways of coping with the distress connected with alexithymia
Three – trauma – the digging out and dealing with past and present traumas

Essentially, X tells me, we only have twelve sessions and this is already number three – we haven’t set any goals yet and we need to get on and do that (I’m paraphrasing). So I have to pick just one? I ask. How do I separate one from the other when one informs the other there is only 12 weeks, nowhere near enough time to do them all? Where does that leave me? I can be ‘cured’ (imagine me doing air quotes a lot during these sessions) of one of the things but not the other two? Have I got that right? Pretty much, X says. X keeps pointing their whiteboard marker pen at number three, as if that is the one they would like to get their teeth into. See – this is why I don’t trust therapy, I say. In nine sessions, all my trauma gets dragged out and then it’s bye-bye – no more therapy and me with all my trauma hanging out, all my life turned upside down and then I’m turned away like nothing?

X puts there head in their hands and rubs their face in a tired way. I think I might be exhausting for them. I think I might be exhausting for everyone. I exhaust myself.

Fair point, says X. Then they explain that these sessions can be extended to an additional four, then I can maybe get twelve more, though it would involve being re-referred and going back on the waiting list. I tell X that this doesn’t bother me as I am always desperate for a break at the end of them, and wish they were fortnightly, not weekly, as I never seem to be able to catch my breath between. X says they are already thinking I need more sessions. I am probably being difficult but I explain how this would mean starting from scratch with yet another stranger, yet again starting from square one – and that takes up at least three of the sessions, so I never get ahead. I just can’t face beginning all this yet again with anyone else, I sigh. Then X says that I can remain with them – it would have to be added to the referral form. Maybe that might be better.

I thread my bag strap back around my neck, stand up and balance through the knee-cracks and go over to take a photograph of the whiteboard. I am closer to the window, so I look our again, experiencing a jolt of surprise. Do you know, I tell X, when I wrote my notes for the first session, I had that building out there down as dirty and cracked-white rendered. I can clearly see right now that it is not – it is shapely ochre sandstone, with fancy, stone-surrounded bull’s-eye windows. It’s nice, in a doll’s house way. I thought there was a locker on this side too, behind the whiteboard. There isn’t. Why did I think that? What happens inside our memories? I ask. Who knows? X responds. Perhaps I have been in so many of these rooms over the years, my memory has built a generic scenario, a fail-safe go-to environment that I don’t have to use fresh energy up rebuilding. Perhaps my mind returned to a past memoryscape for some unknown reason and remade that. I am suddenly weary. How can I ever trust what my senses bring to my brain? How much of what I remember can be believed? I want to scream and it comes out of my face as a rigid grin.

At least the plastic plants I suspected were there are real. There are four. X hates them, says people keep bringing in more of them. Now everyone thinks you collect them, I joke. You’re going to get one every birthday and Christmas. You know that don’t you? X winces. X looks as tired of me as I do of them. The room is swollen with my presence – now that the session is over, I am manic. I am Alice on an ‘Eat Me’ pill. I feel as if my head is going to smack on the ceiling.


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