Plateau

Today in session, I was telling my therapist that I feel like I’m at some sort of therapeutic plateau. I have come so far in terms of stability. I am in a good place – my life is overall quite wonderful. Of course there’s a lot I still struggle with, but that is entirely internal at this point. I have eliminated all sources of truly toxic or harmful external stresses. There is no one left in my life who can, or would, hurt me.

So, naturally, I feel a compulsion to continue to hurt myself.

During last night’s session, I nearly had a flashback. I think the only thing that stopped it was that I felt it coming on and mentioned that fact to my therapist. She told me that she knew it would annoy me, but that she was going to do what she needed to do in order to keep me “in the room” with her. For us, that means she asks a lot of grounding questions and makes a lot of grounding statements.

Why is this annoying? Because it feels like an abandonment. Not necessarily from me, but from the parts that are stuck in trauma time. I want to pull away from the memories and sensations, but unfortunately that means that I leave those traumatized parts stranded in their present-day torture.

Which sucks. But I just can’t do it. I can’t go there.

Scheduling Changes

It’s probably fairly clear from all the time I spend blogging about scheduling issues that my therapist and I often struggle to keep our three weekly sessions. We’ve somehow always managed to figure it out thus far, but it’s tough. We both end up doing a lot of rearranging and making small sacrifices here and there to make it work. Overall, I think it’s worth it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it less challenging.

I’ve been seeing her on Mondays for a very long time. That has probably been the most consistent day in which we’ve had sessions together. Due to my latest clinic schedule, however, she’s had to do a lot of shifting her schedule in order to offer me three “primetime” (i.e. after standard work hours) slots.

Which means no more Mondays. For the next month I will see her on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Except for a couple of weeks where I either have class or she has a conflict and we have to switch Friday to Thursday. As I mentioned recently, we changed my session to Thursday last week. And then I didn’t have session today because my Mondays were switched to Tuesdays.

I really don’t like that. I’ve gotten into a nice little routine of starting my week with a session after school/clinic. It was bizarre and unsettling to realize that wouldn’t be happening today. One positive is that it opens up my schedule to attend my favorite yoga class again, but I still felt sad and upset about the missing my normal session time.

Using Anorexia to Disengage

Things have been pretty calm in therapy lately, at least from a relational perspective.

That’s not necessarily why I haven’t been writing about it more on here, but I think it might be part of it. Mostly I’m just too under-nourished and distracted by my obsession with food and other related numbers to find the time or energy for blogging.

I don’t know how others experience eating disorders, but I must admit it is the most energy-consuming and demanding thing I have probably ever encountered. There are moments here and there where I feel like I’ll start to shake it off, but then something activates me and bam! I’m right back to the usual nonsense.

It’s tough. Using ED behaviors as both a pretty effective coping mechanism and a tool of self-destruction has become more of a habit than anything else. There are moments when I think about pulling out of the incessant self-deprecation. For example, I’ll think, “Okay, so I’m disgusting. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe I don’t need to obsess and panic about it every literal 3 seconds.” Which, for me, is progress. But then I feel the ED tug on me and I reassure it that even if I am less self-loathing, I won’t give up the disorder.

It is stubborn and strong and a LIAR. Yet I love it. It makes me feel safe and powerful and worthy and capable and accomplished. It is what my therapist has not so lovingly started calling my “greatest frenemy”.

Sickness as Abandonment

All week long my therapist has been sick. Not severely sick, just a head cold. But when I got to my first session of the week, I immediately realized she sounded congested and I asked her about it. She said she has a bit of a cold, but it was nothing major.

Sure.

Except, it totally freaked me out. In the past year and a half, she’s never been noticeably ill before. She’s never cancelled or rescheduled a session for personal reasons at all. So I don’t know if I was worried she would get more sick and then take time off from work or what, but it really upset me.

Then for our second session of the week, she called me an hour before my session and left a voicemail. I was nervous that she’d called to cancel, but she actually just had a client cancel their session, so she wanted to know if I happened to be available to come in earlier.

I was a little irritated with her for unidentified reasons (probably her head cold, to be honest) so I’d considered just not showing up for session at all. I almost stayed on the train when it stopped by her office. But then I told myself that I didn’t have to go to session just because I was in the area, so I got off the train.