My Monster Has A Name

Trigger Scale: (1/5)

I mentioned in my last Session Splash – May 26, 2009 Part 1* that I often bring notes of what I want to talk about to therapy. I also expressed having a hard time asking and saying what I really want to, as I am at a very vulnerable stage in my therapy. To help with this I am creating the following script, which I brought with me to my last session on June 6, 2009. I will post this session splash within the week so you know how it went.

This script was inspired by “mmaaggnnaa”, or Marie, who writes the blog “Coming Out of the Trees”. She wrote a series of posts about a script she read to her therapist, which starts here if you would like to read it. Here is mine:

Script for Therapy Session

• Brief Discussions: PTSD & In Treatment
• Script Introduction
• Questions About the Blog
• Questions About My Status & Therapy
• Questions About DID

communication. by ~liamu on deviantART

Brief Discussion

Things I would like to discuss briefly today:

• PTSD – purchased the book “The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook” and came up with a few questions. I also created a timeline of my PTSD progression.
• How trauma memories are different than normal memories (see Figure 2.1 from PTSD Sourcebook)
• How people with DID might be different at storing memories than just PTSD (see drawing)
• Why memories come into consciousness in parts
• Why did people like Stalin, Castro and Hussien choose their path and not me? What made this difference?
• Feel better that my actions can be described by PTSD, but isn’t this still an excuse?
• TV series “In Treatment” on HBO

Script Introduction

Read to my therapist:

This is going to be very hard for me to today. I am going to be more vulnerable than I am comfortable with. I may shake, I may cry, and I might have multiple panic attacks, which I would like you to ignore unless there is an emergency.

When thinking about this session I have had the following repeated thought or mantra from one of my voices: “I am not allowed to be weak. I am the mountain, that if moved will spew out Satan’s dominion and maybe even Satan himself.” I am trying to say there is a lot of fear associated with this content, I guess.

Here are my questions. You might not have answers to all of them, and I may even have the answers to some of them. I am also comfortable if you want to answer some next session so that you have time to think about the answers. Okay?

Questions About the Blog

Read to my therapist:

I feel like we have gone back and forth about the blog. At first you said you wanted to think about whether or not you would read it, but we never brought that up again. Next you told me that you had read parts and how we should use the blog in therapy only for assistance, that I would need to talk about what I wrote in session. I understood this and was not mad you had read the blog without us discussing it again, because I do want you to read it.

Next time when we discussed the blog you decided that you would not read the blog or bring up topics written there unless I brought them up in session myself. This back and forth is the first real time I have been frustrated with our sessions. However, I think it would help if right now we decide together how we will handle the blog going forward.

Questions:

• Are you going to read the blog?
• What parts of the blog can I expect you will have read?
• What parts are off limits to read, if any? What parts make me uncomfortable for you to read?
• Should we discuss issues on the blog that I did not bring up first?
• Are you comfortable with me posting the session splashes?
• Will you leave comments & register as a user?
• SIDE NOTE: Raising money through Blogging for a Cause for iSurvive

Questions About My Status & Therapy

Read to my therapist:

I wanted to let you know that I am aware I do not often look you in the eye when we are talking. I usually do like to look people in the eye when I talk to them, and consider it rude not to. I am not trying to be rude, but only do this because of how vulnerable I feel here. I hope you have not felt offended. I have been wanting to let you know that for a long time.

Okay, here are my questions about therapy:

Questions:

• Am I going too slow, or maybe too fast? Does the pace seem right for me?
• How could I do better? What am I doing well?
• Am I holding myself back in some way? Do I have habits that are making therapy slower? (such as over intellectualizing concepts)
• What do you feel we should focus on in sessions right now?
• I think you hold back too much on your assessment/comments and offer your opinion/critique more often. How do you feel about this?
• Do you sometimes wonder if my case is too serious for you to handle?
• Do you still think you can help me? I feel like I might be too messed up…

Questions About DID

Read to my therapist:

I trust you, but maybe other parts of me do not. This will be harder to discuss than specific abuse memories because I have spent a lot of time covering it up. This diagnosis was probably also the reason I have not wanted to work on a timeline in the past. I must have sub-consciously known that my missing time would become very apparent. I tried so hard to cover it up, I forgot that I had worked so hard to forget about it…

Answering some questions may help to ease me. Here are my questions:

Questions:

• I had a lot of issues since our last session associated with this topic. Here is a post I wrote on my blog about this. Do these symptoms concern you? What do you think about my DID suspicions written here?
• Do you have other patients with this diagnosis?
• Do you have hope that people with DID can be healed?
• Do you believe in false memories?
• Do you believe my memories are real?
• How can dissociation be different than repression if dissociation leads to repressed memories?
• Discuss best friend’s reaction and if I should discuss it with him at all going forward.
• Afraid of anger – shaky, white vision, uncontrollable urge to get MY point across and have it agreed with. Feels like it is not ‘mine’?

1. Session Splash – June 6, 2009**
2. Session Splash – May 12, 2009*****
3. Session Splash – May 26, 2009 Part 3**
4. Safety First Checklist Part 2*
5. Session Splash – May 26, 2009 Part 2*

Trigger Scale: (1/5)

Learn what a “session splash” is.

hour 1 (part 1)

• Roommate’s friends do not like me!
• Should I write a letter to an ex-client about professionalism?

i wish i could write these the day of or after, but i usually need a day or two to process until i can write. this week’s session was very hard, so it took me a bit longer to get this down in writing. we also discussed many things, so i am going to split this session splash into 3 parts, hour 1 (as 2 posts) and hour 2 (as a single post).

we started hour 1 talking about an incident with my roommate and some old friends of his. i brought it up even though i did not plan to, so it must have bothered me more than i thought. my roommate (also my best friend) got in contact with some old friends, and they were discussing meeting.

somehow i came up in their conversation and his friend said “she probably has him tied in a basement somewhere by now” and also eluded to me being a bad friend. they also made it clear they did not want me coming along for the visit (it has been years since i last saw them). of course my roommate defended me, he is a good friend, which i appreciated a lot. but it made me really sad and made me cry (a little) anyway.

my therapist asked my why it bothered me so much? it is because it immediately reminded me of my roommate’s/best friend’s parents, who also feel the same way, and probably disowned him because of me, and my ‘influence’ on him (i am not exaggerating here). it happened almost 10 years ago now, but i still hold a tremendous amount of guilt about it to this day, especially because he does not even talk to his family now.

i also felt that his friends were being judgmental, since it had been so long since they had seen me and were not willing to give me a second chance. i hate to call people judgmental, because it makes me feel judgmental as well. but i cannot help how i feel. in that vain, i also feel that they are shallow (which to me means lacking a depth of personality, interests and humanity).

i have always felt this way because they are all social drinkers and do not care to talk about anything deep or meaningful. no joke, i remember once one of the girls and a few others got into a conversation about something equivocal to whether or not to recycle (i cannot recall exactly what the topic was) and she said, i can’t talk about this, it is too serious!! wtf? and this type of attitude is reflecting in all of their conversations, drunk or not. not really my kind of people anyway, i told my therapist.

this prompted her to ask me if i wanted them to give me a second chance. i said no, because of the above reasons and because i felt it did not really matter. i don’t have many friends, but i only want ones that i really ‘groove’ with anyway. however, if my best friends was going to start hanging out with them regularly, i would want them to at least be civil and get to know me a little, if they are going to be around the house.

i next asked her if it was appropriate to write an ex-client an e-mail about how i felt he mistreated me during the time i worked for him. the situation is that my car broke down, so i had to start working from home. i told him to please let me know if the arrangement was not working out, and i would rent a car to continue our regular meetings, which he agreed to.

long story short, a few weeks into this arrangement, he called me and said it was not working out, he had set up to work with his old bookkeeper already, who lives in a different state and would be, what!?, working from home. he said for me to call him at the end of june when i would have a car, and we could go back to normal. so basically, my therapist and i agreed that i was passively aggressively fired.

side note, how did this client expect me to still get a car by the end of june if he had taken away $1,000.00 a month of my income (more than half!)? he also gave me one day notice, so basically none. it is my understanding that 2 week is typical, but even 1 would have been nice. he never treated me well, and doesn’t treat anyone in his life well as far as i observed. but here is my personal list of grievances:

• he was often not home when i got there and my work was not ready for me. i waited outside for him many times, and was late only once over a half year period.
• worked in his home and he never greeted me when he got in, but sat down to eat lunch instead. this means he did not make sure the internet was working, whether or not i had work, or if i had any questions.
• he had me work at a pull out from his desk that was 2 x 2 feet on an old wooden chair, knowing that i have a serious back issue. i told him weekly that i needed a new chair and that it was not an option, to no avail.
• he would often (i mean a few times a day) say “this was an error on your part” then later correct himself to say he figured it out and no error was made. when i did make an error he would ask me why, which happened maybe once a month. how about human error jack ass? and to note, i counted about 5-10 errors on his part weekly, and i was only there one day a week. wtf? i pride myself on my accuracy!
• had constant internet problems, that he blamed on my computer (which i had to supply a laptop myself to work in his home, which i got specifically for this client). every other client has supplied me with a work-station if i did not work from home. i already have 2 computers (PC and MAC)!
• at one point i had a friend come in to consult on his internet issues at $50 an hour, but the issue was inconclusive. he did not pay my friend for the ONE hour spent because he felt he did not get a solution, although he was given 3. other contractors, such as Geek Squad, came to the same conclusions. he stiffed my friend and thought he was in the right, but paid Geek Squad! frugal my ass, try a manipulating cheap skate!
• he basically treated me like a hired hand or a commodity, and does not view his employees or workers as human beings, obviously!

so i asked my therapist if i could express some of this to him from the view that i felt the office environment and him constantly trying to find small errors was very unprofessional. my therapist suggested that i take it more from the perspective of what i would have normally expected in the given situation and not accusatory, which i thought was a good idea.

i told her i wanted to write it and then sit on it for at least a week, which we agreed on. we also discussed writing two different versions, one where i just rant and rave and one that i could actually send without jeopardizing my professional image. (once i get these done i will post them.)

my therapist asked me if this client reminded me of somebody? i had actually thought about that a lot, because he causes me to have very bad panic attacks, especially when i had to tell him something slightly negative or had to ask for something, such as a proper office chair once a week. this was singular to him and the environment and does not happen often with any other clients. i started to think about the way he treated me, like i was a robot and his physical build which reminded me specifically of one of my abusers.

this client is muscularly overdeveloped (so is his wife) and works out daily. he even had a set of weights in his office and reported straining his muscles often. i could tell that he was a shell of a person, hiding from something with the level of perfectionism that him and his wife operate at, or try to appear to operate at. they were always tense, often agitated at each other and argumentative (yes, right in front of me), and my client had an explosive temper and one time even banged his phone hard and suddenly, screaming “fuck these people”. scared the shit out me!

i also got a weird sense about the way he treated his two daughters. the younger one is spoiled to death (nannies, maid, multi-million dollar home, kind of lifestyle that he called frugal) and one day was throwing a temper-tantrum in the office. he grabbed her hard by the arm, looking to me like it might have bruised her and dragged her out of the room screaming. lot’s of read flags for me.

my therapist next asked me why i wanted to tell him? i told her that given all the faults that i saw, i felt that he might take my words into consideration, if i could present the facts properly (even though he is the robot!). i guess i feel that there is hope that he will react reasonably, and he might think about changing himself, even if only a little. i don’t know why, but i really want him to change how he treats people in the future, or at least give it some thought.

i will cover the rest of hour 1 in part 2 tomorrow.

1. Session Splash – May 12, 2009*****
2. Session Splash – May 5, 2009*****
3. Session Splash – May 26, 2009 Part 2*
4. Session Splash – May 21, 2009**
5. Session Splash – May 26, 2009 Part 3**