Fly on the Wall in my Therapy
I thought the horror and violence of my mother’s bridge jump in 2019 was the reason I engaged with my therapist. I haven’t told you about that yet, have I? That’s a spoiler alert. I will come back to this awful but repeated historical trauma that my family and I faced in February 2019.
Was it the reason I sought therapy in 2021, though? There were so many traumas to choose from, such is the very nature of the condition I would be later diagnosed with. There are many reasons why people take the step and reach out, such as a counsellor, a friend, a work colleague, or a telephone helpline.
My Complex-PTSD allowed me to choose which traumas I wanted to focus on. By nature, the condition wrapped all my suffering in a metaphorical gold paper, and unknowingly, this concealed the main issue as the ultimate reveal. Experiences like childhood abandonment, visits to an orphanage, a parent with alcoholism, suicide attempts, mental health struggles, neglect, and emotional, sexual, physical, and later financial abuse were the ‘offerings’ I presented to my therapist—like conversation cards for someone preparing for a first date. I knew there would be no awkward silences with my therapist; I just hoped she would be in therapy herself after helping me.
My therapist was my first witness to a secret I kept hidden, like an undetected cancer, growing slowly and silently since 2000. I believe this was one of the main reasons I eventually sought external support. She bore witness, over three years, to bits, breadcrumbs, and innuendos of this truth. I danced an awkward waltz of denial with my shadow self, and the therapist gradually helped me change the music. Until I was the only one left on the dance floor. My shadow dissolved. My truth echoed in the silence.
That is the power of therapy; she is not afraid of silence. My monsters were. And there were many. I collected each over the decades and melded them together. My resourceful nature and versatility demanded this, ensuring I could fulfil my role as a mother and complete my full-time nurse training, all while juggling two other jobs; such is the nature of survival.
In silence, are all the unsaid words. Disbelieved. Rejected. Unwritten. Unheard. The silence before the truth. My therapist believed me.
Silence is a technique used within therapeutic conversations, as I learned over time. My therapist was well-rehearsed in this. She knew. She waited. I told other stories, traumas worthy of her attention, but never “the” story. Eventually, I told her something happened, but not by whom. Sessions came and went, and I left this conversation dangling, like a rope, a long discarded noose in a remote wood. That’s why she provided the silence. She was quietly creating a safety, like a warm blanket for me, ready for the chill. Silence did not sit well with me at first. I felt a need to rescue my therapist from it; did she know what it disguised? Yes, she did. And yet she didn’t rescue me from it. She waited. As long as it took. I could hear the icicles melting, drip, drip, drip. The thaw of the deep freeze, the creak of the lid, lifting. And then I told her who, when and what. And my world tilted on its axis. And so the real work started.
Now the silences were bearable, because these words filled them, in a room with my therapist. The theory is that as adults, we often act out from the pain of our inner child wounds, which inevitably affect our personal/professional relationships. This is usually unconscious. I started to move from the year 2000, going backwards as far as I can remember, then moving through the years up until the present, making sense of a chaos of pain, a void of emotion, unprocessed, a catalogue of words unsaid, only heard by my therapist.
If we start to recognise some significant behaviours, ones which are affecting our emotional or mental wellbeing, or worse, destroying the loved ones around us, we may decide to reach out. This happened to me. I was gradually watching my marriage disintegrate, struggling to withstand my emotional disintegration. It is a very brave and difficult decision to admit the need to help, and it is also costly.
It is also one of the most catastrophic changes you will make in your life. It is brutal. It is painful. It is raw. It is overwhelming. But these are the names of all my wounds. And the effort of burying them for all the decades of my adult life, cost me far more than the finances that lifted the burden. I carried inside, a heaviness, a coiled and knotted ball of cord, wrapping itself round my solar plexus, weaving its way up to strangle my throat chakra, muting my truth. A little bit of spiritual spiel in there for you- I’ll have to write another book on that, perhaps call it “my awakening”.
But like the calm before the storm, there had to be a long sleep from which to be awakened. Until my counselling, I gagged every little Grace at every age of pain, not just the year 2000, but every year, even, odd, and prime. I see the same eyes, just slightly wiser and crinkled as the years fall by, looking now, expectantly. Some are looking up, craning from their tiny three feet of growth. Others are meeting me head-on, confusion holding the gaze.
“You’re listening to us?”
“You can see us! “
“We’ve been crying for decades! We felt invisible!”
“But you can hear us”?
“Why haven’t you answered”?
Because I used up all my bravery getting you all to where we are now. Here. together. Ready. In the beginning, I would preface the sessions with pleasantries and dancing around the elephant in the room like my feet were on fire. The elephant was my pain. The fire was the deterrent.
“Don’t speak of it, Grace.”
“Your Mummy will go away again.”
“You will make your Mummy poorly again.”
“You must be a strong little girl.”
“We don’t talk about those things!
“There are dying infants in Ethiopia; we must thank God for what we have.”
The room was already filled with other voices. Mine was too quiet. But my therapist could hear. In between the spaces. Distracted not by my dancing, she put the elephant gently into the very centre of the room. The elephant was there for a long time before I acknowledged him. I am giving him this pronoun because of my personal experience. We can all have elephants that we ignore. You can also choose your pronoun. And animal.
For me, the size is fitting. Because there was a lot I was ignoring. Don’t get me wrong, I have no malice towards elephants. The irony is not missed, in the age-old theory that they have wonderful memories. But Complex-PTSD and trauma response have the best amnesia for any event. Still, each hour that I booked, we would talk; sometimes I would lean sideways to see my therapist, the elephant filling my view. I talked in the plural before June 7th 2024. I was part of a survival group; my siblings and I. We were separated from our mother, we were sent to an orphanage, we were taken up to our Grandma’s, and we changed schools. We were visited by Mothers boyfriend, in our bedrooms at night, we were exposed to pornographic material, we were neglected by an alcoholic mother.
As my therapist and I stripped back the layers of my trauma, drawing the current behaviour to previous experiences, I could feel the shift, the changing shapes of who and what I had become. I began to realise that the inner voice, the internal critic, was lying to me. She had spent years living inside my head, berating my character, tearing me down with her judgments. According to her, I was not worthy of respect, I was already broken, and in any situation where I felt discomfort, anger, or frustration, I was the problem.
But a new voice had been given a magnificent sparkling microphone (not dissimilar to the one my sister bought for our country walks- another chapter). This voice had an authentic tone, a more calming quality, one which I started to tune into as much as possible. The critic was still present; she was trying to upgrade to a megaphone (another country walk companions my sister and I had in real terms). It can be like tuning into a radio station, where no matter how close you get to the one you want, there is interference, static. My inner critic was the static, my new internal voice a window with a different view.
The work I have done with my therapist has cultivated the map to this view. Over the last 4 years, the conversations, the soul searching, the tears, the panic, and the healing have shifted my position, creating a new perception of myself. A better version of who I thought I was. I still see myself in the mirror, and admittedly, some days I must iron my features back together, such is the curse of menopause and age. However, I think I see a sparkle back in my eyes.
This is the importance of seeking help with complex PTSD. It can be overwhelming. It can be exhausting, and most of all, it can be painful. Imagine having a thousand plasters located all over your body, covering wounds you haven’t looked at for decades. Visualize the pus that has built up, the festering smell of decay you have allowed to set in. This is what happens if you don’t listen to and bring back to life your inner child. In my case, inner children; there’s a nursery in my therapy, and I’m just lucky most of them are potty trained.
Trauma counselling is not linear. As my therapist always told me, trust the process. For example, I haven’t lined up all my inner children chronologically, giving each one an appointment slip and a microphone. But I did share the microphone around; whoever wanted to take centre stage got the attention in that moment. It has been a profound and enlightening experience, listening to pain, seeking and finding the source of it and applying the necessary healing. After all, if you don’t know what underpins your suffering, how can you resolve it?
I always like to provide safety net advice to anyone reading my blogs, and this is my opportunity to remind all of you that there is help, if you need it. You can reach out either to your NHS GP, or 111 or look online at local counselling services, or visit MIND website, or NHS online.
