Days

There are days when there doesn't seem to be an inner structure holding it all together, nor a way to find one. When it all seems to have disintegrated, making any kind of approach to life uncertain at best. I think you could say I am slowly revisiting all those days. Some of them at moments of crisis, traumatic events, shocks, some of them the longer-term effects of those moments. Collapse, depression, grief. Also revisiting the inner world I inhabited when I had to know but not know devastating truths, the complicated and necessary strategies adopted to survive being lied to for a long time. Denial, dissociation, undoing, reaction formation. These the technical terms, for how we try not to know about what threatens our sense of safety, not to feel what seems unmanageable, how we make things just not have happened in our minds, and how we sometimes adopt the exact opposite attitude from the inwardly true but impossible-to-live-with one.

I truly believe that this process will help me to have more choice, to have a clearer sense of myself, my perceptions and feelings, to disentangle myself from the knots of futile repetition, to have more energy for now. Of course I do, I'm a therapist myself for god's sake. But at the moment I have at least one foot most of the time in various parts of the past, my heart is aching, I cry, rage, drink and mourn. My dearest wish is to be taken care of, my greatest challenge taking care of myself.

And the rain is back. Though it's a kinder rain. Not so cold, not so hard, not so relentless, and interspersed with sunshine sparkling the drops.

L has gone to see how the rain looks on Liverpool, and hopefully the sunlight too.