Celebrate

L's pot has been removed! Much rejoicing, though she is moving a little tentatively and experimenting with different footwear to see what feels most comfortable. It is lovely to see her walking without rocking slightly from side to side - the plaster and surgical shoe were hard to match with a shoe of the same height. The doctor has discharged her, says her toe should make a full recovery though it might remain swollen for several months, which surprised us. Tomorrow she will start a programme of rehabilitation, involving little walks up and down the road, before gradually venturing further.

I'm reading a learned paper about neuroscience research and how it meets and affirms psychoanalytical thinking. Interesting though unbelievably verbose in the way only academics can be, and requiring rather tiring deconstruction sentence by sentence. For example:

The quintessential clinical context for a right brain transferential-countertransferential implicit communication of a dysregulated emotional state is the heightened affective moment of a clinical enactment.

Believe me that sentence was short! I'm starting in a Neuroscience Research Reading Group next Monday so got to do my homework. Also starting a series of seminars on Personality Development in November. Great to get into some studying to support my work. Certainly feels a long time since I last did any!

Came through some tests in my work last week. One of which was a salutory lesson in not necessarily being able to work with all comers - currently enagaged in helping family find suitable alternative support. Some of the things you hear in this line of work make you hair stand on end. Got to know your limits...

Equinox

It gets light at seven, it gets dark at seven. I do like the symmetry of this, the sense of balance. I could get used to it, but just as I do it will be sliding off in the other direction, the days shortening, the nights lengthening. I'm making it my business to stay aware and notice this happening this year. The weather is a mixture of languid late summer, and breezy wet early autumn. We've had the heating on an odd hour or two here and there, but not at all the last few days. This time of harvest and stock-taking and thanksgiving suits my mood after surviving the (almost) year since I received the belly blow that sent me reeling into the dark. Preparation too for the challenges of the winter, and the tasks ahead of survival and good management of resources. In my case of starting to earn my living again, little by precious little.

Phase

A bowl of greengages waits to be stewed with some honey. I'll top them with a crumble of brown and white flour, oats, walnuts, brown sugar then bake. Outside sparrows are fluttering as they hang onto the fat-ball holder attached to the fence, and peck the deliciousness therein. After a warm and mostly sunny day, the clouds are gathering, the light dimming.

My life is in a state of transition, with a good beginning made to establishing some private work with children, and a job application in for a day a week as a student counsellor at an FE college. As it approaches the year mark since the shit hit the fan when the complaint was made about my blog, I feel at last clear and certain signs of recovery. I have a renewed sense of my own professional (and personal) worth and potential, renewed determination and enthusiasm for the next phase of my life. And an increasing ability to see that since I definitely did not want to be in that job by now anyway, I may just be in exactly the place where I'm meant to be.

Feldenkrais

I lay on my back, my front and both my sides
and breathed in - hold - out - hold for an hour.
I felt my body relax, my mind expand.
I felt the world changing.

Fly

A fly, heavy as a small stone
travels across the kitchen,
catches light on its fretted wings
as the clouds begin to spill warm rain
from their dull bellies
and all the shoes in the house are still
all the shoes are still.

Dreams Of Carol Ann

I have a strange cough, but no matter, we went to hear Carol Ann Duffy read last night for the second time in just over a year. This time in Haworth, though not at the Parsonage itself, as (I guess) they don't have a big enough space there for a poet laureate sized audience. They're having a Bronte festival of women's writing (sic) this weekend and this was the highlight. While Katrina Naomi read first, Carol Ann sat down next to L in the front row. L got a little red in the neck but handled it with aplomb - even making a moment of conversation before the introductions were made... CAD looked a little off colour, we all agreed having seen her very close to. A little grey. She sneezed once while reading, though no other evidence of a cold. And she said it was caused by 'little bits of Bible' in the air (we were assembled in a Baptist chapel...) The reading did not disappoint though, except for feeling about 10 minutes short to me. Maybe she was not feeling well, and wanted to get away early, I don't know, I felt a little bereft when she stopped and suddenly it was all over bar the signing. No refreshments, and no desire to stand in a queue (and L had got her to sign our copy of Rapture last time), so nothing to stay for. We came home with friend S and drank red wine.

Carol Ann is splendid, whatever might have ailed her last night. And her writing seems to get better and better. There's a kind of deep English vein now running through some of the work, a profound affection for history and tradition, and a fairly clear radical sentiment. Pub names, county names, Dutch elm disease, and the decimation of bee populations were all there. She did a few poems from The World's Wife again to start with, which are superb and funny and true, but I wonder if she's getting a bit tired of reading these, ten years on? She made some comment about not even knowing she wrote them any more... The ones about her mother and the newer ones just sang, lyrical, spare, strong. But I missed the passion of her love poems, which I'd heard her read some of last time. What stays with me most is the music of her work, the rhythm and cadence, and her terrific reading. I hope she has (will) made some recordings.

Last night I slept fitfully, with a multiplicity of short dreams, like poems, all of which seemed to feature Carol Ann. And when I was awake I was writing poems in my head, about her, and about the rain.

I am currently reading Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road, and am unable to shake off my sadness that these two are no longer together...

The Boot

Something rattling around my mind today about depressive thoughts, depressive tendencies. Mine I mostly mean, though also my mother's and my young client's. And L's absence of same. I saw my wonderful supervisor today and told her how I still struggle with the aftermath of the blogging-about-work fiasco, how I catastrophise and undermine myself, and have again and again to rebuild my confidence from the ground up. She spoke about the 'boot on your neck' and the need to find ways to get out from under that violent pressure. And yes, it does feel like someone has a boot on my neck at times, exactly, right down to a very physical corelate of that metaphor. She advocated using something of a CBT approach - writing down these thoughts, seeing the worst excesses of negative thinking on the page, so I know them, and then can identify them when they come for me again. And it isn't that I haven't used this kind of strategy before, but it's a timely suggestion as they have been getting some leverage with me lately, and are just so damn destructive, when I'm trying to rebuild my life, and they keep jeering in my ear that I'm possibly incompetent, too inexperienced to be taken seriously, or there won't be the work for me that I anticipate, or I'm just going to contract a terminal illness anyway and never be able to earn money again, and will soon die anyway. Reader, you will either recognise the territory so well you will require no explanations, or marvel that it could exist at all inside an ostensibly well-adjusted, intelligent and sensitive person such as I, particularly perhaps an experienced psychotherapist... But so it is.

Currently I'm back with 'morning pages', Julia Cameron's basic practice from The Artist's Way, and every day I end my pages with affirmations, and every day one of my affirmations is I am willing to be happy (x 4). I made that one up, or if I didn't I no longer remember that I didn't! Either way, it remains spot on for me. There resides inside me a sub-personality (a critic, if you will) who actually isn't, at all, willing to be happy or to let me be happy, depending on how you conceptualise the dynamics of this. I have so many unconscious or barely conscious ways to make myself unhappy, I don't even know a lot of the time that's what they are, that that is what I'm doing, or that I can not do them. These depressive habits of mind, when one is in them, are so compelling, it is very hard to get the perspective needed to see that these are only thoughts - inaccurate and destructive ones that make you feel bad (bring on the CBT...) I think will is an important part of dealing with this, and I am determined to start exercising it more firmly to say NO to the boot on the neck thug! The other thing, as ever, is to feel angry rather than like a victim. I was talking about my disappointment with the way my manager managed what happened back there, the way she failed to support me essentially, and my supervisor asked if I felt angry and I said 'yes!' beginning to feel that as I spoke and she said 'good, that's better...'