Stupid O'Clock Musings - Not for the Faint of Heart
It is past 2 in the morning and the recent trend seems to be that my eyelids should be unable to remain shut. I am aware of the generous contribution being made by my erstwhile friend Caffeine - I've been binging unashamedly and unreservedly on sources of it. Luckily, with this substance I know it's a fad that will soon be switched to something else, like sparkling water, tea or hot chocolate. It will begin to make me queasy, and I will just stop. Or perhaps stick with the dark chocolate. It's an anti-depressant with delightful side-effects (weight not being one of them).
It is during these silent mornings that my thoughts turn in on themselves and their cackles begin to echo in the caverns of my consciousness. These audacious thoughts keep me awake and I know the reason.
I sat in my therapists's room the other day. This wayward one had strayed off for a few months and returned to its fold to ruminate. He eyed me with amusement, as he always does, and a shuttered expression except for the slight sardonic smile I've come to recognise from a mile away. "I've never seen you this cranked up before. You're in a good place," he says.
"Nice one," I retorted. "I saw a T-shirt I'm going to start wearing to your sessions. It says 'Keep talking. I'm analysing you.' ..."
We both burst into giggles. I like Charles, because he calls a spade a spade. I am equally hard on myself and I don't beat about the bush - once I'm ready, of course.
Charles' observation was (is) a sharp one, and as I told him bluntly, there are both his sharp intuition and his exquisite prowess behind that observation: I've watched him work with others and his analytical skills are so sharp that they are forensic. He can profile a person within ten minutes of meeting them and he's rarely wrong. I've honoured him with being my mentor in honing that particular ability - naturally, I'm being sardonic here, the honour is all mine. But more of that later.
However, as I also did observe, there is the length of our professional relationship, which has been sufficiently comfortable to allow an element of intelligent discussion to work itself into our sessions, or even our social conversations if it comes to that. I like his unorthodox manner and for him to be able to help me, the boundaries of professional assistance needed to be blurred a little and I also consider him as a friend and professional collaborator (in work matters). Possibly, a clinical therapist would not be able to dig beneath this particular surface. I can lie to fool myself in therapy (and to fool the therapist unless it's someone as shrewd as this man) and Charles had to dig deeper than the facade I presented behind those four walls he calls his clinic.
"You had to do the full monty. You took no short cuts and it's taken you this long."
I was silenced for a moment, then I realised he was right. We have eight years of my coming and going (and that excludes previous years of subconscious processing, I suppose). Sometimes I would pause my sessions, thinking I was well on the road to healing, or even that I had dealt with my issues. I always knew when Charles thought we had reached a dead end and that he could no longer help me on a topic in particular. His demeanour would be very telling, his span of attention short. Then I knew it was time for me to go out there and heal on my own, and nobody would be able to help me if he couldn't.
'Not so fast, young lady!'
No short cuts.
I am sure he was chuckling away - or somehow feeling very frustrated - when this particular, hard-headed patient (yours truly) was stuck like a broken record on issues that wouldn't get their claws off me. Perhaps I was comfortable wearing that particular cloak.
I had to get out of my safe-zone, especially if I wanted to kick particular habits and to shed childish stances towards authority. To do that, I had to trespass certain self-imposed no-fly zones and now I find myself at wide river, knowing there is only one bridge that is the one to cross.
I know, however, that there are many doors that will be opening once I do.
At this silent time of night, when you can hear a pin drop, those voices echo in my head again: it is the resurrection of old, buried griefs in their last death throes. The earth-shattering anxiety that I feel now is one that is palpable but also well-explained by Charles: as soon as I described it as similar to my daily dawn grieving, shortly after my dad passed on, he comes up with the following question. "What are you grieving?"
Of course he knew the answer. Charles always knows the answer, but he allowed me to explore it for the last few months (years, I now realise), until matters came to a head within my very own existence. I could not be accompanied in this journey, except at a distance, and I wasn't about to be hand-held.
One grieves for the person one is leaving behind, the old skin being shed. Charles was not the only person to see this new light radiating beneath the caparison. Today, during another of my most respected mentors, Manuel, says that he's seen a change in me. I suspect that inner peace radiates beyond the confines of one's own existence once it begins to settle. The journey isn't over, but I can see land somewhere in the morning mist.
Another close friend, equally intelligent and who literally shoved me very hard a couple of years back, claimed that he saw me as stuck in a rut at some point, a slippery slope that I had to have the courage to hop off, unless that self-destruct button was going to bring me to a dead end. His grating words were true, but difficult to internalise. I raised bulwarks to my fear and hid behind anything from achievements to socialising.
But monsters hidden in a cupboard have a way of fiddling with the lock you have secured, and will come out to get you at your most vulnerable, or when you think you are at your calmest.
As Charles once observed to a client we were assisting together, in different capacities: healing comes in its own time. Stay with the confusion, the mist will lift. You may be stuck, like a broken record, for years, unable to budge. Then, once healing is ready for you it will wash over you and all will fall into place (devastatingly) swiftly.
Or words to that effect.
It is during these silent mornings that my thoughts turn in on themselves and their cackles begin to echo in the caverns of my consciousness. These audacious thoughts keep me awake and I know the reason.
I sat in my therapists's room the other day. This wayward one had strayed off for a few months and returned to its fold to ruminate. He eyed me with amusement, as he always does, and a shuttered expression except for the slight sardonic smile I've come to recognise from a mile away. "I've never seen you this cranked up before. You're in a good place," he says.
"Nice one," I retorted. "I saw a T-shirt I'm going to start wearing to your sessions. It says 'Keep talking. I'm analysing you.' ..."
We both burst into giggles. I like Charles, because he calls a spade a spade. I am equally hard on myself and I don't beat about the bush - once I'm ready, of course.
Charles' observation was (is) a sharp one, and as I told him bluntly, there are both his sharp intuition and his exquisite prowess behind that observation: I've watched him work with others and his analytical skills are so sharp that they are forensic. He can profile a person within ten minutes of meeting them and he's rarely wrong. I've honoured him with being my mentor in honing that particular ability - naturally, I'm being sardonic here, the honour is all mine. But more of that later.
However, as I also did observe, there is the length of our professional relationship, which has been sufficiently comfortable to allow an element of intelligent discussion to work itself into our sessions, or even our social conversations if it comes to that. I like his unorthodox manner and for him to be able to help me, the boundaries of professional assistance needed to be blurred a little and I also consider him as a friend and professional collaborator (in work matters). Possibly, a clinical therapist would not be able to dig beneath this particular surface. I can lie to fool myself in therapy (and to fool the therapist unless it's someone as shrewd as this man) and Charles had to dig deeper than the facade I presented behind those four walls he calls his clinic.
"You had to do the full monty. You took no short cuts and it's taken you this long."
I was silenced for a moment, then I realised he was right. We have eight years of my coming and going (and that excludes previous years of subconscious processing, I suppose). Sometimes I would pause my sessions, thinking I was well on the road to healing, or even that I had dealt with my issues. I always knew when Charles thought we had reached a dead end and that he could no longer help me on a topic in particular. His demeanour would be very telling, his span of attention short. Then I knew it was time for me to go out there and heal on my own, and nobody would be able to help me if he couldn't.
'Not so fast, young lady!'
No short cuts.
I am sure he was chuckling away - or somehow feeling very frustrated - when this particular, hard-headed patient (yours truly) was stuck like a broken record on issues that wouldn't get their claws off me. Perhaps I was comfortable wearing that particular cloak.
I had to get out of my safe-zone, especially if I wanted to kick particular habits and to shed childish stances towards authority. To do that, I had to trespass certain self-imposed no-fly zones and now I find myself at wide river, knowing there is only one bridge that is the one to cross.
I know, however, that there are many doors that will be opening once I do.
At this silent time of night, when you can hear a pin drop, those voices echo in my head again: it is the resurrection of old, buried griefs in their last death throes. The earth-shattering anxiety that I feel now is one that is palpable but also well-explained by Charles: as soon as I described it as similar to my daily dawn grieving, shortly after my dad passed on, he comes up with the following question. "What are you grieving?"
Of course he knew the answer. Charles always knows the answer, but he allowed me to explore it for the last few months (years, I now realise), until matters came to a head within my very own existence. I could not be accompanied in this journey, except at a distance, and I wasn't about to be hand-held.
One grieves for the person one is leaving behind, the old skin being shed. Charles was not the only person to see this new light radiating beneath the caparison. Today, during another of my most respected mentors, Manuel, says that he's seen a change in me. I suspect that inner peace radiates beyond the confines of one's own existence once it begins to settle. The journey isn't over, but I can see land somewhere in the morning mist.
Another close friend, equally intelligent and who literally shoved me very hard a couple of years back, claimed that he saw me as stuck in a rut at some point, a slippery slope that I had to have the courage to hop off, unless that self-destruct button was going to bring me to a dead end. His grating words were true, but difficult to internalise. I raised bulwarks to my fear and hid behind anything from achievements to socialising.
But monsters hidden in a cupboard have a way of fiddling with the lock you have secured, and will come out to get you at your most vulnerable, or when you think you are at your calmest.
As Charles once observed to a client we were assisting together, in different capacities: healing comes in its own time. Stay with the confusion, the mist will lift. You may be stuck, like a broken record, for years, unable to budge. Then, once healing is ready for you it will wash over you and all will fall into place (devastatingly) swiftly.
Or words to that effect.
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