Tag: anger

Group and no more trust

Tomorrow is MBT (mentalisation based therapy) group. I don’t know whether to go.

All trust I had in the service has gone. It’s been completely wiped out by the lies and let downs of the past months, the proofs they don’t believe me, the tricks, the cuts that open me more and more vulnerable then leave me with nothing and noone.

I don’t really want anything to do with a service that does this, but I’m desperate and have nowhere else to go. I’m desperate for help but it’s denied, it’s promised then withdrawn, or I’m deemed not in need or not believed. I want to do the therapy but I can no longer go forward safely with it. I cannot cope between sessions except by overdosing to black everything out and self harming to punish myself, temporarily quiet the voices, temporarily be something other than the utter pain. I’m not allowed any of the things that would keep me safe between sessions.

If I go tomorrow, I will be so angry. I can’t say I’ll keep it under control in the session. I can’t say I’ll stay “stable”. Nothing keeps it in anymore. I can’t mentalise like this and really I don’t want to. These things just are as they are. There’s nothing to be “curious” about or explore my feelings or someone else’s thoughts. Their thoughts have been made totally clear – they don’t believe me, I’m not allowed help, they’re tricking me, they’re cutting me open then leaving me and finding more and more ways to do it. My feelings are exploding and total. Fury. Hurt. Trapped. Over the edge. Liar. Fake. Fraud. Pain. Screaming.

If I go to group I can’t avoid it being clear I have no hope and no trust left. If everyone or anyone else does trust the service and does believe they’ll help them, then maybe that gets them through and helps them and is a lifeline for them. I don’t want to destroy that.If I say what’s happened to me, even in the last couple of days, I could destroy it.

I could go and just try not to talk about anything to do with me and just be there for other people and listen to them and try to mentalise about what other people bring. But I’m so far gone over the edge I don’t think I can trust myself not to explode.

When the group started committed to do it all. I committed to not leaving. I committed it to everyone in the group – not out loud, we didn’t do that, but in my head I did. I promised to God and Mother Mary too. If i leave I break my commitment to everyone, not just the service. I really don’t want to do that.

Yet at the moment I’m just ending up in more and more danger. It seems as if I should just accept this’ll never end, dissociate as much as possible, hope for something sometimes bearable…. but I think I’m too far gone for that. I wish I’d never trusted them.

Time to pack it in and leave, I think

So the last couple of hours have brought me absolutely beyond all hope.

I’ve been led on a cruel dance by all the so called emergency out of hours lines.

The PD service secretary refused to even phone any of the clinicians. She told me all kind of rubbish and lies, like that she couldn’t put me through to anyone else in the hospital, she didn’t have a telephone number for any of the clinicians or anyone else in the service, she refused to get me help, she pretended the crisis team didn’t exist, she shouted over me. I called 111 the out of hours service, since it was after 5. They refused to get me an appointment face to face or telephone. They said my own gp still needed to see me. They were not responsible til 6.30. They refused to make me an appointment after 6.30 or refer me to the crisis team. My own gp put me through to the duty doctor. She refused to visit me because it was too late in the day. She refused to refer me to the crisis team because they wouldn’t accept a referral without her seeing me which she’d refused to do. She then hung up on me whilst I was speaking.  The so called emergency out of hours mental health line went to answerphone 3 times. I finally got through. They had none of my messages. They talked over me constantly and said nobody world come to see me and just go to a&e. I’m too ill to go out of the house and what’s the point of going to a&e? They just send you back out a few hours later. What was the point of the line then if they don’t offer help? If I wanted to go to a&e I’d have gone. The woman actually agreed yes it’s fairly pointless, she just tells people to go to a&e.

I am desperate. I have done everything I’m told to. I have jumped through every &*$/€(# hoop. I even trusted them. What do I have to do to get help? Every single thing gets taken away. How much sicker do I have to be before they’ll help me? Before they stop talking about building my resilience? They’ve taken every bit of my resilience away and finally pushed me over the edge.

I’ve been thinking for some time about just packing up and going away somewhere else. Going off to the other end of the country. Somewhere else I can live hidden, preferably under a different name, nobody else knowing all this $#@/!&£* inside me, nobody pulling me apart and cutting and cutting deeper, nobody tricking me, and it’ll be numb but it’ll be some pretence of normal, it’ll be numb and fake but I’ve seen what trusting gets you, nobody will come near to me again, the real and the screaming and the desperation and hurt, I’ve been shown what that deserves, I’ve had it. I think I should just choose the numb.

Shattered

I feel so drained. Every part of me aches. Even the joints in my hands. It takes a stupid amount of effort to do a tiny thing like hang the laundry or wash up. I want to stay wrapped in blankets and pillows in the safety of my sofa. I stayed there all morning clutching my stuffed animals that for some reason I still find childishly comforting. It felt like I was shaking and couldn’t calm and just wanted to cry.

It took an immense effort to go outside, but I did because I had to meet someone. My movements felt wrong and unsteady, my body going from sweaty to chilled and back again and so so tired.

Since I told to the police I feel a more vulnerable sadness. This is a new feeling I am even less able to control. Sadness separate from anger. Sadness of loss. Is it sadness perhaps for the first time separate from self disgust and self hate? Sadness of the little child part of me, that’s always with me, although she’s also lost.

WHY. (This ends tonight.)

I have been wondering for a couple of days whether to post about this or not, considering various thoughts about whether this would be too triggering or disturbing and whether potential dangers would outweigh the benefits.

However, I think this is so personally specific that I hope it isn’t triggering, if you see what I mean. Also I’m bearing in mind the advice that acknowledging and talking and asking about suicidal feelings doesn’t cause people to become suicidal.

Something else prompted me to post this tonight, which I’ll explain momentarily.

This post attempts to describe a tiny bit of what I was feeling on Saturday when I overdosed and why I did.

Someone I know has just essentially described my overdose as drama because of a cancelled coffee date. This is so incredibly far from the truth of what led to my overdose and what I felt. It was massively painful to realise that is what it was for her. She is not by nature a judgemental person. She has herself suffered with mental health problems. She is highly intelligent. She is medically trained.

I’m not posting this to tell her she’s hurt me. I don’t understand how she could possibly think that’s why I overdosed.  Perhaps my “why” is equally incomprehensible to her. I do wonder if anyone wanting to understand more about why people overdose or attempt suicide may be interested to read this. But as I said, it’s only very personal to me. Every person’s story and pain is different.

I want to be very clear I am not glorifying overdose or self harm – I am describing what I felt. I am not describing a solution. At the bottom of this article I’ve listed a couple of details of organisations that I think can help towards getting support.

In italics below I’ve tried to describe some of what happened to me in the days and minutes before I overdosed. Though factors and thoughts had been multiplying over days and weeks and months, the actual “1000th last straw” kind of feeling and the final loss of control and “snap” came very suddenly that night.

I guess this comes against a background of mounting external stresses – numerous cancelled appointments, lost support, lost relationships, lost job, financial hardship, threats from my landlord, debt, endless difficulties with numerous benefits and being stuck in hopeless inextricable messes with error after error on the authorities’ part despite my best efforts, poor physical health and constant pain – as well as the internal stresses of my mental health like hallucinations, flashbacks, reexperiencing, voices in my head, memory gaps and dissociation.

Because:

Because everything is utter pain and nothing else exists. All of me is lost outside it. Because nothing, no cutting, no purging, no screaming voices or obedience to their call, is enough to rid the sick evil inside me.

Everyone knows I’m a fake, a liar, foul, ugly, greedy, everyone knows what I’m really like. But I can never stop the evil.

Because the voices do not stop and I so badly need to sleep.

No matter how much more you say, just one more day, one more hour, there really is a limit somewhere, don’t they see? And I know it’s weak but I passed it long ago. It’s true when I say in tired. Let me sleep.

Because I’m screaming, crying, and no one ever came and no one hears today either.

Cruellest – every person has left me when I was most raw. They tricked me to trust, they got at the most bad and vulnerable – then they left. [Like my abuser.] First this hurts with utter fear. Utter loss yet again of all I am. Loss of any hope.

Then rising anger boils and it is just one sick joke or cruel game too many, where they delight in punishing me, I can never win, tricked and tricked again, delighting in hurting me – like HER abuser] – and God delights in my downfall and hurt and he has crushed me to the ground and taken all of me.

No good is visible, no hope exists; no caring is possible, only no more; no more; only sleep.

Then in one moment, comes blinding rage and tears. From numb, dissociated, to intolerable existence to exploding anger, cutting and smashing, no hurt enough. Fears of this exploding monster turning outward now, to someone else, no longer just assuredly to me?

This is all now. ..

In some vague place in another part of my mind, knowing and hoping my heart will stop now I’ve taken the pills.

Running.

Blank.

Slowing.

Tired and the screaming pain is silenced and the voices gone. I can sense my heart, my breathing high and caught and slow but rising. ..

So. This is it now. After that unbearable state consuming – …. the end seems very simple.

 

Of course, it is not at all simple. One most bitter thought in my mind right now, after the comment that it is drama over a minor thing and can’t be dealt with, is that having reached this absolute end point of not being able to go on, even in this I am causing anger and harm and manipulating without wanting to, because to others it’s not real, just drama, trouble, unnecessary, manipulative, can’t be dealt with. I cannot go on and I cannot even stop. Twisted, but definitive, proof ending it isn’t the solution.

FOR HELP, THE FOLLOWING NUMBERS AND SITES COULD BE OF USE:

Samaritans, call for help 24 hours – 08457 90 90 90

http://www.stopsuicidepledge.org

http://www.mind.org.uk

http://www.b-eat.co.uk (eating disorders support)

Ginny xxx

 

I hate the girl in the mirror

 

The Ladies’ facilities at work have mirrors all along the walls right above the sinks. Inescapable. Two more full length mirrors in the locker rooms, one of them again inescapably right by the door out to the shop floor.

I hate what I have to see in the mirror.

Fat first of all.  Fat, ugly, just Too Big. Too Much. Ugly, wrong.

Nothing matches up and I don’t fit together.

Hate. Look at yourself. Hate. Fat, bulging, disgusting. Foul, no wonder they don’t want you, no wonder, who’d want you?

Remember they’re watching. Remember they know. Everyone knows really. You’re a fake. You’re a liar. They all know how weird you are and what a nasty little thing you are. Listen –

No. Stop, please. I don’t want to hear it again. I wish I could cut the evil out. (Go on, purge, get it all out.) I wish I could go back. Disappear. No more demands of my disgusting body.

Rationally I know these thoughts are always strongest when I’m unstable for a long period. But it still hits me every time I have to look in the mirror and hate.

Aching and doubting

I’m aching. I want to curl up right now and I probably will soon under my blanket… literal comfort blanket. ..

I wish someone would hold me. So much it hurts. I’m scared. Of these feelings and just the state of hurting and all the thoughts and voices.

It’s very raw and very childish.

I don’t expect anyone to believe me. I know everyone thinks I’m fake. I can never be sure I’m not evil and I think I am and everyone knows but I can’t stop it hurting everyone. Some little part of my head knows that’s maybe psychotic.

Longing is dangerous. I’ve really really hurt someone who is good and who has been generous to me beyond what I deserve because I needed too much and asked too much and though I know I don’t deserve it, I really needed help. I know it’s her choice to not be there and that’s her right and I’m not her responsibility but in my version of trust she always absolutely left me. At the very point I trusted and needed most. How can I have those two ideas? Knowing she had no need to be there and the choice had to be hers but also desperate longing turning into violent hurt and anger and consuming desperation when I was left? How can I be guilty but still angry?

She hasn’t contacted me. I have no idea what to do. I’ve hurt her so much and I need to make it right and I need to tell her it was my choice alone and my responsibility alone what I did. I need to try to make the hurt right. But what about the fact that I’m still angry? She hasn’t contacted me and she knows what happened the last couple of days I think. So that means definitively she doesn’t want contact, I think. All at once it’s very final. If she knows I was at the end and she says nothing? Doesn’t come? That means she definitely doesn’t want to know anymore. And she shouldn’t. I’m almost sure, despite hurting, that now I’ve done this I mustn’t contact her again and I must stay away because now everything has too much risk and meaning and I would manipulate her without wanting to because I was and am so out of control. I’ve needed too much. Always that’s my wrong.

I was so angry when she said I can’t have anyone now, some point in the future I’ll be able to have normal relationships. That i have to learn to be independent. I’m not allowed anyone there now? But I think she’s right maybe. I always need too much and cause hurt.

Ginny xxx

Going to the police

[TRIGGER warning for mention of and thoughts around memories of childhood sexual emotional and physical abuse, reporting abuse and so on; also as I wrote I know I’ve gone totally crazy and this post could be frightening.]

I’m waiting for the police to call me. A DC called me earlier in the week and we talked about making a statement reporting the abuse. (I’ve another post I haven’t uploaded yet about how this all came about – will upload that as soon as I can. ) We decided I’d take a few days to think and the DC would ring me back this evening about 7.00 to talk again. He hasn’t rung yet. But I can well understand they’re busy and have emergencies to deal with. I’m just on edge and really unstable today.

However, my decision is made. Funnily enough my friend’s actions yesterday, when she knew I was in pieces and really needed help and had asked her please did she just have a little time to talk about how to get through reporting what my mother did to me – she messed around the time of the meeting, then still left me waiting 20 minutes, made sure we had no privacy and very little time so I couldn’t talk about a thing and then left me when I was really distressed and unsafe (why exactly do all this? Why not just refuse to meet? Why trick me again and pretend to be there, drag it out and string me on more and more desperate?) – all of that has crystallised my decision in my mind.

This is yet another time nobody hears me and nobody is there when I’m most desperate. When I try to tell them about this it gets brushed off, I’m not allowed help, I just have to keep going and be independent, nobody will listen, they say I’m making impossible demands. … when I have had absolutely everything I needed to be safe taken away then I’m thrown out on my own and told just get on with it you’re responsible for your self. … it’s a really sick game.

Nobody will help me. They’ve tricked me.

I don’t want anything to do with them again. I’m not letting them near me.

I will report what she’s done. I found out she attacked a paramedic, attacked my father twice at least, as well. So what she did to me she is capable of to others too. If others can be in danger from her it makes some difference too. I thought perhaps it was only to me. She had so many delusions about me. The things she did were always bound in some way to those. That we were being watched, that I had a special intelligence and knew her thoughts exactly and had plans to punish her, that I was causing my father to have a heart attack or her to be paralysed, that people had done things to me and she had to check it out and then show me what a woman I’d be taken to would do when she examined me – that was her way in when she started putting things inside me. Was it all bound to her sickness? How can we know? Her intent wasn’t the same as an abuser who take sexual pleasure from it if she was sick and doing it because of weird beliefs? What does that mean? Was it a crime still?

And so much was emotional. Does that count as a crime? She trapped me and trapped the family and isolated me totally and did quite a good job of the same with my father. She made false allegations about my father. She told me I was saying and showing my father had abused me sexually unless someone else had done it and she told me I had to tell her what had happened or that was what it meant. They’d be taken away and go to prison and all because of me. So I had to tell her. I had to stop it. I lied but I had to stop it. I could have got someone else in trouble with my lie though. I was 6 or 7 I should have, must have known. I took it back as soon as I made myself dare. I took it back and I hate myself since. I hate the foul thing I am to do that. I know I invented something – so I can never trust myself and never be sure because I did that. She told me for years how evil I am inside. If i lied like that perhaps I could be. It’s not perhaps. I am.

But she encouraged me in the story. She didn’t go right to the police. She told me I’d be taken to be examined. She kept coming back to me to get me to tell. She showed me books and wanted me to draw pictures. Something is not right. Something is not the normal action of a frightened or worried parent. Was she actually sick getting some pleasure from it? That thought has never been in my head before today.

I’m going to the police. They will have to listen when they take my statement. Perhaps they will tell me. Perhaps they will find the sick thing in me and if I’m evil they’ll punish me. They’ll take me in. They’ll tell me if it’s abuse or if it’s me that’s the sick one and invented in some twisted part of my mind. They’ll tell me if she was sick or if she was abusing me. She did hurt other people and maybe at least I can stop that. I need the answer now because I am going mad with this and this will be how I get it because everyone else I trusted has decided I don’t get any help and have to be left. I think the police are my very last hope now.

Ginny

The 1000th last straw

[TRIGGER warning for mention of self harm, overdose and suicidal thoughts, and childhood sexual abuse;  and for anger, i am really angry and hurt writing this.  I am not meaning people to worry about me. When i say I’ve given up i mean on therapy and the doctors and everyone i trusted, not that I’m immediately suicidal.]

I am so far beyond angry. Hurting. They can decide I don’t get help. But it does come to a point I can’t just keep going one day more and being told the bad things are temporary.

In group and after I desperately needed to talk about the abuse and trauma and the decision I’ve now got to make whether to make a full statement to the police. I needed help when I told them I was really high, right on the edge, really unstable, not safe. Nobody heard.

I’d dared to ask a friend for help and to help me talk through some of what I have to decide about the police. She’s cancelled and changed arrangements so many times we’ve had to meet. I doubt she really wants to anymore. She keeps meetings to the most difficult and shortest times. She knows I’m ill, she knows I’m desperate, she surely knows how difficult it is to talk about abuse! She agreed to meet in the middle of the day at her work. Obviously I needed to talk in private but if that was all the time she had then I was thankful for it. I was at my wits end today after group. She changed the time and place back and forth through the morning today. She knows this puts me right on edge if I have no idea what’s happening. She told me she only had 30 minutes, then that she had work to do and hadn’t finished, then couldn’t I wait an hour and a half later, then asking where I was, 2 hours earlier,  when she knew I was still at my hospital appointment. When I finally pinned her down to a time she still came 20 minutes late without even letting me know and we had to meet in a crowded cafe where I obviously couldn’t talk about a thing – what did she expect me to do?! “How’s your cappuccino? Oh yes and by the way, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to cope when I tell the police about my mother sticking things up me when I was 7, any thoughts?” I don’t think so!

Then she told me I ask too much, it would be impossible to do what I ask (really? Is it so very hard to agree to meet a friend, stick to the arrangement and turn up?) And she doesn’t believe i wanted to meet in private because I thanked her for agreeing to meet in the middle of the day (well just because I thanked her and was grateful doesn’t mean I was happy or it was what I needed, I was just grateful for any help – or what I thought was help). She said she didn’t know we needed to meet in private (really? Is she that stupid she doesn’t know if you have to talk about abuse you won’t do it in the middle of a cafe? I don’t think so).

I was in bits and in so much pain as well  – and yet again the last hope of getting help or to talk to anyone was snatched away. It’s not just today. It’s every single time. I’ve had it now after this is just repeated – every one i should be able to trust,  every place i should get help. They don’t hear. They don’t believe me. They don’t help. It’s some sick joke or someone’s plan to find out when I break, to laugh at me, to test if I want help enough. Well I’m screaming and nobody can hear. I can’t scream louder. They can choose to keep up this game. Well I guess they’ve won. I can’t shout louder. I can’t make them believe. I can’t make it so that I deserve or am allowed help. I can stop trying anymore because it does just hurt too much. That one’s down to me. It’s not really a choice because it simply now is too painful. But I can choose not to let anyone near me again so they can’t trick me, so they can’t decide to keep a distance because I’m not allowed help and cut me down again because I’d just started to trust and go forward believing they’d be there, so they can’t disappear and show me how they don’t really want me around and it isn’t a friendship and they won’t be there.

(Funny. She’ll threaten to call an ambulance – and if I do go to a&e I just talk to someone then get bounced back out after a few hours and I’m alone again – but she won’t come to see me when I’m not safe, understand how hard it is, sit with me when I’m terrified, come to see me when I was in hospital – every time I was in I was the only person on the ward who didn’t get a single visitor -or hug me when I’m crying. Why is it so hard to do any of that? The doctors don’t care and don’t help me and the only friend I have nearby doesn’t want me around and says go to the emergency services. So I’m not allowed medical help and not allowed friends.)

I’m not allowed any help. I need a friend and I need someone with me and I need to trust someone but every single thing I trust gets taken. It’s not just today it’s every time and I’ve had enough. Oh, you must keep going to work, they say. You’ll feel worse if you have nothing to do. No, I won’t. All I want is it to stop. I don’t want to go out. I want to sleep. I want drugs to stop me feeling.

Oh it won’t help you if you have anyone with you it won’t help you get better you have to be independent. Why is it for her to decide what I need? She’s not my doctor! She doesn’t know what it’s like! I need help. I need someone with me. I want a friend. I want someone to help me. I want someone to care. I want someone to be there when I can’t cope. Not only when I can say everything is fine. Not only when it suits them. Not only because they’ve decided I have to learn to be independent. I’ve always been independent. Nobody has ever been there when I needed them. Now I Can’t cope anymore. It’s even more cruel that every time I’m most desperate I have to be deceived into thinking someone’s there then left alone.

If you’re friends with someone, if you care for them, you are there when they need help. You don’t decide what they need or that something else is best for them or they have to learn something. You don’t see them sometimes then walk off when they’re ill. You don’t constantly change every arrangement. You don’t only allow them in certain situations and certain parts of your life. If they need you you’re there for them. If they’re sick you help them and care for them. You don’t just disappear because it isn’t convenient. That’s just utterly basic friendship and actually basic morality. I’d do it and do do it for anyone.

Is it really so terribly much to ask? Every other person in therapy has family, a carer or a spouse with them. I’m the only person who doesn’t, who lives totally alone. Is it really so terribly awful to want someone to be with me when I’m in crisis, to hug me when I’ve been crying for hours, someone to stick to a commitment, someone to be a friend, someone to help me when I’m cutting as soon as I’m alone, when I’m terrified of the hallucinations?

And the doctors know and they don’t care. They don’t help me. My friend says call them if I’m not safe. She says persist. I’ve been persisting for years. I’ve been accepting nobody wants me. I’ve told them in not safe. I’ve told them I’m cutting and overdosing and when I was planning to end it. They didn’t help me. I don’t want some stupid phone number for a few minutes of so called support. That doesn’t keep me safe or get me help or a friend or anyone with me. I’m on my own again. Left to just go back to the same cutting and overdosing. There’s no other way to cope. They tell me just keep going is temporary. I don’t care if it’s temporary. I can’t right now.

After years of making sure never to say what I needed and always to do weekday I’m meant to, I’ve had it. I’m a disgusting selfish b*tch and a baby and I’m screaming and I need help now and nobody can hear me. I’m not allowed help and I know I’m not but every time it’s proved the kick hurts even harder. I know it’s selfish and disgusting but actually the need and the hurt has taken over. Nobody wants me. Nobody wants me really, not what’s really me.

 

 

What do you hold onto in the darkest times?

I’ve posted before about how, like many people with Borderline Personality Disorder, one of the things I find hardest when I feel really bad is to hold on to any knowledge that it will not always be this way. The overwhelming emotions – especially fear, sadness, loneliness, anger, pain, frustration, self hatred, self disgust, hurt, distress, longing or needing, or the feelings I can’t yet name that come with flashbacks – they eclipse everything else and become all that exists.

I wonder if their power is greater if I fear the emotion I sense. But the totality of the experience, their consuming nature, makes them the more frightening.

Descriptions of this emotional experience in BPD often term the feelings intolerable or unbearable. It is that but it isn’t quite either; it’s not all of it. Intolerable, more than I can stand, yes… but it’s not something I can’t stand because it’s me. In that state there is nothing but the emotion and there is nothing of me but the emotion. I cannot stand it but neither do I exist apart from it.

I hate it so I hate myself. I must get rid of it, purge it, so I must get rid of myself and cut away the bad – so I cut.

I can name some of the emotions afterwards. Maybe the therapy is helping me to do that. But in the experience, I cannot. I cannot recognise anything but hurt and pain and hate and evil (me); I cannot hold in mind anything but the impulses to cut, run, scream, end it, reach back for numb. .. and I am gone. ..and I spin between cut off and unable to feel and any attempt to engage being painful, and the state of total emotion, of only existing as that pain.

I cannot control it. I cannot bridge that gap. Therapy is helping me identify what feelings are. But it doesn’t separate them from me, from time, from permanent reality, from right and wrong. It doesn’t tell me how to feel, rather than be, the emotion. It doesn’t tell me how to bridge the gap between the different people I become – the cut off numb one;, the one that hides everything to cope day to day and do what I’m meant to and fulfil my responsibilities and pretend and hope I could ever be good but knowing all the time that everyone really knows how fake it is and how evil I am deceiving everyone; the frightened needing child; the angry, vengeful and impulsive one. More and more they seem to be separate personalities. I am fragmenting. I am more unstable. I lose more periods of the day – when I’m in one state I cannot “access” the other and I can’t remember things that happened (though I may remember the state). I flick so quickly between states without being able to engage my rational mind and try to employ any grounding techniques or DBT techniques to control my behaviour or my experience.

I guess it’s good that I can start to be curious about the process, from the temporary relative stability of my “coping” state. It must show I do have some ability to learn to mentalisa about what’s going on in my mind. Usually my “coping” state would be trying to suppress what I’m exploring right now. Perhaps eventually I’ll be able to build a more curious and stable personality at least alongside these others.

What do you hold on to when your whole reality, your whole existence, is unbearable sensation and emotion? It sounds utterly stupid. It sounds utterly out of proportion. It sounds self centred and I am forced to admit that though it’s the very last thing I want and one of the things I most hate in myself, in a way it is, though at the same time self has got totally lost in the feeling and emotion coming from everywhere.

What do you hold on to when you can’t access your coping strategies or even your most rooted beliefs and deepest cares? I love my God and know God is mercy and compassion, but in the bad states I can only conceive of a vengeful God or a God casting me out. I love my godchildren, I care about keeping my commitments at work,  but in those states I can conceive only that I do everyone harm and everyone knows I’m bad really and would rather I weren’t around. The centre of my beliefs and values warp according to the state I’m in.

What to I hold on to?

Ginny xxx

“I will not abandon you”

“Can a woman forget her nursing child And have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you,” says the Lord God (Isaiah 49 v 15)

These lines from the Bible came into my head just now. Thank you Jesus. It’s very hard to hang onto anything when everything I trusted in, so much – too much – seems to be taken away. The Lord alone suffices, St Teresa of Avila wrote. The Lord alone will never forget us and never fail us, even if His face is hidden from us for a little while. He loves us like a mother or a father, and more.

“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” (Psalm 27). When everything else crumbles, when we are totally alone, still God who is love remains. One translation of the Aramaic actually says “Because my father and mother forsake me,”; “because” rather than “when”. The Lord knew we would be abandoned, and so, He never leaves us and He takes us up in His arms.

I struggle very much to pray when I feel as I do now. The hurt and obstacles and anger and frustration and alone-ness, all obscure my hope in God and too quickly I allow them to cloud who God is and who He created us to be. If all I run into is this pain, He must be angry, He must wish me punished, He must take pleasure in my pain. I must return to His Cross and return to listen to His Word in the Bible. This is God, not my pain of itself. Love surely brings pain, but it is not the pain and hurt and isolation itself.

And then in prayer, came my Jesus’s tender promise – “My gaze is longing love.”