Tag: Borderline Personality Disorder

Walking this Borderland #1: Introduction to the “Walking…” series

Walking this Borderland #1: Introduction to the “Walking…” series

I’ve decided to start a new series which I’ve called “Walking this Borderland”. I’m going to try to make each post in this series short and readable. My idea is that each will share an idea, skill, or thought that I find helpful in coping with an aspect of the symptoms of my Borderline Personality Disorder. Some of these are things that have been suggested to me by health professionals. Some are ideas a friend (perhaps who also has BPD) has given me permission to share. Some I have come up with or encountered myself in my path living with BPD.

I am sharing these in the hope others may find them interesting or helpful. Perhaps if you suffer with BPD or another Personality Disorder or know someone who does, you may find they are things you can identify with or are relevant or helpful to you. Perhaps they might equally be helpful to people who struggle with other mental health conditions – or even to anyone curious about emotions. Perhaps as a reader you would like to share your own experiences and ideas that help you, in the comments. I’d love it if you did want to do that.

As I have said many times before on this blog, what I’m sharing is personal and every person is very different in what is helpful to them or how they experience emotions. I really hope there is nothing I post in this “Walking…” series that would be unhelpful to anyone reading but please bear in mind that I am only sharing from my experience. Though I have worked in many mental health treatment settings and had some non-clinical training, and receive therapy myself, I am not a doctor, I am not clinically trained, I am not medically qualified to provide support or help to people with a mental health condition. So whilst I hope that this series is going to be useful, I very much urge you to please please access and rely on support from clinicians who are trained to help you.

Ginny xx

“Stop arguing with the fish,” and other helpful business philosophies

There’s a poster up in my workplace with a quote from our founder: “If you want to catch a fish, you don’t start by arguing with it.” The text goes on to expand on this, saying how, if we hope to attract and keep customers, we need to give them what they want, provide a service and resolve problems – not delay, debate, or refuse to sort things out. I like that very much and I like working that way.

It got me thinking because I have felt incredibly frustrated in the last month by what to me are some very poor experiences of customer service. I really don’t like complaining or asserting my rights or making a fuss and if I think I have I am very angry with myself afterwards. However one thing that really winds me up and at the moment, uncharacteristically sends my externally directed anger shooting right up (ie angry feelings towards the outside as opposed to just the anger I feel to myself), is customer service that really is not serving the customer. I’m not quite sure why this angers me so disproportionately at the moment.

In particular, when the focus of the person who is supposed to be helping customers seems to be not at all on helping and resolving but on at all costs emphasising how they are not personally responsible, have done nothing wrong, are completely in the right, even have no duty to provide customers with explanations or information. They even seem to do all they possibly can to be obstructive and argue and prevent access to further sources of support (information, colleagues, their manager etc). To the point of talking over the customer, refusing to give information, refusing to connect to a manager, threatening to hang up unless they are allowed to continue saying various lengthy obstructive things, refusing directly to answer questions or giving one-word, irrelevant and rude answers, refusing to send written confirmation of important contractual information and discussions, refusing to diverge from sending automatically generated form letters even when numerous conversations or correspondence has been had that makes them irrelevant yet still full of threatening, scary demands….

Is it just me, or is this kind of experience of customer non-service on the up? In the last months I’ve had this experience to the extreme with a mobile phone company, a bank, a housing office, shops and a hair salon. In a couple of cases it caused me a lot of stress and I’m sure others are equally affected by it, especially the vulnerable (unwell, elderly, poor, etc).

It can be hard to pick apart whether what’s so distressing is the unpleasantness of the interactions, the complete non-service provided at times when you very much need help and are already likely experiencing considerable anxiety, the delay, the fear and panic caused by threatening letters (in the case of the incident with my bank) that come after you have done everything you can and everything you were asked to, or even the complete clash with one’s own values. Honesty, helpfulness, providing a service, taking responsibility, acknowledging the customer’s feelings and needs and being willing to undertake everything I possibly can to help them, are so central to me.

What is the more distressing part of it? I’m not sure. Are my reactions totally out of proportion? I’m not sure. I’m scared by the explosiveness of my feelings of anger.

Still, I wish more people would stop arguing with the fish and swim alongside them for a while instead.

PS re my customer service model: I think sometimes you don’t even need to “catch” the fish to keep them there. If you make them a lovely clean pool, light and air it right, make it pretty* and give them just the right kind of food, then they’ll like to stay there or make return visits of their own accord and perhaps they’ll bring along their fishy friends. [*Okay, perhaps not pretty, I haven’t yet seen many fish that appreciate interior design, but I still think they should have a pretty pond to play in. Potential over-extension of fish pond metaphor alert. Probably time to stop writing now 🙂 .]

Ginny xx

The fear of what lies within

It was my MBT therapy group this morning.

I was very sad at the end and the frightened abandoned child part of me was crying.

I do not want to risk breaking any confidences so I will just say that we shared our feelings and thoughts around abuse suffered, memories, trauma, and times of finding out that a loved or trusted person has done something very very wrong, perhaps the most terrible wrong of violating the most delicate and intimate part of another person’s physical being and emotional soul.

I wish I could write more freely but I am very afraid to break or betray confidences, even though I do not give personal information or write under my real name. Too much rides on that to ever risk it and it would cause too much pain to everyone else in the group.

[Note – at this point I know that my writing that follows has not become very coherent. This post is a lot of things I had to get written down for me and it may not make any sense whatsoever to readers. I am sorry for that. I am not sure that any good can be gained from reading it, actually. I feel I have to write it to start to unravel some of the terror I’m feeling right now about the experiences we explored and to start to pick out some of the emotions. I don’t know well what they are right now. This comes with a warning about painful and scary themes in the writing that follows although because I don’t know if it makes any sense at all, I’m not quite sure what exactly to warn for. It does mention a memory of someone threatening and abusing and physical violence. Just…. warning…. xxx]

I am sad and cold now and desperately wish someone were with me to hold me; to hold me here and tell me what’s real, what’s not real, what’s no longer real, and maybe the hurting child part of me would be protected. She knows only she is wrong and she has harmed and she could drive someone to death – and the flashes come of the terror of finding her, there, like that – and she must be alone and she must know the bad that she has done and if she just watches hard enough perhaps she can get away before it all happens again. But still she’s crying and hurting and nobody comes. Nobody held her, nobody told her it was alright, nobody told her being loved and being able to love didn’t mean being able to get it right enough, disappear enough and fill everything she needed without fail. She cried on her own and she wished alone would stay forever then, in the little room and her make believe world with the “children” she cared for and made real in her mind and for her eyes only, where she didn’t do harm, and later where she was even allowed to cry and someone would hold her and tell her she was good and it would be alright. She could even save people in that world, be brave and strong and rescue and save, suffer hurt herself to protect and save the others. She could slip into that world.

If only the alone time always lasted. If he didn’t come home, didn’t open her door, and know instantly from her frightened watching and sometimes her attempts to block the door, and her mother in her own bedroom in the dark in bed (sleeping? Silent and still, certainly.) If he didn’t come and Mother didn’t get up (one day would she not get up? would it have happened that she’d gone away as she threatened, or even that she was dead?) then alone would last. It was frightening and panicky and hollow but it was safe and she could slip back into the other world, with her “children”. But he always came home. He knew straight away – without a shadow of a doubt she thought this – what had happened that day and what she had “done” to her mother and what had happened and what her mother was going to do because of her. He’d go in to her mother and her mother would tell him what she’d done. Then down they’d come, and he’d be cooking dinner, and the evening and night “session” would start, of Mother crying and screaming and threatening and asking her over and over why she had done it, until Mother came up with the explanation for the evil thing she had done, to punish Mother and get her own back in some twisted way. And the child wouldn’t even understand what the initial deception was supposed to have been, sometimes, let alone how that was punishing. The wrong, you see, was only a wrong if she had intended the evil and the punishment in her action. The action wouldn’t have been wrong without it because it had not any value, it just was. But there was the evil motive and intention and Mother always knew it exactly. And all the time she’d be asking, watching, shouting, accusing. And the child would be crying. Nobody came to her. Nobody helped her. Father comforted Mother, hugged her, sat beside her, stroked her feet and legs, sat with her when she went up to bed when she’d made her so sick she couldn’t cope. He brought Mother the wine and coffee she drank and the cigarettes she chain smoked. (Did he know she threw the glass jars at her? With practised precision to smash into thousands of shards directly at her feet, I know now.) Nobody brought the child anything to comfort her and nobody held her when she cried at the threats and shouting or being left alone when Mother went away and she wondered if that would be the time Mother didn’t come back – look what you’re doing to your Mother… stop crying like that, that’s what people do when they’ve had something really serious happen to them, stop sitting there dripping like a blood machine – and nobody went to her when she cried at night and nobody was there when she got up and was terrified to move and terrified of the stairs. She couldn’t tell anyone when she wet herself because she was too frightened to open the door of her bedroom to go to the bathroom in the night because she thought Mother would be dead outside and that would be the night she would find her – but if she didn’t go out it wouldn’t be real in that child’s mind – she tried to hide the wet things and when Mother found them stuffed into the back of the wardrobe, smelling, she didn’t answer why she had done it. Mother was always there. Father took completely her side and the totality of everything she claimed was the entire truth in his eyes. But nobody was there for that child.

She’s still there and scared and she wants a hug and in the flashbacks she’s all I am and I’m frozen and terrified. She needs someone to take her and not let go and never let go and she really really wants to be real and not be bad, just be the real little girl she is and not the terrible other evil things that Mother said she was doing. Is she a little girl or is she manipulation and evil and danger and damage? Is she real? Is the world she prefers to escape into real? Because it’s so much better and so much safer and it’s there that somebody wants and needs her. Please could she be real.

It really really hurt when Mother did the things she did with her body, in front of the mirror and on the bed and in the bathroom and……. inside…… it really hurt and Mother told her how to breathe so she could do it.

Why didn’t she know it was wrong?

Why was it her normal?

Why didn’t she tell? Why didn’t she stop it?

Especially in the bathroom. Because she was older then. Why did she just let her. Why even when the problems started later did she still not connect it.

Why.

Why is she so dirty and disgusting.

And most terrifying of all what if all this is a lie. What if she’s a foul ugly silly little thing and she’s repeatedly punishing Mother and that’s all this is and it’s all a lie.

Voices. Voices. And crying. Crying tired. Crying for it to stop. Cold.

And was there anything that was good?

****

And what if someone so bad – as what Rev. F. did with the young men… what about me? I thought he was kind to me. I thought he encouraged me. I thought he was kind and he always remembered my name, said hello and said he’d pray for me, and told me hope when I was in the grip of bulimia and losing the plot. I held on to the peace in the evening services as we prayed. But then he did – was doing? – that with the young men. And that was pure hurt and wrong and never never can in any way be alright and so so much harm has been caused to them. What does it mean that I thought something he did was good? What was his thinking when he did the things I thought were good? Would I have become complicit? Why did I think he was kind – someone who could do things like that? Am I so so bad too if I could think he was kind? Am I somehow open to being taken? Taken and used and used to hurt even without knowing?

Yet again. There it is. Used to hurt, doing bad, doing bad without knowing.

Can good be done without good being the intention?

Does that just reinforce that bad can be done without knowing too? Does that mean you can be bad without knowing?

Ginny – – – but not Ginny, really, tonight. Ginny’s got a bit lost right now. Tonight I’m still the frightened child. (Dissociating again.)

I’ve called her Lily – the child. I’ve called her Lily. She’s always there.

Lullaby (5) – Makes my heart smile, to know that you give love so freely

I met my friend and her new baby B. today. She is perfect, beautiful, adorable, cuddly, with inquisitive eyes (when she woke up!), rosy little cheeks and already crowned with lots of soft black hair that loves to stick straight up and you can tell will soon make cute little bunches on top of her head.

There is something very special about the rush of love that fills me when I hold a little child. Much as I fear having my own children and fear I would not know what to do, would not know how to be gentle enough or how to keep my patience when they cry and cry or do not sleep the night for months, or how to know what they need, holding B. today the perfect trust she showed as she cooed and nestled in to me and went to sleep soundly, as though she had found a “safe place” of her own, pulled at my heart with protective love.  As she laid on my chest I knew it was a privilege to be loved by her unconditionally and to protect and adore her and wish to give her everything good.

And B. is not my child – how much more must those feelings be as a mother!

B’s mother, who has encountered with varying degrees of proximity many distressing family and childhood situations, including ill treatment and abuse, said that she has asked herself how inconceivable it is that anyone could ever do a child harm.

Part of me would long for my own family and I have been touched by love for and delight in my friends’ children, including my godchildren. Equally I am stunned that my friends did choose me as a godmother, being so sure myself that I do not have anything good to give and if only they knew how very bad inside and dangerous I really am. I even won’t go to spend time with my friend if her boys will be there, sometimes, because I am so afraid I might do something that hurt them – either unconsciously, in a dissociative state, or because I’m just bad really – or that I would only upset them. If I were a mother I’d be afraid I had no idea how to raise a child, what to give them, how to teach them, and that my patience would run out.

My fears intensified when I was babysitting years ago and the child I was caring for was in the midst of a tantrum and the voices in my head started telling me that I was going to hit her. I was terrified. So terrified that I shut the child in her room and myself into another room and left her alone crying because I thought that was safer than what I was going to do. I was very disturbed afterwards and starved myself in the following days as punishment. I have never babysat since. It was all the proof I needed how the evil was going to erupt from me.

Today B. slept in my arms. Today she just wanted cuddles and love. Today the love cast out some of the fear, whilst I held her. It really touched me that I had been open with my friend about some of the awful things going on in my head – my BPD, my hallucinations and obsessional thoughts – and still she wanted to come to see me and let me hold her child and trusted me.

“For perfect love casts out fear,” the Gospels say. In the moments that little baby melted the fear in my heart, I began to understand.

There’s a fight in my heart and my head right now because as soon as I left my friend and baby B., the anxiety grabbed at me and I’m terrified again; something cold and horrible is clutching at my chest. It’s as though all the knowledge that I’m bad and fears of the evil in me are redoubling their efforts to break me, so as to punish me for loving and trusting and being happy with B. Tonight’s going to be a very hard and scary night. I’m going to try to keep loving.

Ginny xx

This song by Vienna Teng, “Anna Rose”, speaks very much to me of the tender love between a parent and child and the delight children’s non-judgemental acceptance and trust gives us.

Regretting

I fought with a friend today. She is one of my two closest friends and the person I see the most. She probably does more practical to support me than anyone else.

I feel so so stupid, selfish and cruel right now and like I’ve demanded the forbidden. I’ve asked too much and am too much for anyone to cope with.

I got angry and exploded at her really mad and upset because of something we were discussing that a CPN at my service had said to her about carer support. Suddenly and irrationally I felt they wanted me alone and I was never allowed any help or to have a friend and was so harmful to everyone I had to stay on my own and no matter how much it hurt, never show it and never have any help and at that time I felt I couldn’t trust them anymore.

I was hurting and screaming out for someone to hold me but at the same time knew I was so bad I just had to be away from everyone.

My friend does so, so much for me and is the last person I’d be angry with. She was the last person I wanted to hurt or make feel she’d hurt me. I absolutely do not want her to feel responsible for me, that she has to help me or save me, or that she should do more.

I felt like I knew she didn’t want me and I was too bad really. But the frightened child part of me was still screaming for comfort.

I don’t know why I made the leaps of judgement I did. I wish it had never happened.

She told me she is okay. She told me I have not hurt her. She told me she does want to be my friend and does want to meet and she would not do things she does not want or feel able to do, and that she would tell me if she cannot do something. I do believe her. I do.

It was one of those periods where the anger I can’t really explain and the hurt of what felt (irrationally) like confirmation I was never allowed anything but to be on my own blacked everything else out.

Perhaps it is better that we could both speak honestly.

Does the childish part of me want and need too much and is that why I find it so hard to be on my own? Do I ask too much in friendship? Do I become too close in both what I want to give and how I need to be able to count on someone? She was right today – I trust completely or I am completely hurt and closed.

I regret today and I am so sorry for what I said. However, I do believe what she said and assured me as well and I do know we will keep meeting up. Perhaps that’s less “black and white” than my obsessional thoughts would have allowed me a while back  – I would never have allowed myself to see her again because of the hurt I might cause again.

I am so very thankful for the very few people who stay with us when we are frightening and repulsive to ourselves.

Ginny xx

Another year ended (Perhaps, just for a minute, I can believe.)

Another year ended (Perhaps, just for a minute, I can believe.)

Today in my church we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the church calendar year. Next Sunday will be the First Sunday of Advent.

Time passes too quickly.

It’s easy to regret, at this time of year.

Advent is a time of joyful waiting and hope in darkness – for me in my faith, preparing to receive in our heart’s God’s gift of love, and placing all our hope in a God who comes into our darkness just as He came as a helpless little baby to Bethlehem that first Christmas. He does not fear to enter our need, confusion and darkness and we need not fear our darkness and confusion because He delights to come to us.

This time of year is one of heightened scary emotions too. It can feel like being pulled back into too intense memories of the past, of past events and tensions, past failures to make things what I should have. We talked about the emotion of regret in my therapy group and I said, trying to give hope to someone else who said she felt regret, that the idea of regret implies perhaps that we know some way in which we would have liked things to have been different. Perhaps we can build on that.

Right now I don’t think I know how to make things different. Looking back this year or so has been terrible on the face of it with loss after loss. Loss of two jobs. Loss of a very close friend (former partner) when our relationship finally was dashed away completely. Leaving two temporary homes. Loss of the ability to carry on or hold it together. Loss of my job and loss of the ability to work full time; with it loss of stability, colleagues, confidence to be able to do anything at all good. I have been in hospital three times for a length of time as an inpatient and at least twice more for a period of hours when I was suicidal.

There is constant news of so much suffering, fear and terror (in all senses of the word) in the world and more and more hurt that cannot be stemmed. What do we do faced with this? What can we do that is good? What is going to win out in the end? I hurt so much too for people close to me who are ill or struggling or suffering and feel their pain to a point I cannot breathe. I wish I could be any good to them.

Is my grip on reality slipping further and further away? The voices, seeing things, explosive emotions, longing not to be alone…. trying to keep going seems more of a fake and more of an act, more exhausting and harder to keep up. Asking for help fills me with fears of unworthiness, having lied, being a fraud and my intense inner evil that I can’t purge.

Yet a couple of people close to me have said that they see a change in me and something getting better that wasn’t there before. I cannot see it yet but they can.

I have a flat of “my own” rather than just one room as a lodger. I can make it home.

I have discovered friends who do not abandon me even when to myself I am totally repulsive and when I cannot believe that anyone would choose me or want to be around me and when I feel I can be no good to them.

I got to work with someone I truly trusted and respected and learnt from him, not only specific skills and knowledge, but how to be fair and calm and how to give generously and work always in a dedicated manner, yet still keeping boundaries and structure and still holding on to a sense of one’s worth when everything around is screaming the opposite and deriding you. I cannot in any way hold that myself yet, but I watched and learnt and it stays with me somewhere. I hope we may stay in touch.

The Lord has treated me tenderly and shown me He is with me and in a moment of the most impossible despairing distress, showed me that at the deepest point and longing of our heart, there is love and there is Jesus, and just for a few minutes I could believe.

I have a therapist. I have one to one and group therapy. I can go to a support group sometimes. I can ask for help when I need it from a specialist PD service, which is a blessing and luxury in the NHS that such a thing is available in my geographical area.

I can join in a therapy which explores emotions and thoughts and reveals something to me every week. It hurts and shakes me but I have to trust that this can somehow lead me to coping and living better and being able to reach the same plane as everyone else in some way. I don’t think my BPD will ever suddenly disappear like with a magic curative pill but I do think I will learn to feel and live better and learn to let the good things ground me rather than the terror. The darkness will not grip so hard.

It’s the end of another year and Christmas is coming (and everything that means in my head, my heart, my family and out in the world). It’s a scary and shaken year and it has passed so fast.

Still, just for a few minutes, perhaps I can believe.

Ginny xx

A super quick question about BPD / PTSD and physical pain

This is a theme I want to come back to in a longer post. I have been meaning to write something on this for a long time. For now, a very quick question, if I may.

As well as my mental health problems, I suffer with fibromyalgia, endometriosis, chronic back pain following an injury, some degree of hypermobility and potentially now a nerve pain condition as well.

I have noticed from therapy and support groups I have attended that pain conditions and joint conditions seem to be suffered by lots of people with personality disorders, PTSD / complex PTSD and/or who have suffered abuse (often in childhood). Certainly in a group I participate in at the moment, I think a higher percentage of us suffer these physical problems than you would expect to find in a random sample of the general population, if that makes sense. I have also read a couple of articles on this theme recently.

I don’t want to push people to disclose something that feels too personal so please don’t feel any need to answer. I just wonder if anyone reading this also suffers pain conditions as well as mental health difficulties? And do you find any interaction between them eg when one is worse, another also is? Or do you feel that psychological things you have suffered have had a physical impact as well as an emotional one? If anyone did want to exchange thoughts on this I’d be really interested.

Ginny xx

Goldilocks and the three bears (with a sore head – or three sore heads I guess)

Goldilocks and the three bears (with a sore head – or three sore heads I guess)

[Artwork is not my own.]

Q “Why are you chasing after a giggling fortune teller with a crystal ball?”

A “Well, my therapist told me that I have to try to reach a happy medium…”

Yeah okay sorry about that one…

In therapy recently we’ve talked about different concepts of an emotional thermometer.

One view could be a bit like a normal thermometer which can read positive and negative temperatures (ie plus and minus zero, not positive and negative in the sense of value). When we reach a very extreme emotional state either side of the middle, it is a bad time for us and we are not able to use coping techniques or mentalise, because of the extreme we are at.

At the high, hot, “red” extreme, where the thermometer has “shot up”, we are experiencing very intense emotions – extreme anxiety, distress, hurt, anger etc. I guess it could also be an extreme of a positive emotion although I wonder if this would make coping as difficult? I probably should think more about that.

At the low, cold, “blue”, frozen extreme, we also aren’t able to manage because we feel so low, cut off from our emotions, maybe as if we are in a numb state.

It might, perhaps, be more possible for us to function in the low extreme than the high extreme – we might be more able to get through the day better than when we are in an extreme of eg distress and crying – but it is not a place we are calm or happy.

In the middle of the two extremes, so a range around the imaginary zero, is a mid-ground where we can have calm and balance and where we are able to mentalise about our thoughts and emotions and be curious and reflective about what we and others are experiencing. So the zero is not a zero in the sense of zero = no emotion, but it represents the mid-ground.

This happy middle ground is the “Goldilocks state”*- where we are not too hot, not too cold but “just right”. (Sadly the term just works with reference to Goldilocks and the porridge part of the story. It is not the emotional state one frequently reaches when finding someone else sitting in your seat on crowded trains and I’m not even going to touch on what happens when you find an unexplained person sleeping in your bed 😉 [joke!]…)**

In order to be able to employ coping strategies, the aim may be to find ways to bring ourselves away from either of the two extremes to this happy “Goldilocks” middle ground. No end of different factors, including our personality, what we have learned about regulating our emotions as children, the role models that we have had, and so on, can affect our ability to return to the middle ground and the extremes we go to in the first place. I guess this something I’m going to find my way through in therapy. Someone said to me that they find the term “emotionally unstable personality disorder” more accurately descriptive than “borderline personality disorder” because it better represents these extremes of emotion.

I think there are lots of ways the thermometer metaphor could be used. Perhaps instead of imagining a plus and minus end of the thermometer, it is more helpful to imagine a thermometer from 0 – 100 degrees and that the happy medium is around the middle of this range, too much is going towards 100, etc.

Personally I can identify with the metaphor that involves the minus temperatures because I definitely feel I slip into a state that’s like sub-zero, when I am so numb and cut off from my emotions (and others’) and can’t engage with anything. Sometimes I can’t even talk to anyone. It is not the heightened emotional arousal of my extreme distress but it is by no means good either. It may allow me to give the impression of functioning for a while, but I feel I am operating in a dream world, not really present. And it is very dangerous because of where it can quickly lead me to, or switch to.

Which brings me on to the thought that for me, as well as the thermometer there is a cyclical path that does not involve going vertically up and down the thermometer, but oscillates straight from one extreme to the other. My “sub-zero” state can very quickly flip straight to the high, hot, red end. My numbness can flick straight to anger, hurt, agitation, even thoughts of violence or fury which I would never normally experience let alone act on. I can flick straight into the compulsive need to self-harm and self-punish to turn the anger and emotional energy on myself. It feels like a frightening loss of control. I can oscillate in the other direction too. Overwhelming sadness and distress can suddenly plunge into numbness and disconnection and dissociation from the world into what feels like one of my other personalities and my memory of what has happened will go very blank. It feels very out of control afterwards.

I don’t know yet how I will start to learn how to some how get off this dangerous oscillating circle to get back to the happy middle ground or how to get control of the extreme emotions, especially managing anger.

Does anyone else switch or spin through emotions like this? I’d be really curious to hear other people’s experiences.

[Note – *and** : as in the children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a famous children’s fairytale in the UK / USA. I know some readers are not from the UK so please ask if this reference is puzzling to you!]

Ginny xx

Financial disaster again

Financial disaster again

Disaster is a strong word, I know, but it’s what it feels like right now. I know that many people have suffered and struggled with far more and I am fortunate that I do not have my own family to support – no partner, no children – it is only me, otherwise this would be hundreds of time worse.

I had to leave my last job for my health. I could no longer cope and I was getting daily bullying, harassment, intimidation, pressure, then was told I was completely useless anyway. I tried to make a choice to stop my health deteriorating further and to enable me to keep on going to my therapy sessions. I hoped it would be a choice for the positive. I was so so thankful when I was able to find another job quickly. Although it was much lower paid I could do part-time hours that I needed and I thought it would at least give me a chance. I was just starting to hope again.

Mistake.

Wrong again.

Why haven’t I learned my lesson by now?

I found out last night that instead of the nearly 1 month’s pay I was expecting next week, I will get just 1 week. They have some strange system for temps of pay being at least 2 weeks behind everyone else, and something I don’t understand about different cut-off dates according to when you start for when you get paid. Apparently you get the pay you’re missing at the end of the temp contract. I assume so that if you leave without giving notice they can withhold it.

Even my manager didn’t know about this and couldn’t believe it. I am very thankful and appreciative that she phoned payroll and tried to get things sorted out for me, or an advance. She really did much more than I would expect a manager too. It isn’t really her problem. But payroll flatly said there was nothing they could do.

So now I have the prospect of living on 1 week’s pay until the end of December, which evidently is impossible. Rent? Council tax? Electricity, gas and water bills? Food? Travelling to my hospital appointments? And let’s just pretend to forget that Christmas is coming up and I have nothing to give some of my family or my godchildren! It was already a total pardon-my-French mess because I was paid only Statutory Sick Pay when I was signed off in my old job, and wasn’t told this until after the event, so I didn’t know to claim Housing Benefit as soon as I should have done.

I had just climbed out of debt and now I will be straight back in again – overdraft? Applying for credit cards? I don’t know. That would be the best case scenario. I do not know how I’m going to live. I’m already eating rubbish because things are so desperate financially, trying to live on coffee and toast and whatever I can find in the pound store.

This really was the last straw last night and I was completely wrecked. It had been awful already before this. Just as soon as there was a tiny bit of hope it was smashed away again, like God and the world is saying, how dare you hope, how dare you think you can have anything good, you don’t deserve it, you’re dirt.

I was put through to a support line and there may perhaps be a possibility of a loan until next month, but if it were all to be paid back next month I have no idea whether it would help or just postpone the same situation happening again next month.

I was distressed at work (in private) after this was all dropped on me – none of it was explained before I started work and even my manager didn’t know. I know I’m fortunate to possibly be in a situation of getting help from my employer and not many people would have that assistance. But I just don’t know.

And the support service were helpful and did seem to appreciate some things when I explained my situation but they also said if you think you want to be kept on you will really have to prove yourself, perhaps they will forgive you this time for having a meltdown but if you ever let it happen again there are any number of people standing beside you, if you aren’t strong or if you have any time off your job will be taken away and given to the next person. This was the support team, not my manager, and they do not actually have any say on my performance or whether I have a job or not. I already thought and knew the things they said but it did make it even more painful and anxiety provoking to have it spelled out by another person who is there to provide support.

I wonder whether it’s worth going on. Is it just postponing ultimate complete disaster? I should be more thankful and hopeful but I’ve really run out of strength. I really needed something to hope in.

Ginny xx

Sorry for my absence this week….

Warning: this post mentions hallucinations, self-harm and suicidal thoughts, my distressing thoughts and voices and the darkness I’m feeling right now. If this may be distressing or triggering for you, please take care.

…. It has been a very bad week. I am sorry for not posting for a while. As I do not have the internet at home at the moment it’s difficult anyway. It has also been a really bad week. The hallucinations are growing / getting more frequent and it’s scary. I am so so tired and really wish I could escape and things all stop. I’m so scared and I wish someone were with me, I wish someone would hold me and tell me it would be alright although in my head it never, never is and I feel so stupid and needy and incompetent and childish and everything else for so much needing that right now. I feel so alone. It hurts but it’s numb as well. I really need to be able to talk to and see a friend but the only two people who live close by are just too busy, their lives too full and too difficult already and I know I would be everyone’s last choice to spend time with, kind as they are, and as much as they have given me. I cannot ask for more. Then the horrible monster inside me tells me that if I had a friend feeling like this and needing help I’d go to be with her straight away, why am I always alone and not allowed anyone? Then the guilt comes crashing back, how dare I be so childish and needy, greedy, ugly, disgusting, go on, get it out, cut and cut and scratch and vomit til you get it all out you sick revolting evil thing…

I want it to stop. I nearly ended it last night. There is really a limit somewhere and mine has been reached over and over again. It’s very dark right now.

I need to write and want to write and perhaps this will build some way to keep going.

Ginny xx