Death and Resurrection

Well, sorry it’s been so long since I last added a proper blog.  I shan’t explain, just accept it was a glitch which is now resolved.  It wasn’t a glitch with DBT which on the whole has been quite difficult and simultaneously positive.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story of the rag man, wandering the streets of a city and offering “new for old” to the people he meets.  The hole ridden shoes of a homeless person swapped for new, comfy walking shoes plus a 4 season sleeping bag.  The blood-stained rag of a youth beaten up exchanged for proper bandages, clean clothes and a comforting shoulder to cry on.  The characters all had to give up the thing that most reflected their need and the rag and bone man gave them back so much more.

Another way of putting it.  Without a death there can be no resurrection!

My last session with Joy was one of those death moments, which allow a resurrection to follow.  Since starting DBT I have stopped the most risky form of self-harm I used completely and significantly reduced cutting.  However, I have become increasingly aware that I am already one quarter of the way through the programme – I can’t afford to take too long over change.

This was reinforced by Joy today who when I suggested a compromised version of change challenged me to go the whole way now, by reminding me that a complete stop to self-harm is an ultimate goal in doing DBT.  To leave the life of self-harm and emotional turmoil behind to have a new, more balanced one.  A life where I can choose my reactions rather than letting my emotions, or fear of the emotions, dictate my responses and behaviours.

So what was the death that will clear the way for my new life?

“Today I decided, and made a commitment to never deliberately cut myself again.

To that end I will search out every blade / self-harm kit that I own,

and dispose of it safely.

If I should slip up with this commitment in the future

I will not give up, but re-commit and carry on!”

There, I’ve said it, and not in secret which to me, seals the commitment.  I know this will not be easy, but as Joy pointed out, never again will I have the chance to make this change with the level of support available while doing DBT.  So, I am now an ex-cutter.  It is gone and my new, scar free life has begun.  The death has occurred.  It is frightening and painful – but the way is clear for a resurrection to occur, and I am in a good position because I firmly believe in resurrection and new starts.

What BPD feels like...

Sorry I've not been around as much as usual.  I had a bit of a hiccup and couldn't to manage to write.  However, someone gave me this link which, if tending towards being cheesy is nevertheless a helpful insight.  I related to most of it anyway! Please watch it.

What BPD feels like

A Safe Place

As part of the DBT I am being encouraged to develop a personal safety plan.  This a list of strategies, things and people that are tried and tested sources of relief if I’m very distressed and likely to self-harm.  It sounds like it should be something useful to do, but I don’t like it.

It’s very existence makes me feel more of a loser than I already am.  I hate it.  I can’t imagine I will ever use it, and yet I have dutifully started to fill it in.  One of the group facilitators told us that we should stick it in a prominent place like the fridge or cupboard with the tea and coffee.  I think I managed to maintain an impassive expression at that suggestion while inside I was yelling “No Way” and imagining the sort of place I wanted to “stick it” instead!  Imagine the shame I would feel having such a window to my weaknesses and failings on public display.  What sort of questions might Jenny ask when she saw it?  No, the safety plan is not for me.

However, I am trying to fill it in.  The first part is to write down my safe place.  An imaginary or real place where I am totally and utterly, 100% safe.  This was my first point of failure!  I cannot think of or imagine a place where 100%, total safety is possible (excluding the grave that is).

In the end I remembered a picture I had drawn for something else on the theme of hope.  I can’t put it here as it is a self-portrait, but it shows me resting in a cloud of things that engender hope, like love and faith.  At the same time there are bricks of all the bad stuff such as abuse, anger and hate hurtling down towards me on the cloud.  The point being, that whatever comes my way, hope remains even if I can’t see or feel it,  and that is as safe as it gets in this life.

I showed this to Joy when she asked if I’d started my safety plan.  She basically said I had to change that picture because it wasn’t safe enough.  I told her I don’t believe a safer place exists.  We discussed it for a while before she closed the conversation with,

“We’ll bang out heads together on that one another time!”  

 What fun!  I shall look forward to that.  In the meantime I have deleted the picture from the document, and filed the picture less safety plan in the back of my DBT folder where as far as I’m concerned, it can stay..

DBT re-named

I am a cruiser (with regard to learning that is).  I always knew that, but I didn’t quite see the impact that has on me until I’d had chance to reflect on my last appointment with Joy.  The one where she told me that using skills by accident was not going to do me any good.  I hate to admit I was wrong, but I was.  Joy was absolutely right.

It took a few days for me to reach this enlightened position.  Despite being a bit discouraged at having done all my DBT wrong up to that point, I gave the new way a try.  In the morning I would pick a skill or two to try during the day.  It was really difficult.  I couldn’t remember what the various skills involved (I still can’t).  I couldn’t even remember what they were called at first, even though so far, I’m only practicing a third of the distraction skills and some mindfulness.

To help overcome this I wrote the headings and sub headings in a notebook application on my i-phone.  Since then, when my mind goes blank I’ve been able to refer to those notes, and to anyone watching it just looks like I’m checking a text message.  Doing this has meant that some of the new skills, and how to apply them is starting to sink in!  I feel like I am actually learning.  This is a new feeling.  I didn’t know I hadn’t actively learned before – not till I started to experience it this last week or so.

Obviously I have been able to learn before.  I passed exams with quite good grades at school, and I very much enjoyed doing my degree despite towards the end getting bored and handing my dissertation in unfinished.  I even referred to my time at university as a three year holiday!  I learned just by being in a lesson or lecture, with minimal additional reading, and a last minute blitz of writing the night before an essay hand in deadline.  This approach has served me well enough.  I even passed A level English without reading most of the texts.  I just bought revision notes which I read instead.  Thomas Hardy, Canterbury Tales and such like were just too boring.  I think I might be a habitual under-achiever!

I think this passive approach to learning, and not bothering if it’s boring has been the root of my problems with maths.  I couldn’t get the hang of it by passive absorption which has meant I believed I can’t do it.  It’s possibly time for me to re-evaluate this belief.  DBT has triggered in me a glimmer of hope that maths may not have to be the stumbling block that denies me the opportunity of a new career.  Watch this space on that one!

The same trait has affected other areas of my life.  I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned already that I’m a Christian.  I have been since I was sixteen and many times it has been my faith that has given me strength not to give in to suicidal thoughts and feelings.  However, much as I have never lost my faith I have found it difficult to feed my faith through prayer and reading in the way I would’ve liked.

Prayer is part and parcel of the distraction skills.  A prompt to pray is now in my  i-phone.  Because of the DBT homework I am starting to experience a change – an improvement in this area of my life.  So much so, I’m wondering if it might be appropriate to re-name DBT from Dialectic to,

“Discipleship and Behavioural Therapy.”

Towel Throwing

For the most part I’ve tried to keep my posts on here either, informative, creative or light.  I think on the whole I’ve managed to succeed with that.  I’ve avoided relating the most extreme examples of BPD in my life.

The thing is that isn’t a real picture of BPD.  The intense emotions I experience and inner distress I live with are horrible.  I have placed a lot of hope in my ability to make DBT work for me.  Today I seriously doubt if I can do it.  DBT is very structured and I’m not used to it.  I want to kick against it – I want to throw in the towel – a great big wet, sweaty bath sheet at that!  I want to have a tantrum and scream at the DBT team.  Why?  Because I’m useless at it!

Then, having done that, I want to carry on with DBT as if nothing had happened, and, since life’s not like that, I will have to pick up that smelly old towel and throw it in all over again!

Right and Wrong

I thought I was doing ok at DBT.  I was managing to do my diary sheets and homework.  I felt I was understanding most of the theory of the skills being taught in the group sessions.  I thought for a beginner I was doing ok.

I don’t have that many named DBT skills as yet but I was managing to record ones I’d tried on my diary sheet by reflecting on events of the day last thing at night.  With hindsight I would identify the skills I tried to use and record it.  I mentioned this was how I did my diary sheets to Joy in my one to one.  This triggered a big reaction.

 “Using DBT skills by accident won’t enable you to learn to use them when you need them” 

Joy asserted.  It took a good few minutes for her to finish making this point, by which time I was despairing and told her there was no point in reviewing my diary sheets as they were all wrong.  She spent at least as long again trying to convince me that they weren’t wrong she just wanted me to do them differently in future.  I still believe this is therapy jargon for wrong and so said I wasn’t convinced.  This led her to make the point again, that I had done what I knew how, so that was ok, and now she wanted me to do it differently.  In other words, it was wrong due to ignorance as opposed to wilful choice.

Sometimes it would be really nice to hold to a belief that “there is no right and wrong – just opportunities to learn and grow”.  If that were true I could accept what she says as true.  However, this idea is not practicable in real life.  In real life there has to be rights and wrongs.  Rules are essential for existence.  For example, the rules of gravity, if they get broken and become wrong the whole world is in big trouble!  The rules of football – take them away and you have a bunch of people aimlessly charging after a ball and running away with it wherever they like, however they like for as long as they like!  It is wrong to abuse a child, to inflict violence on someone, to take what belongs to someone else without consent – if it was ok we would not need prisons and perhaps the victims of such behaviours would not mind, and it wouldn’t hurt them. 

 

Ignorance does not make wrong things right.  It may well be a reason for a wrong – but the wrong is still a wrong.  When I played in my first ever football match I had never heard of the offside rule.  In my ignorance I went running up the pitch only to have the referee stop me in my tracks for being offside.  (By the way, for any men who may read this, I am female and I do now understand the offside rule).  The ref did not let me off the misdemeanor because I didn't know.  I had broken a rule, done a wrong in football.  I learned from that so I didn't do it again.

The existence of rights and wrongs if an unavoidable fact of life.  It's how you respond to them that matters.  This is one of my areas of weakness.  I hate being wrong, making mistakes, failing, not being good enough etc.  These things feed despair, self loathing, hopelessness, a sense of inferiority etc.  That was how I left my one to one with Joy.

With some water under the bridge the cloud of despair triggered by getting my DBT practice wrong has lifted, and now I have started to try and do it differently.  I aim to name a skill that I will try during the day.  It is much harder this way, and I soon found myself floundering to remember what I had to do for  particular skill.  I think I've cracked it now though.  My i phone  holds a summary of all the skills so I can select and revise the relevant one when I need it.  

I pray I am now really on the right track for DBT success.

Inconvenience

I am an inconvenience!

I don’t want to be.  I don’t try to be, in fact I actually try not to be – yet I am still an inconvenience.

This was true at home as a child – I caused my brother to be violent towards me and then when he hurt me I didn’t even have the decency to be quiet about it so the neighbours complained about my screaming.

It was true at school when I couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in with my peers.

It has been true in work and voluntary organisations I’ve been involved with.  When I see injustice and discrimination to myself or others I won’t tolerate it and choose to be an inconvenience to the antagonist.  In those circumstances I can be as inconvenient as a stone in your shoe when you need to run for a bus.  Being an inconvenience is not always a bad thing, not when it means you are a catalyst for positive change.

Just now however, I am simply an inconvenient inconvenience for Joy.  She has real difficulty finding a slot where she can offer me my weekly DBT appointment.  Her schedule is far too pressured to take into account my needs and personal circumstances.  Last time we met she offered me an appointment that was impossible.  She had offered me this slot before and I had explained quite clearly that the slot she proposed was totally impractical for me as it was after school finishing time and I have no child care.  Therefore, when she suggested it the following week I was disappointed that she had not listened to me.  She muttered about having to swap this and that and change other people’s appointments to slot me in at an earlier time.  After which I thought we agreed that for the most part this new slot would be a regular time and day so that in future I can make it and she doesn’t have to get flustered changing things round.

Today Joy called because she needed to cancel my appointment.  That’s ok – things happen and plans have to be changed.  The bit that has got to me is her comment,

“I’ll call you tomorrow to arrange another time!”  I thought it was arranged – same time, same place, next week!  No doubt she will offer me another, equally impossible time as she made it clear last time that she really didn’t have any other slots I could have, and the one she eventually changed it to was a hassle for her.

I don’t quite get the problem really.  When not doing home visits she is based in the building I attend.  I only need an hour of her time.  It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me that she could block me in for a regular slot.   

You may think at this point I am being a little selfish – why should I have my own slot and other people fit in around me?  The reason is this.  The geographical area that Joy covers and is based in is the opposite side of the county to where I live.  It’s a 50 minute drive there and 50 minutes back again.  I am her only DBT client, and as such I am her only client who does not live in her patch and has such a long way to travel.  I don’t think a bit of flexibility is inappropriate in the circumstances.

Why oh why oh why didn’t they link me with a keyworker based in my side of the county?  

Oh yes, I forgot – living where I do, I am just an inconvenience.

Rant over!