Peer Work

Happiness

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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Rose and I are away again, house sitting in the hills with Zoe. It’s bliss. Yesterday friends visited for fire baked spuds and card games. I’ve spent today sleeping or reading in front of the fire. Rose is spoiling me. Last week was busy, I’m still embroiled in tax paperwork, my cert 4 in small business management started and there were some stressful emotional days. By Friday night I was teary with exhaustion and pain was making me short fused. The effort of getting out of the house, especially with the dog crate and so on for Zoe, was almost too much. But we did it, and it’s been wonderful.

I was thinking the other day how normal it’s become to be multiple. When Rose I go shopping, and I switch to a little kid in the lolly aisle, we are both so unconcerned. Mostly people don’t notice, and we don’t draw attention to ourselves. But we’re not afraid or ashamed either. Those who do see something different probably assume that I have some kind of intellectual disability or delay. I’ve long stopped being distressed by that or feeling ashamed of being seen that way. So what? In some ways, I am ‘delayed’ at that moment, by about 25 years. 😉 I’m not afraid of being thought of as disabled because I don’t think about disability the same way any more. Me switching is so normal for us, not a big deal, not a source of shame or anxiety. (I switch many times a day, and my system ages range from 5 up and cross various experiences and expressions of gender – most who don’t know me well would not be able to tell that I’ve switched – Rose usually can)

This is such a difference from the years I was terrified of someone else finding out, from my first disclosures where people reacted so badly. So different to being diagnosed with a “terrible disorder” that would prevent me ever getting work, that would ensure I spent years in and out of psychiatric facilities, that would wreak havoc on my relationships and require thousands of excruciatingly painful hours in therapy for any hope of peace or happiness. I feel like someone who was told they would never walk again who goes dancing on Saturday nights. They got it all so very wrong, and I’m so glad I didn’t listen.

So I’m different, in some ways that people can’t see, and in others that are at times visible. So what? Welcome to the world, it’s a very diverse place. I’m not a freak show, and I’m not scared of a conversation about dissociation with a checkout operator either. I am so blessed, so at peace. I don’t live like a spy in a foreign land any more, watching everything I say, always concealing some truth of my identity that would destroy everything. How much of what we put down to the ‘mental illness’ is the stress of this way of living? The loneliness of it, the chronic, grinding fear? I’ll never forget having new members to Bridges, the group for people who experienced dissociation and/or multiplicity that I ran for several years, weeping when they first attended, because it was the first time in their lives they’d met anyone else like them. I’ve been lucky to know and care for and love and learn from so many people, and so many fellow multiples over the years. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve lost a few along the way, but I’ve learned, I’ve been humbled, I’ve tried to take the lessons with me, the hard won wisdom whether through success or terrible disaster.

I feel set free from those old, dire prognosis, and I hope my work, my choices, the way I live my life, also helps to set others free. My life is not without pain, I live in chronic physical pain, I have experienced extreme emotional anguish. My story includes grief, darkness, suffering. I live with ghosts and old wounds that are very deep. I am not ‘recovered’. But I’m also not waiting to get better before I feel alive, or at peace, or hope. All lives touch pain, tragedy, disability, loss. Some more than others, yes. I don’t have a good life in spite of multiplicity or illness. I have a good life because I’m here, present in it, drinking it in, the sorrow and the joy, the pleasure of driving myself hard at work, and the bliss of a day reading by the fire. The warmth in the arms of my lover. I love and I am loved. It is my heart that is the source of my greatest pain, and my brightest happiness, and in matters of the heart I have been fortunate indeed.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

Links between childhood trauma & adult chaos and hoarding

/ Sarah K Reece / 8 Comments

I know these two things don’t seem to be related, but my experience has been that for some people, there’s several links that can be very difficult to manage. Not everyone who was traumatised or abused as a child struggles with mess & chaos as an adult – and vice versa! Plenty of people who’s personal style is more ‘trench warfare’ than ‘glossy magazine’ haven’t been abused. And there’s a natural diversity here that I don’t wish to pathologise! But for those who have experienced childhood trauma this can be a difficult aspect of their lives, one that causes conflict and shame, and can be depressingly resistant to efforts towards change.

I once had a friend, I’m going to call them Nicole, who really struggled in this area. Their living space, and most especially their bedroom, was in a constant state of chaos and uncleanliness. Things were not just messy but in major disarray. Lack of clean clothes, bedsheets unchanged, food leftovers not picked up, mess from pets not cleaned away. Her spaces ranged from untidy to actual health hazards with moulds on walls or tiles surfaces and in food areas, and food scraps attracting rodents and bugs. I remember being initially confused and then repulsed by the state of her home. I couldn’t understand how anyone could live this way. I would help out from time to time when Nicole became really overwhelmed by it all, and between the two of us we would clean everything back to sparkling and she’d vow to do better. It never lasted. The more I helped out, the more I realised that there was more than messiness going on here. I’ve lived with messy people, they’re a pain to pick up after, but if you’re fairly diligent and there’s not too many of them, you can keep up with things. With Nicole it was different, it was more like she was at times actively trashing her space. And yet, she hated it. She wouldn’t invite friends over because she felt so ashamed of her home. When she house-shared, it was a constant source of massive conflict with her house mates who became fed up with promises to change that never came through. She struggled to maintain work when she couldn’t find any of her resources, important documents, or food for breakfast or lunch. When things got very bad her personal hygiene also suffered, without clean clothes it seemed pointless to shower, the bathroom was unpleasant to spend time in so she would also stop brushing her teeth and hair. Profound humiliation set in as she would take long stretches off work on the basis of anxiety, and self harm and suicidiality would be the result of this awful spiral.

It was so distressing to watch. We talked about it and over the years we started to tease together some idea of what was driving it. Nicole isn’t in my life anymore, but I’ll never forget the conversations we had, and my slowly dawning awareness of the links between her mess and her history of child sexual abuse. We coined a phrase – graphic, but appropriate, for the need that the mess sated – it was her moat of corpses. For a child who hadn’t been safe in her own bed at night, surrounding herself with filth and mess made her feel safer. She slept better at night with the comforting notion that anyone sneaking into her room would fall over the trash so she would hear them coming, would be put off by the mouldy food, might decide it was all just too much trouble. Once articulated however, this idea simply made her feel more humiliated and helpless, like confessing as an adult to a fear of the dark or still wetting your pants. (Neither of which are uncommon for people sexually abused as children when they are triggered and stressed) On some deep level, her inner child was still terrified of sleeping in bed, and found the mess a comforting barrier, and the idea of being unclean and unattractive far safer. These needs, difficult to explore or understand as they were, were far stronger than Nicole’s other needs for order and cleanliness and comfort in her own space. The essence of the struggle was a profound sense of not being safe, and a struggle for control between her deeply ashamed adult self, and her terrified and abused child self. (using this language in the sense in which we all have parts, rather than that of multiplicity)

I’ve since come across this dynamic many more times, with friends or loved ones, or people I’ve reached out to in my mental health work. At times issues like this are driving the cluster of behaviours we call ‘hoarding’, although there are many other things that can instead be at play. I’ve noticed a few more links between childhood trauma and chaos, one is that of the child who is raised in chaos and has no models of how to use adult routines and systems. If you’ve ever helped a child to clean up their room when it’s been completely trashed, you’ll know that children struggle to work out how to break such a big task down to small steps. Helpful adults show a child how to tackle tasks like these ones, perhaps like this; start by putting all the laundry and bedding on the bed, then let’s put all the shoes in the shoe box, now the toys back on the toy shelf, now the lego back in the lego box, now we’ll sort the clean washing from the dirty… and helpful adult have set up basically useful systems in their houses – like having a toy shelf and a place for shoes to go, and a routine at evening where everyone brushes their teeth before bed. Chaotic houses are not like this. The adults in these houses are often either distracted (such as with a very sick child in hospital), overwhelmed (with mental illness, grief, or addiction), lacking in these skills themselves, or abusive or neglectful and do not invest energy in the child’s environment and well being. It’s important to note that chaotic households are not always abusive, particularly in the instance of very bonded parents there may be a great deal of love and fun in all the chaos! But without someone to model how to use systems and routines, kids struggle to develop these skills. In houses that at times also felt unsafe and highly stressful, this effect is compounded in that it can be harder to simply tack on a few extra skills once adulthood is reached.

In other situations I’ve seen children who come from highly organised households still have huge struggles in these areas. Sometimes an abusive parent is not chaotic, but rather wears a mask of caring investment in their child. Children of these parents often reject their hypocritical role model – and so also reject the valuable skills around maintaining a home. It takes a lot of processing, maturity, and self esteem to be comfortable in any way resembling someone who has badly hurt us, or whom we despise. Sometimes it is not the parent who is abusive, but in strict households where order and neatness of appearance are prioritised over connection and expression of emotion, children who are traumatised or being abused in another setting can find themselves under tremendous stress at home when their ‘normal’ reactions to those experiences are interpreted as disrespectful and disruptive. Huge power struggles over issues of neatness and hygiene can result, with the underlying issues of poor self-worth, emotional exhaustion, alienation, and intense emotional pain going completely unnoticed. Rebellion against house rules that are perceived to be overly strict, or designed with the intention of ‘looking good for other people no matter what’s really going on’ can become an entrenched behaviour into adulthood. For many people in this situation, arguments about cleanliness with family members continue well into adult life and remain a constant point of conflict. Awareness that developing these skills and resolving the issues around chaos would meet with family approval can completely block any progress in this area when this approval would be distressing. At times the need to be in opposition to people is far stronger than our need to feel successful in our own lives.

There’s a lot of overlaps between the kinds of dynamics I’m describing and those I see in families where someone is struggling with dangerously disordered eating. There’s both the issue at hand, and the challenge of the massive stress it causes in key relationships. Caring about someone who is a trauma survivor can be challenging. Sharing a space with someone who keeps trashing it can be a source of intense distress! The conflict of needs is not just within the person, but within groups of families, friends, housemates, and neighbours. In severe forms, this can be a health hazard. People can get sick from improperly stored food, or where fridge or freezer doors are left open, moulds can trigger allergies and respiratory issues, and the psychological impact of living in a permanent tip can be huge. It may not be possible to have friends to visit. It can be a huge struggle to maintain your own life and routines when there are not only no clean dishes, but even the dirty ones haven’t been put back in the kitchen and you have to go looking for them every morning if you want breakfast. Mail gets lost. Important things are left in the rain. Broken glasses are trodden on at night in bare feet because no one cleaned them up. The back yard is a mass of dog shit, broken toys, and flies. Undesexed pets spawn litters that are sickly and difficult to home. For some people, the shame is catching, and living with a parent, sibling, or housemate who generates this kind of chaos can make people feel very ashamed. A sense of misery and hopelessness descends. It’s a difficult environment to take good care of yourself in, to feel a sense of dignity and self respect in, even to think clearly in. With all of this comes a sense of being held hostage to someone else’s demons. Efforts to fix everything don’t last or are rejected. Cycles of feeling sorry for them, of ignoring it all, of being really angry with them, cleaning it all up, and numb depression never seem to resolve, except with explosive ruptures where households disband. The underlying shame is re-enforced and there’s no way out.

If you are someone who struggles with chaos, take heart! You don’t have to be caught forever in a spiral of shame and rejection. You may be able to find ways to resolve the needs and learn the skills needed to keep a home ticking over, or you may remain messy and chaotic, but either way you can manage this. The very first thing people often need is a way to be able to think about this without hating themselves. You’re not just a horrible person. It’s not that you don’t try hard enough. I know that you have huge blocks in your head that make this incredibly difficult to even think about, much less act on. It’s not your fault.

If you are living with someone like this, also take heart. You can break out of the cycle and find ways not to be drowned by it all. You don’t have to be caught between feeling sympathy for them (and putting up with it), or hating or leaving them. You are allowed to love someone who is flawed and has been wounded, and struggles with chaos as an adult. You’re also allowed to insist on your right to feel safe and not at risk of harm in your home.

Being able to accept that this is an issue can be a radically different approach when everything you’ve always tried has been either fix it/live with it. This approach is about reducing shame and trying to untangle all the different valid needs that people have. Shame often intensifies the stress that drives this behaviour, creating a loop that drives everyone insane.

Containment is a key need. The spiral I described that Nicole would get into started with messy bedroom > chaotic home > work stress > lower personal hygiene > self harm > feeling or acting on suicidal feelings. If she was flat sharing, the messy bedroom wasn’t the end of the world, but the chaotic home stressed her flatmates, and self harm or suicidal impulses made them scared, angry, and tended to blow up simmering stress into major rejection and restructures. If the spiral can be interrupted, and the chaos can be contained to some level, the catastrophic results don’t come into play. There’s many different ways this can happen. Perhaps 1/2 day a week, everyone cleans up the house together. The rest of the time it might be trashed, but this is a regular enough team effort that it is never too unmanageable to live with. Perhaps rules around safety are agreed upon and the home is allowed to be incredibly messy provided there’s no fire or health hazard. Perhaps the person with the chaos lives alone, or in a separate space, which can be trashed without distressing their partner or family. Perhaps some more money is needed to help set up systems – shelves for boxes, wardrobes for clothes, a fridge with a door handle. Poverty and chaos are often tangled together and they can re-enforce each other. Considering that each often generates disgust and contempt from other people, those struggling with both these issues are in for a very challenging time.

Perhaps different home set ups are explored – often when these dynamics are in play it’s like there’s only two options – trashed, or magazine perfect. Homes come in so many different flavours! Sometimes the magazine look is a huge trigger, but a hippy home full of lamps and rugs, or a thousand knick knacks on shelves, or a collection of indoor plants becomes a space that feels safe and able to be tended and looked after. Sometimes rooms need to be set up differently! If bed feels unsafe, maybe you need to sell the bed, sleep on the couch with the dog for a year, set up that sewing room you’ve always wanted. Maybe you need to move away from our modern trend towards open plan living, and set your bedroom up as a labyrinth, with shelves in front of the door, a box to step over, a lego bucket as the world’s most lethal moat, a lock on the windows. When you’re not feeling overwhelmed by shame, and that not having this problem any more is the only way you’ll be acceptable to friends and family, suddenly you can tap into your creativity and find other ways to manage it.

It’s important to protect other people from our demons, and in some cases where chaos is a trigger for your friend or partner, it can be very difficult! Sometimes our particular demons do not play well together. It’s not the end of everything, you can create enough safe space for your relationships to be happy despite these challenges. They don’t have to dominate your life, threaten your relationships and self respect, and bring social workers into your home. There’s some great resources online such as Unfuck Your Habitat. Part of this is about skills, but a lot of it is about the blocks that can make those skills so hard to learn as an adult. There’s room in life for blocks, we all have them! You can find ways to manage the stress and limit the damage. Good luck!

Freedom

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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I sat down yesterday and wrote about how my world is opening up, changes in my system and approach, how I’m managing the ‘adult’ world of tax and business and admin completely differently and with far more skill. Then I found myself going back to old posts about my experience of psychosis, reading my sharing of the darkest nights of grief and loss. There’s a disconnection at first, that familiar awareness that I’m reading someone else’s writing, reading about someone else’s life. And then the growing recognition of us, that tiny glimpse of how far we stretch – from the darkest poet to the lightest administrator. And I find myself marvelling how freedom has changed everything for us. Where the literature wanted each of us to compress, to move closer together, become more similar, compact ourselves into a box marked Sarah and never step out of it again, we have found life in the opposite process. I am more ‘mentally ill’ and yet more functional. I have parts, and psychotic episodes, and days I shut myself in the house and do not speak, and sometimes I wear wrist poems as dark, painful souvenirs of a scream that sounded in my skin at 3am. And yet, I’m getting up and doing my tax with a clearer mind than I can ever remember. We’re getting out of each other’s way. We’re sprawling, stars filling the sky from horizon to horizon. I don’t have to choose one colour, one perspective, one way of living, one identity, one name, one life. We are moving around each other and enriching each other’s lives instead of stealing time and fighting for control. There is trust and sorrow and joy and anguish and pain and nostalgia and hope. This is not what it is to be a multiple – it is what it is to be a human. This is what life is, beautiful and tragic. I’m not turning into a ‘recovered patient’. I’m no one else’s success story. I’m not always comfortable to be around. I’m not leaving anyone behind, or killing anyone, or carving anyone out of my system. I’m finally keeping regular sleep hours but without excluding the poets and night people all the time. (that’s still a big work in progress) We’re building a business and a life as a structure that protects what is vulnerable and precious and unique about us, instead of excludes it, relies on pretending it doesn’t happen, or exploits it. In a weird way, it feels like integration, without fusing us back to one. It feels like I’m finally figuring how to grow up without dying inside.

So much to tell you…

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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Wowee what a week! I have so much to tell you about!

Rose and I have just come back from a couple of days away in the bush, celebrating a friends birthday. It was a bit hectic fitting it around work (still doing too much work on my weekends) and only possible at all because kind friends came to our rescue last minute and dog-sat Zoe for us. 🙂 But we had the most wonderful time connecting with a new bunch of people. It’s often still so novel when we’re in a room full of queer families, we’re used to being ‘representative’ but in a space like this we weren’t the queer couple, we were the young couple among many other families queer or queer friendly, with kids already. Awww it was nice! Having conversations about donors with other people who have been there, being part of a beautiful little community of people navigating the complications and joy of rainbow families. The location was spectacular, with clear starry skies and kangaroos outside the windows. Rose and I feel so at home out in the scrub, and sharing meals and bathing kids in a tin by the fire, it was a wonderful taste of things to come. We fell asleep on the couch by the fire, watching the stars out the window, and soaked up the beautiful countryside on all the driving. We’re now planning to do something similar for Rose’s next big birthday – rent a large space somewhere beautiful and have friends and family visit us. It’s a sign of how much things have been changing for us that we can even consider spending money like that – Rose’s job has been a blessing and my business plans are looking hopeful!

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Life continues to be whirlwind! I’ve written my first business proposal – for all my plans around freelance mental health work – and have just been accepted into the free Cert 4 in Business as part of the NEIS training – a government scheme to provide support to people receiving some form of welfare who wish to start a small business. I’m going to be doing my first online study, which is exciting because it will be a test run to see how well that format suits me… If well, then it opens the doors to finishing my psych degree or any other study that keeps my researcher part happy and not left to pick wallpaper off the walls. 😉

So this will take three months and overlap somewhat with the Cert 3 in Micro Business I already have. However I’m still keen because I’ve been finding that with all the work I’ve been doing lately on mindfulness and my anxiety levels, and having finally seen a tax accountant to get all my overdue paperwork sorted out, my mind is so much clearer and I am coping with and processing this kind of information so much better. I am gradually transforming into a business woman! It’s been a long, tiring, amazing, complicated process, but I am watching it happen. It takes a lot longer than people seem to think to regain mental space for skills like this after crisis and homelessness. I think the sexual health counselling also made a huge difference, in that I am feeling less out of my depth, less like these things are part of an adult world I don’t and can’t understand. I’m not corporate or comfortable with bureaucracy by nature, but I’m finally seeing past the bluster, the incomprehensible language, and really there is only a little man behind the curtain. For the first time in my life I am doing admin without panic attacks – in fact without even stress. I’ve had to rewrite my excel spreadsheets for expenses/income/profit and loss to accommodate changes recommended by the tax accountant, and although I could certainly think of more fun ways to spend my morning – and also appreciate friends who help trouble shoot for me!! – it wasn’t a big deal. Which is blowing my mind. I’ve also opened new bank accounts, started new systems for tracking receipts, and had possibly the most productive week in my life, lol.

I’ve overhauled my Glitter Tattoo kit and completely restructured how we store and display them at gigs – I had the change to test it a couple of times over the weekend and it WORKS so well! I’m enjoying the realisation that I am good at setting up systems that work and tweaking designs and procedures to make them easier and more efficient. I now have nearly 200 tattoo stencil designs that I use at gigs, which needed a very different set up from the 40 I started out with a year or two ago. It’s these little successes that make me feel so self-satisfied, ha haa. 🙂 And I’m thankful for that because it’s helped to buffer other moments this week where I’ve felt very vulnerable or disappointed, like my new little fish dying unexpectedly, or getting a stack of abuse from the member of an online support I volunteer admin. It’s amazing to shift from the glow of contentment to feeling so fragile and hurt, but I seem to be bending with the wind and bouncing back better.

I’ve also been doing a lot more to be aware of my system and cues that I haven’t been noticing. Such as picking up on when inner kids are close to the surface and my ability to be adult is fragmenting – before an actual switch. If I keep pushing and don’t pay attention to those needs – often around feeling vulnerable or bored – child parts naturally try to balance my adults who are all work and no play – then things get really hard. I keep working, I’m still adult and still able to reference an adult perspective but my needs and emotional responses become more and more child like and my capacity is reduced. It’s like revving the engine with the handbrake on, I do make progress but it’s ridiculously slow and frustrating and overall pretty damn hard on the car. Really, this whole mindfulness process is just taking my capacity for self awareness and extending it into all kinds of areas of my self and life I hadn’t thought to before… this is about moving out of that crisis functioning where you have to ignore limits and push right through them, and back into thriving in regular life, where the more sensitive and aware of your own cues, triggers, and needs you are, the more responsive you can be to them before you’ve pushed yourself into burnout, collapse, or internal war. It’s about listening to the small voices. Everything feels different with this sense of being tuned in. I don’t feel that horrible sense of being a machine anymore, with parts as cogs that turn, trapped and dehumanised. It feels like I remember it used to, back before diagnosis and self consciousness; a dance – spontaneous, responsive, beautiful. The system feels organic instead, something that lives and breathes and grows. It’s goddamn beautiful.

2014-06-26 07.52.33-1In other news, now have a dishwasher. I was super lucky and given one for free by friends of friends who found themselves with a spare. WOW. I have been in two big crunch spaces recently – handing up a semesters worth of assignments at art college, and doing tax, and my house is still reasonably clean and functioning – due entirely to this awesome machine. I can cook and trash the kitchen for dinner, then clean everything into the dishwasher and run it twice a week! No more back pain leaning over the sink, no more constant shame and frustration at the state of my house. I don’t actually have room for a dishwasher in my unit, so I’ve removed my washing machine and put it in the laundry. Going to the laundromat once a week is a nuisance, but far outweighed by the benefits! The energy I’m not using to stress about my dishes is being used to keep up with tidying, sweeping, cleaning the bathroom – or at the moment, mainly tax admin. I’m so happy about this!

Health wise it’s also been a busy week. I’ve seen a lot of specialists lately and that’s likely to continue for a little while yet. I’m coping okay with this! I have a sense of humour, I feel more in control of the process and less overwhelmed by memories of being vulnerable. Which is a massive turn around from the three week triggered spiral I went into after seeing the gastro-enterologist recently. The consensus has been that my sinus surgery IS needed and important and likely to help, and that I’m in good hands with that specialist. That’s a huge relief. Just to underline my awareness of the need, I have another sinus infection and feel like I’ve had a few good punches to the face again. Argh! I’ve had the astonishing rare experience of specialists including each other in their letters/advice, the TMJD dental specialist actually wrote not only to my referring dentist, but also to my GP, sinus specialist, and physiotherapist! I’ve been encouraged to go back to the physio, and use heat, massage, and stretches to manage the facial pain (when there isn’t active infection going on) which is great news for me as surgery or medication options will have large down sides with my liver. Basically I need to try to budget for physio type care in my business plans to keep me as well as possible and manage my pain levels better with all the work I’ve been doing. I also need a different car, preferably with power steering and a good heater/air conditioner. So there’s things to work on that don’t involve hospital/being a patient/being in pain/destroying my liver. Also continuing to look into more options for fun ways to exercise (Rose and I are starting trial classes in martial arts!) going on more walks with Zoe when I’m well enough, and cooking healthier foods.

My new book that teaches how to use In Design has arrived at last – I am going to set aside 1/2 a day a week to study it and learn how to lay out my own books for self publication. This morning I’m up blogging in my dressing gown while Rose catches up on sleep. The garden is beautiful, the animals are lively, I have friends visiting for afternoon tea, and I’m feeling on track and excited about life. It doesn’t get a lot better than this. 🙂 I may consider shifting my blogging schedule now that I’m working so actively on my books, I love and value sharing here but certainly can’t keep up with my daily posts. I may go to weekly, or do little photo-based updates instead of longer posts. I know that mostly it’s the mental health information that is so valuable to people, but it’s challenging to create that in book and blog form at the same time. Maybe I’ll just learn to be more concise. 😉 At any rate, chronic infections and tax notwithstanding, life is pretty awesome over here. I hope you are also feeling good to be alive and connected to yourself. 🙂

 

My experience of sexual health counselling

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

A few years ago, I took myself off to see a counsellor at my local sexual health clinic. I was anxious as all hell, looking for some support while I grappled with my sexual orientation and dysfunction after previous distressing sexual experiences. What I thought was going to be a brief fix to my anxiety, sending me on my way with some reassurance, has turned out to be some of the most useful and powerful therapy I’ve done. This is completely at odds with everything that says that people with DID need intensive therapy by experts in dissociation and multiplicity. To be honest I manage a lot of that side of my life pretty independently. But help in some areas, such as sexual health, has been invaluable for me.

I didn’t see the counsellor very frequently, often we had a month or two between appointments, but the conversations have changed my life. I developed a routine for sessions, I’d follow them with a trip to the Shine SA resource library and borrow books about bisexuality, sexual dysfunction, sexual development, sexual health in seniors, feminism, gender, and culture, essays about being the children of gay parents, and so on, then I’d head over to a café to sit and ponder the session, write in my journal and sometimes cry into a my chai latte.

What I’ve learned is that sex isn’t a side issue the way we think it is. It’s treated as a specialist topic, quite separate from other issues such as trauma recovery or mental health. But for me, it’s not an issue off to the side of my life, it’s part of my foundations. My experiences and beliefs about sex impact my sense of self, my approach to life, my ideas about relationships. Conversations about identity, power, communication, relationship, love, consent, and desire have had a profound impact upon most aspects of my life and health.

I started with thorny confusion about things like: I think I’m into women, but what if I’m wrong? What if I start dating, some lovely woman falls in love with me, and I break her heart? What if my attraction to women is caused by abuse? What if I’m just trying to piss off my father? …Or conversely, what if I only think I’m attracted to some guys because I’ve been culturally conditioned to think that’s normal? Or because of abuse? (if abuse can make a straight person think they’re gay, can’t it also make a gay person think they’re straight?) Does God hate me? Is this about lust or love? Can it be both? Does what happened to me ‘count’ as abuse? Does my history mean I might abuse other people? How do we define abuse? How do we engage as sexual adults when we’ve been traumatised as children? Does abuse really destroy you forever? Is it possible to have a great sex life after trauma and abuse? How do I navigate coming out late in life?

I have never been able to discuss most of these things with other therapists. Even those who specifically work in the area of trauma and child sexual abuse have not been comfortable discussing sexual matters explicitly and matter of factly. We would talk in generalities, but never openly. Usually the therapist would look deeply uncomfortable and change the topic.

In this therapy, all things were discussed, without shame. There was space for frank discussion, it was respectful, appropriate, and very real. I remember one session starting with the therapist looking me in the eye and saying “so let’s talk about masturbation”, as I blushed with embarrassment and laughed with relief that here, the taboos could be spoken of. (obviously we had a rapport at this point) What use is therapy, if not for the discussion of things you can’t speak about?

These conversations have touched on crucial issues that have helped me to understand so many other areas of my life, such as key experiences that drive my intense self hate, my distress and confusion about the exercise of power, and my tangled and painful sexual development and struggle to reconcile myself to my sexual orientation. More importantly, they’ve helped to free me from them.

A while ago, I said thank you and goodbye. I was sad and grateful and looking to the future. I have navigated coming out as bisexual, and found myself a comfortable place under the umbrella term queer. I have started dating and fallen in love with a beautiful and complex woman, Rose. I have gently ended seven years of celibacy and discovered it is possible to have a wonderful sex life despite having an abuse history and issues with trauma. I have learned a vocabulary I am comfortable with to think, read, and talk about sexual matters. I have overcome sexual dysfunction. I used to suffer from vaginismus, an involuntary flinch reaction due, in my case, to traumatic experiences. While I still don’t like them, I can usually handle medical interventions such as gynaecological exams. I no longer sob with some undefinable, overwhelmingly intense grief every time I masturbate. I’m learning to embrace the diverse gender identity within our system. I have a context for pain and confusion in my childhood. I have begun to understand the cost of family secrets and cultural norms that I inherited, to find ways to face and understand legacies of shame and fear. I no longer think that I was a monster as a child. I am beginning to understand just how little we do understand about sex and sexual development. I am facing my demons and finding some frameworks that make sense. I am looking to the future and thinking about how I engage the world as a parent.

I’m not finished. I’m still living with trauma. I’m still living with the devastation of a family divided by abuse, shame, secrets, and fear. I’m still living in a culture that treats sex as a commodity, that confuses love with narcissism, that struggles to understand consent, that traps victims of abuse in a place of disconnection, silencing, and the expectation of permanent dysfunction, and groups all offenders, those fearful they could be offenders, sadists, the abused, children, criminals, people in breakdowns, pimps, into one box marked ‘inhuman, evil, kill on sight’. I still have questions, losses to grieve, things to understand. But I don’t look at the world, or myself through the old frameworks any more. On the one hand I have a powerful legacy of trauma, distress, self hate, and confusion. On the other hand, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me and never was. I don’t need to hate myself or to fear sex.

Our ideas about child abuse are often inadequate and ill informed. In the same way that I hear so often often from people struggling with multiplicity who “are not a real DID” (their words, not mine), we don’t have a good understanding of the diversity of people’s experiences that cause pain and suffering. Each creates its own ‘Gap’. There are those who experienced the horrible, sordid stories we are familiar with, who understand how effortlessly lives are split into day and night, the things we speak of and the secrets we keep. There are those who’s stories sit further down spectrums of torture, victims of organised crime or isolated with inventive sadists and debased in ways that defy our sense of hope in humanity. There are also those who experienced harm in contexts that left them wondering if they had any right to claim refuge under the term ‘abuse’, cousins on the farm making grotesque comments about animals mating, a teacher who stood too close and arranged too many private conversations and spoke about his sex life but never touched, an aunt who left porn lying around the house. There are also people who’s harm was not exposure to sexual contact but to silence and fear and shame about anything sexual; menstruation, nocturnal emission, infatuation. People who have never been sexually abused but who have been told they are ugly and repulsive for years, who find this makes sex an experience of painful exposure and deep shame. People who were told they were lucky because they were only ‘almost raped’, or because they were beaten instead of molested. People who struggle to make sense of their experiences and untangle their unique combination of terror, numbness, excitement, shame, curiosity, self loathing, comfort, and loneliness. Some stories have a familiar anguished simplicity to them, the brutality of a more powerful person taking from a more vulnerable. Others are paralysingly complex, people who found some comfort in the sexual experiences when the other parent was so terrifyingly violent, or children who re-enacted sexual abuse in games with each other without realising their gravity. We tend to want to rank traumas but my experience has been that anything that makes you feel disconnected from yourself and the world around you, any story you can’t share and own, anything that makes you hate yourself, has the power to kill you.

There are not many in my past who did wrong with the intention to harm me. Some of my bad experiences for example, were by a peer, then also a child, who had themselves been terribly abused. Sadism is present in my story, but it doesn’t dominate it. Most of my ‘monsters’ were themselves profoundly damaged and abused, which is in some ways easier to process and understand, and in other ways harder. Part of my pain was stories told and secrets that were shared that needed keeping still, and part of it was also being forced to observe sexually abusive behaviour between other people in my personal life. Self hate and a profound conviction that I was evil, and myself a monster, stemmed not only from abusive experiences, but from confusion about my own culpability as a young child, from appalling frameworks that made it impossible to develop any interest in sex without being framed as a monster, creep, unfeminine, dirty, or unholy. Frameworks where being queer, multiple, having a complex relationship to gender, and being attracted to other women were all seen as sickness, sin, and depravity. Frameworks where I was not allowed to control my own body, not allowed to say no to touch that made me uncomfortable, where I must play a role and obey social convention. Frameworks where my body belonged to someone else for their pleasure, where the stakes were astonishingly high and the risks of failure to be perfect and behave as I was required to could not just impact my life but damn my eternal soul. (this is not to suggest that all religions have harmful attitudes towards sex, or that all non-religious cultures are sex-positive)

Like my experiences with bullying, the incidences of contact we think of when we talk about child abuse are not really where the most damage was done to me. There was a much more mundane, insidious harm. The cultures of ignorance, secrecy, shame, confusion, and victim blaming is where I suffered. These cultures can harm people without any direct abuse ever taking place. When we make all the conversations about trauma, and a narrow definition of trauma at that, so many people with struggles miss out on support and resources. I remember once asking a psychologist I was seeing if I could attend the ‘sexual abuse support group for women’ he was facilitating. He told me that my none of my experiences of trauma really qualified as abuse, and that would make the other women feel uncomfortable. It’s been cold comfort to later piece together the complex jigsaw of my life and determine that some of my experiences certainly did fall within that definition.

Like many of us with bad experiences, I’m still grappling with how to translate my knowledge into something that is an asset rather than a poison for my own children, into wisdom and courage instead of paranoia and shame. How can we bear it, those of us who know exactly how vulnerable children can be, and how dark the world but can get? I cannot go forward with the belief that I can control everything and prevent terrible things from ever happening. I can hope that my familiarity with this particular underworld may have sharpened my senses. I put my faith in all the learning that tells us it is not so much the act of being touched that does such harm, it is the lack of support and love, it is the world shattered by secrets, it is the stories we tell to and about children who’ve been hurt, and the stories the abusers tell them, and the stories children tell to themselves. Terrible things sometimes happen to children. This knowledge makes me want to scream at a pitch that will shatter the world. But people also heal, and they heal very well when they know that the world can be terrible, when they can speak about their pain, and when they have love and support and skills to navigate trauma. Many, many cultures in this world who have been destroyed by war, famine, poverty, crime, earthquakes, and the horrific sex crimes that often accompany crisis and social breakdown would attest to this. Resilient cultures mourn and rebuild. I will try and figure out how to be part of a resilient culture, and how to support my children to be resilient. I will try to make sure the frameworks are good, healthy, sex-positive ones. Between the rage and the terror, I will try to accept my limitations in making the world a safe place for my children. I will fight and be aware and do everything in my power, and then I will try to have faith in our capacity to grieve and heal.

I am less afraid. I can speak now. I can read books, search the net, look for information when I’m lost and confused. I’ve found that I’m not alone. Conversations about sex happen everywhere in my life now, and there’s so many people struggling. People with abuse histories, with disabilities, mental illness, with orientations, identities, or desires that mean they don’t fit in the majority, people with anxiety and confusion about sexual health, desire, love, consent. The need is so much greater than me, which is why I started writing my series about emotionally safer sex. I’ve not been struggling and confused because there was something wrong with me. I was struggling and confused because the whole world is conflicted. Mixed messages, terrible advice, wild assumptions, misinformation, disconnection, disappointment, grief, and confusion are everywhere. We confuse privacy with shame, bragging with honesty, coercion with romance, obsession with love.

In sexual health counselling, I found what I needed to be able to engage with this part of the world, and this part of adult life. I don’t have all the answers, but I have a place to stand. The most useful part of this counselling for me, when I drown in shame, confusion, and silence, is the very clear memory of someone speaking with me with compassion, without disgust, without fear. Conversations that untangled sex from shame, and desire from destruction. My hope is that, in some small way, sharing such a personal experience with you will help you also to find this place within yourself, or to be a gentler and more loving support to someone else who hasn’t found it yet.

Anxiety & Mindfulness

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’m working on this a lot lately, as it has huge implications for my health and business. When I’m highly anxious my eating becomes disordered, and I tend to over work obsessively and only half productively, without giving myself real time off to recharge. This can spiral badly. I’m in a short intensive mentoring course for my business and we’re identifying the key areas that are causing stress and limiting my ability to be productive and efficient and energetic. I’m having a lot of trouble with anxiety as stress comes in from all angles. This morning I was overwhelmed by a to do list of terrifying things and time pressure to get them done in. I woke at 5 and couldn’t get back to sleep but was exhausted and wired and paralysed by anxiety.

After talking things through with a couple of friends and doing some journaling, I finally reached this place:

Right here and right now, everything is okay.
All the fears are just fears
They’ve no more substance than shadows
I don’t have to live my whole week this morning
I just have to be present in this moment,  to pay attention to it, to be aware of it, to enjoy what beauty there is in it.
I will eat and rest and do the tasks at before me, and stay in today.
That way, there will be more than just stress
There will also be noticing my lily is blooming, and enjoying my breakfast, and texting with my love, and all the other little unexpected treasures of the day.

Right here and right now, everything is okay.
Stay present.

It helped. I had a good day, I did a lot of work on my tax paperwork without much stress, enrolled in college, and did my business planning. I wrote in my journal:

Anxiety is a thief that steals each day from me, so distracting me with visions of a future on fire that I do not even notice the loss.

Today it took nothing. 🙂

“When sex gets hard’ – Sex & disability forum

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Content warning for explicit but not gratuitous discussion about sex.

I was lucky to attend this forum recently, and promised to blog my notes for all those interested parties who couldn’t attend. This is not an exact record of the event, I scribbled notes as quickly as I could but none can be considered true quotes. I have paraphrased and may have misunderstood or mis-attributed in places. This was a forum arranged by the Society of Australian Sexologists. It’s a topic close to my heart but difficult to find training in, so I was really pleased to hear about it at the last minute and be able to squeeze in. It was an excellent, wide ranging conversation and I came home even more enthused about being part of cultural changes and a movement towards more freedom and joy in sex for people who have traditionally been marginalised. The panel was made up of:

  • Assoc Prof Greg Crawford, a Palliative Care Physician who works with people and sexuality in the context of end of life care
  • Dr Tabitha Healy, a Medical Oncologist who works with sex in the context of cancer and cancer treatments – she’s become known as the ‘dry vagina doctor’
  • Assoc Prof Sharon Lawn, a Mental Health Academic who described herself as being married to a lovely man with paranoid schizophrenia
  • Dr Jane Elliott, a GP who specialises in treating women who are struggling with menopause
  • Sonia Scharfbillig, a Pelvic Floor Physiotherapist – this is working with the muscles of and around the pelvis to help restore function, elasticity, sensitivity, or ease problems such as chronic pain
  • Naomi Hutchings, a Sexologist who has worked with SHineSA, and in youth work
  • Nick Schumi, also a youth worker, and representing the views of those with a lived experience of disability
  • Kelly Vincent, member for Dignity for Disability, partnered with Nick, and likewise representing lived experience, with additional interests in sex abuse, and sex work

Q: Why don’t doctors talk about sex more?
Greg: Doctors often don’t like to talk about sex. There are cultural issues with many doctors and nurses coming from Asian backgrounds who are very uncomfortable with the topic. There’s a lack of training provided.

Tabitha: Oncologists don’t talk to patients about sex for three main reasons:

  1. I don’t know enough about sex to feel comfortable discussing it
  2. There’s not enough time to bring it up
  3. Isn’t that topic someone else’s problem?

Meetings like this tend to preach to the converted. Training must be compulsory or those who are most vulnerable or anxious will never learn the skills.

Sharon: Mental health clinicians don’t discuss it because they don’t want to open the ‘child sex abuse’ box, because they don’t know what to do once it’s open. Sexuality itself is often pathologised in mental health, especially for young men with psychosis. All their sexual behaviour is interpreted as part of their disorder, and possibly dangerous. Delusions about being pedophiles or rapists are common with such young men, and it’s not hard to trace where the ideas have come from. There are also issues with overmedication when people only have support from mental health teams. Because this often causes sexual dysfunction, then we see non-compliance and often then treatment orders. It’s a big problem.

Kelly: There’s a lot of issues in the disability sector too with people being unwilling to acknowledge that a person with a disability can be sexual or want to have sex… It also helps to ignore cultural ideas about what ‘real sex’ is (ie penetrative sex) to be able to relax and enjoy whatever sexual activities people really want and feel ready for. There are a lot of unhelpful myths about what sex is.

Naomi: There are a lot of issues with doctors not disclosing that mental health medications can kill the libido.

Jane: On the other side of ‘not acknowledging that people want a sex life’ is that if women weren’t ‘distressed by their symptom’ (low libido) they don’t have a problem. Women are sent to me by husbands and whoever to be ‘fixed’. Problems with dry vagina can be resolved by using oestrogen in the vagina. Fixing menopausal symptoms can fix sex issues just by allowing everyone to get more sleep and be less stressed. Testosterone can ‘turn up’ sexual feelings a bit for women where everything else is alright. It won’t overpower depression. Low doses only are safe. High dose patches etc have been taken off the market for good reasons.

Naomi: There can be troubles with partners who have a desire mismatch. Sometimes women come to see me for help because their libido is improving after treatment and they’re excited, but their partner is very unhappy – they were actually content with the low amounts of sex they were previously having.

Sharon: There can be issues with partners wanting people to stop taking their meds so that mania would happen and they would have lots of sex. People can be very vulnerable.

Q. How can we better support people who are having sexual problems due to disability eg. stroke etc. ?

Naomi: Unpacking penis-in-vagina as the only form of sex is helpful but so complex! There are huge cultural issues – emasculation issues – some men feel anxious about not using their penis the way they’re used to. I talk to people about having more ideas and opening up more options. You don’t have to orgasm! Presenting this as an expanding of experiences, not a loss of options. A freely available resource is the Masters and Johnson sensate focus exercises. I start the conversation – what do you think sex is? “If my penis didn’t work today, I’m not a good lover” – well, there’s thighs! And hands, and eyes, and so on. Being sex positive. Exploring what you can do – especially for people with physical disability. Learn what your limitations are. It’s not about what you do, but how it makes you feel. There’s an adjustment process to illness or disability – “This is not the end”. Another suggested resource “Sexuality Reborn” a DVD about disability and spinal injuries and sex, contains suggestions for comfortable positions and so on. Available from the SHineSA resource library.

Kelly: It’s about using bodies in alternative ways. Many women especially are taught that masturbation is masculine and selfish. The reality is that trying to live up to a partner’s expectations while learning about your own body can be exhausting.

Greg: You know the Old Testament story of Onan – who incurred the wrath of God for spilling his seed on the ground? In the hospice, they have a budgie called Onan.

Sharon: Carers, especially those caring for people who have had strokes, or war vets and so on are striving for relationship and dignity with their partner. Systems often focus on the burden of caring, helping you with your tasks. Carers themselves want support with intimacy, connection, maintaining dignity.

Sonia: Working with pain. My role is often about the mechanics – being able to achieve or tolerate penetrative sex. Often women are motivated only by love for their partner, not personal desire. Women are often at their wit’s end and don’t want a bar of sex. Mine is a very clinical approach, stretches, relaxation – taking the sexual side away from it and approaching it like you would any other group of muscles. In my work I differentiate between ‘intercourse’ and ‘outercourse’. I refer to sexologists such as Naomi for the psychological aspects.

Naomi: It helps to de-medicalise issues like vaginismus. The process is often:

  1. Take penetration off the table for now
  2. Work on communication
  3. Rebuild normal patterns of arousal and pleasure
  4. Undo the aversion

It’s important to find time to feel sexual that’s normal and not medical.

Jane: The importance of understanding limerance, that sexual desire changes as relationships develop. A loss of libido can be about unrealistic expectations about desire. Sometimes ‘decision driven sex’ can be a key resource – Rosie King, Where Did My Libido Go?

Kelly: With disability those expectations are often reversed. For example, I was once phoned by the head of the support agency who provided care for me, after sex at 22, in my own home. They were smirking. I told them the phone call wasn’t appropriate. Their response was “We thought you were a good girl”. My agency called the residential care agency who provided support to the man in question (who had an acquired brain injury). They discussed the situation and decided to resolve it by no longer providing transport support for the man to visit me. It was only many years later that I discovered this breach of my confidentiality and collusion by two support agencies to prevent a sexual relationship between consenting adults.

Nick: I was once working in consultation with SHineSA in a supported accommodation situation, providing education about ‘safe sex’. Young men were taught to put condoms on by using broomsticks as an example. One night, two of the young people got together. The workers discovered them in the same bed, with two broomsticks in the room with condoms fitted to them! It’s important to educate in relevant ways so people understand! Just because you do have to educate in different ways, shouldn’t mean people get excluded.

Tabitha: Porn can be a huge issue in that it sets up expectations and distorts the sexual norms. Young men are now often confused by pubic hair on women. There is an expectation of penetrative anal sex. The accessibility of porn and lower age of sexual onset can cause problems. The most effective recommendation I have to support people’s sexual functioning is exercise. It boosts oxytocin and serotonin, the happy hormones. Exercise has been shown to have extraordinary outcomes for cancer, health, mental health, sexual health. It is more effective than antidepressants by far in trails. It’s also good for body image and so on. There’s debate about radical mastectomy vs breast conservation surgeries. All women have different relationships to their breasts and sense of femininity and sexuality. The biggest single factor that impacts on a woman’s health, body image, and happiness post mastectomy is their partner’s response to the surgery. Weight gain associated with chemotherapy and hormone therapy is often more deleterious than mastectomy to body image. It’s important to ask questions, identify problems, and refer to a useful network. None of us can ‘do it all’ or be the one answer.

Sonia: For men with prostate cancer, physio can help hugely with bad pain. Anatomically, men are similar to women with regards to their pelvic floor. Pain can cause a pelvic spasm that perpetuate pain. Relaxation and sometimes dilators can help. Retraining the brain about responses to pain – to prevent the muscle tension. Pelvic Floor Physiotherapists work in private practice and through public hospitals – they are available at Flinders, the RAH, Lyell Mac and so on.

Greg: Men going through prostate cancer often have to deal with a life threatening illness, plus feminisation by the meds, plus loss of libido (due to anti-androgens). Many of the meds cause terribly side effects such as fecal incontinence and so on.

Tabitha: The psychology is important – masculinity, erections, identity, sense of self, and confidence all have a relationship. Men who undertook a structured exercise program had 50% improved erectile function – for much better outcomes this must be started as early as possible post treatment, and also to maintain erections via masturbation. Women going through radiotherapy are often not told that their vagina can seal shut if they do not use it – with dilator etc. There is a real ‘use it or lose it’ aspect to this.

From the audience: As mental health workers we are witnessing sexual exploitation, abuse, risk taking, but we’re not supposed to talk with our clients about it. We’ve been told us talking to them about sex is akin to prostitution. We’re not allowed to discuss safer sex. Clients are not supposed to be having sex.

Sharon: The Mental Health system is obsessed with risk. There are huge issues with risk management marginalising people, othering people, and increasing risks. Many other issues compound for people, such as poverty, grief, abuse, low self esteem.

Kelly: Often the problem (refusing to discuss sex, othering the client) doesn’t come from the workers, it comes from the bosses.

Q: How to support people dealing with chronic illnesses, where low energy levels impact on libido?
Tabitha: Fibromyalgia is common in cancer. Reconditioning program – twice a week in a gym with a personal trainer for 6 weeks – the difference is extraordinary. We talk about “A new self in chronic illness” – it’s key to reset expectations. Being chronically stuck in a world where you’re trying to be who you used to be is horrific, people become distraught and self destructive. Guided programs are key! People are too sick and overwhelmed to do this on their own.

Sharon: Start early! Exercise after de conditioning and weight gain is much harder for people.

Kelly: Exhaustion and muscle fatigue are limiting. Nick and I have found working activities that help with energy and muscles into the sexual wind up process eg stretches, massages, some forms of exercise – become part of sex. We take a very physiotherapy approach to the nits and bolts of muscles and energy. There are many resources available on the net and youtube! For example, if you need resources about having sex for a client in a wheelchair, google wheelchair sex positions, you will get a lot of information. This kind of sharing of lived experience is very valuable for people.

Q. Kelly, where do things stand with the decriminalisation of sex work in South Australia?
Kelly: Stef Key from the Labor Party was recently involved in drafting bills to protect rights. It didn’t pass. For more information about sex work and disability, there’s an organisation in NSW called Touching Base. Touching base was started by Rachel Waters to teach sex workers how to engage with clients with a disability. SIN (Sex Industry Network) also do good work in this area. People with disabilities may seek out sex workers for different reasons – and some absolutely do not want it, or it would have detrimental effects on self esteem and so on. It’s a complex story with many different aspects. Choice is important. There is some danger in looking at sex work only through a disability perspective.

Someone mentions that clinic 257 (the STD clinic at the RAH) codes sex work as a community service. Kelly argues against this, using the example of sheltered workshops being moved out of industrial relations and into the community services bracket – that this creates a damaging view of disability.

The wrap up – that it’s helpful to build a vocabulary to have these conversations. Redefining our ideas about ‘normal sex’ is also crucial. And that our obsession with normality makes us slaves to our cultures.

This was an exciting forum, very encouraging in light of the work I’ve been doing regarding Emotionally Safer Sex. I’ve also recently completed some work with SHineSA, supporting the development of training about sexual health specifically for mental health work. I’m looking forward to seeing the first round of training offered later this year and hope that this goes some way towards busting stigma and starting good conversations for people. I’ve also decided to share my own experience of sexual health counselling. There is much yet to be done!

No stars

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

There’s no stars visible in the sky, just a deep endless inky blue. I’m alone tonight, saving Tonks and Zoe, as alone as I get anyway. Rose is sleeping over with family. Funny how it transports me straight back to being single, so many nights like this, when I turn out the lights there’s only the sound of my breathing, the whoosh of blood in my ears like the echo of the ocean in a shell.

Today was a good day. I’ve finally come out of the trigger spiral I’ve been in since the Gastro-enterologist tried to put me on a diet. I can think clearly again and the voice of self hate has gone quiet. You can’t stay triggered forever, wait long enough and they pass.

There’s hard things going on, as usual, but I’ve found a calm centre for now. I’m working on the triggers and issues around food with a new shrink. We’re looking at ways of reducing the intense agitation I’ve been struggling with. There’s been a lot of anxiety for me this year, at the height of it I’ve been having about 3 panic attacks a week. We dug into mindfulness stuff last session, something I’m very good at but can’t access and get tasks done once I’m highly distressed. I’m spending a lot of time working on home and business things and study, in a state of intense self loathing and high anxiety. It’s exhausting and inefficient and my ability to manage food well suffers.

I know I have issues with success. There’s so much baggage. Ridiculously high expectations, the pressure of peer work where people are often telling you that you have to ‘make it’ so they know there’s hope for them, a sense of responsibility to those who haven’t survived, it feels like dragging a lot of rocks around with me all the time. It makes it so hard to think clearly, be brave and bold, use my creativity.

I’ve just noticed that there’s also issues around how I believe I will make it. I seem to have become indoctrinated with a lot of ideas about what it takes to be successful that are instead half killing me. Success is achieved through pain, sacrifice, hard work, drivenness, focus, pushing yourself past your limits and so far outside of your comfort zone you can’t remember what it looks like. I think I’m partly right but also very wrong. For me I need downtime, rest, playfulness, freedom, and space in my comfort zone to recharge. The drivenness becomes exhausting and destructive when it gets out of hand. The ridiculous thing is, at the moment I have actually been getting more done on my days off than my work days, and done easily and joyfully.

It parallels the journey and learning about physical health I’ve done. After years of tests and agonising or uncomfortable or stupidly restrictive treatments I finally stated to get better when I walked away from trauma and abuse, started spending money on things I enjoyed instead of supplements, and went back to eating a regular diet. The thing I’d been promised over and over – that if I suffered enough, drank enough nasty things, restricted and controlled enough, there would be healing – that never happened. I don’t think I can sacrifice my way to success either. Some sacrifices are necessary, yes, but my balance is far out of whack. In one sense, the best way to create an awesome future is to create an awesome today. Every day, over and over.

So I’m focusing on living more in the moment and my heart is singing and I feel whole again. I’m watching my work hours and refusing to let myself work into my evenings. It’s harder than it sounds. I’m asking myself what I want to do with my time off instead of filling it with more jobs. I feel freer. This is more sustainable. This is where I find my joy and my heart. Success can spring from those rather than pain and stoicism. Or not, one never knows. But I’d rather fail on these terms than succeed on the other. It’s a far better place to be in. Peace to you also. x

Rolling with the waves

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today was awesome. Which is pretty surprising considering I was sobbing with exhaustion in the small hours of the night, dreading all the driving and running around. It was a crazy day, made worse by one of those terrible series of events by which little miscommunications become big, last minute stressful horrors for all involved. The upshot of which was that I was now giving a talk at TAFE at 10am instead of 1pm. So, with some early morning rescheduling, I was dropping Rose off at her work out North before flogging down South and just making it to the talk in time, then driving that same damn highway another three times always slightly late for the rest of my appointments today.

But, despite being up since 5am covered in hives, I’m in a great state of mind. I so enjoyed giving this talk today. It was a small group, which surprised me as I usually have a full class and so give more of a lecture. I adapted and aimed for something less formal and more conversation, not a workshop but hopefully a little more appropriate. It’s such a privilege to be invited to share my experiences, to talk about what worked and what didn’t, to get people thinking critically about the ideas we take for granted in mental health. These are the people who will be working in our services, and I feel humbled to talk about issues of dehumanising treatment and unbearable pain with them. I came away inspired.

I’ve been working on my business website lately, combining what have been two separate sites into one. Up until recently, I’ve kept my work as an artist and my work as a mental health consultant very separate, concerned about stigma. But this week I talked with a fellow art student about their struggles with self harm, and I showed a collection of my artwork about madness and life to mental health students. I’m happy in this place where two of my passions overlap, where I hope I’m of some use to the world. It occurred to me recently that I haven’t promoted my talks and workshops very often, unless people have already come to one, most don’t know it’s something I can do. So I’m updating my website to showcase my skills in this area. I’ve asked people who’ve attended a talk or training I’ve done to send in an endorsement for me to use, assuming they do endorse my work! I hope to pick up more work in this area, it is tremendously meaningful to me, and I often hear from attendees that the experience has been very meaningful for them too.

In more good news, I am finally back to normal iron levels! I’m so thrilled about this. I was suffering from extreme anaemia due to endometriosis, but I’m back on a med to control it and the anaemia has completely resolved. Unfortunately the med is also causing rapid weight gain, I’ve gained 7.5kgs in 7 weeks! The previous med I tried for it caused severe depression. So I’m off for more advice and hopefully I can find something else without such problematic side effects! Sigh.

Nevertheless. A great day. I’m exhausted but feeling hopeful. The wind of change are gusting and I’m bending with them. Something will work out and I’ll have direction again. In the meantime I’m gathering information about what do with work, studio, and studies, staying on top of said studies, and working on my book! Here’s to finally being home today, my lovely girlfriend making dinner, and if I’m lucky, a decent sleep tonight! 🙂

PTSD friendly bedroom

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Rose and I rearranged the house over the weekend. PTSD trauma stuff often has the same settle and flare pattern as chronic illness, and there’s a flare lately which is killing sleep. So, it’s a good time to work on the sleeping space.

I had my art studio set up in the master bedroom of my unit, and a queen size bed stuffed into the small room. Unfortunately this meant the bed was pushed against a wall, so whoever slept that side had to clamber over the other one to get in and out. We swapped sleeping sides depending on who was feeling the most fragile about feeling trapped. Now we’ve got the reverse, the bed in the master room with space on three sides for leaping in and out, and my studio table in the small room. It’s a brilliant change and is making tough nights just a little easier.

We also get to open the widow in this room as it faces the front of the house – the other room faces the back and Zoe destroys those screens when there’s thunder and she panics in the yard. A cool breeze during trauma stuff is super welcome, as is being able to lie in bed and look out at the garden instead of into a shed.

There’s not enough room in the smaller room for all my art supplies, so our bedroom has shelves of brushes and turps, which is also helping. Sometimes if trauma has a link to a particular room it helps a lot to do things that make the space feel really different. So it’s not a straight bedroom, it’s a bedroom-art-studio with paints in the drawers and ink paintings on the walls.

There’s still nightmares and distress and broken sleep. But these gestures help a little, in between them there’s content mornings reading in bed with the cats. And the fresh realisation that the patterns and arrangement of your life exists for you, if it’s hurting instead of helping you don’t just have to grit your teeth and struggle. However unconventional it may be, you find something that works for you. There’s things you can’t change, and things you can.

What is a man?

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

Happiness is trying on men’s clothes at a second hand shop with your queer girlfriend.

At least, that was yesterday’s definition over in my world.

Some multiples have parts who have a different sense of gender. I’ve touched on this before in About Transgender. This can be a challenge. We have one who doesn’t identify as male or female, but who doesn’t come out very much. We also have a couple of guys in a female – dominated system, and a female body. We’ve struggled with this. The neat and simple thing to do is to accept and welcome and move on with life. Some multiples manage this really well. We, for various reasons, haven’t. It’s not neat or simple or easy at all for us. Gender is a loaded concept for us, with lots of baggage. So we’ve suppressed and hoped we didn’t have to engage. Why have male parts? Why are they here? Why continue to be here? Can’t they let go of their sense of male identity? What is a male identity anyway? Why do they feel so different from our ‘tomboy’ parts, those who tend to reject the feminine while still feeling female. How do we create a safe space for them when most people don’t cope with parts on any level?

When we first started to make sense of the mutliplicity itself, we were so suspicious about it all. Like a lawyer, we attacked every aspect of it – how do I know I’m multiple? Have we invented it to please the shrink? Is it iatrogenic? Do we just want to be ‘special’? What if we’re mistaken? I find the same suspicion about the trans parts. Do you have to be this bloody complicated? Can’t you just all identify as female? Do you have to have recognition externally, isn’t it fine if people just think you’re butch? Aren’t you just trying to alienate yourself/piss off your father/prove something? Wouldn’t you have to let go of your sense of identity to integrate anyway? You’re holding us back. You’re making us vulnerable. Go away.

You’re not a real guy.

You’re not a real trans either.

There can be a powerful sense of being an imposter when you’re a trans part. I don’t belong to the trans community because I’m only a part. And most of my system is female and out a lot more than I am. We’re never going to transition. But what makes a guy, anyway? It can’t just be about bits. It can’t be about a bit of flesh in my hand, or being able to pee standing. It can’t just be hating my breasts and thinking I’m ugly and weak. It can’t be rejecting the feminine, I like poetry and reading and have a system full of women and girls I think of as my sisters. I’m not into misogyny or rejection. But I know being called a woman makes me angry enough to spit. I know that the thought of my girlfriend recoiling from me in fear or disgust makes me want to die. I know that I want to be a better man than my father. I know that the cultural ideas of masculinity seem like grotesque parodies of the tenderness and strength and complexity I admire in good men.

I now know that having Rose take me shopping to buy guy clothes, to laugh at the shop assistant who looked at us in disgust, to go home with a bag of trousers that are too long in the leg and tshirts with collars on them and guy shoes makes up for the glitter nail polish on our hands and the nose piercing and the way we are always identified as lesbians when we hold hands in public.

What makes one belief acceptable and another one psychotic? If I thought I was a rabbit or an astronaut instead of a guy, what then?

I’ll never forget watching a movie, many years ago. The main characters kiss. We switch back and forth, one moment the woman feeling his stubble graze her skin, another the man, tasting lipstick and the sweet drink on her breath. Co-consciousness can be mind bending at times.

I think of Jung’s ideas of anima and animus, the male and female aspect in all of us. I think of an old boyfriend, when I was young, pointing to the ground – here is male, and across from it is female. Then in a diagonal cross – and here I am, and here you are. Both and neither. Different but connected by our inability to relate entirely to one or the other. I remember borrowing his clothes to wear some days/

With suppression comes shame and loneliness. There’s been a kind of hope that without a place in the world, we would quietly unravel, unknit back to yarn, the raw stuff of self. Let go of shape and identity. It hasn’t worked. I can’t answer the question ‘Why am I here?’, but maybe I hold the key to some of the self hate. ‘What would you tell someone else in your situation?’ Rose asks me. Your approach isn’t working for you, try something else. 

It is what it is. There’s glitter on my nails. Rose holds my hand, unthreatened, unafraid. The words and labels are only ways to describe and explain things that are far deeper than words. She pays for a bag of clothes for us, makes a space in the world for us, tries to use the right pronouns. I’m part of a whole, and most of that is female. I refuse to be afraid of that.

What to do with a suicidal part

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I am so damn tired. It’s been a rough week with a lot of stress in my head and the lives of a few of my close friends. On the upside, I have a lot more material for the part of my book that’s about managing overwhelming emotional pain… sigh. Silver linings!

One of my big stresses recently was a part becoming suicidal. This can be a huge issue for multiples! I get a lot of emails and contact from people who are struggling with one or more parts who are in absolute meltdown. Whole systems can fall apart under the stress, and processes which were fair or reasonable can become abusive and totalitarian.

Most people who have felt acutely suicidal have experienced that disjointed place of desperately wanting to die and being terrified of your own feelings and actions at the same time. It’s a profound conflict, an inner struggle that consumes all resources and leaves people utterly drained and deeply afraid of themselves. For multiples the struggle and the conflict can be more polarised and even more intense. Parts who don’t feel suicidal are often terrified of being killed – as far as they are concerned, not by suicide but murdered. Fear does not make us kind. We recoil, disconnect, and attack when we feel like our lives are being threatened. Systems can rapidly devolve into massive power struggles, and outright war with other parts trying to permanently suppress or annihilate suicidal parts. Child parts especially may become so terrorised that they dehumanise a suicidal part and see them as a witch, demon, monster, or other evil creature. Being trapped in a body/mind with a suicidal part can be very traumatic. Experiences of fear, horror, and helplessness may contribute to the development of severe trauma responses in other parts, including PTSD. As a suicidal part becomes increasingly attacked, dehumanised, and alienated from the rest of their system their despair usually intensifies, their behaviour becomes more dangerous, and the restraining factors of empathy, connection, and a sense of responsibility to the rest of their system are eroded. Sometimes this ends in catastrophe. The loss of anyone to suicide is utterly devastating. Having spoken with frightened, non suicidal children and other parts in the hours or days prior is almost unfathomable.

Versions of this dynamic tend to repeat themselves with parts who self-harm, have addictions, re-contact abusers, suffer eating disorders, or have other frightening and self destructive behaviours, with varying levels of intensity. There is no one magic fix for this situation, and different multiples manage it in many different ways. I can share some thoughts and ideas that I’ve found useful and you can possibly use them as a spring board to trial your own approaches.

My first observation is simple but important. When we are frightened, we will try to control. When we are frightened of someone, or some part, we will probably want to reject, dehumanise, and alienate them. It’s okay to have these impulses, they are human! It’s okay to feel everything this horribly stressful situation makes you feel – scared, frustrated, confused, angry, overwhelmed, defeated, hurt, exhausted, burdened… It’s a really hard place to be in. Some of your feelings are going to want to make you act in ways that will feel right but make the situation worse. You have every right to feel everything you’re feeling, but you need to be careful before acting on impulse.

Exactly the same goes for the suicidal part/s. You probably can’t make them stop feeling the way they do and rejecting their feelings and pain will probably intensify them. They have every right to be feeling the way they are, it’s their impulse to act on them that is the issue. I have one part who has a strong desire to self harm, and at least two who are very vulnerable to feeling suicidal. So how come I’m still here (touch wood)? My observation has been that parts who are at greatest risk of killing themselves are parts who:

  • misunderstand the nature of multiplicity and think they can kill the body without the rest of the system dying. This is pretty common and important to check with any suicidal part!
  • are disconnected from or rejected by their own systems and don’t feel empathy towards the other parts
  • are being abused by their own systems
  • are being abused by other people in their lives
  • are angry and resentful towards their own systems and deliberately seeking to frighten or punish
  • do not feel loved
  • do not feel hope, and feel responsible for finding a sense of hope for the whole system
  • have horrific roles within the system – for example, the part who remembers all the bad things, the part who feels all the shame, the part who acts out all the stress for the system, and so on
  • do not get their needs met
  • do not feel safe
  • feel overwhelmed by guilt or shame, believe they are evil, believe their death will protect someone or make the world a better or safer place

Obviously there are other risk factors too. Some of the protective factors I’ve found support suicidal parts are:

  • having a safe place or person to express their intense feelings without censoring or judgement by their systems – other parts often feel shame about these feelings and may refuse to allow a suicidal part to speak to a therapist, write honestly in a journal, and so on.
  • feel a sense of connection and love from their systems. They work together as a team to manage the feelings and impulses. Their system expresses empathy for their situation, and they can feel empathy for the situation their feeling puts other parts in
  • understand that suicide will kill everyone in their system
  • are able to allow other parts or people to find or create hope in their lives, accept support from others
  • are able to negotiate some role changes when needed
  • are given respite from demands of life. eg. when out, these parts are allowed to stay in bed, email the therapist, not leave the house etc, or they are willingly switched back inside if functioning is needed that day
  • are willing to compromise on ‘needs’ – so eg if the intense experience is a ‘need’ to cut, they work with their system to find alternatives that sate that need somewhat, such as Ink not Blood.
  • are treated with respect and gratitude for their role
  • are treated as though they are important, valuable, significant members of the system

As you can hear, a lot of this is about relationship. This kind of connection takes more than an afternoon to build, and for a system under such extreme stress it’s a hell of an ask. On the other hand, it could save your life. In my experience there’s usually one member at least who is able to connect and empathise better with a suicidal part, and it can become their role in the early stages to intervene on behalf of a suicidal part and the rest of the system (assuming a system of more than two parts). Part of the basis for this can be realising that there is a lot more common ground to your situation than it seems at first. Suicidal and non-suicidal parts are both often feeling trapped, stressed, scared, overwhelmed, and unhappy. If you keep seeing the problem as being the suicidal part, all your reactions and solutions will be about controlling or eliminating them. If you can see the problem as the experience of being suicidal, you can approach the part with more empathy and team up with them to help manage that experience. Here are a few approaches that people sometimes find helpful:

  • directly influencing a part’s feelings, memories, or autonomy. Some systems or parts can do this, some can’t. Sometimes you can directly engage to dial down intense emotions, shift who is ‘keeping’ bad memories – perhaps spread the load a little more evenly, or keep a part inside in lockdown while they are a danger.
  • engaging suicide on a symbolic level such as allowing a part to ‘exit’ from life, refuse to come out, disengage from relationships, change their name and so on
  • killing or supporting the part to die without affecting the body. Some systems can do this, some cannot. There are complex ethical concerns here that suggest this as an option of last resort.
  • containing the part except for safe locations – eg. hospital, in therapy, in a ‘safe’ place where they can express feelings (safe is dependant on their likely methods of suicide – it may be an empty beach if drowning does not appeal, or a craft room if scissors are not a concern, etc)
  • increasing the part’s dissociation so they are buffered from their intense feelings and less likely to act on them. eg. sometimes if a suicidal part is close to the surface whoever is out in my system will trigger dissociation by surfing the net, watching tv, sitting in the bath, anything that makes us ‘zone out’ until we feel safer
  • comforting the part internally by doing things such as hugging them, talking to them gently, singing to them, making a safe nurturing space for them internally (not all multiples have internal worlds, and not all multiples can communicate internally)
  • take on the parts’ unmet needs as problems the whole system needs to engage and manage. eg. if they need better social support the whole system works on building stronger supportive friendships or finding a good support group online, or if they need a musical outlet the system works together to save money for an instrument and lessons. Take the burden of solving problems, finding hope, and meeting needs away from the part who isn’t coping.
  • explain the part in non-frightening ways to scared system members such as children. Humanise them and help to develop empathy towards them. Sometimes kids will have the most profound and effective connections with deeply wounded parts.
  • make the most of the multiple experience of never really being alone. Support and be with each other.
  • stagger behaviour in order from least to most harm done. If an extremely bad night is going to be survived only with self harm then better that then death. I write more about this kind of approach in ‘Feeling Chronically Suicidal‘.
  • merge or fuse a suicidal part with a hopeful or naively optomistic part to create a more balanced single part from them both
  • try taking a caring, invested, parental approach to a suicidal part. Coax, coach, nurture, and set limits with them
  • understanding and affirming that no systems are invulnerable without also being psychopathic. Part of what it means to be human is our capacity to feel shame, suffering, and hopelessness. We also have the capacity to heal. Most people who survive a suicide attempt later feel far better and are relieved they did not die. I’ve no reason to think that parts are fundamentally different. Keep these things in mind if killing or otherwise removing a suicidal part is your intention, there may be unintended consequences assuming you are successful.

In some ways, what helps suicidal parts is pretty much what helps anyone. Other approaches are more specific to being multiple. Some of these ideas may seem increibly far away or even impossible for you, especially if your system is at war. Please be assured that even small steps make huge differences. Little gestures of compassion or connection can start turning everything around. Only you and your system can find what works best for you, and only you can decide your own take on the values and ethics with which you will engage these very challenging situations. Please be assured that you are certainly not alone in these struggles, and that it possible to live with suicidal part/s. Wishing you all the very best.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.

Your problems are your fault

/ Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

It’s hard to be present in the face of pain. Sometimes it’s really hard. If we’re already feeling fragile or scared, someone who is hurting can feel like a whirlpool that sucks us down. If someone’s pain is really big and deep and strong, being with them on any level can feel like we’re caught in a storm. The sense of helplessness can be overwhelming. We want so badly to make it better. We want to stop them hurting, to ease and heal that tangle of futile rage and helpless hurt. I’ve been here. I know what it’s like to have no words for someone, to fumble badly and find myself turning to silence or clichés because I don’t know what else to say. I remember the terror I felt the first time I went to visit a friend in hospital after they survived a suicide attempt. Walking in was so damn hard, I was so frightened that I would do or say the wrong thing and make it all worse. I remember sitting with someone I loved who was in emotional agony, night after night, and literally singing to myself in my head to dissociate from their distraught, racked, sobbing because it felt like it was going to kill me. I have spent a lot of my life in pain, and I have spent a lot of my life reaching out to other people in pain. I still get scared, and I still stuff it up.

We are to some extent, wired to ‘catch’ emotions from each other. We’re social, we live and work and play in groups and families. Emotions are powerful ways we connect to each other and communicate with each other. We mirror emotions in each other. This can be a wonderful thing, it can help us to realise something is badly wrong and we need to be scared before someone even opens their mouth. Our ability to treat each other as human is partly founded on our ability to empathise with each other. But it can make it hard when people are hurting, because we feel a little of their pain. And we hurt too because we have to witness it and face our own inability to fix it, and that helplessness is a really hard place to be in. We also hurt and get scared because it’s frightening seeing other people hurt and realising this could be us.

If we are brave and skilled, we can be with people who are in pain. If we lack courage, we’re too vulnerable ourselves, or we don’t have the skills to stay afloat, we are left with really only response – distance. We might simply go silent. We might stop calling or visiting the friend with cancer, we might block the family member who is drowning in depression. We just retreat, make our excuses, and quietly move the threat out of our lives. Another form of distancing is to blame the person who is in pain. If their pain is in some way their fault, it gives us a lot of breathing room. We can disconnect empathically, because the solution is right in front of them and they are foolishly not doing it. We can feel less afraid of going through what they are suffering, because we know better. Some people blame to justify leaving. Others stay connected but use the blame to distance themselves and protect themselves from feeling the hurt too.

Anyone who has suffered has had some experiences with people distancing themselves like this, and it’s extraordinarily painful. Take whatever it is you’re already experiencing, and magnify it significantly for every time someone plays the role of Job’s comforter in your life. It’s a cruel twist that other’s people inability to handle your pain will add to it. People distancing themselves hurts. People telling you that there is something you are doing wrong, or something you are failing to do, that would make everything better is a kind of torture. I’m not talking about people sharing resources – that is a wonderful thing, and many of us spend a lot of time passing along and gratefully receiving suggestions for therapies, physio’s, and good books. This is done in an attitude of shared humility – hey, this thing was helpful for me – it might work for you! It’s timed for when we’re looking for information, and we feel like equals. Blaming you for your problems may be done under the guise of ‘trying to help you’ but it is actually about managing discomfort around pain. It’s done when you are most hurting, without connection but in place of it, and the more distressed you become, the more adamant they are that all this upset is simply needless if you would just see their doctor/meditate more/ask for forgiveness from God/fix your karma/take this supplement. It’s not about your pain, it’s about theirs. For you, being told that you have control over something you simply don’t is an impossibly painful place to be in. The only thing more distressing than being bashed against some terrible obstacle – be it sickness, grief, mental illness – is being told that it’s not actually there in the first place.

There’s whole branches of self-help and spiritual ideas that are specifically about this kind of distancing. Books and gurus that are geared around making us feel better about awful things that happen to people by reassuring ourselves that we can avoid it. It’s a form of victim blaming. The most obvious forms we tend to see in situations of violence – the ‘s/he was asking for it’ line after a sexual assault. Facing that the world is not under our control is a hard thing. There ARE things we control, and they are very important! When we try to control things we can’t – or when we’re expected by people around us to be in control of things we are not – it’s like a moth trying to reach the ligth inside the globe, or a fly to get through a windowpane. It’s a futile nightmare, and it takes energy away from the things we CAN actually do in our difficult situations. When it comes to sickness, grief, and other kinds of suffering, there’s so many ways to make it someone’s fault. In spiritual practices this is as simple as a ruthless assessment that the suffering person in some way deserves their lot. God, the gods, spirits, or karma are doing their thing. It is fair and just and the person should either endure it and be ennobled by the experience, or figure out what they’ve done wrong and make amends. Sometimes it’s conceived of as a ‘test’ of some kind. The single standard feature is the horrible lack of empathy hurting people are treated with. The self help alternative health sector can also be ruthless. Entire disciplines of thought have developed around the idea that people are in control of every aspect of their health and able to control their experiences. Much of this is a warped take on some very real, very important discoveries about how people function. Books such as Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life put forward the idea that all physical illnesses are caused by emotional struggles. This is a gross misunderstanding of the reality that our physical and emotional health are interrelated. Blaming the person is not a new thing, and it especially occurs around conditions and diseases we don’t really understand yet. The victim blaming ‘it’s your personality’ theories that used to be levelled at people with tuberculosis are now dumped on the door step of people with fibromyalgia, for example. These ideas put sick people under impossible strain and tend to polarise the conversation – everything is emotional and under your control – everything is physical and how you feel is irrelevant. This clouds the information we actually need to be able to manage it.

Let’s look at what we do know. Physical illnesses are physical processes. Aids, cancer, strokes, cholera, chromosomal abnormalities, and so on, are not caused by grief, issues with your mother, or a lack of self love. There is a physical mechanism in action. Sometimes there’s things we can do about this – good diet, care about sanitation, keeping an eye on genetic conditions. Sometimes there isn’t, bad luck deals us a crappy hand and we do the best with it we can.

Our emotional life is different from, but connected with, the rest of our health. Sometimes it’s the filter through which we experience things – for example, our perceptions of pain are far more intense when we feel scared. Sometimes the interaction is more direct – how we feel can impact how our immune system functions, and how quickly we heal. Sometimes it’s more subtle but even more powerful – how we feel influences our life choices, how much energy we have to look after ourselves and how much we care for our bodies. Sometimes we can trace the mechanisms by which emotions and health interact, and sometimes we can’t. But there’s no denying that they are, indeed, very important! Dr Dean Ornish has written a beautiful booked Love and Survival, which details the costs of experiencing things like loneliness, and the health benefits of intimacy and love. Research projects of many different kinds with many different conditions demonstrated that feeling loved and supported was a key – something the biggest single factor in recovery or preventing relapse – bigger even than diet or exercise or smoking or other things we know are huge risk factors. Sick people who felt lonely, unloved, or lacked support were twice or three times more likely to die. Emotions do matter, a great deal! But they do not give you control. You cannot stop planes falling from the sky, or cancer, with your feelings. For every story of someone who miraculously survived an illness, apparently due to positive thinking, there are ten amazing people who loved deeply and looked after their bodies, and were very optimistic, and had children to live for who died anyway.

So, where does this leave us? How do we untangle this information? What do we do with it? Well, let’s look at the context. Emotions don’t happen in isolation. The primary arena for this – whether it’s healing or harming us – is our relationships. That means those of us who are unfortunate enough to be lonely and isolated, or abused and put down, are a lot more vulnerable than those of us who feel loved, connected, supported, and nurtured. When something bad happens and we’re in a lot of pain, we’re often very scared of being rejected. We know that people may feel overwhelmed and distance themselves, and we try to manage this in different ways. When we’re also under pressure to be positive and make ourselves magically well, we often try to shut down our emotions. Some of us are very good at this and will wear a cheerful face through the most harrowing of circumstances. Some of us are terrible at it and anguish leaks through all our attempts at suppression. Either way, we often start this process of trying to distance people from our pain. This disconnection can leave us very lonely in a crowd, without anyone we can be real about our feelings with. When some of our people also struggle and distance – for some unlucky people everyone in their networks will distance – we find ourselves in exactly that vulnerable place of isolation that makes our situation so much harder.

The research out there about how emotions impact health suggest that, rather than blaming and distancing, entirely the opposite response is needed – empathy, connection, shared experiences. The distance/blame response actually sets up exactly the most vulnerable emotional circumstances for hurting sick people. So the guys doing the loudest, most unbalanced shouting about how important your emotions are to your health are setting the stage for causing harm to people already sick and in pain. Most of the times this is not at all the intention! But to claim it’s all altruistic is also a bit disingenuous. Even if you think you have the cure for a dying person who, through stubbornness, won’t take it, you approach them with love. And with a little integrity you quickly find that for every miracle, there are so many of us who don’t get them. We’re not bad people, or unloving, or denying the possibility of hope, or out of touch with spirituality – or at least, not more than all you healthy people out there. If you can’t see that you’re not much of a friend.

If you are struggling with people stuffing it up when you’re hurting – welcome to the club. And sadly, experiences of pain don’t really equip us with the skills to be automatically awesome when other people are hurting too. I wish it did! But it can motivate us. We don’t have to get it right all the time. Muddling through is good enough. The quote I’ve used to guide me – both to forgive well meaning friends and to comfort myself, is ‘the friend who comes, and holds your hand, and says the wrong thing, is dearer than the one who stays away’. Try to find some grace in your heart for those who love but stuff it up. When you are less overwhelmed, maybe you can share what you do need or need to hear and what isn’t helpful. Or maybe you can lose it and be honest about your feelings and then make up. For those who stay close but don’t listen, don’t empathise, don’t connect, and keep distancing – be careful. This can be abusive and destructive. They may totally disagree with your ideas and approach, but a basis of a relationship has to be that respect for you and some sensitivity to the distress their approach is causing. Some people get off on causing other people pain, and some people work through their own issues around suffering, vulnerability, and mortality on handy nearby hurting people. Don’t let anyone drip feed you poison. Losing ‘friends’ like this might be painful and lonely and bad for your health, but my experience has been that networks full of people like this do far more harm than loneliness does. 

In an odd sense, I feel I was lucky. When I was a kid, as the eldest girl and the one with a knack for first aid, I was taught how to comfort a distressed child when my parents were stretched. I recall hours sitting by the side of a sibling who was suffering from migraines. My mother taught me how a regular gentle stroking action on the skin can help distract from pain, how to match breathing with someone who is panting in distress and gently slow my own down so they calm with me and slip into sleep. I learned how to box up my own feelings during first aid crises such as dislocations, car accidents, or bad lacerations so that I could be present and useful and then feel all my shock and distress later on. I learned how to talk myself through scary things, to remind myself of my values, to accept that some things are very hard to do, to reward myself afterwards with time to wind down. They get easier. They are absolutely easier to do than to lose someone and have to live with the knowledge that you bailed. We distance to try to protect ourselves, but unless we do a massive amount of running away and lying to ourselves, we hurt anyway. It hurts to be near someone in pain, and it hurts to let them down, and it hurts to lose them. If taking on a bit of pain and figuring out how to live with the knowledge that bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it helps to reduce their pain a little, how can you not? One day it will be you, realising the limits of your own power and control, and desperately needing other people to understand that your problems are not your fault. Or one day it will be someone you care about enough to want to stay with them, and it will sure help to have learned a few skills before then.

Soul

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

Yesterday was an extraordinary day. The pain has eased, not that in my body, but the soul pain that was driving me insane. I can breathe again, the phrase was like heart beating in my mind, over and over. Monday is art college day. We always learn something, no matter how sick or exhausted or in pain, no matter the occasional tutor who drives me up the wall, or the frustration of ‘concept development’ invading every class I have loved. Today I painted with oil washes for the first time, creating a likeness of a small creature I first crafted from newspaper:

image

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I’ve never worked with oils, inks, and charcoal in the same painting before. I like him.

In photography class I talked with my painting tutor about our project topic – identity. I had been exploring pain, disability, illness, public and private selves. We talked openly about being multiple but that we did not want to explore that in a crass way for the project. The reductionism of the assumptions about identity grated, people were making their sense of self down to lists of attributes, to collections of likes and dislikes. I am not these things, I argued. The tutor said self is a synthesis of these things. I said no. If you ask me to photograph my self, I want to photograph my soul.

We switched, away from madness and suffering and despair, away from the futile rage. Tonight Rose and I ate dinner on the beach, watching the planes fly in over the water. My heart cane back, my dark heart, my poet, my one who eats pain and is not driven mad. All the world shifted and there was no despair any longer, no anguish. The night sang, sweet and wild and beautiful. I thought about so many people being driven mad by pain, trying to learn how to eat it. I thought about how the life that distracts me, the pain that prevents me from making art is not a distraction but is the subject of art, something I understand intimately. That things of which I’m ashamed, like my need for wrist poems, are places where art keeps me alive, where art gives me unscarred skin. And here, on this blog, it’s where I tear down my public image, over and over, before it crushes me. Where I search constantly for the truth of my own story, for my humanity.

Tonight the shackles fell away, and I was alive, and free as anyone can be. It won’t last, but then, what does? I don’t need it to. It is enough to drink the night and hear the ocean and breathe the stars and smell the skin of my lover, her hair like jasmine and her mouth like roses. Everything can be broken and wrong and heart full of grief and body of pain and still there is this place in the night, beyond fear, where something within you can fly if you remember how. I hope you know it too.

Pain

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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I’m home again from my weekend away at the Medieval Fair, curled up in bed, listening to the saddest music I can find, and dreading a full day of college tomorrow.

I’m glad I went, it was wonderful and I enjoyed myself. A bunch of people were very kind to me to make it possible, driving me around, petsitting and all sorts. I bought some lovely things, had great food, spent a lot of time sitting around fires and hanging out with good people. But my fibro was very bad, pain levels very high. At the end of the weekend my head is a mess, partly because I’ve been trying to keep it together until I get home. I’m okay but also on the edge of serious trouble. Parts range from placid acceptance and wanting to tidy the kitchen to extreme distress. There’s a lot of head noise and huge self loathing. We’re fragile about the fibro flare and the changes in business plans, a sense of desperation, failure, and hopelessness dog us. Fear that maybe it’s all over, that dream of income and business success, self sufficiency. Not enough sleep, too many triggers and reminders of my past, too much trying to be strong, too many emotional shocks and bad news.

Under the place where I’m fine, there’s a sense of building panic, someone screaming out for help. It’s been a hard week. A few more dreams curl up and die, and we can’t figure out who to hate. The more gracious we are to others, the more we drive the knives into ourselves.  We also bite easily, like a frightened dog, and hate ourselves for that too. Terror and rage. I have to keep reminding myself we have value, we don’t have to let anyone in we don’t want to, we’re allowed to reject, refuse, shut down, retreat. Tonight, in bed, with Radiohead weeping on my mp3 player, it’s good to be alone. Someone in me screams and someone cries and someone sharpens their claws, and the sense of being different, of being inadequate, of being misunderstood, eases just a little. I can be a savage shape here and no one gets hurt. I can despair and no one drowns but me. I can hate myself without new fuel for that feeling as self loathing warps my perceptions and behaviour with others in ways I also hate. Arrest the spiral. Just be, even if I’m resting in a place of profound distress. Just be what I am and nothing else.

I breathe in failure and exhale despair. My joints cry out in pain of wasted effort. Someone sobs and someone soothes and someone cries ‘I hate myself’ over and over again like it’s a spell to keep away the bogeyman.

Outside, the night is still and cool and speaks to me of freedom from suffering and grief. There’s a song in it that calls my spirit and the yearning is painful but it also calls me back into my body. So I lie here, without blood, without screaming. I just breathe, and hurt. I breathe in the shadows and breathe out the pain and my bones weep and my mind is a city crying out in a great darkness but even that is a song if you know how to listen for it.

Pain is good, black earth to grow new dreams in.

Let there be a dawn

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today was so hard. I am beyond exhausted and into dissociative. But I’m still here, and the day is almost over. I’ve curled into bed with a pounding head and a body that feels like it’s been kicked too many times and a heart that feels like it’s been put through a mangle. I know it will be okay, good things will come out of it, we will plant good seeds and do our best, and in some moments I’m able to find that sense of grace and compassion in amongst grief and pain. Rose and I have lost another friendship dear to us, not through death but by… Well it’s not easy to sum up and I don’t want to expose anyone. For the moment at least, people we care about have pushed us away. It was a big shock. I’m glad for moments of perspective and hope. The rest of the time, I feel like life just keeps crashing big waves over me. I’m not swimming at the moment, I can’t even tell anymore which way the shore is. I’m drifting with the tides and trying to keep my head above water. We kept everyone safe today, no self harm, no suicidal gestures, no ambulances called. We grieved and hurt and got angry and grieved some more and talked and switched and talked and found other safe people to talk to, and night fell when you’re allowed to go home and not be strong anymore or try to understand other people’s perspectives, when you can go to bed and curl into a ball and cry because sometimes life is very hard, and because you’re hurting, and people you care about are hurting too and you can’t make it better for any of them.

Funny how things that felt solid yesterday feel fragile today, the wind blows and the paving stones tumble down the road with the leaves. Pieces drop out of the bottom of your world and you find that you’re standing on air, nothing between you and the void. The threads of love that bind us here are soft as mist. You send a prayer flying like a bird from your throat, please let us all see out the week. Please let there be comfort and ease from pain. Don’t let the darkness last forever. Don’t let tender hearts break in vain. Keep us tender, as we were meant to be. Give us rest. Let there be a dawn to all hopes. May grief wash tomorrow new and green.

Sleep tight, strange and painful world. May the love that breaks us also strengthen us. May the cracks let the light in.

It’s my birthday!

/ Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

I often struggle around my birthday, but fortunately Rose is very good at celebrations so I’m getting spoiled. We usually get badly depressed this time of year, but with some extra loving and being the other side of 30, it hasn’t been intense this year. Plus my life has gone through so many changes over the past month that my head is still spinning, a birthday hasn’t really had a look in. I’ve finished my working week, which was painting at the Zoo again, good work but painful. Last night was dinner and cards and chocolates with friends, a good laugh as always and just what I needed after a hard week.

Today is presents and breakfast in bed, a trip to the plaster fun house for my kidlets, and a campfire with friends around tonight. There will be baked potatoes and chocolate pudding and hot spiced mead and bunting in the trees. We’re a bit excited! We might be going out dancing at the local goth club tonight too. One or two of us who just freak out have had some time to write in the middle of the night and hide out. Birthdays can be complex when you’re multiple!

Tomorrow Rose is whisking us away on a surprise holiday to I don’t know where. I love trips and I love surprises so this is pretty special. People are looking after my animals while we’re gone. I used to be so lonely and miserable on my birthdays, a hang over from years without friends. Now my world is taking good care of me, and I’m very lucky.

Free Event Tonight – Join us to Celebrate Regeneration

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Bare feet watermarked

We’re having a celebration tonight and it would be wonderful if you could join us! Regeneration is a short film about community and recovery I was involved in making, and we were really excited to hear that it won an award in a Canadian Film Festival and went on tour over there! Obviously we couldn’t turn up in person so we thought we’d host a little screening and celebration here. It’s free to come along, it won’t take up much of your evening (the screening of the film plus some other little performances or treats by each of the artists involved) and we’re providing nibbles.

5 – 6pm
Today, 15 April
The Box Factory
59 Regent St Adelaide

Here’s a Map

If you’re on Facebook, here’s a link to the event.

If you’d like an invitation to print out, here it is.

“Bare feet on grass was the foundation for this beautiful silent film about recovering from mental illness. Written, filmed, and performed by people with lived experience – Helen Keene, Steve Clark, Suzanne Reece, and Sarah K Reece, with support from filmmaker Victoria Cox. Despite having no previous experience with the medium of film, we have been honoured by Regeneration being selected as the winning film for a drama under 10 minutes by Picture This Film Festival and toured around Canada. Come and celebrate with us, meet the artists, and get an insight into our passions and wider body of work.”

RSVP to mindshare@mhcsa.org.au
Enquiries to (08) 8394 2559

Dark & light

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

I’ve lost my voice again, the blog goes quiet. Funny how that happens sometimes. I’m grieving. I struggled awake this morning from a terrible dream about someone close to me dying. At the end, even as I started to realise it was a dream, I couldn’t help myself from reaching out, trying to hold on as it faded.

Depression comes and goes, a joyless, lethal lethargy with a bitter self hate.

There’s a pervasive sense of something being terribly wrong that’s hard to live with. I can’t tell if it’s the grief and sense of loss, or some other choice I’m making. I woke with it this morning as I wept into the sheets. Life is so fragile, what am I doing with it? What am I making of it? Suddenly I miss everyone, want to phone everyone, hold them all, tell them I love them. I restrain myself, I make tea and come back to bed. I let the animals touch me, I’ve disturbed them with the sobbing and they need to come near. It’s a beautiful impulse, the simplicity of the need for touch when someone cries out in pain.

I’m curled in bed, looking out at a white sky through the branches of my tree. This beautiful house. I won’t live here forever. There’s a sense of everything slipping away, of time stealing all. I try not to re evaluate my life, there’s been so much of that lately. I pat Tonks and think about a conversation with Rose last night, talking about how sick my dog Charli was, how I nursed him to the end but struggled to connect, how I bonded to the foster cat Abbie, but she died. Death and attachment. How strange it is that so much of what we want from life comes down to feelings. It’s not that we want success or career or to find love, it’s that we want to feel whole, content, connected, loved. I want those things. I think I’d how much work Rose and I have been doing lately and suddenly I want to run to her house, take her away, drive somewhere lost and lonely in the white sky, sit on the edge of an empty beach and fish. Sit by a fire and listen to the crackling, for hours and hours. Slow time down. More than anything I want to be able to feel the things around me, love and affection, grief, wonder. It’s the numbing detachment I fear. Living without being alive.

Rain glitters on the leaves of my tree. Rose is getting ready for work in her house down the road. Tonks is in the window, watching the birds flying black against the sky. There’s some kind of peace here. I still have a heart to break. I can still be moved by life, I know what I’m pursuing. Grief and terror rest alongside acceptance, a calm joy in the beauty of my world, my little home. The big searing questions of life and meaning and my life settle like tigers, resting behind me in the shadows, purposeful and waiting, but at rest. Rain falls silver. I lie by the window, between the dark and the light. My heart stops trembling and sleeps. Shadowed by pain and lit by joy. I’m still alive.

Dot paintings

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

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This was a four part project in my painting class at college, each panel we were given specific instructions about tone/hue/method of application and so on. This piece was my favourite, which surprised me because the colours were all so muddy and ugly on my palette, but together they are such a subtle blend. I had to work with round shapes, for this one I used large dry brush round, and tiny paint dots. I like the dots, they spoke to me.

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I’m relieved and a little sad to have handed in my final project and finished the class. Next week I’ll start photography which I’m sure will be interesting. Life is blurring by me at the moment, I’m taking off as much time as I can to rest before I get properly sick. I’m a little overwhelmed and dispirited. Nothing is simple with my business. Reminders of Leanne, my dead friend, are everywhere, like the way Amanda’s Facebook profile always shows up on my feed as a possible friend to invite to events even though she died last year. It doesn’t hurt as badly as it first did, but there’s a wrongness to her being dead that’s hard to reconcile myself to. I want her to be here so badly, to visit and laugh and tell me she loves me again. Life is fragile, and I’m sad.

Recovery & contradictions

/ Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

I’ve found something I love now that this blog is nearly three years old. I’ve written enough to be able to take some of my earlier articles and write the shadow article, the contradictions. For me, a huge aspect of being multiple is that there is so often more than one reaction or opinion going on. I have to clarify my thoughts to be able to share them, here or in my work or relationships. Often this process over simplifies, it strips back complex concepts to a simple one. There’s huge value in this, especially for people who are in crisis or new to a field of information. They need somewhere to start, something that can be easily grasped hold of. But it gives me such a shiver of delight to be able to go back and contradict myself, to write in the shadows cast by all these ideas. Grounding techniques can be the most amazing tools for managing chronic dissociation and trauma issues. They can also be completely and utterly the wrong approach at times. Sometimes you do not need to be more grounded, more adult, more sane, more sensible and responsible, more a creature of the day. Sometimes the screaming and the madness are because the night is calling you and your spirit needs to fly. Sometimes it is not that you are too dissociated, but that you are not dissociated enough. Sometimes you need less safety and more adventure.

In the talk about recovery I give at Tafe, I usually point to a number of contradictions in my story, precisely because they are so commonly overlooked and reduced to a single, simpler story. I mention several in particular –

    • My childhood was terrible/my childhood was wonderful
    • Dissociation takes away from my life/dissociation protects my life
    • I am vulnerable/I am resilient
    • I need help/I can offer help to others

Each of these things is true, I say. And yet so often one obliterates the other. One story hides the other in its shadow. They are posited as ‘either/or’ facts when they are ‘and’. My childhood was both terrible and wonderful. So often when we talk about recovery, we hear a story arc that goes – Things got hard, I got sick, I found help, I recovered. Recovery is an endpoint where madness is no longer welcome. We do not talk any more about agony. There is a bizarre idea – totally at odds with my experience of life – that mentally healthy people do not suffer pain. Wildness is gone. The contradictions are all neatly ironed out, no more wrestling with doubt. Everything makes sense and all the loose ends are tied.

The human experience is so complex and strange. I like the contradictions and I’m suspicious of stories that don’t have any. Within contradictions I find an honest reflection of life; of the magnificent beauty, the breath taking, heart rending love, the horror, anguish, and misery of what it is to be alive. To love vulnerable and flawed people, to have dreams and watch some of them die, to struggle and succeed and fail and find that life is complex and unexpected. This is what it is to be human. Recovery as an idea, if it is to have any worth, must embrace that complexity rather than shrink from it. It cannot be a whitewashed place of pretending that we no longer bleed when pricked. That is a trap in which peer workers, those who’s very jobs depend on their capacity to prove they have ‘recovered’, will starve.

So, we have the idea, and the shadow of the idea. To be able to pick it up, turn it over, look beneath it, scrape the soil from the underside and smell the cold night scent of it, this is what I love. I built theories and frameworks and ideas and I love to do this. It helps me, like navigating the night by the pattern of the stars. I love to take masses of complex, unrelated information, break them down, and put them next to each other to see what happens. I love building ideas. And I love knocking them over, not treating them as sacred, not being scared of the truths in the shadows. I believe with my whole heart in the work that I do, and I love it down to my bones. But it’s not a house of cards that a contrary wind can blow over. They are stones in the palm of my hand. They are boulders on which I can stand. They reveal a truth, and they conceal another truth. I make them and I love them and I love the shadow beneath them. Life is not meant to be a neat, comforting story. In the contradictions are the depth and beauty. People are not meant to be so recovered that they walk without touching the ground, with no shadow, no dark uncertainty, no hint of wild abandon. We should not abandon complexity and uncertainty to territory marked ‘sickness’, ‘madness’ or ‘here be dragons’. Contradictions are also part of health, freedom, and love, an essential part of what it is to be human and to be alive.

How to rebuild

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I learn so much from books I love. I gave a talk again about Mental health and recovery to some students at Tafe the other day. Each time I do this I love it more. It’s such a treat to have the floor for a little while, to talk about freedom and loneliness and love – all the things we so rarely talk about in mental health, all those things so critical to our lives. I draw upon such a wide collection of information, psych textbooks, biographies, my own experiences and those of other people I’ve met or supported, and so often, fiction. Good writers understand life deeply and they write about it in ways that are just as useful in helping to answer questions about life and people.

I’ve just finished re-reading The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip, one of my favourite authors. There’s a beautiful passage in it that resonated with me. I’ve heard a few people lately struggling with how to rebuild lives that have been taken apart by grief or illness. This is a gentle place to start:

I do not know anymore… I cannot care. It seems I have heard a dream, except that – no dream could hurt so deeply or be so endless. Maelga, I am like weary earth after the killing, hardening winter… I do not know if anything green and living will grow from me again.
Be gentle with yourself…Come with me tomorrow through the forest; we will gather black mushrooms and herbs that, crushed against the fingers, give a magic smell. You will feel the sun on your hair and the rich earth beneath your feet, and the fresh winds scented with the spice of snow…Be patient, as you must always be patient with new pale seeds buried in the dark ground. When you are stronger, you can begin to think again. But now is the time to feel.

 

The fear of dying

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today was a triumphant day. Rose and I saw our first dreadlocks client in our new studio, and spent 5 & 1/2 hours getting them looking great again and putting in about 50 extensions. We’re both trashed but on a wonderful high.

Last night I dreamed that my friend Leanne, who died recently, was still alive. In my dream our long drive interstate for her funeral was actually to see her, in response to a plea for help. When we arrived she told us that she was terminally ill and wanted assistance to kill herself. In the dream I was outwardly calm as we took her to the doctor for assessment (euthanasia was legal in my dream) while inside I was screaming with a kind of terrified despair – please please don’t make me do this to you! A desperate clash between wanting to honour her needs and wanting to care for my own.

I woke distressed and confused, it took a little time to untangle dream from reality, it had been extremely vivid. It’s easy in some ways to turn my face from the grief and the reality of her death, to let it slip past my mind. That’s why I have a photo of her coffin in my phone, a piece of stone from the graveyard where she was laid to rest. Not to wound and torture myself, but to inoculate me against dissociation of the kind that takes away life. So I get out of bed and I do the things that make up my day, and I always try to do them wholeheartedly. Then in quiet moments I remember my bright, lovely friend, and I realise her passing, that though she remains in my heart her voice is now silent and we cannot have any new conversations except in the constructs of my mind.

It makes me miss her and it makes me fear dying young. I have so much love ahead of me, so many dreams and hopes and so much love. Years of torment and loneliness have passed, made way for hard won insight, for love and friendship, for some kind of peace, for joy and hope. It makes me feel the farthest from suicidal I think I’ve ever been, to clutch to life with desperate desire to live longer and dream deeper. When the guilt and the self loathing crank into life like a carousel spinning in my mind I think to myself – I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to waste on self hate, there is so much life to be loved, friends to love, so many dreams I’m hoping for. And it doesn’t feel dismissive, it feels like permission to stop torturing myself because I never get that time back. I feel a deep laugh, a joyful casting off of a heavy weight. I put it down and throw myself back into my strange, beautiful, tiring, complicated life, with joyful abandon. I am deeply blessed.

Grieving

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

It’s been a hard week. I’m home again and exhausted. I slept for almost 12 hours last night, and spent all today feeling very ill on the couch. Whenever I wake up the reality of my friend Leanne’s death is like a heavy weight falling on me. I woke at 5am and sobbed my heart out into the bedsheets. It’s overwhelming. There’s such a sense of being torn from a future I thought I was working towards. When the grief comes over me the pain is physical, tendons in my shoulders scream, muscles ache in my calves, I can’t catch my breath. It’s hard to bear.

I talk to Rose about her, about the ways they’re similar, how much I think they would have got along, how delighted she would have been to meet our children. When guilt creeps in and self loathing eats at me, I say to myself “I don’t have time for that” and I think of how brief life can be, and how quickly it can be taken from us.

No one knows yet what killed my friend, she was only in her forties. She died in her sleep, at peace, no mess, no pain, no waking to feel heart failing or stroke crippling the brain. Her eyes still closed, her face resting in one hand. It’s an image that stays with me.

I want her back. But I’m determined to grieve her loss in a way that doesn’t harm me. She brought so much to my life. My world is so diminished by her death. But I won’t be less for knowing her. I won’t add to my pit of self hate. I won’t withdraw from Rose and my friends. I won’t just push through and ignore this, or pretend it’s not a tragedy. I’ll remember her wonderful humour and how important it is to get together with friends and laugh. To be surrounded by books and music and animals. To shut out the world when it’s overwhelming, and find the courage to get back into it when you need freedom again. I am different for having known her. I am better for having known her. I’m going to hurt and I’m going to heal. I’ll hold all my memories precious, and I’ll love those I still have here. I’ll do my best to make her proud.