who only by moving can balance

I occasionally mention the concept of making. the job. smaller. Overwhelmed by a task? Okay, alter your concept of "success" to something manageable. You're not going to write a novel today, but you can write the prologue. Or half a chapter. Or whatever. And then you can do another half chapter tomorrow. And then you get to the end, and you look up, and there's a novel.

Counselling and mindfulness and a whole host of other things have, over the years, trained me to at least consider the possibility of don't make the job larger. That's not a framing it's been given explicitly, but it's not exactly an unrecognised phenomenon: to some extent, think sneaky hate spiral (ALL OF THE THINGS ARE PROBLEMS), but also catastrophising (THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD).

For me, it tends to go a bit like this: the Thing is terrible. If I am already overwhelmed, it is even worse than that. I cannot possibly control or have any effect on the Thing [note that this is a distortion: instead of making the job smaller, to make it less overwhelming, I abnegate agency and power in order to do away with choice and responsibility, both of which are Hard]. Anxiety about the Thing then gets displaced onto anything that looks even slightly similar within a large radius: "there is no point in even trying to Deal with the Thing, because it's not like I can handle the Badger either." And thus I spiral further and further into telling myself I'm shit and incapable and incompetent and can't manage anything, and get distressed about wider irrelevant putative problems that may not even be problems, and all the while the Thing looms larger and larger above the foothills of self-hatred.

Mindfulness techniques, as it turns out, have really helped me with this. The meditative practice of sitting with thoughts but gently redirecting one's focus to one's breath, or heartbeat, or whatever, has an awful lot in common with looking at the thought that goes you are too incompetent/ill/crippy/lazy to be on this PhD programme, you can't even adequately read and synthesise literature, there's no point even trying to fix the transfer report, you might as well fail out now and be done with it and - not ignore it, but nod at it, show it to the waiting area, and return to the pargraph at hand.

I sometimes summarise this - possibly via Pratchett - as you do the job in front of you. There's no "just" about it - like I said, it's taken me years to get to the point where I can semi-reliably do this under pressure - but over the course of this evening I've realised just how far I've come in this respect, and I am enormously grateful.

In the approximate chronology of this series of posts, we have now had our first session with a new counsellor, and we are thinking about how to plan for the next one.

A habit I'm attempting to get into is writing up notes from counselling immediately after the session happens (which I then post to DW, because that's the easiest way for me to manage and think through these things): this helps me keep track of the patterns and metaphors I've been discovering, and means I can't forget useful things. Write-ups are based on very brief notes I make during the counselling session.

Over the days before my next session, I start Making A List. Usually longhand in one of the notebooks I carry around, because that's what works for me, but occasionally in a text file I sync between computers. I start out by reviewing the previous session's notes, and from there build it up a bit like this:

• have I taken any actions planned last session?
  
• have there been any developments with respect to situations/interactions discussed last session?
  
• has anything major happened since last session?
  • Shit I Found Difficult
    
  • Shit That Is Complicated
    
  • Shit I Don't Know How To Feel About
    
  • Shit I Am Proud Of
  
  
• have I been keying particularly hard off any music/poetry this week? How's it been making me feel?
  
• have I read anything (particularly relating to How Brains Work) that I'm trying to fit into my working model of myself?

Back at the beginning of March, this was my list:

- Still Catch The Tide
- making a really bad yardstick in general - does this apply to counselling too?
- culture of mental illness among PhD students vs my lived experience
- negotiating care needs
- cleansing ritual!
-- seeds continue to germinate :-)
- craving interaction

... and obviously that's a lot of shorthand: but it's enough, in each case, to be a prompt for the tangle of attached thoughts, cf the way that "negotiating care needs" did indeed turn into an essay.

I've yet to start working on the next list - I seem to be antsy about doing it when I don't have a definite date in mind, though we're coalescing on the 4th of April - but for me the absolutely key thing is to give myself time to work on it, so things can pop up and get written down and not just vanish again.

I think I haven't made this explicit before, but I'd love to know how your strategies, if you have them, differ :-)

(Next: setting boundaries with counsellors.)

Previous interludes are under access-lock. As stated elsewhere, in general I grant access very readily, am happy to receive requests regarding same, and use lock so I know to first order who is reading. That's why the numbering looks out-of-order. Additional disclaimer: I have drugged myself to hell and back again and it's all kicking in over the course of writing this post, so like, if it stops making sense halfway through then (1) I apologise and (2) I'll be back in the morning to fix things.

<edit>now more sober, I realise that it would be helpful to state explicitly that I am here talking about finding a private counsellor, which obviously involves a significant amount of financial privilege, even with low-income places. I discuss my reasons for using private counselling in comments.</edit>

There's a number of places I look when I'm trying to find a counsellor. They include:

• PinkTherapy, which is good if you're in London but honestly kind of staggeringly useless everywhere else I've ever looked
  
• The British Association of Counsellors & Psychotherapists' Find-a-Therapist portal
  
• The Association of Cognitive Analytic Therapists' Find-a-Therapist portal

This shortlist arises at least in part because I know what I am looking for. I know that I do my best brain-work when I'm teasing out why I think/feel/believe/do A Thing: the way I approach the world, I find it much easier to address a problem when I know why it is happening. That's why ACAT's on the list above: Cognitive Analytic Therapy is the framework most of my counselling's been in; it combines aspects of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (e.g. techniques to challenge intrusive thoughts) with a narrative approach (i.e. working out why). (The ways in which CAT works really well for me are... abundantly clear, I think, from my habit of exploring my emotional state and wellbeing and relationship to the world via contextualisation/resonance of song lyrics and poetry.)

BACP is on the list because they've accredited every counsellor I've ever worked with and, for that matter, every counsellor I've ever considered working with. They're more-or-less a gold standard.

And PinkTherapy is included because I'm poly, trans and queer, and I really don't want to have to explain that from scratch to someone I'm paying private rates.


So my process for finding a counsellor goes a bit like this:

1. Work out what style of counselling I probably want (in addition to CAT, I'm currently doing a lot of self-led Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and I'm getting on really well with it).
   
2. Find directories of counsellors relevant to my broad geographic region (country-level).
   
3. Filter to local (or willing-to-Skype).
   
4. Filter to types of counselling I'm interested in.
   
5. Run through the list and see if the individual profiles suggest that the person in question has sufficient relevant experience that I won't want to scream before we're ten minutes in to a first session (for me, that means "has heard of queers" and "has worked with trauma"; "knows what an autism is" is a bonus; "will do Skype counselling and is flexible about session regularity" is SUPER-AWESOME but I don't expect to find it).
   
6. No luck? Remove one of the constraints (starting with style-of-counselling - though I note that I have some pretty hard limits about the level of fluff I am willing to tolerate; I fundamentally want counsellors I can trust to tell me I'm talking bullshit, if necessary, in those words).
   
7. Sit with the shortlist for a few days and see who sticks (much like my approach to purchasing Lioness jewelry, entertainingly enough).
   
8. Start sending out e-mails (ideally one at a time) to enquire as to (i) space on their list? (ii) willingness to set up a first session?

And then, of course, there's the issue of the actual first session. How I tend to approach those - and the suggestions I'd make to someone going into a first session, especially if they've not had counselling before - comes in the next Interlude.

How to do science.

Oh, sure, I learned a lot of facts in the various departments associated with my degree - but questioning and reasoning and reexamining the evidence and testing hypotheses and weighing up potential origins and competing explanations, in order to build a holistic model of a complex system?

That I learned from the University Counselling Service.

How to grieve.

(In a break from the usual, this post is brought to you by the counselling session I've just got home from - rather than one that happened months ago, and has had time to settle.)

There is this thing I do.

Something bad happens, and I make jokes about it.

After a while, that stops working, and I find that what I actually am is angry. Really, really angry.

... and some time after that, I am overcome by floods of tears, and it is around then that I realise what's really been going on.

And after that? After that comes compassion and acceptance.

But it turns out I'm still scared of being visibly upset - scared of what will happen if I say "This is hurting, and I am scared and vulnerable, and will someone please help me?" Hence the laughter and anger at the pain clinic; hence the laughter and anger at Simon Baron-Cohen. Hence being so, so upset by my baby brother and his current life circumstances: I look at him, the world having suddenly settled onto his shoulders with a thump, and I think about how fast he's having to do a lot of really painful growing up -- and I think about how fast I had to do a lot of really painful growing up, and I want to tell him all the things me-at-18 would have loved to hear, and all the things I think me-at-18 would have benefitted from knowing, and I want to protect himme from the things I had to deal with.

And so instead I asked my mum to tell him that I was incredibly proud of him, and that I wanted to give him a hug.

And now it's time to give me a hug. Because, yes, actually - contrary to what I was saying in comments about it "not being that big a deal"; about how it wasn't any worse than I expected -- no, actually, it hurts.

It hurts to have people tell me that my life and my achievements and my value to others are "nothing". It hurts to be told that the tool which enables me to leave the house, to visit gardens and museums, to enjoy life - is evidence that I'm not trying hard enough; is a problem that needs solving at all costs. It hurts.

It's okay for it to hurt. I'm allowed to be upset. I'm allowed to feel attacked and undermined and discredited, and as though my competence has been brought into question.

And perhaps most importantly? I don't have to legitimise them - to myself, at least - by fighting them.

This process normally takes me months; managing it within 24 hours (at least of the most proximate event) is... progress. Good. Well done, me: have some chocolate and a warm drink. Because, do you know what, sometimes things are tough, and those make the world a better place.

Well enough is, well, enough.

I struggle with perfectionism. The Gifted Child, artificially high standards, abuse, Making [People Love Me/Myself Lovable], etc. (I'm trying very hard not to be more dismissive about this than I am being; there's the temptation to practise self-deprecation rather than self-compassion, and there's also the back-of-brain voice about bragging & self-aggrandising & talk-it-down-or-people-will-hate-you.)

It's better to write a document well enough than to get myself trapped in the spiral of "I don't have the brain for it just yet; I'll put it off until I do; oh gods it's been three months it has to be REALLY GOOD NOW else SO LOSE FACE."

Hypothetical future perfection isn't helpful. First drafts and starting points are - and that's okay.

[content note: abuse]

Nobody has to be wrong.

A major feature of my childhood was being told that my father didn't care who'd done what, he just wanted us brats to be quiet and stop squabbling, how many times does he have to tell us before we'll get it through our thick heads, and being shouted at or threatened with violence until I parroted "Yes daddy, sorry daddy, I won't do it again daddy."

Surprisingly enough, I ended up with pretty shoddy skills in the general area of conflict resolution.


My first reaction to any conflict - for a long, long time - was self-loathing: I am bad, I am wrong, I have broken everything, if I am abject enough maybe things will be okay eventually.

My first step out of that response was to externalise: if it's not me who was obviously, 100%, vilely wrong - then clearly it's the other party. And off I stalk in my towering righteous rage...

... but of course It's A Bit More Complicated than that. One of my many hats is active listening; my work with vaginapagina (on the LJ side, rather than the DW!) requires me to gracefully mediate in conflict resolution on a pretty regular basis. One way or another, I come into contact - very frequently - with the idea that in disputes, a lot of the time an awful lot can be fixed by getting participants back to a point where they can assume good faith of each other. Because both parties have history getting them to the point of conflict...

... and the difficult bit? Turned out to be applying the same principle to myself: the idea that just because I'm having a disagreement with someone doesn't mean I'm awful and inhuman, and also doesn't mean they're awful and inhuman, and that there is in fact a middle path.

Like so many other things, this one is a work in progress for me - but I'm getting better at it, and that's okay.

This is part one of an irregular series I've been meaning to write for a while: I keep promising people I'll talk about what my counselling is like, and then I don't. So now I am; while knowing this stuff doesn't always lead to gut-deep belief, one of the things that's really helped me is rearticulating ideas I've come across before - because sometimes they click and fit and lock in place, rather than sliding off into the corner with a small sad sproing. And so:

The ice cream is not a lie.

[Content note: discusses abuse.]

Like an awful lot of people, I'm very, very good at working myself up into a twisting, screaming state of panic over something apparently trivial - something where starting is well over 80% of the work.

Like an awful lot of people, for a very long time my reaction to this was to yell at myself: ramp up the self-criticism for being so [insert negative descriptor here] as to not even be able to do [SIMPLE THING IS SIMPLE AMIRITE].

I am pretty sure I know exactly when and where and how this reaction was trained into me. The details aren't important (many unhappy families are, after all, unhappy in very similar ways), but this bit is:

The way out of behaving like a panicked toddler is, for me, dissociating enough to split myself into "toddler" and "adult".

Sometimes this is easier than others; some days I can do an internal monologue, and sometimes I need to vocalise in order to make the words happen. (I have been known to make my way across the big local open spaces, well after dark, well into winter, giving myself an out-loud pep talk. This gets you odd looks, but whatever - it's worked. Think I'm gonna cry - don't know why/Think I'm gonna sing myself a lullaby/Feel free to listen/Feel free to stare...)

I'm good with kids and I'm good with animals. I'm a babysitter. Modelling myself and my reactions as a terrified five-year-old or a skittish foal shows me what tools I need to use to calm myself down: I need to make myself calm and open, I need to move slow, I need to speak softly, and I need to give myself space and love. Those skills are so routine to me that part-dissociated, my "adult" self can do them even when the vast majority of me is curled up under the metaphorical sofa screaming.

So that's what I do: because oddly enough, promises of love and acceptance and support work better to calm me down than screaming and threats of violence. They work much, much better when it comes to making the same stimulus less scary next time.

And the best bit about not actually being five? If what it takes to get my metaphorical toddler across the metaphorical rope bridge is the promise of ice cream, there is nothing that can stop me getting some.