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“Don’t upset yourself”
This is what my mother and grandmother used to say to me. Maybe it was that my feelings were always too big, too incongruous with what had actually happened, because I was born without an emotional skin to protect me. Or maybe it was that they couldn’t deal with my feelings, couldn’t help me contain them. It meant your feelings make no sense. It meant shut up and deal with your feelings yourself. It meant don’t upset me. They said it when I was 12 years old and depressed. And when I was 13 years old and suicidal. I took away from my childhood the belief that my feelings could not be validated and no one could contain me or help me contain myself.
When I was young I had invasive medical treatment instigated by my parents and related to puberty. A few years later as a young teenager in an inpatient unit, I was pushed and pushed to talk about it. The staff had a habit of rubbishing my history and my feelings, and fearing that if I said what actually happened it wouldn’t be ‘enough’, I ended up making false allegations of sexual abuse. This lead to a nightmare chain of events that got me taken away from my family etc etc. T and I had agreed that today I would try to tell the story of what actually happened. The history of the previous attempt to tell, as well as the trauma of the original events, meant that this was always going to be hard.
As it happened, today was a day from hell. Such a tough day on placement and by the end I had a splitting headache. I was sick with anxiety about therapy and by the time I went in I was really dissociated. It felt like the whole world was spinning. We did some grounding. I tried to talk. I remember at one point I was somehow standing there in my underwear, literally acting out what had happened because I didn’t have the words. T talked me back down and into my clothes and I sat down and we talked a bit more.
And then it was nearly the end and I tried to express how sad it felt that here was somebody who would have handled it so differently if she had been my mother, but after this brief time together she was going home to be someone else’s mother, and I was going home to be alone. And T’s response was
Don’t upset yourself.
And the words tipped a bucket of ice water over my head and froze my heart. Today I needed T to be different from my mother, who couldn’t help me cope with or contain my feelings. And different from the psychiatrist, who I feared would see my feelings as me being upset over nothing. And in the end she was just the same. I hoped for healing today, but what made me brave enough to try was believing that at the very least, nothing that happened could make the shame and confusion worse. But it did.
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