Thank you for your long heartfelt reply OpenEyes. Without being rude, my brain isn't fully operational at the moment and I don't know you much, so slowly I am reading it one, two, three times... and it might take a couple of days to reach my neurons inside my skull. Please don't take that as negative. It's just, you know, when brain is processing trauma everything slows and gets itemised and scrutinised perhaps because brain is re-formulating the traumatised physical connections.

I wanted to thank you very much for posting. Often when I post from the heart, as opposed to from somewhere more superficial, I don't get replies on PC. I guess that there is a personal level when only ongoing friendships can twig the meanings, but also ongoing friendships are two-way with stuff happening on both sides.

So far, how your post helped is that I realise something is bugging me about re-reading these diaries. Something about myself that I've been too busy for and hence ignored - my blinker system doesn't always work in my own favour.

Partly it was realising once again how "therapy" although systematically purporting to be a cure-all, actually it can be a cure-nothing. There is no cure-all. Huge horrible things happen and therapists are often actually very limited people contending with their own emotional and cognitive overloads. The people best at mapping outside the box, are the people who find themselves outside the box.

I remember proposing that therapy needed to change from individual interviews to emotional education for the masses, and one therapist saying to me "how do you believe that you are strong enough to change yourself, let alone change therapy". Both a realistic and undermining comment. I was working but all my money eaten up by daily living. Change requires leisure and surplus income.

Then there is a pattern required for intervention which wasn't any part of my cultural upbringing. No one where I grew up had recourse to state interventions. We had a pattern of looking after ourselves, and at breaking point we gave up and died. That pattern is alien to the "nice helping professions".

Despair. There are real life situations which induce despair and overwhelm.

Sorry Openeyes. This started as a genuine thank you for posting and I seem to have gone out on a limb. I am going to stretch my legs and come back and read again. Note to self "do it"!!

Saidso