Hi OpenEyes,
Thank you for writing some more about this. I was for a long time on a survivor website and befriended two women who had the most shocking life experiences that I ever heard of, yet who found a way forward. So when I say that on reflection my situation was horrible, it's all relative and on a continuum.

What I was writing wasn't (I don't think it was) about being heard so much as about realising that there are human experiences way too big for the majority of psychotherapy practitioners. Especially low-cost psychotherapy practitioners, who are not always themselves sitting comfortably in their armchair reading horror stories from a distance in the papers. Unfortunately we are sucked in by our own desires and the myth of "professional expertise"... the pseudo scientific jargon...

There is a defensive stance where the psychotherapy profession (in UK and in France) say "that's too big so it's outside our remit and let's pretend that it isn't happening". Unfortunately some of us are born into situations where we can't pretend it isn't happening - wrong country, wrong social class, & etc... basically we get born the wrong side of the historical situation. Our child might be physically sick in a country with no medical care, for example. How is therapy supposed to deal with that!

There is a whole spectrum of strengths required to deal with historical disadvantages that are not part of the therapy curriculum. Those strengths can be double edged.

I look back at medieval church sculptures representing the horrible sufferings of normal people, and the luxuries of the elite - so I guess that this split has always been part of social experiences. And even the elite were victim to violence and plague.

And, yes like you say getting on with their goals as best they could despite the emotional impact of it all. That's human, and that's what I see, and that is a fat lot more than what I see represented in the microscopic emotional investigations of therapy.

I get confused when I read my diaries, or when I otherwise come up against all that. It's a sort of "nudge" that I get occasionally from someone who knows the same thing. Yup. I get that very occasionally. I got it from reading my diaries. At other times - I had someone who works as a child therapist visit me socially recently and she was talking all the labels "self harm", "abuse", blah blah blah - and it was clear that she herself was only standing at the edge of all that.

I'm not trying to knock anyone. I'm just saying this causes me confusion in my sense of identity and in my thinking. I grew up in a situation way out on the edge of what therapists label as their healthy normality - yet I met people there who showed such strengths beyond that comfortable normality. So perhaps my range is different, and peculiar?

But then, still pondering, I read the last paragraph of what you wrote and I think that to each of us our own experience of despair is most important and unique? It might be either too big or too small to resonate with the listening person???

And situational despair requires that we act in some small way to change our situation, however impossible that seems relative to our meagre personal resources.

All of this is just my ego struggling to catch up with what I feel in my bones. Because it's worrying to be reminded that I had life experiences as an adult, as well as in childhood, that have been forgotten. When I first moved here, I had a neighbour who had lived as a teenager through the siege of Warsaw and who much later saw one of her two sons die in a freak accident. She didn't talk intensely about either experience, but... the experiences were there. I'm not sure that any modern rituals, including therapy go that far. Perhaps religion does for some people.

Sorry that I am still only in a state of halfway connecting - a work in progress here. Some things that I "think" are just steps along the way to finding a better way to include all of my self.

Thanks again!!!

Saidso