SOME PERSONAL HISTORY ~ Transference and countertransference

As a result of a lifetime of abuses starting in my early childhood as well as many agonising losses and painful relationships including further abuse experiences in my adulthood, I was a broken woman existing very much in my child personality for most of my adult life.  I had seen many therapists during my lifetime, but none were able to pinpoint my struggles to help me in any way. 

In 2006, the year I was to turn 50, I was a total mess and had lost all interest in living.  A dear friend, Emmy, introduced me to a “good therapist”, a social worker in private practice... and so my journey to healing began at last. 

My therapy journey was a very difficult one, fraught with flashbacks and a new kind of deep suffering and struggle, yet at the same time, a huge awakening for me of what my lifetime of struggles had always been about... where they had all started and why I was the way I was. 

By facing these truths, I had an understanding and a real reason for the first time in my life, to FACE the “true brokenness” of me.  I had barely ever looked myself in the mirror over all those years, I so loathed myself, just as my abusers had taught me to through their cruel and heartless treatment of me... but now, on this therapy journey, it was as if a mirror to my own behaviours and reactions to triggers stood in front of me at all times, revealing to me who I had become as a result of “THEM”!  As a result of the Power over me that “I” continued to give to them!  I was still their victim!

Working for my therapist as her receptionist over a four year period, she became “my mirror”.  Although working for one’s therapist is not the ideal situation, I would never have had it any other way, because without constantly being shown what I was doing over and over and over again, I would never have understood the true gravity of it all, or the debilitating effect it was having on my life and the lives of those around me.  Sadly though, around the second year of therapy, due to the very close and intense therapeutic relationship, transference and countertransference gradually started to set in and slowly ate away at what had started out as a truly healing therapeutic experience.   

As things once again started to crumble and fall in my life, I found myself gradually being pushed down... deeper and deeper, back into my dungeon of childhood confusion and complete and utter despair.  I started to self-injure regularly in an attempt to quell the extreme anxiety, self-loathing and guilt that again rose to the surface in me.  Once again back to the feelings of the broken and victimised child I used to be... the child who could never do anything right for her mother or stepfather... the child who was to blame for everything that ever went wrong... the child who could not “fix” the problems and make her abusers happy.

And so in my deep emotional turmoil and struggle, I hurt myself over and over, until at last, sometime during the fourth year of therapy, I realised as an “awakening” to my true “adult self”, that I was once again in real danger of “losing it” and realised that I had finally had enough!  Totally numb... I walked out of a therapy session that horrible day, never to return.   

This was the first time I had ever taken a real stand in the face of abuse, to protect myself from it all.  That day marked a pivotal point for taking responsibility over my own life and a chance to make a decision between life over death in the face of yet another overwhelming loss that seemed far too painful to bear.

Of course my struggle didn’t end that day... I was still entrapped in that dark and miserable state for some time to come, but more about that another time.

POEM: One bitter night on the 25 July 2008, unable to sleep due to the extreme anxiety I was experiencing as things were becoming increasingly uneasy in the therapeutic relationship I wrote the following: 

THIS IS MY PLACE – MY ONLY HOPE

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This is my room – my place of honour,
My place to let “it” all out – to mourn and cry,
To scream and shout – this is my place!
My place of utter shame – to face my guilt!
To relieve my trapped and bitter fears!
To realise my twisted perceptions – to find a way to set it all right!
To have exposed – all I ever understood about the world I know,
The way I am – the way I have been!
This is my place – where I can share my weakest thoughts and deeds,
To feel a certain freedom at last,
To allow myself to be stripped naked to the bone – again!
To be broken down to the smallest parts of my existence,
Sliced through all my stubborn resistance,
To face the self-defeating destruction of my own behaviour!
How I have tried to fit in – and why I have not!
To face the reasons “WHY!”
To discover the need to change!
To face the difficulties of, “HOW?”
No matter how much I protest!
No matter how painful or hard the journey might be!
This is my only hope – to grasp,
How “I” should be – How “I” could be!
To face my “truths”, and find a way to rid myself of all the “lies!”
To see the world with brand new eyes,
To hear with brand new ears.
To untangle the utter chaos of my past!
The mass of binding chains and confusion!
To undo all the bitter knots that have held me bound for so long!
This is my place to search in hope,
To find a new and better path,
To escape the darkness of my dreadful past,

This is my Place!
This is my only hope!
My only chance!

Please don’t give up on me!

***

All my life I was looking to be rescued... when all along, I was quite capable of rescuing myself, but did not know it yet.  I had invested all my hopes of healing on others, and still in the crumbling therapeutic relationship I clung to the need for the therapist to “fix me”.  I was totally unaware at the time that I already possessed all the tools for self-healing buried deep within myself, I just needed help to realise that they existed and to learn how to use them.  My study of Logotherapy has been teaching me how to do this and I have come so far on my healing journey in such a short space of time as a result that I, and many who knew my struggles before can hardly believe the amazing changes, for which I am so very grateful. 

This is the reason I want to give back to the world and share what I know with others out there ~ Pana