The Black Box.

The 23rd of May has been an an overly significant date, too many times! Without doubt memory is the key to trauma and I'm really grateful for the EMDR I received over a year ago now. The trigger memory for treatment was the sound of the gate and my husband standing there. Waves of disapproval rolling off him, telling me I should not be burning things in the garden. Later that night he would be tricked into going round to her house.  Where her husband was waiting... His car was a write off afterwards.  The photo of that car, windscreen smashed, reminds me of how much better I felt once I'd got the truth. Something had to give, something breached, secrecy destroyed. Gaslighting ended. The earth was the earth once more, the sky only sky... Truth, even the worst truth is so much better than lies. But the 23rd. And memories. Between the garden gate and the car, there is the tree. The memory joins and flows into the feeling of walking out of Kit's room for the last time on the ...

I could not understand why Kit thought I'd ever return as a client?  "I wasn't talking about you, I was talking about my principles, my ethical rule, that once a client always a client because you never know what the future is going to bring, and people do come back" ... he wasn't 'talking about me '.  Whilst at the same moment, talking to me  This erasure, this double bind, this? Well what on earth is it when a person uses the term 'you' and then makes clear that they don't mean you? Anyway! This led to me feeling so utterly rejected, disliked even. I'd dismiss it as utter ignorance on the part of the speaker...but, he is a therapist. and he doesn't think there is any need for apology. or reparation, so? So I blog. Experiencing this objectification, of being positioned as a role, classed as this other entity - no longer a person, a forever client - was such a corrosive poison that it has taken; I was about to say, it has taken this blo...

The joy of postmodern therapy, for both clients and therapists is in how a postmodern approach gives value to inspiration, creativity and the imagination. For we seek to recast the future and the past in ways that enable, and no longer disable. For us, the concept of mental illness as a loss of contact with reality , begs the question - whose reality? And that question has to be asked, because it places power at the core of diagnosis.  If, as the postmodern therapist tends to believe, if reality is to a large extent constructed, and if people arrive with different versions of reality, and if someone imposes their version of reality over the other person's...that may well be an abuse of power. It certainly is in therapy where the art is to enable a person to reconfigure their own reality! So the subject of power and how power can be inadvertently misused really bothers postmodern therapists.  It leads us to actively create verbal interactions that will enable our clients to tr...