Coming home on a wing and a prayer.

February is a bad month. It was in a February that I sent the therapist a heads-up that I was thinking of requesting my notes.

It was a February when he called me a minx.

And just before February last year I was shifting towards making a formal complaint against him, hoping against hope for a sensible resolution before I metaphorically let out the dogs...

This February feels like it is going to be tough. But no longer is this to do with the therapist.

I had a long drive to the border land between England and Wales to meet up with friends. But almost there a warning light lit up with an unwelcome ping! It was raining, it was cold. I stopped the car and felt the aloneness and vulnerability of being a woman who has 'lost' her husband. I felt all the fear I carry all the time, no longer drowned out by whatever clients, whatever CPD, whatever...it is the fear I feel in the evening when I catch a bus home. But not in the car; my car is my safe place!

This sudden need brought back memories of my husband, always by my side on trips like this, of how we were good friends (until...,) and thinking of him, of how he once made me feel so safe, and later so threatened. And how angry and distraught my son is over what happened..of how he wasn't heard, didn't feel safe, and couldn't understand why...

I ate my emergency Marmite sandwich and cried. 

Feeling safe isn't a solid memory. The car trips we took are faded photos under leaden skies. Almost everything good would be poisoned in the future. So I'm left with a sensation - memory of companionship, but examples that could prove it, have all gone, all overwritten by bad.

I remember the happiness of sitting on the back of his new motorbike. Then months later accelerating away from those same lights now in the opposite direction. My  terror fear,  my certainty that he'd tried to cause me to fall. 

Thinking of him I experience anxiety, fear of the world pulling me towards him, expecting security. And avoidance, the acceleration, the knife, being hit..

This tailspin also underpins spiritual and therapy abuse. And it doesn't matter how securely attached you were as a child, when a 'safe' person is actually the opposite, a real physical danger, the cognitive dissonance is all the more crazy making.

Regarding the therapist and his attempt to destroy my chances of employment, to 'kill' my career, I think because I'd gone through so much worse! Terrible though it was to be summoned by the police, it was all small beans compared to my husband's abusive behaviour. And though I felt shamed and threatened by the therapist's action, I told my story. And I'd known that he'd respond this way, I'd felt like I was standing on thin ice.

But February - not a great time of year.

I messaged my friends and turned the car around and limped back home.