The Black Box.

I fell asleep at half five this afternoon and I awoke at ten thirty -three hours ago. It's now early morning. I'm reading, making notes, I'm in my element.  Glad nothing is booked for today! I'm reading The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. It was my rare good fortune to have been part of a couple of forums (Listserv, remember that?) with him during the early 2000's and so here I am, learning from David again, by asking how do we know what we know? This is epistemology, it is the beginning, and possibly the subject, of the whole book. Relevant to me because epistemology is a large part of my personal research into the mechanism of the compelling explanation. A compelling explanation often has only an emotional component to make it an explanation.  'We don't know how it works it just does ' isn't a good explanation. It doesn't create knowledge, and how knowledge isn't made, how it is suppressed and destroyed is also epistemology. David w...

One of the legacies of my therapy is that I doubt myself about how bad the end of my marriage was. The therapist dismissed my fear and it was too easy to feel that he was right...and something of that injustice remains. Finding my diary shows me that things were much, much worse than I remember. It shows me that when I heard fear in my voice as I spoke about my husband to the therapist, my fear was justified.  So what had happened on April 4th 2020? I'd asked my husband the question again 'is it over (his relationship with a colleague) because it doesn't feel as if it is!'  Five months later, there was the final lie in September 2020. After that I was well on the way to understanding my true predicament. The metaphor was  'Alien' the film. My husband, like the synth - the character Ash - had had an agenda. The crew - our family - were expendable. And we had been unwitting hosts to something that was unable to stop itself tearing us apart from the inside out. Fo...

I was looking through photos on an old phone and I came across this capture - one more evening in Hell with my lying husband.  A Friday night six years ago. I had felt shock, pain, grief. I couldn't see his wedding rings! And so I dared ask the question. His response, how could you doubt me?' was aimed like a dagger at my heart, my feelings, my love, aiming to make me feel uneasy, to doubt myself, said with a warning tone. And this was December - he was already 'giving her lifts home'... He wasn't wearing his wedding rings because he had already gone, just too scared of her husband to make the move a physical reality. Had to wait until May for the grand revelation. For some reason - oh yes, because he was scared of her husband - he had to make me think everything was all about our son, that nothing was wrong between us. So when the therapist said (several, many times) 'what makes you think that I...? '  Well now, where have I come across a similar sidestep...

  To read the post: https://open.substack.com/pub/3lack3ox/p/question-one? My Substack posts are more logical, better English versions, distillations of the contents of this blog. But to the question, is unconditional positive regard from your therapist all an act? My answer is, no. Or, yes - it could be. Therapy is a vocation for many therapists. And many therapists discover that therapy isn't about feeling rewarded by following their vocation. Others discover how to balance on a tightrope that stretches between hope and fear. And because they can do this, their clients likewise pick up the skill. Not being phased isn't an act. It comes from a genuine trust in oneself. The vocation only led you here. Now you better find out what it's all about! Going back to the subject, authenticity. Once the dreaded Kohuts were mentioned - read the post! I could not trust the therapist at all, well not as a therapist. He'd already blown his therapy credentials to bits by calling me a...

Deliquescence (Live) by SWANS GDPR is very much in my mind. Anyone who holds digital information about another person is a 'data controller' and as I write notes about my clients, I'm a data controller and so I have to have a policy, explaining how I will handle any requests for notes from clients on my website. Actually I've always had a policy of transparency, if a client wants their notes the protocol is that they sign to say that they accept responsibility for their information and that their therapist is no longer able to preserve the confidentiality of the notes.  Then they also have a choice, to go through the notes with me, or to simply have the notes. The ICO is very keen on confidentiality - the way notes are stored - and the law is very keen on clients being able to see their notes and correct any information about themselves that they don't want recorded. Should I make another, more assertive request to see my notes? Would The therapist regard this as mo...

As I left the house this morning, those were the words in my mind - I didn't run away . This is the kind of statement clients might make, and I will reflect such statements back with a hint of admiration in my voice. I know what it costs - to not run. Because of course there have been times when I did run,  for instance when the emergency services man was yelling at me to get out of the house. If I hadn't run then to distract my son, my husband could have lost a finger. My son was trying to bite it off.. I remember the aftermath, sitting on the ground, a dark and cold February night. My back to the garage, watching the police take my son away in handcuffs.  (What happened? +)  And there have been lots of things I've said that I should do, or will do, and then thought better of it! Not phoning the police when my son was extremely violent was one. I didn't know what was on the other side, would he be arrested, get a criminal record? But doing something different when it i...

It isn't just women.  I'm not even going to say that this happened to me, but if someone else told me that what had happened to me had happened to them... Ok, well we know that therapists will go to the police and claim that they are the victim of harassment - see Dangerous Memories (Tortoise Media / BBC Sounds), The shocking part is, the 'victim' only has to say that they told the client never to contact them again (twice ) for their complaint to be taken very seriously as harassment, and to have some evidence such as an email about or to the victim says that there is a problem with the victim. The communication doesn't need to contain a threat. The perpetrator doesn't have to have made a threat to hurt or harm. The victim's complaint is enough. Because a person experiencing harassment might be in such a bad psychological state, that they can't speak about it. And quite possibly, police, unlike therapists, don't feel comfortable with going into the ...