The Cerebral Mum

Ahh, counselling. Not my favourite idea. I’ve tried it twice in the past. Or tried to try it, anyway.

In a crisis frame of mind when I first started dealing with the child sexual abuse, I found a counsellor. I wanted to talk about it. I hadn’t really talked about it before. After a few weeks of talking about my toilet training, and my juvenile medical problems, I was no longer in a crisis state of mind, and had no patience for it. The psychologist was nice, and I think I understood her need to build a fuller picture of the person she was dealing with. Maybe she was gathering useful information. But it wasn’t useful to me. If it had the potential to be, well, it wasn’t quick enough. Or cheap enough.

My second attempt was for an eating disorder. I started throwing up between the end of high school and the beginning of university. That gap meant I had no Austudy - Australia’s income support for students. I had no income. And I had nowhere to live. I had been living in a school funded apartment with another “homeless” student, and once I graduated I had to move out.

The people at what was then the Dept of Employmen, Education and Training were very helpful. They wanted me to go on unemployment benefits, but that required me to sign a statement that I was seeking a permanent full time position, and I wasn’t because I was waiting to get into University. The officer I dealt with pulled strings, and the Department put me on the dole without me signing the paper. I found somewhere to live. And then I found a temporary job. Goodbye dole, and hello waiting a month for my first paycheck.

I walked for nearly three hours every day to get to that job. Each way. With the money I had, I bought rice and popcorn to eat. Popcorn is the cheapest food there is when you have no money. A 90 cent packet makes a lot of popcorn. Sometimes, I would pinch a little of my housemate’s tomato sauce to flavour my rice.

I guess the exercise and the limited diet triggered the problem, but when I had a little money again for food and the bus, I would buy a packet of biscuits, eat them all, and throw up. then I would run on the spot until my calves were so tense I could barely walk. This behaviour settled down then flared up every so often over the next few years. And then it got really bad. I couldn’t eat so much as a lettuce leaf without feeling an overwhelming urge to purge myself of it. I would eat in secret ten times a day and throw up ten times a day. I was getting very sick. My hair started to fall out.

I didn’t mean to meander back through the past so much. Counselling.

When it got bad, I tried every related helpline I could find. Every single one was disconnected. So I tried unrelated helplines and eventually got put through to the Eating Disorder unit of the closest Psych ward. Where I was asked to leave a message for the one doctor who was qualified to talk to me. I didn’t want to leave a message. I tried again every day that week, but could never reach anyone. So I quit my day job and spent the summer at the beach and got better by myself.

So much for my counselling experience.

But this weekend (ie; crisis point) I noticed over at Life In The Country, a post entitled Combat Strategies: Fighting Depression so I clicked through and followed the link to Lifeline and searched there for my local health service. I tried the email link. The email was returned undelivered. I went to their homepage and used the email address there. It was returned undelivered. I sent an email, in the end, to their PR Department, asking them to forward my details to someone appropriate.

(Let me just say, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs and I often wonder what the experience is like for people whose lives are actually on the line.)

Anyway, that email went through and yesterday I got a reply back from the PR department that simply said…

>Thankyou for your e-mail which has just been passed on to our Community Health Service. Someone will follow you up early next week. Regards.

It made me cry. There is something shocking and confronting about the possibility of being helped. Later that day I got a phone number to call and spoke briefly on the phone with someone who has put me on the waiting list. That made me cry too and afterwards I went outside and paced in figure eights on the driveway, the paving warm on my bare feet.

Unexpected offers of help are stressful. I don’t know why. I don’t even think counselling is helpful. The fact is that the hard work can only be done by me. The most I expect really, is a place away from my responsibilities, where Caspar can not see me, where I might give myself some room to really cry. But soon enough, I expect, I will become frustrated with talking to someone who wants to help, but does not know me. Who wants to help, but has a procedure which doesn’t respond to me. Who wants to help, but cannot help me.

I am the only one that can do it. Other peoples opinions and perceptions and perspectives are great too, but it hasn’t been my experience that counsellors give you those. It is such a synthetic process and psychologists seem so blank. If I am going to talk to a wall, I think I would rather it was made of paper and it spoke back to me with my own pen. I know many people have found counselling so helpful and perhaps that’s why, when it feels like a crisis, I call. But I just can’t imagine it working with me.

I’ll try it anyway.