So so drastically behind and everything in my head is a huge mess and grrrr! Taking things one day at a time at the moment. I feel like I'm on a constant roller-coaster of emotion and I just want it to stop round about now. I'm sick, sick, sick of really really not being okay, yet pretending that I am. Bleurgh. 3 hours sleep in the last 50+ really isn't helping matters either. Please brain, just switch off.

'I feel irrational, so confrontational, to tell the truth that I am getting away with murder. Is it impossible to never tell the truth? The reality is I'm getting away with murder' - Papa Roach

During the week between my sixth and seventh therapy session I had a dream completely different to any other's I have ever had. It made me feel hopeful and suggested that something within me had changed. It suggested that I was looking at my experiences differently and perhaps evidenced that I am further into the healing process than even I am able to currently realise.

The whole dream started off different... Normally the dreams start with me as a teenager in the place where I was abused but on this occasion I was the adult I am now and I was in my bed in my room at university. 

In the dream, the person who abused me came into the room and started his usual routine of groping my boobs whilst kissing my neck and rubbing himself through his trousers, picking up my hand and physically making me rub it for him until it was rock hard. The involuntary lifting of my hips as he pulls at my pyjama bottoms. All so real and all so current. I have to do what he says to lower the chances of him hurting me physically, he might anyway but at least I can say I always tried. There's part of me that knows I'm in a dream... Why is this happening? I'm safe here. He can't hurt me any more; he doesn't even know where I am! But still it continues and I can feel myself trying to wake up and it's all really weird and blurry and I'm somewhere half way between asleep and awake... 

Suddenly, my door bangs open and out of nowhere he's on top of me, trying to penetrate me. I know I'm fully back in the dream now but two of my closest friends are there, in their pyjamas, dragging him off me and screaming the place down. The neighbours bang on the wall telling them to shut up but they won't. My abuser is lying on the floor - he looks as though he is in excruciating pain. They kick him repeatedly, there's blood everywhere - up the walls, seeping through the carpet, oozing out under the door onto the landing. My friend isn't satisfied as she drags him to his feet, nailing his hands to the wardrobe with a mallet and huge 5 inch spikes. He's naked and humiliated and being made to suffer in the same way that he made me suffer for all those years. We find knives and carve words into him until he's sick in the same way that he used to physically hurt me until it made me puke. It's all a massive game. He looks like Jesus nailed to the cross only his sins will never be forgiven and he doesn't give a flying fuck about anybody else. His sneer has finally gone and it's been replaced by fear... I laugh at him as I plunge a knife deep into his chest.

It was at that point I woke up. I don't know what it symbolises but it felt fucking good.

'Oh yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it' - Rafiki, The Lion King

I felt much more comfortable attending my sixth therapy session. I knew what we were going to be talking about and I felt as though the planned topics for conversation would be beneficial.

Bernadette and I went through all the good week, bad week pleasantries before cracking straight on with the more deep and meaningful stuff. Having not kept a dream diary when she had asked me to I felt a little awkward in my desire to revisit this area, having still not completed the task. She asked me to describe my nightmares to her in more detail and I explained that they are basically replays of things that had happened when I was being abused. I provided more details but I feel as though the level of detail in my writing has perhaps exceeded already what I would deem to be acceptable and I don't feel as though graphic details in this context would be of benefit to anybody, particularly not me. I explained that in these dreams I was always the age I was then and where I was then. She asked me how I felt when I woke up and I explained how awful I so often feel, how I often wake up in a pool of sweat with tears streaming down my face, how my heart beats so fast that I feel as though it is about to pound out of my chest... I explained how difficult I find it to take those images out of my head and get back to sleep, which often leads to me feeling sleep deprived and helpless. 

I did however find it interesting to discuss how the nightmares help me to make sense of what happened to me. Often in the daytime, something will happen and I will experience flashbacks; I feel a crushing in my chest as though the beast is lying on top of me and I hear the moan he omits as he orgasms and I smell the smell that I could never shake from my nose and it so very much feels as though I am back there. These flashbacks only occur for a few seconds normally and I have become pretty good at hiding when they are happening. But the scary thing is, they happen for seemingly no identifiable reason. Obvious things happen that remind me of what happened or remind me of my abuser which can often make me feel uncomfortable e.g a car the same as his driving by, the smell of his aftershave, anybody sucking their teeth, sex with men generally, but these things don't perplex me as they are easily explainable and don't cause an intolerable level of distress. However, the more severe flashbacks are often unexplainable at the time but will sometimes be more identifiable following a nightmare. 

I have just realised that I'm really not explaining this very well. Let me provide an example. I was staying at a friend's house a while ago now and I noticed that the pillowcase was on the pillow inside out. The feeling, the horrible intense terrifying flashback feeling, swept over me and I had no idea why an inside out pillowcase had caused such an intense emotional reaction. That is, until a few weeks later, when I had one of my abuse nightmares and as I was being abused from behind, in my dream I was staring intently at the pillow, which low and behold had an inside out pillowcase on it. My nightmares so closely correlate to what happened to me in real life that I feel as though the triggers and the daytime flashbacks are helping me to fill in the sick sordid little details that deep down I want to know. I want to be able to feel as though I know the complete picture. Maybe in a weird sick little way, if the nightmares completely vanished, I would feel as though my past would never be complete? That sound's so fucking vile and disgusting and, as I discussed these feelings with Bernadette, I couldn't believe the words that were coming out of my mouth; it made me want to vomit. It sounds almost as though I enjoy reliving the abuse, which isn't the case at all, I just feel as though I need to know all of the details, all of the potential triggers, all the answers to all of the unanswered questions, I need to know the insignificant bits so that it all becomes easier to think about, easier to talk about, easier to process, easier to make normal and less life defining. Easier to accept that this stuff happened to me and that doesn't mean that it has to define who I am.

This lead on to another discussion about the guilt I feel... I feel so guilty about what I had just confessed and I don't even know why. I think it all stems back to my mother's idea that I 'enjoyed fucking her boyfriend'. I went on a humongous rant about how I have read on the internet about abuse victims who involuntarily orgasm whilst they are being abused, not because they are enjoying it in anyway, but because that is a bodies natural reaction to stimulation and how that had never once happened to me even though I was abused many many of times over several years thus proving that nothing that happened to me was enjoyable or natural and I NEVER FUCKING WANTED IT. It made sense in my head at the time; it felt crucial that Bernadette knew that I had never once been gratified by anything that happened to me. But then I felt bad because it sounded as though I was victim shaming girls who had experienced this. 

Bernadette suggested that we try a technique she was trained to use called the Rewind Technique. She explained that normal things that happen are processed as memories pretty quickly and disappear somewhere into the depths of your mind where they are accessible as and when you choose e.g if a friend says 'do you remember when...?' you'll be able to locate that memory in some detail but it's not always there in the forefront yet can easily be found, used and put away again. However, difficult and distressing memories are very difficult to file in a similar fashion and the brain almost acts as a pinball machine to ensure that these thoughts aren't allowed to be processed and always remain in the forefront. It makes sense really and she explained that this is closely related to the minds automatic function of protecting it's human from dangerous situations. She lost me a bit with all the science behind it as she was talking about neurons and pathways and all sorts of complicated stuff. I was tempted to look it all up to find out how it all works as soon as I got home but resisted and decided to go with it as a patient, as opposed to trying to look at it theoretically as a healthcare professional.

Bernadette asked me to think of an incident that I had experienced which caused distress on a regular basis. Once I had decided upon an incident, she asked me to imagine that I was sitting on the back row in a cinema, nobody else was in the room. She then asked me to picture myself in a safe place before the incident occurred and then to play the scene out in my head although I was a spectator watching what was happening on the screen. It was critical that I watched myself within the scene rather than replaying what had happened to me as though it was happening to me. I had to tell her when the scene was finished and she asked me to watch myself returning to a safe place. She then asked me to imagine myself walking down the stairs of the cinema and into the screen where I should step back into myself. Then she told me to play the scene backwards in my head ultra fast but still including details as though it was being rewound. I took a few moments to do this before I returned to my safe place. Bernadette asked me to open my eyes and return to the session. I felt almost drunk, unsteady, strange. Bernadette reported that was normal and a sign that I had followed the procedure correctly and the memory was being stored away again, but this time in a better way.

She had anticipated that the emotion surrounding the incident may have been instantly relieved; it wasn't. She says we will discuss it next week to see if any of the emotion has dispersed and regardless of the outcome will try it again. I'm happy with this arrangement.

We then discussed in more depths my beliefs about my friends, and other people generally, perception of me. She asked me to go away and ask some close friend's three things that they like about me or that they feel are my qualities etc. She wouldn't tell me what we would do with these responses and I was instantly embarrassed by the prospect of asking for compliments. She said we wouldn't revisit this the following week but the week after that so I had time to collect some responses. I didn't know how I was going to go about it and the very idea filled me with dread...

Overall, a busy yet productive session. I was really starting to feel the difference.

I'm persistently frustrated with how far behind I am with this blog. Life just seems to be moving way too fast and a lot has happened and I'm trying to finish this bloody degree and I should not be prioritising dealing with the past right now but it's all that I can think about. Considering the amount of time I spend aimlessly surfing the internet I should be on top of it but sometimes I just can't be bothered with anything and just want to stare at lists of 'Things Every Girl Should Do In Her 20's' on Thought Catalog - does that make me a bad person who's not willing to do anything to support her own recovery?

Part of me really wants to just dump this blog right here, right now. I know I will instantly regret it. It's important to me to reflect upon what's happening to me and I often feel as though I can't just sit down with another person and tell them all of this in a calm, articulate and comprehensible manner. Damn, sometimes I can barely write in an order that makes much sense but at the end of the day I am doing this for myself, as something to look back on, maybe to even help others. So screw it, continue on I shall.

LIFE AIM: Blog to be up to date and assignment to be finished by Monday night. Realistic? I don't doubt myself for a second.

'I would like to turn in my skin and change it for a new epidermis. It feels as though I will never be able to rinse the sadness from my soul' Holly A Smith

So for the first time I wasn't dreading therapy at all and it was quite an unknown strange feeling... A sign that things were improving and progress was being made? I felt almost shy going back after finally opening up but once I was in there I was fine. Well, not fine, but as though I could continue to open up with some level of ease.

She said that she thought it would be beneficial to spend the session talking in more depth about the various events I had written on the piece of paper the week before and how they affect me now. I talked about the very gutteral pain that I experience 24/7 that feels like I am carrying a huge weight around inside me, I talked about the persistant nightmares, I talked about the flashbacks that happen during the day when random and unexplainable things send me into a panic stricken state of distress that are gradually increasing the further into therapy I get, I talked about the fear and the emotional pain and the physical pain and how it all just feels too much and I want it to vanish. I told her how paranoid and socially anxious I get and how most of the time I feel completely worthless and as though I don't deserve to be happy and how I feel guilty and fraudulent when anything good happens in my life. I briefly mentioned my sexuality and how I feel as though it has formed as a result of my past and how in some ways I am quite over sexualised and at times disinhibited.

Again, she thought there was too much to talk about in one session so we mainly talked about the physical pain I feel in my stomach. I spent my adolescent years being prodded and interrogated and sliced open by gastroentrologists and gynacologists looking for a physiological explaination for what is actually psychosomatic pain. I let them cut me and anally probe me and examine me intimately in the vane desperate hope that they would realise from how I looked physically that something was going on that was bad and that they could save me. I almost wanted them to find physical evidence of my torture so that I could come forward and disclose and nobody could possibly accuse me of lying and it wouldn't just be my word against his. I was already diagnosed with PCOS and endometriosis at this point so I knew what the pain related to these conditions felt like but this was, and continues to be, something else entirely. It was the first time I had ever admitted that I knew what the physical pain was.

She asked me to describe what the pain in my stomach would look like if it was extracted. I described it as a grotesque ball of thick black bile; a perfect picture of pain, destruction and death. She asked me how I thought I could go about changing the mass into something more manageable and less invasive. I had no idea and I don't think that she did either but at least she didn't ask me to draw it. She suggested that if I could possibly find a way to deal with the cause of the pain then it might reduce/ evaporate all by itself.

But, although it's not nice to carry this weight around with me, I see it as the punishment I deserve. I talked about how I still feel like everything that happened to me was my fault. I explained that, although I was young when Charlie abused me, I had a woman's body, I was fully developed, I was not a little girl; I had hair in all the wrong places and boobs and a monthly trickle of womanly blood that seeped out maliciously from between my legs (he liked it when that happened). I explained that when the abuse started, it was purely sexual and it was only once I started questioning outloud what was happening to me and fighting against it that the threats, manipulation, physical abuse and more extreme/ disgusting sexual acts commenced. If I had just accepted the initial stuff than maybe none of that would ever have happened, and there I am, back to blaming myself. I also told her that I felt as though by already self-harming I gave him some kind of subliminal permission to hurt me; I could hardly complain about another person hurting me when I was already hurting myself. Bernadette was brilliant in her response to this. Having never vocalised those thoughts to anybody before I expected her to shrug it off and think I was being ridiculous but she didn't... She really listened to what I was saying and acknowledged why I may feel that way. She did say all the cliched stuff about how regardless of my physical form I was still a child and he had a position of power over me, blah blah blah. But most importantly, she said with sincerity that it wasn't my fault. And it felt wonderful. Friends that have known about my past have told me this before but it somehow felt different coming from her, a virtual stranger, a specialist, an adult. Bernadette saying that simple statement made me feel as though she really had my back and that I could trust her with everything, completely difference from my confidence with any type of disclosure to my mother. Another memorable moment where I felt like change was possible.

We finished by identifying areas I might want to work on in the following session. I idetified that the daytime flashbacks and their relationship to the nightmares was something that I would like to explore. Having spoken about the hatred and guilt I feel towards my self in the context of self blame and never being good enough, I felt as though I would also like to explore these feelings further. She told me that it seemed odd that I had so many friends and so many people liked me when I had such a intense dislike of myself. It wasn't a statement but a question, I was stumped. I had no idea how to respond. She winked and said she might have a suggestion that she would put forward in my next session.

Overall, another positive session.

'I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone but though you're still with me, I've been alone all along' Evanescence

I thought about what Bernadette had said about my unwillingness to engage and my readiness to work through my difficult past a lot that week. I am ready for this. I have to be ready for this. Enough of my life has been engulfed by the effects of the abuse I endured and I don't want any more of it stolen away from me. I needed to sort myself out and make the most of this opportunity to have free counselling with a specialist; opportunities like that don't come along all that often what with the mental health budget cuts and the waiting lists and the way in which care is prioritised and the lack of specialist not for profit organisations - it felt like it was now or never and I couldn't let it be never. If I accepted never to even be an option I knew that I might as well go and throw myself under the nearest train - things couldn't carry on like this.

I was perhaps more apprehensive when arriving for my fourth session then I had been when arriving for my first session and even my initial assessment. It was weird. I thought Bernadette might confirm that I was beyond help and she didn't want to work with me any more, maybe the decision would be taken out of my hands. However, that was not the case. She asked me what I had decided and practically beamed when I acknowledged that I wasn't going to find it easy but I was ready to actually start talking and dealing with the past. She had a different demeanour that day, something had changed within me but there was also a definite difference in her too. Maybe she had received clinical supervision or something and was looking at my case with a fresh perspective? She seemed much more confident in her ability to help me and to actually work towards positive psychological change.

She asked me how I felt would be the best way to start. I explained that everything felt so tangled and interlinked that it felt impossible to articulate everything in any kind of comprehensible manner. We came up with the analogy that my brain was a huge tangled ball of string and in order to organise any small length of it, another length had to be pulled at and basically, for one part of the ball of string to be even slightly okay, the rest of the ball had to be too but it was a mess and couldn't all be dealt with in one go. I had no idea how long the ball of string even was or what may be found lurking in it's tangles and that terrified me.

Bernadette suggested that it may be a good idea to initially look at different events in my life as statements. She asked me to draw a timeline of my life with good things written on the top half in green and bad things written on the bottom half in red. At first this task felt simple and we sat in silence whilst I jotted down all of the things that immediately filled my head onto the huge sheet of paper she had provided. It was really strange to look at my life as a chronological set of events, it made it all look so simple.

I was startled by the lack of positive memories and events I had put down from before the age of 8 when I experienced my first trauma. I had previously found it odd that some people could tell stories from their early childhood with such intricate detail whilst I could only provide details that I knew from photographs and what had been told to me by others. I expressed this concern to Bernadette and she said that this was entirely normal for people who had experienced trauma. She told me that I shouldn't think too much into it but warned me that as I deal with the shitty stuff, my mind will begin to process memories in a different way and it may alter what I can and can't remember about my childhood. I just hoped there wasn't anything else dark and twisted within my past waiting to come up and bite me on the ass.

We then briefly discussed each of the points that I had written down. She basically asked me to expand on what happened and how it affected me psychologically and behaviourally at the time. She stated that she deliberately wasn't asking me how the events were interlinked or how I feel they continue to affect me now as that was too much for one session and was something that she wanted to spend more time focussing on in future sessions.

I won't bore you with every little detail that we discussed because it's not overly interesting and it's not dissimilar to stuff that I have written about previously. However, it was interesting to discuss with Bernadette some of my experiences from after Kellie died. I explained that I used to see her at night and that it felt like very real experiences that all of my senses were involved with. I explained that she used to come and talk to me and that sometimes she was nice to me and told me that things weren't my fault and that other times she was mean to me and mad at me and said I was entirely to blame and told me to hurt myself to prove to her that I cared. I explained that I could see, hear, touch, smell and feel her - just as though she was alive and actually there. Bernadette said that it sounded as though what I had experienced for much of my childhood were hallucinations. I know all about hallucinatory experiences from my work so I don't know why I had never realised that was exactly what was happening to me for all this time. I guess deep down I knew that's what it was but I didn't want to accept that as it's often considered a symptom of psychotic type illnesses. Bernadette explained that although hallucinations do fall into that category, a high level of emotional trauma can also lead to short term hallucinatory symptoms; it was just a normal way for my brain to deal with very abnormal circumstances, although could it be considered short term? It felt difficult to recognise that for all that time it had been my own mind playing tricks on me, how could I have been so stupid? But then again, I was only a child whose life experiences far outweighed what she was emotionally mature enough to deal with. And I didn't intend to write this but I don't want to hold anything back so now that I know that, why is it the case that sometimes at night before I fall asleep I can still feel her snuggling up beside me; her scent, her touch, her whispers... Am I actually more severely mentally ill than I have ever even acknowledged? I've talked before about how that used to happen but I've never spoken about how sometimes it still does happen although definitely with less frequency and emotional intensity. Bernadette suggested that it's something I should ask the psychiatrist about when I finally see them... She obviously feels as though it might be relevant and suggestive to a lot of things.

I felt better for having told Bernadette about these experiences and was glad that she had taken me seriously, yet been able to make me rationalise and feel better about what I have, and continue to, experience. Maybe, just maybe, if I had been able to talk to Bernadette about that then I would be able to talk to her about other things that felt deeply scary, shameful and difficult too.

All in all, this session felt like a new start. I felt positive for the first time in months and was rather looking forward to my next session to see what would be discussed. I finally felt as though maybe I was getting somewhere... And maybe Bernadette wasn't quite so bad after all. I was actually beginning to trust her, and maybe starting to quite like her.