Stress.
The effect of stress is a taste like metal in my mouth, all the time.
I'm fortunate, my course finished last week - beginning again in September - so there is time for the highs and lows to balance, to reach an equilibrium.
I hope.
Visiting hangs over the day.
The journey on the motorbike [free parking otherwise it would be £5 a day]
The waiting for the lift up to the ward.
Too many people and the lifts are elsewhere...
The corridor walk to the ward seems really long because it is!
Then pressing the buzzer and waiting...
Then we have no idea what state of mind Josh will be in.
The night with the bloody finger nails and the scratching at wounds was particularly hard to take.
Last night was a very good visit though.
Josh was dressed and though slightly drugged up and out of it, he was there enough, and able to go on towards the next step in dealing with what has happened...
He is sure that he opened a door to hell by talking drugs
And it had been only a matter of time
Before a demonic presence pushed him towards oblivion.
This symbolism allowed us to talk about what if something protected you?
Opening up the possibility that the future is important and that there is a good reason for his survival.
Personally I'd say who ever designed the bus deserves gratitude, and the work of the medical staff! but this isn't about my belief system...Survival is a second chance, the opportunity to become someone living a different life..lessons will be learned, and a return to the old life is possible, but everything will have changed...take this life as a gift.
But first the psychological wounds need to be addressed.
And that isn't happening.
There isn't any psychological support for Josh.
Just us and his friends.
For him to reorient himself to what happened, he needs to be able to reinterpret his view of himself.
Reorganizing traumatic memory has to be done gently...
But he can't live with himself as the person he believes himself to be..
Truth is painful and banal and feels small and so familiar it is difficult to recognize.
Emotion provides the clue.
He flashed anger when talking about going to X ray to have his pelvis imaged.
He had been asked to take his pyjama bottoms down.
'They put a cover over you surely' I asked.
'Yes'
'And they would have asked you to take them down, someone else didn't do it...?'
'No...'
'So you were triggered....'
'No...'
'You are angry...'
Then for the first time he talked about being a victim.
He hadn't associated anger with being triggered.
Triggered people are supposed to run out of the room crying...
Slowly it dawned on him - after all we are very clear that what happened is bullying - that he is a victim.
It is painful to relinquish the fantasy of agency and power.
It is form of denial really, a fantasy that self as victim is impossible, and that self is the direct cause of someone else's actions...
The denial of the truth that self didn't have any plan for what happened on that day, and could not at first realize what was happening, and finally could not access the shock...instead internalizing what happened to create an image of oneself as corrupt and corrupting...is pretty common.
Feels safer to blame one's self...
So I'm not surprised he would use the metaphor of demonic presences.
That is how it feels for him...
We left him with the Evangelical Born Again mental health nurse...Psychiatrists threw Freud so far away, any concept of how to support someone engaging with mental chaos (as the brain tries to defrag in the presence of severe confusion and distress) is impossible for them to imagine.
So psychiatrists don't do psychotherapy.
Nor do they think it works.
So that leaves CBT.
'Oh could you offer CBT?' say I to the psychiatrist in the home-visit team.
'Service User doesn't talk - he would have to talk to the therapist for it to be of any value'.
They sent us the occupational therapist who tried to explain the ABC model (integral to CBT) to Service User, and missed out the significance in his replies of the empty box called trigger...
I'm fortunate, my course finished last week - beginning again in September - so there is time for the highs and lows to balance, to reach an equilibrium.
I hope.
Visiting hangs over the day.
The journey on the motorbike [free parking otherwise it would be £5 a day]
The waiting for the lift up to the ward.
Too many people and the lifts are elsewhere...
The corridor walk to the ward seems really long because it is!
Then pressing the buzzer and waiting...
Then we have no idea what state of mind Josh will be in.
The night with the bloody finger nails and the scratching at wounds was particularly hard to take.
Last night was a very good visit though.
Josh was dressed and though slightly drugged up and out of it, he was there enough, and able to go on towards the next step in dealing with what has happened...
He is sure that he opened a door to hell by talking drugs
And it had been only a matter of time
Before a demonic presence pushed him towards oblivion.
This symbolism allowed us to talk about what if something protected you?
Opening up the possibility that the future is important and that there is a good reason for his survival.
Personally I'd say who ever designed the bus deserves gratitude, and the work of the medical staff! but this isn't about my belief system...Survival is a second chance, the opportunity to become someone living a different life..lessons will be learned, and a return to the old life is possible, but everything will have changed...take this life as a gift.
But first the psychological wounds need to be addressed.
And that isn't happening.
There isn't any psychological support for Josh.
Just us and his friends.
For him to reorient himself to what happened, he needs to be able to reinterpret his view of himself.
Reorganizing traumatic memory has to be done gently...
But he can't live with himself as the person he believes himself to be..
Truth is painful and banal and feels small and so familiar it is difficult to recognize.
Emotion provides the clue.
He flashed anger when talking about going to X ray to have his pelvis imaged.
He had been asked to take his pyjama bottoms down.
'They put a cover over you surely' I asked.
'Yes'
'And they would have asked you to take them down, someone else didn't do it...?'
'No...'
'So you were triggered....'
'No...'
'You are angry...'
Then for the first time he talked about being a victim.
He hadn't associated anger with being triggered.
Triggered people are supposed to run out of the room crying...
Slowly it dawned on him - after all we are very clear that what happened is bullying - that he is a victim.
It is painful to relinquish the fantasy of agency and power.
It is form of denial really, a fantasy that self as victim is impossible, and that self is the direct cause of someone else's actions...
The denial of the truth that self didn't have any plan for what happened on that day, and could not at first realize what was happening, and finally could not access the shock...instead internalizing what happened to create an image of oneself as corrupt and corrupting...is pretty common.
Feels safer to blame one's self...
So I'm not surprised he would use the metaphor of demonic presences.
That is how it feels for him...
We left him with the Evangelical Born Again mental health nurse...Psychiatrists threw Freud so far away, any concept of how to support someone engaging with mental chaos (as the brain tries to defrag in the presence of severe confusion and distress) is impossible for them to imagine.
So psychiatrists don't do psychotherapy.
Nor do they think it works.
So that leaves CBT.
'Oh could you offer CBT?' say I to the psychiatrist in the home-visit team.
'Service User doesn't talk - he would have to talk to the therapist for it to be of any value'.
They sent us the occupational therapist who tried to explain the ABC model (integral to CBT) to Service User, and missed out the significance in his replies of the empty box called trigger...
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