when i saw A i used to get upset a lot. she used to say that there is an ocean of grief inside me, and all this grief needs to get out -- somehow. i was sad a lot. i cried a lot. so much terrible sadness. on occasion i was laid low by sadness, for a week or two weeks. an ocean of sadness. 

yesterday i went to see B (promoted to her very own letter!) after teaching my first day of classes. i was very tired. i ached physically pretty much all over and i was, though i didn't feel, emotionally drained. i hadn't slept much the night before. a bit into the session i got upset over the administrators who works in her office. they handle the accounting and the refilling. i am not crazy about there being all these people who know so much about me -- who i am, what medication i take -- but i guess the pharmacists know too, and a universe of other people. 

the person in charge has been particularly difficult through the years and we had a few unpleasant encounters. when B was my psychiatrist i never had a chance to talk to her about it. she would cut my complaints short and, since i was there to get scripts in the smoothest possible way, and since i had a therapist i could talk to, i didn't pursue it. also, i was scared of B. she intimidated me a little because she held the purse strings of my medication and psychiatrists have a way to fuck you around when it comes to meds. it's their little power trip. 

yesterday i brought up the unpleasant administrator for the first time since B became my therapist. many things happened at the same time:

a. i got upset and my speech became passionate, outraged, emotional b. i kept well within the bounds of the acceptable. i didn't raise my voice one tiny bit  c. i don't know if B knows it -- i did tell her some of it, but she may not have gotten the full import -- but raising my voice and losing my cool, have been the banes of my childhood and, in reprisal, my nastily truncated therapy with A. when i was a kid i felt so, so powerless. i was punished all the time. i was hit. i was teased till i broke. i remember the pressure rising in my chest and my mind rmantra-ing: don't lose it, don't lose it. but i always lost it. i lost it like fucking clockwork. i would shout. i had nothing else to use against what felt to me the gigantic, unfair power my mom exercised sadistically against me. my mom had this thing she would say: "there you go: now you are on the side of the wrong [i can't translate this better]. even if you were on the side of the right, losing your temper has put you on the side of the wrong." this felt like the ultimate outrage. had i really been "on the side of the right?" why hadn't she told me? i would not have lost my cool then! and if i was right, why did shouting make me magically wrong? what did it matter that i was shouting when i had been right all along? there are no words for the impotent outrage of the child who is trampled on by sadistic adults. no language d. shouting was a huge deal with A too. she was really sensitive to shouting -- it upset her terribly. she asked me many times not to shout and i tried very hard not to, but in the first years of my treatment i simply could not not shout. you would have had to sew my mouth shut. i often detected in her (i'm sure unfairly, but that's how transference works) the same terrible violence my mom (and other adults) had perpetrated against me as a child and, like that child, i shouted. i had to make myself heard, somehow. in the course of the years i shouted less and less frequently. near the end it was rare   e. so, yesterday, when i expressed my upset at the administrator's rudeness with emotional speech i felt pretty much like a fucking rockstar. i thought i was doing exactly what i was supposed to be doing. i thought i was letting some of the grief out of the ocean through a properly dug canal, the water calmly contained by the levees, not spilling, no "passing to the side of the wrong"  f. and then B interrupted me. i had just another few sentences to go and i would have stopped anyway, but she didn't know that. she cut me off and i said, somewhat agitatedly, "i'm not done!" she said, shockingly, "but i have something to say," as if that was a perfectly good reason to cut me off   g. and something broke inside me. some old grief, some lifelong grief, flooded into me. because this "adult" felt it was perfectly okay to interrupt me just because she had something she wanted to say   h. this is how i think of therapy: i think of therapy as the place where you get heard. if you never felt heard in your whole life, you do get heard here. and since there is this wonderful thing called transference, you get heard, for the first time, but all the people who didn't even try to hear you when you were little. you get a second chance. you get to tell them, "you are wrong," and "you hurt me," and they listen. it's a minor miracle born of human kindness and the encounter of two psyches in the name of something that falls very clearly under the umbrella of love   i. but yesterday this adult to my child decided that i was done speaking and that her need to say something trumped my need to finish what i had to say   j. i think B felt i was getting out of control, overwhelmed by emotions (she said so) and she wanted to soothe the emotions before they overtook me. what i don't know is whether she was scared that the emotions would lead to unpleasantness -- shouting, escalation, possibly something physical   k. but this is not how i operate. there is a very powerful part of me that is almost always (i'm tempted to say always) orchestrating, or trying to orchestrate, how i express myself. yesterday this part of me was entirely in charge. she knew that i was doing fine, that i was expressing myself within the rules, so she was relaxed, allowing me to regress into ancient powerlessness at the abuse of adults. the administrator was an abusive adult and i was telling my mom about it. i wasn't shouting. i wasn't doing anything wrong. but i was upset. upset is okay. upset is fine   l. and it scares me no end that B has formed an idea of me as someone who can get so easily out of control that she needs to be stopped before things escalate into forbidden territory   m. did i tell her that i am like that? did i contribute to this misapprehension? i do warn therapists about me, but i'm not sure how that warning gets received. i don't want to scare people, but i think that maybe i do. i think that i scare people into wanting to protect themselves from me   n. we tell people bad things about ourselves. some of them are not quite true, but have built inside them the imperative of being told anyway. we tell people that we are horrible persons. in The Center Cannot Hold Elyn Saks needs to tell her analyst(s) that she kills small children. she doesn't do anything of the kind, of course, but the compulsion to tell is so powerful she becomes psychotic so that she can tell the world what a terrible, awful person she is

i dreamed that i went out with my mom to buy clothes. as usual in my dreams, we weren't in any recognizable place. we were out and about shopping. i was on my skateboard, though for some reason i was using two, one for each foot. i left my skateboards outside when we entered the shop; we didn't find anything (they had sold all the nice shirts we had seen the day before). when we walked back out i was surprised and grateful to find them there. they were pointing in different directions from each other, so my mom straightened them. rage started boiling inside me. as we were moving down the sidewalk something happened and i was sitting on my ass on the skateboards, out of balance. my mom got me from under my arms and pulled me up. the rage blew up like the contents of a pressure cooker. i told her to STOP. i told her she has to PAY ATTENTION. i told her she has to UNDERSTAND.

her hurt. her uncomprehending face. her desire to help.

me, rageful and powerless and guilty. i woke up anxious, upset, and lonely.

i find myself, when i'm upset and S asks me what he can do for me, saying, i want to be respected. i don't know where that comes from but this is what i want, to be respected.

it's not hard to see childhood trauma in all this. these dreams recur and recur and recur. A told me once that i am extremely sensitive to misattunement. this is what i am. misattunement sends me into a tailspin. no one was paying attention when i was a child. never. i know because i know the actors and none of them was capable of paying attention. nothing in me that mattered was paid any attention to. it devastates a child. it lays waste into a child.