moon_on_water

I am getting there. Better I mean. But slowly. Nothing serious, just another sore throat and chest ripping coughing with headache and temperature. If i wasn't so cynical I would say it was brought on by psychic attack.

I attended a supervision group (the second module of two days) which was on Monday and Tuesday last week. By Tuesday afternoon I was running a high temperature, but I didn't leave the group because too much shit had gone down and I didn't want to add to people's fantasies by leaving early.

During an exercise on the first day, to name the thing that wasn't being named in the room, I did a foolish thing. I did the exercise and named something I was feeling.
I told the truth. I told the group that I was irritated and angry and I didn't know why. I shared it so I could attend to what was being said because if I held onto it without sharing it in the room I would be absent and I didn't want that.

Immediately I was attacked. One woman said she felt criticised. I was sorry for that, I wasn't criticising her, in fact I wasn't yet sure what the irritation was about. When I knew I would tell them, but for now I needed just to name it and wait for the penny to drop. It was amazing how many people took my feelings as an insult personal to them.

One man said he was angry I had dropped this just a little while before lunch. I told him I was sorry it was not good timing for him but I was doing what I needed to do.

After lunch one woman said she was upset that she had had to deal with my feelings over lunch. That was when I nearly hit the roof- but very calmly I told her that no, she wasn't dealing with my feelings over lunch, she was dealing with HER feelings about me over lunch, and I could not be responsible for those.

The next day, one woman told the group that she had been paralysed with fear the day before and didn't feel safe in the group. This is because one bloody person chose to be authentic and not tip toe around pretending things are just hunky-dory.

Therapists really are the worse. They think they have the lion share of authenticity, transparency- they think because they intend to help others that automatically means they are good people.

It didn't help that I also voiced the possibility that as therapists we should look at whether we need our clients as much or more than our clients need us. Damn it. Let us admit that we are a certain type of people who do this work. We are people that are prone to be do-gooders and we like the way it makes US feel to be of use to someone else. Just occasionally we should admit that at times, some therapists get off on having vulnerable people venerate us, need us. Some of us even possibly (shock horror) cultivate need because we need to be needed. A woman at the group even admitted that she felt high after working with a client, and that she felt it was because she'd had a good session. I didn't help myself by voicing the fact that all she could possibly know was that she had had a good session. Unless she asked the client she had no way of knowing that the client had had the same uplifting experience- a hush all round. She tried to say that she did know, she could tell. Oh dear this stuff worries me, it really does.

They hated what I was saying. I was a traitor in their midst, and all I was doing was saying hold on, look in the mirror, examine yourselves, don't make false claims, don't tell yourselves narratives. Ask yourself if you really can know another person's experience as you claim to be able to.

I am sick yes, physically, but I am ready for the next round. Bring them on. Wake them up. Therapists need to look at themselves. I count myself in that number. I also need to look, but I am willing, what makes these people so unwilling?

Ill. Ill. Ill.
Sick of being sick. In the last five months I have been ill with some such thing five times. Once a month.
Not good going. Lover phones to ask if he can bring me anything but I have refused all offers as what generally happens is he gets it and gives it to his family and so the circle goes on. I am not going to give him or his family this one. Or have it back.
Go away sickness. leave me alone.

My mind is buzzing. Just had two days with therapists who want to be supervisors.

Nice to be in a group again, but also nice to be back home being ordinary and in the world of asking my
daughter what she wants for dinner.

Ordinary, normal, no big searching questions that make me feel space-y.

I notice when I am in these groups I tend to have moments when I just have to lighten up or make someone laugh by being outrageous, or the opposite of 'empathic therapist' . I want to laugh!!! Let me just be ordinary. And I also know that I am looking for fun in therapy.

It reminds me of Laing's session with a depressive client and how he spent the whole hour telling jokes outraging the client (who had laughed uproariously for the whole time) who felt Laing had not done therapy or earned his money. And Laing's view that he thought he had by providing a window where the client had had a different experience. Or something.

Now I could pick this apart. Just as it would be picked apart in a therapy group as possibly not being empathic to the client bla bla bla, but I also feel - Yes, sometimes too much empathy of the wrong sort, the formulaic sort is also not helpful. And that Laing was actually trying to do something much deeper than telling jokes, by pointing out something about the client's self importance and in his wanting to hold on to his depressive state.

Oh god. See the effect of being in a therapy group. I feel as though I have just disappeared up my own backside. I need to go back to washing the potatoes for dinner again. And changing into my pyjamas and sitting down to watch some drivel on the box. I want my head to stop peeling back layers of meaning and finding more layers of meaning. I want to hear my lover say. Isn't that just stating the bleedin obvious!!! Oh to be back to the bleedin obvious.

I think my lover is playing games.
I wasn't in on Sunday at 4pm. I was in town when he called and I think he gets jealous. He didn't ask
where I was and our conversation was brief. He knows I am on a course for the next few days and his wife
is away, but he didn't call as he usually does in the evening. He often goes quiet and withdrawn when something is up. I am aware that I am feeling quite angry with him. Of course I am assuming he is in some way punishing me for not being available on Sunday to see him. I may be wrong of course, but I am interested at the level of my feelings. I just think oh, fuck off with your crazy jealousy. How can he dare be jealous when I am the one that can't contact him. and he is the one with other relationships. Does he really think I can sit around and wait for him? No. I have to live my life. Perhaps I recognise that we are just each others light relief from the world and nothing more. Fine. I accept that , but then don't be jealous about something you have no right to feel. Deal with it. Get over it. This is what we have , an affair, and nothing more. We each want exactly what we have from the other and no more. That is the fact.
I am enjoying the course very much too. And can't be bothered to be bothered or side tracked.

Went to National Theatre to hear Joan talk about her work The Year of Magical Thinking. Wonderful book. In error I booked her talk and not the play she wrote based on it with Vanessa Redgrave ( I should have known , in a rush of optimism I marvelled at the cheapness of the tickets £6 for two of us ! HA!) Anyway it was a real privilege hearing her talk. Her book is wonderful. If I get some funds together I will save up and go and see the real thing.


She is a tiny woman, almost a skeleton, and I wonder at her courage in writing such a raw portrayal of grief, first at the loss of her husband of 40 years and then later of her daughter from a brain tumour - as she says at the start of the play..... we will all experience this grief , maybe not now, but at a time in the future...... it is pertinent to us all.

Last week just before I came down with sore throat and chesty cough I went to see an exhibition at the Wellcome Trust.

"24 sets of photographs taken before and after death

Nothing teaches us more about life than death itself. Journalist Beate Lakotta and photographer Walter Schels asked 24 terminally ill people if they could accompany them during their last weeks and days. From these vigils came a series of insightful descriptions and photographic portraits taken before and after death.

Far from being gloomy, these intimate concerns of the dying reveal the preciousness and transience of life, and make us question what we often take for granted."



The exhibition was profoundly moving. The large photographs of people's faces and the short paragraphs under them, conversations with them and their thoughts on their imminent demise, were powerful in the extreme and touched my soul in a way church, or religion doesn't. I went there with the friend who I haven't seen for a year through our differences about my affair with a married man. I knew she would like the exhibition so I texted her to let her know it was on. She sent a text back asking if I wanted to go with her. ... and so we went, together.

It was easy being with her. It has taken a year and a bit for the hurt to die down between us. And after seeing the show we hugged. You can't hold on to ridiculous differences for long when faced with your own mortality.

I am appalled to learn from a friend who is a chaplain in a hospital that she has no supervision.
She lives alone, and deals with such things as having to arrange burials for dead babies for people who don't speak english, arranging to wrap the poor 26 week old foetus and deal tenderly with the hysterical parents with the aid of an interpreter (dangerous at these times when the words you choose are so important) and then to deal with a suicide the next day. Where does she debrief? She needs to talk about these things. Luckily she opened up to me last night, because she knows I am a therapist, but she felt until then unable to call up a friend just to talk and be heard. She needs supervision. Especially as she lives alone and these things build up in the psyche and need clearing out. This sort of thing really upsets me. Do people who should know better really not understand the importance of support in these situations.

Today he bit my shoulder and left a mark.
It comes after his fear about my friendship with another man.
He withdrew for a day until he realised he was being ridiculous.
I said "you are doing things in your head, don't , it is all rubbish".
And so after a few days of being jealous he comes back to me.
Love refreshed by seeing the possibility of it's ending- for he is
tied to his family and I am free, except for the fact I love him.
And so for the first time in two years he marks me at the neck.
A sign . Please don't leave. Please don't forget me.
Doesn't he know that the mark he leaves on me runs deeper than
skin deep?

Best we switch Christmas and Easter methinks.
The snow we had on Sunday was three or four inches thick. Looked beautiful, didn't ice up the roads, or turn to slush and was gone by the evening. Perfect. It didn't affect travel in anyway, or cause anyone injury. It provided a wonderful few hours of snowball fighting and was so well-planned it arrived on a weekend with time to enjoy it and disappeared before the adults started cursing.

Recently a friend of mine's husband died tragically of cancer. It was quick, though not painless.
My friend's grief is centred around her children and their pain. The youngest is 15, the oldest at university.
As for herself, she is free of a relationship she found disappointing. She hasn't had anything but a pretence of
a marriage for 12 years. Don't ask. I am not sure how she stayed. But she did, and in the last year did everything she could to tend for him so he could die in peace at home. Still she has a lover, married, who is going to be slipping in the back of the church for the memorial service for her husband. She doesn't seem to find this in the least bit unacceptable. She sees it as a support from him. Are there degrees of morals? I who can understand her affair, find it totally wrong of her to allow him to come to the memorial service. I find it more repellant of him to want to go. Does it not smack of gloating? Yet who am I to feel such a revulsion, when so many will find my present life questionable.

One of the things I love most about life is the way everyone is so different. Understanding why we all feel so differently is a absolute source of delight and wonder to me.

Now enough of the heavy stuff, which dress shall I go dancing in?

I can't believe it has been 48 weeks.....
Almost a full year.
Mainly the blog has taken a very back seat. I found it easier to dedicate myself to the novel and when I blogged I ended feeling as though I had done the writing bit, and had no time nor enthusiasm for doing anything here. Still it is good to take stock and see where I am. Here is the catch up.

1. Finished first draft of the novel, coming in at 104,000 words, I have put it in a drawer about a month ago and am leaving it like good wine to ferment. I shall begin rewrites sometime in the next month.
2. Started to work on play. Very different from a novel to write and I am struggling. Unlike the novel I do need to know where I am headed and who is who right from the start. Should be interesting.
3. My daughter's stomach aches are from stress about school work, she has developed an ulcer. I wish I could communicate accurately to her how unimportant these bloody exams are, but I can't reach her.
4. My lover is well. Our love is well. We enjoy each other within the bounds of what we have. I do not want anything more. I am happy.
5. Dancing brings be a lovely group of people to be with, and has totally taken over my daughter's life. She is now demoing and intending to learn tango, ballroom, cha cha, latin. Thank goodness she has found something that brings her in touch with lovely people and where her confidence in herself as a woman, and a graceful talented woman at that, has been allowed to grow.
6. I only have people in my life now who are there for me in real ways. Two friends down but richer by their absence ironically.
7. My clients continue to flourish. I am intensely grateful to have them in my life. It is a two way street, each of us learning from the other.
8. Made an impromptu visit to Prague before Easter. Have decided to do many more such short trips. Lovely city.

One day at a time.
He didn't show today. He always comes , so I imagine it was difficult.
Went to Portobello Road. Early. Coffee and croissant in a lovely place called 'Tom's'
Lazed around. Some days are just meant for pottering. Warm and lovely.

This is why I feel unable to have a full relationship. I go from boredom and deciding to give this love affair up, and then he comes and he shows up at Ceroc, and he watches me dance, having slipped out on the bike. He wasn't allowed to stay, he wasn't a member, but he came to see me dance.... and then all my decisions go out the window and I am his again. I suppose it is just lust, a loving of his physical presence and his care and love for me... or lust for me....but I looked at him, suddenly seeing that familiar figure dressed in leather, standing 6ft 3 and I thought. He is gorgeous. I love him and his sensitive heart. How can I leave. And yet a few days ago, it felt so easy to do. This is why I can't commit. I can't deal with all these fluctuating emotions

I am fickle. One moment I am sure of wanting a future with him, and the next I am bored of this. I won't act yet but I feel the tide is turning. There is something ever shrinking of not being able to text him any more. This will have to change somehow, there must be a way to lockup the phone so that no one can access text messages. This space is ever shrinking.

Today, I didn't want to see him.

I came home, worked and then went out with my daughter. I told him I was going to be out with her, so he won't come round. I need some space and thinking time.

It seems I am no good at this.
I just can't pull away. And when I tell him we are simply putting off the inevitable, that
he must let me go. He must go to where he belongs. He looks at me with pain, and tells
me no he cannot let me go. He loves me. And he won't. So it is me again - to have the strength to go when I do not want to go.
He came over today. He fixed the boiler pressure. Squeezing himself into a tiny attic space, getting himself all dusty. He did it because he noticed the pressure was low. I told him not to bother but he did. He takes care of me like this, and it so bloody hard to give up what I have never had before. But it is all a matter of time. Sitting on the Titanic looking at the iceberg getting closer. Wondering if I can swim away in time.

Numb. Lost. Saw his face today. He looks lost too. Trying to keep it together , get it back to where we were. There is a lot of sadness around, though he masks it. Has been doing guilt jobs around his house, and the family is calming. I on the other hand am not. I am right up against knowing I will eventually have to let him go to where he belongs. I feel as though I am waiting for someone to amputate my arm without anesthetic.

Even so, I wouldn't have changed a thing. I have had 9 months.... of something special.
This was not a fling. This was a love affair.

On Saturday his daughter was looking for something on his phone. she has had her suspicions I am sure. And he didn't delete my last message. Or it was sent again , as sometimes happens with mobile texts. Anyway his weekend was spent with the family in tears. He thinks nothing will change between us. He has lied his way out of it, and even though they don't believe his story, they want to believe it. But the truth is something has changed for me. I cannot sleep walk through this new change, as he wants me to. He needs to choose his family, not wander till he falls of the cliff and his wife throws him out. And as he can't, I have to.


I am already in a state of grief. I saw him this morning. I felt so sad. But kept it to myself. I have watched the grief build today, till I can't keep it in any more. Tomorrow I must tell him. We must let each other go. And I need to look after this broken heart. I don't want to have this clarity. I want to carry on dreaming with him, but something that is too much the core of me, will not go to sleep. If his wife phoned me, I could not lie to her. Perhaps no one will understand this, but I have more trouble with lying to someone about something they think they know, or intuit, than in sleeping with their husband. To me it is the ulitmate betrayal. You do not stamp on someone's intuition and damage that most prescious of things. If things come to light you do not lie to them. Omission is a sort of lie yes, and that is what he has been guilty of but now he is lying to their faces and not giving them necessary information. They need to know that their marriage needs looking at, for this to have occurred, and I cannot any longer be a bystander to this traffic accident.

It is as if he is allowing circumstances to dictate his fate. And I can't bear that. What happens if his wife throws him out? He doesn't choose anything, he just has circumstance decide for him. He needs to choose. He needs to let right action happen, and if he won't I have to. Why does it always have to be me? To leave someone I love when they are resistant to leaving me. To leave when all I want is to be with him. To give up the love and care I have felt in the last 9 months, it is so difficult. But I HAVE TO DO IT.

Felt so strange today. Just after lunch I suddenly felt all the energy drain out of me. I mean really. My legs felt like jelly. I lay down for a bit, but I wasn't tired just energyless. When T came over at 4 he took me out to buy slow release foods like bananas and stuff, and ended up buying me far too much stuff. But he shows he cares for me this way. He tells me he is angry that I don't look after myself and that I needed to eat something a bit better than a bowl of brussel sprouts and cheese for lunch. I know he is right, but Listen I had the sprouts and I didn't want to throw them out, and I just couldn't think what else I fancied. Anyway we came back and we ate something, and my daughter eyed the toffee dessert he had stashed in the trolley just for her. He loves me. He really does. Right or wrong. He loves me. And I love him. And he is so sweet to M. And sometimes I just want to hug him and melt into him because any other state just isn't as perfect as that. And laugh.... he makes me laugh.

He must have landed now in Heathrow.
No word. Always this is the worse time. Wondering whether
this is it. The inevitable future that this relationship has in store for me.
And which I accept. If he actually turned to me one day and said, I am
going to make it work with my wife, and I can no longer see you, I would be sad.
But something else too. Glad for him. Hopeful for him, and in my heart although
there would be pain, it would be sweet pain for what we had, and a relief that no one but I got hurt in the process. The opposite outcome would be worse. I couldn't actually cope with him saying he would leave her for me. I will not let that be the outcome.
I am off flying this afternoon. I shall be at Heathrow too, coming in after he has left it. I am longing to be home. I love my home. Want to see my daughter. Feed the cats. Sit. Think. Wonder. I am filled up with sunshine moments.