Counselling

I’ve been attending counselling sessions and yesterday’s visit provided plenty of food for thought that I want  to give some further consideration to.

I spend much of the sessions jumping from one life event to another as everything comes spilling out of me, things that I haven’t thought about in years, things that are occurring now. I’m not entirely sure what I want to talk about, or that everything can be covered in six sessions, or that anyone could even keep up with my self-absorbed waffling.

But actually, yesterday she did manage to pull out a few common threads and has started my thinking in a new light about something.

One of my main issues at the moment is feeling overwhelmed. We’ve talked at length about how I believe my mum to be autistic, and how I’m either on the spectrum or at the least I’m of a broader autism phenotype, and she’s been taken aback by how much I take upon myself to do, the all night feeding, the 10 wake ups per night, having no evenings, working, flogging myself over becoming an autism expert as quickly as I can, and the constant guilt and berating myself for not achieving enough, for not being the best, not being perfect.

She is really keen for me to put some self-care in place and it became apparent I wasn’t very good at this, that I seem to believe I shouldn’t do things for myself and feel guilty when I do.

She explained that we learn how to look after ourselves initially from how our parents look after us, by how they respond to our needs. This is a subconscious process but essentially how they care for us provides us with the blue print for how you take care of yourself – as well as how you relate to other people and many other things. Small children are tiny mimics.

You can see how having an autistic mother might complicated this process (and why my autistic traits could be either genetic or learned). More so than the autism though, but the fact she was addicted to tranquillisers for a while when I was tiny and can’t even remember me when I was small. We used to call her a zombie. Basically it’s quite feasible that my needs might not have been entirely met, I do know I was left to cry it out (which was common practice in that era I will point out). I know for a fact as I got older I tried to placate other children and convince them not to wind her up, because it made life in our house a misery.

What it boils down to is that because my mum could be quite unresponsive to me when I was tiny, I didn’t really learn how to look after myself. Because my needs were not met I now struggle to meet my own needs for myself. What I did learn though was to try and meet other people’s needs, suppressing my own in the process. I think I actually learned not to expect my needs to be met, that it wasn’t something I had a right to.

This reminds me of that lifelong feeling that I’m not supposed to have all those things that other people take for granted, you know, love, friendship, good things happening to them, the pursuit of dreams and goals etc.

I learned how to walk on eggshells and tune in to other people to try and keep them happy, or at least to try and keep them from getting upset. No wonder I often lose myself in all the people pleasing, why I can’t seem to stop myself. Because my needs and opinions and beliefs and feelings should be repressed and secondary to everyone elses. That is how I was taught to be.

An extension of this is my inability to argue properly. This sounds strange but I’m really afraid of confrontation and in that situation (which does arise because I bend and bend for people until I snap, which in itself clouds my ability to argue rationally because by that point it’s an explosion of emotion that even I can’t make sense of), but I struggle to argue in general because growing up there was just no point in trying. No matter how right I was I couldn’t win, it wouldn’t make a difference. I was basically told to let it drop for the sake of not upsetting my mum, my dad would always side with my mum because he believed in presenting a united front and for the sake of peace. But combine the two things and it’s little wonder that arguing, or disagreeing becomes problematic for me now. I can’t argue at the appropriate level for the situation and my head gets in such a tangle I can’t formulate an argument anyway.

So if this is the situation, and it resonates with me, it makes sense… how do I move on from this? Because that is what this is about. I don’t want to feel sorry for myself and I don’t even hold any sense of blame to my parents, they were doing the best with what they had, I don’t feel any resentment.

But apparently I need to re-parent myself now. First up I’m under orders to take some time out for myself, half a day a week and half an hour per day. With that I need to do things purely for me, that I find fulfilling.

I also need to tune into myself better and learn to recognise what my needs are and then work to meet them.  Yes I am allowed to do that apparently (now that’s a message I need to keep drilling into myself)… In truth I don’t entirely know how to do this. This is where the session ended. I’m just watching for signs that things aren’t right, such things are the tension headaches, or feeling cranky, things that are trying to alert me to something going on inside, to unmet needs or that I’m spreading myself too thin. And then I need to actually take some action. None of this feels easy!

Some useful things also came about from discussing Sam too, particularly my misery at thinking he’s been left out of party invites and worries about him being lonely in general. First up she said I need to recognise that these feelings are all mine and not Sam’s (based on my own history). She tasked me to draw a line in my diary down the centre of the page, write my feelings and needs on one side and Sam’s on the other. Then I need to recognise that these are separate, Sam is not me and I am not him. We don’t think and feel the same, we are two separate people. And what bothers me may well not bother him, or not in the same way, or not as much. We are individuals.

She pointed out that because of his autism he might be less bothered by the social interaction side of life and find his energies may be centred more in other areas, these areas that could make him happy even though they aren’t my personal idea of success. So don’t get hung up on marriage, popularity, the size of his circle of friends because that may be my idea of success but not his. It may be, but don’t just presume it is. Don’t presume anything.

All in all that was a positive session

.