Girl. Not interrupted.

June 11th, 2010 |Published in Uncategorized | Link to this Post| 6 replies

How to start this post, whether to post it at all, those are the questions this morning. I think I’ve mentioned that I have recently scaled back the time I spend at work, and have begun the long process of re-training to become a counsellor. Then there’s the running, then there’s the wedding planning, then there’s researching all the ways to use up the rhubarb we’ve been sent in our veggie box, SO MUCH RHUBARB, it’s a busy, rhubarb filled time.

Part of the counselling course is skills practice, we do about an hour and a half of theory, and then we split into groups and practice on each other. The thing is, you have to bring up your own stuff when you’re playing the role of client, and that’s brought up some things which, although I think about them often, I haven’t ever really worked through. This week in particular, we discussed the i-you relationship between counsellor and client, i-you, rather than i-it, the ‘it’ being the problem, the you being… well, you. This is where I realised, as I was playing the role of client, that when I talk about the things I have never really worked through, I tell them like a story, this happened, and then I did this, and then this happened, and then this, and she said, and then he did… and never once, do I say it made me feel like this, or, and that’s when I thought this would be a good idea.

It was very rarely a good idea.

I’ve been fascinated over the last few years by memoirs written by young women who have come through trauma, been somewhat self destructive, and then come out of the other side. Women who have been through hard ship I could never imagine, and finally emerged, sometimes stronger, sometimes not.

John found a book recently which he bought me, as he thought it would be especially interesting to me. It’s called ‘Wasted’, by Marya Hornbacher.

Extract:
I am not here to spill my guts and tell you how awful it’s been, that my Daddy was mean, and my mother was mean, and some kid called me Fatso in third grade, because none of the above is true. I am not going to repeat, at length, how eating disorders are “about control,” because we’ve all heard it. It’s a buzzword, reductive, categorical, a tidy way of herding people into a mental quarantine and saying: There. That’s that. Eating disorders are “about”: yes, control, and history, and philosophy, society, personal strangeness, family fuck-ups, autoerotics, myth, mirrors, love and death and S&M, magazines and religion, the individual’s blindfolded stumble-walk through an ever stranger world The question is really not if eating disorders are “neurotic” and indicate a glitch in the mind – even I would have a hard time jusitfying, rationally, the practice of starving oneself to death or feasting only to toss back the feast – but rather why; why this glitch, what flipped this switch, why so many of us? Why so easy a choice, this? Why now? Some toxin in the air? Some freak of nature that has turned women against their own bodies with a virulence unmatched in history, all of a sudden, with no cause? The individual does not exist outside of society. There are reasons why this is happening, and they do not exist in the mind alone.

It’s an extraordinary book, written by an extraordinary woman, but I’d be lying if I said it’s an easy read. I have never identified with someone as much as I do with her, and I’m having to read it in small sections, it’s cathartic, it’s beautiful, it’s comforting, it’s frightening.

The thing is, the counselling, and the book, have both brought up things which I have only allowed myself to think about in an objective, abstract way, and the time is coming when I have to stop thinking of it as separate to myself. We are one and the same, and in order to stop torturing myself over things which should not matter, in order to become, finally, a whole and complete person, a useful counsellor, a decent wife, maybe, eventually, a good mother, I have to take it all in. There is, after all, a reason why counsellors have to have counselling themselves in order to be properly able to help other people. A person has to be full in order to empty oneself and take on another person’s pain.

It’s just starting to do that that’s the problem. I guess I’ve already set foot on that road, maybe without even realising it, the question is, which way will it take me?