We’ve just realised we have NO idea how to end relationships of any kind – but in particular any professional relationship. Whenever we’ve resigned from a job, stopped seeing a doctor and so on – we panic. The first time this was abundantly obvious was when we left the garden centre job we had after finishing our undergraduate degree. There were probably more earlier than this, but I have no awareness of it. All we had to do was hand in our resignation letter, but we put it off for over a week and jeopardised our notice period. We had a good excuse for leaving – we were going back to university. I have a sneaking suspicion it was just an excuse and not the real reason for moving on.
This is potentially part of the reason why we kept within the relationship with the husband so long – but it would have been level pegging with us being a “typical battered wife” (don’t you just love that label).
But what is odd is that we find it harder to end the professional relationships than we do the personal relationships. I wonder if it’s to do with the fierce sense some of us have to be working in order to be invisible? We were unemployed while we studied via distance learning when we started our undergraduate degree and we had to go through job placement interviews with government agencies as part of their attempt to get the unemployed back into work. We found that incredibly stressful. This is also possibly part of the reason why we have resisted going onto any form of disability which we qualify for with room to spare. Anything to stay invisible.
We’ve never stayed in one job for any length of time, up until the marriage when part of us realised we needed more stability in one aspect of our life.
All of this leads in a rather convoluted way to why we’re finding it hard to stop seeing the clinical psychologist and move on. We had therapy today and told her that while integration is potentially an end goal, there need to be smaller goals that lead up to it – like developing more communication internally to reduce the time loss. It looked like it was all going well with her understanding and agreeing with us. Then I’m not sure if we were misinterpreting her, but it appeared like she was playing word games again by saying things about staying the same was safer and that we knew so many coping strategies as it was that there seemed little use in developing more. We asked how it was safe to continue living as we were considering that being sectioned wasn’t all that safe, neither was the suicidal ideation.
We’re not sure if she’s playing games, we’re being too sensitive or whether we just need to bug outta there. Cos you know, life living with dissociation just ain’t hard enough by itself, we thought we’d throw in some other complications as well just for fun.
