After Four Years, My CCAC Therapist is Leaving

Published Categorised as Personal, Brain Health, Health

My therapist is leaving. I have no idea what I’m feeling because when my emotions tried to rise and connect with my conscious mind — with the me I’m aware of — click, off they switched.

Just gone.

I thought I would take about 12 hours to process what she was telling me, what I never wanted to hear, that she was leaving me — and I am proud of what she’s doing and wish her well — but nope. Well, I had an adrenaline rush that suddenly stopped as she was telling me about the very good reasons why, and I felt uncomfortable for several hours like something wanted out but couldn’t emerge. And I did burble at the 8-hour mark, then pfft gone.

Some would say I’m coping better. I’m not being overwhelmed and having huge meltdowns like before, which is good. True. But the process is the same these days: rise of emotion, experience them for a short time, maybe a whole evening, then gone. Poof. Like they never existed. The only difference is the intensity of the emotions.

In the years after my brain injury, the intensity could rock a court house full of lawyers into gibbering idiots, they were that powerful. Now the emotions are mild or even tinier, like they are too timid to connect fully or maybe because the old me is rising from the ashes and through my unconscious exerting the old iron-grip self-control on expressing my feelings, except it doesn’t quite feel like the latter. So maybe a combo. Either way, it sucks. I’d just like to be able to react normally, even if normally is a storm of bawling in public. After all, I should be used to humiliation or embarrassment. I mean, no one, like no one, can ever get through a brain injury without doing something supremely stupid and humiliating, with crying at the drop of a hat or laughing at inappropriate times or not reacting when strong reactions are called for being the least of them.

Sigh.

I have noticed that when I see my neurodoc, about a few hours after or a day after, I can suddenly feel and express my emotions normally. And then I feel a great need to talk to him because I have also processed and remembered aspects of what we’d been discussing and am finally able to respond. But it would be helpful if I could do that within the appointment time because though he will usually call me back, it’s days later and briefly, leaving me to cope with what are not usually good memories. PTSD is a bitch.

Ramryge angels at Gloucester Cathedral, England

Brain injury grief is

extraordinary grief

research proves

needs healing.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. Either I can be discharged from therapy at CCAC or be assigned a new therapist. The last couple of months when my therapist has been away were a sharp contrast with the two weeks after she returned. As much as my brain is changing, as much as I’m better able to resist rumination thanks to the latest brain biofeedback protocol, I still very much need a human to do for me what my prefrontal cortex still can’t, including and especially organization. So yes I still need help. But oh my god, to have to get used to a new person, to teach them about me, to settle into a new working relationship with someone who will never have known how I was before the last couple of years and will inevitably make assumptions about me due to my intellectual capacity and have to learn that has SFA to do with functionality and hoping that they’ll understand computers well enough and be comfortable with smartphones to be able to help me properly . . . I despair.

I can hear my therapist telling me not to catastrophize. But I’ve been through this before. That’s how I got her because I had to complain loud and long about the pen-and-paper disrespectful person they sent me for them to send me someone excellent: my therapist.

I’m making like Charlie Brown. I can’t stand it!

My Duck logo walking on my books in pink and blue shading.

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