When trying to sleep ...

Sometimes, when I'm lying in bed, trying to sleep, I am instead thinking, whilst trying to get to sleep.

:::

Craig and I have been seen a new shrink recently.

After our first appointment, which we attended together, we were very hopeful about him. He seemed very professional and interested in how he could help us.

He decided at that first appointment that he should see us separately as well as jointly. So we each had a 45 minute appointment to see him separately.

At the end of my 45 minute appointment the shrink decided that he needed extra time with each of us alone. So we made an additional appointment for us each.

But then when Craig went for his double appointment (ie. 1hr 30mins), it only lasted for 25 minutes. Craig got a call in the morning from the shrink asking if he could come earlier because the shrink's family circumstances prevented him from attending at the appointed hour in the afternoon.

Craig was very surprised about the 25 minute appointment. He was also rather surprised about the discussion during the appointment. At the end of the 25 minute appointment, the shrink's conclusions about Craig were:

(i) he is depressed, but if he does exercise that should break the cycle of depression;

(ii) he should stop doing everything with me, and that should break the cycle of inter-dependency.

Right. Not very helpful at all.

I believe that this shrink is doing what most people do. He's treating our situation like other situations. But our situation is not like other situations.

Craig's depression is related to something very specific. It's almost an insult to him to say that his depression means that he is "sad".

I also suffer from depression. It's related to the trauma which we have experienced with the births and deaths of our children. It's related to the anxiety I feel about Craig's safety. It's related to the total devastation of our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions. It's related to the disappearance of the person I used to be.

:::

So while I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, I was thinking that my life at the moment is like a fall-out zone. A nuclear fall-out zone.

A bomb went off in our lives. The most awful, enormous, devastating bomb.

It destroyed everything.

And we're just trying to live with the fall-out.

The problem with this fall-out zone is that it's only visible to us. It's only our lives which have been destroyed. All around us people are still walking, cycling, working, making love, playing with their children, making plans, living their life. As if nothing had happened.

But that's not for us. Because something did happen. We are living in the middle of a nuclear fall-out zone, and we don't know what to do about it.

:::

Today we went back to the shrink. After an absence of several weeks.

He seems to have realised that what we have experienced, and what we continue to experience every day, is slightly out of the ordinary.

He seems to understand when I say that I worry for our future. Because I don't know how to build a future out of the ashes which are our past and our present. Because at the moment I don't know that I can build anything at all on this crumbling foundation which is us and our life.

Anyway, I hope that he will be able to help us.

:::

I started writing this post at the beginning of June. But then I sort of lost of interest, and then we went on holidays for two weeks. I read through the post again today and thought it was still worth putting on the blog. I finished it off today -- we saw our shrink again this morning.