Phoenix_RisingSenior Contributor
Just feeling very alone right now
Hi,
I am super struggling right now. It’s ok, I know it is just a wave and I know it will pass, but it HURTS. I feel super alone and super hopeless. I had my fifth session with my new psychologist yesterday and we are still struggling to figure out the boundary stuff. Specifically, we can’t figure out what the heck I’m supposed to do when I get a giant wave of suicidal ideation. My psychologist says she isn’t available to be someone for me to call in a crisis…and I don’t have anyone else. We have talked about how the crisis lines (lifeline and the suicide callback service) usually hang up on me and on the occasions that they don’t hang up on me they usually say dumb-arse stuff that escalates the situation. We have also talked about how a lot of my trauma issues are related to my experiences in the public mental health system. Yesterday in our session, my psychologist simply mentioned “go to the hospital” and I dropped to the floor, crawled under her desk and started doing the whole headbanging and making weird noises thing that I do when I get super flooded with giant feelings. This was towards the end of the session and I couldn’t get properly emotionally regulated before it was time for her to boot me out of her office. Thus I left my psychologist’s office feeling about a thousand times worse than when I went in. And now I feel alone, abandoned and afraid as I look down the barrel of an entire week without anyone to talk through the giant feelings with.
I asked my psychologist what her other suicidal clients do when they are in crisis, and she said they generally have friends and family that they know they can call, and then as a last resort they will go to the hospital (that was when I got triggered). So…given I don’t have “friends and family,” I feel like I’m totally screwed. I’m feeling hopeless because I don’t have that support, but I’m also feeling muddled because in my past failed attempts at friendship, when I’ve tried to ask friends for help the response has been that this stuff wasn’t friend stuff and I really needed professional support. So what I’m hearing is that the professionals palm it off to friends and family, the friends and family pass it back to the professionals, and the client sits in the middle desperately asking for help and being ignored from every angle.
I feel utterly hopeless. I really like my new psychologist. After my hideous twelve months of therapist shopping and my eight failed attempts, I know she is the right match. I super like the fact that she is open to SOME between session contact – I am amazed at how many therapists refuse any! Our rules are that I can send her one email a week, which can be as long as I want and she will acknowledge it, and I can send two voice messages, which can be a maximum of three minutes each. This works well for me in terms of generally feeling connected and not abandoned all week. However, my psychologist was saying yesterday that I can’t use these communication methods to reach out to her if I am in extreme crisis. She said that right now she doesn’t know the answer to this problem and she acknowledged that it definitely is a big problem. She said she will think about it over the coming week. I do super like her, I’m just feeling hopeless about whether one can really do intensive trauma-related work without support beyond the 50 minute therapy session. I actually felt pretty good going into the session yesterday and it just doesn’t seem right that I came out feeling so awful…and that as a result of what transpired in the session I’m sitting here at 5am working hard not to SH.
Well thanks for listening. Sorry it got kind-of long. I'm really glad I discovered the forums 
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In my failed attempts at friendship, a recurring message has been that I take up too much time and that the person needs to spend time with their family. The message is that family comes first, and I can only ever expect to get the leftover bits of someone's time, care etc after they have tended to the needs of their family. So again, even though I hear the message bandied around that you can "make" a family through friendship, my experience is that no, there is something qualitatively different about individuals being bound together by blood or legal bonds, and if you've lucked out in that area, than you're screwed.
. I know that this is partly why some of my attempts to connect with a therapist failed last year. It was like they got overwhelmed by the bigness of the muddle around X and they struggled to navigate the issues around it in order to build a therapeutic relationship. Thus, even though it is REALLY difficult at the moment, I am grateful that my current psychologist sees the complexity and is working hard to come up with strategies to make this excruciatingly difficult transition as smooth as possible.
