Sacking the Psychologist. Time and Money wasted

I have come to believe the psychologist and I should not have been put together. It is nobody’s fault. Nobody could have known.

She is engaged in the truly admirable pursuit of assisting first responders to deal with PTSD. She gives a great deal of her psychic self to their healing. They suffered far too long without help. I have someone I care very much about doing the same thing and have always been proud of her.

The problem for her begins immediately. I am a seriously traumatized man. A great deal of the abuse and trauma I still carry was caused by local over-policing and bullying when I was a teenager and then truly vicious treatment by rogue police years later that left me absolutely broken.

It took months to get from the GP referral to actually turning up at the first appointment in Erina so this outcome is disappointing and painful.

It began very strangely.

The psychologist let me through the electronically locked door and sat me in an office filled with sofas and chairs and a desk. She asked me what I wanted from her and refused to give any hint of what was supposed to be happening. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach. Had I missed the college certificate on understanding psychologists? It may have been a universal offering when I was in a coma after the motorbike accident. This was very bad as she was asking $200 an hour and I had already failed the first test.

I started relating some stories from my childhood. I have had years of amnesia and it takes many weeks of digging within myself to string enough parts of an event together to feel safe relating it. I sat up night after night telling the story over and over again in the hope it would make more sense. The tension was so bad I wanted to scream all the time and sleep was short broken bursts in the day with me talking to myself the rest of the time. It was bad! My neighbours would turn their backs and make strange signs to ward off evil on the rare occasions I left the apartment. The walls are thin and my muttering went all day and night.

It was a surprise to me when the psychologist began to push back by telling me no one had a life like I claimed to have and she didn’t believe me. We hadn’t gone very far at that stage. I kept telling the story simply because I wanted a basis for our understanding but I was getting the vibe she was rejecting everything I said. She certainly appeared determined to not recognize that serious abuse would lead me to a state of trauma. It was confusing and perplexing but you hope a person accepting so much money has an idea where we were going and was building some structural plan of therapy.

It was difficult to avoid noticing her emotion. I asked her if she felt capable of dealing with me as I seemed to have lived a life outside her experience. She became triggered again and spat out a list of things she had done.

We had reached a kind of conversational minefield where I felt I had to weigh every word in case she found some negative element I didn’t think of and ran with it. Her view on things also seemed very conservative so some of the things I thought funny and risqué were deadly serious or insults in her mind. Some of things I had discovered as a mystic and philosopher seemed far too dangerous to approach even distantly.

I had been beset by determined and persistent racism for a substantial part of my life even though I was fifth generation Australian and she constantly rejected their determined mistreatment of me. Later the area I lived in was in the hands of corrupt police and everybody suffered. She seemed angry when I laughed and explained I had been targeted by police and had entire walls papered with traffic and social behaviour fines given during bouts of harassment. It also seemed her position as a conservative business person did not allow her see to my victim hood in this period or the victim hood of the rest of the group. She seemed to develop an aura of culture warrior and I was convinced I was moving to the wrong side of her tracks

We reached appointment five which is months into the program and I was very concerned. She had been triggered by my description of abuse perpetrated by the in-breds at Budgewoi. It isn’t her job to defend people or to argue with me over the virtue of my desperation in the face of constant harassment. I told her I had heard a man died and I hadn’t known about it until years later and she immediately demanded to know if I had murdered him!

She began to ask why I didn’t drop the art business and give my time as a volunteer to charity. That was the bomb. After five appointments and many months she didn’t know I was seriously handicapped and needed carers to assist me to travel. I had given her the details to find the Weblight Studio Journal and she hadn’t bothered to see what I was actually doing. Not only didn’t she understand that it has taken years of saving to have paints and canvases but there is the entire online presence of a business if I could just get some stability in this life. The Weblight Studio journal, websites, Facebook business sites, all reside quietly at the address I gave her on a card when we first met. If I could manage a charitable job I would have all this working for me instead.

This is the thing about being handicapped. In the psychologist’s case I had triggered her and she seemed to be getting spiteful and gaslighting as hard as she could go. Another dose of gaslighting so soon

The psychologist had demanded evidence of the things I said about the early period and I managed to scrape up enough to begin firming in the story. Her pushback was intensifying. The more I supported the things I said with documents the more contemptuous she became of the story.

She had literally been fighting everything I said since the program had started. I made a long email firing her and explaining why

I don’t know where we go from here. I am again struck by the lack of any real mental health support for men like me and certainly by the growing resentment among some of the health providers. Most of them are excellent but there are enough to waste my time and money and leave me sinking deeper and deeper in the mess left in my mind.

 An hour per fortnight may be enough for someone describing a single dimensional or single traumatic incident but anything after that is too big to be appreciated in so little time. A person suffering significant emotional, intellectual or psychic damage will literally stew and become worse and worse in the huge gaps between appointments

The other health issues have eased a little with the cooler weather although I am still experiencing a kind of chronic fatigue where my body sends me to sleep after chores or shower or even feeding myself. It still has a scary side because there is no way to know if this will be the one where the heart fails.

There was a very odd outcome on Ebay. I have been looking all over the world for very baggy and soft cargo pants. I found one group who would make them for over a hundred dollars so I just marked the site for later. There were two pairs of military pants from a surplus store in exactly the pale beige colour and loose shape so I ordered one. They took the order then a day later refunded the money. There was a second, larger, pair which would still work for me so I ordered them. Today they refunded the money again. I sent them an email but no answer. The seller is in Britain and I suspect I am meeting one of the few racist outcomes I have experienced on Ebay, possibly from a Moslem workplace

I have to deal with a couple of things here because they have been raised. Someone in the family was concerned I would use sensitive family things to spice up the journal. The journal is about being a handicapped artist and limited to that. A few funny and quirky stories may be added but not of the nature to embarrass or harm or even identify any people. I don’t think I have knowledge of anything to concern anyone. I certainly have come up against nothing to include in an expose. This doesn’t include the bullies and abusers I run up against during the writing of the journal. For the most part their interests are protected also but the worst of them are identified.

In the attempt to get assistance with the things which have broken my mind it is necessary to provide a framework of those events but no more than that.

I am writing a book…maybe. It is about teenage bikies and also does not pin down any identities to any events. The events happened in that period but are spread loosely among characters that are conglomerations of my friends.

This entry was posted in Everything. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply