Friday 12 June 2009

Feeling Abandoned

It is now five weeks since my last psychotherapy session and I still cannot sleep properly on a Thursday night.

I understood the reason for my not sleeping when I was actually going to therapy; I often started to become anxious on a Wednesday and that feeling just increased as the hours passed and by Thursday night I was often in a real state. Sometimes I managed two or three hours sleep, sometimes none, before I had to get myself ready to go to catch the bus to the hospital.

I can perhaps understand why I continued to have problems sleeping on Thursday nights for a couple of weeks, but to still be suffering in this way is starting to concern me.

The problem seems to be with the way that the therapy terminated. There seemed to be no proper ending. The resulting feeling of abandonment seems to have left me in a permanently depressed state where I find it difficult to do anything meaningful.

I seem to manage to pull myself together sufficiently to make the presentations that I am asked to do occasionally, but the recent cancellation of one of these, and the cancellation of the summer course that I was to be lecturing on, seems to have made the feeling of abandonment worse. I'm back to crying for long periods of time, finding it difficult to do anything that requires more than a minimal amount of concentration, and wondering why I bother carrying on with life.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can obviously relate to this since it was six weeks for me this week since my therapy group ended and I too was feeling somewhat abandoned at a time when I needed there support more than ever... The Thursday just gone was perhaps the most easiest for me so far and the one where I didn’t find myself clock watching as much or thinking about Lucy as much as I had been... I am only hoping it gets easier now as time goes on.

Lady Pippa Jemima Fortesque Smyth said...

Abandonment is a hard feeling to deal with. In my experience there are two strands to it, the first is that others have left me, rejected me, abandoned me; the second is a feeling of loss and mourning for what is gone, whether it is therapy, or an opportunity or a person.
The first strand makes it more difficult to work through the second. The anger and rage (for me) interferes with the expression and working through of loss.
I've found that working through these irrational thoughts and replacing them with more rational ones helps me to move on. This however, has only been possible after long and sensitive psychodynamic therapy in which I have felt understood and heard.
Why carry on with life? Well for me its because everyday single day I can make a difference to someone, even if it giving a smile to a tired and fed up shop assistant or letting someone go ahead in a queue. There are times when that has to be enough to carry on....
Karen