Lock Me In. Kate Simants

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СКАЧАТЬ you feel comfortable going into a little more detail about the episodes you have at night?

      [pause: 12 sec]

       EP: Look, I-I don’t know.

       CC: OK: Eleanor—

       EP: Ellie.

       CC: Ellie. A lot of the people I see, they find it very hard at the beginning. They can feel like … well, they don’t know if they can trust me. Or it might be that they don’t trust that talking is going to help.

      [pause: 27 sec]

       EP: No. It’s not that. I just know what’s going to happen. We’re going to go through all this, and then you’re going to give up.

       CC: Ah, OK. Tell me a bit more about that.

       EP: I’m just … like, I’ve tried. You know? I talk to Siggy, I talked to other people, tried medicine and everything. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to do all of that again. Just tell you all of it and then have you just say that actually you can’t help. Or that you don’t believe me.

       CC: Who does believe you, Ellie?

       EP: My mum.

       CC: She’s always believed you.

       EP: Yeah. She’s-she’s seen what happens. The fugues, and – everything.

       CC: Anyone else close to you? Other family?

       EP: I’m an only child. My dad’s dead.

       CC: OK.

      [pause: 11 sec]

       CC: OK. And was that a long time ago that you lost him?

       EP: Yes. Before I was born.

       CC: I see. It can be challenging, growing up without—

       EP: No. It wasn’t.

       CC: You don’t want to talk about your father.

       EP: No.

      [pause: 31 sec]

       CC: OK, Ellie, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to know. Sometimes therapists can be a bit mystifying. They can wait for you to work things out for yourself even if they have a good idea of what’s going on and what needs to shift in order to improve. But that can take a lot of time. In my experience I think it’s best to be up front and tell you what I think is happening, and what we’re going to do to put it right. Seems more honest, that way. Does that sound OK?

       EP: Yes. I just want her gone. I want to be better.

       CC: I hear you. So the first thing is, the aim of the psychotherapeutic work I’m going to do with you is to understand what’s happened. What I want to do is reduce the conflict between the different parts of your identity, help them cooperate.

       EP: OK. I mean, I can’t see that happening, but OK. We can try.

       CC: Good. So, the second thing I need you to know is that the kind of issues you’re having with Siggy, they’re something that almost always stem from quite a significant trauma, often something in early childhood.

      [pause: 34 sec]

       EP: OK.

       CC: And so at some point in our sessions we’re going to need to talk about that. What you yourself think is at the bottom of it, how it all started.

      [pause: 19 sec]

       CC: Would you like us to come back to this at another time?

       EP: No.

       CC: OK. I understand. The reason I’m—

       EP: I just … look, nothing happened, OK? There’s no deep dark secret. She’s just there. I don’t know why. I’m not going to come along here and just suddenly remember some massive, buried … it’s not going to happen. She’s always been there. I just want her gone. OK? I want her to leave me alone.

      [pause: 22 sec]

       EP: I just want her to leave me alone.

       4.

       Ellie

      It felt like she was gone forever. I called Matt again and again but there was no answer.

      I checked the time on the wall clock – three hours gone – and then saw the streak of pink highlighter on the calendar. I was supposed to be doing a shift that afternoon, volunteering in the children’s ward in the hospital where Mum cleaned, and Matt worked in the imaging lab. He’d set the whole thing up for me, sorting all the stuff out with the permissions, after I told him how one day I’d like to work with children. But after his effort, I’d managed to miss my slots twice in the last few weeks. The HR person had already come to see me about it, but I couldn’t explain to her what had really happened: that if I went back to sleep after a fugue, I was impossible to wake.

      Matt said I should just come clean about it, explain that I had a mental illness. It was a hospital, he said – how could they not understand? I didn’t dare, but I knew then I’d made the right decision in confiding in him.

      At first I’d been careful to stick to the rules, to censor myself. Mum knew how serious I was about him, and in his company at least, she approved of him. I’d come home once to find them roaring with laughter over a game of cards: he was genuine, polite, reliable, she said, and nothing like my father. She made me promise not to let myself fall asleep with him, no matter how tired I got, but she was still worried. There wasn’t a man alive who was patient enough, understanding enough, to be with someone who’d always sleep alone. Even good guys can break your heart, she said.

      To begin with I said nothing at all about Siggy, but I couldn’t keep the secrecy up for long. There was no boundary where I stopped and she began, and after a few months, I realized I couldn’t be myself without telling him.

      Matt had listened to it all. We’d been sitting in front of the log burner in his narrowboat, sharing a bottle of wine. I sat propped against his chest, and I told him the whole story. From the first time Siggy had got me up at night and taken me outside, until Mum, frantic at 4 a.m., found me lying underneath the car. I told him about the exhaustion I got the mornings after a fugue, the grinding headaches, the ten-tonne limbs. I told him everything.

      No. Not everything. I didn’t tell him about Jodie.

      After my very long monologue, there СКАЧАТЬ