Hi,

So I would like to know what you think, I have been lucky enough to see a therapist for three months in an organisation that provides free counselling. She has really helped me and I want to thank her with maybe a card and or a box of chocolates but I don't know if it is appropriate.
I think it is because the service was free so she has been giving her free time to help me and I have seen cards in her office, would a small box of chocolates at the end of our last session be appropriate ?

Thank you for your advice

Hello,

Well for starters I wanted to say that I'm a Seventeen year old girl who has recently been diagnosed with GAD. I have always feared a lot, and would always obsess over a certain thing/thought. I never really thought much of it, but now that I look back, it all makes sense. When I was around Seven years old, my older brother had came home from school one day and told me about germs, he explains how they were all around us. I quickly became obsessed with the thought that I would catch all these germs and catch a deadly illness and die. Every time I touched anything or anyone touched my hand, I would run to the bathroom and wash my hands. I was washing my hands up to 15 times a day and I didn't want to touch anything at all... Well like I said, I never thought much about that.. Until recently during summer break I had nothing better to do, other than watch TV, and everything I saw had to do with murders and people going insane. Well I saw this episode on a Hispanic show about a lady who had some type of Multiple personality disorder, who ended up killing her boss. She took medication for her disorder, but that day she forgot to take it. She didn't realize she had killed her, until the memory of her kept haunting her. She would see her everywhere, and she would speak to her telling her "You did it, you killed me" much later she got the clue that she had committed that murder. Well I quickly became obsessed with the thought of me going insane or sleep walking and doing such thing. I actually started putting things against my door so if I did sleep walk, I wouldn't be able to get through. The thing is there hasn't been a time where I have slept walked. The thoughts used to be much worse, but I've been seeing a therapist since the moment I realized I had a problem, and I've been feeling much better. There's days where I feel completely fine and happy and then there's those other days where I completely panic and feel like my world is falling apart. I would much rather kill myself than to ever hurt anyone in anyway. The thought of doing such thing causes me so much emotional pain, because I know that I wouldn't hurt anyone. Sometimes I cant help but feel so hurt and upset with myself because of those thoughts, that I just want to end my life. I try to talk to the people who I love about this and try to explain it to them, but they don't really seem to understand. They say "Oh everyone has those types of thoughts, just get over it" although, everyone might have those types of thoughts, I cant seem to just "get over it". I basically want to know, is there hope for me? How many others can relate to the way I'm feeling?

I am notoriously self absorbed, so the idea that others will be able to read what I right tickles me. It more than tickles me, it gratifies me. Right now I am struggling unsuccessfully with a gambling addiction. It goes against the public persona that I have created for me to struggle this way, so I was actually thinking of setting up an alter account for my alter ego on a main blog site. This will work just dandy. Now I get to be my own dirty doppelganger and still be on the downlow with what a #######5 person I am.

Quotes from an interview with psychoanalyst and writer, Adam Phillips:

"I'm not on the side of frustration exactly, so much as the idea that one has to be able to bear frustration in order for satisfaction to be realistic. I'm interested in how the culture of consumer capitalism depends on the idea that we can't bear frustration, so that every time we feel a bit restless or bored or irritable, we eat, say, or we shop.

"It's only in an initial state of privation that you can begin to have thoughts about what it is you might want, to really imagine or picture it. It's very difficult to know what we're frustrated by. In making the case for frustration I want to make it more interesting, such that people can talk or think about it in different ways."

For him, psychoanalysis is a set of stories that we tell ourselves and each other, a way of redescribing our experiences. "To begin with, one needs to understand," he says, "but I think the final project is to relieve oneself of the need for self-knowledge. It's not that it's useless – in some areas of life it's very useful – but there are lots of areas in which it isn't, and in some areas it's actually pre-emptive and defensive, and this is where psychoanalysis potentially fails people, by assuming there is an infinite project and that the best thing you can do in life is to know yourself. Well, I don't think that's true."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/01/adam-phillips-life-in-writing


"I believe in what you see being most of what there is… and that life's passed on to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that's the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent."
:: Richard Ford (from the novel 'Canada'.)

I am Hartlepool_lad, I have tried to type my experience on the blog about seven or eight times but each time I have erased it, the abusive voice in my head yells at me that no one is interested in my story and that I am alone, pathetic and other words that have been planted in my mind which I don't wish to reveal at the moment.

My systematic mental and physical destruction was to start almost immediately, I couldn't call or meet friends I had to explain where I'd been why I'd had to go there and what I had been doing while there and who had I spoken to, my phone and internet were checked as were my texts and e-mails. Bank account details were demanded and checked almost daily and a reason had to be forthcoming if I had withdrawn money, receipts were checked if I had paid for anything with my card, I was cut off from contacting family as she would put it “this is the only family that matters to you now” this was being constantly shored up with abuse of the type that I was crap at what I do, a useless person and painful insults that I can only shudder at now, I was verbally abused everyday, physically abused every day, I have been beaten, punched, kicked, humiliated, stabbed, had buckets of hot bleach thrown over me her aggression hightened if the house wasn't clean enough the dish washer hadn't been emptied or the ironing hadn't been done exactly how she wanted, constant accusations of infidelity, squandering money, being a useless person.

Then the torture of previous relationships started, I was given full and frank details of all the one night stands she'd had, I was informed by an ex friend of hers that she'd had threesomes and multiple encounters in one weekend.

She would regale me with the sordid details of these encounters and once estimated she'd had in excess of two hundred that she could remember and not counting the drunken one night stands she couldn't, all the while telling me that I was worthless, useless, a crap person etc.

It all came to a head in September 2005 when after months and years of such brutal torment the stress levels had reached such levels that my brain shut down for three days, I didn't know who I was, anything about myself, what I did for a job, my past anything.

I was diagnosed with P.T.S.D. Dissociative Amnesia, severe depression, social phobia and I have lost everything, my memories of my life are just shadows, the event is, as always right at the front of my eyes, she still haunts my mind and still continues to influence me inside my head, I have no respite.

Hartlepool_lad.