journal - 18 may

i have given up trying to keep track of which day of the journal this is - i can't do the maths - so i will date them now. this is a new method of writing my journal. i've switched off the little google notifiers that tell you if you have new e-mails and i'm writing this in a note thingy that i can cut and paste from. so i should get less distracted. if i could write properly with a pen i would do that but i can hardly write at all these days - i never did like it much but as i have got out of practice it makes my hand hurt.

i am sitting here on the sofa with the whole family; my husband watching footie with the headphones on, my son watching without sound, the dogs snuggled up with us. there is something ancient and primeval about having a dog sleeping with his head on your lap. what with my dog's head and the laptop i am nice and warm.

i have a lot to think about after my session with my psychotherapist today. there is the whole thing of why i am so busy and buzzy all the time. i have been aware that it is to stop me thinking but i always looked at this in too simplistic a way. i thought it was about trying to stop my conscious mind dwelling on things that worried me, whether in today's world or from the past. but it is more complex. i was describing my head like a computer; the hard drive containing the memories and the ram being the thinking conscious bit. so i was thinking that if i were to stop 'doing' the memories would seep into the ram bit and be a bit disconcerting. but there is more to it than that.

when i am anxious for my son about things i think might hurt him, i am not able to be a proper adult in relating to him . there is still inside me the child who didn't have recognition for her own pain and fear. so my feelings about my son are all tied up with that. i can't separate how i felt from the way things are for him. today we talked about how important it is to look after the child inside; how unless i can find a way through the fear and anxiety of the past it will continue to influence the present. i need to re-examine the past from the point of view of an adult. i am going to do this a bit at a time. a lot of what i have written before will help me to make a start.

journal - day 12

a bit of a gap again in my journal. the days when i am working seem to be too full to think at all. today is my day off and i am planning a nice soak in the bath followed by a walk with the dogs.

since my last post i have been working on looking after myself. i have started yoga again to try and tackle the aches and pains that have been getting to me. i have booked a massage for 26 may. i cycled to work yesterday (a ten mile round trip). i'm trying to eat more healthily.

i'm also looking after myself in terms of thinking about things. i haven't managed to get much head space yet but i have been thinking when i can. a couple of things that would have got to me in the past were much less of an issue. for example, yesterday my boss was a little bit short with me and in the past i would have taken it very much to heart, but i realised that she was strung out by stuff going on and managed not to take it personally. sure enough a little while later she was fine so it wasn't me she was crotchety with.

and i have managed to refrain from telephoning one of my friends who is having troubles. early in the week i rang to check how she was and said if she needed anything at all she should call me. she hasn't and i am leaving it to her to contact me when she needs to, rather than constantly calling her.

another friend is worried about her son. i was able to talk to her in what i think was a helpful way (a lot of it relates to stuff we have been through) and to comfort her without feeling i had to take all of her stuff on. so things are moving around a bit in my head.

journal - day 7

the first thing to mention is that in spite of trying to keep a daily journal i have only managed to write a weekly one so far. for someone who only works 2 days a week, with various other stuff dotted around, it is amazing that i haven't managed to find time. it is not that i haven't had slots of time but that i need head space to write this sort of thing. one thing that my life seems completely devoid of is head space. because my son is at home all the time at the moment there is never a time when i am alone in the house. if he is not in the room i am in i can hear him - gunshots and police chases on the computer, bb gun in the hallway (we won't let him use it in the garden so i have made him a board to catch the ones that miss rather than the wall getting it), getting tools out to make things. this is the nature of someone with autism and adhd. i wouldn't change him but it can be very much in your face, and we have a very small house.

that in itself is not insurmountable. i could go to an internet cafe, or indeed take my laptop to the beach or somewhere. i think what the issue is that i need to learn to give myself permission to have some head space. when i don't have it i am aware that i get more buzzy and distracted. so lesson 1 is to timetable in an appointment for me to write this journal, and take photos and just be me.

this week has had more than its fair share of stress. i have been waiting for a job to be advertised at work. it is a job i can do, i would be good at and more importantly it has job security and a decent income. to start with it would be full time (which would mean even less me time) but after a period i would aim to go down to 4 days a week. last week i was off work with a dreadful throat infection. this week i came in on wednesday and found via a friendly colleague who knows i want this job that it had been advertised internally, only for a week, and that i had missed the closing date by one day. i would not have found out had my colleague not had dinner with someone who mentioned it. this week we were moving offices so i had no computer and could not have got onto the intranet.

when i found out about this i was speechless. then i was furious. in the past i would have cried about it but it is so vital that i get some sort of stable job that i just lost the plot. my colleague arranged an extension of time for me to get my application in and i wrote it overnight and got it in the next morning. my first thought was that it was a total stitch up and that someone had their eye on the job but my colleague says this is much more likely to be sheer bad luck. she worked in HR for years so i trust what she says, but the whole thing left me very shocked and shaken. thank heavens i am very good at putting job applications together. they have to give me an interview because i am disabled, and they know i am not someone who will roll over if they treat me unfairly so i hope i am back in with a chance. but this destabilised me quite a lot and left me very buzzy.

also there is the business of my son's education and trying to sort out a place that can bring out his many strengths. we have been to visit somewhere that is ideal and so now the battle for funding starts. i am quite good at battling but it is tiring. also we have had a big breakthrough in that we managed to get my son to come to an open day at a local agricultural college. he was very resistant and it was hard going but he stayed for quite a while in what cannot have been an easy environment for him and even said he liked some bits of it. on the way home we drove by the potential school so he had a visual idea of it. as i drove i was aware that i was rigid with stress. i ache from head to foot at the moment, and it may well be stress related.

as well as that, i have a couple of friends who are in a bit of a bad way. i am trying to learn the skill of supporting my friends but not wading in and rescuing them. i need to let people develop their own solutions to problems but to be there for them. i am a compulsive rescuer so this is a new skill to learn. i need to trust that people will ask for help if they need it, which a lot of people won't. i think i hate to see people's distress and not be able to help them. i suppose the distress bounces off my own memories of distress and current feelings of distress and kind of prods them.

what i need to learn is that people's feelings are related to who they are, not who i am. so if someone is feeling rejected, for example, they are feeling it within their own framework of beliefs and feelings. they are not necessarily feeling rejection overlaid with the long history of rejection that i have. so while my feelings when i am rejected nowadays might be somewhere like 13 on the richter scale, other people might be feeling it at say 5. i need to learn to avoid ascribing my feelings to others. i think there is a term for this but i have no idea what it is (note to self - look it up on google).

this thing was something i was very aware of when my son was younger. autistic kids have huge meltdowns when the world gets too loud for them (i use loud to mean all the senses, not just hearing). my son used to cry and scream and exhibit signs of devastating grief that i found completely overwhelming. my husband, who does not have the same baggage as me, used to deal with them so i could go out of earshot when it became too much. it was because i could not put myself in my son's shoes; could not see that his grief was not that of a child whose mother doesn't want them but was entirely different. it is ironic that one of the ways autism manifests itself is an inability to place oneself in someone else's shoes. while empathy is something i am good at in some, less pressured, circumstances, when i am stressed i tend to over-empathise. or more accurately to climb inside someone's pain. rather than holding their hand, i try and scoop out the pain and take it away.

from writing this i can see that there are two facets to this. one is that i can't separate my own history of pain from other peoples; the other is that i compulsively rescue people because of my history. it is not a great combination. if someone exhibits pain i feel compelled to help; yet i then buy into their pain way more than is helpful to either them or me.

i think how i will approach this is not to avoid people who are in pain. that would do me even more harm as i would feel i was rejecting them, which sets off yet more alarm bells in my mind. what i will do is to look at it using the same model we used when i worked in a community law centre. lawyers in private practice take people's problems and sort them out for them. the law centre aimed to empower people by helping them to sort out their problems and at the same time equip them better to deal with the next problem that comes along. so i think i will adopt that approach with people who are in distress. holding their hand and walking alongside them as they work out their own answers. and trying to keep in mind that they are not me, either now or when i was young.

in practical terms i think it helps me to support people online or by e-mail rather than on the phone. i am not great on the phone, due to my hearing and lack of focus, whereas e-mail allows me to read over what i have said and spot any signs that i am over-identifying with someone else's stuff.

so this week's goal, among quite a few others, is to stop and think about my emotional response to other people's pain, to use my skills to support them in their journey rather than picking them up and carrying them. and to book a massage...

journal - day 1

i am trying to deal with the fallout from the past. i have been trying on and off to do this for most of my adult life but there is a new incentive for me now. not only is the anxiety and self-doubt affecting my own functioning but it is spilling over and affecting my son. among the other things he has to negotiate, he has now developed generalised anxiety disorder. people have been saying to me for years that i am too protective of him, too afraid of things happening, and that i have to start letting him go out into the world. his autism has given me the ideal excuse for being over-protective; he took a long time to develop road sense, and where we used to live had dangerous roads.

lately, after a particularly stressful couple of years, my son's anxiety has moved into new realms and he has become anxious about more and more of life. added to this is a physiological problem which has yet to be stabilised, which causes motion sickness, making car travel really hard for him. so his world has shrunk. we have been trying to get some help with developing his independence skills for some time. my husband and i are not the best people to do this with him; me because of my anxiety, my husband because of his impatience. but so far it is down to us, so i need to work hard to put the anxiety back in its box, for my son's sake as well as my own.

part of this process is to record what makes me anxious, so i can face it. this in itself is quite a job. most things seem to make me anxious. because it is so all-pervading i am going to try and record what gets to me. in particular, i am going to try and take note of when i indulge in displacement behaviour.

for me, displacement behaviour seems to take two forms. the most obvious one is that whenever i am stressed i will start doing things, usually in an effort to bring order to my environment. but rather than the more usual tidying or cleaning, i will get out my toolbox and start fixing up shelves, putting things on walls, mending doors. very early in life i developed a sort of home-making tendency. i scrounged things from the neighbours in our flat to put in my bedroom, brought things in from the dustbin area to add to my collections, made dens in the shrubbery in the communal garden. i must have been the only 14 year old to buy a sofa.

(in fact the story of the sofa is quite a funny one, involving my friend and i pushing it up the road until the castors fell off, whereupon we sat on it in a layby trying to work out what to do. luckily a truck came by occupied by some men from the water board. they put the sofa in the back and transported us the 5 miles or so to my house. how we ever thought we could push a sofa 5 miles i have no idea but this episode gives some idea of the extent to which displacement behaviour can go.)

the other thing i do, if it is too late to start drilling holes in walls, is to open a bottle of wine and shut my anxiety up that way. of the two sorts of behaviour this one is probably the least healthy. it takes quite a bit of wine to squash down serious anxiety, which is not so good for the body, or indeed for the mind in the long run.

so the plan is that when i feel the need to indulge in either sort of behaviour, i will instead sit myself down and try and write about what thoughts and feelings i am trying to avoid. this doesn't mean that i will stop putting up shelves or drinking wine, but i will be aiming to do those things in a more healthy way, rather than a pathological sort of way.

so here goes...