Safety First

One of the hallmarks of my life has been a vain attempt to find and maintain a "safe place". For the vast majority of people, their safe place is simply their home, their castle. Mine should be. Circumstances beyond my control have taken my safe place and turned it into a minefield of disasters.

Circumstances: read "LRHM". For those not in the know, that stands for "Little Red Headed Menace", or my son's girlfriend. I've referred to her as such for quite some time. Since she lived with us for so long, and disrupted our lives for many, many months, I had lived mostly in my bedroom. My home was not my own. If she was in the kitchen, or family room, I was upstairs. It's amazing to me that someone who used to feel some semblance of strength could let this mite send me scurrying like a barnyard rat to the hidden anonymity of my room. Her unpleasant demeanour grated on my nerves to a point that nearly drove me to physical violence; her behaviour with my son disgusted me. I do recognize his culpability here: he could have pushed her away, and he didn't. My stomach may never forgive him.

But she has since moved out, and now her visits are restricted to mostly weekends. It still feels like too much, and still like an invasion. When their vehicle is in the driveway, I often don't even enter the family room, but go immediately upstairs; I cannot tolerate seeing them engaged in ... whatever it is they do. It triggers anger, bitterness, sorrow, loss ... all directed towards my son. And I hold her responsible, whether that's right or not.

My psychologist, alternately referred to as Dr. Know and Dr. Ugly, depending on my mood, has told me to take back my home. "Take back the kitchen first; then the family room. Then the living room. Take back your home!"

In essence, he's telling me it's time to make my home my, "safe place". So where is my safe place now, you ask? Well, interesting question.

He tells me that my safe place is his office. I've been seeing him for a year and a half. During that time I ended up with this wicked RHM, and crisis after crisis of my own, and lost my home; I HAD no safe place. While he urged me at one point to continue to help the little witch, I asked him, rather plaintively, "Who is supposed to take care of ME? Where is MY safe place?"

"Here," he answered.

Trust isn't my best thing. Because of the trauma I've endured in the past, I don't trust a whole lot of people. Screw me over and the chances are, you're not going to get a second chance. Once burned, twice shy, blah blah. I can count on one hand the number of people I trust, and oddly enough, the number is shrinking. And you'd think that the one person you can trust is your psychologist. And I did. Finally, I thought that this was the one place where I would, indeed, be "safe". I can trust him; he will not turn on me ............

Last week, I admitted to my psychologist that I'd been drinking. I recognize this is a bad idea, being that I take half a dozen medications. Obviously this is WHY I TOLD HIM. I felt it could be turning into a problem, as I was feeling a "need" to do it, and a couple of times had gotten rather inebriated. Other than that, there were times when I'd just, "had a few". So I told him. But along with that, I told him of everything else that was going on, the gut-wrenching, continuing soft green shit that is swirling in my mind like mental diarrhea; the rage that never seems to end, that drives me to the bottle; and the fear that I am indeed, finally, going over the edge, around the bend, off the deep end. My husband, who had actually stayed home from work to accompany me to the appointment, asked him about having me put in the psychiatric hospital for a time, and how that was accomplished. The dear doc said that it was actually done through the psychiatrist, and that he, the psychologist, just had to mention it to her, and it would be taken care of. With that he said, "I'll consult with her later."

Now foolish me, I assumed this meant he was consulting with her in a way that would AID me. The next day I had an appointment with her, the psychiatrist. Her job is strictly to supply my medications; you know, the ones that stop me from going completely nuts, or killing myself, and from doing most of the damage I would do if I wasn't taking them: driving off cliffs, cutting symbols into my skin that require sutures but don't get them, destroying rooms, screaming at my husband, hyperventilating, major depression. You know, little things like this. I entered her office and was greeted with VERY few pleasantries; then, "You've been drinking? How much? How long? When? How much of this medication have you taken? How much of that one? Why not this one? Or this? WHY AREN'T YOU DOING THIS?" Now I'm not talking about a normal conversation between two people, I'm talking about an interrogation between Bertha the Prison Guard and Bo the Brittle.

She switched tactics very suddenly. "Ok, the first medication to go is the lorazepam. Then we'll take away the depakote. Then the topomax, then the seroquel." Just like that. There was no questioning, no whys or wheres, nothing. Just "I'm taking away the very things that sustain your life, and fuck you, darling".

Her next comment was, "30 days clean and sober or they're gone. Period." Now this might not sound like a bad idea to some of you, but anyone who knows me would recognize that this is just pouring fuel on a fire. And the inward explosion was pretty much ... well, that. Blood pounded in my brain, rage ran through my veins as I realized that the OTHER doctor hadn't helped me, or "consulted" her in any manner to help; he'd simply ratted me out. There was no discussion of hospitalization ~ just a threat to get me to do what they wanted.

Tomorrow I see Dr. Ugly again; it's my first appointment since this has happened, and I really don't know how I'll react to seeing him. I'm angry. Oh, I'm angry! Yes, I recognize that I cannot drink. Yes, I recognize now that it was probably her way of shocking me into doing what she needed me to do, but it was SO WRONG for me. And having been her patient for over a year, how does she not KNOW this? How does HE not know this?

And how does he not know that tomorrow I'm going to come in and think that he's just as big a prick as he is?

I have no safe place left.