A Dialogue with Helen
Sleep is elusive again so I am here in my room sitting in my chair, contemplating where I am right now. I have had a nice day today and that has felt satisfying. I managed to ‘process through’ some anger earlier and I have found some peace. I felt Helen, my therapist who has died, sitting with me on the window ledge, discussing the merits of compromise with me. Ah how I miss Helen and our therapy sessions. We used to discuss how black and white my thought processes used to be and my unwillingness to venture into the grey areas or the middle of something. I would announce ‘this is me and I don’t see anything else’ and Helen would say to me ‘I know that’s how you feel right now and yet I will not collude with you Susie, I see something else in you and I don’t agree with your stance!’ I used to rage and lament and slowly I would see another perspective. And in time my world view changed. I became more willing to compromise my fixed position and so many things began to shift for the better in my life.
Today, I took everything I had learnt with Helen and managed to find a compromise within myself. This created a change and a feeling of shifting emotions from anger to peace, to satisfaction. Simon said to me that this shows my resilience now and for me, it demonstrates that I have changed. No longer, Mrs Black or White. I can stand in the grey area, jig and dance and have a party. I can feel into what I need and make decisions from there. No longer following old family scripts of this or that, I can say ‘there is another way and I will find it for myself’. I feel liberated by this and rather proud that I can utilise what I learnt in my relationship with Helen, outside of the therapy room and directly into my life. That feels so good! And even though Helen has died, she has left a lasting legacy in our relationship that spanned those twenty years. She said to me, towards the end, ‘you will have an internalised version of me and you wont forget what you’ve learnt here’. And now I understand what she was saying. I so miss our sessions, I so miss the bouncing of my ideas and Helen’s ‘bothering’ of me. And it is four months since her passing and I am sad and I still feel that grief welling up. I feel that loss and yet I am comforted by Helen’s presence in my mind. I say ‘what would Helen say?’ and I begin a dialogue with her. I think right now she would be nodding her head and saying ‘you did well today in unpacking your emotions, and you see you don’t need me anymore!’. Ah those bittersweet words! I may not ‘need’ Helen anymore, and yet I so miss her still.