Rings around the moon.

Increasing madness. Ex service user smashed his bedroom window with his guitar...I barricaded myself in the bedroom. A policeman heard ex service user ranting and saw the glass....Ex service user taken away by the police. I'm to give a statement, no idea what's next. 5:54pm The police are keeping him in. The policeman said, they will phone tomorrow and ask if we are willing to have him back. Really, my gut feeling is to say no. We gave him every chance to seek help, and to turn around his seething rage. He didn't take that path. So, enough now. Our house is at peace, but the feeling is of bereavement. So heavy, so so sad.

Field theory is used... ‘to understand or to predict behavior, the person and his environment have to be considered as one constellation of interdependent factors’ (1946:338).  A field is: Everything about a person...  Everything that apparently influence the behavior that causes concern.  At a specific time. I try to see the gravity force lines and the geographic cracks. The high tension cables suspended by pylons. But the fields and landscapes flash by as if I'm on a speeding train. My memory doesn't work. Yesterday escalated, front door handle dislocated and disconnected, the phone smashed, the rest is a blur.  Lewin's theory is the idea that grows into the black box flight recorder. And I realize as I write this that if I don't remember, then I have broken my vow, never to blank out. The one thing we established, after I came back from college last night is that ex-service-user gets angry when a person shows signs of distress. As his monologue ...

I sit in the bathroom. Earplugs in. Going to college, so I'll stop writing this and have a shower soon. House, kitchen extending upward to living room, and including his bedroom....dents and holes in the walls. Violence isn't predictable. I just stand still and try not to curl up in a ball and weep. So, what gets me is, why do the drugs companies sell drugs for mental ' health' issues as if they are a cure? For one, how can something that disconnects a person from their feeling- processing enable a person to gain control of themselves? But second, what's wrong with being honest, and providing some kind of sedative....ah yes, that was the word. Once! Well yeah, I'm beginning to get it. For the sake of the sane, psychotic folk need an off button....and the only way a psychotic person can be drugged is to make out that the drug is therapeutic... So? So, we endure. Because the drug root is non scientific, possibly harmful, not curative.... ...

As I sit here enjoying a rare moment of privacy. Phone in hand, about to email this post...the process of not looking down, of bracketing, of trying not to notice, is slipping. Things getting smashed, is normal. I've got used to thinking I'm about to get hurt. I hardly flinch anymore. Later, the fear rushes in like a wave of heat and ice, and then it's gone... But the damage is done. Holes in the plaster, a box of broken glass Add a bag of shards on top of the box. Frustration doesn't fit. We are getting this wrong. Frustration also with my counsellor. She seemed up for helping me map my polyvagal states, but then she seemed to start talking about starting with the happy state? And also to ignore my theory that the best way for me to induce states is via computer games. My shortcut to Doom3 with console access for dorsal vagal, and Quake3 for Sympathetic fight flight. Ok, I don't know! But it seemed a good experiment, worth a go. Last night I read that gestalt thera...

Being as I'm locked in my bedroom whilst ex service user rages concentrating on writing my assignment is impossible...let's give the polyvagal a spin. Imagine three emotional circuits. The oldest one evolved in fish. It runs down your back (Dorsal vagal nerve) it connects heart, breathing, guts and genitals. It can paralyze you, slow your heart so far down you hardly exist, place you in a panic so deep you can't think or move. It comes on in it's terror form, under the influence of cortisol - in other words, when fear is too much for too long. Next circuit. This evolved in reptiles. It is core, central, and it too is wrapped around all your insides. It is either suppressed or on. If it is on, you are hyper, in fight and flight. Your heart racing, your pupils dilated, you are possibly entering into screaming mad. Final circuit, runs down your chest, around your heart following the others, then it swerves upwards to control your face...we got this one when we became...

Ok, this helps. It helps me to understand why I get into the frozen, immobile, unable to speak or think stage. It helps me to understand why, when I'm heading into relatively shut down, ex service user becomes worse. And it increases my tolerance to his constant talking at me. I sit and nod, and mindlessly mumble key words back, and support myself by watching SFBT videos. Basically I'm at the point in my course where my next assignment should be done and isn't, and the final one should be half done. Ha, it isn't. Anyway, I passed the last one, so I'm still on a high. More about the ployvagal theory next time! 

So, mental health triage  is a newish thing pioneered in the West Midlands. It is a team of three, the psychological assessment bit coming from an IAPT, which is - I think, don't quote me - a person with a psychology degree who has some counselling skills. Therefore a triage team seems to me to be a really good idea when things are getting out of hand and others can't cope with an individual's chaotic behaviour. A police cell is no place for someone experiencing severe panic, rage. Yet the single thing that has always been aspired to, and constantly missed, is asylum or sanctuary. A place of grounded sanity and safety. Real asylum or sanctuary doesn't exist as a ' main stream' option. There is a Home Visit chemical mist delusion of asylum, which must be better than hospital - if ex service user's experience is anything to go by...or hospital plus the chemical haze, so called medication ( the chemical lobotomy)... Real asylum would be a place...

The existence of a triage team was news to me, though quite frankly I wasn't in any fit state to appreciate it at that particular moment in time. It was quarter to ten at night. I'd staggered home from college, and had almost finished eating when the police arrived. Someone had phoned in their concerns. But it was Tuesday....And the time when the police and triage would have been helpful, long gone: 4.5 days too late. They strongly advised ex service user to see their triage team.... And then my husband explained how things were slightly fubar before... and then completely fugazi after the psychiatric help, so though it's not up to us about the triarge, you ( the police) can now understand exactly why we are struggling with this problem by ourselves. And that we could go to the doctor's, but we don't. So, that was last night. Ex service user politely declined the triage, and the police extended their sympathy and best wishes and left.

Of course the shiny new laptop isn't the whole story. This morning I felt like I was wading through black mud, unable to speak, unable to think. I made the breakfast - same as in Friday - listening to the memories of how it began, totally out of the blue. Impressions: one of the first was discomfort and an awareness that I was holding a knife, slicing orange.  Next, I knew he was going to push over the workbench; and it is really heavy... Then I remembered him swinging the kitchen stool. I remember my phone in my hand and him going for me... All this as I'm slicing orange again. I didn't ask if he wanted breakfast, as if that would break the spell. The laptop meant I could lock myself away. At some point I'm going to have to start writing about what works...

As I sat in the living room next door, I could hear my computer being broken...The damage wasn't as bad as it sounded. Basically computers are pretty tough; just keys missing off my keyboard, no right click on the mouse, and the entry port for the headphone socket must be damaged in some way. So I got myself a a laptop with a gamer quality GeForce card, and a new mouse that possibly glows octurine..It is imperative to my sanity that I can run around the 'Endless Forest' as a sweet little deer, and problem solve in Portal games, run around madly in Quake 3 and threaten myself with wading through Half Life (everything after the first game). My laptop is splendid. And I just downloaded a meditation thing, (PLAYNE)  where I 'sit' in a different forest by a campfire. I think I have to click the mouse each time a thought crosses my mind! So basically if I don't follow my thoughts, the sun rises and the trees grow, I will see... The laptop enables me to lock mys...

Well...who knows why today has been as it is. He could have read something on Facebook. Could be the moon. All I know is, it started bad. I know I said before that, truth is, I never see it coming. I never think, today I'm going to be asking myself seriously...am I about to be killed? Today as I fled the house, he was busy slamming the grill from the cooker into the wall. The table had been overturned, he has smashed things, I'd reached for my phone and he went for me. As I reversed off the drive he was ripping the aerial off my car and trying to get in..I drove away. By now I'm hysterical... I returned thinking I can't just let this happen...went into the house, he was still smashing things. I went into the garden, wanted to huddle safe under a stone. Air so cold, tiny snowflakes falling. I phoned a friend - left a sobbing, incoherent message. Phoned husband, again had to leave message. Couldn't bring myself to phone the police. I just went to ...