I started training to become a therapist, but felt a fraud. Could someone as damaged as I had been really become a counsellor or psychotherapist? The old feelings of not being good enough started to creep back in and undermine me.
Despite all the positive feedback I had from the tutors I had nagging doubts which I took to my counsellor. He said he saw the qualities I needed in me and that even if I couldn't trust myself, maybe, I could trust the trust others had in me. So I borrowed that for a while and continued.
I felt I needed to talk to one of my tutors openly about my reservations and doubts about myself. I disclosed my abuse and ongoing battle with the depression and OCD. The tutor said these issues should not prevent me becoming a therapist and that he had had the same history and conditions. For a while a huge weight was taken off my shoulders, I could do this I started to say to myself. I completed my 2 year Psychotherapy Certificate with a merit.
The doubts remained; I felt I needed more training and continued adding one more course after another. Always dismissing the last one I had obtained, "If I had managed to get it, then it couldn't be that good or useful" I kept telling myself. The ruminations of self-doubt and lack of self-belief continued to haunt me. I had proven time and time again that I was capable of passing academic and vocational training, why then did this self-doubt persist?
I feel this is one of the more insidious aspects of abuse, the ongoing lack of innate core self-belief & self-value and not placing any value in what you achieve. Always striving for something external to provide that recognition or affirmation that you are achieving or are "good enough".
I sincerely hope the above does not simply sound like me whining away; the reality for many survivors is that these negative core beliefs continue to operate long after the abuse has finished. They have become part of our identity. We have held onto them for years and they were instrumental in our development into adulthood.
My counselling had come to an end and had helped me enormously, but now I needed more than ever to take what I had learnt from that process, live it, believe it and continue to claw back everything that had been taken away from me.
I had believed that completing the counselling would have meant completely recovering from abuse and that I would have no issues left. What I hadn't appreciated was that I would need to continue with the battles for many more years. There was more work to do and it seemed that many of the issues would only be dealt with through time and perseverance.
I also came to the conclusion that recovery doesn't flow in the one positive direction; you bounce back and forward, from victim to survivor to thriver to victim.
This is true for everyone, regardless of being abused or not; everyone has victim days;
"Why did I chose this shopping aisle?.... The other ones are always faster"
"Why is it always the motorway lane that I'm in that gets congested?"
"This always happens to me!".
I often use the following diagram to see what voice is talking in my head.
It was during this period that it became clearer to me and my girlfriend that we were not happy at all living in London, I was still bumping into old friends (and their habits), it was the right time for us to move away and rebuild our lives.
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