Rhys, this is exactly how I experience it. I never, ever found it enjoyable. I completely hate it. It doesn't help me to hate it, but I do.
One and a half year ago I terminated 21 years of therapy, 11 years twice a week and 10 years follow-up (or whatever it was) twice a year (I was diagnosed with borderline). That is, he terminated me, in a disastrous way. He called me to tell me that he now retired, and that he would give me one last session - in 3 days. No reaction. I didn't feel a thing.
After the first 8 years something went terribly wrong in the therapy which resulted in a psychosis for about a week. This was never discussed or solved. The therapy got stuck. I felt more and more dead inside. For the last 6-8 years or so we only chit-chatted in these half-yearly sessions. So - since I didn't feel anything when he informed me about his retiring I thought that I had let go of him long ago.
Well, I came on the appointed day and time, and when my T turned up he said that he had to talk to a colleague the first 10 minutes before the session. He reduced our very LAST session with 10 minutes. He had never before even once reduced our session with one minute for the 21 years of that therapy. No reaction. Numb, just numb, careless. The same in the session.
Afterwards, when I got home the first layer was lifting, and I knew what was under way. The same thing that had happened 13 years earlier. I tried to stay in my freeze position, but this was beyond my control. I wad terrified. Abandonment and separation are my core issues. Hell broke lose. I totally lost contact with reality. I called him already the day after the last session to ask for one more session to get the chance to say a proper goodbye. But he was not at the hospital any more. I wrote him a letter and sent it to the hospital. His answer was no. He had stopped working.
It was like dooms day. I didn't eat, I didn't sleep. It was a constant struggle against annihilation, against death. It lasted for more than a month. I feel that this last session was like a suicide. I had felt numb a lot of the time during the therapy, and I simply couldn't fight it or get out of it. But I didn't get much, if any, help from my T. Actually, I don't think that he understood what this numbness was about. Nor did I. I was just terrified of it whenever I kind of "woke up" from it. I was afraid to disappear again, and of course I disappeared again. Now, when I look back I have the impression that my T saw it as mere resistance or anger. We should have talked about this numbness. I told him several times that I always had had this feeling, also outside the therapy, that i had blackouts, as if I wasn't here, and that mind was blank. But he didn't seem to be much aware of or interested in talking about it.
When I am in this condition I have no feeling at all. No one can touch me. My consciousness is narrowed, and my perception is very low. I hear. My ears hear, but I don't perceive well what I hear. I can talk and communicate quite vividly, but it is a robot talking. Not really me. I'm like a sleepwalker. A living dead. This is worst when I feel insecure or threatened, and many times I don't even know what's going on. When you are dead you can't know that you're dead, can you? I have this gloomy feeling that I'm always in that condition, more or less like an alien, never really breathing. If only I knew how to get out of there. We should have worked on that in the therapy. But I'm afraid that this life-killing protector became his enemy too. I don't know. How I long, still, for an evaluation with my T. We never had an evaluation. But I can as well forget about it. He's gone, forever.
If I hate this dissociation? With all my heart. It is my worst enemy because it is so destructive. It is a real life-killer! My faithful and fatal Medusa. Useful? Maybe, in the sense that it probably serves as a protection against something (still unknown) my system cannot bear. The two episodes in the therapy where I lost my senses and was in danger of losing my mind tell me that it may be useful, maybe even necessary to survive. I hate that too. It robs me of life. It prevents me from being fully alive. It prevents me from being able to attach to anyone.
I will end this moaning with two extracts from a ballad I was writing during my therapy before the disaster, the psychosis. I never finished it. It silenced after my first fall in 1999:
You were never the captain of your ship but the slave of a terrible force.
An invisible monster who knows how to vanish whenever you search its source.
It dwells within you like a devil in disguise.
It shows no mercy, it takes you by surprise.
Like the ghastly Medusa it puts out every fire, every spark of life.
To beat your passion and black out your mind it needs no weapon, no sword or knife.
It fills you with dope and makes you believe it’s better this way.
With a satanic smile it puts you to sleep and persuades you to stay.
It keeps watch at your sun bed, it keeps you away from disturbance and nightmares.
It knows that it’s safe to lie dormant, your defender of freedom from cares.
******************
Shattered and cold you crouch on the raft from the wreck of your phantom ship.
Paralysed you stare at the water, what does it matter if you fall or slip.
You look for salvation, you seek safety in flight.
But there’s no escape, no harbour in sight.
With all your heart you cry to the wind, to the gods of the sea or maybe to your own reflection:
Don’t let the devil defeat me, don’t let me nourish it, let me resist its fatal protection.
If I strike a volcano, if I’m torn by storms, let me not run away.
I’d rather be dead and buried than buried alive, so why should I stay.
I left my anchor, I deserted my soul.
Reckless and blind I made my fate.
Go back to the Stoker and do what you have to do before it's too late.
He has opened your heart, with you he's been fighting for your eyes to see.
Now why would the Stoker not let you release your anchor, why would he disagree.
Will there be time,
will I have strength and spirit?
Will I have one more chance
- and the courage not to queer it?
