A Puddle of People: Can We Write Again, After Therapy?

We are so out of the habit of writing that we don’t know where or how to start… We guess it became difficult around the time therapy started - two years and five months ago - before then we’d used writing as our primary tool for processing our internal and external worlds, oversharing too much of our life, in the hope that even if our rambles didn’t help anyone else, they helped us. 

The process of getting to specialist therapy was horrific, we think we probably shared a lot, but when the last hurdle hurt so much, yet we felt we couldn’t publicly share that process and pain, we relinquished our oversharing and used our therapy to process the trauma of getting to the therapy. 

To briefly summarise what happened for us, we had been diagnosed with DID (that itself a palaver as anyone who has tried to seek the diagnosis knows), and our MH nurse and doctor had applied for funding for the Maudsley Centre in London. We got a letter telling us we were on their waiting list and it was expected to be two years. At the time, Mia (one of us) was on Twitter a lot, where she complained about this, to which someone from a specialist clinic responded saying they had capacity to provide therapy for us through the NHS. 

So we went back to our MH nurse and had the funding transferred, which took around seven months. We were to have a partial assessment as we’d already been diagnosed. We turned up to the online assessment, expressed relief at finally making it this far (we’d first gone to our doctor asking for help for DID in early 2021 and this was October 2023), and were chastised for our relief and enthusiasm: “This is not therapy. This is an assessment.”

Ok…? So, within thirty seconds of meeting our assessor our brain was broke, we were dissociated and messy, and struggled through the assessment as best we could. We can’t remember it. 

A few days later we got her report. The clinic were not offering us therapy - our instability, suicidal thoughts and personality disorders (which we were initially diagnosed with, along with Mixed Dissociative [Conversion] Disorder and ‘traits’ of MPD - all of which were supposedly superseded by the DID Dx), were cited as reasons the risk was too high. 

We cried for days. We listened to the same song a hundred times (Trapped in a Dream by RudyWade). Mia messaged the clinic manager on Twitter, he agreed with the report and there was nothing we could do to change their decision. The assessor had given us a deadline of until Friday to respond. We sat down and wrote, we bitched, we threatened, we begged, we complained, we demanded, we wrote everything we shouldn’t write, and then asked for help, and a friend kindly edited it for us. 

We sent it on Thursday. Cried some more, kept listening to the song, pondered suicide. And on the following Monday we got an email from the clinic manager - he had “had a think” and thought he knew a Psychologist who might be able to help us. No acknowledgement of the report, or rejection, or our email. Obviously we wanted to tell him to go eff himself we didn’t want their help, but it had taken over two and a half years to get to this point, and we didn’t want to transfer the funding again, have more waiting, more assessments, so we thanked him. Our therapy started on the 5th December. 

On the 30th November, our husband had received an email from our landlord - he and his wife had split up, she was moving back to the UK and wanted to live in the house we’d been living in for a decade. We had two months to vacate, with Christmas in the middle of that.

So, as you can imagine, therapy started well. Or terribly. Between processing the process of getting to therapy, moving house, plus the rest of our crap we’d been saving for therapy, there was plenty to be working on. 

Our therapist was nice. We had fast and good rapport and were grateful that he was new to working with/for the clinic. As you can imagine, the first several months were consumed with moving, processing getting to therapy, figuring out what therapy is/isn’t.

Sadly, it turns out it isn’t magic. We wanted magic, we wanted him to be able to fix us, to have all the answers, to be able to see inside our head, and tell us what we needed to do to fix our very broken selves - but we never had enough time, or did the entire thing wrong. 

We had a bunch of people vanish, refusing to engage with therapy at all. From the little we do recall from over two years ago, we know Mona did therapy alone for a long time. Mona was the split we conveniently created while moving. Dissociation and fragmentation do have some positives, but there’s usually a negative that goes with it. For us, we held our shit together and moved house in less than a month. We weren’t even angry with the landlords, but we found all the bad feelings, pain, and misery when we found Mona. She was miserable. We think we/she maybe wrote a blog post about making Mona. 

So therapy wasn’t a quick fix. Or even a slow fix. We’ve been so very grateful that we were lucky enough to access therapy through the NHS (inside there’s laughter… nothing feels lucky, but we know we’re fortunate we had help and could advocate for ourselves enough to access therapy). 

Part way through the first year our therapist applied for a second year, but this was by no means a certainty and it was the week before the end that we found out it had been funded, the not knowing was another painful difficulty. The chance we would get a third year funded was slim to none, so our therapist applied for an extra four months transitional period, he had to fight for it but was successful. 

We don’t know what happened. Our therapist says we made progress and are improving. We hated where we moved to after the eviction, and in July our husband’s mum died, leaving him enough money and property that he would be able to get a mortgage and buy a house. So that consumed therapy. Waiting and waiting for one thing after another, his mum’s house was sold and early 2025 we started looking for our forever home. It was just over a year ago in April 2025 we saw this house, viewed it and made an offer. 

We were lucky being first time buyers and our best and final offer was accepted, even though it wasn’t the highest. We got the keys in August and moved in after doing some work, in late September. 

We don’t know what we should have been doing in therapy, but we do know it wasn’t what we have done, and we feel we wasted it. It was wasted on us. The assessor was right, we shouldn’t have got therapy, we are beyond help. But we did, and instead of using it to work ourselves out and heal, as hoped, we cried about whatever happened in the last week, and kept swimming. 

We talked with him about different ways he could help us, different things we could be doing. He had told us about schema therapy, which helps people identify and change deeply ingrained, self-defeating patterns from childhood, and replace unhelpful coping strategies with healthier ones. The assessment took weeks and the results were interesting and insightful. 

We scored highly on Unrelenting Standards and Punitiveness, so for us, alongside the constant pressure to be perfect, there are also harsh internal feelings that criticise or punish us when we inevitably fall short. It’s not just striving, it’s never feeling like we’re allowed to get it wrong. 

This was incredible insight, which we see happening all the time. It prevents us from starting things, continuing with things when we face hurdles, finishing things we so desperately wanted to do. 

We see the trigger happening, we can name it, explain it, yet cannot stop it. They say awareness is the first step, but we can’t work out what the next step would be. We have many unfinished, and finished, blog posts, books, among other endeavours.

The reactions we have to triggers are still strong and overwhelming, and we now have to figure this out by ourselves. Therapy is over, and we cannot afford to access private therapy. 

The other thing to come from/during therapy was our ADHD diagnosis. We’d been aware of our probable AuDHD for some time and our therapist suggested trying to get assessed for ADHD. We went through Right to Choose and referred to Psychiatry UK for an ADHD assessment. 

It didn’t take long, we can’t remember how long but less than a year. The assessments were hard but manageable, our mum needed to provide evidence from our childhood, we didn’t like the psychiatrist (we haven’t actually met one we did like yet… Anyway).

The ADHD diagnosis was no surprise and was validating, the psychiatrist recommended we seek an assessment for ASD (Autism) too, and maybe we will do that soon. We also know that there might have been signposting for further help from the ADHD Dx, but at the time we were in house limbo and it was too difficult. 

There was also the anticipation of therapy ending, which was worse than it actually ending, and we’ve been anxious about this since it started. We expected it to be a bigger event, but when it ended there was also relief mixed in with it. Relief that it was over, relief that we didn’t have to keep holding all of it in that space anymore. It felt strange though, because the ending we’d built up in our head didn’t quite arrive in the way we thought it would, just like the therapy we built up in our head was so different to the therapy we received. He has said we could keep in touch, and we sincerely hope we do, he was a very important part of our life and we shared a lot with him. We look forward to an occasional light hearted email, with some TV recommendations… Which was a theme… 

We are more stable than we have been since the DID revealed itself (ourselves). We have the external stability of our own home which is huge. We felt like we were on unstable ground between the eviction and our move to this house, nineteen months later. We love that we can do whatever we want in this house, and slowly it is coming together nicely. Now that spring is here we are enjoying our garden and the birds, as is our dog, Jason. 

But we’re also messy, we described ourselves as a puddle of people to our therapist in our final session last week. We don’t know who we are, we don’t know who is present or active, we don’t know what we want to do, there’s a lot of unknowns we hoped would be resolved with therapy, but daily life and surviving consumed therapy, and now it’s over. So, hopefully we can write again. We are writing again. If we can get this to a point we’re happy with, remember how to post a blog post, how we share. Do we want to share, even? We don’t know. But we have a neglected website, so we will. 

There are numerous more positives and negatives we could explore about our current life, but at some point we have to say, this is enough. Is this enough? Maybe. We wholeheartedly disagree, but we have to fight those schemas, and maybe calling this finished will feel good? 

We started by saying we don’t know how or what to write anymore, yet in a couple of hours we’ve written more than we have for months or years. We have a lot of stuff to sort out with ourselves, and now that it’s all on us, we’re glad to see we can write again, aplenty, apparently.