2022: reflecting on my year and truly understanding my pain, grief and sadness.

It’s that time of the year in which many of us reflect on the last twelve months and assess how it’s been. A success? A failure? A mixed bag?

It’s flown. It’s dragged. I can’t believe it’s Christmas again etc etc. It’s also a time when many set goals for the year ahead and enter the new year with a fresh start and a new focus after hitting the reset button.

2022 has been a really important year for me: a year of milestones but also a year in which I connected with some of my deepest feelings, experiences and traumas.

This year marked a key step on my recovery and personal reset following my 2014/2015 breakdown - something I wrote about recently: 

https://www.amjcounselling.com/amj-blog/eight-years-since-my-world-came-crashing.

It was the year that I qualified as a psychotherapist/counsellor, set up AMJ Counselling, and began my private practice. It was the year when, as we emerged from the shadow of the pandemic, we could see with even greater clarity the horrendous impact COVID and our response to it had on our mental health, health services and daily lives. My clients talk every day with me about the way COVID and it’s aftermath has changed their lives - and very rarely for the better.

As I have written before, my practice this year (as in the previous year) has been, at least in part, dominated by eating disorder work and clients who have been experiencing the complex challenges of dealing with disordered eating or eating disorders when those closest to them simply don’t understand (not their fault) and the support that should be there form the NHS is not (also not their fault but the result of chronic under-investment and under-resourcing).

I wrote about this recently too: https://www.amjcounselling.com/amj-blog/eating-disorders-wood-for-trees. 

It has been a time of further, deep personal reflection for me. A year in which I reconnected with journaling to chart my daily mood and feelings, and importantly, to track my daily self-care. I know that to be the best possible therapist for my clients, I must look after myself, but that isn’t always easy.

Like millions of others, I am trying hard to balance my own needs (including for quiet, me-time, daily exercise, reading, music, fresh air, good sleep and more besides) with the demands and expectations (more often than not generating from within myself and not coming from others) to be the best possible dad, husband, family member and friend. Delivering on all these fronts is not easy, especially when trying to also be the best version of myself at work, and trying to establish myself as a therapist and my new practice.

I am proud of what I have achieved this year but also mindful of my personal challenges. I have struggled at times with my own mental health this year with periods of depression and anxiety - this isn’t a surprise because I’ve faced those challenges for years and know that when I’m tired and emotionally depleted (especially when my self-care has slipped and I am over-stretching myself or facing what I perceive to be unfairness) it creates the most fertile ground for my depression and anxiety to grow.

I also know now that so much of my inner pain is linked to feelings of rejection which I have been feeling from a young age, reflected in this recent post: https://www.amjcounselling.com/amj-blog/feelings-of-rejection-and-being-misunderstood. This insight, coupled with my own ongoing therapy, self-care, journaling and commitment to taking time out every day to reflect on what is really going on inside and why I am reacting as I am to things, has helped me, especially on difficult days. The times I feel shame or guilt after reacting rather than responding - reacting as a child and not a 44-year old man - I ask myself why and what has happened to me, not what is wrong with me. More often than not, I am feeling depleted emotionally and the event happening now is bringing up those deep, painful, hurtful feelings inside of not feeling loved, wanted, cared for and valued. This understanding I have after many, many years of therapy and work on myself has freed me from self-loathing and feeling not good enough. It doesn’t take away those feelings - I have been deeply damaged by what I have experienced and the trauma (small ‘t’ trauma) of feeling rejected and abandoned (many times) - but it helps me to be kind to myself in those moments when I am not at my best.

2022 also saw me connect at a much deeper level with the grief I felt when losing my beloved nan, Mary, something I wrote about in September: https://www.amjcounselling.com/amj-blog/a-loss-that-never-goes-away. Her lost was tough at the time - 18 years ago - and prompted my first visit to a psychotherapist/counsellor in Chorlton, Manchester - but it has become greater over time as I came to appreciate how important, emotionally, she was to me. Our relationship filled a huge hole in my life - something I have only really appreciated in recent years when other things have happened to me and I wanted to dial her number, sit in her back kitchen in Finch Lane or hear her voice, and her swear some more. The grief of losing her and all those missed moments, especially of her meeting and knowing my amazing wife and daughter, remain brutally sad for me - as are the feelings of the grief and sadness of the abandonments and other losses I’ve experienced in my life - not just deaths - which I have really come to understand properly this year.

I am taking some time off over the next two weeks - with my last scheduled sessions on Tuesday next week. I am contactable to my clients over the holidays if they need to set up some urgent time (in my view, the big challenges in life doesn’t just stop for clients just because I want them to so I can eat some turkey) but I have cleared my diary until the first week of 2023 of regular sessions. I am taking a rest from blogging, social media and work over that time. It will be time for me to sit with my little pile of books I want to read, my favourite movies, my favourite people and my jam jar of things that keep me well.

It will also be a time to sit with the feelings of 2022: a year of important milestones for me and a year in which I truly connected with the pain, grief and sadnesses of my life to help me move forward. For both of those things, it has been a really good year. A year with ups and downs; joy and pain; tears and laughter; but a year I look back on with deep gratitude for everything it has brought me.

Feicfidh mé sibh an bhliain seo chugainn. I’ll see you next year.