Beverly Wade writes:
My first contact with Stella was on the 6 March 2008. On returning home from a session with a client, I checked my phone for messages. As one of the messages had cut off half way through, something led me to return the call of one of the numbers, even though no message had been left.
Stella was so pleased that I had called back, though her nerve had gone after ringing my number, and after a chat we agreed that our consultant Chrystine would ring her the next evening to book a session.
11 March 2008. Chrystine spoke to Stella and she had had a cold and depression, asked to be rung in 10 days. Finally, they set a date: 1st April 2008.
29 March 2008. Stella called me to say that she was getting cold feet, in part because she had not yet seen our agreement document, and had some concerns about confidentiality and privacy. I was able to reassure her, as did the document, and the visit was set to go ahead.
Stella was much more chipper this time and was ready to talk about what happened between the two previous visits.
‘I was back to staying in bed, unable to do anything’
As I write this I think it must be very hard for Stella to do things in the bedroom. There is clutter to clear, but the clutter is often the comfort clutter of Stella's depression. Because, going back to bed in the down periods is a time when she needs to re-visit the comfort bits, to go in and try to sort stuff must trigger all kinds of conflicts besides reminding her of the bad times.
When I’d left at the last time, Stella had said: ‘I think we’ve found all the caches of paper’. On my way home I started thinking about two ‘lumps’ in her bedroom covered by floral curtain fabric and wondered what was underneath.
In answer to the question: ‘What do you want to do this week?’.
Stella said, ‘I want to do the floral lumps in my bedroom’. We laughed about both having thought about papers hiding there.
Once again I was impressed at Stella’s courage in going back into the bedroom that had produced a hiccup.
‘Since you were last here, I've started putting my laundry away in the drawers we've cleared.’
We passed the sitting room on our way to the bedroom and she showed me how she had built on the new furniture layout. She was pleased with how her decisions had worked. The stationary supplies that we'd found on another visit were now stored in the bottom of the computer table. She’d made some other titivations and refinements and was already making plans as to what she wants to do next in that room.
‘I want to move the TV table over. It will be a fiddle because I'll have to take it apart, but I can do that by myself.’
The choices and alterations Stella made when I wasn't there meant that the room was more than ever both hers and ’in use’.
We did find papers under the floral fabric which we carried down to the front room to join the ones that hadn’t yet had the initial thinning out. This freed up another corner in the bedroom.
To finish off we did a bit of basic paper sorting and, significantly, identified another class of paper that I could just throw out without having to ask Stella each time.
Good session, because Stella’s energy was back up we could do 4 hours.
