It’s funny how memory plays tricks - the first being the name of that Simply Red song from my student days.

But let’s start with today. It’s been a good week and a half, since the start of the summer break for my therapist. 

And now if we go back six months, it’s been a real rollercoaster of a ride. Three periods of really serious thoughts of self-harm and one half-hearted attempt to end it all, punctuated by a month off work.

Go back another six months and its a new start. A new job, never done before, in a new town and a new start to try and breathe life into a relationship thats been struggling for ages. Lots of possible  sources of stress but life seems bright and full of promise.

And so we go on back, another six months and I am in the middle of four months away from the work that I have been doing for the last twenty years. It’s a break to try and recoup some energy and focus and boy do I need it. Seeing the local mental health team for the first time just makes me realise how low I feel, trapped by the thought that they won't offer any help.

Go back another year, or five or fifteen and I am sat in a room with a counsellor, trying to make sense of how I am in the world. Trying to understand why I feel so detached from my life, why I can put issues in boxes and move on to the  next, and why my memory is so poor.

And that's me, always looking back, trying to understand where my emotional detachment has come from - so that I can move forward and build a stronger connection to my feelings, my body and my future.

But family and friends say it’s not a good thing to look back, and that it makes me feel worse. And after the last week and a half with no counsellor, I'm thinking there may be some truth in their view.

So how about you? Is looking back a help or a hinderance? And should I make the counsellor's holiday a permanent thing - forget rolling back the years, and just move on?

Just some guy you know 

A Moodscope member.