The final few sessions with Sally Mungall had very little to do with art therapy. I had, by and large, stopped making drawings. The images of monstrous self-disgust, bodily contamination and excretion had gradually been replaced by idealized drawings of Sally herself and then, finally, with one painfully sad picture that seemed to foretell self-enforced boundaries and drowning. And then I drew no more. I simply talked. The pretense at art therapy was over. What emerged was psychodynamic therapy and that was, to me, life-saving.

It is a truism that virtually every session with Sally Mungall was harrowing. I plunged headfirst into each allotted hour with the zealous commitment of a Kamikaze pilot. I died, was resurrected and returned again each week. Yet, despite the very real pain, there was nowhere else in the whole world that I wanted to be than with her. The pain that I felt made me realise that I was alive or at least realise that I was struggling to be alive. I never understood it then as I do now; it seemed, at the time, that Sally was saving my life. In retrospect, it was psychodynamic therapy that was useful to me, while being properly seen and being properly heard. Sally Mungall, herself, was compromised, likely due to her own counter-transference.

And I heard her voice in between sessions. She was talking to me even when she wasn’t there. Sally told me that this was known as ‘introjection’, otherwise known as integration or internalisation . Introjection is the adoption of the thoughts, traits and ideas of someone else and is the normal part of human development such as a child taking on the values and attitudes of their parents. In this particular instance I was internalizing the values and attitudes of Sally the art therapist. This reinforced my blossoming love for her.

I spoke often of my love for her. There were times when she seemed to accept my feelings towards her without protest and yet there were other times when such declarations irritated her. There was one conversation that I remember all too well when she switched from one attitude to the opposite so quickly that it threw me. I tried to explain my feelings toward her and at first she listened, patiently absorbing my words. She then replied, telling me that I wouldn’t like her in real life because, according to her, she could be a ‘bitch’! Bitch is a pejorative and when applied to a woman means someone who is belligerent, unreasonable, malicious, controlling, aggressive, or dominant. It is especially revelatory when a woman applies such a pejorative to herself and I have played this admission over and over in my mind, deliberating much and often since. At the time I was quick with my response. I told Sally ‘I was okay’ with the idea that she might, indeed, be a ‘bitch’. I told her that she could be a ‘bitch’ to me and I would still love her. She groaned in reply. It was just a groan but it was loaded with so much tangible frustration. She had lobbed ‘bitch’ at me like some kind of diffusing hand-grenade and I had simply lobbed it back like a tennis ball, instead.

We spent the remaining time together trying to evaluate my parenting of Meg. Sally provided some suggestions designed to improve things. She made a recommendation to reach out to Linsey Spillane at Basingstoke College of Technology who supervised courses for students on the autistic spectrum. There were other aspects of the work that remained incomplete. Sally had started an intergenerational trauma family tree but ran out of time before she had made much of it.

The final session of art therapy with Sally Mungall took place on the 16th December, 2021. I remember it was a sombre hour, filled with deep sadness and diminishing hope for me. Sally was exceptionally gentle with me. Indeed, she reflected on the occasion in her therapy notes that I partially accessed later the following year with an acknowledgment that the work had finished too soon for both of us. She made a half-hearted attempt to walk me through a document she had prepared that addressed my as of yet unprocessed therapy drawings but my heart wasn’t in the right place.

Instead, we finalised the plan to meet much later, when I was ready, to formally process my art therapy drawings. She told me that, when I decided that the time was right that I should telephone the CAMHS reception to make the appointment. However, I was anxious that if I left it too long then maybe Sally might follow a career opportunity elsewhere and leave or that some other unforeseen circumstance might mean that she no longer worked for CAMHS at Bramblys Drive in Basingstoke. I expressed my concern but she replied, with a heavy sigh, that she expected to be working in the same position indefinitely. I noted the obvious sign of discontent with her current position. She was obviously yearning for new challenges and a change of professional scenery. I went further, asking her ‘How long will I have with you when we meet to process my art therapy drawings?’ Sally replied ‘As long as you need.’ I was reassured and took Sally at her word. I trusted her.

Sally promised to make formal safeguarding arrangements for both Meg and for me as she realised that we were both extremely vulnerable.

Finally I reminded her of my intentions, often repeated during those final sessions. After we had properly processed my art therapy drawings and when the work was finally complete, when the therapeutic relationship was over and any ethical conflict arising from our current status was made moot ( at least in my mind ), I would ask to see Sally socially, to ask her out on a dinner date and, hopefully, ( for me at least ) pursue a romantic relationship with her. I asked her to refrain from giving me an answer until the therapeutic relationship was actually over. Sally agreed to everything. I took her at her word which to me was as good as a promise but, words are cheap and lying comes easily, apparently.

As I was about to leave she handed me an envelope. Inside was a ‘gift’ from her, a gift in the form of two photographs, somewhat faded by time, taken by her long ago during a trip she had taken to the Kielder Forest, the same woodland location that was part of my own suicide fantasy. She had not forgotten my revelation; it would be hard not to forget but it was especially touching to read the pencilled notation on the back of the images of Kielder Water that alluded to ‘tranquillity’. ( I wont quote the actual words she used as haven’t looked at the photos in nearly three years nor reread those words. Those photos, along with the words Sally wrote are as painful to me now as they are confusing. I will always treasure them but I will likely never look at them again.)

It had been arranged for Meg to continue seeing her psychotherapist, Mark Birbeck until the end of January, 2022 and there were still two ‘review’ meetings scheduled for the 23rd December, 2021 and 13th January, 2022 in order to assess and finalise Meg’s work at CAMHS. With that in mind, Sally and I said our goodbyes.

I walked home, resolved to finish working on my own ‘gift’ to Sally. I had an idea to also write a letter to her. It ended up being an innocent and naively romantic letter but ultimately provoked hysteria among Sally’s clinical and managerial cohorts and later used, cynically and dishonestly, to misrepresent me as some obsessed monster. I have a digital version of that same letter and will publish it in my next blog post so that you, the reader, can be a judge.