This is probably the most unimaginative title for a blog post ever. No matter how inane it might be is that it has been a huge process to arrive at the idea of a Three Hour Session. That has as much to do with my own healing process it does to do with decolonising time. Two very big ideas and exploration to fit into a 500 word blog post. Yet let me make a wild attempt.
The idea of a Three Hour Session probably emerged in my consciousness over 10 years ago as I attended a consultation for a Mental Health Day Clinic at which I had to run through my immediate traumas in super quick time in order to beat the one hour clock. I was completely unable to stop for breath before gazing across at the Mental Health Practitioners and witnessing their own unguarded expression of shock and awe at the tail I had unveiled to them in the search of some Mental Health or rather Emotional Support. It was only this year that a rather lovely somebody was able to describe it rather eloquently to me as a Trauma Shopping List. That somehow we are meant to trail off an ever expansive list of the tumultuous events that has led you to need Mental Health support in the most inconvenient space of any hour. It’s bullshit. What’s even better if you get to hang out with a load of nutters in a similar state they will also tell how alarmingly inadequate and hour is to unpack and life time of trauma. Like seriously. Not only that, the very real impacts of retraumatising are completely debilitating as you try to prevent complete emotional collapse on public transport. Aye it’s fucked up. I myself have had more than a few very serious public meltdowns as a result of the unconscious, unboundaried approach of careless professions to my trauma. Seriously unless you going to talk to traumatised people right up until they are finished talking, don’t fucking talk to them. Just don’t.
So that’s me and my position of Three Hours Sessions. I want you to be able to talk until you are finished, not stare and the clock in terror nor spend the first 20 minutes panicking to find out if you trust me enough to speak to me. Or that when you do get to the source of your increasing distress it isn’t just a matter of handing you an elastoplast and saying thank you so much for sharing would like to spend even more money to feel worse next week. Fuck that.
So in greater news Three Hour Sessions are about reclaiming time from the capitalist system and in fact healing too. You can’t heal trauma in an hour. You just can’t, nor can you address it appropriately. It’s like a surgeon hoping to do a 12 hour operation in an hour because well a botched job won’t kill you. Fuck that. Primarily I’m interested in healing. I’m interested in making sure that you have the scope of the issues you are working with before you even begin to unpack the more sensitive topics or unfold the healing journey. How do you expect to ‘treat’ someone’s trauma in an hour when they have a twenty years trauma history and actually in the current climate most of us do. As more and more of us start unrolling our healthy histories that start at eight or even younger. Seriously it’s a thing and it’s common. What even more common is the volume of people that have been seeking medical help since that time and are still fucking ill. It’s mildly enraging for me and that is why the work I do centers around the systemic.
So for me Three Hour Session are a way of decolonising time. Where I like to think that back in teh day you wandered up to witches hut and it was a half day immersion. Yet if you think about it, not so long ago , you would have spent a morning of your life able to talk to your gran, or your aunt or actually just anybody able to listen. You see this would have been the role of the elderly back only a couple of decades ago to listen and hold council. Now the elderly are part of the on mass societal narcissistic discard. You have no economic contribution to make and now you are not of any value, It’s pretty sad imagine if we all had a kind older person to speak to. Imagine none of us had to feel lonely or isolated. Imagine how that might cure trauma?
