Dr. Sarah Marusek

It was a mistake for me to delete my review of the Tuning Room. Declaring war on the healer has sadly helped me to understand why.

Yesterday I was surprisingly able to attend an amazing concert. Karl Jenkins conducting his Mass for Peace. It was the most stressful concert of my life.

Wow, are my facial nerves releasing!

Then last night I realised why I needed to write this difficult blog.

I finally know why I so often get suicidal. It really is physiological.

My suicidal tendencies are something that have always been there, lingering. However, it is not like I spent any time planning my death. I only heard the drumbeat of thinking that I did not deserve to live.

The urge to act on it was always impulsive.

When I was a youth, this would often manifest when arguing with my mother to and from gymnastics. I would undo my seatbelt, unlock and open the car door and lean out. I needed to put myself into physical danger to wake up.

The impulse was in response to a social situation that I could not handle.

Now I know why: for me, because my body was never safe and I do not know how to love myself, my flight option has always been suicide.

My baby’s neuroception did not know that healing was an alternative.

When somebody especially triggers my injury and I cannot continue fighting with them anymore, I often get suicidal.

Growing up, I learned to bury this impulse deeply inside of me, but certain stresses would still bring it out, especially with people I really cared about.

So, early misunderstandings with my mother often triggered it.

Hence her ‘oh my Sarah Heartburn’.

Unfortunately, this reaction only made the impulse stronger. Whenever anybody underestimates how much my nervous system is hurting enough to actually choose death, the monster’s wings spread even wider.

Over the years, just me loving started triggering this impulse. I think this is why the only time in my life that I actually planned and attempted suicide was over many months of strain over loving an (undeserving) married man.

One night I took music, a stool, a noose and some wine to a deserted park in West London. I tied the noose to a tree and put my neck through it and stood on the stool crying, but my body would not allow me to step off.

I could not go through with it because even though my social context told me that it was the only solution, my body was not ready to submit.

I am very sorry to say this, but working with the healer, over time, put my body into a physiological state where suicide felt like the only option.

He should have known better than to allow this to get so out of control.

I explained to him early on that I was starting to feel suicidal. He was asking me to do things that my nervous system was not ready to do, like scream.

Now I scream several times a day but back then, it did not reach my right side. When my monster logic on the left echoed that scream, I bought a rope.

After I told him, he said my suicidal tendencies would not be a problem for our work together because he thought he understood my nervous system.

I was relieved. The last man I dated broke up with me over them.

So, I fought very hard to continue working with the healer, as he is very gifted, but my nervous system was starting to protest too much because it was becoming more and more terrified of him, not just because of my monster logic but also because he underestimated my injuries.

After one session, I had an electrical seizure that scared me more than normal and I told him that I was too frightened to come in.

He did not take this seriously enough.

During another session, I fell off the table after my entrainment.

He did not take this seriously enough either.

My nervous system was becoming hyper panicked because it was being pushed into a physiological state where suicide was the best option.

I know this now because I am currently in this state, only more controlled, which is why a concert for peace triggered my PTSD.

Now I can handle this better and fight feeling suicidal. But back then my right side, the problem-solving side, was still inaccessible.

By the end of my treatment with the healer, I was increasingly finding myself suicidal because my monster logic is both physiological and ideational.

Those wings of despair are fucking real, physical structures.

When I convinced myself that the healer did not even care for me as a patient any more, it was because my energy was only coursing through them, putting me in a permanent state of fight or flight.

I had tried to fight him through explanation, using examples from my research. I even tried to incorporate the ideas of his hero, Dr. Donald Epstein.

But none of it was working and I continued to spiral more and more.

The night I almost ended it was after the Tuning Room suddenly increased their prices just when my finances were becoming a problem due to unemployment. I had a seizure at their office and left in tears.

Nobody followed up.

That night I was maniacally out of control for over two hours. I had already bought the rope so I frantically started planning and only stopped when I realised that I was already closer to doing it than when standing on that stool in a park in West London with the noose already around my neck.

I told the Tuning Room that I was suicidal and would not be coming in anymore.

This too, the healer did not take seriously enough.

Just like my mother while growing up, strengthening the monster.

I ended it with the healer because everything about him started to terrify me, not just my love for him. I was no longer able to fight.

From then on, I could not communicate with him by text without crying.

I would start shaking violently whenever I had to pass by the Tuning Room’s building to reach my daily ice baths. This lasted for months.

Even thinking about him now still makes me shake (hence the shitty drawing).

Why?

The idea of him always brings me back to that night. Ever since then, I have been equating my love with the urgent need to kill myself.

So sadly, the healer has made my healing journey that much more difficult. I am obsessed with him every time my body goes into a panic.

By not even recognising how much he hurt me, he locked the loving part of me into a closet and threw away the key.

I think this is why I wrote ‘All Summer in a Day’.

Until I declared war, my nervous system still thought that it needed him to see me, in other words recognise that I have never come closer to killing myself, because I am again feeling this imperative now as the injury finally releases.

I am sincerely sorry for hurting you, Harry.

But you were supposed to be different. A healer. An empath. A weirdo like me.

I did not want you to lose your job.

But I did need to write that review because you hurt me. I do not think it will ever be possible for me to love or trust another human again.

Instead, I need to embrace this social isolation without feeling lonely, because I do not deserve to be going through any of this.

I need to visualise my monster to truly document my incredible pain and suffering and how I am overcoming it in the hopes that it is of interest to somebody out there somewhere. I need to start making a living soon.

‘My Good Day’ is a beginning.

‘Why Can’t He See Me’ does not yet capture enough of my torment.

But, most importantly, I need to start lovingly embrace my inner monstrosity.