Therapy: a break.

I've not blogged about therapy recently because I've decided to take a break from it for awhile. I've only got 9 sessions left for 2008, so my plan is to take what I've learned and run with it for now, then head back in later in the year when I've got questions.

I felt like I was breaking up with my therapist when I called her, but she wasn't in the office when I called. I sometimes view therapists/shrinks with a skeptical eye, always a little wary of being roped into a situation where I feel like I need to do it. I've even caught a vibe from my therapist once or twice where it seemed like she was trying to sink some hooks into me. So I'm nipping that in the bud, as it were, and taking a break.

I may still post about some of the issues I'm working on from time to time.

Therapy, session 11

Today's session was a jumble. I started off rambling about some minor, unimportant annoyances in my life, then snuck in a zinger; I told her I'd been thinking of taking a break from therapy for a month or two as I take some time to apply some of the things I've learned.

Shockingly, she was not a fan of that idea. (Was that too sarcastic?)

I mentioned that I'm a little poor at the moment (we later covered my inability to manage money), and that my 20 sessions per year paid for by my health insurance are already half gone. She then launched into a little riff about how my mental health is worth it (okay, she's got a point there), and that I should make therapy a priority (as if I don't give it enough priority in my life. sheesh.).

The rest of the session focused on my previously-mentioned lack of financial management skills, and how it relates to my relationships. I quickly learned that she puts a much higher priority on money than I do. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but she treated some of the things I said as relationship revelations, when I honestly think that they're no big deal. I do get down on myself from time to time about my poor money skills, but I certainly don't let money (or the lack of it) keep me from being happy. A minor embarrassment, sure. Relationship deal breaker, not so much.

Bah, this post is rambling. Enough for now.

Therapy, session 10

I went into this session feeling a little feisty. See, I recently had this good conversation with a friend, where I came away with the distinct feeling like I just need to buck the fuck up and put my ancient history behind me. Acknowledge it, deal with it, learn from the mistakes, and get on with my life. Stop obsessing with the bullshit minutiae that happened to me 25 years ago and learn how to make some concrete changes in my life right here and now, today.

Those of you still reading this might be yelling "FINALLY!" at your keyboard right now. Yeah, that's how I feel about it, too.

All of my past experiences, all the hurt, the anger, the pain, the power struggles, all boil down to one thing. Fear. I'm afraid. And for me to ever experience life, to really earn my friends, to really love, to really fucking LIVE, I have to manage my fears. Sure, it'll always be easier and safer to do what I've always done, live the life I've always lived, but gee whiz Wally, look how smashingly well that strategy has worked for me so far. Playin' it safe, perfectly content to shut myself off in my own mind where nobody can sneak in and hurt me. That's been such rewarding fun.

The high dive is a cheesy, but apt metaphor for what I'm trying to convince myself to do. I'm up there, lookin' down on that water, drenched in the fear that if I let anything change my little life up there on that platform, oh gosh, I just might get hurt. What I never consider is that after 36 years of puttering around in the shallow end, I'm a pretty damn good swimmer. I can handle that dive.

I just need to trust myself.

Jump.

Therapy, sessions 7 & 8

I'm combining my posts from the last two sessions, since it seems like we've been covering the same topics over and over again. A topic we only touched upon briefly, but I think is very important, is my way of dealing with anger. Specifically, I keep anger stashed away for fear of expressing it. Most people who know me well seem to see me as a pretty even-keel guy, and I've got a pretty long fuse. But things do bother me, and I've never really figured out how to express anger in healthy ways; I just stash it away and ignore it. Hell, I've never been in a fight or hit anyone in anger in my life, despite wanting to on more than a few occasions.

I'm sure most of my reluctance to express anger stems from my fear of becoming my father. Seeing how he let anger ruin his life and hurt his family left an indelible mark on my psyche. I've gone to the opposite extreme; never expressing anger in any way, never letting anyone get close to me.

I plan to bring this up in the next session, see if I can learn something.

Therapy, session 6

This session was another one where my head just spun afterward. I was very glad to have my notebook, even though my notes are a frantic, scribbly mess.

We talked a lot about how I'm alone in my life, how I'm most comfortable when I'm alone, mainly because that's how I've always managed to keep myself safe. I've lived most of my life feeling that if I never let anyone in, they'll never be able to hurt me. I fear the unknown; the possibility that I could be hurt by someone I trust makes solitude mighty appealing in comparison.

This is a recurring topic in my therapy so far; I feel like we go over this stuff almost every session. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that my dad really put the fucking zap on my brain back in the day. He never hit me or physically hurt me, but the toxic words he pounded into my impressionable little head sure did the job on me. When I think of the possibility of someday having children of my own, I see myself, hear myself saying those same things that he said to me. Those same things his dad said to him.

When I was about 13, I had this friend named Mike who was a year or two younger than me. Mike was a good kid, a little ditzy, but fun to hang out with. One day he was over at my house and needed to call home to let his mom know where he was. At the time, we had an old-fashioned rotary dial telephone (my dad didn't believe in touch-tone) and Mike had never seen one. He didn't know how to dial it. For no reason at all, I grabbed the phone out of his hand and in just about the meanest tone, I said "You're a stupid idiot!". The moment I said it, it echoed in my own ear as if my dad had been there saying it to me. The realization hit me like a brick, and my mouth snapped shut so hard it hurt my teeth. I like to think that I apologized to poor Mike, but I don't even remember what happened after that. I hope I apologized.

I can't ever let myself do that to another person again. Ever.

Would I be as bad as my dad if I were to have kids? Hell no. But he wasn't as bad as his dad - my grandfather was an alcoholic, a master of verbal abuse and used to beat my dad with a belt. I'm sure my dad used to tell himself he'd be a better dad than his dad was. I'd just as soon break the cycle completely and never have children than perpetuate that family tradition in any way.

Not only am I afraid to let others in for fear they may hurt me, I'm also afraid of repeating the past. My solitude keeps me safe, and it keeps me from hurting anyone else. I've got to somehow get beyond that and learn to trust. Trust myself, trust others.

Therapy, session 5

Session 5 was a good one. We spent a lot of time talking about my intense need to project an image of serenity and competence and happiness to the world, when the reality is that I'm often not serene, competent, nor happy. I hate to admit it, but this is a habit I learned from my father. As a kid, I remember how he was often concerned about putting on the perfect game face for his friends, his co-workers, and the neighbors, when the reality was we were a terribly unhappy family.

Over my lifetime, I've wasted a nuclear reactor's worth of energy stressing out about how I appear to everyone in my life, convincing everyone that I'm okay.

I've wasted every single one of my relationships because I never felt like I could trust anyone to know that I was not okay, and that I did indeed have flaws.

Some of the most intense embarrassment I've ever felt has been when I had to admit to a girlfriend that I needed help, needed bailing out of a tough spot. Admitting that I'm a shitty money manager, that I have ongoing problems with the DMV, that I'm not as smart as I like to think I am, that I have no clue what I want to do when I grow up.

I'm terribly selfish and over-protective of my thoughts and my fears. I don't trust anyone enough to let them know what is really going on in my odd little head. I need to change that.

Therapy, session 4

My fourth session was a total fucking blur. Part of the reason why I haven't been keeping up on the therapy posts is that I really have no clue what we talked about in session #4. I left her office thinking the session only lasted about 10 minutes, and for the life of me, I couldn't remember what we talked about by the time I got to the building's stairway.

I know we talked about a bunch of topics, but I feel like none were of any real substance, and nothing got enough focus to stick in my short-attention-span brain.

The upside of this is that I've since started bringing a notebook with me. After each session, I sit on a park bench outside her office and write down as much about the session as I can remember. The process feels just like the way I used to try and take notes in the morning after a dream; I sit there furiously scribbling notes as fast as I can write before the synapses evaporate.

Therapy, session 3

This week's therapy session took a turn from previous topics. This week, we talked mainly about sex. That's one topic that I'm just not going to cover here; I don't want to share it, and I'm sure you don't want to read about it.

In other topics, an interesting thing I have noticed about Janine (the therapist) is that she files away every little thing I say, no matter how minute, and is ready to wield it at any time. For example, when I first sat down for Monday's session, I mentioned that parking at her office is tricky - it's street parking only, and that part of Santa Monica is very busy. I've had trouble finding a spot each time I'm there. Well. About a half an hour into the session, she whipped that back out at me as an example of something-or-other that I do that isn't right. It caught me so off-guard that I've since forgotten what point she was trying to illustrate by it.

Also, in my very first session she pointed out the fact that I'd missed part of the new patient questionnaire (which I filled out in her waiting area before she arrived) as an example of some other foible of mine. Perhaps she's using these as a way to feel me out and how I defend myself against weird arguments, but I should ask her about it if she does it again. I understand that the sessions are short and that she needs to consider as much as possible to help me out, but reading between the lines of the pre-session small talk is a little nutty.

Oh, and one last odd thing that she does. When I step into her office and sit down, she's completely silent and just looks at me, waiting for me to start. Maybe that's what they teach you to do in headshrinker school, but it freaks me out a little bit to go from running up the office stairs to talking about serious shit in the span of 20 seconds, with no small talk as a warmup.

Okay, enough bitching about the shrink. She did help me out with the main topics of discussion *ahem*, so I shouldn't complain.

Duh.

Just as I stepped out of the shower this morning, I had a small revelation. I spent a hell of a lot of time in counseling when I was younger, working on undoing the damage of my childhood issues with low self esteem, yet no time at all dealing with the problems I would deal with later in life. The future problems of an adult, unable to trust and share my true self with another human being, even those whom I love.

If you know me and you're a reader of this blog, you're probably saying "DUH!", but man, that sudden realization hit me like a brick this morning as I was toweling off. I used to tell people that I had childhood issues that I went through years of counseling to repair, and that I dealt with them and put them behind me. That's true, but I only solved half of my problems, half of the crazy shit that turns my head inside out and caused me to nuke almost every relationship I've ever had as an adult.

The things I'm dealing with now are not the problems of a teenager getting over his parent's divorce, they're of a guy who has never been able to trust the people who love him.

Is it possible to step back and see yourself from an objective distance? I can't imagine it is, but I know it must be possible to assemble enough of the puzzle to accurately see myself and my past, finally start learning from it, and stop making the same old mistakes over and over again.

There's a lofty goal: stop making the same goddamn mistakes. Truly something to shoot for.

Duh.

Therapy, Part 2

Tuesday was my second session. We talked at great length about my need to be independent and self-sufficient, and how I'm unable to trust others because of my intense instinct for self-preservation. I'm one of the most self-sufficient people I know; I fix my own car, my computers, pretty much everything in my life that can ever break, I can fix it. Everything except myself.

The trust vs. self-preservation issue will be my biggest battle to overcome in my relationships. All my life, I've operated the same way: If I trust you, and I let you into my own little world, you could start breakin' my shit. Or worse, you could decide to bail on me after I trust you and that just can't happen. No fucking way.

So I continue as I am, until I figure out a better way.

The funny part is, I thought I had dealt with most of these issues when I was younger. It seems that they're still with me.

Therapy.

When I was about 13, my mom decided it would be a good idea for me to see a counselor. Someone for me to talk to and deal with any problems I wanted to sort out. My parents had just divorced, ending an ugly marriage where my dad had turned into an angry, abusive dictator. My mom was depressed and barely able to deal with her own troubles, much less help me with mine. So she sent me to someone who could help; I started seeing Jack Raby, ACSW.

Jack was exactly what I needed to keep from completely self-destructing. He figured me out pretty quickly - there were sessions when we'd spend 20 minutes talking about his boat (he had a beautiful ~40 foot Hatteras) when I just couldn't put what I was feeling into words. He knew when to not say a word and just let me sit there, perfectly silent, and try to make sense of the thoughts I couldn't understand. I was a painfully shy kid back then, afraid of what others thought of me, convinced by my father that I was worthless and stupid. He snapped me out of that, for the most part, and helped me feel better about myself - no small task when you're dealing with a gangly, pimply teenager.

Now that I'm a slightly less gangly, pimply adult, I've decided to give therapy another try, and I'm going to document some of the things I deal with here. I should probably have my head more thoroughly examined for posting this kind of thing on a blog with my name all over it, but I want a place where I can put it all down and see it. I learn by seeing and reading and re-reading and examining.

Last Monday was my first session with Janine (I'll leave her last name off, for privacy's sake). This first session was mostly spent in gettin'-to-know-you mode, so we didn't have a lot of time to deal with the things I want to sort out. But I'll have more to say soon - my next session is on Tuesday.