A Therapy Holiday (How Not To Swear At Your Therapist)
I'm body stoned with sadness. To my therapist's left, a vase of wilting flowers deposits purple petals onto the tiny table which is never used for coffee. Usually they'd be fresh and bright, but not this week because it's only a few days before a break and I guess whoever does the flowers didn't figure it was worth it. They're wildly appropriate, drooping toward slaughtered wood with a defeated sort of attitude. “Don't mind us,” they silently sigh. “We're just dying.”
On the table next to me, a Christmas shaped lighthouse sits incongruously making no kind of sense at all. Since when do lighthouses celebrate holidays? It's a little reminder that nobody escapes the Christmas season, not even lighthouses, which are traditionally the domain of hermits and misanthropes.*
I hate holidays. Not the general premise of them - I'm on board with not doing work sometimes. I hate holiday 'seasons' where everyone and everything stops going to work and people start driving into one another at inordinate rates while interminable jingles ring out holiday cheer.
Of course, one could look on the bright side: the holidays mean a break from therapy, where you get pressured to spend time with the family that helped put you there! Hurray!
Suffice to say, between the desecrated light house and the dying flowers, it's been a hard session. Actually, hard doesn't begin to describe it. I've spent most of it either in tears or on the verge of tears, feeling a sadness and anger which is nearly overwhelming.
In the midst of the umpteenth tense silence, an alarm goes off.
“We've got five minutes,” he says gently as he silences it.
“Fuck you, and fuck your five minutes,” I don't say. It's one of the many things I've not said this session, and I'm glad I didn't say it because he doesn't deserve that. It's not his fault.
I feel guilty for being so miserable. He's probably looking forward to his holiday (who wouldn't look forward to two weeks without people falling apart in fairly dramatic, if still somewhat restrained fashion. You could not pay me all the money in the world to be a therapist. More specifically, you could not pay me to be my therapist.)
The reason I'm so sad is that I'm not feeling this as a two week break. For some reason the mad hatter which lives inside my brain has gone two seats to the left, found himself with a saucer full of cold tea and a sleeping dormouse and decided that this is not just a break, but the end. The end to end all ends! This is the very last time I will ever see my therapist, the mad hatter says, so this is of course a very sad occasion.
Without feeling my feelings, I would be able to deal with this a lot better. I'd do something suitably adult, like suppress my feelings, go home, fight with my partner, and drive halfway across the country before calming down. You know, proper coping skills.
Instead, because I am feeling my feelings, my utterly ridiculous, disconnected from reality, overblown feelings, I am more miserable than I've been in forever. (Forever being since the last time I remember feeling sad, which I don't because my memory is being run by an overworked gnat and I can only really think of this time right now. This is the only time that has ever been or ever will be.)
Somehow we get through the next five minutes. Words. Stuff. Things. And then I leave, with an odd sense of relief and lingering sadness. The session was worse than the break will be. The break is just life being life in which things happen. The session itself was the point of separation.
I had expressed that to him during the session. He pointed out that I could have avoided it by not coming, not by way of saying that I shouldn't have, but by noticing that I didn't take what I guess would have appeared to have been the 'easy' way out and avoiding the session altogether.
Sometimes I do wonder why I keep putting myself through this pain. Because it really does hurt. A lot. A lot. And then it hurts some more. He's suggested it's because I'm being brave. I put it down to emotional masochism. We're possibly both right.
It has been an almost universal rule in my life, (and probably, in everyone's lives really) that the people we are closest to cause us the most pain. It's somewhat unavoidable that the people you care about have more of a capacity to hurt you. Of course, as in most things, it's a matter of degree.
Some of us experience more than the normal range of hurts in our lives. Some of us grow up in an atmosphere of chaos and sadism. In that environment, masochism is a survival response. If I let you hurt me, maybe then you'll love me. Or simultaneously more and less than that - if I don't let you hurt me, then you'll abandon me.
I feel that playing out in therapy. Sometimes I feel that I'm enduring pain in the hopes of... something. I'm not even sure what.
At times it feels that pain has become emotional currency. The more I hurt, the more he cares.
I often resist tears and sadness, because it reminds me of a time when my pain was for someone else's pleasure. My instinct is to shut down all feelings, to cut the source of the beast's pleasure off. If I'm not hurt, then you can't feed on me. You'll pick another target, an easier victim. You'll get your blood elsewhere.
That is why I often feel anger toward my therapist, because in probing for the sadness I feel like he is just like the daemons in human form who feed on pain. Sometimes it feels as though he's not content unless I am deeply miserable.
It is exceptionally hard to differentiate between someone who hurts you because it makes them feel good, and someone who wants you to express your pain because it would be good for you to do so – and it's really difficult to make that distinction when you're in the middle of a whirlwind of sadness and all you want to do is make it stop.
My biggest challenge in therapy, maybe my only challenge, is to look at him and know that he is not like previous tormentors. To remember the good times, when we connected over something besides pain, when I saw him as something other than a demiurge of tears. To believe in a goodness which is not perverted by pain, but which can persist through it, and remain after it is gone.
Just by naming that desire, I feel like I've made some strides toward it. Unlike previous breaks, this time around I didn't spend the last session snapping at him, denying and defying any feelings I might have had. It was deeply miserable, there's no doubt about that, but I survived it, and although I was and still am somewhat shaken and uncertain, some of the sense of goodness did too. That's progress.
*On reflection, I'm pretty sure it's not actually a Christmas themed lighthouse. I think it's just a lighthouse which I mentally dressed up as a Christmas ornament because of internal reasons.
On the table next to me, a Christmas shaped lighthouse sits incongruously making no kind of sense at all. Since when do lighthouses celebrate holidays? It's a little reminder that nobody escapes the Christmas season, not even lighthouses, which are traditionally the domain of hermits and misanthropes.*
I hate holidays. Not the general premise of them - I'm on board with not doing work sometimes. I hate holiday 'seasons' where everyone and everything stops going to work and people start driving into one another at inordinate rates while interminable jingles ring out holiday cheer.
Of course, one could look on the bright side: the holidays mean a break from therapy, where you get pressured to spend time with the family that helped put you there! Hurray!
Suffice to say, between the desecrated light house and the dying flowers, it's been a hard session. Actually, hard doesn't begin to describe it. I've spent most of it either in tears or on the verge of tears, feeling a sadness and anger which is nearly overwhelming.
In the midst of the umpteenth tense silence, an alarm goes off.
“We've got five minutes,” he says gently as he silences it.
“Fuck you, and fuck your five minutes,” I don't say. It's one of the many things I've not said this session, and I'm glad I didn't say it because he doesn't deserve that. It's not his fault.
I feel guilty for being so miserable. He's probably looking forward to his holiday (who wouldn't look forward to two weeks without people falling apart in fairly dramatic, if still somewhat restrained fashion. You could not pay me all the money in the world to be a therapist. More specifically, you could not pay me to be my therapist.)
The reason I'm so sad is that I'm not feeling this as a two week break. For some reason the mad hatter which lives inside my brain has gone two seats to the left, found himself with a saucer full of cold tea and a sleeping dormouse and decided that this is not just a break, but the end. The end to end all ends! This is the very last time I will ever see my therapist, the mad hatter says, so this is of course a very sad occasion.
Without feeling my feelings, I would be able to deal with this a lot better. I'd do something suitably adult, like suppress my feelings, go home, fight with my partner, and drive halfway across the country before calming down. You know, proper coping skills.
Instead, because I am feeling my feelings, my utterly ridiculous, disconnected from reality, overblown feelings, I am more miserable than I've been in forever. (Forever being since the last time I remember feeling sad, which I don't because my memory is being run by an overworked gnat and I can only really think of this time right now. This is the only time that has ever been or ever will be.)
Somehow we get through the next five minutes. Words. Stuff. Things. And then I leave, with an odd sense of relief and lingering sadness. The session was worse than the break will be. The break is just life being life in which things happen. The session itself was the point of separation.
I had expressed that to him during the session. He pointed out that I could have avoided it by not coming, not by way of saying that I shouldn't have, but by noticing that I didn't take what I guess would have appeared to have been the 'easy' way out and avoiding the session altogether.
Sometimes I do wonder why I keep putting myself through this pain. Because it really does hurt. A lot. A lot. And then it hurts some more. He's suggested it's because I'm being brave. I put it down to emotional masochism. We're possibly both right.
It has been an almost universal rule in my life, (and probably, in everyone's lives really) that the people we are closest to cause us the most pain. It's somewhat unavoidable that the people you care about have more of a capacity to hurt you. Of course, as in most things, it's a matter of degree.
Some of us experience more than the normal range of hurts in our lives. Some of us grow up in an atmosphere of chaos and sadism. In that environment, masochism is a survival response. If I let you hurt me, maybe then you'll love me. Or simultaneously more and less than that - if I don't let you hurt me, then you'll abandon me.
I feel that playing out in therapy. Sometimes I feel that I'm enduring pain in the hopes of... something. I'm not even sure what.
At times it feels that pain has become emotional currency. The more I hurt, the more he cares.
I often resist tears and sadness, because it reminds me of a time when my pain was for someone else's pleasure. My instinct is to shut down all feelings, to cut the source of the beast's pleasure off. If I'm not hurt, then you can't feed on me. You'll pick another target, an easier victim. You'll get your blood elsewhere.
That is why I often feel anger toward my therapist, because in probing for the sadness I feel like he is just like the daemons in human form who feed on pain. Sometimes it feels as though he's not content unless I am deeply miserable.
It is exceptionally hard to differentiate between someone who hurts you because it makes them feel good, and someone who wants you to express your pain because it would be good for you to do so – and it's really difficult to make that distinction when you're in the middle of a whirlwind of sadness and all you want to do is make it stop.
My biggest challenge in therapy, maybe my only challenge, is to look at him and know that he is not like previous tormentors. To remember the good times, when we connected over something besides pain, when I saw him as something other than a demiurge of tears. To believe in a goodness which is not perverted by pain, but which can persist through it, and remain after it is gone.
Just by naming that desire, I feel like I've made some strides toward it. Unlike previous breaks, this time around I didn't spend the last session snapping at him, denying and defying any feelings I might have had. It was deeply miserable, there's no doubt about that, but I survived it, and although I was and still am somewhat shaken and uncertain, some of the sense of goodness did too. That's progress.
*On reflection, I'm pretty sure it's not actually a Christmas themed lighthouse. I think it's just a lighthouse which I mentally dressed up as a Christmas ornament because of internal reasons.