The Therapy Box
There's something vulnerable about him from the moment we meet. He has an age defying quality, not quite a baby face, more like a young soul. His qualifications are solid, his experience impressive. I find myself with an instinctive trust for this man who seems so earnest and unjaded by the world even though he is more than old enough to have been touched by the worst of it.
He speaks gently, softly, sometimes so quietly I can't make out the words. He asks me what has bought me to therapy. I tell him many things. I tell him how I have seen other therapists, but have been left cold by their approaches which seem to skim the surface of everything and address nothing. One has stared at me with wide, deer in the headlights eyes as I described my feelings. The other twisted himself into such a sideways contortion as I spoke that I thought he might actually fall over on the couch where he sat.
“How would you like me to respond to you?” The final nail in the coffin of a therapeutic relationship. When the therapist no longer has any idea what to say or how to say it, the client can hardly feel safe.
The man in front of me, the new therapist, seems less confused when I explain the source of my pain. Adult child of an alcoholic. Unable to form deep, intimate connections. Adrift in a world and universe which I consider to be inherently uncaring. Bored by everyday interactions which seem meaningless and hollow. Oh, and with a dash of neurosis thrown in just to make things more interesting.
We agree to work together.
Over the following sessions, I find it difficult to get a precise read on him. He is calm and caring, but for some reason he seems to become younger and younger in my eyes. Finally I ask him how old he actually is.
That is not a question he is inclined to answer right away. “I'm not sure,” he says.
“You're not sure how old you are?” I ask in surprised response.
“No,” he laughs. “I know how old I am, I just need to reflect on how to answer that.”
He is very considered. I am not. The impulse to snarl 'just answer the question, dammit' is strong, but I resist, because that sort of behavior is not appropriate, and he is far too nice to snarl at.
A week or so later, he reveals that he is in his mid-thirties, which is older than I thought and a little older than I am. I find myself relieved.
I am very curious about how therapy is supposed to work, and what it is supposed to be. I don't understand precisely what talking to someone else can do to fix the wounds which were inflicted repeatedly over the course of my development. At times, I find myself feeling as if we are two would-be mechanics standing around a busted engine, pointing at various parts and agreeing that they are broken, but without any spare parts to actually put in.
This curiosity persists for many, many sessions, during which we make some kinds of progress. We speak about many things. I am often sad and emotional. I find tears frequently flowing when I talk about various episodes in my life. And yet, the core of the thing, the dark little nexus at the center of it all remains untouched.
I begin to wonder if I can be fixed. If anything can be done for me. The sadness deepens then, and a sense of futility begins to infect a great many things. After a session in which I rail against the very universe for letting kittens die, and suffering come to untold millions on a daily basis, he suggests an appreciation journal. I seem to be focusing on the negative, he says. Perhaps it would be better if I tried focusing on the positive.
I react poorly, largely because the notion of an appreciation journal sounds like something a wayward twelve year old would have to do as homework. And I have never done my homework.
This marks something of a milestone in the therapeutic relationship, though I am not sure he is aware of it, or why it feels that way to me.
He is swift to say that it's something I could do for myself, he wouldn't have to see it, it's not something I have to do and he has other suggestions at the ready. But it is a little too late for all that, because the fuse has already been lit. A chain reaction has begun.
On the one hand, I do not want to write an appreciation journal because it would make me feel small. (Which is, of course, not the reason I give. I growl something about hippies and inform him that all life feeds on other life and clearly everything is terrible and the only reason we aren't all horribly depressed all the time is that we are stupid and numb. This is sufficient to effectively derail the session and it appears that the impression he is left with is that I have a huge opposition to journaling - and the universe as a whole.)
The problem for me, is that I have been left with a different feeling. For a brief moment, it felt as though he were in charge and for a brief moment, I liked that.
There are two problems with that. The first being that I don't like that I liked that, as with many people who developed hyper independence early on, I have a complicated and largely reactive relationship to authority figures. The second being that I am fairly certain that the therapist is not actually supposed to have any position of authority. My experience of therapists in general is that they spend vast amounts of time getting educated and becoming skilled and then an equal amount of time pretending that the complete novice in the chair across from them is somehow in just as good a position to make therapeutic decisions.
The truth of the matter, if I were brave enough to admit it, is that after a lifetime of being the one who makes everything okay, who makes every decision, who has to separate from others in order to protect myself – there is a part of me that wants, or more correctly put, absolutely craves someone else taking the lead for a while.
Unfortunately, there is the small matter of the fact that in therapy, as everywhere else in life, I panic every time there is the slightest hint of that happening, and usually sabotage it out of the gate. And there is the other fact, that I'm pretty sure that's not what therapy is for. We're supposed to be equals (albeit equals where one person has trained for years and years and become professionally experienced and the other wanders in off the street and cries about the universe being unfair.)
So there we are, the two of us. He clearly frustrated on some level by my lack of inclination towards certain suggestions, and me feeling as though I am stuck in a place where I'm not really 'supposed' or 'allowed' to be, wondering if maybe this is just another place, and another paradigm I don't fit.
He speaks gently, softly, sometimes so quietly I can't make out the words. He asks me what has bought me to therapy. I tell him many things. I tell him how I have seen other therapists, but have been left cold by their approaches which seem to skim the surface of everything and address nothing. One has stared at me with wide, deer in the headlights eyes as I described my feelings. The other twisted himself into such a sideways contortion as I spoke that I thought he might actually fall over on the couch where he sat.
“How would you like me to respond to you?” The final nail in the coffin of a therapeutic relationship. When the therapist no longer has any idea what to say or how to say it, the client can hardly feel safe.
The man in front of me, the new therapist, seems less confused when I explain the source of my pain. Adult child of an alcoholic. Unable to form deep, intimate connections. Adrift in a world and universe which I consider to be inherently uncaring. Bored by everyday interactions which seem meaningless and hollow. Oh, and with a dash of neurosis thrown in just to make things more interesting.
We agree to work together.
Over the following sessions, I find it difficult to get a precise read on him. He is calm and caring, but for some reason he seems to become younger and younger in my eyes. Finally I ask him how old he actually is.
That is not a question he is inclined to answer right away. “I'm not sure,” he says.
“You're not sure how old you are?” I ask in surprised response.
“No,” he laughs. “I know how old I am, I just need to reflect on how to answer that.”
He is very considered. I am not. The impulse to snarl 'just answer the question, dammit' is strong, but I resist, because that sort of behavior is not appropriate, and he is far too nice to snarl at.
A week or so later, he reveals that he is in his mid-thirties, which is older than I thought and a little older than I am. I find myself relieved.
I am very curious about how therapy is supposed to work, and what it is supposed to be. I don't understand precisely what talking to someone else can do to fix the wounds which were inflicted repeatedly over the course of my development. At times, I find myself feeling as if we are two would-be mechanics standing around a busted engine, pointing at various parts and agreeing that they are broken, but without any spare parts to actually put in.
This curiosity persists for many, many sessions, during which we make some kinds of progress. We speak about many things. I am often sad and emotional. I find tears frequently flowing when I talk about various episodes in my life. And yet, the core of the thing, the dark little nexus at the center of it all remains untouched.
I begin to wonder if I can be fixed. If anything can be done for me. The sadness deepens then, and a sense of futility begins to infect a great many things. After a session in which I rail against the very universe for letting kittens die, and suffering come to untold millions on a daily basis, he suggests an appreciation journal. I seem to be focusing on the negative, he says. Perhaps it would be better if I tried focusing on the positive.
I react poorly, largely because the notion of an appreciation journal sounds like something a wayward twelve year old would have to do as homework. And I have never done my homework.
This marks something of a milestone in the therapeutic relationship, though I am not sure he is aware of it, or why it feels that way to me.
He is swift to say that it's something I could do for myself, he wouldn't have to see it, it's not something I have to do and he has other suggestions at the ready. But it is a little too late for all that, because the fuse has already been lit. A chain reaction has begun.
On the one hand, I do not want to write an appreciation journal because it would make me feel small. (Which is, of course, not the reason I give. I growl something about hippies and inform him that all life feeds on other life and clearly everything is terrible and the only reason we aren't all horribly depressed all the time is that we are stupid and numb. This is sufficient to effectively derail the session and it appears that the impression he is left with is that I have a huge opposition to journaling - and the universe as a whole.)
The problem for me, is that I have been left with a different feeling. For a brief moment, it felt as though he were in charge and for a brief moment, I liked that.
There are two problems with that. The first being that I don't like that I liked that, as with many people who developed hyper independence early on, I have a complicated and largely reactive relationship to authority figures. The second being that I am fairly certain that the therapist is not actually supposed to have any position of authority. My experience of therapists in general is that they spend vast amounts of time getting educated and becoming skilled and then an equal amount of time pretending that the complete novice in the chair across from them is somehow in just as good a position to make therapeutic decisions.
The truth of the matter, if I were brave enough to admit it, is that after a lifetime of being the one who makes everything okay, who makes every decision, who has to separate from others in order to protect myself – there is a part of me that wants, or more correctly put, absolutely craves someone else taking the lead for a while.
Unfortunately, there is the small matter of the fact that in therapy, as everywhere else in life, I panic every time there is the slightest hint of that happening, and usually sabotage it out of the gate. And there is the other fact, that I'm pretty sure that's not what therapy is for. We're supposed to be equals (albeit equals where one person has trained for years and years and become professionally experienced and the other wanders in off the street and cries about the universe being unfair.)
So there we are, the two of us. He clearly frustrated on some level by my lack of inclination towards certain suggestions, and me feeling as though I am stuck in a place where I'm not really 'supposed' or 'allowed' to be, wondering if maybe this is just another place, and another paradigm I don't fit.