Therapy
I have been sitting here for the longest time staring at this blank screen trying to figure out how to title this post and nothing came to me except the word therapy. That word just seems to be such a loaded word right now for us.
I have had some pretty big WOW moments in the last 2 weeks and they came from the realizations we have had.
Last week I was having coffee with a friend and she kinda started all of this for me..........I was trying to explain to her the difference between the "headlines" of our life and the story of our life. There is a HUGE difference. The best way I was able to describe it was by talking about a newspaper and the title of the stories was the same thing as a headline for me, but it is the details under the title of the article that is the story. Any ways we got talking about my the new therapist we have been seeing for a few months now and how she had wanted to get a better understanding on how or internal system worked and the topic of headlines came up. I told my friend that my old therapist didn’t find out about ALL of our headlines until after about 2 years and I thought it would be too soon to tell the new therapist what they were now. Well she posed a pretty valid question to me and asked me if I wanted it to take that long this time, and since I knew what they all were now, why wouldn’t I tell her them. Well that got me to thinking. I, for some reason had but a time frame on things, like I couldn’t tell someone this….until after a year of knowing them and so on and so on. I had no idea I did that but it occurred to me in that conversation that was what I have done. It didn’t really have anything to do with how I thought they would take the information or how they would react to it, it had to do with a time frame. That is where the phrase would always come in to play…”it was too soon” I use that phrase all the time. It is too soon for her to know about this or that, it is too soon to talk about that, it was always too soon. So I let that roll around in my head for awhile and thought a lot about it.
When I went into my T’s office and started talking about how our internal system worked and she gave me a project to do, a map of things inside, which I accepted to do. I spent a week on that and did a lot of thinking of what therapy process was and what I/we wanted from it and I realized I never really ever got a clear picture of what it was supposed to look like –therapy I mean – I was always so busy trying to protect the information inside to even look at what I was doing going to therapy in the first place. So I did the project and I wrote in this journal she gave me what our headlines to our life were.(in very general terms). I brought it to my next session even though at that point I had no intention of giving it to her yet.
This week when I saw my T we talked about the email I had sent her that week. My old T had emailed me and it brought up the hurt I felt and the anger and I needed to make sure that my new T wouldn’t just let things go when it got hard and needed clarification about a lot of other things. Well I found myself actually talking to her and being open about what I wanted/needed when things got hard. I was so surprised at one point I stopped in mid sentence and said WOW out loud. She asked me what the WOW meant and I looked right at her and said I never done this before, I have never talked liked this before to anyone. It was so real and honest and open, it completely shocked me. But even though after the realization hit me and the fear had started to sink in, it felt to good to let those other feelings take over so I continued. Which also has never happened before. So I ended up giving her the journal and the map we drew and coloured to her. It just felt right at the time.
The funny thing was though that when I got home I felt this empty kind of a feeling inside me. I didn’t know where to go from here and I must admit I still don’t know. The project was done, there was nothing left to do. We were going in a direction and we actually felt like we had a direction to go to while we were doing the project and talking to her about what we had done, but when I got home I just felt like I was standing still and I had no idea where to go now once I got home. I couldn’t hold onto that good feeling of the accomplishment we had just achieved. I can acknowledge the accomplishment but it is done and now I am thinking ok now what? And I have absolutely no answers to that question. I am still amazed and shocked that I just handed everything over to her just like that but I don’t really regret doing it. I guess a part of it might be what she is going to do with the information she has now about us……and that bothers me a little bit because it feels like I am giving her too much control, too much power. She doesn’t get to decide what she does with that information, we do.
I don’t know…….Something has majorly changed inside and I can’t figure it out. I know this has been a very new experience for us and that feeling of being just empty is a very new feeling, one I don’t understand. The other weird thing is that I don’t really feel scared. Which blows my mind all together. I feel like I am standing on this blank page with absolutely nothing around me, just a blank huge sheet of white paper under my feet and that is all I can see as far my eyes can see. And that doesn’t scare me. I don’t feel anything really, just kinda there and I think ok now what………
So I would really be interested in what anyone's thoughts are on this.
Thanks for listening
Tangled
"You may not remember what someone says or does, but you will never forget how they made you feel" Mac Anderson.
|