therapeutic

Well. I started a hard post and then things went off the rails and now it's been five days. Sigh. Ok, back on the horse. Here's the hard post:

For some years, I saw a therapist. I wrote about it one time.

I was so happy and proud when I wrote that post. Having been raised with "I don't deserve therapy" (mom) and "psychology is for the weak" (dad), this wasn't an obvious thing for me, and I was doing it, and it was Good. Now...I cringe when I read what I wrote back then. Was it blindingly obvious to everyone else how that story was going to end?

The short version of how it ended is that I "developed feelings" for Dr. Therapist, and I felt like therapy devolved to us chatting about our kids for an hour a week, which was truly lovely but maybe...not what was supposed to be going on? When after months and months of internal drama I finally worked up the courage to tell him this, he said that personal relationships have no place in a therapeutic setting and therefore we can never be friends and those are the terms of therapy, like it or not, the end.

I didn't like it. 

The long version is...longer, but the outcome is the same. End of therapy.

I go through all five stages of grief about this.

Denial!
    Surely there's been some misunderstanding and we can work this out?? *We* could, I think, but that would require both of us wanting to talk about it and one of us decidedly doesn't. This is healthy boundary setting on his end, probably, but that doesn't particularly help me.

Anger!
    He said it was his responsibility to maintain these boundaries. But was it somehow *not* his job to talk about them up front, or to check in periodically on how therapy was going for me, or to start the uncomfortable but necessary conversation? Dude. Also it seems particularly cruel to end a therapeutic relationship with someone who has trouble trusting herself with, effectively, "you're just wrong."

Bargaining!
    Maybe Dr. Therapist could at least prescribe an antidepressant, which is in fact why I had gone to see him in the first place? He said yes, he could do that, and we could check in quarterly. Three check-ins later: no, even that was too much. The antidepressant was not having the effect I was hoping for anyway, so that at least was for the best.

Depression!
    How do I suck so much that I managed to mess even this up? I lost [someone I thought was] a good friend, a relationship I treasured. The fact that the relationship may have largely been in my head doesn't make the loss any easier. On top of that, I'd valued therapy so much that I'd dared to think that maybe it was a path I could explore - I can't become a psychiatrist of course (too late for that now, though weirdly it was a childhood dream of mine, thwarted in young adulthood by my terror of needles), but maybe becoming some kind of therapist would not be totally out of the question? Because I'm interested in people, and sucky in groups but okay one-on-one? But now I don't see how therapy is ever supposed to work. How do two people meet regularly for years and *not* develop a personal relationship? 

Acceptance?
    I guess the silver lining here is that in trying to work out for myself what went wrong, I've learned a lot about psychology and therapy. Starting with Love and Limerence, the 1979 book (short description here) in which Dorothy Tennov argues that psychotherapy is a cruel invention of the patriarchy, I somehow eventually landed on the YouTube site of Tori Olds, a therapist and educator based in Texas, whose work I can wholeheartedly recommend. I think Tori would say that therapeutic techniques have evolved in the direction of shorter-term interventions with more "therapeutic focus" precisely because the old ways were too nebulous and their effects too difficult to evaluate. Living 50 years in the past strikes again! Thanks for nothing, Switzerland.

One time before it all ended for good I had a...I hesitate to say "vision" but, like, "vivid dream" in which Dr. Therapist and I were leaning on the railing of the bridge over the river not far from his office, looking off in the direction of the old part of Zurich and past that to the lake, hills, and Alps. In the distance there was a mushroom cloud. This should have been terrifying - death and destruction were coming this way, and fast - but instead there was this deep sense of peace. Whatever was coming was coming, but in this moment the two of us were together, exactly where we were supposed to be, doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing, which was (for some reason) witnessing the beginning of the end.

At the time I took this as a cosmic sign that the two of us had something to do together, and that it would be a mistake to let the relationship go because we clearly had not found that thing yet. Maybe a more useful story is that whatever it was we were supposed to do together, we did it, and now it's time to move on. Do I believe that? I do not. But I am at peace with the whole mess more often than I used to be, if far from always. 

Dr. Therapist has since changed the focus of his practice from psychotherapy to ADHD diagnosis and coaching.

And sometimes lately I have glimpses of that feeling of being at peace with whatever it is I'm doing. 

The actual view from that bridge, pre-apocalypse.