Harriet M. Welch

On Friday, before the snow started, I sent J an email with my homework assignment. I was supposed to figure out what a parent’s responsibility is for their adult child. Basically what I said in the email was that I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to write about parents in general, or me specifically. If it was about me specifically, then I feel a lot of responsibility towards my son because of the things I didn’t do properly during his childhood. I gave him a link to a post on my blog where I wrote about my son and the difficulties he had academically, and what I tried to do for him, and how I ended up messing things up pretty badly. I also told him that he was welcome to read other posts on my blog about my son, but he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to.

Then I told him that thinking about this has brought up old bad feelings that I don’t want to deal with. I would rather focus on the problem. And don’t I have responsibilities for my daughter, my family, and myself? I told him that I just wanted to solve the problem without it being about me.

And I told him my son’s name.

And then I mentioned the insurance company difficulties, and how I am concerned that I had to lie to the insurance customer service woman, and now I am concerned that they will find out that I lied because of whatever paperwork J has to send in to them with my claims. And that was about it.

I wasn’t really expecting a reply, since I didn’t ask him anything, and this was just an assignment that he asked me to email to him, and the last time I emailed him he didn’t reply. I’m glad he didn’t send me back an email because I had enough to deal with over the weekend with the weather situation.

But this morning I did get an email from him saying that I bring up some good points and that this assignment was a prelude to coming up with a plan for my son. He said he would be happy to develop a plan but whatever he suggests would be just that – a suggestion, but he wanted to conceptualize my role first.

I felt really stupid once again when I read the email, and I was even more happy that he didn’t send it to me last week, because I would have been thinking about it all weekend and thinking about how I suck at therapy and here I am messing things up again. Of course he had a plan, why would I think he didn’t have a plan? And here I am saying I don’t want this to be about me, I just want suggestions for dealing with the problem and I don’t want to think about my feelings and all he was asking was for me to conceptualize my role in order to be able to make a plan.

And then he addressed the insurance issue – he said that he can handle it with minimal disclosure and he can show me what he submits to them. I don’t understand this at all, I really asked him if I could just pay him, and not deal with the insurance company at all. Why would he be opposed to that – maybe he thinks I don’t have the money to pay him and he’s afraid my check will bounce or something.

He didn’t say whether he read the blog post that I sent him the link for.

This morning I was talking to my husband about how I am “sharing” my friend’s personal trainer. We signed up for 12 sessions – which is 6 weeks – and he asked how much it was costing. I told him it was $55 per session, but it is a onetime thing, I’m only doing the 12 sessions and that is it. He said, “$100 a week???” OK, I guess that is a lot of money, but he has a gym membership that is $100 a month. Yes, that is $300 a month cheaper, but he has been going for a couple of years and I only want to do this for 12 sessions. After that I can do the workout on my own, or with my friend.

This afternoon, right after I got the email from J, my husband finally got around to asking how my workout went this morning, which I was surprised about since he never asks me how anything goes in my life. I told him that I had to pay the trainer the full amount in advance, so could he put $600 in my account. He got really pissed off and scowled and finally mumbled, “Fine.” Then I felt like a real piece of shit. Here I am using my family’s money to work out with a personal trainer 12 times, a real luxury, and how dare I do that? He plays golf all summer, which is expensive, and belongs to a gym, and my daughter has her own horse that we pay for board and lessons and horse shows, etc etc. And I want to spend $600 on a trainer and he gets pissed off. Just thinking about it is making me upset. I hate having to ask him for money.

I really want a new job. I’ve been answering job ads on Craig’s List, but no one ever gets back to me. I guess I have no marketable skills that anyone wants, and I have no way to make any money. The people that I normally work for haven’t been calling me because their workloads have dwindled lately, and they don’t want to spend the money on me. Or maybe they just don’t like me, who knows.

I just really feel like a worthless piece of garbage right now. And I have gained 5 pounds recently. It seems every day when I step on the scale there is another pound. I’m not sure if it is due to stopping the wellbutrin, or maybe I’m drinking more. I do keep track of all of my calories, but maybe I’ve been cheating too much. I really need to get my act together. I even bought some diet pills, but they don’t seem to do a thing. I certainly don’t feel any different or eat any less when I’m taking them. That was a waste.

This evening I got an email from the trainer asking, “How was today?” That was all he asked, and I started to read all kinds of things into it: He doesn’t want to work with me, he thinks I’m lazy, I complain too much, I’m not strong enough, I’m too fat, I’m too weak. I emailed him back asking, “I thought it was fine. Did you think it was ok? Did I complain too much?” He replied that I did fine and he wanted to be sure he was addressing my needs. Now I’m wondering what he really means, when maybe what he really means is what he really said. My mind is just totally spiraling out of control at this point.

Tomorrow is therapy and I get to go in there and feel like an idiot again. Isn’t therapy supposed to make me feel better about myself? When does that start happening?

It’s finally over. Our power came back on at 8:00am. When we woke up it was 48F in the house! Luckily we live on a main road and we were plowed out, my husband shoveled the driveway (a few times), and I was able to spend the day cooking and doing laundry. I’m almost done with the puzzle. Schools have already been canceled for tomorrow and Tuesday and amazingly more snow is in the forecast for Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. I have so much reading and writing to catch up on, but for now here are a few photos.

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It’s 7:00 PM and we still don’t have electricity. We have been cooking and boiling water on the gas grill. It’s pretty cold – going to get in bed and read by flashlight. I hope we can get out tomorrow! We got about 28″ of snow today. My blackberry only has 20 percent battery left, darn. I’ll definitely return emails tomorrow though.

We’re in the middle of a blizzard. The electricity went out at 1:45am. It’s cold. I have a lot of food but no way to cook it. It’s going to be a long day. I’m doing a 1000 piece puzzle.

I started out by telling J that I was having some problems lately. I’m feeling really badly about myself, I’m cutting a lot and I’m thinking about dying a lot. He asked me a lot of questions about the cutting, because my latest cutting habits are a lot different from my usual pattern. So we talked about motivation, and how I feel during and after cutting, and if I feel that I’m cutting in order to be proactive. It has become kind of a habit lately, more so than as a way to relieve bad feelings. But I told him that I have to stop because a friend asked me to join her twice a week to work out with her. She has a trainer that comes to her house, and it sounded like a really good thing to do, and not too expensive since he’s splitting his fee with both of us. I met them for the first time this morning, and of course I had to wear long sleeves, and it was really hot. If I’m going to keep this up I’m going to have to switch to cooler workout shirts, which means no cutting on my arms.

Then he asked me what’s been going on to cause me to be feeling this way, and I told him that it started about six weeks ago or so and there have been some stressors in my life. He asked if they were “garden variety” stressors and said he didn’t mean to minimize them, but he just wanted to know if there was something else that was more major. There are a number of factors, and I did say that, but of course when I only have 45 minutes to cover everything I can only focus on one or two items. He knows about my weight issues and mentioned that I did tell him a couple of weeks ago that I had gained some weight. He said, “Was it five pounds?” I said, “NO, it was two pounds.” But that is garden variety stress.

There were a couple of things I could have picked as my major impetus for the negative feelings, but I decided to tell him about the situation with my son. I said that at the beginning of January I decided that I would set a goal for myself – by the end of the month I would do “something” about my son. (As a reminder, he is 19 years old, flunked out of college last May, has not gotten a job, doesn’t go to school, stays up all night and sleeps all day, spends all of his time on his computer and playing video games, and doesn’t drive.) So as the end of January was getting closer and closer I was getting more and more distraught and feeling like I was an incompetent parent. I kept thinking I should do “something” but I didn’t know what the “something” was. Lots of people are freely giving me their advice and opinions, despite the fact that I do not ask for their input, but I didn’t feel comfortable with any of these ideas.

As I was talking about my son I said to J, “Have you noticed I don’t use names? I just found out recently that people use names in therapy.” He said that’s normal, he doesn’t use names when he is talking to people who don’t know the names of those to whom he is referring. He said it’s not weird that I don’t use names, that in fact some people use so many names it’s like a soap opera. I told him about a woman that called the hotline the other day, and was using everyone’s names. And it turns out that her son goes to my daughter’s school, they are in the same grade, and all of the names she mentioned were people that I know. That was disconcerting.

We talked about how my parenting issues with my son cause me to feel badly about myself due to how I think I made so many mistakes with him. I asked him what I should do about the situation. I was thinking that this was good, I’ve never really asked him about a specific situation in the year and a half since I’ve been seeing him, so maybe I can actually get help with this. We talked about parental responsibilities and how I need to figure out what mine and my husband’s responsibility is at this point. He talked about how I need to discuss this with my husband, and I can write about it since I express myself more easily in writing.

Towards the end he asked how I was feeling about this. I told him that it seemed overwhelming and that my husband is basically useless in matters of this type. We talked about whether my husband considers this my responsibility and I said that no, he doesn’t, but I think I consider it my responsibility. He asked if my husband would be willing to join me in carrying out a plan, when and if we develop a plan, and I said that I thought he would as long as it doesn’t cause him any conflict.

So my “homework” is to figure out what my responsibility is for my son. He said I could email him, or bring it next week, or I don’t even have to do it (I supposed he doesn’t want me to feel pressured).

Thinking about my responsibility for my son is causing old bad feelings. I posted on my facebook asking for input in what a parent’s responsibility is for their adult teenage child, but didn’t get much feedback. I think it is definitely a gray area.

My son is capable of working, he doesn’t have any kind of disability that prevents him from doing so. J and I talked about theoretical things like charging him rent, or kicking him out. He said if we kick him out of the house we are making that decision, but if we charge him rent and he doesn’t pay it, he is making the decision to be kicked out. I said, “So then I don’t have to feel guilty?” And he said I didn’t need to feel guilty either way. That’s great in theory, but what parent doesn’t feel guilty about things like this?

I think it may be fairly easy for me to determine what a generic parent’s responsibility is for their generic adult child. But since I feel very strongly that I caused many of my son’s problems regarding his ability to function in the world, I think my responsibilities are different than the generic ones would be. Imagine that a parent was driving drunk with their child in the car, and got into an accident that left the child with permanent disabilities. I would think that parent would feel much more responsibility for the care of the child than a parent to whom this did not occur.

Now, this is a very extreme example, but sometimes it takes an extreme example to get people to understand what I’m talking about. In the past I have felt that J didn’t really get the extent that my actions, or non-actions, had on my son over his course of his childhood. So I don’t really feel very comfortable discussing this with him.

I felt conflicted when I left the session. J didn’t even acknowledge that I said I think of dying a lot, but I have heard of therapists who don’t discuss death and/or suicide with their patients. I don’t know why that is exactly, I’ll have to do some research.

But later on, I realized that perhaps he could really help me with this situation, that it is a tangible real life problem, unlike nebulous things like self esteem or body image. Maybe this will get me to feel more positive about my therapy.

But later on still, I realized that thinking about the homework assignment is bringing up painful feelings, and I’ll probably have to discuss those with him, and then we’ll be back to the nebulous issues again.

So I’m not sure where I stand now, but I do want to think about the homework, at least in regards to the responsibilities of a generic family. I’ll work on that first.

I’ve turned off comments as you noticed. It is not because of anyone in particular, or anything anyone has written. I’m just overly sensitive and was feeling overwhelmed with the comments and the fact that I was having trouble making myself understood. I’m sure I’ll be turning them back on soon.

I’m going to write a therapy recap about my session today and I’ll post it when it is done. Have a good evening everyone.

Wow, you guys really took the ball and ran with it. I don’t think I even mentioned talking to J about this, did I? You see, if I was the kind of person who could talk about this with my therapist, I wouldn’t need therapy. It’s the same Catch-22 that always seems to bite me in the ass. But I think I’ve made a commitment to throw a few new things at him this week. I’ll see how that goes. I’ll report back.

Today is the day I was supposed to meet my mother, my sister, and my sister’s friend for lunch and shopping. My mother already backed out, and yesterday my sister said she can’t go either. So it’s just me and her friend, L. L is the one who gets messages from dead people. Other than that, I like her, and she is easy to be with. I really need to get out more, so it should be good. I also went out to lunch with another friend yesterday, and that went well. I think know I spend too much time inside of my own head. I also haven’t been working enough hours, I need to work more. Especially now that I’ll be paying full price for therapy. Hopefully therapy will end soon. How do you know when it’s over anyway? My t once said that he works with people for an average of 6 months, and I’ve been going way longer than that.

Thank you for all of the kind wishes about my father. Yeah, I miss him.

I ran along a different part of the river yesterday. It’s the part with the rapids and waterfalls and it is really dangerous. There is a bridge built over the wildest section and I stood on that for a while. The water was so crazy it was making me dizzy. Here is a photo, I didn’t take this, but it shows the intensity pretty well:

I saw four people carrying rafts down to the water – I can’t believe anyone would raft in that ferocious water. And the water must be incredibly cold too. It was even too intense for me, I would not want to die that way. Not peaceful at all.

I’ve been thinking about how the act of suicide affects those left behind. I know someone whose mother committed suicide when she was teenager, and I’ve been doing some reading. Apparently, and judging by this person I know who is pretty screwed up, suicide of a parent or loved one has a lasting impact on the survivors. What isn’t fair, though, is that these people don’t generally show appreciation or gratitude for the suicidal person when she is alive. But after she is gone they get all fucked up. I guess one can’t really expect the people in one’s life to be constantly reassuring them that they are needed and valued though, especially when that person acts like nothing is ever wrong.