I hope everyone has a good evening, doing whatever it is that you want to be doing. I am in Pittsburgh with my family, and we are in a great suite hotel with two bedrooms, a living room/dining room combination and a full kitchen. It’s amazing, because usually hotel rooms are claustrophobic. It’s going to be a hockey filled weekend, with 20 members of my husband’s family.
I’m going to take a couple of days off from blogging – see you soon!
Another sleepless night. This time I only got up once, but I was up for two hours. I got a lot done in my head though. At 4:30am my daughter got up, because she was going to a horse show. And my son was still up, he hadn’t gone to sleep yet. I never realized how much goes on in my house in the wee hours of the morning. I took some Nyquil (this time I brought it in the room with me before I went to bed) and finally fell asleep at about 5:00am. And while I was not sleeping, I came up with an idea for a slideshow to figure out everything that is going with me. Well, it doesn’t figure anything out, but it describes what is going on with me. I did the whole thing in my head, and then when I got up this morning I created it.
Let me know if makes any sense to you.
[cincopa A8FAwa645h6d]
2:30am. Wake up. Look at clock. Damn, I don’t usually get up this early. Next thought – therapy today sucked. Why would that be the first thought in my head? Think about it for a while. Look at clock. 2:45am. I feel nauseous. How many glasses of wine did I drink tonight? Uh-oh, three. One more than my allotted amount. But it was in a five hour period. Did I eat? I went to a friend’s house to watch the hockey game, he didn’t have any food. I asked for string cheese, he didn’t have any. He found a block of cheese and I saw some little tortillas in his fridge, so I cut up the cheese and stuck it on the tortillas and melted it in the microwave. It was good. I ate. Look at clock. 3:15am. Is that a headache I feel coming on? Behind my left eye. Therapy sucked today. Why didn’t I talk about what I want to talk about? Is it my t? Do I need a new t? I feel nauseous. Should I get up and try to read? I don’t want to open my eyes. I am comfortable. Can I take more Nyquil? I took 30ml at 10:00. But that would mean getting up to go get it. I don’t want to get up. Look at clock. 3:30am.
5:00am. Wake up. I must have gone back to sleep. I am hot. The dog is sleeping right next to me, stretched out along my legs. Why can’t she sleep at the foot of the bed? Take off covers. I’m cold. Put covers back on. Look at clock. 5:15am. Therapy is so awful, what am I going to do? How am I going to bring this up next week? Oh no, I just remembered I was supposed to call my boss yesterday afternoon to help her with Microsoft Word. I forgot.
6:30am. Wake up. I must have gone back to sleep. Boss is away, so I wasn’t planning on going to work until 10:00. Try to go back to sleep. Therapy sucked. I hate myself. I’ll never get better if I don’t deal with these issues. Do I have a headache? Not sure. It’s dark out. When is my next pdoc appointment? I didn’t write it down. I have to call her today and check.
What a night. I know a lot of this is the wellbutrin causing insomnia as well as racing thoughts. Why do my racing thoughts have to be about therapy?
Maybe I’ll try the Eckhart Tolle method and not think about it. Yesterday is over, I processed it, I learned my lesson. There is nothing more I can do with it. And there is no point thinking about next Tuesday, unless to plan how I will bring up my topics, or make them into more concrete terms so that J will understand them. But I don’t have to do that now. I’m going to try not to think about yesterday or next Tuesday. Have you ever told someone not to think about a zebra? What do they think about? A zebra.
And another thing about not thinking about something – it doesn’t make it go away. It’s still there. Maybe it will come out in other ways, self destructive ways, physical ailments, etc. My stomach hurts. Can I tell my stomach to stop thinking about it?
But really, this is something I don’t need to dwell on. I have a week, I don’t want to spend a week of my life ruminating about this. I am not going to think about it. I might write about it, as a way to get it all out, but once the writing for the day is done, I am not going to think about it.
I’m really sad. Therapy didn’t go at all the way I wanted it to, and it’s because of me. I even went in there with stuff on a piece of paper, but never took it out. On my way home after the session I was wondering why I talked about what I was talking about and I concluded that I was trying to entertain my t. I was giving him stuff he likes. I basically wasted 45 minutes and $120.
We started with talking about how I don’t think I’m good enough, and I find fault with myself. That led to a discussion of the time I thought I lost my boss’s dog, and J seemed to get into that, so I continued with the story of the time I almost put the wrong gas in my boss’s car, and J seemed to like that, so I continued with telling him about an occurrence that happened last week when I was putting a computer together for my other boss and the cabinet on the desk fell over and smashed all of her mugs and fell onto the floor. It was a whole session about things that happened a few months ago (or last week in the case of the desk) and how my anxiety about these things stuck with me for a day or two.
That was it.
What did I really want to talk about? The things I’ve been writing about this week, the questions that last week’s session brought up for me, which to repeat are:
But this session (last week) has left me thinking about many things – what do I want from relationships, what exactly is a “connection”, how I fear anger because when my kids were younger I couldn’t control my anger and I would yell and scream and throw things, and now when I start to feel that feeling (which now is rare, maybe once or twice a year) it really scares me, what do I want from my relationship with my husband, how can I find people who share my passions and don’t consider them “Harriet things”, should I work on deepening my friendships with long term friends, or work on developing friendships with new people, like the ones I went to Mississippi with, or the ones from my writing group?
I was hesitant to bring any of this up with him because it isn’t really concrete, and he doesn’t like abstract. He likes situations, events, conversations. But I am paying him, so why do I have to entertain him also?
I had the crazy idea of calling him (I have never called him, except to make my first appointment) and telling him that today didn’t go as I wanted it to, that I screwed it up, and if he has any openings this week I’d like to come back and have a do-over. Lots of people on vacation this week, so maybe his schedule isn’t too full. But I don’t know if I can do that.
I found this quote from one of Eckhart Tolle’s books:
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
How interesting. So if someone close to you dies you are not unhappy because they died, but because of your thoughts of them dying. So just don’t think about it!
How about if you have cancer and you are puking your guts out from chemo? It’s not the situation – it’s your thoughts about it. Just don’t think about it!
Are you in an abusive relationship and your husband beats the shit out of you every night? Just don’t think about it!
Are you sitting in a Humvee in Afghanistan being pelted by hand grenades and bombs? Just don’t think about it!
And while you’re at it, don’t think about landfills being filled with so much trash that it will take over the Earth soon. If you don’t think about it you won’t need to recycle!
And don’t think about how our country (I mean the US) is so reliant on Middle East oil, and the conflicts this causes – just go buy a huge gas guzzler and have fun driving around!
And don’t think about where the food on your plate has come from, that would just make you unhappy. Thinking about factory farms, and pesticides, and genetically modified plants. Ugh, why would you want to think about that?
And don’t think about where the clothes on your back came from either – how factory workers in Bangladesh are subject to some of the worst working conditions on the planet, always in fear that their building will go up in flames and they will be trapped inside, something that happens once or twice a year there. Don’t think about that – just think about how cute you’ll look in that darling little sweater.
That should be our new motto – Don’t Think About It!
Christmas Eve we ordered Chinese food for take out, because last year the restaurant was so crowded and we had to wait over an hour. Yesterday the grocery stores were open, so I went to the store and did a little shopping so that I could do some cooking. So far I have made chocolate peanut butter cookies, banana bread with chocolate chips and cherries, basil tomato soup, and a spinach orzo salad. Yesterday afternoon my husband, son and I went to see True Grit and then my daughter joined us and we went to a Thai restaurant.
The reason I am telling you all of this is because I really stepped out of my comfort zone for the past two days. Lots of cooking, which I haven’t been doing lately, and Asian food two days in a row. I don’t eat that ever! But you know what, it was really good. And if I gained a couple of pounds I’m sure they will disappear once I get back to my spartan regimented eating habits. Ick.
Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate Christmas! I don’t, I celebrate the Jewish Christmas – a movie and Thai food. True Grit was very good – I liked it.
Remember the other day I talked about my good friend who moved to the golf/tennis resort and was telling me about how great her life is – Tupperware, pot luck dinners, tennis, etc. I had sent her an email asking her three questions:
1. Are your friends nice? As in real, authentic, honest, trustworthy, can you open up to them, be yourself, share things?
2. Do you spend a lot of time with your husband?
3. What is the best thing about your relationship with your husband?
She very kindly answered these questions in great detail. And recommended that I read Eckhart Tolle’s books because they changed her life.
1). Are my friends trustworthy: some are and some are not. Therefore I trust my trustworthy friends (and yes, open up, share and be myself) and don’t expect trustworthiness from the ones who aren’t or who are not as close, for whatever reasons. They are still my friends however, just different. I don’t reveal too much. And friendships evolve.
2). Do I spend a lot of time with my husband. Yes and no. We spend most evenings together but hardly at all during the day. I go about my day and interests and he goes about his. I do a lot of things with girlfriends (or even guy friends) separate from him. In the evenings we have dinner and watch TV. Sometimes we don’t talk much (sometimes nothing meaningful, just functional stuff, for days) but that’s OK. Sometimes we do. And I always simply like being in his presence.
3). Best thing about my relationship with my husband: We have an easy acceptance (even joy) of each other’s different personalities and respect for our differences.
She then went on to say that he sometimes drives her crazy, and gave some examples. Then she asked me to answer the same questions. And I responded with all of my crap:
I have not read Tolle’s books, not a fan of his, but I have been reading about mindfulness, and I think it can be a good concept. I used to worry a lot about the future, I didn’t dwell much on the past. But there was always “what if”, and I don’t do that anymore. I can’t see a future so I don’t think about one.
I have been isolating myself from my friends for the past year or so. I still see them on occasion, and there is one friend who I see more often than the others. I started feeling like I couldn’t be myself with them, they didn’t understand me, and they were openly sarcastic and sometimes rude to me. I was enjoying my volunteer work, but recently resigned both of my positions – one was being a court appointed advocate for a foster child, and the other was working on the county crisis hotline and suicide hotline. Now I am working about 35 hours a week and have no time for volunteering.
Which is good financially, because husband seems to have a problem with compulsive gambling, and I don’t know what is going on with our finances, and he won’t tell me the truth. Our relationship is basically none, we have nothing in common now that our kids are grown, we don’t like the same things, and the things I was willing to put up with years ago I don’t feel like putting up with now. It doesn’t look like we can afford to get a divorce, because we can’t afford two residences, so I am trying to stash money so that maybe I can leave, or at least be prepared if more financial hardship hits.
I work mostly alone, so therefore spend most of my time alone. All my life I had something to look forward to if I was in a life stage that wasn’t so great. For the past 20 years my life basically revolved around raising my kids, and husband didn’t participate much in that at all, so it was mostly just me. Now they are grown, so I have to rethink things. I can’t see anything to look forward to, not just in the future, but even when I wake up in the morning and think about the day.
I took a writing class and really enjoyed it, although I had to drop out for a couple of weeks because it was too emotional. But someone in the class that I connected with convinced me to come back and I’m glad I did. It was only six weeks though, although now we meet once a month for a writing class reunion. I might sign up for another class.
Husband and I don’t spend any time together, and don’t say much to each other. He is downstairs all night watching tv and playing online poker, and I am upstairs in my office writing, or talking to my online friends, and trying not to drink too much.
I’ve been thinking about what I want from relationships, what exactly is a “connection”, what do I want from my relationship with husband, how can I find people who share my passions and don’t consider them “Harriet things” (as one friend called it), should I work on deepening my friendships with long term friends, or work on developing friendships with new people, like the ones I met when I went to Mississippi in April to work with Habitat for Humanity, or the people that I met in the writing class. On the one hand it is safe to be in my little cocoon, all by myself, no one can hurt me, but on the other hand I think one of the most important things in life is connecting with people, and I’m not doing that much at all lately.
So there you go. Aren’t you glad you asked?
And she responded with a very nice email telling me that she loves me and she wishes we lived closer (we haven’t lived near each other since 1985) and that people should have the courage to break free, but she knows it is hard, and I should take it one step at a time while I figure out why I think all of my avenues are closed, and that mindfulness is a huge part of finding oneself and realizing that it’s not other people, but ourselves where we find our happiness.
She again recommended Tolle’s books, that seeing and knowing and feeling and being the truth is the only way to true peace and happiness. Then she said, “I know you will figure out what the right thing is for you, and learn to not be defensive but loving/forgiving/wise/knowing instead.” Ouch, that kind of hurt. To think that I am not loving/forgiving/wise/knowing. OK, maybe I am not wise and knowing, but I am loving and I am forgiving. Or at least overlooking. Aren’t I?
She said she wanted to call me, but I told her I would get too emotional and with my husband taking the week off of work, and both kids home, I don’t think it would be a good time.
I am glad I opened up to a friend about all of this, even though it was through email. I don’t know what I expected exactly, or how she can help me. But I did it at least. I don’t plan to read any Eckhart Tolle though.
My existential crisis came out in public recently. Sunday night my husband and I went to a party given by a couple with whom we are friends. They live in our neighborhood, and there were lots of neighborhood people there. Too many people, actually, I had to keep going into the rooms that were more empty (ie; the ones without food or drink).
At one point in the evening my friend, the one who was giving the party, and I were talking about his next door neighbors, with whom we are also friends, and apparently they had just gotten back from Florida where they went to look for a retirement home. My friend, D, asked me what I think about getting a retirement home, that he can’t even imagine doing that now, if ever. Well, he and I are in a different age group than the other couple, their children are out of college and one is getting married next year. D and I both still have children in college. D was telling me that his parents moved to a retirement home in Arkansas and all they do is play cards, and they are frightfully bored. I told him that my mother lives in a retirement community, and she is constantly busy, she has many, many friends, she plays mah jong a couple of times a week, she goes to museums, plays and concerts. She also travels. When she was in Aruba for two weeks this month she told me she missed about a dozen parties and she doesn’t think she will go away again in December because she doesn’t want to miss the parties. She is definitely not bored. She is sad that she doesn’t have a husband to share her life with, but she is living a full life.
I told D that I don’t even know if I want to stay married to my husband, let alone buy a retirement home with him. He said, “What?!?” I said, “Come on, D, now that the kids are older don’t you think you can finally have your freedom?” He said, “No, I never think that, but maybe my wife does.” I said, “I don’t know. I can’t plan more than a couple weeks or a month ahead. I have no idea what I want to do, what there is to do.” Then another neighbor came by, her youngest just graduated college, and her oldest is married. She said she is loving her freedom. I asked her what she does with all of it. She says she comes home from work and she enjoys cooking for just her husband and herself, and not being a short order cook for the kids, that they have a beach house and they enjoy going there, that she plays a little golf, her husband plays a lot of golf. I don’t know, it didn’t sound very appealing.
But for both of these other couples, and the one looking for the home in Florida, they seem to have something I don’t. An enjoyable relationship with their spouses. If I could look forward to coming home from work because my husband and I would spend good time together, either doing something we both enjoy, or staying home together and just connecting, I would enjoy my freedom too. But now I come home, and he watches tv in his room and plays online poker I guess, and I go into my office and do my thing. So when I leave work I don’t look forward to going home.
A good friend of mine, who I met when I was 23, recently retired from a successful career in the magazine publishing business in New York. She and her husband moved to Charleston, SC and bought a beautiful home right outside of the historic district. But she just told me that she moved recently. This is what she said:
“We were making so many friends through golf and tennis and most of them lived in this community, and we fell in love with it. The funny thing is that I always said I’d never live in a suburban, golf-resort, country club, stepford wives community, and this place couldn’t be any MORE like that !!! But I LOVE it. I hang at the country club, play tennis and have luncheons with the girls, go to supper parties and bring covered dishes, plan block parties and go to tupperware parties (well, jewelry and fashion parties, actually). I can’t believe this is my life now!!! So next time you come visit, it will be different. Come in the summer. We have a great pool with poolside lunch and cocktail service, the beach just 15 minutes away, and downtown is only 15 minutes away too, so lots to do.”
She sounds so happy with her life. Is that what I want? Luncheons with the girls, pot luck dinners, block parties, Tupperware, poolside cocktails (well, that part does sound good). Maybe if I had a partner that I loved and that wanted to share this life with me I would be happy with that. Maybe it’s not a life I am looking for, maybe it is a connection, a relationship, someone who cares for me and loves me and for whom I can care and love back. But I don’t even know if I can do that. I feel so closed off from everyone. But I think I just want someone I can share my life with.
I brought J a Christmas card. I said I would only give it to him if he wouldn’t make a big deal out of whether he was going to read it, or not read it, or read it when I’m there…..He said he wouldn’t. I told him to just read it when I’m not there and don’t make a big deal. He promised, so I gave it to him. I wrote a note in it thanking him for helping me.
He asked me what I thought about last week’s session and I said it was fine. I said, “I think you liked it, right?” He didn’t answer. He wanted to know if I felt comfortable sharing the stuff about my husband and his situation, and I said yes, it was not a problem. He asked how I felt later in the day and I said I didn’t really much of anything, I don’t understand where the therapy was. I felt like I was just reporting a story to him.
Then we had a discussion about what is therapeutic, and what would therapeutic look like? I said I think it concerns itself more with why people do things, why they might want to change, how they can change, identifying what problems there are, etc. I gave the example of someone who is trying to lose weight. Everyone knows that to lose weight you eat less and exercise, but if it was that easy there would be no overweight people in the world. So someone who can’t lose weight might need therapy to deal with the issues of why she/he can’t eat less. That just going to Weight Watchers meeting isn’t therapeutic. He said people say lots of things are therapeutic – going for a walk, getting a massage. I think that people might have different ideas of what therapy is for them and their particular issues.
Then we got into why I keep people at arm’s length, and why I am isolating myself. I talked about how if you connect with someone, the closer you get the more chance that you could get hurt. We talked about my husband and my friends, and I told him about one friend who hurt me by something she said about me. She said, “Oh that’s a Harriet thing” after we had a discussion about something I feel strongly about. I told him I am passionate about a lot of things and I guess those are considered “Harriet things” by my friends. He said that I put more weight on what other people say and think than I do on what I think. I said that if people are my friends I value what they say, so if one of them says something hurtful, it’s not like a stranger on the highway cursing at me.
I told him about a discussion I had with someone on my blog recently (that would be Sanity). That I was giving my opinion about zoos, and she responded with her opinion and we discussed it and then she said we should agree to disagree. And how respectful it was and I felt that my opinion was valued by her even though she didn’t agree with it. She didn’t say “That’s just a Harriet thing.” I know these things are my “things”, but the way my other friend said it, it felt dismissive and somewhat rude.
Then he asked me about anger and I said I rarely feel anger. We talked about that phrase “depression is anger turned inward”, which I said I hate and he said he does too, but he said that there are situations where I should be angry at someone but I take it out on myself. I told him that my mother has told me, even as an adult, that I need to overlook and forgive. He said he doesn’t think overlooking works, but choosing to let something go can be a good thing. He said it gets easier over time. I said it gets harder over time, to keep letting things go if someone keeps doing something that is hurtful. He said that, yes, if it is a particular person or situation and I have to keep letting it go it can cause resentment and sometimes I would have to give up that relationship. I said sometimes you can’t give up a relationship. (I was thinking about my sister during this conversation.)
So I’ve been thinking about what is therapeutic for me, and I do feel that this session was therapeutic. I believe that if I leave feeling like I have something to think about, to process, to learn from – then it was a therapeutic session. I think that there are other types of sessions that may be therapeutic as well – if I just need to vent about something for 45 minutes, that could be therapeutic for me as well, although I never do that. If I have an insight, that would be therapeutic, although I know that can’t happen every week, I wouldn’t want it to because it takes me a while to fully process insights.
But this session has left me thinking about many things – what do I want from relationships, what exactly is a “connection”, how I fear anger because when my kids were younger I couldn’t control my anger and I would yell and scream and throw things, and now when I start to feel that feeling (which now is rare, maybe once or twice a year) it really scares me, what do I want from my relationship with my husband, how can I find people who share my passions and don’t consider them “Harriet things”, should I work on deepening my friendships with long term friends, or work on developing friendships with new people, like the ones I went to Mississippi with, or the ones from my writing group?
I will have a lot of things to think about this week. Of course I know I won’t come to any conclusions right away, and I won’t be making any big decisions, but maybe these thoughts will lead to more discussion in therapy and more therapeutic sessions.
I have a bunch of books about therapy and psychology and I look at them from time to time, always trying to figure out what the “secret” is to therapy and how to feel better about myself. Yesterday I picked up Shouldn’t I Be Feeling Better By Now – Client Views Of Therapy, by Yvonne Bates.
This book contains essays by clients who have had negative experiences in psychotherapy. There is one that I particularly love, written by Alessandra de Paula. I have tried to find it on the internet so that I could link to it, but no luck. I will copy parts of it here, but if you want to read the whole thing you will have to find the book I suppose.
It is called “Alice’s Adventures in Psychoanalysis” and she intersperses quotes from Alice in Wonderland with her experiences. Her main point is that the therapist’s behavior is rarely examined or questioned. Another issue she brings up is that if the client does not agree with the therapist’s interpretations, she must be resistant or in denial. And if this continues to happen, the client will undermine herself, she will be questioning herself to such an extent that she loses sight of who she is, or she will lose confidence in herself and in her own judgment. This can cause anxiety and even trauma which can outweigh the issues that brought her to therapy in the first place.
Of course, this is an extreme situation, and hopefully none of us have therapy that has reached this level of trauma. But I can believe that it does happen, and that some clients are more susceptible than others.
Here are some excerpts from Ms. De Paula’s essay.
Definitions of terms used in therapy
Rationalization – whenever you think you have a good reason for having done something the therapist disapproves of, he will say that you are “rationalizing.”
Projection – when your therapist’s self-perception is different from your perception of him.
Introjection – when your therapist’s self-perception is in agreement with your perception of him, but he blames his behavior on you.
Transference – when you get a crush on your therapist, or when you have recurrent fantasies of killing him with your own hands. These feelings have nothing to do with the fact that he looks like Brad Pitt, or that he happens to treat you badly. Your feelings are the re-enactment of some past issue, usually from your childhood.
Counter-transference – when the therapist gets a crush on you, or when he has dreams about throwing you out of the window. These feelings will be attributed to the re-enactment of some past issue in the therapist’s past.
What is therapy all about?
Therapy, for the most part, consists of a set of rules of conduct that you and your therapist are supposed to observe, and the interpretations your therapist will make when either of you breaks, or attempts to break, these rules. For example, you may have arranged to see your therapist every Monday from 9am to 9:50am. If you arrive late for the session, your therapist will probably interpret the event as an unconscious resistance to therapy, and any attempt to explain why you are late will be taken as rationalization.
Interpretations don’t work the other way around. It the therapist finds himself doing something he is not supposed to do, this is because he is responding to some of your weird expectations and therefore his course of action will be to interpret what you did to cause it.
The rules you should follow
Don’t touch the objects in the office (they are symbolic representations of your therapist)
Don’t forget to take your coat when you leave (if you don’t, it means that you don’t want to leave, or that you want a reason to come back sooner than you’re supposed to)
Make your payments on time and in full (if you don’t, that’s because you expect to be taken care of in exchange for nothing)
Don’t hang around the office after your time is up (if you do, it could be because you’re dependent on the therapist, or because you have boundary problems, or both)
Don’t try to illustrate situations with hypothetical examples involving the person of the therapist. This is a very important rule. If you cannot help it, at least avoid extremes such as, “if I brought a gun here and pointed it to your head,” or, “if you and I were having sex.”Be wary though, restraining yourself too much will result in the therapist asking why you are so detached, and that, too, can become the main subject in future sessions.
The rituals
Therapists have rituals that may seem funny or annoying to you. Some will not talk to you on the way from the door to the couch. Some will never initiate the conversation at the beginning of the session. Some will open the door, call your name, then go inside and turn their back to you until you have taken your place. Don’t worry about these things; don’t say to the therapist that you think he is being rude. If you question these rituals too much, they will become the main point of the therapy session, and drive you crazy.
The contradictions
The therapy relationship is intended to be intimate, and the therapist will try to empathize with your feelings. At the same time, he’ll give you the impression that, if he sees your car broken down at the side of the road in the winter, he will not stop to help you.
You will be told that you cannot help who you are, and at them same time you will be told that you are free to choose your paths in life and that you are responsible for the success of therapy and for your own choices.
The therapist will tell you that the whole 50 minutes is your time and you can talk about whatever you want. He will, however, direct the conversations as he pleases, responding well to things he wants to talk about, and ignoring things he is not interested in.