Tag Archives: high expectations

Dec 11 2012

Talking About The Mask

When I saw Art T today I showed her the mask and said I wasn’t sure if it was right, and of course she said there is no right or wrong. I told her it was creepy, the hair and the eyes. She said I could try to fix it and I said what if it gets worse. She said the cool thing about this is I could just cover it up with another layer. I said what if I keep trying to fix it and it stays bad or gets worse. At least if I don’t try to fix it I could have the hope that it can be fixed. She said that seems like a metaphor. I said yes it does. I said maybe that is why I stayed with J for so long. If I had left and found a therapist that was a better fit for me and I still didn’t get better then I would know I was broken. But staying with him always gave me hope that I could be fixed, just that he wasn’t right for me.

She asked what would make the hair better and I thought maybe brown straight ribbon or yarn, but I bought the curly ribbon because it was already curled and attached to little cardboard squares so I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to attach. She made a comment about how I picked the easy thing, and I said that saying I was looking for a shortcut was somewhat insulting because I spent a lot of time doing this thing, I had to find the materials and cut out all of the words and actually put it together. She said she didn’t mean to be insulting. I told her that J would sometimes say I was looking for a shortcut, and she said “Oh I hit a J sore spot”.

We decided I should take off the ribbons and make the mask bald, and it really did make it better. I also told her that there weren’t enough words for the front, and too many for the inside. We talked about the words on the outside and how that is how people see me.

So about being broken, she said people aren’t born that way. Then she was talking about trauma and I said that I didn’t experience any trauma, and she said she believes that I did. I said that she is watering down the meaning of the word trauma and she said there is Big T trauma and little t trauma, and told me about a study where people who had Big T trauma were compared with those with little t trauma later in life, and they seemed to have the same attachment pattern, which I am assuming is a bad attachment style. She said some of the little t trauma people were even worse because they couldn’t specifically put their finger on what caused their problems.

J was always trying to convince me that my mother is narcissistic, and now Art T is trying to convince me that I had trauma in my childhood, and I don’t think either is true. I know too many people who have experienced trauma, and what I had wasn’t trauma by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, maybe the family was a little messed up because of the illness of my dad and my sister, and maybe because I was different and ugly as a child I got made fun of, and no one ever really understood me, but that is not trauma.

Then we talked about being sensitive and I said how bad it is, but Art T said it is good, and told me that all of the things I’ve done to help people are because I am sensitive. I said being sensitive makes it easy to get hurt, and she said that is a downside. Then I said something about sensitive people getting hurt when they are bullied, and confident children wouldn’t let it bother them, and she said confident people don’t get bullied. Oh.

Art T spent some time reading the inside words and said some of them are things everyone would want – love, living life, connection. We talked about how I am always looking for something that seems missing, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe what I want is something I already have and that is why I can’t find it. I have a good life. She asked me if anyone sees the inside part of me and I said that sometimes people see parts, very few people. But I think maybe I should just accept things the way they are, and I think she said something about how she can see I am looking for something and I should try to find it. I think she said that.

Amazing was a word on the outside and she asked me if I do amazing things and I said I don’t, but people say I do. She asked what would be amazing and we had a talk about how what I consider amazing for other people isn’t amazing for me, like donating a kidney. She asked what would be amazing and I said it would be running in the street to save a child about to be hit by a car or something. J and I had this same discussion. I said that whenever anyone does anything amazing they never say they are amazing, they just say they are doing what anyone would do.

She said I have high expectations of myself, yes, I already know that. J and I had that discussion many times.

I said something about helping people and doing it because it makes me feel good and then I feel guilty. We talked about how doing things for other people intrinsically make us feel good and doesn’t take away from the good we are doing. She said that what would it be like if she felt guilty for everyone that she helped because it makes her feel good. Then something about doing things for others makes some people feel like they have power – doctors sometimes get that way.

Then we talked about happiness. It was getting confusing, I think sometimes an hour session is too long, it gets overwhelming. With J I only had 45 minutes, and it felt too short, but of course, he talked a lot. Art T talks too, but it is more back and forth talking, not me sitting there listening to her talk for minutes on end.

I said that no one can be happy with everything bad going on in the world, and if I have a moment of happiness I feel guilty. That only ignorant people can be happy. She got out the feelings paper to see other words that are like happy, and we talked about “being happy” vs a “feeling of happiness”. I said that when someone has a baby they would be very happy and they shouldn’t feel guilty about that. This whole part was too confusing. I can’t really remember it and I know I wasn’t thinking clearly.

I’m going to have to ask her to cut our sessions shorter, or talk about something less deep for the last 15 minutes, or maybe do art. As long as I don’t feel self conscious about the art it might be relaxing to draw or color for 15 minutes. I love to color in coloring books – that’s so stupid, isn’t it? I’m 52 years old.

It’s amazing to me how much we can talk about in an hour, without talking about my week at all. I never once mentioned anything I did this week, or anything about the stress I am under right now with my marriage and our finances falling apart. And that is fine with me, she is much more into talking about emotions, and deep things. Of course, I cried a little a couple of times. It wouldn’t be therapy with Art T without some tears.

Jan 2 2010

Things I Learned in Therapy in 2009

I spent the day yesterday reading through the 245 pages of my journal/blog, and what I read was so fascinating to me. I decided to tell J the discoveries I have made by reading a year’s worth of writing, and here is part of the email I sent him today.

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I originally started my journal by hand, but in December of 2008 I began writing it in Microsoft Word. It is now 245 pages long (don’t worry, I’m not sending it to you). When I saw that I thought, wow maybe I should stop writing and start living, but I spent the day yesterday reading over it (a good thing to do on January 1st) and so many things became clear to me, and I learned a few things as well. So I’m sending you this email because there is no way I will remember it all on Tuesday. Maybe you can make some sense of it and figure out what to talk about next week.

Many of my journal entries are self indulgent, self pitying, hard to read. I feel like I am reading about someone else, although I know I wrote this, I remember writing most of it. My first reaction in reading these is to delete them, but I didn’t do that. I think I might want to read them every once in a while to remind myself that I am striving to NOT be that person anymore. I kind of feel sorry for the person who wrote these entries, she doesn’t seem like a bad person.

After reading about myself over the period of 13 months I see that in that time I didn’t do anything bad. I may have caused people to become impatient with me, I may have confused people, but I didn’t actually do anything bad. (Thoughts don’t count here). Seeing this in black and white is really eye opening. I do a lot of good things, and I have some good qualities, and some good talents. Maybe I’m not really bad after all (not counting old parenting issues, etc.)

There is an entry in February when I was considering dropping out of my flying group. I wrote about how I’m not a perfect flyer (there are certain airports I won’t fly into, certain airlines I won’t fly, and certain types of planes I won’t get on), but I’m a good enough flyer. I thought you’d like that.

I really can see how I have way too high expectations of myself sometimes. There was an entry in May where I write about how I painted the whole bathroom, including the ceiling, over the weekend. And then at the end I write, “I’m so unmotivated lately.” I think I’m much more aware of doing that now.

I also am trying to be nicer to myself. I was cooking something a few weeks ago and I got a little messy and spilled something on the stove. My thought was immediately, “I am such an idiot.” But then I thought that if it was my husband or one of my kids who did that I would never say they are an idiot. So I did a take back and told myself that I’m not an idiot. Reading the journal makes it so clear about how hard I am on myself. If I was reading this and it was written by someone else I wouldn’t understand why she is so mean to herself.

In May I wrote that you said progress would be if I could move from shame (mentioned 65 times in the 245 pages) to low self-esteem (60 times) to acceptance. I think I might be in the low self-esteem category now, so I’ve made progress. This is where I would normally make a sarcastic comment like “at a snail’s pace” or apologize for taking so long and so much of your time, or say what a loser I am for making such a tiny step in a whole year. But I won’t do that. I don’t do that anymore.

And guilt was only mentioned 27 times, so maybe soon it will be shame mentioned only 27 times and guilt 65 times. That would be progress too.

I didn’t realize how much you liked the cutting collage, or you seemed to anyway. I wrote that you looked at it a lot, and brought it up a lot. I guess it must appeal to your sensing function. I made another collage this week, I’ll bring it in Tuesday.

We talked many times about me being a bother to you, being boring, not having anything interesting to say, how this only costs me $19.40 a week so I should probably only get 1/7 of the attention you would give to a full paying client. The word bother appears 30 times in the 245 pages. I wrote a lot about feeling bad that you are so nice to me.

I wrote quite a bit about how I wasn’t able to communicate things very well to you and it led to me feeling misunderstood. Email worked when it worked, but it didn’t work very well sometimes. I would like to be able to communicate better, not just with you. I’ve been noticing I have this problem with other people, and maybe that is why everything is just on the surface.

Reading the journal I realize that food and weight issues are part of the reason I stopped seeing friends (the other part being I was just isolating and avoiding stress). At this time last year I was going out with friends all of the time. But then I became fixated on food issues, and it was too hard to keep doing that. The words food/eat/eating/weight appear 201 times. And I don’t think we’ve ever even talked about this.

I wrote a few times (12) about having my feelings validated and how you don’t do that. I think that was the cause of having hurt feelings and anger at the beginning. You do say that feelings aren’t good or bad, they just are, so in general you are validating feelings. But in specific instances you don’t do that, and I’m used to it now. I guess I missed out on feelings validation when I was a child or something, but I’m trying to be the kind of person who doesn’t need her feelings validated by a third party.

About the bell curve (mentioned only 11 times, although maybe the find command didn’t catch the times I called it the bell f***ing curve), I understand that for all of the aspects of me that cause me to feel different, or weird, that I am somewhere on the bell curve. Not necessarily in the middle, usually not in the middle. But isn’t everyone on the bell curve, even those with extreme differences? They are on there, just over at the ends.

It seems as though you had to walk a fine line between my desire to be like everyone else, and the fact that in some regards I am not like everybody else. There were times you called me or something I do strange, and times when you said something about all of your other clients doing or feeling something totally opposite of me. I would usually get offended by those things. But reading the journal has made some things clearer to me in this regard; although I still have some confusion as well.

I’m actually not sure what it is about me that makes me feel different. You’ve pointed out some things, for example how all of your other clients feel safe in your office and I don’t, how your other clients are impressed with the way you remember things they’ve said and I find fault when you don’t remember things I’ve said, how your other clients’ therapy is more linear because they have a specific problem and I don’t, how a lot of clients come to see you to learn how to have stronger boundaries but I’m in the minority, that I’m the only client who has ever told you that you are intimidating, that you frequently explain why you are doing something or your motivations for doing something to me and you don’t do that with most clients. I wrote that maybe you are trying to get me to accept all of my weirdnesses (differences would be a better way of saying it) instead of trying to change to become normal.

Which brings me to the cyclical nature of my feelings towards you. At first it went like this: I liked you one week, you made me mad or hurt my feelings the next week, I liked you the next week, etc….. Now it is more like: I like you one week, the next week you make me mad or hurt my feelings, the next week I realize it’s not you who did that but it’s me projecting, I like you the next week, etc…..

Some troubling things –

Naturally, I have forgotten some things we talked about, but when I read what I wrote about them it comes back. There are a couple of exceptions though. In December 2008 I wrote that I gave you a letter I had written. I have the letter in my journal as well as in the document folder on my computer. But I have no recollection of writing it, giving it to you, or you reading it. The same with an email I wrote in May that I have no recollection of writing, but it’s in my sent mail folder, so I guess I really did send it. Forgetting about things we talked about is no big deal, but forgetting about things I actually did is unsettling.

It appears that there are times when I am in total denial. For example in January I got angry at you because you asked me the same question two weeks in a row. A few weeks later you brought up the fact that it made me angry, and I said I didn’t know what you were talking about, I was never angry.

In December 2008 we were talking about the same issue as we talked about in December 2009 – intrusive thoughts. And the same things about the intrusive thoughts, like what’s the payoff. We never resolved anything and I guess that topic just got put on the back burner. It’s kind of discouraging that we are having the same conversation a year later.

And it seems I started to feel not so well in January, maybe because I went off the wellbutrin in middle of December 2008? I started it again at the very end of October. It dismays me to realize that I might really need the wellbutrin; I went off of it because of the side effects. I have a lot of trouble sleeping, and it makes my head buzz. And with everything that is already going in my head, the buzzing is not welcome. Now that I’m taking it again I’m getting the same side effects. So this is somewhat of a challenge.

So that is it for 2009. Thank you for everything you do for me, I really appreciate it even if it doesn’t seem so and even if you don’t have any toys in your office. See you Tuesday,

Sep 29 2009

Therapy Recap 9/29/09

I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep last night. I haven’t been sleeping well in general, and last Monday night (night before therapy session) I couldn’t sleep at all. So last night I took 1mg of klonopin before bed. I hated myself for doing it. I’ve been tapering off the klonopin for about 4 months now, and I was finally down to ¼ of a .5mg tablet. Last week I finally stopped taking it, I couldn’t cut the pill any smaller or it would crumble. I started having trouble sleeping when I got down to that last low dose, but I thought I could tough it out and my body would adjust. It has to adjust eventually right?

But last night I couldn’t stand the thought of being up half the night and I took the klonopin. I slept great. I didn’t budge until 7am when the alarm went off. I disgust myself. I finally got off the stuff and I took it again, and it worked like a charm. Argh.

I got to therapy and there was the usual question, “What are we talking about today?” He said the things he is interested in are where I am on the self injury flowchart and how my job at the hotline is going. I have no idea why he is obsessed with those things, they barely register on my thinking on a day to day basis.

I told J I hate that question, it causes me to panic, and that I woke up at 6am yesterday morning thinking about that question and what I was going to say. That led to a discussion of what I am afraid of. We talked about how I am waiting for “other shoe to drop” (and J explained the origin of that expression because I never knew what the hell it meant, even though I use it all the time). J asked me if there have been any relationships in my life where someone left me because they found out something about me, and I said no. But I never tell anybody any of this stuff about me, this is the first time. J told me that he has had to terminate (bad choice of words, mine not his) three patients. Two came on to him (women I’m assuming), and one threatened him to the point where he was glad that the police station is across the street.

I would not do those things (I could never come on to someone who looks like Brad Pitt and is 10 years younger than me) of course. He assures me there is nothing I could say that would make him kick me out. I guess I’m more afraid that the more I tell him the more repulsed he will be by me and he just won’t want to see me anymore, or he won’t have empathy for me. How could someone who knows all of this stuff about me want to even look at me?

Somehow this led to a discussion of my marriage and how I’m also waiting for the other shoe to drop with my husband. We talked about my marriage, how it is, how my husband I relate. My husband and I don’t spend a lot of time together. He does his thing and I do mine. It works really well for both of us and my husband claims he loves me and wants to stay married to me. I asked him, I said, “Now that the kids are older and you don’t need me do you still want to stay married to me.” He said, “Of course, why wouldn’t I?” J asked if my husband loves me and I told him that he says he does, but what does that really mean? J asked how I could improve my marriage and I couldn’t really think of anything. It really does work. We never fight, but we never really connect either. That’s just me, I don’t really connect to anyone anymore.

I told J that I “overlook” a lot, and that is what I think makes the marriage work. He asked if I hold back from confronting my husband because of my fear that he will leave me. Do I do that? I don’t know, I have to think about it.

Then we talked, again for the gazillionth time, how I am hard on myself, I don’t see anything positive about myself, etc. J asked why my husband loves me and I don’t know. He asked me about good qualities about my husband and I listed a whole bunch. He asked me if I think I’m a good wife and I said no. He asked me what is good about me in my relationship with my husband and I said that I don’t have affairs, and that is good. He said that is the absence of negative, it is not a positive. Anything good about myself would be the absence of negative – I’ve never killed anyone, I don’t steal or cheat on anyone, etc. He asked me if that’s due to my mom, and I told him I felt bad about everything I said about my mom last week because she is not a bad person. He said he knows that and I asked how he knows that, because I didn’t really tell him anything good about her. He said he doesn’t mean to stereotype me, but I’m pretty typical for a daughter of a mother like mine. He said my mother was anxious, and had high expectations, and wasn’t supportive, she didn’t think my worth was due to me as a person, but more because of what I did. He said everyone messes up their kids, even parents who are 99% perfect. There is always going to be that time that they weren’t there for their child when the child needed them.

He once again asked me to state something good about myself. Somehow we got onto the subject of me being reliable and I grudgingly admitted that maybe, sort of, I guess I’m reliable, sort of. He wanted me to forget the maybe, sort of, I guess and just say I’m reliable. It doesn’t mean I’m 100% reliable, because no one is perfect. But I’m a reliable person. Ok, I admitted that I am a reliable person. He said my homework for this week is not to think of good things about myself, which I seem to have confused with good deeds, but to reinforce to myself that I am a reliable person and to come up with another thing about me that is good.

I asked him if he was done with my DVD, and it turns out he never watched it. It was still in his computer, but for some reason he couldn’t watch it on his computer – who doesn’t have Windows media player (he doesn’t have a Mac so there goes that excuse)? He gave it back to me and when I got into the car I broke it into lots of tiny pieces. I never knew it was so hard to break a DVD, netflix doesn’t seem to have that much trouble breaking DVDs. I guess he wasn’t too interested in watching it, even though every week he asks me where I am in my flowchart of self-injury.

I feel really sad now. Therapy brings out all of these things. I knew all along that I can’t think of anything good about myself, but having to admit it out loud makes it so much more real. Who can’t think of one good thing about themselves? Not like “I’m a good cook”, I have that stuff. I mean something good about myself as a person. How pathetic am I? Everything about me is fake, that’s what it feels like. And I realize that parents influence their children, but I am 49 years old and I’m still being influenced by my mother. That is so…..I don’t even know.

Therapy makes me feel like shit. I’m glad J isn’t a cheerleader, my son’s therapist was like that and it didn’t feel genuine. I knew it was fake. I’m glad J doesn’t do that, actually today he started to tell me that I’m perseverant, that he has patients who come 2 or 3 times and quit because they aren’t willing to make the commitment to work at themselves, but I keep coming week after week even though it is incredibly anxiety provoking. But then he said, “I don’t want to point out your good qualities to you.” I guess he wants me to discover them for myself which will be so much more meaningful, right? He must see something positive in me. I know that I show up every week, I never miss my appointments, I pay my bill within minutes of receiving it in the mail. I wonder if he sees anything more than that? Sometimes I wish he would give me a clue.

Sep 24 2009

Parent Insight

Today is my mother’s birthday, so we spent the day together. We had lunch and walked around a fun historic city that is nearby. It was really hot and humid, but otherwise a nice day. It’s been 11 days since her husband passed away, and she has closed all of his accounts, arranged for his daughter to pick up his car, cancelled his insurances, notified all of his doctors and dentists, talked with her financial planner, and booked a cruise to Bermuda with seven of her single friends. And one wonders why I have such high expectations of myself? I can’t help but be intensely aware of everything she is saying and doing lately, and how these behaviors and comments have shaped my development when I was a child and young adult. Maybe it’s because I’m in therapy and am more self aware.

Here are some examples. My mother was telling me about my sister’s husband, and how he didn’t go to work one day last week. She thought he was very upset about the death of my mother’s husband (actually I think he just had a cold) and was too emotional to go to work. Her comment was, “He’s not like us.” She said the same thing about him 11 years ago when his and my sister’s son, my nephew, had a major surgery to reconstruct the bones of his skull. He was 11 months old at the time. We were all sitting in the waiting room of Children’s Hospital and the doctor came in towards the end of the surgery to tell us that the surgery is almost over and everything went fine. My brother-in-law started to cry. Later my mother said, “He’s not like us.” Meaning, we don’t expose our icky emotional feelings to the world. We hide them and move on to the next hurdle. No crying, no missing work, just move on.

Today my mother was telling me about my cousin. My cousin is going through a divorce, her husband got laid off and she had to get a job. I asked her what type of job my cousin got. Her response was, “I don’t know. She’s never known what she wants to do. She’s tried so many different things, who knows what kind of job she can get.” This was a bit personal for me, because I’ve never known what I want to do, I’ve tried so many different things, and I don’t have “real” job. The way she said it, with a degrading tone to her voice, made me wonder, “Does she think the same way about me?” Because my mother values hard work, commitment, nothing wishy washy.

My mother’s values have imprinted themselves on me. That’s a normal parental thing to do, we pass on our values to our children. It’s not good or bad, it’s just a part of parenting. A problem arises when a child’s personality is so different than the parent’s personality. Those values may not be in sync with the child’s personality. So how does one resolve that dilemma? Maybe that’s why I often feel torn inside. I have a need to show the world that I am capable, confident, competent, that nothing fazes me, that I can solve all of my problems on my own, that if something difficult comes up I deal with it and move on. But inside I know I’m not like that. I’m emotional, not always capable, have no confidence, everything shakes me up. If something difficult comes up I do deal with it and move on, but do I really move on? Or do things build up inside of me to the point where I engage in self destructive behavior?

Sep 23 2009

Therapy Recap 9/22/09

I had to cancel therapy last week because it was the day of the funeral. It’s really hard to go back when I’ve skipped a week. Monday night I could not fall asleep – I think I finally fell asleep at about 3am, and then I woke up at 6:30am. I also had a really bad stomach Monday and Tuesday morning.

The last time I saw J he assigned me homework. I was supposed to write down one good thing I did and one thing I’m grateful for every day. I actually did the homework Tuesday through Saturday, but that was it since my mother’s husband died and things got crazy. I had a really hard time with the homework. The grateful stuff wasn’t bad, but coming up with good things was very difficult. Two of the days I didn’t do anything good, one day I made a donation to my friend Ann’s foundation, another day I bought girl scout cookies even though I don’t want girl scout cookies – I donated them to the troops. I did a volunteer activity one of the days, which I don’t even think counts as good, but I was desperate. I was actually going to go to the humane society and adopt a dog just so I had something to put on the list.

J said that wasn’t really how the homework was supposed to go. He apologized. He said he didn’t intend for me to go out and search for ways to be good, I was supposed to just write down things I did in my daily life that are good. But I don’t normally do good things in my daily life, so I’m a bit confused about what he was looking for. He said in the future he’ll give me more explicit directions. He gave me back my list and I ripped it to shreds. I said it was stupid. Mature of me, isn’t it?

We got onto the topic of my mother. Every therapist’s dream, right? It all comes back to the mother. I told J about something my mother did a few days ago that really hurt my feelings and I wondered why she felt the need to do that, but “that’s what she does.” He asked me to explain and I told him that my mother is very judgmental and nothing is ever good enough. I gave a couple of examples. We talked about my childhood a little, and how my parents had very high expectations of me, and not very high expectations of my sister. I think that is because she was sick as a baby and toddler and she could get away with a lot more. I took on the role of the “good child”, and I was smart and well behaved so it was a self fulfilling prophecy. The better I was the better I needed to be.

J postulated that perhaps my parents wanted me to be this good child because it made them look like good parents. Never thought about it that way, but it makes sense. And to this day I never feel like I’m good enough or meet my mother’s expectations of me.

I know that everyone at some point talks to their therapist about their parents. I feel bad about it though. My mother is a good person, despite her flaws. Everyone has flaws, no one is perfect, and plenty of people had much worse mothers than I do. I do feel guilty about the things I said about her to J.

I did some more projecting during our session, but maybe since I admitted that I was projecting when I sent J the email a couple of weeks ago, he felt more comfortable telling me when I was doing it. He’d say, “You’re projecting again.” I don’t do it on purpose, I swear I don’t!

I have more to say, but I’m so tired. In the ongoing dental adventure I’ve been having, the second stage of my root canal was supposed to be last week, but due to the circumstances I had to reschedule. And now my tooth is infected again, so I called the dentist and he prescribed another antibiotic. I took two doses, and last night woke up in the middle of the night covered in hives. I took some benadryl and finally went back to sleep, but since I didn’t sleep Monday night or last night I’m exhausted. I’m on a different antibiotic now, I’ve taken this one before so I don’t expect any hivey surprises tonight.

Aug 12 2009

Therapy Recap 8/11/09

I started out by saying that I know I screwed up, that I said I was sorry in my email, but I guess I didn’t say it like I meant it and I am sorry. J asked what I screwed up. I said, “I’m not really sure exactly, but since you didn’t answer my emails I know you were mad.” He said, “I did answer your emails.” He went over to his computer and read me the emails he sent me. I never got them. I was somewhat taken aback, here all week I was upset because I thought I made him mad and he wasn’t mad at all. I was even nervous about going in to the session because I didn’t know what to expect, but he didn’t think anything was wrong at all.

Then we talked about how email glitches are causing miscommunications between us. He suggested I call him instead. I said I didn’t want to call him. He said I can call and leave a message and then he’ll call me back and leave a message. If he actually answers when I call I can hang up, he doesn’t mind. Calling makes me very uncomfortable though. Then he said, “Maybe texting would be better.” So I think now if I send an email I’ll either call to let him know I sent an email, or text him.

When I got home after therapy I checked my email, and guess what? His email was in my spam folder. I have no idea why some of his emails would go in there and not others. Damn gmail.

So we talked a little bit about the previous week when I was feeling really down and what caused it, which is the usual stuff that causes me to feel down, and how I took the klonopin and it was a really bad day. He asked me how I got over it being a bad day, and I told him I went to training, and then I came home and it was time to take another klonopin before bed, and then it was time to go to sleep. Ack! That is such a lie. That was the night I came home and had a drink and cut myself. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him. It’s like I had totally put all of that out of my head. I was in such denial I didn’t even think about it. So J made some interpretation about how I was late for the training, but the trainers made me feel ok about it, and think I’m a competent volunteer and that is what made me feel better. Which is really not right at all. I told him I didn’t think that was what made me feel better, and he said, well it could be part of it.

I was thinking of emailing him to explain that evening and what I really did, then I changed my mind because I don’t want anything like that in writing in his computer or in my file. I’ll tell him next week though.

We talked about how I feel incompetent. He asked me in what areas I feel incompetent, and I rattled off a list of about 10 things, one of which was doing things around the house. I tend to procrastinate on my chores, like laundry. J seemed to latch onto the laundry idea and it made me irritated at first. I realize he is using that example because it is easiest to prove his point that in certain areas I don’t have to be so hard on myself. Like laundry, if it piles up a little it’s not the end of the world. But choosing the easiest example from a big list of examples makes me feel minimized. Why couldn’t he pick the fact that I feel incompetent professionally because I don’t have a career?

We talked a little about my hotline training and he started to ask me why I am doing this. I stopped him and said I don’t want to think about why I’m doing it. But he persisted and asked the question and I said I don’t want to know. He talked about his job and why he does it, but that he also has gotten a lot more out of it than he originally thought he would. He said listening to other people’s problems puts a lot of things in perspective for him and it might do that for me also.

J kept trying to get me to tell him how I was feeling on that bad day last week, and I asked him for a list of feeling words, I just couldn’t think of anything besides “icky”. So he printed me off a list and I picked some words from the list. I told him I don’t like his open ended questions, and he said he is trained to ask open ended questions, but I said I prefer multiple choice. I guess that wouldn’t be therapy then.

At one point he said, “So with your ‘perceived’ incompetence…” and I said, “what do you mean perceived? You’re making a judgment.” And he said, “I can’t say, let’s talk about your incompetence.” I replied, “Why not? At least I would feel like you understood.” He kind of laughed at that. Isn’t that the idea of therapy, to feel understood? That’s what we’re learning in hotline training. Perceived incompetence means I think I’m incompetent, but I’m really not. But what if I really am? He doesn’t really know if I am or not.

Meh, this is getting old. At the end of the session we were back at the SAME PLACE – I’m too hard on myself, have too high expectations of myself, etc, etc. I said, we always end up here. Meh.

Tooth update – dentist yesterday was a waste of time. She can’t look at the nerve of my tooth through a microscope unless she is doing a root canal. So what was the point of going to see her? She says I need a root canal. No one is willing to try any other treatment for this.

So I gave up. I made an appointment for a root canal next Tuesday. At least the pain will stop. I can’t even exercise, and I can only eat soft warm food. This is affecting my life way too much for too long, and needs to end. Root canal it is.

May 26 2009

Therapy Recap 5/26/09

I had emailed J last week about the journal entry I wrote last year, and I told him he didn’t have to read it until today. When I got there today first I gave him that piece of crap book he recommended to me and he told me he never even read it. That’s the second time he’s done that to me. I told him about a great book I’m reading about shame, which I’ll write more about tomorrow, and the great blog I’ve been reading from where I got the name of the book.

J had printed out my email with the journal entry and we talked about that pretty much the whole time. The shame of being bad, etc. I told him that I thought shame was more than just being bad vs. good and he says he knows that. I don’t think he quite gets my shame, he seems to think it’s just because I don’t think I’m perfect at everything, and that’s not really it. It encompasses a lot more than just that. Or maybe that is it, but it covers a lot of different areas. We talked some about my parenting shame, and I don’t think I’ve successfully conveyed the extent of poor parenting I used on my son. I’m going to have to do a better job of describing that. Maybe I’ll print out that blog post about weighing the pennies.

We used recyling as an example of not being perfect since it was in the journal entry. I was telling J that I feel bad when I don’t recycle every single thing. I know my family throws some recyclables away, and I don’t fish them out of the trash to recycle them. Also sometimes I’m too lazy to walk in the next room with a piece of paper and I’ll put it in the trash.

J was saying if he is reading the newspaper in a coffee shop and there isn’t a recycling bin, he’ll throw it away. I asked, why? He said because there is no recycling bin. I said why don’t you just take it with you? He asked, take it where? I said, into your car, then into your garage, then into the recycling bin. He said, he just doesn’t.

He also has little plastic cups in his waiting room by the water cooler, and there is no recycling bin there, so the plastic cups just get thrown away and he doesn’t feel bad about that. I asked if that was normal – not feeling bad about that. I told him that I used to teach nursery school at a synagogue and there was no recycling there. I would bring everything home from the entire school with me (just plastics, not paper), and people would come down to my room with their plastic stuff and I would bring it all home and recycle it. I had to order an extra large bin from the county. I just couldn’t stand the fact that all that plastic was being thrown away. I asked him if it was weird that I did that. He said he is not the determiner of weird vs normal and if recycling is my pet peeve then it’s fine for me to do that. The problem is everything is my pet peeve!

We once again are in agreement that I am too harsh on myself and set expectations for myself that are too high. We keep coming to this conclusion – the problem is how do we change it?

Then it was time to go and I said, “I have been having some problems and we didn’t have time to talk about them.” He asked what kind of problems. I kind of answered….relationship things sort of. I said, they are not really problems, that’ s an exaggeration, to which he replied, “That is something typical of you to say.” He suggested since I am so good at writing my problems out that I should email him all of my problems. I said that it might be too long, and I didn’t want to bother him, etc etc….. And he assured for the millionth time that it’s not a bother, he wants me to email him. So I guess I will.

Then we had a discussion about how it’s my fault that we didn’t talk about my problems because I didn’t mention that I had something to talk about. He said it’s not someone’s fault. It is what it is. He said I probably don’t like that expression, and I don’t. I said, yes, it is what it is, but it could also be someone’s fault. If a patient comes in every week for 9 months and never has anything to talk about, why would he think that one day she would have something to talk about? And he said, he does think I have things to talk about.

So I’m going to send him an email describing my problems. Then he’ll really see what a bother I can be.

May 19 2009

Therapy Recap 5/19/09

So J wasn’t upset that I didn’t do my homework. I emailed him yesterday to tell him it was too hard and I couldn’t do it and he said it’s no problem. He assured me for the 86 millionth time that I am not a waste of time and there is nothing for me to be sorry about. So I felt better.

When I went in today we talked about shame, again, and he tried to get me to tell him something that makes me a good person and I couldn’t think of anything. Then we spent 45 minutes talking about what makes a person good. J says he feels like a good person when he pays his bills and he feels good that he can support his family. That didn’t impress me much.

Many of the things that J thinks make a person good are things that I think people should just do because they are part of the human race and it’s our responsibility. For example, helping someone whose car broke down at the side of the road, or telling the salesperson in the store that they forgot to ring up an item. Doing those things doesn’t make a person good, those are just responsible human things to do.

I did say, though, that there are different standards of good for different people. A man with a wife and 8 kids who is working two jobs and living in a trailer and has no medical insurance and can barely afford electricity isn’t going to have a lot of time in his life for volunteering. But he can be a good person nonetheless, he is working his tail off to provide for his family and keep them safe.

I’m not in that position. I’m a very lucky person. I have everything I need, my husband makes a good salary, we have a lovely home, I don’t need to work full time. I should be going above and beyond average in order to consider myself a good person. I don’t even know what that would be.

So I did admit that my standards of good are very high, too high to ever achieve. It seems that in order to consider myself a good person I will either have to lower my standards, or figure out a way to meet my own expectations. I’m wondering if I figure out how I got this way I can learn the way out. Or would that be a waste of time, should I just start figuring out how to change my thinking?

I just think that if everyone in the world lowered their standards of “good” what a mess the world would be. It’s not such a great place already; our standards are already too low.

This is a dilemma. I feel like there is no solution. And that’s just the good/bad aspect of my shame – there are other dimensions to it that we haven’t gotten to yet.

May 6 2009

Shame Continued

I found another interesting website about shame, and therapy. More about how we develop shame, what happens to us when we feel shame, living as if we’re “OK”, and what helps. Here is the link: About Shame. It is written by Tony Schirtzinger, a therapist in Milwaukee.

Some interesting points from the site and how they relate, or not, to me.

WHERE SHAME COMES FROM
Shame comes from being taught
that we are worthless or bad or something similar.
It comes in childhood from adults who say things like:
“You’ll never amount to anything!”
“You are worthless!”
“I wish you were never born!”
“Shame on you!”

It also comes from severe physical discipline
since each hit of the hand or fist or belt says to the child:
“You don’t matter at all!
Only what you do matters!”

And shame comes from being humiliated for our behavior.
It comes from adults who say:
“What would the neighbors think of you if they knew…?”
“You look ridiculous!”
“Don’t you have any pride?”
“What’s wrong with you anyway!?”

And it comes from being threatened
with shaming, or physical discipline, or humiliation.
When we are threatened with these things,
the psychological message is the same:
“I can and will treat you any way I want to…
You are a worthless weakling at my disposal!”

In my case, when I was a child I was not taught that I was worthless or bad. My parents always said I was perfect. They had high expectations of me, and I had high expectations of myself. Now we all know that having high expectations can lead to feeling imperfect because we can never meet those high expectations. My parents never told me that I wouldn’t amount to anything, or that they wished I was never born. They expected me to be president of the world, master of all things possible, a perfect example of a human being.

I never never never was exposed to any physical discipline from anyone in my family or anyone I knew. I remember my mother hit me once, across the face, when I was a teenager and I said something nasty to her. I deserved it! But aside from that, physical discipline never occurred. Of course, I was perfect so they never needed to hit me, right?

I was never humiliated for my behavior or my appearance. I always felt humiliated for my behavior and my looks, but that was purely internal. No one in my family ever told me that I looked ridiculous or asked what was wrong with me. I asked myself those questions all the time. My mother used to tell me I was pretty and that I was lucky to be tall and thin.

I was never threatened in any way. I never felt like my parents had the attitude that they could treat me however they damned well pleased. They never made me feel like a worthless weakling at their disposal.

Now I am not disagreeing with anything on this website. All of these things can and do lead to feelings of shame. I’m just saying that in my case, my shame was not caused by anything external. Somehow I got it in my head that I am a worthless, unlovable person, deserving of nothing. It would be so simple to be able to place blame somewhere, but I’m not sure that would help me get over it any easier.

I’ll continue with more on this site tomorrow. I am contacting the authors of these websites to ask for permission to discuss and quote their words.

Apr 14 2009

Will I Be Better Off?

Therapy wasn’t so bad today. All of that anxiety for nothing. J talked to me about transference. I’m not that crazy about the whole transference theory. It seems like it can dehumanize feelings a bit. But if he wants to put a label on this, that’s fine. He talked about how we deal with things on the surface, and also at a deeper level. We actually talked about a lot of different things. I told him that I don’t tell anyone in my life the things I’ve told him. He wondered if I thought he wasn’t dealing with my feelings in a validating manner, and I said I thought there were times when on the one hand he would tell me feelings are neither good nor bad, but on the other hand he would tell me my feelings are wrong. He asked for an example. I told him there was a time when I was telling him that I didn’t like being tall, and how difficult it was growing up because I was so much taller than everyone else. And his response was that he thought everyone would WANT to be tall. I said that basically he was telling me my feelings are wrong. He didn’t say, “That must have been hard for you, growing up and feeling so different.” He did just what my mother always did – “What do you mean you don’t like being tall? It’s great to be tall!” (She is 5’ tall by the way).

Then J told me about “enactments”, which apparently is what we did in that scenario. We acted out the same scene that happened in my childhood. How did he know just what to say to mimic my mother anyway? I asked what I did wrong to get that response from him. He said I didn’t do anything wrong, but later he said that I have a pattern of trying to take responsibility for things that aren’t my fault, and always blaming myself for situations. He said he was operating on a CBT level, which isn’t usually his preferred method of therapy, but is a technique that he uses along with others. So he was trying to address my maladaptive ideation by being logical and telling me that he thought most people would like to be tall, when actually what I needed was to have my feelings validated. I said that it just reconfirmed that my feelings are wrong. He said it reconfirmed my feeling that my feelings are wrong. OK, whatever. I said I do think it was partially my fault because I had expressed in our sessions that there are things I didn’t want to talk about, so basically I was keeping everything on a surface level. Perhaps that is why he responded that way.

So we talked more about how I was the “perfect” child and this led me to be independent and never ask for help and never reveal my feelings, a way of life that persists to this day. But when one is a child and is so independent and self sufficient and never reveals their feelings, they never get help and attention that they need. And everyone needs help and attention. I said that it’s kind of scary in therapy because I need to talk about my feelings and what I need. Because I know I need things from people. I mean, I can depend on myself and I can do everything myself, but one needs other people in order to feel connected. Relationships are important.

J asked if I would be better off if I was able to express my feelings and needs to people. I’m really not sure about that. I know things are missing in my life right now, but it’s safe. If I were to reveal my feelings and needs to others, I might get what I’m missing, but I would be paying a price. We talked about having expectations of others, and I said I have low expectations of others, that way I’m not disappointed. But I have very high expectations of myself, which is why I never measure up.

So would I be better off? I really don’t know. Is it worth the risks? I don’t know.