Tag Archives: trust

Feb 14 2011

What is therapeutic?

This break from the blog isn’t working out very well, is it? Maybe I can’t be all or nothing about the blog, maybe I can just write now and then. I actually wrote this last Friday, because at my t session last Tuesday I left feeling, “How was that therapeutic?” And I decided not to think about it, that an idea would just come to me. And it did, on Friday. Here is what I wrote:

I liked last week’s session. I cleared up my misunderstanding about “why do I keep coming back?”, I explained why I fear illness and aging and I talked about stopping my writing in my blog. I talked a lot.

It took me three days to figure out what was therapeutic about this. But I think what I have come up with, is my fear of vulnerability and my fear of what other people think about me. I think everything I said last week was boring, or stupid. My whole story about growing up with a sick father and sister, the ridiculousness of going on and on about The Wrestler. I’m sure I was a dull, boring person and the only reason anyone would listen to me is if I am paying them.

But maybe it doesn’t matter what I talk about. Well, it does. But one of the therapeutic aspects of this is changing distorted beliefs about what people think about me, and being less reliant on what other people think about me in order to feel good about myself.

It matters what I talk about, because I also need therapeutic help in allowing myself to become more vulnerable, and the way to do that is to share parts of myself that I don’t usually share. So, yes, I could go in and talk about the latest People magazine (if I actually read it) and that would help with overcoming the distorted thoughts, but it wouldn’t help with the vulnerability.

However, and this is the tricky part, what if my thoughts about myself aren’t distorted? What if I really am a dull, boring person and the only way I can get people to listen to me is if I pay them? How will I know this? There are certainly boring people out there, and there is nothing worse than being boring and not knowing it.

So this brings up my distrust of people. I don’t trust that they are telling me the truth, I don’t trust that they aren’t saying behind my back, “That Harriet – she is beyond dull”, I don’t trust them not to laugh at me if I reveal something personal, or ignore it, or tell me I am being silly, to just get over it. I don’t know the therapeutic solution for this.

Dec 12 2010

The Gambler

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I wrote this post. I talked about my husband doing something wrong, but I didn’t say what he did. What happened was that my husband got kicked out of his club for cheating at cards. He was a member of this club for quite a while, and his social life revolved around it. His friends were members there and they played cards usually all weekend and one or two nights a week.

One weekend day I heard him having a strange conversation on the phone, and then he said abruptly “I have to go somewhere” and he left. I had no idea what was going on. One night that week he told me that he got kicked out of the club for cheating at cards. He said he was done with gambling, he wouldn’t even be betting on football anymore (which he has done since before I ever met him). His social life was done, he had been cheating his friends. We never went out anymore. He was home all the time.

But as time went on he got back together with one or two of his buddies. I’m not sure how or when. I would ask, “Isn’t M one of the guys you played cards with?” And he would say, “Yeah, but we’re good now.”

I’m still not sure what went on or how much it cost us. He did start watching poker on TV again, and he started playing online poker. I don’t have proof, but I think he is betting on football again. He doesn’t say much, and when I ask he has a good answer for everything.

My husband is a very upstanding guy. I remember once my daughter having a fender bender and I said, “Maybe we can say I was driving – it will be less of increase on our insurance.” And he said, “No we can’t do that, that is insurance fraud.” He always follows the rules. When he told me he was cheating I didn’t know what to think. It’s like trusting someone implicitly for 24 years, and then he does one thing, and now I don’t know whether to trust anything he says.

Jun 13 2010

I’m Just Wrong

My heart is pounding, I don’t know why. I think I’ll go take one of those little heart pills the doctor said I could take if my heart is beating too fast. I wish it would stop.

Friday I went in to work for S and I didn’t say anything about our conversation about my son. We acted as though it never happened. That is always safe. I was telling her about how I am going to the beach for a few days next week. She asked who I am going with and I said no one, just myself. She said, “Just by yourself?” She said if she went to the beach for three days by herself she would be bored. I said I wouldn’t be bored, I plan to relax.

She said, “You are the most independent person I know. You went to Mississippi by yourself and you’re going to the beach yourself.” I said, “Well, I wanted to go and no one wanted to go with me, so what is the alternative?” She said, “Don’t go?”

I know she was giving me a compliment, that I am independent, and I appreciate that. I value independence. But it made me feel bad too, because the reason I am so independent is because I can’t/don’t/won’t trust anyone to be dependent on.

And I have really been isolating myself for about the last year or so, and I just want to be by myself. I don’t think it is a good thing, but it is what it is.

I’m so afraid of being needy, even the slightest bit. I don’t think being needy is a good thing, I think because my mother stressed that while I was growing up. Take care of yourself, don’t depend on anyone. I don’t remember her saying that, but that is how she was, so I guess I modeled her behavior. I look at my sister, who is very needy, and it creeps me out. I think it is disgusting.

Logically I know people have needs. Maslow says so. I don’t want to have any needs. The problem is I know I do have needs, and when people don’t meet my needs I get hurt or mad. So the whole thing doesn’t even make any sense.

I’m just wrong. Everything about me is wrong. But people look at me and think I’m so independent, can take care of myself!!! Yay for me!! But they don’t see that I’m just screwed up.

Mar 14 2010

Time To Think

What am I thinking about? More and more, as things with the job settle down. My boss was out of town all week, so I was more flexible about when I could work and I could do more from home. Still a lot of work, and also working for the old clients, but at least I wasn’t so structured with time constraints. He’s coming back today, and then leaving again Wednesday for a few days, so it should be a fairly peaceful week. At least I’m getting more time to run.

My mother left me a voice mail yesterday morning and I haven’t called her back. I can’t deal with her right now, I’m mothered out. I feel bad complaining about my mother, because she is really a good person and we’ve always had a good relationship despite her difficult personality, and despite my issues, which I’m sure she would also describe as a difficult personality. I know plenty of people whose mothers have passed away, or who have mothers who abused them as children, and I am lucky to have my mother in my life. So I complain, but I do feel bad about it.

And of course I’ve been thinking about therapy, and what issues to deal with, and the fact that I am growing resentful of therapy and of J. It just seems like I bring up important issues, well they seem important to me, and they never get resolved, or they get put on the back burner, or ignored. And it is hard for me to resurrect things that I believe J feels are boring, or unimportant, because of my lack of assertiveness and low self-esteem. And now it seems like there is the proverbial “elephant in the room” which is the horrible place I was in just last month, when I was truly suicidal, and hating myself, and wanting to drive into trees, and take overdoses of prescription medicine that I continue to hoard. Is this a topic not worth talking about? How is it possible to just move on?

And have I really moved on, or am I just currently distracted? I feel like I am teetering on the edge here, and it would be so easy to slip back into that place. I mean, I just got a job, and that is good, but it certainly isn’t going to save me from all of my deep seated problems. And I still find myself distrustful of J after the blog incident, which was also never resolved (my fault though, not his). I tend to hang onto things, and I can’t move on. I just don’t know.

Feb 15 2010

I Called

I finally got up the nerve to make the call. I have my whole list of questions and my list of my issues. This was the psychologist that I found on my new insurance company’s list and I liked what she had written on her Psychology Today website bio. When I called I got the recording, “The number you have reached has been disconnected.” Crap. It took me two weeks to get up the nerve to call her. Well, it turns out that the phone number that the insurance company has listed for her is wrong, the phone number on the Psych Today website is correct. So I waited about an hour to get my nerve up again and I called again. This time she actually answered, which I wasn’t expecting. I thought she’d be with a patient and I’d leave a message – it was 3:15PM. I asked her if she was still accepting this particular insurance, which she is, but she said she only has one available time slot. I thought for sure this deal was dead, but it turns out the one available time slot is Tuesday at noon. I currently see J on Tuesday at 11. How fortuitous is that?

I told her that my current t doesn’t take my new insurance and she asked me how long I’ve been seeing him. I told her about a year and a half, and I guess she got suspicious. She said that the insurance company will pay for out of network providers if that is what I am concerned about. I told her that I have been having doubts about my work with my current t and this insurance change was the nudge I might need to set me on a different path. She asked me what kinds of doubts I was having in my work with him and I told her about how I am intimidated by him and how a recent trust issue arose. She asked if I talked to him about the intimidation and I said that yes, we have talked about it. As for the trust problem I said that I can’t seem to move past that.

She then asked me what my problems are (well, she didn’t quite word it like that obviously.) I ran through the whole list. I omitted self injury and suicidal ideation, but otherwise I laid it all out. She said she frequently works with others with similar issues. I asked her what type of therapy she does and she said she uses a variety of methods. She said she does some CBT but that is not the main method. She told me that her office is in her home and that she has a parrot, and for those clients who like animals the parrot can stay in the office during the session. Hell would freeze over before J would have a parrot in his office. He doesn’t even like to have toys in there.

I told her that I was looking for someone who was a little bit Carl Rogers, a little bit Carl Jung, a little bit existential, and some CBT for the day to day stuff. She said based on that we would work together well. She also said she does energy work, but I didn’t ask her to go into detail. I wonder if she means Reiki?

I made an appointment to see her next Tuesday. Tomorrow when I see J I’m going to tell him that I want to take a week off. I don’t want to make any commitments about anything right now – whether it be quitting, a long break, starting with someone new, etc. I just plan to go meet her, and ask her the rest of my questions. It’s going to be really important to me that she let me do some of my communicating in writing. Not necessarily email, I don’t mind bringing in what I write. But I refuse to read anything I write out loud. So if she doesn’t like writing or if she wants me to read to her, that won’t work for me.

I’m really very freaked out by all of this. The thought of starting from square one with a new person is terrifying. J knows everything, well almost, and it took me about a year and a half to get to this point with him. There are definitely things that bother me, but I can’t imagine any therapeutic team being perfect. No matter who I use I am sure there will be things that bother me, especially because I am so closed off. It is difficult for professionals to work with me because I don’t say what I need or if anything is wrong. I don’t know, maybe she’ll let me talk to the parrot and the parrot will pass along what I say to her.

I see J for my regular session tomorrow and as a result of our emails this week I suppose we’ll be talking about whether it will be beneficial to take a break. Based on his last email which he sent over the weekend he seems to think it would serve me better to continue. He said, “I wonder if not addressing issues causes them to persist because that dynamic seems to have taken place already. You continue to view yourself as an inadequate parent because of perceived shortcomings from the past. Here’s my psychologist bias but I think that one needs to work through or resolve issues in order to avoid repeating them. Will you feel better if you take a few weeks off from therapy? Or will you keep beating yourself up over those few weeks?” And then he said, “I can’t give you my opinion about taking a break – I don’t know whats best one way or the other. If you feel a break would help you, then I am fine with that.” It seems he did give me his opinion though.

He is always saying “I wonder” in his emails. What does that mean? I really doubt that he is actually wondering. I hate that phrase now. He has also used the term “perceived shortcomings” before when referring to my parenting. Why doesn’t he believe that I have shortcomings? To me this is perpetuating the quality that people seem to think I have that I am totally competent and good at everything. That’s the way I present myself, due to various underlying issues, but of course it isn’t true. Everyone has shortcomings, why is there this attitude of “Oh you’re a great parent, you did a great job. Any shortcomings you have are all in your imagination.” Why can’t it be, “OK, you made some mistakes, every parent makes mistakes, but it’s ok, we can move on from here and either fix things or do better in the future.”

I’m already in a stressed mood because I went to see pdoc today and we were talking about my son. He knows my son, because he used to be a patient there too. That discussion again caused old bad feelings and I’m really afraid of talking about it again with J tomorrow. I just don’t even know what to think about anything anymore.

Jan 30 2010

Time To Make A Change?

I’m starting to think about the idea of finding a new therapist. I think the impetus for coming to this decision is the insurance debacle of this week, but I know if I was totally happy with J I wouldn’t mind paying whatever it takes. This is kind of an eye opener that something isn’t right. But I’m going to take time to figure this out, because I am afraid that the reason I am thinking this way may be because of my hurt from last week that J didn’t remember telling me in an email that he wanted to discuss a certain topic. It’s one thing to not remember what you tell someone verbally, but writing it? Can’t you go back and check to see what you said prior to the client showing up? And although I said I needed to move on after the lying fiasco because that is part of my process of growth and maturity, well, screw that. I hate the fact that he didn’t own up to this, and it does cause my level of trust in him to decline. And trust doesn’t come easily to me, so it is a major issue.

When I first began seeing J I really didn’t know what my problems were, just that my life wasn’t going as well as I thought it could. Over the last year and half I have really identified the issues, and made progress on them as well. I think this is be very beneficial to me if I do start with a new therapist because I can jump right in. With J I spent months picking apart what the actual problems could even be, and that doesn’t count working on them, just figuring them out.

I also think, but I’m not sure, that now that I have disclosed personal thoughts and feelings and behaviors to someone it will be easier for me to do this with someone else. It was very difficult with J, and I’m thinking it’s because I had never done it before. I would have no trouble going in to see a new person and handing over or reading a list of all of these items.

And I’ve written many times that J is very intimidating to me because of the way he looks, his youth, and the fact that he is man. I thought that part of my therapy would be to overcome this intimidation, and I still believe that. But maybe I would be able to make more progress in other areas if I didn’t have the intimidation factor.

I’ll be writing a lot about this in the next few days. I have so much thinking to do.

And for those of you who are not sick of me writing about the river, and posting photos of the river, here is a video I took of the river this morning:

[cincopa 10547648]

Jan 17 2010

Trust

Can you ever really trust anyone? I’m not sure if I have a problem with this because of my too high expectations. Can anyone ever be 100% trustworthy? Or is there a good enough level of trustworthiness? And what does a person do if they are the type who is very distrustful in general, and they take that risk, and their trust is betrayed? Not just once, not just twice, but repeatedly. Just accept the fact that other people are human, that no one is totally trustworthy and move on, continuing to take the risk of trusting people, but now knowing that at some point many people will betray their trust? I just don’t know about this.

If someone specifically asks me to trust them, it seems that they should go above and beyond to not betray that trust. And if they do, what then? I get angry at them and feel hurt of course, but I mostly get angry at myself for letting myself get manipulated into this situation. I know that cutting myself up with a razor blade is not the best way to deal with this, and if another person is the one who hurts me, why am I compounding the problem by then hurting myself?

I guess I feel that if someone betrays my trust that I am not a person worthy of respect. They don’t care about me because I am not worth caring about.

But as a wise blogging friend told me:

“Baby don’t you fret
Living in the future
None of this has happened yet.”

Well, she didn’t say that, Bruce Springsteen did, but the message is the same.

Jan 13 2010

I Think I Figured It Out

So while I was laying in bed last night unable to sleep even though I had taken a klonopin (which I promise myself is a one time thing, I am not going back to the days of klonopin = sleeping pills since it took me 4 months to break that habit) I thought about what I was feeling yesterday. I think it goes like this:

Build up a little trust – take a risk – see what happens

If what happens is positive I get to take one baby step forward, like in mother may I.

If what happens is negative I get to take 10 giant steps backwards, plus even losing a turn.

Yes, the positive reinforcement has much less of an impact than the negative reinforcement. Maybe that’s why in a marriage 5 positives = 1 negative. (Look up Dr. John Gottman if you want to know more about that.)

Maybe in therapy 5 positives = 1 negative also.

I have difficulty with trust, and with making myself vulnerable. But I force myself to make disclosures every once in a while, and sometimes it ends up well and sometimes I’m left wondering what the hell I just did.

When I sent J the email about the recap of 2009, I took a big risk. I tried to make that letter as honest as possible. I know it was intense and it was long, and maybe I should have broken it down into smaller pieces over a longer period of time, but it was what I was thinking and feeling and I just wrote it all down. And J said it was great and perfect, but you know sometimes what people say and how they behave are different things.

We talked about the email last week, covering the section about having negative feelings about myself, and about the section in which I wrote that he doesn’t validate feelings. He said that didn’t bother him, but he mentioned that paragraph a couple of times, and of all the things to talk about from the email that’s the one he chose. Which is fine.

I also wrote in the email about:

My problems with communication and feeling misunderstood
Not seeing friends because of food issues
Being on the bell curve and being in the middle vs either end
Feeling different, not really knowing why I feel different, why am I different
Forgetting things I’ve done or said
Medication issues
The problem of intrusive thoughts

Yesterday I just thought perhaps there was more to talk about from that list of concerns. We did talk about food and eating which ties into #2 on that list, but isn’t exactly the same thing. I think what I’m feeling is that everything else besides negative thinking and feelings validation isn’t worth talking about. I don’t want to say I feel minimized because that implies I have some degree of importance, and I don’t think I have any more or less importance than anyone else (I probably feel I have less importance, but I’m working on getting over that.) So now I’ve taken 10 giant steps backwards, and I guess I’ll be losing a turn. Or maybe more than one.

Why would I make myself vulnerable at this point after experiencing a negative response last time?

I think this must be another example of me being too sensitive and taking things too personally and holding on to negatives. I never know whether it’s me being those things, or if a situation really warrants those feelings. I need some kind of ruler to carry around with me so that I can make objective judgments about my reactions.

But that is how I feel, and feelings aren’t right or wrong, right? But feelings aren’t facts either.

And I emailed my friends to tell them I couldn’t make it for lunch on Friday. One of them emailed back and said she totally forgot about it and she can’t make it either, so then they decided to reschedule and make it dinner instead! I really couldn’t say no, so we agreed to have dinner next week. But it’s ok, I’ve been thinking about it and I haven’t seen them in two or three months. One of these friends I have know for 26 years, and the other for almost 20 years. I think I can handle one dinner, it will be good. I just have to put on my thick skin before I go.

Dec 18 2009

I Have No Excuse

The other day during my therapy session we talked about my son’s therapist and how poorly he treated us. J asked me if there was anyone in my life who had previously treated me that way, and he specifically asked if my parents acted that way, to which I replied no they did not. They did not treat me the way my son’s therapist did, not at all. I had very loving parents. Maybe not the most emotionally forthcoming people, not huggy and kissy, but loving nonetheless.

I have no excuse for the way I am now. No childhood trauma, abuse, no lacking for anything. Never while I was a child, teenager, young adult, adult, anytime in my life, have I experienced anything traumatic in any way. I am so lucky. So so lucky. So why am I so screwed up? Why am I so untrusting, why can’t I get close to people?

I don’t know what is wrong with me, the brain tumor theory isn’t holding up here, unless it’s the slowest growing brain tumor ever. I could be written up in the New England Journal of Medicine if I’ve had a brain tumor since I was 5. Forty-four years. What explanation is left? That there is something wrong with me, with my personality, with the core of my being. I have no good excuse for being this way. I’m just bad.

Dec 16 2009

Two Theories

I have come up with two theories. The first one explains why I have been having crazy thoughts and why my mind won’t stop thinking and imagining and driving me crazy. I must have a brain tumor. Those are the symptoms of a brain tumor, right?

The second theory explains why I have always put a barrier between me and everyone else. I believe this began when I was young and I realized that I wasn’t like everyone else. I was odd, different, weird. And if people knew that they would, at best, not understand me, and more likely ridicule me. No one likes to be ridiculed, so I just shut down. That was simple.