{"id":3156,"date":"2012-03-09T00:05:28","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T06:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/?p=3156"},"modified":"2012-03-08T22:40:25","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T04:40:25","slug":"emotions-about-psychotherapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/?p=3156","title":{"rendered":"Emotions About Psychotherapy."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I am going to see my psychologist, and I&#8217;m kind of dreading it.<\/p>\n<p>I just feel like I&#8217;m in a weird place in my relationship with her. There was a time when she was a huge help, a huge motivator, and a huge balancing force in my life. I needed to go and see her and talk to her. I had lists of things to talk to her about every week, and often didn&#8217;t get to them all. I then got to a point where I needed her for other reasons. I needed her to help me get on hormones, get things started, make sure I&#8217;m not forgetting anything dumb about transitioning, and be there as a guide to answer questions.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I don&#8217;t know why I go. I have to wrack my brain for things to talk about that I actually want to talk about. I mostly just end up telling her about significant things I did, which, I mean, I already kind of do here with you, blog, so that seems a bit unnecessary. It&#8217;s just this formality, for the most part, that costs me quite a lot of money and quite a lot of time.<\/p>\n<p>Occasionally, I do have something I want to really talk about, but more and more, I am finding it to be something that I have trouble doing. Bringing up things I find important feels difficult to do, because in a lot of ways, I feel like the sort of things I am bringing up now are things that she does not agree with. We&#8217;ll often get into conversations where she will stop me in the middle of a story I&#8217;m telling, and tell me how I should have done it, before I tell her about the outcome I got that I am very happy with. I often feel like I am put on trial, in a sense, having to somehow justify decisions I should not have to justify. It just feels awkward, in a space where I&#8217;m supposed to feel safe to speak my mind, to feel like I have to hold back how I feel or somehow temper it to sound like something she can support. I mean, it&#8217;s not like I&#8217;m talking about unhealthy things here. It&#8217;d be different if I was talking about something that was causing me harm. But it&#8217;s not that sort of stuff. I mean, like, we had a conversation about polyamory, and she is clearly pretty against it. But that&#8217;s a thing I&#8217;m doing and, frankly, with Aesa moving here and everything getting crazy, is the big thing on my mind right now. But now I feel like I can&#8217;t talk about it to some extent. I mean, I don&#8217;t feel ashamed about my decisions, and the relationships I am in. Fuck no. I just really rather hate confrontation. If I have to defend myself, why am I even going? If this isn&#8217;t a place where I can relax and talk about my problems and feelings, what&#8217;s the purpose? If the thing that&#8217;s supposed to help deal with my stress and problems is creating stress and problems, what&#8217;s the point? I kind of don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>My psychologist is an awesome person. I have nothing but respect for her, and I would recommend her to anyone needing the sort of help I needed. But&#8230; well, I said to Kale the other day something along the lines of this: I am finally, truly feeling that my life is less a desperate run from disaster and despair on a day to day basis and more something I am establishing that I can be proud of. It shocked me to say that. It shocked me to say I felt I was on sure footing. But I am, for once. I can do this without that help now. I really believe that. I want to move on and live my life.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it. That&#8217;s what this is. This is a tie that makes it clear where I&#8217;ve come from. This is a reminder of how much of a failure I was, of how much of a mess. I go there, and I feel like that mess again, and I leave, and I feel better to be away from it. I want to lose that connection. I want to finally just fucking be myself, without strings and caveats. I want to live a life that&#8217;s mine. I want to move on. I&#8217;ve seriously fucking forgotten what life was like before in a lot of ways, and I am so fucking glad I am at that point where I can forget how terrible I felt. But she is a constant reminder that I was not well, may still not be well. She makes me feel like I haven&#8217;t succeeded, not because of anything bad or wrong or disagreeable that she&#8217;s doing, but just because of what the memories connected to being there bring up in myself. It&#8217;s a 5 hour process of reminding myself that I&#8217;m broken, when I no longer feel that way the majority of the time.<\/p>\n<p>Talking about this stuff can help. But goodness, I wonder how I explain all THAT to her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I am going to see my psychologist, and I&#8217;m kind of dreading it. I just feel like I&#8217;m in a weird place in my relationship with her. There was a time when she was a huge help, a huge motivator, and a huge balancing force in my life. I needed to go and see [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3157,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3156\/revisions\/3157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}