Just What I Needed, More to Think About
So my first therapy session was pretty much as expected. A few nice suprises that have nothing to do with therapy at all, really: It didn't rain when I went into SF for my appointment last night (I had some worries that if it rained a lot I'd use it as an excuse to not go). Also, it's not so far from 24th street BART, Papalote(sp?)--one of my favorite taquerias in the whole world-- and Lex's pad, so there are some plusses for traipsing into SF aside from just getting healthier. Sometimes I need little bonuses to push me over the top when it comes to facing my problems. (The promise of new shampoo/toothpaste/soap has often been the only thing that gets me out of bed on down days.)

Some things that were not much of a suprise, therapy-wise:
I cried. That was pretty much a given, and I said as much when I first sat down. Of course, crying while I was telling her that I'd probably cry wasn't something I really expected. I obviously needed to cry. This explains why I teared up during "Ever After" at movie night a coupla weeks ago.

There was a clock prominently displayed. It's weird to be watching the clock while you're pouring your heart/mind out. But it was strangely comforting and focusing, actually. I tended to get back to my point (maybe) more often, though I still managed to ramble quite a bit.

My therapist is hot in the butchy-dyke-ish way that I tend to like. This did not suprise me. I have a feeling that no matter what my therapist looks like, I'll have some sort of attraction to him/her simply because of power dynamics mixed with my intense need to be heard right now. But still. Argh. I don't need complex relationships with my therapist. Of course, she turns out to be the sort of therapist (so far) that I am looking for, so I'm going to try to just ignore the hot thing. Given that most of the time I'm just blubbering along, I tended to forget my attraction anyway.

I quickly learned about a blind spot that I have. Again, not much of a suprise...that's one of the main reasons that I wanted to go. She early on pointed out that anger and sadness/depression are usually thought of as linked--sometimes to the point that some people think depression is mostly repressed anger. I wouldn't go quite so far in my case, but I think that it's amazing that I didn't link my anger and my sadness. I thought they might have similar root causes, but I didn't put it together that repressing one might cause the other (and I think that happens in both directions with these two emotional states, for me). Seeing this connection explicitly will help me to manage/change/grow regarding them both. I hope.

Some things that did suprise me:
It was pretty emotionally draining. Not sure why this suprised me, but it did. I guess I haven't had a real venting session with anybody in a long while. I forget how tiring it can be--to the point that I start to worry about my therapist--how in the world can she listen to hours and hours (not just me, but clients before/after me) of this stuff, empathize, and not just be completely utterly drained. I woulnd't be able to compartmentalize it enough, I think. I'd go crazy. er. Crazier.

I found myself morbidly joking around a stranger. I thought that I would take the whole thing pretty seriously, but I guess as a defense mechanism of some sort, I made a lot of jokes at my own expense. Or should I say "jokes". Lots of stuff about how I'm crazy and all that. I was suprised by my inhibition of talking about myself, to some degree. Usually I have no problem talking about myself. And I managed to blather on quite a bit...but I also hesitated and held back. I suppose trust will have to be built.

I am more uncomfortable with doing this than I thought I would be. I have done therapy, briefly, for various particular things before, but this feels different. I feel like I'm sort of needing this more than I have in the past, and that makes it harder to handle emotionally. I also feel like some of the reasons I need it more (i.e. don't have as many friends to talk to) make it tougher to deal with, because I am more insecure about it to the degree that it's something I need.

Other people aren't exactly thrilled to be going to therapy, either. The office has four or five counselors working in it, so I saw some people come and go as I waited for my appointment time. Nobody made eye contact (well, I tried, because I refuse to feel shameful about this, if I can help it) on the way in or on the way out...but it may not have anything to do with shame. Maybe more about privacy and the like. Coming out of the offices into the waiting room is intense, because you sort of would like to have a decompression chamber or something, which I suppose is a testament to the fact that I really did feel comfortable while I was in talking with her.

If I keep going (still unsure whether I can afford it), there will be posts ad nauseum about it, but that's it for now...


Filed under:
Health and Therapy

Baby Steps

Moving right along with the therapy stuff. I don't know that I'm going to be able to afford to do it the way I think it would really help me. Or, perhaps, right at first I just don't have the momentum to look for the best way to do it (i.e. some good, cheap therapy), so I'm going to perhaps pay more than I ought to for a little while as I figure out what I really want and need regarding all of this stuff. I sort of feel like this: If I let the money stop me right at first, I'll never get it off the ground. So, I'll spend more than I ought to at first with the goal of figuring out the best thing to do (which may very well be not having a therapist or finding a cheaper one). I've given up some stuff in my budget in order to do it for a few months at least, so we'll see.

I have a budget. A real one. Not one that I'm 'thinking of doing,' but one that I've had for a few months now. It's not perfect, but I'm working on it, and that's a good thing. Slowly but surely I do think I'm climbing out of some holes; with a little bit of luck I'll make it out for the long-term. A little good luck never hurt.

I am starting to recognize that the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race attitude is really the only one I'm going to be able to work with. The negative is that it sure doesn't feel like progress sometimes. But changing my attitude for what counts as progress is part of the process itself, really. This morning, before I talked to a potential counselor, I was going over my finances, trying to find some money to do the therapy thing. I was getting frustrated, because I just don't really have the money to do it the way I'd like--but then I realized a little later that I really have improved in so many ways: I have a fucking budget to look at and try to work something out with. I have a way to try to save money. I am not avoiding my money problems, but rather trying to face them. And even if I'm failing in some sense (i.e. if I can't go the therapy route), I am at least succeeding in some small way in that I at least know that I can't yet afford it. Knowing that may not make a whole lot of difference--but most likely it will make a difference. I'll be able to set therapy as a goal, to plan for it financially and such. And that sort of success matters--or at least it ought to.

Be Nice to Me On Wednesday
I'll have my first appointment this Tuesday. I'm thinking I might be pretty distraught by the time it's over, actually. The people I've known who've been going to therapy long-term end up a bit tender for a few days after a session, especially right at first. I'm thinking that lotsa cans of lotsa worms will be opened. Or maybe not. But still, I'm looking forward to at least trying this, even if it doesn't turn out to be what I want (or what I can afford).

If this therapist isn't a good fit for me, I have a couple of other options at the moment, and more to explore if I need/want to. So things are looking up on that front and I'm happy with myself that I'm trying to be happier--trying all sorts of ways that I can.

Closet Buddhist

I've been told several times by 'practicing Buddhists' that I'm something of a closet Buddhist. I've read just a smattering of Buddhist stuff, and I can begin to see why people might see me that way from what I've read. Just like a good deal of religious (and, erm, even more non-religious) texts/beliefs, there is a lot to be gleaned from various Buddhist ways of thinking. I don't mean to dabble in a superficial way and think that I've come out with some great truths, but dabbling does provide me some insight, in the way that, say, reading some Nietzsche (but probably not understanding in a terribly deep way) can provide some insights.

I stumbled across an interview with Sharon Salzberg, who has written some books on the subject of faith in general--from but it seems not completely limited by her own Buddhist perspective. One of the things she said struck me as particularly meaningful to my present situation, as well as a strong sense of empathy that I got when I read somthing k recently talked about in her blog.

Sharon Salzberg notes that suffering, rather than being something that only separates us from others (when I feel suffering, sometimes I also feel some added alienation, even if I'm suffering from alienation in the first place, for instance), but that it's something that actually binds us together in some sense, something we all have in common. We all have suffered, in various ways. There is a strange sort of comfort to be had from that, I think, along the lines of a sort of shadow of 'we're all in this together' sort of thinking. I have always thought that people who respond to somebody's pain with "everybody feels that way, everybody goes through pain" were sort of missing the point--but now I'm thinking that I was missing the point. The point of reminding somebody who's suffering that others feel that way too isn't like saying "buck up, little camper!"--it's a reminder that at a fundamental level our experiences do converge, and that they do converge can be very important.

In my current case, that others have felt/will feel the way I do right now (i.e. anxious, sad, unloved, alienated and the like) points to the fact that it's part of living, part of what it means to be alive and a person. Why does that comfort me?

Not sure. But it does.

Therapy-Hunting

I wrote up a long post about why I'm looking for a therapist, but it basically turned into a whine-fest about the fact that I have to look for a therapist and all that; I ended up talking much more about the stuff that I really do need to be talking with a therapist about, instead of just giving background as to why I'm looking. So I ditched the long whiny post. (Keep yer 'isn't this blog just you whining in place of therapy anyway' jokes to yerself, thank you very much.)

The thing I'm more interested in writing about is the effect that deciding I wanted to check out therapy and the process of actually looking for therapists has had on my psyche. The basic background is this: Enough people I know who go to therapy or have been to therapy have told me that they thought therapy might help me in various ways. I'm not opposed to therapy. I think it's the way to go in a lot of cases for a lot of people. It has been the way to go for me, a couple of times (though I haven't yet gone in any sort of long-term way). When I was 12, I went to a therapist once when my mom was getting divorced--and the therapist herself told my mom that she didn't think I needed to keep coming. When I was 17, and in the midst of the worst romantic breakup of my life (given my journal the past year, saying THAT puts some things into perspective), my mom insisted I go to a therapist. I went twice. First time, just basically poured my heart out to a stranger, and it was great. Second time, wrote the typical 'letter to the heartbreaker that you will never send but it gets things off your chest' thing and then she told me I didn't need to come back. And, in fact, I didn't need to. It was something of a turning point. Kinda silly, perhaps, and cliche, but that worked just fine for me. I also did some group therapy for something I'd rather not put out on the ol' blog (which is quickly becoming less and less anonymous). In all cases, I had good experiences with therapy in general.

So why, I have to ask myself, did I get so upset the other day when I started looking around for a therapist to help me through some of my anxiety and (possibly) depression that I've been feeling for more than a year (i.e. this goes back to before S's and my breakup, really)?

I think the answer is complex, but I know a lot of the roots. One is just the relief that comes from admitting to yourself that you can't go it alone, or that you would rather not, if you have the choice. For me, strong feelings of relief bring tears of a relief. There was more to it than that, however.

One other important factor was my slow-but-strong realizations about just how much depression/neurotic-ness/anxiety/compulsiveness/alchoholism and the like there is in my gene pool. I'm pretty sure that I'm not that different from most people, that there are enough black sheep in every family to keep things interesting, but when I look to my close family, my mother has managed to keep her head above water fairly well, but there's a lot of depression in the rest of my immediate family (and my mom hasn't escaped completely, either). My grandfather was an alchoholic. So was my father. My grandmother was agoraphobic by the end of her life. My uncle had some sort of compulsive disorder such that when he died they found stacks and stacks of newspapers in his house (and worse). And more.

So, being able to better acknowlege this stuff is part of the reason I'm going to try to find a therapist, but acknowleging it is also difficult emotionally. One wants to keep it in mind to use that knowledge in deciding how to live one's life, but one doesn't want to see that sort of thing as fated, or determined, or even a series of stumbling blocks. I am not my mother, my father or my grandfather. Still, I am their offspring, and genetically that means something (it's not clear exactly what) when it comes to depression and anxiety. I want to seek therapy in part because I have seen how unhappy some of my family memebers have been/continue to be, but I don't want that reason to be something that actually holds me back from being happy, some sort of genetic anchor that I'll always be struggling to haul up.

And then there's the emotional weight of knowing that one reason I may need therapy is because I don't have the support network that I used to have. This doesn't mean that I don't have good friends, or even that they aren't there for me or anything. (It's taken me a while to really realize this.) What it does mean is that it doesn't seem like my support network can help me enough here, for various reasons. (Granted, part of those reasons have to do with the fact that there are fewer people I'm involved with day-to-day to help, but mostly it has to do with these problems being bigger than a regular network of good friends can help with.) But this is all hard to face. Not only can I not easily navigate this stuff on my own, I can't navigate it with the people who care about me. (Or, more to the point, I can't do it *enough* for my comfort level any longer.) And that puts me in the precarious position of admitting that I need some outside help...because I may not be able to get that help.

Which brings me to one of the last important emotional factors: The financial cost of therapy. I guess I was used to the 'on-the-cheap' group therapy that I got years ago now, but it's looking like I won't be able to get therapy in the way I'd like because I won't be able to afford it. My insurance doesn't cover it unless I'm in some sort of drug program or I'm suicidal/homocidal/etc. I don't begrudge therapists their fees--it seems logical to me that they ought to earn a living doing what they're doing, and some of the sliding-scale people go low enough that they make the same or less than, say, massage therapists. (Which isn't to say I think one ought to earn more than the other--they seem, in my mind, to be sort of equitable things to do.) The thing is, just like I can't afford weekly massages, there's no way I can afford even the cheapest therapists--and I can't afford even the cheapest on a weekly basis. And so far, even the places that I could afford (say, bi-monthly) aren't available to me--they're full up with crazies like myself. (Which brings me to another conundrum--do I really want to take a low-end-of-the-sliding-scale spot away from somebody who might need this more than I do?)

I'll be able to get some help, I imagine. I won't go weekly, and I will likely have to do some sort of group therapy, which isn't exactly what I was after. And spots may open up at places that I 'can' afford. The point is--it's silly to say it, but I can't really *afford* to need therapy, apparently. And I imagine that it's not much different for a lot of people with more depression/anxiety than I have. The process of seeking out help becomes part of the problem, and that really sucks.