Ways of Dealing
Last post I asked for suggestions for things I ought to talk about in therapy. This was half joking--only half, because sometimes others can see the things that you ought to be dealing with a lot better than you can (the opening scene to Brain Candy always comes to mind, where everybody recognizes the dad is gay but him). It's all about the blind spots, sometimes. Eden's comment/suggestion was an interesting one, and it did get me to thinking about my methods of dealing with 'stuff' in life. In fact, one central purpose of therapy for me (aside from having somebody who I can regularly go to when I'm in need of venting/crying/etc.) is to learn to interact with the world in different ways. I'm not sure I'd want to characterize this as 'dealing with psychological problems'--but it's along those lines.

Last night my therapy session led me to at least one realization: I oftentimes distract myself from how I'm feeling/what I ought to be doing by invalidating my experiences through over-recognizing the validity of the experiences of others. In less new-agey-speak, I think that my problems aren't a big deal because other people are suffering such more difficult problems all the time. But this is (in part) an avoidence mechinism, keeping me from changing the way I interact with my world.

One of the tricks is to see my experiences as 'valid' without sort of reifying them. That is, I do experience sadness around loneliness and gender issues, but I need to recognize this without also thinking of loneliness and gender issues as somehow inherent in my life--or I'll be the most self-fulfilled of all prophecies.

Doing It All
One of the other things that came up last night was that I tend to cause a lot of internal strife because I forget that I can't do it all, especially when it comes to particular feelings in my life. For instance, a big one for me is that I desperately want to better understand my expression of gender, and to play with it, to engage it in whatever ways, but I'm almost constantly beating myself up for the ways I don't engage it at all. Meaning, I do a lot of thinking about gender, I look at various situations through the lenses of gender, but I don't, say, change the way I dress because of such things. For some reason, dressing like a 'typical guy' bothers me a lot--though not enough to change the way I dress. Therapy was helpful for me last night because I recognized that I don't have to dress differently than I do in order to better understand the way I do 'being a man'. It might help if I did, but there are other avenues that I can explore, and I often do.

Boundary-Making
One last thing that came out of last night (there were more, but this is all I can deal with at the moment): I need to better draw some boundries...mostly around what I expect of myself as regards dealing with the feelings of others. In an effort to not be a complete jerk, I've gone too far down the road of empathy--to where it somehow leaves the larger paths of taking care of myself. I need to sort of relearn how to ask for what I want from people without censoring myself so often by what I perceive as their needs.

This comes out in various ways, but mostly I need to talk with a few of my friends about how much I need them to interact with me in various ways intellectually and emotionally. Is that vague enough?

Anyway, thanks to Eden (and to k) for giving me some meta stuff to think about on the way to therapy (and during!). I'm my own best hobby, I think.
Filed under:Therapy