easy does it

I just spent the past year in a deep depression. You see, there was this guy. He was beautiful, intelligent and super exciting (I think partly because he was Chinese and sometimes foreignness makes qualities seem interesting in a man that in any American would seem rude, stupid or just plain boring). I broke things off quickly because it was clear that his feelings weren’t there, even though he kept trying to convince me that he “was just busy with work”, or whatever. That’s why he couldn’t call me his girlfriend and that’s why he couldn’t call me back in a timely manner and that’s why he could feel totally easy about leaving me sit around on New Year’s eve without a date.

Cutting him off immediately brought a sensation of a knot being untied in my gut. So why the depression, you ask? I spent the next eleven months beating myself up for ever letting him get in my pants in the first place. Do you have any idea what sort of effect eleven months of telling yourself you are a loose woman can have on your self esteem? Let’s just say by the end of a year I was left with some unattractive wreckage to pick through. I am pleased to report, however, that after having stomped around through all the debris I was able to locate the foundation and it seems to be intact. The reconstruction is already underway.

I am learning that the key to overcoming my anxiety is to accept my reactions as reasonable. Guess what? That crying jag I had last Tuesday? Reasonable. The lack of direction I feel? Reasonable. My inability to listen? Reasonable. The anger I feel towards my loving, well-meaning mother? You guessed it …..totally reasonable! And considering my baggage, one relationship with a thoughtless young man is fairly reasonable. Even feeling depressed about it is reasonable……But I don’t want to do it again. And as long as I beat the crap out of myself for feeling the way I feel, I will not get better. I may doubt a lot of things, but this I have no doubt about.

marcello

One interesting thing that I have failed to mention about the transference train wreck week from hell is that I had managed to meet a seemingly very nice young man from Brazil during this time. We made a connection while French- serving coq au vin (The yummy Julia Childs kind with bacon) and mashed potatoes to bankers the day after my session and unsettling father dream.

His name was Marcelo. He was tall, dark, handsome, young and he wore very nice shoes. He asked me for my number at the end of our shift and I gave it without hesitation; one would almost say eagerly and this despite the fact that an annoying voice in my head was shouting something about wanting men to leave me the hell alone.

He called me up and asked me out. I told him I was willing to do coffee. We set up a time and said that we would meet in the general vicinity of Bryant Park and we would make up our minds about where to head from there. We did not give a specific spot. We would just go to Bryant Park at a designated time and the first one there would give the other a call. Very casual. Does anyone else see the potential issues with this plan? People get on my case for being a tight ass but I mean really.

Anyway, the two of us had created a plan where the possibilities for subconscious self-sabotage were nearly endless. So I’m driving to my date (and I have to say that my hair and outfit were fabulous!). I am singing at the top of my lungs to that new song by Beyonce trying very hard to dump the feeling that I did not want to be dressed up, driving or heading into the city to meet with a man I barely know, nice shoes or not.

I parked the car and gathered my things, then I decided that it was too warm for me to wear my adorable violet jacket with the pretty purple flower buttons. I didn’t want to carry extra crap so I left it in the backseat. I was at 9th street on the Path Train before I realized that I had left my phone in that cute little jacket .

I had 15 minutes until my date started. Now here’s the list of problems.

1. His number is in my phone.

2. I do not know his last name so I cannot try to call information and get his number.

3. The car and the phone are ½ hour away from me and this is not including the time it will take for me to wait for a train going in the opposite direction and then another train to switch over at journal square.

I am red faced with shame. This is the type of squirrely behavior that other people exhibit. This is hurtful to poor Marcelo and embarrassing to me. I am picturing him standing there dressed nicely waiting for me. In my mind’s eye I see his expression of happy expectation turn to one of disappointment and anger as I fail to answer his repeated calls. I beat myself thoroughly. I do understand that the experience is not going to scar him permanently, but I self-flagellate anyway.

It is 25 minutes after the date was supposed to start before I get to my phone. I immediately call and apologize profusely. It ends up not being that big of a deal. He had spent that entire time looking for a parking space. He even asks me if I would like to meet him later for dinner. I turn him gently down. I have learned my lesson about forcing myself on dates. I have already vowed to discontinue this behavior. It occurs to me that he must have really liked me to be so gentlemanly about the situation, but then I remind myself that he does not know me. His transference, his problem. He kept calling me for a week before he got the message and I no longer heard from him. I felt relief in my tummy.

I relate most of this to my therapist. He tells me that the date represented my desire to prove that I did not want to have sex with a father figure. For a fraction of a second I wonder what the hell I am paying him for. Then I realize that my insurance is paying for almost all of it and I relax.

This is going to be a long lonely ride. Thank God for dildos.

Nobody told me there'd be days like these

It was a good day for growth. But sometimes I think that all that anxiety has simply moved from one space to another like a cloud of tear gas floating down the road on a slow moving breeze. It hasn’t really dispersed, but maybe I’ve got a better view now. When I was a child, my picture of adulthood did not look like this.

I have to return my library books. They are overdue. Boo.

special

What is it about this crazy need to feel special? One psychology book said that erotic transference, or what the lay person calls a hair flaming crush on your therapist, is simply the need to hoard a feeling of specialness. Apparently I want to hoard this special feeling in my pants which makes no sense to me, but there you are.

My specialness problems come from a long way back. I dealt with varied and numerous abuses in my early childhood, but probably the largest blow to my ego happened on the worst and best day of my life when my father packed a pair of underwear for me in a green bag and drove me to the rape crisis center where he left me and I got a new set of parents. I was exactly one month away from my sixth birthday. My new mom was a teacher at my school. She came to pick me up in an old jalopy . I had two questions for her on the way home

1. Did I have a new dad? (yes) and

2. Did he have a beard? (Not now, but he used to have one).

I sat like a mouse on the sofa while my new Mom quietly bustled around the kitchen preparing dinner. My new dad came home about a half hour later introduced himself and then both he and mom gave me plenty of space for the rest of that evening.
It soon became clear to me that I had traded up in a big way. My parents were gentle and patient with me. They were awesome people with special training dealing with emotionally disturbed children. In many ways they were the best imaginable fit for me……. So by now I should be totally cured of all ills, yes? I mean how could it hurt that my father had left me to strangers if those strangers were able to provide a home that was about a million times more loving? My dreams had come true I was born into the wrong family and it turned out I really was a princess with a castle and a king and queen waiting for me. My new perfect home.

It turns out that things are not so simple. My mother, loving woman, and expert on disorders of early childhood that she is, never recognized the anxiety disorder that was almost literally eating me alive. Instead she put me on meds for ADD, which masked some of the attention problems that come with acute anxiety. It was enough to get me through school with great grades, but socially I was a cripple limping through my childhood. I withdrew into books and felt some compensation for having no friends with nearly always being the teacher’s pet.

Now I am a 30 year old woman with an expensive degree from a top tier liberal arts college who has travelled the world. I am also someone who sleeps on her ex’s sofa because she so frozen by self-doubt and anxiety that she can hardly function. I have no career to speak of, hardly any friends and not a single hobby or interest to make me excited about getting up in the morning. So much for the fairy tale.

But there was a break in the clouds. My mother finally talked me into going back into therapy. About two months in I began making strides I had been able to go almost an entire month without a panic attack. I was feeling hope and confidence and just a little glimmer of liking myself again and then, there it was, a snake in the grass. Feelings that threatened to derail every hope I had for getting better.
Instead of running away I decided to stand and deal with it. I talked about it. I'm not sure my therapist won't end up dumping me but I'm glad I did it.

Usually a therapist realizes that a patient is struggling with transference when they suddenly start acting whacky in sessions like avoiding talking about anything that might make them look bad, constantly canceling or rescheduling sessions, or just plain disappearing. If the person has pulled a Houdini it is, unfortunately, too late to address the problem. There are a lot of people on the net advocating not telling your therapist for fear that you’ll be dumped. Better dumped than wasting your time and money. You have to decide how much you want to get better. Most of us, I believe, come to therapy with abandonment issues, but in session is the time and place to deal with it. For me, I don't feel like its much of a choice. The alternative is too frightening to think about.

the sky is falling

About three weeks ago after a productive session, I had the weirdest dream that I was having an affair with my father. It was disturbing enough to wake me up out of a deep sleep. It took me about thirty seconds to swim toward consciousness and in those murky moments I understood that the dream was not just about my father.

I was attracted to my therapist.

I believe the first word out of my mouth that day was “shit!!!”. As far as I was concerned the sky was falling. I had been making progress. Real verifiable progress. I was no longer panicking at the drop of a hat. I was starting to be gentle on myself and was even re-entertaining ideas of going back to pursue my life’s dream of acting. This seemed like about the worst thing that could happen to me at this point in time. I knew that I had to fight and fight hard. There was only one thing to do. I googled.

I googled until my fingers started to go numb. I googled transference. I googled ego-supportive therapy. I googled transference and ego-supportive therapy. In one fit of punitive self-diagnosis I googled borderline personality disorder and then cried for 45 minutes convinced that I had finally lost my mind.

The following week went as follows. Almost got hit by a car twice. Got drunk on tequila for three days overslept and left the car parked in front of the school where I got a $55 parking ticket and blocked the buses from being able to pull into the school and let the kids out. Then I tried to drunk dial my biological father and scream at him on the phone for abandoning me and fucking me up so bad that I would be such a crazy stalker person (No I hadn’t ever actually stalked anybody, but at the time that just seemed like semantics). Fortunately for both of us I could not find his number in any of the search engines I used ( I think it may be possible that he’s dead). I cried some more.


My session the following week felt rather similar to what I believe it must be like for someone who enters a lion cage weaponless, perhaps with a raw t-bone tied to their chest for good measure. I don’t believe I was actually shaking. I think it was more like the response that baby deer has when faced with some terrifying thing. I was frozen. My mind still worked. I was able to speak and convey things, but any other movement was out of my power.

I could draw you a very detailed picture of the shoes that my therapist wore that day. His freakishly small feet are the only thing I remember seeing. They were black loafers by the way. Really unstylish ones. Of course I see how ridiculous it is for me to be so petrified by a soft spoken man with tiny feet and questionable fashion sense, but reason does not come into such things I am learning.

I stared at his feet and told him about my dream and then summed it up with my interpretation that “last week’s session must have been a good one and therefore my subconscious sent the dream as some sort of resistance” I was fairly impressed with this analysis. Jim’s response was

“Mhmn. Perhaps I can offer an alternative interpretation”

A moment . I give a teeny nod. He proceeded on one of his convoluted verbal pilgrimages that embark from point A on their way to point Z taking a minor detour through Albuquerque. He finally landed at his point “You have a crush on your therapist”.

Later, when discussing the situation with one of my closest girlfriends I would be impressed with the fact that he had come to this conclusion, especially considering that my dream had not included any Jimminess and I had not included in my narrative the fact that I had awakened to this very point myself. At the time I took it as a matter of course that he had “gotten it” and simply continued on with my session, which was telling him about my train wreck of a week and my research into transference and how it is handled in ego-supportive therapy.

Two sessions later he referred to the fact that I was able to make those connections as “brilliant”. My ego was quite stroked by this until I reminded myself that in order to raise my self-esteem and create a strengthened relationship Jim would probably tell me that the sky is green. OK. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it does bring me to my first major point which is:

1. My “crush” must be an erotic transference simply because I have very little knowledge of this man’s likes, dislikes, interests and more annoying qualities. The things he chooses to share with me he does so in an effort to build and maintain a therapeutic alliance. This does not necessarily mean that the things he says are lies, only that they are minute bits of himself chosen carefully to highlight the similarities between us and therefore to put me at my ease and help me to ease up on myself in seeing that someone whose competence I trust is like me in some ways. What this means is that if I have developed a crush on anyone it is really myself. Creepy, No?

Point number two is related to the afore mentioned ego-stroking.

2. This particular therapy is called “ego-supportive” for a reason. Instead of being totally myself in my sessions I’ve been running this useless “I want you to think I’m a real smarty pants” agenda. Like I might get an award for “Best patient ever”. There’s no medal. Not even a cookie. There’s just getting better or staying the same.

Surprisingly these realizations in themselves have not been enough to “fix” me. Yet another example of how knowing things intellectually and understanding them viscerally are two different things. If given the choice I’d go with animal understanding every time, thank you very much.