I’ve been sitting here thinking about why I need a therapist so much all of a sudden. What is this urge. What does it mean? Why is it happening?
I have this intense need to be seen. I need to feel like I exist in the world and I need to see proof of myself reflected in the eyes of other people. Right now I have Noah and the kids, mostly. I go through my life feeling invisible. I am not someone in the eyes of the people around me. I am furniture. They don’t know me and they don’t particularly care.
I have wonderful friends who give me what they can. They are all busy people. I tried to change the nature of my friendships-called-family and they blew up badly. It’s happened one right after another. I can’t keep risking this. This is too hurtful. My need is just too much for people.
I see a therapist week after week after week after week because otherwise no one gives a fucking shit about the stupid piddly shit of my life. I feel like I only exist in the highlights. No one cares what I am actually struggling with. No one wants the story. No one has time. Some of them kind of wish they could. The problem is that if they wish they could maybe then they feel some shame about not being able to help me. Then they get mad at me. Because it’s my fault they feel ashamed.
I need a therapist because I need to see knowledge of me reflected in someones eyes. I desperately fucking need to have someone know my complex story so that I can make small references to the distant past that is hugely significant. I fucking need that. I can’t handle having to live my life in the Readers Digest Version. I feel like a fake and a liar all the god damn time. I’m constantly feeling my heart race because I’m afraid I’ll slip and talk about the wrong thing at the wrong time and all of a sudden people will hate me and tell me they don’t want to be near me any more.
Don’t call this fucking paranoia. This is my god damn life.
I have to pay someone to be as consistent as I need. And even when I do pay someone to be in this role I can’t get it.
I’m looking for a parent. I’m looking for someone to be an active mentor. I feel so fucking alone. I’m so scared. I think I am pathetic. Isn’t it past time I was the adult already?
But I still hide under the desk and cry because I don’t know what to do when I feel consumed with self-loathing other than to hurt myself in some way and I’m trying not to teach that. I don’t know what to do. Right now I rock and cry. I feel like a blithering idiot but I try to comfort myself. I feel really stupid. I stroke my own hair.
No. No one is ever going to take care of me. I will never have that. When I am sick I have to get up and deal with it by myself. It is never going to be different. I just missed that. These things are stupid and petty and small.
But I haven’t cut myself in over a year. I haven’t cut myself since I stopped trying to meet the needs of my chosen family. I just can’t. I have nothing to give. If I want to keep the self control to not mutilate myself I have to save that energy. It is that hard to not hurt myself. To not beat my head on the floor. To not punch door frames.
Sometimes all I can do is sit under the desk and cry.
I need a therapist because I need someone to watch the seasons of my life. Who can coach me. Who can talk to me about why I am currently struggling and what are the “balls” I have to drop. How I can I figure out how to lower the amount of harm in my life? It’s a process.
When I am actively involved in communities I can sometimes coast without a therapist and do ok. I had a Buddy when I was a teacher. He had the classroom next to mine. We spent a lot of time talking. He got a lot of the story. Not the details of abuse or anything. But he learned a lot about me. A lot more than a therapist given how much time we spent talking.
I had that at the munch when I dated Tom. Losing that in the breakup was hard.
I need a therapist because for me what I am feeling right now is what I have always felt and will always feel. It’s not true. I have a very convenient memory. I need someone that I touch base with who really focuses on me. Where I get to be selfish and self absorbed and no I am not going to keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to “burden you”. Fucker I need some god damn support. And I have to pay for it. And it’s flakey. And it might die. Or tell me to go away because I do something horrible. Or it might stop showing up within an hour of the assigned start time. Or it might… just… need to move on. I’m a client, not a friend.
As inadequate as it is… it’s the only way I can have a relationship with someone where I see them every week. I need that. Even though it makes me feel pathetic and stupid and small. Better to pay a therapist to be my friend than to kill myself because I feel like I don’t fucking matter.
Just seems like money well spent.
I’m not sure you need to need a therapist to see a therapist. If you get value from time spent in therapy it seems a good use of your time (and money.) Same deal for a massage or a guitar lesson or a day at the food bank. I have no standing to give you permission (although I would) but you don’t really need anybody’s permission than your own.
At this point I am tired, overburdened, and angry. I’m not in a position y do any of those things.
Oh, sorry, I in no way mean to imply that you should jam a bunch extracurrjculars into a full schedule (I think overbooking is pretty endemic in the US and that none of us really benefit from that.) What I meant to say was that I think of therapy like anything else that takes time, money and attention rather than some special category all its own. The examples were meant only to convey a spread along a sort of selfish/selfless spectrum because I think therapy itself is spread across that spectrum, i.e. that therapy benefits both participant and society. Sometimes (perhaps often) I use fewer words than I ought and leave too much ambiguity lying around.
Therapy has a focus, if it is done in a professional way, that you don’t get under any other circumstances. I get to talk about me me me me me me me me for 50 minutes. I don’t have to give a shit how you are feeling or affected by what I am saying. Not my problem! It’s glorious.
“No one cares what I am actually struggling with. No one wants the story. No one has time. Some of them kind of wish they could. The problem is that if they wish they could maybe then they feel some shame about not being able to help me. Then they get mad at me. Because it’s my fault they feel ashamed.”
I read your book because I felt I needed to know the whole story – or as much as you would include in the book. I had some of the story from your past journal posts, but I knew I didn’t have it all. And I imagine I still don’t really have it all.
So, I’m not necessarily one of the people who doesn’t want the story, and doesn’t care, but we both know I’m one of the people who is short on time. I feel badly about that, because I feel like I’ve let you down. It doesn’t make me angry at you, though — it makes me sad. I don’t like being yet another person in your life who has let you down.
I don’t know what to say about that.