Category Archives: therapy

Different facets.

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Today is hard because I have already been a friend, a lover, and a therapy client.  Any second now I need to be a mother.  I need to be a partner.  I need to be a wife.  I need to be a boss.

It’s hard to be these different parts of me.  They feel like they don’t add up to a person.  I’m not sure if they are less or more than a person, but not really a person.  A host with many guests.  I hurt.  I hurt inside my heart.  I am all these things and more and it feels like a terrible thing I am doing.  I am supposed to pick.  Ok, probably not one.  But just two or three.  Fine, I can be a mother and a therapy client and a wife.  Those are supposed to be my priorities, right?

But I really enjoyed being a lover today.  Today I felt beautiful.  Noah tolerates a lot of my derogatory self-talk.  Well, he ignores me.  He tells me I’m beautiful.  He tells me he likes me.  Today my Daddy made me stand in front of a mirror and he touched me and made me look and told me that I am beautiful.  I feel like I can still barely lift my head.  I can’t look up at someone saying that about me.  I’m not.  I’m so ugly and mean and bad.  You don’t know how bad.

Maybe.  There are parts of me that are ugly and mean and bad.  I have done things I am ashamed of.  I have hurt people.  But maybe this isn’t an ‘or’ situation.  Maybe I’m ugly and I’m beautiful.  Maybe the most beautiful thing I have done in my whole life was standing up to my family and prosecuting my father and preventing him from ever victimizing another person.  I did that.  All by myself.  My father was a serial rapist.  He had molested many people from childhood to adulthood.  I. Got. Rid. Of. Him.  As sure as if I put a gun to his head.  I made sure he could never hurt anyone again.  Ok, so I didn’t expect him to kill himself, not really.  I was surprised.  I was devastated.  I knew it was a risk.  Everyone thought he would put a gun in his mouth.  But he didn’t.  He sat, like a chicken shit, in his garage and ran his truck.  While he sat there he wrote notes of hate to me and my mother.  I burned that note many years ago after Tom urged me to.  It ate at me.  He told me, essentially, that he was committing suicide because I was an evil liar and he didn’t want to go to hell for the sin of murdering me because I murdered my brother.  Did you follow that?  His grammar (and spelling) was worse.  But the hate was god damn obvious.  What a piece of shit.  He sent that note to his daughter.

It’s not like he could tell himself that he was innocent.  Give me a break.  He didn’t want to go to prison.  He was too fucking chicken shit to accept the consequences of his actions.  I’m not.  My father is dead.  I’m glad.  I made the world a more beautiful place by effectively killing him.

But I am still what he made me.  I still thrill to the touch of my Daddy.  Maybe I can find a way for that to be ok.  Maybe that’s just one way that my friends can love me and touch me and heal parts of me I can’t reach by myself.  Every man I call Daddy has been in my life for a long time.  Specifically, Dad has been active in my life for nearly as many years as my biological father.  I stopped seeing my biological father when I was thirteen.  I have known Dad for eleven years.  I have spent considerably more time in Dad’s company than I did with my father in my entire life.  Dad is also a really good grandpa to my kids.  He loves them.

And Daddy?  Well, he sure knows how to make me come.  And he is ok with me waking him up in the middle of the night when I need to talk.  He has been for more than seven years.  I have done so, whenever I needed to, for over seven years.  And I’m crazy and bossy and difficult and he loves me.  It was really nice to come home to my Daddy today.  I am feeling pretty shocked by how this feels.

Maybe the only kind of love I have ever known how to get from a dad will be met.  And it will be met in a way that allows me to be healthy and whole.  I’m not a hole.  My Daddy may be a big slut, but I’m special.  I always have been.  And Dad?  I’m his first daughter.  He introduces me that way, which is funny because he has a biological daughter.  He’s had several girlfriends after me who are also “daughters”.  But everyone knows it’s different with me.  I’m not a girlfriend and I never was and I never will be.  He just takes care of me when I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I feel very little.  And happy and sad at the same time.  I feel like I am holding the hand of my best friend at the funeral of a very bad person.  I am safe now.  I will never be hurt by my dad again.  I may be single tailed by my Dad.  I may be fucked by my Daddy.  But my dad will never hurt me again.

Maybe I’m not over the incest thing.

Auditioning therapists

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I’m looking for lightning.  I’m looking for that strike of magic where I will feel ok sharing all of my hard, complicated stuff.  It’s not always obvious who I will feel compelled to spill my guts to.  With most people, I selectively tell stories.  I am aware of peoples perception of me.  That’s not a great thing to do with a therapist.

Yesterday I felt tentative.  She was intense in a way that felt intimidating.  She had a very strong, sharp personality and a sharp tone of voice.  She sounded like me.  When she listened intently, which is most of what she did, her face was closed in a way that felt hostile.

Today I had a totally different feeling.  She looked comfortable in her body.  She had a very small, slight smile the whole time.  I felt like if I lost my shit and crawled over and put my head in her lap to cry she would stroke my hair and say, “Poor Baby” in exactly the right way.  She checked in with me about making comments.  She point blank asked, “Is it ok for me to say…”  When I told her I would like to hear some response from her at a certain point she said, “Listening to your story makes me feel very quiet.  I have to listen with all of me so my voice feels small.”  Then she had to clear her throat and try a few times before speaking.

She kind of had to take a pause twice.  The first time was when she was skimming the timeline.  I told her that is most of the highlights of traumatic events, but I didn’t list them all.  She visibly startled and said, “There is more?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”

At the end I tried to startle her again and I asked her about bdsm.  She shrugged it off and said she’s totally fine with it.  I said, “I’m kind of an extreme player.  If it won’t cause someone else to be traumatized, I probably won’t get off on it.”  Her eyes went WIDE.  For about 1.2 seconds.  Then she said, “Oh.”  I could see her thinking about that but she didn’t ask.  So I volunteered that I like to do things like be hanged by the neck.  She didn’t blink that time.

Her background is hypnotherapy.  That was her entry into helping people.  She likes the Gestalt/two-chair stuff.  She has done a lot of work with “inner children”.  She feels completely comfortable with my drug usage.  Her facial expressions when I talked about Noah were priceless.  I think she likes him already.

And man, I’m going to say it.  She is black and she has that kind of Mammy vibe.  Like she is the best person in the world to talk to about your problems because she will either take care of you, if you really need it, or slap you on the ass and tell you to get busy taking care of yourself.  I’m not sure how to describe this feeling.  Like a combination of deep patience and experience with suffering combined with just being sick to death of whiners and loafers.  It’s a lot like how I see myself, only older and more mature. I can’t read anything about her life and I like it that way.

I made an appointment with her for next Thursday morning at 9am.  Anyone available to babysit?