Almost....But I Think The Moment Has Gone

I’ve decided I quite like my therapist!

He’s very good. I wanted to not like him, to be irritated by him, to be superior to him and second guess him all the time. I don’t know why. It’s about control I suppose. If I give in to him, I make myself vulnerable, I concede power, I allow him the weapons to wreak possible havoc in my life.

I’ve treated this whole thing as a bit of a game. Go ahead if you think you can get in, if you think you can get me to offload, if you think you can spot a chink in the armour. I don’t think so.

Thing is, he’s known that all along. He gets me. He has been very patient with me. He knows that I’m very nervous of what might be uncovered. He has let me go along at my own pace.He has told me a few times that he is happy to see me for as long it takes but that I needed to realise that could be years, as long as I insist on keeping up my guard.

I was hoping therapy could be me just talking and talking and telling him all sorts of things from my childhood onwards in a bid to just get everything out and then maybe, maybe once it was all laid out, I could start putting bits together.

In my last session though, while I was in the middle of talking about some nonsense, I suddenly realised doing it this way is not going to work. I stopped talking and he let me sit quietly for a bit and then asked if I was OK. I told him that I liked him, that I appreciated how he had let me be these last few months. He asked me quietly what it was I wanted and I told him that I just wanted to be able to sort everything out but that I was frightened of facing myself. He asked me if I knew exactly what it was that I was afraid of and I told him honestly that I didn’t but that I suspected it would be that I despise myself and given that I have built a lifetime out of being a great gal, loved by everyone and full of fun, that would be hard.

He said he could help me if I was willing to think about things differently. Again he went back to his pet subject, Ewan, and asked me why I was so keen to protect him. I started crying. It’s been a while since I’ve done that with him.

In our very first session, I told him something that Ewan had done quite early on in our marriage, something I haven’t been able to bring myself to blog about, yet. Nothing too terrible in the scheme of things, I suppose, but something that affected me. Thinking about it now, I’m surprised I came straight out with it and told him. No one else knows. That was actually the most productive session to date as I felt so desperate that I was willing to talk about everything. Every week since then I have maintained “control”.

The therapist has often asked if I want to address that issue and I have always skirted round it. This last time, he told me that the thing with Ewan was the “elephant in the room”. He could see it and didn’t understand why I was refusing to acknowledge it. He said that I should stop hiding it away and pretending that it never happened. (I’m making it sound very dramatic – it will be a real letdown when I finally blog about it, after such a big build-up!!) He says if we can talk it through, we can make some real progress.

We couldn’t take it any further then because we were at the end of our time which is a shame because for the first time, I felt like I was on the edge of something. I’m worried we’ll have lost our place by the next session. I spent the weekend thinking that if I could blog about it all, I might make that discovery before going back to the therapist. But I sat down to write and I find I can’t. All I have been able to manage is this nonsensical ramble.

In a bid to get back to the same place, the therapist has asked me to be ready to talk about whether or not I married Mr Right. I should have written about that today.

That’s what I’ll do next time.