I have an email to send, later, after this post has been composed. It's going to a therapist; one that I spent an hour with yesterday. My procrastination comes as an innocent bystander, caught in war between my conscience, and my annoyance. This, having been my first ever therapy session, I am not sure what is demanded... if anything at all. I suppose a third option for such an individual is to hide until resolve takes the higher ground. Innocence, not quite, I am therefore conceding that the next person at post will have not benefitted from the awareness I didn't share with interested parties. Indeed - anger at my perceived and unvalidated notions that you should be reading me better than I am reading you. Shouldn't your expertise wield my body language like a crowbar to a coffin? Shouldn't my words hang like tethers that you pull until unwound? I do not know; you have not told me - but you did share that we are going to spend some time on a checklist that the clinic makes you complete during the first session. Our journey into Ron is not fluid or surreptitious; it's a halting, often stalling, jerky-kind of rollercoaster of defining, detailing, and saying the same things in a backwards walk through a thesaurus. If perhaps, I'd thought to bring a family tree, we may have shaved off a minute or two to talk about, trauma? I had a wild thought while staring off into the corner. As yes/no/who/when darts were thrown in my direction, I wondered how much easier, and less off-putting it would have been to maybe answer all these questions before my session... you know, on my "free to me" time. There were enough unrestrained brain cells to ponder my body language...
"what's her body language?"
"Oh - I don't think I like that?"
"I wonder what else this office is used for? There's two chairs, her chair, and a patient chair like you'd find in a medical clinic. The bright fluorescent lighting is not amiable to the therapy session I had in my head. Should I ask her if we can turn off the lights?"
"Jack, my step dad is Jack... Charlie is my real dad. Jack is the one that raised me my entire life." Sigh. "Oh, there's her body language firing up. I hear a different tone than before."
"This might be a good time to tell you that I believe I am on the spectrum."
"Well, because I had numerous indicators as a child, and I recognize some of my adult tendencies to be aligned with possibly Asperger's Syndrome."
"Okay, we'll circle back to that?"
"Artist's Colony in CELO that was founded in the 60's, that's cool... can I guess that it's a lot of glassblowers and potters? Bet they have cool coffee mugs there."
"No, sorry, Charlie, the real dad, he's dead. Jack - he's the one who married my mom and is still married to her. He married my mom AFTER Charlie married my mom. No - I'm not adopted. Yes, they are still alive. Jack and Mary are alive and still married."
"Oh, I should go to a CELO event and introduce myself to the artists. Yeah, that not really how..."
"Okay, you can't figure out how to send the link, maybe I should just take a picture of your notebook for the never time I go do this?"
My therapists words aren't coming so sharply now. In fact, if I answer with a "yes" to a question, I am then coached thru another list (an outline format if you will where clicking on said ailment opens a sublist of symptoms). We are losing the precious minutes, I'm confident someone timed themselves asking these questions to ensure it filled an entire 60-minute session. Again, these are things that a simple survey would've answered prior to our meeting, and we could have drilled down on the traumas beyond a simple; "did this happen?", "when?", "who?", "did this happen?", "when?"... you get the idea. Here's a thing no one told me to do... during our fluorescent endeavor into the surface psyche of the therapy virgin - I was supposed to be evaluating whether my trust in this stranger with a clipboard was swooning or drowning (because that's how it happens?
"You be vulnerable, I check a box."
" - funny, you don't look like my manipulative first love? Frankly, she's probably still quite hot. I wonder how many syringes are in that orange box? Wouldn't it be kinda Clockwork Orange to bust that open and stab all of them into her neck? No - not adopted. We just moved a lot. I have some theories on why? Heroin. No, I'm not violent. Syringe. Hmmm."
Wow - I just said out loud all the events that took 51 years to fuck me up. That was... unpleasant. This is what therapy is, right... saying ugly things that make you feel ugly to someone you don't know.
"I don't want to speak for you Doc, but I really like where this relationship is going. Not only do I get to hear about your therapist and how good she is, but I also get to know A vulnerability about you and the passing of your husband 12 years ago. Are we married now? We may have a problem."
I think we ran out of Madlib pages, because suddenly the notepad snaps shut and that "all-downhill rollercoaster" just left the tracks. Suddenly, like the thunderclap following a successful exorcism, the atmosphere of the room sucks in to a minutely tiny mass. It hovers and spins violently for a milli-second...just enough time to formulate awareness of the event, and then it explodes into a shrill force that expands aggressively, filling every surface of the room with the weight of a million suns.
"You've shared several events from your life with me that I think I can help you manage. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM THERAPY?"
"Huh, to receive it? How do I answer this? Just say some words that make sense."
"All of it?" "I'd like to seeing my way to thinking about stuff in a healthy way as opposed to allowing the last 50 years wreak havoc on my exhausted brain?"
"Okay, so I need you to figure out what you want therapy to do and when you figure that out, let's speak. Let me ask you this, do you trust me to be your therapist?"
"I can't answer that, I have no idea. I'm completely disassociated and fantasizing about stabbing you with dirty syringes, maybe that's a no?"
"Well - think about that as well, and if you want to see me again, make an appointment."
In summation. I haven't asked anyone yet, whom I know to have tried therapy what to make of this defloration. It feels a little like violation, but as a side-effect of having to do complete the checklist. Had we sat, and stared deeply into my soul, studying the intricacies of my analytical trauma - I do not believe my disposition on this event would be different. One of us should have been a saboteur, it should not have been me. Sure, you have the facts, but I got more than a little bit of your personality, and it's not romance I anticipated. Maybe it's the "there's 40 checkout lines and only 3 cashiers kind of vibe".
"Did you ever love me, therapy person?" "Was I not witty enough?" "Are you not entertained?" "Maybe it's Frasier's fault?" "Honestly, I've always been in Lilith's camp."
I am not going back, and I now need to write a Dear Jane letter, "it's not you, it's me..."
"Now that I think about it, we never did circle back on the autism, but Jack is exactly where he should be. And so is Bill - in there, throwing out the abuse swag. Oh yeah, that's why I hate DC."
So... I need to figure out some stuff. Was this normal? Do I need to know what I want from therapy? Is day 1, SATs? Is therapy like ordering a cake? My instinct says this was abnormal, and my therapist is just as happy that we won't be sharing a small medical office room in the future. I am not abandoning the journey simply because this was off-putting. But I need to find out if there's any validity in the one substantive question she asked, and if so, how do I encapsulate layers of traumatic events into a formulaic a + b = ? I feel kind of crazy (no pun intended) that I the victim of traumas should have enough understanding and awareness of unprocessed trauma on the brain after 45+ years, to say - please turn my trauma into an artistic masterpiece that I can live off of. Oh wait - I'm giving that to you so you can live off of it. Maybe you are my first love after all... has the student become the master?
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