My ther­a­pist is still get­ting to know me. Now I have books to read and work­sheets to fill out. It’s some­what strange; I’ve been putting myself through self-help for years, but I’ve never traced it so far back to my child­hood. I don’t like to blame my par­ents because I see how Darren and Pat have sur­vived far “worse” but it’s get­ting more and more obvi­ous that there’s trauma in my child­hood that still affects me to this day.

  • Apparently, I’m mod­er­ately depressed, and “mod­er­ate” is not normal.
  • We’ve fig­ured out that my unassertive­ness is the result of con­flict avoid­ance. Even if I prac­tice a sit­u­a­tion in my head where I say some­thing that may bring up con­flict, I often can’t fol­low through. I feel help­less to fix this, and this leads to a self-defeating attitude.
    • This stems from my child­hood. I’ve almost never argued with my par­ents (there were two times in my life I felt strongly enough to stand up against them, both end­ing in me sub­mit­ting because there was no rea­son­ing with them). I’ve always felt like I wouldn’t be loved unless I got good grades and did every­thing I was told. In other words, it was an extremely con­di­tional love.
    • This means I care about what peo­ple think of me, and I define or eval­u­ate my self-worth through them. Knowing this pisses me off because philo­soph­i­cally and prag­mat­i­cally I don’t agree, but can’t do any­thing about it.
  • Every time I’ve been in ther­apy, I’ve cried at least once. This hap­pens when­ever I bring up spe­cific aspects of my rela­tion­ship with my parents.
  • Hearing my ther­a­pist say, “Wow, that’s bad” brings me a com­fort­ing val­i­da­tion to what I feel.
  • Aside from being slightly ver­bose, my ther­a­pist is great. He’s a non-judgmental, eth­i­cal, open-minded intel­lec­tual. He’s also a good listener.