Posts tagged with "therapy"

Five Year Timestamp, Revisited

On the last entry, my Uncle Joe post­ed this com­ment:

You’ve changed a lot. More mature, more sta­ble, more tol­er­ant. 5 years back, you paid more atten­tion to your appear­ance, now you care more about what you do, what you observe. Now you’re a bit slop­py :)…and I like that. Your spend­ing habit is so much dif­fer­ent.

I don’t know what caused all that…work expe­ri­ence? Parents’ divorce? Love life? Tai Chi and Taoism?

The caus­es of my changes were too big to cov­er in the small box, so I said I’d cov­er them in their own entry. Here goes.

Therapy

One of the sig­nif­i­cant things my ther­a­pist helped me with was the abil­i­ty to not sweat the small stuff. It took a few thought records for me to real­ize that there are things out of my con­trol. I used to be real­ly moody, where if a small detail did­n’t go right, I’d get real­ly grumpy. Now that does­n’t any­more, although I do occa­sion­al­ly have to remind myself of this idea, as it’s not a com­plete­ly nat­ur­al reac­tion (yet). This is prob­a­bly what Uncle Joe noticed as me being “slop­py”, as I’ve stopped wor­ry­ing about things going wrong, so a bit more care­free when it comes to details. Even Bronwen said she’s noticed the change.

I also had inti­ma­cy issues, where I’d push my girl­friends away if they got too close. I’ve since learned to let some­one in, even if it means it may hurt me in the end, and there’s a great com­fort to be had in know­ing this. In fig­ur­ing out what went wrong, and being giv­en the hope that my future rela­tion­ships won’t end due to my old inti­ma­cy issues, which I’m sure was buried in my sub­con­scious before.

Taoism

Taoism has giv­en me the same rough mind­set as ther­a­py, in terms of let­ting go of the lit­tle things that don’t go my way. But it was­n’t just due to the fact that things are out of my con­trol, but also the idea that things don’t real­ly mat­ter. I’m still work­ing on oth­er tenets, like spon­tane­ity and wu wei, but what I’ve been able to under­stand and apply so far has helped a lot.

When I’m hav­ing a bad day, I can go to the Tao Te Ching, find a verse that’s appro­pri­ate to my sit­u­a­tion, and for some rea­son my heart finds such con­tent­ment in the words. Perhaps it’s even more than the indi­vid­ual tenets, and the fact that I now have some­thing to believe in that brings com­fort, sta­bil­i­ty, and hap­pi­ness. A non-reli­gious opi­ate, if you will.

Relationships

Having been through two good rela­tion­ships with two good peo­ple, espe­cial­ly with the mem­o­ries I have now, has giv­en me a lot of sat­is­fac­tion. Sure, they may have end­ed, but I nev­er thought I’d be in a good rela­tion­ship, prob­a­bly because of my child­hood with my par­ents, along with con­fi­dence issues. I think some peo­ple go their whole lives with­out ever hav­ing the sort of love that I did, or being able to expe­ri­ence the same won­der­ful­ly inti­mate moments. This has giv­en me a con­tent­ment I would­n’t be able to find any­where else.

(Mis) Understanding Therapy

Occasionally, con­ver­sa­tions around the din­ner table turn to psy­chother­a­py — some­one knows a co-work­er, or a friend, or a rel­a­tive who sees a shrink — and my fam­i­ly would talk about it so dis­parag­ing­ly.

They’d say there’s some­thing wrong with peo­ple who go to ther­a­py; not the fact that they have men­tal health issues, but the fact that any­one who needs to pay some­one else to feel bet­ter is fool­ish. They think psy­chol­o­gists are bad, or of no use. That you only need to go to ther­a­py if you don’t know how to “find a hob­by” or “blow off steam”, or don’t have any friends to talk to. Their ideas about it are so naïve, sim­plis­tic, and stereo­typ­i­cal; a per­fect reflec­tion of their minds and the way they see the world.

I’d always stay qui­et. How could I explain the dam­age done, when it was some of them who dam­aged me in the first place?

But when the con­ver­sa­tion turned to me, I men­tioned that I had a ther­a­pist. Perhaps to change their minds about it, to defend some­thing that has helped me so much. After all, I might not even be here talk­ing to them if it was­n’t for my ther­a­py.

Now they know.

But they still don’t under­stand.

Accepting My Baggage

Sometimes, I won­der what my life would be like if I did­n’t have so much bag­gage. How my rela­tion­ships would be dif­fer­ent. Which ones would have worked, and which ones would­n’t have changed at all.

Love, in all it’s mul­ti-faceted won­der, lev­els, and types, is nev­er a sure thing for me. I may feel it, but feel that it’s fleet­ing and con­di­tion­al at the same time. Other peo­ple have the lux­u­ry of tak­ing love for grant­ed. They assume they’re loved. How com­fort­ing it must be. For me, it’s always been a strug­gle for sta­bil­i­ty. “We won’t love you if you don’t do well on this test. We won’t love you if you don’t prac­tice piano. We won’t love you if you don’t fin­ish your din­ner. No one’s going to love you if you always stay this skin­ny.”

It feels like I haven’t sur­vived my child­hood yet. And I arrive at this fact so many times when try­ing to fig­ure out the source of my issues that it’s start­ing to sound like an excuse. Therapy has helped iden­ti­fy my issues, but it’s still tak­ing work on my part to resolve them, along with patience on the parts of oth­ers. I’m begin­ning to ques­tion why peo­ple would accept and love me. I guess it’s worth it to some, but things would be so much eas­i­er if they did­n’t have to deal with my inse­cu­ri­ties.

An End To Therapy

I stopped going to ther­a­py.

Because I feel like I’m fixed.

Not com­plete­ly, but I’m at the point where I can rec­og­nize my prob­lems, bad men­tal habits, and work towards fix­ing them myself. My anx­i­ety — the rea­son why I went to ther­a­py in the first place — is under con­trol, and I’ve been delight­ful­ly drink­ing black tea in the morn­ings1. No more sui­ci­dal thoughts either.

I asked my psy­chol­o­gist whether I could hang out with him out­side of the ses­sions because I enjoyed his com­pa­ny so much on a per­son­al lev­el. From life to art to soci­ol­o­gy, we would always stray onto a wide vari­ety of oth­er top­ics. Perhaps I found the human mind to be as fas­ci­nat­ing as he did.

He told me that as much as he’d like to, his ethics would­n’t allow him to do so. I brought up the option of going to some­one else for ther­a­py, so that we could be friends, but after a bit of con­sid­er­a­tion, I did­n’t like that option either, because I real­ly enjoyed work­ing with him. On top of that, as he explained, he would be avail­able to me if I ever required his ser­vices in the future. I won’t lie and say that it did­n’t make me very sad, but I under­stood and respect­ed his rea­sons.

So after my last ses­sion, we shook hands, and he said “I’ll see you when I see you. Take care”.

And he meant it.

  1. Caffeine, along with many oth­er things, used to trig­ger anx­i­ety attacks in me. [↩]

Psychoanalytic Reflections 05

Sometimes I come out of a ses­sion feel­ing great. Sometimes I come out feel­ing like a mon­ster, like some hor­ri­ble, fucked-up per­son.

During my first ses­sion, my ther­a­pist not­ed that this was a mutu­al process. It was­n’t as if he was going to sur­gi­cal­ly remove an issue with me, it would take the both of us work­ing togeth­er, with a pro­gres­sive effort from me.

That’s what I’m doing now. I’m deter­mined to fix myself.

Dependence

  • I have a gen­er­al feel­ing of incom­pe­tence, which leads to a lack of trust in my own judg­ments. As a result, I have a very dif­fi­cult time mak­ing deci­sions because I’m par­a­lyzed by the fact that I may make the wrong one.
    • I can trace this back from my child­hood to my ear­ly twen­ties when my par­ents were over­bear­ing and would nev­er let me make any of my own deci­sions. In fact, they would make most of my deci­sions for me, includ­ing sig­nif­i­cant ones, like my pro­gram of study in uni­ver­si­ty.
  • The result is that I tend to ask peo­ple for advice on every­thing, although I’m depen­dent on Pat the most. This is because Pat is so smart and expe­ri­enced, and has nev­er, ever let me down. What I’ve come to real­ize, how­ev­er, is that Pat is so smart because he’s already made his mis­takes.
  • This was linked to my anx­i­ety, where I felt like I could­n’t han­dle any­thing on my own.
  • I’ve been try­ing to fix this is to keep in mind that it’s not the end of the world if I make a mis­take, and that some­times, mak­ing mis­takes is the only way to learn.

Unrelenting Standards revisited

  • I real­ized that I tend to have unre­lent­ing stan­dards when it comes to life in gen­er­al, but espe­cial­ly in my writ­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, or art because I feel like this is the only way I will ever dis­tin­guish myself and be worth some­thing. I feel like if I’m not the best, then I’m worth­less. As a result, it’s dif­fi­cult for me to enjoy my life, even some­thing as sim­ple as sit­ting down and watch­ing a movie.
    • The roots of this are more dif­fi­cult to trace than I ini­tial­ly thought. While my par­ents were a tremen­dous influ­ence in terms of mak­ing me feel like their love was con­di­tion­al, I believe a large part of this life­trap has to do with me mak­ing up for my emo­tion­al depri­va­tion by fill­ing my deep­er empti­ness with suc­cess.
  • Even when I do some­thing that I know I should be proud of and sat­is­fied, I feel like there’s always anoth­er thing to do, anoth­er lev­el to reach. While this fuels my self-improve­ment and has got­ten me to where I am now, I’ve come to real­ize that there’s an imbal­ance between the effort and the pay­off. I work too hard for too lit­tle enjoy­ment.
  • I may real­ize this, but it’s a hard habit to break. I have a feel­ing that I’ll need to fix my emo­tion­al depri­va­tion at the same time to do so.