another cycle begins where i realize that therapy (psychotherapy) is an exercise in futility. how many lifetimes of $$ i have bled to feed this ravenous appetite for who knows what?
this week, when the therapist began with the question… so tell me, what’s been going on this week? and since it’s therapy and I am paying for it, i think I had better dig into the issues, even if the issues are actually reruns (in syndication) told at some time to some other therapist, maybe not in that order… this drive to dig into these “issues,” real or imagined. In this struggle to “create” therapy moments, all of the negativity rises to the surface. and they’re more like pre-processed issues, completely stale and obsolete.
like these days, even though I am steadily losing my job, I dread the dwindling paid hours, as meager as they are… and my obsessing over how will i keep my life afloat is very much in the forefront…
But somehow, once I reach out to the universe for my plea/prayer, asking for guidance at the end of the day, i actually feel quite positive. an inexplicable lightness of being.
which doesn’t mean i’ve reached positive mental health. it simply means that i can find moments of feeling afloat whether they are through friends, new possibilities for life, love, work, the sky, whether they are nothing more than day-dreams. they are quite foreign from what comes up when I speak to the therapist.
She asks how my week has gone. and it’s this false pretend voice emerges that I hope is not me…. the voice sounds very down and needy and lonely and sad…. it’s like i’m carving this person together from all of these past therapy fragments.
And then she will tell me that I need to think differently… that it will take work since it’s retraining how you think, which can take quite some time, I hear. Maybe longer than I will be alive. All that will be left of me are corrections to past thoughts.
i can change. but it’s not going to be cognitive behavioral therapy or re-mapping my brain. It’s going to be something unexpected and it may happen in a burst… a jolt, something jarring… and everything will feel new again.
And out of this newness, cognitive behavioral therapy will be scattered into a recycling bin. and the weight of my past will go with it.
And I will be liberated and free. Any day now. I can feel it in my bones.