Shrinkwrap

I can't quite figure out if I have a good therapist or a bad therapist. There aren't any obvious warning signs like people flying out of rooms crying and wailing after every appointment, but there aren't any obvious positive ones either, like people flying out of rooms crying and wailing after every appointment. I guess you'd have to know how they went in to determine if you're witnessing a trauma or a breakthrough.

I started therapy in probably 2007 or 2008, back when my marriage* was starting to fall apart. She's a licensed marriage and family therapist, so surviving things like the divorce and custody stuff was very much in her wheelhouse. It was only accidentally, while talking about all that really exciting stuff around the dissolution of the central organizing factor of my entire identify as an adult to that point, did I find out, hey, maybe I have some tendencies toward anxiety. And self-isolation. And control issues. And childhood trauma. And adjustment disorder. I signed up for one thing and got all this bonus content for free, like the old Columbia House record club, except instead of taping a penny to a postcard, it was billed directly to my employer-dependent insurance provider. Both equally exploitative in the capitalist mode!

I'm a very wordsy person. You'd probably get that from 20 years of blog-doings. I'm also a very heady person, not as a synonym for "smart" or "cagey," more like "why is this person sitting at this green light without moving?" because they don't know I'm still working out a snippet of a conversation I remember from 1996 like it's real-time. Upside: you can really make a lot of time for figuring things out if you devote 60% of your waking hours to actively relitigating life moments both measly and profound on a loop. Downside: it took me three years to buy a new couch. Why are there so many types of couches? And how do I know if I'm getting the best one for the price if I don't see them all? You heard me, I said ALL.

Somehow this manifests into a little vacation for my therapist, who otherwise deals with adults who hate each other with the murderous intimacy that only spouses and co-parents can, at the very worst points of their emotional lives, acting from the most irrational place a human can act from, swaddled wholly in harm and fear and spite and nihilism. Then I come swanning in, with my "well, sometimes I get kind of pace-y and think about stuff too much" which is then recognized as a legitimate concern AND contextualized as something that can be handled without the intervention of psychopharmaceuticals or a judge's ruling.

Boy, she really lets me talk it out. Wordsy, heady, I'm all about solutions and solutions and solutions, or at least identifying all the ways in which all of the things are/were/could be a Very Serious Problem, from intrusive thoughts to that time the cat was less enthusiastic to see me than normal. She doesn't really say a lot, except to point me in a direction here and there so we can fit as much in as we can in the 50 minutes. There's nothing a writer loves more than an editor, so I'm fucking here for that shit. And at the end, she tells me what a great job I'm doing and what a nice change it is from the other Actual Serious Problems she normally has to mediate. Which is a nice ego boost AND a bit of a dismissal at the same time? It would be clearer (and frankly more familiar) if she was more sarcastic or at least passive-aggressive about it. Give me something I can work with.

Maybe that's why I can't tell if she's a good therapist or a bad one. Am I being supported or indulged in exchange for a fee? I'm probably just not sure because I don't have a lot of practice recognizing earnest positive reinforcement. That almost certainly all traces back to the co-dependent tendencies of my mother fostering an atmosphere of withheld validation and conditional acceptance. Wow, I feel like we've made a lot of progress here today.

---

*I had a strong instinct to type "first marriage" there, which is technically true, but also an irrelevant distinction. You only get to be a "first" before there's a second to distinguish it from if you're a pope. That marriage produced some good things, but I don't think quite enough to be papabile.