We are through the ring of fire and out the other side: my divorce is over! A lot's happened in the past few weeks, but I feel good now. I am happy with how I did the divorce, and I did not lose my self in the process, as I had feared when I began. Plus, I believe T is now just my T, not my coach anymore.

This week was our first post-D session. I told T some stuff that just about knocked his sox off. I love doing that. Each thing I said, he kind of reeled, and then almost fell off the couch (deliberately, in play). Seriously. He's funny. I guess what's really strange is my XH and I are getting along really well now. Maybe with the stress of the divorce behind us, we can at last be "normal" with each other. My XH has said some really healing things to me in the last couple of weeks and this was partly what bowled T over, and I absolutely loved sharing with him. T has been saying to me for the last couple of months, that I have to be prepared that when the D is over, my XH would withdraw from me. T said he wanted me to be prepared--he didn't want me to be hurt. Whatever, T, I remember thinking. I had nodded agreeably but said nothing. So he kind of had it backwards.

But anyway, this one thing in particular my XH said to me was one of those true healing moments. T just got it immediately--how healing this was for me. He totally understood, and that is what is so great about being in therapy. He gets me. If it was a friend I told, I would have to explain every effing thing, and they probably still wouldn't get it. Whoever invented therapy deserves a medal. (Oh, wait. Was it Freud? I take that back then.) Anyway, T wanted to talk a little about this healing moment and said how these moments happen sometimes in family therapy, and how they are instantly and deeply healing. I could tell from the way he said it that this is what he, as a family therapist, lives for (professionally)--that deep healing that right before his eyes takes away years of damage. It is very cool, and I thought, what a cool job T has! For me, this healing felt very physical--like my internal organs all sliding into place, at long last. T says these wounds, in fact core negative beliefs about oneself, can be healed using other methods too, such as talk therapy, but that can take many years. He prefers to use EMDR, which is a lot faster, but he said the quickest and deepest healing occurs when it comes directly from the person who caused you "harm." (I think this is why T's favorite therapy is between adult children and their parents.)

T got to talking about clinical stuff, which he almost never does. Generally, I don't like to talk clinical with him. I prefer him to just be the therapist-artist-healer and do his thing, without talking about technique, diagnosis, etc. He said that all the while he sits there with me in therapy, he has this clinical voice running through his head and he is reacting to me and planning what he will do next for best clinical effect (he said none of his clinical thoughts is something he could not share with me--but really, I have no interest). For example, he said he had just pushed on my system by bringing up my past relations with my parents--drawing a parallel with them and my relationship with my H during the marriage, and commenting on my core belief system derived from childhood. blah blah blah. We've talked about this a number of times. I asked him if his action had the effect he desired. He said yes, and I didn't ask more, lol.

Then he told me something I thought was interesting. He said that when he sits there listening to me and observing me, he is looking for my different ego states. He sees one here and one there, flitting by, as I talk or laugh or cry or agonize. He says these states give him clues about places I need to be healed, places of hurt or trauma. They reveal sore spots in my psyche. And he notes these as places to return to later or places to work on then, if the time is right. It was when T said this that I realized how central ego state therapy is to how he works. I don't think I had known this before. We have previously done some ego state therapy, but I thought of that as something we did for a few sessions and then we didn't do it anymore. But now I saw T's technique as totally wrapped up in ego state therapy. It underlies so much of what he does, even if we don't always speak of ego states in session. I felt I like I understood T better after he told me this. I was also kind of warmed by his sitting there, watching for my states, welcoming them all, non-judgmentally, and always being on the lookout for how he can bring about healing. I felt this new understanding of the hug he often gives me at the end of our sessions. He spreads his arms wide, and welcomes me into them, and pulls me all together. Like, he sees all my separate states during session, and then at the end, he physically hugs us all as one. I like that. There's something really "whole" and unifying about that. That sounds like gibberish, I'm sure, and probably if I were to tell T that, he would say, "what?" and scratch his head, lol.