I have found that therapy is a lot like knitting-- I've been knitting for about 10 years, and I spin yarn on a spinning wheel too (from fiber directly off the sheep or other creatures, sometimes). It gets me outta my head.

I am not one of those intuitive knitters, you know, someone who can pick up yarn and then just make a perfect-fitting sweater. I have to follow a pattern, which in knitting terms, is just a set of step by step instructions. The first time I knit from a pattern, I read the pattern before I started, and it made absolutely no sense to me. I took it to my local knitshop and asked the expert knitter on staff why this pattern didn't make any sense and why was I so dumb that I couldn't understand it.

She said, essentially, there is no way that the pattern can make sense to you in the abstract. YOu cannot possibly visualize how the sweater will be completed by reading the pattern. You have to just do it-- take it step by step. You start by making the neckline. Once you finish the neck, you will understand how you create more stitches for the sleeves. And she was right.

I've used a lot of knitting patterns since then, and although I often have a general idea of how the garment will emerge by reading the instructions, I've found that reading ahead of where I am can actually mess me up. Because rather than focusing on the instruction for what I'm doing right now, I was anticipating the next step and sort of subconsciously adjusting the current step to "fit" what I thought would come next. Wrong. Had to rip that entire part out and start from the beginning of the "adjusted" step.

Anne LaMott has a good book on writing called "Bird by Bird." The story for the title comes from her childhood, when her brother had a substantial report due on birds of the northwest or whatever. He was overwhelmed by the substance of what he had to do (how many birds, something like 20, essentially 20 separate summaries of each bird assigned to him) and he had so little time to do it. How can I possibly do this???! He complained to his Dad.

Bird by bird, said his Dad.

It seems to me, stopdog, that this is pretty much what you are doing. You have something that you need to do that is quite a substantial "product", which is to fix what's not working for you in your life. You're spending a lot of time, effort, and money trying to get various T's to explain to you either/or both what the finished product is going to look like and how it can possibly be written? I think that by focusing on the process, you get to avoid your birds, the substance of what you need to do. You have acknowledged that focusing on the process hasn't worked for you, and now you just have to be brave enough to start on your birds. IMO, of course.

Anne