Quote:
Originally Posted by rainbow8
My T doesn't like me to read emails to her but I know she can't stop me. She always wants to know how I feel NOW, in the present, at the session. So it's a dilemma, because "now" is always changing! I haven't painted in a couple of months but something is stopping me. I don't feel well enough to do that; it seems like typing is all I feel like doing.  That's in answer to distraction.
It's hard because it's a physical urge to email her. My substitute behavior is posting on PC. I need to follow my own advice, to slow down, breathe, or else put laundry away so I have to get away from this computer. Except now I have internet on my phone too.
I'll try to distract anyway, and go to bed early because I don't feel well. Maybe I can journal about her divorce. It keeps coming up for me like a pink elephant in the room, and makes me sad and angry!! |
I know what you mean about a physical urge, but when I read that, I thought to myself.... we are all used to controlling physical urges. We don't always eat at the moment we feel hungry, and sometimes we may eat when we're not hungry to stay healthy or whatever. We don't have sex whenever the impulse strikes, we don't heed the call of nature in public but wait until we find a restroom, we don't scratch every itch, etc.
We follow rules for all our physical urges, basically... so you could look at it like that. A physical urge is just information and we get to decide what to do about it.
Same with your therapist's preference to talk about what's going on in the moment.... you can defer to her and let go of a topic you care enough about to have posted this, or you can hold onto this post and tell her about it if it's important. I appreciate very much her focus on the immediate, the here and now, but.... I don't believe any one approach is perfect 100% of the time.