Um, hi guys. Here I am.

First of all, let me just say you are all adorable and caring and wonderful for being all concerned and excited to hear from me. It means a lot.

And hi Gracey-- this should let you know what the big deal about the couch is for me:

So I walk in and I sit down on the couch. I look at T and say, "I'm not joking about this." I talk to him for a bit while sitting on the couch. (The couch, by the way, is not really a sofa or anything, but a psychoanalytic couch of sorts in which you look up at the ceiling. T is completely behind me so that I can't see him, in order to let the unconscious run freely. And yes, there are at least two cracks in the ceiling.) So as soon as the poems are mentioned, I literally flip on my back and lay down on the couch. We talk a bit, and I occasionally twist around, look at T and say, "Are you still there?" He assures me that he is still there. We begin to talk about a particular poem. Somehow this leads into a discussion of when my self-injury was really bad, around the age of 18 when I was living at home. I had my eyes closed. All of a sudden my unconscious took over. I start to feel weird... a bit agitated... and I was digging my fingernails into my arm. T says, "You need a release right now, don't you?" And I answer him, "Yes." I was 18 again. I began to describe my self-injury ritual at that time in my life. But it was real, like I was there again. T told me, "I'm still here." I stopped digging my nails in, but I was sort of pinching my arm the whole time. After a few minutes, I came out of it, and there was silence for awhile. I sat up and he said, "Why don't you take a break?" So I got up and sat in my usual chair. I was completely shot from what just happened, and I kept looking at the couch. He was trying to help me process what just happened, but I was having a hard time transitioning from what happened on the couch to where we were at that moment. He pointed to his eyes and said, "We're here now, it's okay." He called me brave and courageous. Then he asked what I felt like and I said, "Like I'm 18 again." I told him how I felt like I was 18 and how it was so hard because the thing that I had reexperienced was always a memory that I acknowledged, but wanted to forget about. That I never wanted him or anyone else to see me that way because I was so %#@&#! up then. He told me that it was troubling for him to have to watch me go through that on the couch because he knew how hard and painful it was for me. I was sort of crying and clutching the chair pillow. I never hold the pillow, I always just sit back on it, but this time I was holding it. I wasn't letting the tears come out though. We talked a bit more, and I could see the pain in his eyes; it was an intense connection to see him experience pain with me. We talked abut why that experience was able to occur on the couch, and why something like that could not, and has never, occurred in the chair. He looked me in the eyes and said, "You are not 18 anymore. You are not that girl anymore. A lot has happened since then, a lot has changed. Can you keep that with you?" And I said, "Yes, I think so." The session came to an hour and ten minutes, and then we had to end. He said, "Please call me if you feel you want to." Then he asked, "Are you gonna come back next week?" (He asks this every week). I got up and he stopped me to ask if I was okay. He smiled and said that he hoped I was coming back next week because there are still lots of poems he wants to ask me about.

And that is why the couch is a big deal. It wasn't like, hey... lemme just lay on the couch and relax so we can talk about stuff. T said he was actually surprised at how fast I reached that state, especially considering it was my first time on the couch.

So that's analysis for ya.

When I came home, I was a %#@&#! mess to say the least. The hardest part was when I had to leave the session. To go through that and then have to be ripped away from it all. From T. I honestly don't even know how I'm going to get through the next week. I already feel like I'm just going through the motions. But when I arrived home, I tried to explain a bit of what happened to my husband. I didn't expect him, or anyone who has never been in therapy, to understand. He said, "Do you need a hug?" And he hugged me so tight. Then I said, "I don't expect you to have understand what just happened. Just bear with me." And he said, "Actually I do understand. That's what I always thought your therapy was about." It was nice.

And in the midst of all this %#@&#!, I do have to add my humorous therapy moment of the week, as I always do. In the beginning, he picked this poem I wrote to talk about, called "The Garden." It is a poem about something that occurred in my more... let's say.. promiscuous days. And one of the lines is very raw, very frank, something to the effect of, "You unzipped your pants... I %#@&#! you in the garden." So T asks me to to talk about thie poem, but I wasn't really warmed up yet, so I say to him, while sort of dying the whole time..... It's about this guy I met when I was about 19. He took me to an arboretum, and some stuff happened.... And T starts laughing and goes, "Well I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you did with him; it says it right here!" I was laughing pretty hard after that one.

I don't even know how I will make it through the week.