Hi - I'm new to psychotherapy, having just started this month (for depression, sleep problems, PTSD, anxiety mainly). I'm in my 50's.

I got my medical records and noted that the therapist concluded that some factual information about my past was "Magical Thinking".

I freely admit to engaging in magical thinking in some ways.

However, my therapist misinterprets the nature of some of my factual life experiences with magical thinking, apparently predominantly in relation to the fact that I come from an aerospace and entertainment industry background. This kind of background is completely normal where I grew up (Southern California). But due to the nature of celebrity I find sometimes people don't understand that, and just jump to conclusions that no one could possibly have any such associations unless they were equally famous. They don't get the concept that it's a business composed of "talent" people and "business" people, who all work together and live together in the community. Of course, those people have relatives and friends just like anyone else does. So there really is nothing strange about the fact that someone would inevitably under such circumstances have had various kinds of relationships with celebrities, and work and involvement with the industry or likewise with aerospace.

For example there, my father taught me to fly a plane when I was 5 years old. I didn't do it solo, but I did do it. My brother also did, as did several children of the other Air Force jet fighter pilot dads we knew. In that era, it wasn't all that strange. My father was considered for the astronaut program at NASA and again, this isn't "magical thinking" on my part; just like now, NASA receives tons of applications and evaluates them and picks people, often those with the exact qualifications my father had. So again, there really is no basis to jump to a conclusion that I made such things up. Obviously out of all those thousands of applicants, some of them have children, and thus their life stories will include the fact that mom or dad was considered for an astronaut position at NASA. Fact, not fiction, not so off-the-wall that it is "magical thinking".

My dilemma is how to address this issue with the therapist. We just got started, but now I feel like if she can't believe these facts about my life, she certainly isn't going to believe some of the stranger (but true) facts. Hey not everyone has lived a textbook utterly average life. Isn't that exactly HOW people end up with PTSD, because their life experiences are not normal?

I'm worried that she won't be able to help me or diagnose me effectively if she's not accepting the true foundation where I came from and who I am. That's where we have to start from but if she thinks that's false, I already now feel hopeless about therapy at all.