I thought I’d try writing this out because I almost didn’t go today, and I’m so glad I did because it was unexpectedly nice. He’s on vacation next week, so I want to try to hold onto this feeling for a while.

I brought up the fact that I was upset about the ambivalence around therapy and how hard it feels to both not want to come and to want to come at the same time. I said I was frustrated that the ambivalence is still just as bad as it was a year and a half ago, and it feels crazy to be putting myself through this over and over again each week. And it’s even crazier that I pay money to experience this. He said he thinks it’s different now because I’m willing to talk about it whereas before I wouldn’t. I told him I feel stuck and I said if I leave therapy I won’t have that dreadful discomfort any more. He said he thinks I would still have that discomfort but it would show up in another way.

I said I also feel bad about emailing, especially when he didn’t respond and that I had really wanted to email him yesterday though because I wanted to be sure I brought up how important it was for me to articulate my frustrations with the ambivalence and I wanted to give him a heads up so he wouldn’t be too surprised. He thought it was interesting that I would do that and thought I must think that I am too much for him to deal with in the moment and he wondered where I learned that. I felt bad that last week he said something about how sometimes people call him if they have actual content to discuss, and I told him that I don’t ever want to call him. I’m not sure why it seemed like he had a faint smile when I said that.

I ended up saying I just felt guilty about coming to see him for therapy in general and that it took me a year even to make the appointment to see him because it felt wrong. I told him I’m aware that there are a lot of people who have it much worse and are more deserving of therapy than I am. I told him about the 13 yo girl from Myanmar who had been in several refugee camps and whose mother died of cancer while in one of those camps. Now she’s living in the US with her dad who doesn’t speak any English and she has a bad cancer herself. She (and her father) would be much more deserving of therapy than me. I mean she’s only 13 and had to watch her mother die and now helps translate for her father and is undergoing cancer treatment in a foreign country. He paused for a bit and said that if she lives she would likely feel guilty too, that she watched a parent die and now is left with helping the other while dealing with cancer herself. His eyes seemed a bit watery when he said that and he looked at me quietly. I kept looking away and when I’d look back he was still looking at me, and although he didn’t say it, it seemed like he was making a parallel with my own life (watching a parent die and taking care of another) which was completely unexpected but fit in a strange way. He said, “you’re doing really difficult work,” which was a bit weird (and nice) to hear because sometimes I really don’t know what I’m doing with him.