T Session Yesterday:
I paid the receptionist and made another appointment. Then I sat in the waiting room for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. When T came to get me from the waiting room, she said how happy she was to see me. She said it had been a trying day and she was happy to see me. I didn’t know how to take that exactly. I mean, I was glad that she was happy to see me, but I also felt like, I didn’t want to make her day harder. I tried to brush off those feelings, or insecurities, and just let myself go to therapy for what I needed to be there for and to trust that she could handle it. But it was in the back of my mind at least for the first part of the session.
She asked how I was, and I said I was so-so. She filled out her paperwork and then paused and asked me, “What does so-so mean?” So, I told her that I had SH-ed 10 days ago. That I hadn’t made it to the end of the month like I had planned on doing. She said, “So, you start again.” I was going to talk to her about the battery thing, but she asked me what else was going on, and how work was going.
So, I told her work was going okay. That I had gotten irritated with a coworker about two weeks ago. A salesman who thought he should get the commission on the sale instead of another salesman. I administer commission, but I am not in charge of assigning the commission. I told him he needed to talk to the owner. He had persisted in talking to me about why he should get the commission. I don’t know, but I got the impression that he wanted me on his side. I don’t take sides. It’s not my money to take sides with. He continued to talk to me about it three times, and I continued to give him the same advice, to talk to the owner. Eventually he did, and the owner decided to give both salesman the commission on the sale. I was pleased that I was able to get irritated (though it was painful at the time) because we are working on anger and me being able to feel anger at someone other than myself. Irritation isn’t exactly anger but it’s on the right track.
I brought up the battery thing. She said, “But you didn’t, right?” And I said that I had tried but that I hadn’t
and that I am still having thoughts about it. She said I can’t put the battery in my arm because then I would have to get surgery to remove it (I’m skeptical there). That batteries are hazardous, and they can’t go in bodies. (I’m less skeptical about that.) She said they can’t suture it into me like I think they can. I told her I still felt like trying to do the battery thing, that it hadn’t left my mind just because I tried it and couldn’t get it to work right. She let the subject drop, but I did bring it up a couple of times.
We talked about artwork. I’ve done a few pieces of artwork since I have seen her last. Probably 5 pieces of artwork. I used to be really artistic but sometimes when a person is depressed, they lose interest in what they like to do. And I thought that was what was going on with me. So, I showed her two of the pieces. She really liked one I did which was of a cross and then I had done the background to look like a stained-glass window. The other one was abstract, just black and white. I told her that drawing x’s was soothing for me. She had encouraged me to draw mandalas the last time I saw her, so I told her I had drawn two and I had noticed a pattern of tears in the mandalas. I went on to explain that I don’t cry much but I had cried a lot this past weekend when I watched a really sad movie with my friend. I cried so much that I gave myself a migraine. She said, “So you can cry when something is removed from you, but not when it’s about yourself?” And I agreed with her assessment.
She asked me how I came to see a psychiatrist in the first place. (The psychiatrist I see is in the same office as her. I used to see a different psychiatrist there and then when he moved, I began seeing the new guy that they brought in that I like much more.) I told her that I had seen a therapist when I was very young for a little while. Then when I was older, a woman at my Church was worried about me and she and another woman who was a social worker did a sort of intervention on me and talked to me about going to therapy. The social worker found me my former T who I saw for 10 years. I started seeing my psychiatrist because my PCP insisted, I get a psych eval because of the SH and because she thought I was very anxious and acting oddly in her office. I never exactly got a psych eval. She wrote on the referral depression and anxiety. When I went to see the PDOC he asked me if I had those and I said yes. I think there’s supposed to me more to it than that. Over the years, my therapists have been the ones to diagnose me with various things.
We went back to the battery thing. She asked me how old I felt when I SH. I said pretty young around 8 or 9 because that is when I started to SH by
. She said, “And your parents didn’t notice?” And I said no. By the time I “graduated” to cutting I just started wearing long sleeves (I live in the desert where the Summers are easily triple digit so it should have been a red flag that something was up, but my parents ignored the signs). She asked how my parents found out. I told her that when I was 19, my Mom came into the bathroom where I was changing, and she saw the scars on my arm. My T asked me what my parents did at that point. I said well, they packed my bag, called a hospital, was told that I wasn’t suicidal and therefore didn’t need to go to the hospital, unpacked my bag and that was it. T said, “They didn’t ask you what you needed? They didn’t ask you to come talk to them before you SH-ed? They didn’t tell you they were sorry you were in pain?” I said, “Nope. It just got swept under the rug.”
We talked about my sister’s visit and why I don’t trust my brother in law. We talked about my hallucinations.
How those children that I see are parts of me that need attending to, that they just shouldn’t be ignored. We talked about former T and how I did good work with her on reducing SH and also on the hallucinations, so I could tell what was a hallucination and what wasn’t. We talked about how I haven’t heard an audio hallucination in a while.
She told me that I am a sweet and compassionate person. That I treat everyone with kindness except myself. She said that the love I pour on my kitties, should be how I treat me. We talked about how I am looking at SH the wrong way. That I shouldn’t be looking at it like I am giving something up, but that I am gaining other stuff. (I’m not sure what I would be gaining, but mental health pops to mind, maybe stability.) She asked me what self-care things I could do to help myself when I want to SH. So I told her about what I do that is self-care like how I have the weighted blankets but right now it’s a bit hot for that. She leaned close to me and said, “Yeah, that’s a B****.” She kept calling me the wrong name. It’s a version of my name, but my legal name is usually a nickname for a longer name, and she kept calling me the longer name which really isn’t my name. I wanted to correct her, but I didn’t. It wasn’t that important. I knew she was talking about me. And to me. Even if she uses the wrong name.
She asked me to write with my right hand things that I feel like as a child, and then with my left hand write an answer to that child. That I need to be the parent to myself that I needed. We talked about the relationship with my grandma and how I was close to her and then my relationship with my adopted grandma which was the first person to bring to my attention that my Mom is too harsh on my sister and me, and she asked me how it was growing up. And T said, “And you protected your Mom?” And I said, “Of course, she’s my Mom.”
There’s probably a few more things I have forgotten, but at the end, T who was wearing black flowers in her hair, I told her I liked the flowers, and I told her that she’s like Alice in Wonderland. T said, she was going to take that as a complement. As I left, she said, “I’ll see you soon.” And I said, “Thanks, T.”