So…T yesterday night. Where to start? She came and got me from the waiting room, a bit late. That was okay. I was the only one there and I was just sort of dissociating by watching the ceiling fan go around and around. I was anxious about talking to her about the possibility of seeing Pastor T for a session or two and I didn’t know what her reaction would be. So, watching the fan go around was helping with the anxiety. Unfortunately, it was also making me more dissociative which I don’t need when I go to therapy because I tend to get dissociative anyway in session. When T came to get me from the waiting room, I noticed T had black flowers in her hair, which I like, and I commented how we looked like twins as we walked back to her office. I was in black pants with a barn red sweatshirt. She was in black pants, a black shirt, and a barn red cardigan.


She asked me how I was. I said I was doing a little better than last week. She wanted to know why? Had anything happened to change how I felt from the week before. I said, no nothing really happened. I said we had the tea party on Saturday. She asked how that went. I said it went well, but I had messed up the scones recipe, so we didn’t have any scones, but we had enough food anyway. I also said how we had inadvertently given my Mom three Xanax. She has memory issues, but she also has stress when there is a lot of people in the house. So, I had given her one of her Xanax. Then later my Dad asked my Mom if she had taken any Xanax. She said no. So, my dad gave her two more of her Xanax. So, that meant my Mom had three, about 1.5mg. It was amazing she made it through the tea party without falling asleep, though she did sleep most of the day after the tea party.


Then T asked me about the cutting. I said I had 37 days without SH. She said congratulations! I said I was going for 50, so that means 13 more. I expected her to ask, what happens when you get to 50, but she didn’t. She said we have been looking at cutting all wrong. That it isn’t the cutting that is the issue, that it is the symptom, and we need to get at what lies underneath. What is causing the cutting? She asked me if every time I cut, I know why. I said, no I do not. She said I need to know why I cut so ultimately, I can stop cutting. And she said that it isn’t about stopping cutting, because that will never work, but it is about adding to my life so that I don’t have the need to cut. We discussed things to do instead of cutting, such as playing basketball, holding ice, talking on PC, etc. She asked me to make a list of things I can do before cutting and commit to doing three of them before I cut. She also asked me to keep a journal with the writing prompt, if I were going to cut today, what is it that I feel? And if I can’t come up with how I am feeling, to talk about what I feel in my body, like upset stomach or whatever. I told her I thought I could do that. She asked me what my life would look like if I didn’t have cutting. I said I would lose some of my communication. She said, “Communication with yourself.” I said, “Yes, or whomever I tell about it.” She said, “Oh so, it’s like a cry for help?” I was like, “I guess, at times. Other times it just builds and builds and then I know that it is inevitable.”

I told her I had gone to Church on Sunday and I needed to talk to her about that. So, I told her about my Pastor and his offer to see me for a session or two to “tweak” my thoughts. How when I had been so suicidal, I had reached out to him for prayer because why not use all your resources, and how he was checking up on me on Sunday to see how I was doing. How he wasn’t trying to steal me, but how he thought he might have some techniques that would help me. I told her I knew you weren’t supposed to see two therapists at the same time, but that it would only be for a session or two. She said that it was fine. That if there was something that would help me, she was all for it. She said she isn’t CBT based, and it isn’t her favorite modality (something we have in common) but if someone who is good at it can help me then why not. She said her boundaries weren’t so in the box that she didn’t allow someone the opportunity to get help from someone else. She talked about when she had her own therapy, she had a regular therapist and then an art therapist. Then later she started seeing the art therapist also one on one, but she would discuss what happened with the art therapist with her main therapist. She said she was concerned I would become destabilized with the cutting though and to perhaps commit to one session and see how it goes before committing to the second session with Pastor T. She also later on called him a “faith healer” but I don’t know if that was meant to be funny, or if her pride was wounded, or if she genuinely sees him as a faith healer because her spirituality is more what I would consider mystical than mine. I just let it go. I didn’t want to call her out on using that term which I found sort of demeaning. I mean he has a PhD in Marriage and Family Counseling, so I think he is qualified to do CBT. I don’t think he is a charlatan or trying to sell me snake oil which is what I think of when I hear the term faith healer. She also said she didn’t think it would work for my hallucinations. But she said I could see him and that is the outcome that I wanted so I thought, okay good. Lets just go from there. I told her about a T I saw for four sessions that was strict CBT based and how I was frustrated, and she was frustrated. She kept telling me I have millions of thoughts per second; I just have to pay attention to them. And I was like, “No, I really don’t.” And how she kept threatening to have me hospitalized for cutting. T said, that doesn’t work for me. I don’t like to be threatened and I don’t like to threaten clients. I said it was one of the main reasons I had stopped seeing that T. That and I thought the T was batcrap crazy but I didn’t say that to current T.

We were talking about cutting again. I said one of the reasons why I cut is to get rid of suicidal thoughts. That I tend to not cut when I’m actively suicidal, that I think there’s a safety switch in my brain that has so far worked that has told me that I’m not safe to cut if I am suicidal. I said, Heaven knows what would happen if my switch were to break. But if I am more passively suicidal, I will cut to eliminate those thoughts because it does work. They do come back, but for a time they are gone. I talked about how I cut in order to prevent something bad from happening. For example, if I am worried about my parents getting in a car accident, if I cut, they won’t get in a car accident. She said that is illogical. I said, it works. She said there is no cause and effect between cutting and car accidents. I said my former T called it magical thinking on my part, and how I didn’t see anything wrong with it. She said, you’re cutting, that’s what’s wrong with it. I said, no I meant, what is wrong with the magical thinking. She said because it is illogical, and it doesn’t work. She said she didn’t agree with me. Then I talked about how I cut to get rid of hallucinations. She said, oh that’s a hard one.


She asked me about the first time I hallucinated. I was 10. I was staying at my aunt’s house in Montana. There was a field in the front and a river in the back. If I looked out over the field, I could see soldiers. She said what kind? I said old fashioned kind with swords and stuff. I meant medieval like knights with silver armor and stuff like that. But she thought I meant more of like the Calvary from the age of the wars with the Native Americans which she talked about for a little bit. She said how do you know they weren’t there? I said because no one else saw them. She said, yes, but maybe they had been there, and you were seeing their ghosts. I said, no I don’t believe in ghosts. To which she looked hurt. I felt guilty. But my religion and my views on the afterlife are core beliefs that I have, and I can’t say I believe it could be a ghost if I don’t believe in ghosts. So, then she went on about holograms for a while. Did I know what a hologram was? I said some sort of electronic rendering of a picture. She was like, yeah, sort of. But I don’t know how it could have been a hologram either. That seemed illogical to me. She asked if I had seen the soldiers other places or just in Montana, and I said other places. And how I would rather see soldiers than some of the other stuff that I see. Trigger for talk of Christianity.

At one point, which I may be neglecting to mention something in here because I don’t know why the topic of conversation shifted, she said, “It is difficult to see you in so much pain.” I didn’t know what to say to that. So, so I kept silent. She said, “Your parents really don’t understand.” I said, “No, like when I was really suicidal and I saw my Pdoc twice in one week, my parents didn’t understand how seriously ill I was at the time.” Although my Mom has her own MI so I would think she would have some sort of clue. My T said, “No, it just goes up and over her head. She just isn’t able to comprehend.”
She was talking some at the end of the session, but I was getting kind of dissociated so I don’t really remember everything she was saying. It’s kind of foggy in my head. At the very end she was saying she hoped that I had an even better week than I did this past week and that I would continue to feel better. I told her that I hoped she had a good week as well. And then I walked down the hallway, out into the waiting room, and then to my car.


I may have forgotten some stuff but that was the gist of the appointment. Pretty good I thought.
Comments welcome.