Pieces have been slowly coming together. My therapy sessions have been so hard lately. I want to talk to T so badly, but I can't ever figure out what to say, so I go there and we mostly just stare at each other, or talk about things that are less important a little bit, but that doesn't even last long because we both know that stuff isn't what I'm there for, so we go back to staring at each other.

Last time, which was a week and a half ago, I was so determined to do better, and I tried, but it wasn't any better, and I left feeling frustrated. Normally, I sit in my car when I leave my session, and write a few notes for myself to get the main points down and anything that I need to remember, before starting the 2 1/2 hour drive back home. But I got in my car, and just couldn't sit there by T's office, but wasn't ready to go home either, so I had to go find someplace else to park so that I could sit in my car and cry for half an hour and write my notes. I don't even remember what I wrote, without looking it up, but I remember I wrote a lot, for a session that I didn't manage to talk in very much.

I've been trying to analyze why I keep not being able to talk to T, and I realized that it feels the same as when I was a teenager, and I kept wanting to talk to my parents and tell them that I was having problems and wasn't okay. Only, I never could. I never could figure out how to say what I wanted to say to my parents, and if I ever did get them somewhere without all the other kids listening, I couldn't remember what it was that I wanted to say. I'm reacting to T the same way lately for some reason.

This morning I was reading about treating autistic children, and I realized that, while most people, especially professionals these days, tend to view autistic children as so different from "normal" people that they don't even consider that the things that these children do could have reasons that would make sense if we tried to understand, because they are so different that it doesn't even make any sense. I have worked with people with autism, as well as other behavioral and emotional problems, and the more I worked with them, the more I related to them and felt like I could understand them because I am like them too. That has not been a popular position for me to take, professionally, because other professionals tend to discard me if I am "like them." They don't want to see that all people are more alike than different, and that we all fit somewhere on a continuum that includes even the most "different" or "disturbed." I place myself on that continuum too, and I recognize that I have some of the same problems.

I realized, that I have always seen myself as having problems, and my parents didn't want to admit that anything was wrong. I couldn't talk to my parents because they didn't want to hear what I wanted to say. The message I kept getting from them, directly or indirectly, was "You don't have any problems, so stop saying that you do."

T has been trying to get me to stop identifying myself as so dysfunctional, because maybe I take it too far, and it isn't helping me to do that. And I'm responding by shutting down, because I've gotten that message that I don't have any problems and have no right to think that I do from my parents and previous therapists, etc., and obviously I was struggling, and still do even if not as much, and my parents and others in the past were not hearing me and their objective was to keep me from getting better or getting help (because they didn't want to deal with it, didn't want to feel bad or recognize their part in in, were tired of me, or whatever). So part of my struggle now is that I'm also hearing from someplace inside that I don't deserve help, and it's stupid and bad to do things to try to help myself, and I should just accept things the way they are and not make a fuss. So then I can't tell T about my ideas or what I try that is constructive either, because I'm afraid that she will think it it stupid and selfish and bad and I don't deserve it, and all that stuff.

I still have another week to go before I see T again. I hope that I'll be able to explain this to her then.