[Silent_tsol]

Ok I'm feeling lots of anxiety and I feel overwhelmed so I'm going to jibber my thoughts out into cyberspace. I have T tonight and I had went last week too. The first few times I saw her every other week but now we'll be going on 3 weeks in a row. She said at the beginning she believes the patient should choose the frequency but that has me freaking out. Like we don't even talk about anything because I'm afraid to. I don't even know how to open a window for her. So what's the point in going more often? Let's not even touch the logical financial side of this! She has a really good sliding scale rate so I'm not going to go there (I think I just did didn't I).

I posted last week about how I was afraid she'd give up before I was able to talk. And I just keep thinking about how I want to but I just don't know how. The thought of it makes me want to curl up in my bed (or the couch in her office as that's where I'm headed -i actually wore flats despite the wintery weather so that if I found some semblance of courage I could without getting it dirty)

Where was I. I don't like driving. This is only a new thing for me. I actually have to multi-task because the act of driving is so monotonous I tend to space out which I feel is more dangerous than typing out silly posts like this without looking at my phone. Fancy explaining that to the officer when I get pulled over! "This is the only way I can remember being in the car!"

That's all for me. I'll try to go be "normal" now

[pbutton]

I have an anxiety problem where I feel I'm not paying enough attention when I'm driving. It's tough, I feel for ya. I started listening to a comedy radio station instead of music, that helps sometimes.

[SallyBrown]

Silent, I wasn't able to go through a session without long gaps of silence for a YEAR. But my T sat there, and waited.

At times it might be easier to talk about why you can't talk. Why are you afraid to talk? As my T would say, "What do you think will happen?" What do you imagine? If these things feel safe to talk about it, maybe you can just stay there, outside of the things you need to say, for a little while, and talk about what's getting in the way.

In my case, talking about the things that kept me silent made me WANT to be less silent, even if it felt impossible. I had this voice in my head that criticized and viciously attacked everything I wanted to say as stupid and not useful, but at some point, the voice that wanted to say these things got stronger the more I talked about the critical voice. I started resenting the critical voice and how much time it was hogging up. It felt ridiculous to talk about all its criticisms and not talk about the things it was criticizing. It felt empty to sit across from this guy once a week for so many months and having him not know so much about me, even if half of me thought that there was nothing interesting to know about me. This was a struggle I really needed to have with myself.

One day, I came in and told him that I had made the blouse I was wearing out of an old shirt, by hand. Even that felt risky for me, for personal reasons I won't go into. He gave a very warm smile -- something I get all the time now, but was rare then -- and I guess maybe it was a preview of how good things could be if I told him something risky and he got it... like I had proved my critical voice wrong. That little accepting gesture meant a lot, and it was the first session where I talked the entire way through. Over a year after I'd first started.

Be patient with yourself. If your T is any good at all, she isn't going to leave you. Think of her as waiting patiently in hopes of meeting the real you. It's ok if it takes time.