I began therapy last week. I've had two sessions so far, both have been superficially uneventful but beneath the surface there is a great deal of movement. It is something I am aware of physically in the shifting patterns of my eye twitch and my panic attacks and the various physical manifestations of anxiety I experience. It is something I am aware of emotionally as I have found myself near tears twice in a week and generally I feel rather out of control in regards to my emotions. Powerful feelings seem to possess me and take command of my decision making mechanism (what Freud would call the ego, I'll get to that in a moment) leaving me with an overall mix of excitement and fear. I'm excited in that these explosions of emotion represent to me a thawing out of a part of myself which has been frozen for roughly 10 years. I'm fearful for the same reason. What is coming lose within me I see as a great potentiality. It is my true self and I find myself confronted at last, after years of putting it off with the task of figuring out what the hell I really am.
What I know is that I am different. I am strange...odd, the sort of person that people are drawn to pay attention to but aren't sure if they should smile or snarl at. One thing I understand about these feelings that are returning to me is that as they were preserved so to speak, frozen they are feelings of my younger self. As I feel them I am flooded with memories of having had them, like putting on an old familiar jacket. A familiar memory that has accompanied an equally familiar feeling is the deep wish that I wasn't different. In recent years I have taken to defending weirdness, even exalting it as a virtue. And while it is true now that I do generally find "weird" people significantly more interesting than "normal" people, and while I can make an impassioned case on behalf of us weirdos everywhere by citing case after case of people who have changed the world...I still wish deeper down that I wasn't weird. It is terribly lonely and as much as you are afraid of us I assure you it is exponentially more frightening to be staring back at the room full of puzzled and concerned faces knowing they are all united by their recognition of your oddity.
As I said before on the surface the sessions have been uneventful. I have began to recount to this recent acquaintance (my therapist) the various trials and tribulations of my life. The first session focused largely on my anxiety and its hypothesized genesis, namely having been beaten by my step father for roughly 3 years. I'm sure reading that sentence is as uncomfortable for you as it is for me writing it. In recent years I have developed the tendency to sort of hit people over the head with that detail of my life as a way of shocking them away from prying to close to me. In my current state I again find myself reverting to older feelings and in this case I feel weird and burdensome for disclosing that reality, even to you the hypothetical reader. At my near core I feel a strong desire to apologize to you all for being weird, for saying things like that out loud. The second session was even less eventful on the surface of things. It began with a discussion of the previous week and included a guided meditation.
Beneath the surface though I feel tectonic shifts in my emotional awareness. I believe these shifts to be occurring not so much as a direct result of therapeutic methods but rather as a result of some dynamics intrinsic to the act of going to therapy at all. Those being #1 I have sought help. The mere act of seeking help is an enormous one for me because I fundamentally don't believe I deserve help. Another uncomfortable thought but there it is. #2 The relationship which forms between therapist and patient is built upon massive trust. The knowledge that she is legally and ethically prohibited from revealing things is helpful but of course there is a personal relationship built. It is comforting to me to know that she has standards of conduct which act as firewalls against my general propensity to destroy relationships. #3 The act of speaking things out loud to a person is in and of itself cathartic and helpful. It is not enough but it is something. I've come to believe generally in life the more we find the courage to make ourselves vulnerable the more we grow and the closer we get to some kind of lasting happiness. I am proud I have done that a bit in my first two sessions of therapy.
So having gone that far I am presently occupied with the task of building an intellectual fence. At least that's what it feels like. The fence is made of ideas and my understanding of them which will allow me to hide from anything too uncomfortable that may arise as a result of therapy. Meaning I'm coming up with ways to call bull shit on the whole field of psychoanalysis. In my hyper-analytic mind that means voraciously consuming major works in the field of psychology, researching contemporary responses, applications and criticisms of those works as well as major movements in the field. At the present I am reading a primer of the major theories of Freud. I started to read The Interpretation of Dreams a couple years ago but I found it to be laborious. Scientists always have to defend every step they take by fortifying every inch of ground they've covered by defining terms, summarizing previous studies both supportive and at odds with their view, and then mounds of evidence. I don't mind the evidence so much, particular in dream theory but it just takes so long to make a simple point. So I've started with a primer on Freud, got another on Jung in the pipeline. I've been reading Man and His Symbols by Jung for a couple weeks, pecking away here and there. I had begun this post with the intention of talking through my understanding of Freud thus far but I've filled enough of your screen with my self-indulgent bull shit for one sitting. Perhaps I'll return to Sigmund another time. I should probably start saying something half way interesting to the rest of the world out of civility to any god forsaken readers of this drabble out there.
Then again if this therapy thing maintains its current trajectory perhaps I'll also resume the writing practices of 10 years ago. In those days I believe I was capable of intellectual stimulation delivered in an entertaining manner. Then again I was probably just trying to get laid, or as Sigmund might say my id was working to achieve a release of tension in regards to the sex instinct which result in a release of psychic energy to the ego which manifested itself as my silly little ramblings, right Dr. Freud.
Good Times.
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