6 posts tagged “therapy”

I had therapy today, hallelujah. It’s been two weeks since my aunt’s unexpected death, and I’m only today beginning to work through the tragedy of it as anything other than a surreal story to tell. I spent the four days in Tennessee feeling like I’d been hurled into a movie – something by P. T. Anderson, where the characters stumble around doing bizarre, inexplicable things, and no one reacts to the bizarreness; they just keep going as if everything is perfectly normal – and only in retelling everything to my therapist have I begun to feel in any way connected to the strange events of the week.

I am convinced we – by whom I mean Christians – do funerals all wrong. Sara’s funeral was a very Southern Baptist affair, delivered by an old-fangled Southern preacher who talked about the tragedy of my aunt’s death, yes, but mostly spent the time talking about how she had hope in Jeezuzz and that she had gone home to Glow-ree, and that if there was anything Sara would want him to say it was that she had found her hope in Jeezuzz would want you to, too. All of which is true – but I kept waiting for him to acknowledge the pain all of us were in (well, all of us who hadn’t been dropped into a P.T. Anderson movie) and the horrible, aching hole her death had left. Yes, we can trust that we’ll see her again in heaven if we love Jeezuzz, I wanted him to say, but in the mean time she is gone and we are grieving and THIS SUCKS.

Is this a strictly southern phenomenon, or are funerals universally this skewed? I don’t think I’ve ever attended a funeral north of the Mason-Dixon, so I don’t have a good sense of whether this is how everyone does it, or just the fogeys down South. And am I alone in feeling like this is a horribly stilted perspective, or am I supposed to be satisfied with The Promise Of Glow-ree and all that? I’m not a delayed-gratification kind of girl; I hope that speaks more to my immaturity than to my faith.

My perceptive therapist identified, from my retelling, some traits of my aunt’s that were unhealthy, things I’d always had a peripheral sense of but that I’d never overtly acknowledged. It was clear from the events of her sudden illness and death that Sara really was the hub of our extended family, the one in charge of facilitating all the relationships between everyone else. This was never more obvious than when no one called me to tell me she had been hospitalized, because she was always the one person who made those sorts of phone calls, the one in touch of getting information out. The inevitable church luncheon that followed her funeral (another Southern tradition?) was awkward not only because we were all processing the morning’s service but also because without her there to lubricate conversations, no one knew quite how to relate to one another.

My therapist’s point was that my aunt was a woman who universally loved others, universally gave herself to them, but without ever allowing herself to be filled in return: that by constantly rushing to meet others’ needs, she gave the impression of not having needs of her own to be met. (Tragic case in point: she allowed herself to be caught in the middle of a feud between her prickly, stubborn mother and sister; and as a result of her attempts to interject herself and mend their relationship, Sara and her sister hadn’t spoken in more than three years, and her sister – my aunt Sue – didn’t come to Sara’s funeral (although she did send a lovely flower arrangement)). My therapist was keen to draw a subtle object lesson out of this for me, since a recurring theme of our sessions is that I’m so determined to give the impression that I have all my shit together that I don’t let anyone close enough to meet my own needs.

It left me wondering – how many of us are there? Are there scads of us spending all our time trying to look like we have it all together, when in fact we’re lonely and desperate for connection – and pushing everyone away in the process?

Here is a picture of a nun on a scooter: 

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I have a new friend, and I'm positively over the moon about it. In no time at all she went from being an acquaintance to the sort of person I could spend every single day with, and I could sit and gush about how fabulous she is except that she would probably read this and get creeped out and break up with me.

Yesterday was intermittently thunderstormy most of the morning, but by midafternoon the skies had cleared and the sun was beginning to peek shyly around the clouds. Then, at nearly 5:00 when I was driving to my appointment with my therapist, five minutes late and taking a mental inventory of topics to discuss in my precious fifty-minute session, I finally looked up from my vehicular navel-gazing and noticed this storm front moving in quickly from the west:

Storm 1

It was surreal - to my left were sunny, obliviously cheerful skies; to my right was this massive wall of swirling cloud and doom. I committed a serious breach of the Good Driver's Code by snapping several pictures of it with my camera phone, just before I turned into the parking lot of my therapist's office suite.

I made it in the door just as the storm hit, rain and wind and lightning, pounding thunder that sounded like all the kids from Fat Camp were having a track meet on the roof. On speed. Just as we closed the door to her office, the power went out, so we held therapy by flashlight. It was cozy, like telling ghost stories around the campfire, only the ghost stories were less about highwaymen with hooks for hands and more about the thousand reasons that I feel inadequate as a mom, a wife, a daughter.

Over the past few sessions she's been helping me see how much I rule myself according to external feedback, external numeric feedback, and how this is making me unable to see the more abstract report card of two kids who are happy and healthy, a husband who loves me, a mostly-strong marriage. I have put so much energy into driving myself according to my weight, my ACT scores, my GPA, my store's weekly sales results. And except for my weight, my rigid dependence on these numbers have paid off: my ACT score was durn good; I graduated with a GPA above a 4.0; my store was always in the top of the district. But now that I'm a mom instead of a student or an employee, I don't get this same sort of feedback, no report card or annual performance review; the results I'm given are so much less tangible, less measurable. Now there's no grading scale for me to follow; I have to define success before I can strive for it.

Invariably, of course, I set the bar too high, and I fail. And I crumble. With two kids - a tantrum-throwing, melodramatic almost-two-year-old and a nervous, rigid preschooler - how can I continue to expect so much from myself, from them? What if success isn't a spotless carpet or a stovetop without any baked-on grunge? What if success is turning off the tv after Dragon Tales instead of leaving it on for the kids to veg out all morning? What if success is getting the laundry into the dryer before mildew sets in?

I'm peeking out from behind the curtains to reassure you, my six loyal readers, that I haven't yet curled up on the bathroom floor with a bottle of pills; I'm still here, despite my inexcusable absence from this blog. Although I'm already two months into this process, therapy continues to find still darker, twistier places to plumb; and I just haven't had any room in my brain for any thoughts beyond my ongoing emotional inventory.

Last night's session was particularly difficult and draining, and twenty-four hours later I'm still wrestling with realities of myself that I don't want to accept. Therapy has taken unexpected directions; where I thought I would be focusing on the grief of losing my mom to cancer fifteen years ago and on learning to let go of my anger at my dad for the flaws of my childhood, instead I've been faced with learning things about myself, about my personality and my habits, that I had no idea were there. And that I don't necessarily like.

Yesterday's session came on the heels of my reading this post by Heather Armstrong, who asked readers: What do you regret?, and in the midst of my reading this book, which describes the loss of self that can happen in early childhood and how childhood trauma manifests itself in the adult. The answer I would have given to Heather, had she not closed comments on that post (after nearly 500 responses! Oh, what I would give for that kind of readership!), is that I regret being so ordinary. I look at the life of my best friend from high school, who took her English degree to San Francisco and now works for a major literary magazine, and who now has, in my opinion, just about the most glamorous life I could imagine - and I feel jealous. And embarrassed. And ashamed. Because look at me, at my life: I am a college dropout, a stay-at-home mom - not even a particularly good mom.

As far as I'm concerned, my mother defined what good motherhood looks like. To me, she's proof that supermomdom is attainable! She cooked lovely, delicious meals; sewed cute clothes for me and my brothers (and herself!), kept our home beautifully decorated and immaculate; was active in church choir, little theater, teaching private lessons; maintained meticulous photo albums and baby books; and spent enough quality time with me and my brothers that we were all very grounded in spiritual teachings and could all read well before we started first grade.

And yes, I pedestalize her. This is something my therapist has pointed out, implying that it's not a healthy way to view her; and hearing that from her makes me bristle. I put my mother on a pedestal because she was perfect; I don't see anything unhealthy about that, or at least not that I'm ready to admit. The truth is, I am only now recognizing how much I do idolize my mother - which means that I also villainize my father, blaming him for all the wrongs of my childhood, but that's a post for another day. And when my therapist suggested last night that perhaps my mother was unhappy with being a supermom - that she may have felt pressured and overworked and frustrated and exhausted - this was an idea that I recoiled against. My mother was beautiful and talented and naturally perfect; she excelled because of who she was, beaming a Stepfordian smile even as she leapt tall buildings in a single bound - how could she have been unhappy??

No, the truth is, I need her to have gracefully enjoyed perfection - in order to keep her on her pedestal, yes, and also to give me something to strive for. I need to know that her first-chair life, that that sort of perfection, is attainable. That if I keep trying, I can get there, too.

That if I get there, I won't have to be afraid that no one will love me.

My therapist's unexpected revelation that I'm a perfectionist is amusing to me, therefore - if I were really a perfectionist, wouldn't my life be a bit more, well, perfect? Shouldn't I have more to show for it than an inability to relax? The wry conclusion is that I'm not even very good at being a perfectionist - add this to my list of failures! I want to be first-chair perfectionist, the valedictorian of perfectionism, but I'm barely an understudy. I have a C+ in perfectionism.

But I do resent my ordinary, non-perfect life. I was raised to be better than this. I am bright and funny and talented, daughter of two first chairs themselves. It is frustrating enough that I haven't carved a legacy for myself as bestselling author or world-renowned editor or Carnegie-worthy musician; having to adapt to the fact that I'm only average, mediocre, as a mom and wife and homemaker, that the extent of my acclaimed writing is a blog that scarcely a half-dozen people read - is tremendously disappointing. While my friend works at McSweeney's, the extent of my own publications is a handful of family scrapbooks.

My therapist also pointed out that I've transferred my perfectionism to my therapy. It's true: I change my clothes and put on makeup before an appointment, am careful to use the perfect words and give the right answers in our sessions, spent four hours plowing through the book she asked me to read. That I am pouring all my energy into dealing with the emotions stirred up in our sessions, to the exclusion of being functional for my other duties. My new goal is to get straight A's in therapy, if it kills me.

So she wants me to work on my perfectionism - on letting things go and not feeling guilty about them, on finding acceptance for myself just as I am. Not having to be a super-achiever to be loved and valued. All of which makes sense, but -

I can't do this! I can't settle! I am better than this! I am better better better, I can do so much more ---

-- shout the voices. I have no idea how to be comfortable with ordinariness, content with mediocrity. All my life all I have striven for is to be the best, the smartest, the wittiest, the most talented. I can't just give that up. No one will love me.

And besides: what would my mother think??

I've been inexcusably silent lately; apologies. My New Year's Resolution this year was to get myself emotionally healthy and to make every effort to get off my antidepressant, and to that end I've been seeing a therapist for a few weeks now. The sessions have left me raw and overwhelmed, filled with swirling thoughts that aren't coherent enough to make it past the pages of my own paper journal, the one that will be my undoing if I ever run for office (Attention, potential investigative reporters: DON'T LOOK IN MY UNDERWEAR DRAWER). Counseling has been terrifying and amazing. In just these first two fifty-minute sessions, my therapist has already helped me to poke at the layer of muck that's spent years collecting at the bottom of my subconscious; and although this process of stirring the silt and algae and scum back into cloudy circulation is going to be painful and dizzying, I believe - I have to believe - that if I keep poking, the current will sweep it all gently away.