“I’m totally closed off to you right now,” I said to my therapist.
“Okay,” she said, in her normal, allowing tone. She lightly smiled in the way that she does when she’s excited that I’m expressing distaste (because that’s a challenge for me–to tell someone they’ve pissed me off).
“Last week, I was in here… Telling you about how I felt like I’d been shoved under ground and was starting right at my roots. And I was being shown infected roots. And you were all ‘you need to be above ground in order to heal the roots; can’t solve a problem while you’re in it’ and then telling me I needed to do anger release… and that pissed me the fuck off! Because I’m not a fucking idiot. I understand the logic of ‘you can’t solve a problem while at the level of awareness in which the problem originated.’ Like, I get it. But that’s NOT what was happening. What I was experiencing wasn’t a problem. I didn’t need your fixes, just like I haven’t needed anyone else’s fixes. I was very aware of what the issue was. I was processing some deep emotion and needed you to meet me where I was rather than you try to pull me to you.”
I paused.
“There, now I feel open again.” I said with a smile.
Finding a therapist that I feel safe with and with whom I have good chemistry has taken yeeeaaarrss. It’s like dating. You date a handful of people and think you can’t get any better and work your ass off to fit the mold that they want (and/or try to get them to fit your mold) and then you finally discover that all of those relationships where leading you to this super duper human that’s better than you could have even imagined or written and you don’t have to change a fuckin’ thing about yourself and it’s so easy to simply exist with the person.
Same with therapists.
DON’T SETTLE. IN ROMANTIC OR THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIPS. DON’T. YOU DESERVE THE BEST.
Onward…
Therapist challenged me further, as she does… Because she’s not at all afraid of me and I love that about her. We have been working on me feeling authentic emotion in the moment rather than acting fine in the moment, waiting until I’m safe in the cave of my room, processing all the pain on my own, and then later returning to the situation with epiphanies and well-spoken logic and a flag that says “LOOK HOW AWARE I AM–I DID THIS ALL BY MYSELF”.
It’s still a work in progress, of course. And I’ve come a long way.
And now we’re at Level Two of this skill, which is to express feelings while feeling them.
Which, y’know, goes against all of my childhood programming of learning that I needed to be happy and grateful and poised all the time. And it also goes against a lot of the spiritual readings I’ve ingested.
But I thought I was supposed to let all things slide off my back, because I’m spiritual as fuck and am, like, totally forgiving and awesome.
It’s interesting to be at this place in my journey of self-actualization.
I spent years shedding away all of these things that I thought were negative attributes. I worked hard to train myself out of quirks and pet peeves. I learned that my preferences were weird or gross or embarrassing, so I repressed them. I called myself a controlling bitch and was determined to stop being that way.
And so… I became bland. I kept erasing and cutting and pasting and trying so hard to create this “perfect me” based on a growing collection of input/judgments I’d received over the years.
It’s like I was this loud, vibrant flower that didn’t match all the other flowers.
I don’t have to change who I am to appease anyone.
The right people will find me. And in order for them to do so, I need to strut my weirdness and uniqueness. I need to let my vibrancy shine.
~J