Tag: psychotherapy

One Great Mystery

by Midnight Demon, posted in chronic physical pain, depression, mood disorders, suicide

One Great Mystery

“One Great Mystery” is a new song off Lady Antebellum’s new album, 747. It’s lyrics has struck a cord with me as I don’t know what I did to make my therapist “fall for me”. Tonight I am reminded of the time, many years ago, that I first encountered her stubbornness. I was in another suicidal depression and I so wanted to get rid of her. I felt like therapy was worthless because I was feeling such things. I was so into my suicidal mind that I was planning for my death and yet I wanted to make sure she was taken cared of. So the journal that I subscribed to had an article in it on therapists survivor group. She wouldn’t even accept the paper I was handing her, she couldn’t accept my eminent death, much less going to see a therapist for her grief. She really didn’t want me to die. Yet with every fiber of my being, I wanted to. I just couldn’t face life. It hurt too much. I was tired, extremely tired of fighting the battle of depression month after month, day in and day out. It is exhausting just putting a smile on your face when all you want to do is hide from the world. Yet somehow, some way, she got me through that episode. It was difficult work. I was almost as stubborn as she is. I had to consistently keep in contact with her via text message about how I was doing. I would write her the most awful of text messages. But it was a way to let her know I was still around. Long as I sent her a text, it meant I was still fighting this battle I so wanted to end.

During one horrific suicidal place that lasted for about three long weeks, I asked her if she would tell me that she loved me. I needed to hear that if I was to survive. So toward the end of session she would say it, and it would always surprise me. I was taken aback that she complied. Who does that?? And I could tell in her voice she was sincere. I knew that I had to keep on doing this thing called living. It’s like the song by Garth Brooks, “learning to live again”. One of the lines is “learning to live again is killing me”. And it was. I can’t describe the battle of death vs life that was going inside of me. I so wanted to die but I had my goofy therapist wanting me to live. My “kids” that needed me for their various things. And my sisters who need a person to vent to. When I was working, it was always responsibility to my job, though I planned on killing myself at work because I hated the place. Even though they tried to promote they were for taking care of your pain, they really didn’t. If I didn’t have a caring PCP, I would be screwed. I know that I would have ended my life years ago had my PCP turn me down for opioid therapy.

My therapist knew this. She and my psychiatrist know that my physical pain drives my suicidal tendencies to the limit. And when I don’t have a break, I get into a very depressive state that is hard to get out. Luckily, with my last hospitalization I was put on an antidepressant. If I wasn’t on it, I doubt it would have lifted my depression and suicidal thoughts.

But my therapist is great, as much as I call her a bozo and a PITA (pain in the ass). I know I wouldn’t be here without her persistent nature.

pissed off therapy session

by Midnight Demon, posted in bipolar, blogging, chronic physical pain, depression

Pissed off therapy session

I took a nap before my therapy session which probably wasn’t the brightest idea in the book but oh well. I usually wake up just before session but this time I overslept and woke up to the phone ringing. Rats! I really wasn’t looking forward to talking to her today, especially after what “didn’t” get talk about yesterday.

I told her I didn’t see the point in seeing her and she told me this was a “place to process things”. I laughed. Really? Because that hasn’t happened in ages!! She dropped the issue and I didn’t want to pursue it anymore as I could feel my anger rising. I seriously don’t think she has a fucking clue as to how I am doing anymore. We spent the majority of the conversation talking about how many spoons are going to be spent dealing with my father over the next few days. That is all she seems to want to talk about lately: Spoons. “Spoons” is another word for energy spent on stuff. I got it from a lady with Lupus and you can read the article here. I thought that paper she wrote was typical of all that I go through on a daily basis, from getting dressed, to taking a shower, to making breakfast, etc.

Lately my “spoon” supply has been low and I guess dealing with my therapist just drains it lately. By mid session, I am wanting out of talking with her. I can’t stand 50 minute sessions with her anymore. They are driving me crazy when I don’t feel like talking. And I don’t feel like talking not because there is nothing to talk about, but because I am tired of the way therapy is. I thought that after a while, I would find therapy helpful and insightful. That it would bring meaning to my life but those are just fantasies that never get fulfilled. Granted the last 10 years have been tough with my suicidality and such. But you would think by now she would be used to it and handle it better. She doesn’t and it just makes me shut down. I feel more alone with every passing session because the one person in the world that should know me, doesn’t. I kept thinking about the Mockingbid song my Rob Thomas. The lyrics are stunningly close to how I feel about therapy. The Chorus is right on target:

Everybody else is smiling
Man, their smiles don’t fade
You don’t even wonder why
You just don’t think that way

Maybe you and me got lost somewhere
We can’t move on and we can’t stay here
Maybe we’ve just had enough
Well, maybe we ain’t meant for this love

You and me tried everything
But still that mockingbird won’t sing
Man this life seems hard enough
Well, maybe we ain’t meant for this love

We have tried everything to keep this therapy going. Consults, different therapy avenues, etc. But they never seem to help. I might get a transference session in where I talk about what is wrong with everything but then the next session is like I didn’t speak at all. Things are back to status quo. It really pisses me off. Now I am just hounded by thoughts of whether I should be here or not and I am again alone in dealing with them because my bozo therapist is too anxious to hear what I have to say. She doesn’t listen and she just talks the talk in circles now. I am not asking her to cure me of my thoughts but not having a place for them is really hurting me. But I understand that therapists have their own shit to deal with. But I just once wish that my therapist of 14 years would take a Xanax and let me talk. Otherwise, I think I will just give up therapy once and for all as much as it pains to be even type these words. There is getting nothing out of it if you cannot share your inner most, darkest, thoughts.

I have been down this road with my therapist for some time. It is a well beaten path. I just wish she would restrain herself some and listen more to what I have to say than get all bent out of shape when I mention suicide, or being gone, or leaving therapy. A seasoned therapist should know how to do this by now and I shouldn’t have to write this blog to get the message across, yet again…

Who do you turn to when you have no one to turn to?

by Midnight Demon, posted in bipolar, chronic physical pain, depression, mental illness, psychology

I finally got out of the house today and went to Starbucks. It was a little rough getting there but I persevered. I wanted a latte and by dog gone it, I was going to get one! It wasn’t as sweet as I was hoping it was, but it did it’s job. And I got some writing done while I was cruising through Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t make any sense right now, but I think I will work on it later tonight to see if I can make it make sense. It was like once I started writing I “threw up” and my brain couldn’t make sense of the thoughts anymore.

Back and bowels are having a fight as to who is going to win the pain shoot out. I almost lost control of my bowels twice since coming home. I fear that if I do, I will commit suicide. I am that vulnerable.

I tried to bring up my suicidal tendencies to my therapist today but she got all panicky so I dropped it. I could tell from her voice she was not going to be listening to me and just freaking out about losing me. I never felt so low as I did in that moment. I felt like I had no one to talk to about my ideas or frustrations to do with suicide. It’s just up to me to deal with, once again, on my own. I can’t talk to my pdoc, she is out of commission for a while. And the most she can offer me is a hospitalization. I don’t need to be hospitalized, least I don’t think I do. I just want to talk about what it would be like with me not in the world anymore to someone non-judgmental and criticizing. And also, not be freaked out by it. My therapist is a good therapist. She has kept me alive the past 10 years, some how, some way. But she still gets fucking juiced up and down right untalkable when I bring up suicide or feeling like ending my life. If I can’t talk about it in therapy, who can I turn to? Sure I have my blog, but last time I posted a post on being suicidal someone hunted me down to make sure I was ok and scared a few people in the process. I was lucky they didn’t call the cops. So now I am hesitant to put that on my blog for fear of being taken the wrong way. And if I don’t have my blog to vent to, what the hell is the point of writing this blog every day?? I have been keeping things neutral since that incident. I keep to myself and I hardly write in my journal anymore. Since being discharged from the hospital in August, I really have been questioning things. I am unhappy in therapy, with the process itself, and I am not sure after 15 years, it is going to change. I know my medication regiment is stable and doesn’t need to be played with. I guess I just miss talking with someone, and having intellectual discussions with people about psychology and suicide. I miss being in academia. I miss having the research tools at my finger tips. (Call me a geek!) But I no longer have that and that makes me depressed. I know that if I were in school and pursuing my passion, I might be feeling better but I can’t afford school. It just costs too much for a bachelor’s education and I don’t have the money. If I didn’t screw up my student loans, I would be going back to school now. It would give me routine and sociability with my fellow classmates. I sometimes feel like holding a cardboard box in the square and say “college tuition” just to see if I would get a response. Be a fun experiment, from the sociological viewpoint.

I have thought of passing this on to my therapist, but I figure why bother. She doesn’t “listen” anymore…

Therapy Woes

by Midnight Demon, posted in bipolar, blogging, depression, mood disorders

Therapy woes

I had my session with my therapist today and not for nothing, she is a complete air head. I kept telling her I was pissed at HER and she was rubbing it off on my family members, like they were the source of my being mad. Then she was convinced that Jack was the source of the being pissed. I told her I was mad because you didn’t text me back yesterday. I felt that was a legitimate reason to be mad. I texted her at 0730 and there was plenty of time for her to text me a message that she was unavailable. It would only take a couple seconds, well with her maybe a few minutes, but still. Common courtesy. She says she doesn’t text. Bullshit. Most of our communication about sessions are about texts so how can she NOT text. She is just being naïve and that pissed me off more. Most she could have said was that she was too busy and didn’t have the time to text me back. That I might have accepted. But she didn’t. She read my other texts from that day. She read part of the blog I sent her so I know she got my texts.

I then cancelled tomorrow’s session as I am done with her for the week. Our next session isn’t until next week. She doesn’t like it but tough. She was trying to talk me into keeping it but I was against it. I am just so pissed off I don’t want to talk with her. And it is against her. I am tired of feeling like this is a one-way street, I give her input but she never returns it, and I am not just talking about getting back to me about the appointment. I feel like I give her so much and I just get so little in return. Nothing I write about gets acknowledged or validated, least not without some prompting. Most I get is, “yea, I read your text”. So I am left with what am I supposed to do when I feel like that again. I just have to figure out every thing on my own, why bother with therapy? She is just being so useless lately. All last week she just kept on harping on my father and losing spoons. That was what we chatted about ALL THREE SESSIONS. It was like a repeat button on all the days we were talking. I am thinking of sending her this blog but what would be the point? She reads how I feel and then what? We deal with her anxiety over the fact she is clueless about treating me all of a sudden? She still wants Jack to come out and she thinks that is what is causing me to be angry but it is not, not 100% anyways.

I have to deal with my father on Tuesday and I don’t want to be in a public place when we talk. I have no idea when the appointment is, as I will find out on Thursday. I missed the call and I figured might as well wait till Thursday so my father is informed that he has to see another doctor for his problem. I really don’t want to be squeezed with time as I have no idea how long this appointment is going to last. Specialists are rarely on time with appointment schedules. Even the doc he will see on Thursday runs late all the time.

So with Tuesday being out, I have a week of no therapy. Maybe this break will be what I need to regroup and think about where to go from here. I don’t know what I am doing in therapy anymore. I told her today that I wanted to quit therapy and she was like you can’t make that decision when you are angry. Fuck. I can’t stand her. I guess I am wanted her to be reciprocal in what we talk about but I guess that is not going to be the case. We seem to be always talking about apples and oranges lately and I think talking on the phone is the problem. She doesn’t pick up things when I talk but I do pick up things when she talks. She just isn’t as insightful as I she once was. I don’t know when this happened. Maybe it’s been there all along and I just never picked it up until now. But it’s pissing me off going through stuff and not being heard. Like I told her, Saturdays seems to be a bad pain day for whatever reason and I will think about ending my life. Did she offer any resources to deal with this? NO. Did she even acknowledge my suicidality surrounding this? No. So now that I don’t have my therapist to text to anymore, I have decided to use twitter for my venting. I know it leaks to Facebook, but I don’t care. Most people on twitter don’t listen to what I say anyways, despite having over 200 followers. If I am not going to get an acknowledgement from her, at all, I might as well seek other sources of validation. I know I am a nobody. I am not famous in any sense of the word. Funny that the song by Luke Bryan, “Do I”, came on my MP3 shuffle just now. Song is fitting. “Do I just need to give up and get on with my life? Baby, do I?” that line seems to resonate with me right now. I just want to know if I am still good enough for therapy or if I should be turned away and get on with my life. Even if I do send this to my therapist, there is no way I can know if she reads it or not. I won’t know until the next time I talk with her. It’s not like she is going to text me or anything. She couldn’t even pick up the fact that I was crying on the phone today. WTF. Seems I have been doing that a lot lately.

It will really suck having to stop therapy and go see someone else. But I don’t know what to do anymore. Seems like after my hospitalization things have gone downhill. And I don’t know what to do to make things uphill anymore. She talks and talks and hardly listens. Then when she does listen, I have to make sure she is still on the line because things are so quiet on her end. For all I know I am talking to thin air and I think that sometimes I am. She is just not on the same page with me anymore and frankly, I don’t even think we are reading the same book. It is really frustrating the hell out of me.