Something happend to me this past Tuesday and in the days since that I’m not sure I’d truly ever experienced before.
I’d been musing about the way my brain has processed certain kinds of information for a while, writing it all out here for the world to see. And then it kind of all culminated in this realization that I’d practically gone into mourning over the apparent demise of my therapeutic relationship! Like this has very real world applications.
On Monday, with my post Sad still in the queue, I emailed my therapist with five of these essays… because I felt he needed to know… and there was no way I was going to be able to get it out coherently.
Then on Tuesday I shared on the therapy diary what I’d been up to, what I’d been feeling and how this was a real painful place to be, not helped in the slightest by the cognitive dissonance coming from my awareness that my therapist was absolutely not the right “target” for all this sadness.
And before too long, the empathetic and supportive and encouraging comments came in.
*I’m feeling sad with you.
I know it’s hard, but as you said, this is what you need to be working through right now.
You have so much wisdom, and it has already benefited so many.
I know you and your therapist will tackle this just fine.
I can feel all the way from here how badly you want to heal!*
I’m paraphrasing, but that was the basic jist of the kind of supportive comments that were written in response to what I’d shared.
An outpouring of love and support.
Something I’ve at times witnessed others receiving, but it always seemed I never had the right suffering to qualify for that sort of thing. When you’re in great physical health, have a stable marriage and beautiful children, a good church, a good job, enough to eat and plenty of the good things in life and have a mental illness… you tend to get passed over a lot. And because of that last thing, you tend to be resigned to that being your lot in life, what you deserve anyway (and shouldn’t you be grateful you don’t need it?).
But I wasn’t passed over this time. People understood that what I was going through was hard and painful. Nobody told me to count my blessings. Nobody compared what I was going through to all the folks out there far worse off. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very much in favor of counting one’s blessings and considering the plight of the less fortunate. It’s just that… I also have a right to feel my pain and ask for and receive support and empathy and love.
And I received all that. Abundantly.
And it was amazing. I felt like I could take on anything. I felt like I mattered and that my pain mattered.
I count that as a huge blessing. I’m so grateful. I’m still feeling the glow of this outpouring.
My therapy session two days ago went very well, by the way. There’s for sure a lot of work still ahead of us. I’m not alone in it any longer and that was made abundantly clear, both inside and outside of session.
I still do feel the sadness, and it comes from a very deep place, but it doesn’t feel so strongly connected to my therapist any longer. Instead he was one who welcomed the sadness, stayed with me, worked with me on it, and comforted me by his presence. So what has decreased is a large measure of the agonizing cognitive dissonance. I’m very grateful for that!
Thank you to all who were part of this great outpouring of support. You have all blessed me so much this past week!