Sitting down with the same person every week and sharing what’s on my mind without any fear of judgment or repercussions helps me to find clarity.
I bounce my ideas and feelings off the world all the time on my blog, but it is different when you sit down with somebody in person and get real time feedback from a pro.
What have I found most helpful from my years of therapy?
* Accountability. I tend to hide much of myself in ordinary communication. I tend to present a false picture of what’s important to me. I tend to be different around different people. I can let the game-playing go when I sit down for therapy.
* Possibilities. I love how therapy provides me with choices. I don’t have to keep doing the same thing. I don’t have to keep repeating my father’s life. I don’t have to follow my family. I don’t need to be stuck at the same level of differentiation.
* Therapy forces me to clarify what I’m feeling. I don’t have to be ashamed of being ashamed or sad or lonely or depressed. Therapy helps me to become clear. It helps me to stop fooling myself.
* Therapy reparents me. It shows me new ways of relating to others and to myself. I can learn how to negotiate in relationships. I can learn to say I’m annoyed with you because of X or Y.
* In therapy, I can get advice from somebody who doesn’t have an agenda beyond my welfare. In the real world, it seems that everybody has an agenda.
* Therapists listen deeply. In the real world, most people don’t listen attentively. I love therapists’ simple basic questions such as, “In what way?” “What does that mean to you?”
* I take out a lot of my anger on innocent parties. Therapy helps me to see what I’m doing, to understand why I’m doing it, and to suggest ways that I can stop doing things that hold me back from optimal levels of human connection.
Here are some of the memorable things my therapists have told me:
* “I don’t think you want to change.”
* “You don’t need an audience. You amuse yourself.”
* “Do you want to relate to me?”
* “Do you think you might be a sex addict?”
