Saturday, April 11, 2009

Stop with the "phone contact" already!

On Tuesday I received an email from dear therapist "extending her concern" about my "confusion" of the "phone contact" and she would like to clarify this process "together.

What's strange is the email came about 30 minutes after I was sitting in my comfy chair hugging myself and crying, trying to focus on my heartbeat as a way to ground myself. And in my mind, I was begging her to reach out to me. My efforts to forget how much she used to comfort me and make me feel safe in the dark of the night were tossed aside, and I wanted her to call me, or email me ~ something. Of course, being the willful woman I am, there was NO WAY I was going to reach out to her!

In her email she was trying her best to 'validate' me... in my opinion ~ too little and way too late.
A "taste" of what she said:
I know you are exhausted and hopeless and have been torn between "throwing in the towel" and persevering through to a place where there is some reprieve. Finding the balance between strong and weak, independent and dependent, alone and connected, numb and alive, etc can be one of the hardest tasks as a human. Many people never even put in the effort to work through these polarities in their lifetime. Honor yourself for your treacherously hard work thus far. From this point on, I trust you will make your best decision for yourself.

After reading her written words, I asked myself the famous therapeutic question: Grace, how does that make you feel? If I were going to respond to her email (which I had no intention of doing!) I think I would have first spewed off that she knows NOTHING about me! And then I think I would have asked for further clarification on the "honor yourself for your treacherously hard work" statement. Yes~ let me throw a party (maybe a luau) in honor of Grace's hard work in therapy. Who wants to come to the party in my honor? Let's see, what shall we honor? First, I think we should light a candle for Grace's choice to enter into a trusting therapeutic relationship and baring her soul to dear therapist and then being abandoned when dear therapist suddenly got a life and no longer had the time to support Grace. Then, we'll light a second candle honoring the fact that Grace now feels worse than ever for trusting dear therapist when she said, "You can trust me" and "I will never abandon you" and "I am not going anywhere"... Liar! Liar! Liar!

And then I would have asked what she was implying when she said, "From this point on, I trust you will make the best decision for yourself." I took it to mean she's throwing in the therapeutic towel and will not contact me again. "Ball's in my court" kinda thing. If course my interpretation is contingent on which DT actually wrote the email...
Was it:
~ DT the "validating, caring" T
or
~ DT the "I don't really give a shit" T
I really wanted to respond...for a few minutes I had to sit on my hands!
But I didn't respond.
Why, you ask?

Why bother? She no longer *hears* me anyway. I'm sad and hurt, but oh well!

Things *change* ~ That's what she said. Things change... Yes, DT, they sure do. In fact, the only constant is change.

You had your turn so now it's my turn to *change*...back into the self reliant, independent, self-sufficient, shallow girl I was before I met you!

And then I deleted her email address and her phone number from my address book and cell phone...

Now it's my turn to ask: Tell me, DT, how does that make you feel?

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