Professional Guidance

Go hang yourself, you therapist
You cannot assess me to the fullest
Take your words and camera
You think I exist in a coma
I am passionate and private
I'm not paying you for a visit
I did not call you to be told
My issue is that I am too controlled

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I have had a therapist for 2 years whom I love. She is eclectic. By this I mean that she is into Jung, shamanism, dreams, equine therapy, and whatever she finds to be helpful at the time. She is not tied to a particular psycho theory. I love the hills and valleys that we traverse. But occasionally I get a little restless that we are not addressing the "real" issue at hand and go in search of another therapist.

While keeping my current therapist in the background, I endeavored to seek a new therapist. My goal was to find a CB (cognitive behavioral) therapist. Why? In my late teens I was very fortunate to experience a gifted therapist who helped me tremendously in the area of cognitive behavioral therapy. I have always related to this form of therapy as it has a logical component to it. There is a problem and a solution. The solutions entail a different way of looking at things. It is logical and rational. The therapist that I am working with now is more creative; we analyze dreams, we talk about what it means to be an intuitive, and we talk about emotions and analyze how they are useful and not useful.

Cognitive behavioral stuff helps me get the day-to-day stuff under control. I love to live in the analysis world but sometimes that is my undoing. Creating stories about why this happened or how I know this person felt this way but why they acted totally incongruently is OK but tiring. Cognitive is more productive in the short-term and energy-saving in the long-term. I want both. I want to know how to be productive as well as creative/intuitive/empathic.

A few months ago I found a CBT therapist. He seemed to be interested in what I was wearing and his wife's website. I fired him.

A few weeks ago I found a therapist at Duke. A big name is Duke. Yay!!!!! Whatever.... Anyway, I turn up for my first session and like all first sessions it is an assessment. Boring! I even recognized some of the forms -- the " Beck Depression Inventory" questionnaire. It measures three major aspects of hopelessness; feelings about the future, loss of motivation, and expectations. After 2 hours of assessment the Duke therapist assessed me as having a 'disorder'. Finally, a disorder! I was so relieved. That explained everything!!! "Which one?" I asked him. He looked a little confused. And then he told me. I can't say which one because if I decided to run for president in the future this information could affect my running.... Because his answer was open ended I asked him to clarify. He got a little a defensive and asked me, "Do you get angry with all therapists?" Hmmmmm. And I thought to myself, "Derbrain"...

And the conversation continued. He didn't want me to research the diagnosis because apparently there are many definitions and they are rife with intepreation. You have got to be kidding me. Which interpretation was he going by? I assured him that I would not be googling the diagnosis. He asked me how I felt about the diagnosis..... I loved this, how do I "feel". I knew exactly where he was going with this. I felt nothing about this diagnosis, because well, it was based on 2 hours of knowing me or on not knowing me and some of the questions were questionable. And I told him that. They could be interpreted differently. Touche..... Yes, I was smug. This was not going well. I am supposed to be there to cry, to trust, to work on my self, and here I was being smug. ,
Let's skip to the next week's session. I walked into the session and the therapist informed me that he may have been too judgmental in his assessment and he wanted to do a further assessment. Cripey!!! Thank the little people that I didn't take him seriously and go into the rabbit hole of being "disordered." I endured another hour of his probing. At the end of the "assessment" he declared that I did not have what he previously thought after all, but that I had issues. No f~~n shit....

I even gave him a third session, just to see what he would do and I was traveling hopefully. I hoped that after the assessment was over he would ease off and we could get going. I am not going to even talk about the third session. Needless to say that after the third session I told him that I was not coming back. And then get this; I received an email from him. He told me that he was "fascinated by my story" and he hoped that I would come back.

Now, I must say that the ego was stroked. But I am not fascinated by my story any more. I could go back and listen to me talk and talk but I would bore me. I just want to move on and learn skills. I am truly interested in the journey that I am on. Athletes spend so much energy on learning how their body responds to food, developing more efficient movements, responding to mental motivations. Likewise, I am interested in being efficient not only the body path but the mental, heart, emotional, spirit and soul path. And at times I need professional guidance. Whether you call them therapists or coaches, some are good and some are bad. The point is that I need to acknowledge when the guideance of a particular therapist has served a purpose and when I need the guideance of someone new. In the same way that I need to find guideance to learn how to run without injury so do I need to find gideance to learn how deal with my particular emotional, spiritual, and heartfelt world.

I am not so ego-based as to think that I can come up with answers. If I do that, it is like taking a walk where I think that the path is unique but then I find myself noticing that I have seen that tree before, and then I see it again, and again. The same pattern plays it self out over and over. Without learning a new skill to stop or even recognize the pattern, I will keep walking the same path in the woods. I will never get to walk another path. And another path is what I wish to see and experience.