Posted 1/26/2013 6:51 AM (GMT 0)
Hi all. I have been analyzing my first therapy appointment that I had yesterday. At first, I was all happy about the appointment, but then today I am experiencing some mixed feelings. I don't know, I guess i'm scared, change is hard, and the truth can sometimes be a bitter pill to swallow. The truth is that I do have allot of excuses and I do need to take more responsibility for myself.
My new therapist was unlike any of the ones I have had before who took my money and just listened to me talk about my problems every week. After talking for most of the hour, telling her my story, and sharing with her my problems, she actually turned the conversation around and gave me some honest feedback. I have mixed feelings about the feedback because none of my previous therapist did that. And honestly, it was a little unnerving how she was able to peg me perfectly. She totally hit the nail on the head.
One thing that stands out in my mind is how she said to me that she didn't think "traditional" therapy will work for me. She also said something like, if I wanted my therapy to be about digging through all my bad baggage, then she wasn't the right therapist for me. Then she asked me if I was tired of going through all those bad memories over and over again, and I said yes, but how do you let it all go? (In my mind, I knew that somehow I had to let it go, but could never figure out how, so I did just go over it and over it again and again.) At this point I had an epiphany, I realized that she was right. The more I churn through the memories and the more I focus on all my problems, the worse I seem to get, which is why "traditional" therapy never worked for me.
So what it all comes down to is that I have realized that I have spent my whole life, negative experience after negative experience, just trying to make sense of all the negativity and all the problems. What I haven't done is learn how to let it go. I have never been happy, because I have never learned how to be happy. So, that is what my new therapy is going to be about. It is going to be about working on being more positive and building up those positive experiences. This new therapy is going to be about how I can learn to understand and incorporate more positive thought processes into my being.
I know that the road ahead is not going to be easy, but for the first time in a long time I have hope...