New Therapist

I started therapy again, two weeks ago. It took a while to get an appointment and I had to keep cancelling it because of the chaos of the abusive tenant below me. Being unable to think or form sentences makes it difficult to do the intake session and the treatment plan session.

Finally the day came when I did indeed go to my first and second appointments. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep, not for weeks and weeks, actually not for months and months, but I was feeling that I was going to be able to get through the appointments, and I did.

I will be seeing her every two weeks. Initially my reaction was that I wanted to go once a week, but since my health issues are interfering with things in my life quite a bit right now, and there are other groups and activities that I am interested in as well.  Since the clinic I am going to is through the county, and they are accepting the amount of money they will get from Medicare and not being co-pay billing me, I think I am probably getting a great deal. I am really beyond happy about not having to pay anything out-of-pocket.

There is a therapy support group for women that I can go to as well, which should be good if I can manage to do that. As well there is another non-profit that has another women’s support group that meets twice a month and has other activities that I am interested in. I was a member there several years ago, but it expired. First I have to get to another intake appointment there, which is on a walk-in basis twice a week, so I am hoping to get that done within the next couple of weeks as well.

I like her. And we talked about my major issues and my goals and what I want in therapy and what my goals and treatment plan will be. When we started talking about treatment goals and filling in the treatment plan, she asked me to speak about that. I told her first I wanted to say something, I said I think it is more important for me to say what does not work for me and what really derails me from staying focused and how I need help in staying on task during therapy, and what does and does not work from a therapist and the kinds of feedback I am looking for.

I said because I easily get derailed and can go on and on about tangents it is important not to be asked how I am doing and how my week was. I have done a lot of therapy and I am trying to not waste my time in therapy with issues that are on-going, but that are issues that I am trying to address from the start of the issues, rather than the most recent reincarnation of the issues.

I said that I try to bring a short list of things that have happened and/or issues that I want to start addressing in session, that I really want to mention during session. I told her that other therapists have not been amenable to letting me work from a list, rather than encouraging me to ramble a lot. I told her that I really need a therapist to help me stay on task and to stop me from being distracted. I told her that I realize that is a technique that therapists use, to let a client do stream of consciousness conversing, but for me, and after so much therapy, I don’t need to talk about my week or problems or my family to get to what I need to work on and am willing and need to work on the hard stuff, especially the core issues, from the time period they were created in.

We talked a lot about that, she seemed responsive and that was great.

I talked to her about being a survivor of mother-daughter sexual abuse. And she was incredibly good at handling that, though I realize that a therapist should be okay with dealing and addressing mother-daughter sexual abuse, but that has not been my experience. I talked about the stigma of that being reinforced by therapists not being willing to let me discuss that and that instead what I really need is to be able to release the stigma of being sexually abused by a mother.

I told her that other therapists have steered me away from being able to discuss that and that hurts me and does not help me to heal. I told her that I have in fact brought up the topic of mdsa during sessions and had therapists change the subject abruptly and rudely. I told her that I do not want to see a therapist who cannot cope with that, who cannot deal with that, who cannot hear me speak about it and who cannot support me in healing as I go through this.

I told her that I don’t want to discuss specific memories, but more of mdsa in general, it’s aftereffects, it’s differences, and it’s similarities to other child sexual abuse. I told her that over the years, since remembering the mother-daughter sexual abuse, I have had many interactions with other mdsa survivors and many friendships online and that it has been very supportive and healing to me. I told that still I feel the need to work on this in therapy. She took it all in, with no bad reaction. She was pretty great, actually. So I am looking forward to having someone who is on my side through this healing process, someone that I can actually talk about this with.