New Therapist

I’ve got a new therapist and I really think she is competent to handle me, which is saying a lot. I have seen her three times already.  She has shown me that she is competent to handle me, capable, and willing. She is very good at being a witness to my healing therapy while being present, compassionate, and empathetic.  Those are all huge things.

I will say that I was at the point of being able to articulate in excruciating detail exactly what I did and did not want in a therapist and in therapy and in healing. I had a long talk with the person who was going to re-assign me to another therapist. So that has gone a long way in getting me assigned as her client. She is another therapist in the office where I was going.

I’m glad that I don’t have to go out on my own and try to find another therapist entirely on my own and especially glad that I don’t have that project looming in my life right now, even if it were only to find another therapist in the same clinic. I don’t have a lot of energy for projects right now.

I had some real issues with the other therapist, to the point of avoiding going to therapy for six months. I went in one more time, and seriously I was not capable of making it work, and really why should I have to be the one who had to try to make it work? I think the partnership proved to be a bad fit, untherapeutic. She was very good at helping clients manage the everyday manageability of their lives, but that was not my situation and I was clear about that constantly. She made it hard for me to work on my stated  and agreed upon therapy goals and needs of healing from childhood abuse, especially mother daughter sexual abuse.

The clinic will only allow me to get an appointment every other week, so that is very frustrating. It is a county mental health clinic, so it has a lot of clients and they decide those issues, even though I disagree on that.  But I suppose I would need some time to transition into doing therapy once a week.  The nicest part of that is that I don’t have to pay the co-pay, since the county declines to charge me, about $50 or more a month, so that makes it well worth my wanting to stay there, Also I have not found a better therapist on my own. She promised to help me find a weekly therapist, when and if I want to move on.

I have spent most of the sessions going over my family history and abuse history as background, but I am doing a lot of healing work through talking and feeling about all of that. It is very intense. And very healing. I am doing good work.

Good and healing thoughts to you all.

I Love A Parade

I used to always go to the local small parade each year, though never seemed to manage to go to the big summer ones for years. Many years I would make plans to go. One year in my early twenties I had planned on going with a “friend.” This friend suckered me into babysitting her female friend’s son, so the two of them could go to the parade and I stayed at her non-air conditioned apartment. I was broke and the offer of money for babysitting was too much for me, big surprise, no one paid up. I think this exploitation set up a very negative pattern in my life, much like childhood abuse sets up long-term negative patterns in a survivor’s life. This followed with many years of my saying it was too hot, too humid, too sunny, too mosquito-ey. Then there is my physical body limitations and not being able to walk much.

I had a good time at the small parade on Friday. I went with doggie. We sat on the sidewalk and were very close to the action. I love the bands. What was really great this year was that they had a big Scottish band in kilts. The music was great.

I had a good time at the parade last year. The year before it started raining 30 minutes before the start of the parade, so no parade. The same thing happened when I tried to go to one of the large parades in Minneapolis a few years ago, rained out.

On Friday I was able to realize that I love parades a lot. But the Inners in our system love them even more. I was thinking about this a lot. I decided to try to find out as much information about the parade as possible and the route. The Aquatennial Torchlight Parade will be on July 18th Wednesday, starting at 8:30 pm, on Hennepin Avenue, in downtown. I think this is doable. I am tentatively planning on it.

Healing Quotes Teens 25

Art is not just ornamentation, an enhancement of life, but a path in itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional, a map to self-discovery.

~ Gabrielle Roth