Category: psychoanalysis

24. (What if) I had conversion therapy as a kid and I almost died from it.

25. (What if) I am so fucking angry cuz of it.

26. (What if) I had more conversion therapy in the psych hospital and I almost died from it.

27. The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Desiree Akhavan.

28. But in the hospital you have no rights even thought there’s a Patient’s Rights sign on the wall that you read and read with incredulity cuz not one of these rights is being given to you and the sign is a mockery and a travesty right under your nose and there is nothing you can do about it.

29. So this is when I start feeling really bad about myself, that I’m a bad person, when I think of all those who hurt me cuz I was nothing and they could do whatever they wanted with me and the only explanation for that is that I was (and still am) a very, very bad person.

18. The first day of the year. So many things this year. My heart was smashed and through the pulp and gore new space grew. Space for my analyst, my husband, my beautiful girlfriend, my new dog(s), art, maybe a wheelchair. So much goodness, so much wisdom and tenderness and peace.

19. Today I talked to someone about a friend we lost in 2019. How easy it is for everyone to judge quickly and harshly. There is always a story. It doesn’t always condone what is done, but it’s there, a fully fledged story no one will ever know fully.

20. My analyst is a remarkably humble human. I hope one day to have half her humility. She’s epistemologically humble and interpersonally humble.

21. Humility is not thinking poorly of oneself. That is not humility.

22. I watched Disobedience today. I think I have seen it before but it was new enough. Maybe I never did see it. What a lovely movie. A woman director would have given it a different ending. Maybe.

23. I too was told once, “Try to love men.” I wish I had been told, “You will always love women, let’s find a way to make you happy.”

17. Happy new year!

10. One year when I was still in my birth country, on my way to work I drove through a small valley full of apple trees in bloom. It was near Soave. I was a sub teacher and my tenure at this particular school lasted for a short enough time that the apple trees were always in bloom.

This is what a blooming apple tree looks like. Imagine a small valley packed with them, and the road curving through it, ascending and descending. The valley opened up after a turn in the road, and every morning I took the turn with great anticipation, and every morning my breath stopped.

I loved being a sub teacher.  I saw many rural places I didn’t know and loved the kids and the classroom passionately. The smell, you know? The smell and the books and all that mutual teaching and learning.

11. One must thread the land of memory with great care. Sometimes it’s wise to stay away from it altogether, take a rest

12. The Luiselli book is in part about Luiselli’s own work as a documentarian, and her passion for documenting everything about her life. I am the opposite. I shed traces of the past like a ruthless conqueror who burns his enemy’s fields and tills them with salt.

13. In spite of the salt my past grows like kudzu. I try not to see the kudzu. I shut my eyes.

14. I take my past into my analysis and we grieve it together.

15. I have my memory. I don’t need documents. I don’t want documents. My memory is enough.

16. For now.

9. Day three is a day without fighting. We laugh hard. I often dissolve into silliness and euphoria when I am tired. This is good tired though. Maybe it isn’t even the tiredness but the sheer relief of not being angry.

10. My dog loves me.

11. The year’s change is not easy for me, but then few things are. One holds strong.

 

 

 

4. I am reading Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.

5. I am watching Watchmen and Mrs. Fletcher. 

6. I fight. I calm down. I fight again.

7. I stay the course.

8. I find hope even though Jews are murdered, Black folks are murdered, refugees are disappeared. I find hope in love because “truth without love is unbearable.”

1. On day one I fight. I don’t remember what it was about though it was mere hours ago. After I fight I become despondent about my irredeemably evil nature and decide to punish myself with poison.

2. I watch Netflix’s The Two Popes instead. I am delighted by its representation of weak men who hold each other up through charity, compassion, and humility.

3. I think of Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, which I have of course not read, but about which S. told me the following: the patient kills the psychoanalyst; the patient needs to kill the psychoanalysis in order to get better. It’s an old book, but I am once again disappointed by the mystique this discipline bestows upon the psychoanalyst and the almost deterministic passivity it bestows on the patient.

I know for a fact that I am capable of infinite agency and, while I may very well “kill my psychoanalyst,” I am also capable of breathing life and love into her, and through her into me, and us, in a limitless bounce of back-and-forth givingness. We, my psychoanalyst and I, kill each other and bring each other to life again and again. We are both patients and healers. We are both fully rounded people capable of great passion and emotions.

4. I forgive myself. I forgive everyone.

 

 

 

I’m taking my first voluntary break from therapy in 7 years. I never missed a session unless I really couldn’t go (maybe once or twice altogether) or I had overdosed on drugs and I was too fucked up or too in the hospital to go (more than once or twice; in truth, in 7 years I overdosed so much that hospitalization became necessary only once).

Until a very short time ago (a month? a week?) I couldn’t have voluntarily skipped therapy. There were many times when I wished I could. Leaving another invariably feels to me like being left by another, and the sense of abandonment is intolerable. Now, though, I’m probably rehearsing departure. Clearly, I’m not fearing abandonment. I am so traumatized.

I feel as if my therapist were doing me untold violence. I feel cleaved on the sides of me — off goes an inch from my hips, cleaved clean; off goes a bit of my shoulder; my body’s contours are squarer, less curvy. I’m being cut as to fit into a box.

I feel denied. My feelings, my words. I have never been contradicted, interrupted, corrected so much. It’s part of her new policy. She won’t let me get away with flights of fancy. The result is not authenticity, for me at least. It is the very opposite of authenticity. I’m cutting my own self down to size, just to please her. Maybe I can make this work. Maybe I can make this work. Please don’t be mad. Please stop berating me.

My therapist has become the monster woman.

It seems I was able to speak directly about my analysis only during its first years, and even then, not so much.

It’s been the hardest thing I have ever done.

It’s been the only thing I have ever done that has healed (to some extent: I’m still very much a work in progress) structural damage and given me the capacity to live.

I didn’t know how to live.

I didn’t want to live.

Three days before my birthday, my analyst changed everything. This is a difficult story to tell. This is a story I want to tell. This is a story I don’t know how to tell.

I worry, even behind this wall of anonymity, about protecting my analyst, who is a very serious, very committed, very able professional.

I worry about being judged — my being judged; her being judged; our being judged. Outside clarity is such an easy delusion. Everything is black and white, from the outside. Things are so complex and rich and evolving on the inside. I hate the quick judgments I have received when I’ve told that my therapy is going poorly. I hate that people’s experience of therapy is so shallow that they can easily say, “Oh you have to change therapist,” without even hearing the second sentence of the story.

But then people do do that, don’t they? They protect you. They see harm and, since they love you, they say, “Run!”

I haven’t run. I have stuck it out through this terrible crisis like a pro. She has too. I give her credit for it. But now I see the end coming. The unraveling. The insoluble impasse.

It’s killing me more than the thought of leaving her is killing me. She’s hurting me. She beating me. She’s floundering.

When I tell her she’s floundering she flounders. Alternates between anger and resentment at the accusation and moments of clarity, admission, honesty, courage.

She has decided (this is part of the change) that she will be unflinchingly honest with me. Someone told me a couple of days ago that honesty without compassion is cruelty.

My wonderful, loving analyst has turned into a cruel analyst.

It’s hard to have been loved so damn much for 7 years and now be the object of cruelty. It’s stunning. It’s disbelief. It’s trauma.

She’s floundering. She’s fucking up. If she can’t find herself again, and stop being furious at me, I’ll have to go.