For the moment...

I'm on hold with switching therapists as my psych has to arrange with his intern how to work with me. I'm not easy to work with:-) Maybe you figured that out already from reading my blog. Been told I think too much, ruminate too much, isolate way too much and am generally a misogynist with OCD, PTSD besides formal diagnoses. Opinionated, stubborn, terrified and often too smart for my own good...or everyone else's good because I have a low tolerance for BS and circuitous conversation leading nowhere, which is a primary reason for a change of therapists.

My current therapist doesn't take any notes or tape sessions. Her M.O. when something is critically important and usually dealing with attachment issues/the lack of attachment is to lean in and say very somberly, I am so very sorry you had to go through that, a phrase that runs off my back like water off a duck, in fact it rings so hollow its almost irritating to hear each time, its useless. it's also an opportunity for her to share her own similar stories or those of other nameless patients who went through situations and survived.
I haven't survived, I'm a shattered vessel of a human being trying to manage each day as it comes.

I watched mesmerized today as Dr. Phil interviewed the mother who walked away from her 2 children and husband for 11 years. One day was so overwhelmed with the idea of being divorced and left to raise her children, she abandoned everything with the clothes on her back and walked to a park, to sit crying until a group of homeless came to sit with her and ask if they could help. She became part of a group of people in Key Largo FL, lived with an alcoholic for almost a decade until she couldn't stand his drinking anymore, her father was an alcoholic, her mother didn't bond/attach with the children FOR GOD'S SAKES YOU COULD WRITE MY NAME IN PLACE OF HERS. And her worst sin was she lived a life without ever contacting her kids. She was reconstructing her life each time in each new relationship as if it was going to be good now...when the pressure got to much she left, over and over. FOR GOD'S SAKES YOU COULD WRITE MY NAME IN PLACE OF HERS.

Dr. Phil interviewed 2 psychiatrists and they both said ATTACHMENT issues were at the core, she never learned to deal with anxiety, depression or fear, she had no coping skills that normal parenting would have taught her. Here's where we differ, I also have attachment issues, severe ones that allowed me to step away from my children and both of us wept for all the years of separation but remained incapable of reaching out to close the breach. The difference is I had learned from my father, since I took care of him since toddlerhood, that work is honorable, being smart is a gift and you use what you have to talk your way in and out of anything and everything. So at times I feel like a powerful machine and at other times, sometimes simultaneously, I feel completely vulnerable and incapable of anything productive. This mix of terror and belief in myself has kept me afloat and yet held me back from doing what I might have accomplished as a writer.  I write now and think, who the hell cares, no one would listen there are so many other disconnected dysfunctional voices crying out in the dark.

I felt badly for her, to watch her sniveling in from of a camera, apologizing for something she couldn't explain. Because its almost impossible to explain to another human being, particularly one with children of their own, that you feel that anyone else could be a better parent than yourself, that you don't want the crud that you are to soil your beautiful kids and its better to just walk away to save them from you. Maybe Augusten Burroughs would get it....