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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
If you are just coming to my diary for the first time, please read my introductory entry, where I share some background that is important if you plan to follow this diary regularly.
Please also visit my music page, where you can hear samples from my debut CD, I Believe, which features songs written based on experiences shared in this journal.
Well, I suppose every therapist has some positives and negatives. After all, they're all just people like you and me. But this one really has me thrown for a loop. Part of me just doesn't even want to think about today's session. Only the first 10 minutes or so were worth going to. The rest of the time was just not productive. The end was really bad.
I talked about the situation with my family and how I realized that I keep expecting things from my parents that they've promised and then have to back out on for whatever reason. I was saying there are certain things that I know I cannot count on. For example, if they tell me they're going to help me pay off bills or get the new computer, I know I can't count on this. I know they have money trouble. I've learned not to count on it and to interpret this as their expression that they would if they could. I think they need to not say it if they know they can't do it, but they don't really know what they're saying.
What I have the most trouble with is when we plan to do something and then they back out, especially if they're backing out because Mom feels obligated to babysit for my sister. Or we might go anyway, but the time isn't spent with my parents like I needed it to be. This is what happened on Friday. We were going to go out to eat, and sister didn't show up on time to take Harmony home. So instead of waiting till suppertime, Mom decided we would go anyway. And Harmony doesn't like anyone else talking to my mom when she's around. So I got a yummy lunch out of it, but that was all.
Well, I finally figured out why this gets so upsetting. It's like I have so little interaction with real live people that stuff like this is usually the highlight of the week. The thing is if there were several interactions that week and one didn't work out, it would be ok. It would not crush me. But it's not that way, and it hurts a lot. So we got off on talking about ideas to change my socializing pattern. I got to talking about my church dilemma. When I ride with my parents, I don't meet people. This is actually for two reasons. One is that they don't make efforts to meet people. They run for the car after church. So I'm not exposed to people. The other is people assume that parents will take care of me. They don't talk to me. They run me off to mom real quick.
I was trying to explain this to the therapist and to point out that when I'm not with my parents I am forced to either interact with new people or be more independent, neither of which is such a bad thing. But she made one of those comments that just sent me into a place I don't need to be. She said, "But the people who give you a ride might feel like they're babysitting."
Well, so now what? If I think that way, I'll never do anything. I'm not winning any way I approach this. Of course, the thing to do would be to just not let myself be dependent on my parents. But that is much, much easier said than done. That one comment just stirred up a whole lot of stuff with my fears of being an inconvenience and of people doing things with me just to be nice, and when I'm trying so hard to believe that people really do accept me as a person and not just a tag-along, I just don't need these extra feelings stirred up.
But this is the story of my life. If it's going to get stirred up, it will--all at once. And I'm afraid to have these issues on the table right now. These are the things that make me want to pull away from everybody and just isolate specifically for the purpose of seeing who notices I'm gone, to see if they'll reach for me on their own initiative. But that's not something I want to let myself do. That's not trusting people who have already reached out time and again, and it isn't going to help me in healing. So I'm sure I'll be slogging through this new mess during the week.
I'm feeling drained, and my medication schedule with all the eye drops (six times a day) isn't permitting me to sleep very deeply while I'm diving into this stuff and trying to hold things together and put up a normal front for the world. I'm tired. I'm constantly on the verge of tears since Sunday morning. I want a couple of real live arms to hold me while I cry myself to sleep.
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