Posted by Dinah on April 7, 2014, at 3:59:03
In reply to Re: Ugh, so sorry, posted by Willful on April 5, 2014, at 1:04:49
I think much of the time I am dissociated enough from my feelings that I do ok. I was even laughing about it the other day with my boss. But dissociation from my feelings has its down side. I am suffering from so much IBS that it's just now, a month later, that I feel comfortable leaving home for more than an hour or so at a time. I still don't have much of an appetite. Or rather, I'm unaware that I'm hungry. So that maybe once a day or so I figure it out and eat a lot. The rest of the time I have to force myself to eat, and the results are often negative.
If I don't lose weight from this, I'll never lose weight. Unless the steady diet of Risperdal offsets the little food the rest of the time.
Then of course there are the hostile takeovers from my emotional self. I'll be doing just fine and then some little thing will send me right off the rails (as with the last time I posted here). That was purely my emotional self. I'm now purely my rational self. Only in therapy did the two ever come close to meeting.
I'm sorry about your psychopharmacologist. Is that recent? That is so sad.
I think I'm existing in a dialectic. I have grown to trust that my therapist actually cares for me over the last few years. I still can't accept that he did this the way he did it. It can't have happened. Yet it did. He left me waiting and wondering and agonizing. He didn't add a few personal words to the form email. He didn't contact me himself, and he didn't delegate calling me personally to someone else.
I recognize that this is something catastrophic. His wife has terminated his cell phone number (which was his listed business number), and is closing at least one of his offices. You don't do that if you expect that someone will be back in what is now three months. So on her part there is clearly no expectation that he will return in anywhere close to the near future. I don't know if he will ever call me or not. I wonder what will happen to my records.
The only possibility that makes any sense at all to me is that something happened or my therapist had some sort of breakdown and is in a rehab or mental health program. He would expect to be out in four months (since he mentioned four months a few times in his phone message and email), but isn't sure if he'll be allowed to practice. The vagueness in terms of his medical leave would be due to a fear of negative judgment. I still don't quite get why he'd be afraid (and referred therapist and wife would be pretty sure) that he's never going to return. Even if he's impaired in some way, people generally return to practice don't they? The certainty is baffling to me. Because referred therapist didn't seem to be particularly compassionate or worried about him, so I tend to believe that she really meant that he's NOT dying. Which was said in what seemed to me to be a rather emphatic and almost dry tone. I did appreciate her telling me that.
But I don't at all trust my judgment, and I'm most likely wrong. I don't want to think he's dying. Of course I also don't want to think of his life being turned upside down by mental health or addiction issues either. And I wouldn't feel nearly as abandoned under those circumstances. I think I could understand that he couldn't, wouldn't be allowed, to make contact even if he wanted to. And he might not want to if he expected negative judgment from me.
Which would be foolish of him. I may berate him from time to time for his shortcomings. But I wouldn't do so when life is already berating him. He's my therapist mommy, and you don't stop loving your therapist mommy no matter what they do to you or to anyone else. It's a matter of imprinting.
I worry that I've been so distant lately that I didn't notice something was off with him. I worry that if I hadn't cancelled that last Friday before he disappeared, I might have been spared this agony by learning or sensing something.
And I am starting to tremble convulsively as I write this, so I'd better stop now before I am victim of a hostile takeover by my emotional self.
I want to be very clear that these are just my imaginings and in no way reflect any reality of my therapist. It's not even gossip because I have no information. I know his wife is ok, and I'm pretty sure his stepdaughter is ok. That's all I really know. The rest is pure conjecture on my part and is more likely to be wrong than right. The pieces seem to fit better than anything else I can imagine, but there are still any number of pieces that won't jam themselves into that scenario.
poster:Dinah
thread:1062006
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20140310/msgs/1063784.html