Therapists

       Today my therapist had to cancel our appointment (and all her others) and I was slightly devastated, partially because I’ve been having a “I'm a worthless loser” week and partially because I actually kind of enjoy going to see her and I already think that I don’t get to see her enough. [The weirdest thing is that I had a dream last night that she cancelled my appointment, no lie. I should really try to hone in on that apparent psychic ability.] Now, I’m sure she had a very good reason for not going to work today but I still couldn’t help being a little angry because I needed her and she didn’t show up. It didn’t matter that she really has no responsibility to me whatsoever or that dealing with me is just what she gets paid to do, the emotional part of my brain didn’t want to hear it. This is where the relationship with your therapist gets a bit tricky. You want to like them and feel comfortable with them so that you'll talk to them and they can help you, but at the same time you have to realise that they’re not really your friend. Their job is not to be at your beck and call 24 hours a day. My therapist already goes beyond this for me so I have absolutely no right to be mad at her but sometimes it’s hard to get the rational part of your brain to communicate with the emotional part of your brain.

       It gets even harder when you start to think about the fact that it’s really a one-way relationship. You are completely dependent on them for your happiness and sanity but to them you’re just another patient. I’m not saying that they don’t care about their patients but you are still just a part of their job description, they see tons of people just like you every week. My therapist told me recently that I wasn’t a parasite, that by participating in our sessions I help her hone her counseling skills (as do her other patients), but in reality that’s just what we are. We go on and on about ourselves and our problems and we milk them for their skills and strategies without giving anything back. But I guess that provides the line between friend and therapist, although sometimes it can get a bit smudged. And plus, I’m sure seeing us finally happy at the end of it all is gratifying for them, this is what they chose to do for a living after all. So I guess I just need to work on getting myself to realise that it’s not personal, that this isn’t a friend who’s blowing you off, and hopefully I can hang in there until our next session.      

My Brain Needs Glasses

     Back when I first started seeing my new therapist, one of the main things she was trying to do was to get me to believe that it was okay to have bipolar and ADHD, that it didn’t mean I was defective. One of the things she said was that my brain just needed glasses (and then she told me about a book with that title which I haven’t read). She said that you wouldn’t call someone who needed glasses defective so I shouldn’t call myself defective. I never really got the relation though. Then the other day something struck me about how my brain worked not on the ADHD drugs, but on the bipolar drugs.

     I’ve been studying for my exam and I noticed that everything seemed so much simpler and made so much more sense now. These are things that I have learned numerous times before but had always just memorised the facts, I could never fully comprehend it. I realised that since I started the bipolar meds, everything seems to get through a lot easier. I’ve mentioned before that it’s like watching fifty different TV channels at once, now imagine trying to learn or comprehend something with that much going on, it’s next to impossible. This is where the whole my brain needs glasses thing comes in. For almost ten years now, my brain has been fuzzy, just like how the world is blurry when you need glasses.  But once I started the new meds, the “haze” disappeared and now I’m finally able to think clearly, my brain got glasses. Studying is so much easier than it was during my undergrad because there’s no longer anything clouding my ability to learn, I finally understand everything I’ve been taught in the past four years. Now I realise that me suddenly understanding everything could be because I’m older but for one thing, I doubt that my IQ has increased all that much in the past couple years and for another thing, it’s hard to believe that my mind clearing up after I started the bipolar meds is just a coincidence. 

     It’s unfortunate that it took so long for me to get some clarity; I kind of missed out on ten years of my life. Sometimes my therapist asks me about how I felt during high school or my undergrad and I can’t answer her. She says that she’s older than me and if she can remember high school then I definitely should be able to, but I can’t. The past ten years are just a hazy blur that I wasn’t really there for, not mentally at least, what’s it called? Non compos mentis? That terminology may be a little extreme but I think you get my point. All in all, I’m not defective (although I still think that my brain is at least defective), not because I have bipolar or ADHD and not because I wear glasses.