I have my weekly meeting with my therapist tomorrow and, as usual, I have homework. Unusually, I’m actually trying to do it. I’m supposed to ponder the following:
– What do I want out of therapy at this point?
– How often should I be going to therapy?
I’ve been thinking about it since our last meeting and it dawned on me that I really ought to write it down if I want it to be coherent, and then I figured, hell, if I’m writing things down, then I might as well just turn it into a blog entry.
I think the main problem is that everything I want out of therapy comes in pairs and all of those pairs directly contradict one another:
- I want to keep feeling, in general, as a functional human being, because I need to keep myself together to take care of myself and my family.
- I want to have a complete breakdown at some point because it doesn’t feel like I’m doing grieving right if I manage to go about my life.
- I want to be able to feel joy and happiness on a regular basis.
- I feel like a bad person because I can somehow put my memories of Colin aside for any length of time to enjoy any part of normal life.
- I want people to treat me normally. I don’t want to spend my life being pigeonholed as the guy who lost a kid.
- I want people to give me a break if I lose my temper or mess up at work because, God, it’s been less than a year since I held my five-year-old’s hand as he died.
- I don’t want to be one of those people who spends too much time talking about the misery of it all or posting Vaguebook references about how empty life is.
- I want to be able to get away with telling people I don’t like that I spent my weekend tending the gravesite or that I didn’t sleep well because Colin is on our mind, because I want to make someone feel as uncomfortable in his or her own skin as I do.
- I want to truly be able to believe that I did the best I could for him.
- I spend long stretches of time hating myself for wishing that last summer would just end because I was so sick to death of watching him die and kind of wish someone would call me out for being that way.
Which, I guess, makes the other question pretty easy to answer. Yeah, I probably need to keep up with some kind of therapy. I’m still not convinced that any amount of analysis is going to sort any of this out, but I’m also pretty convinced that talking this out with someone is better than the alternative, even if we’re limited to some kind of Zoom-like system for the time being. I’m not sure to this day what my therapist is actually doing with me – maybe he’d get somewhere if I did my homework halfway regularly – but I know it feels good talking to him. It’s almost like meeting an after-work drinking buddy, minus the beer. Maybe that’s what it all comes down to.
I remember the first day I didn’t cry after Kniff died. When I realized I hadn’t cried all day, I felt so terrible that I hadn’t been “grieving enough” (whatever that is) that I cried.
Feelings are irrational and contradictory. As someone who has stayed in reasonably good touch with you, I can assure you that wanting a terrible time filled with suffering and lacking hope to end is actually loving for all involved. You would have given your voice, your eyes, and your legs if it would have saved him. But there was no such trade to be made.
So, I am only calling you out on being mean to my friend Niels. He was in an impossible situation, writhing in pain, and of course he wanted the pain to stop for himself and for his youngest child, and for the rest of the family as well.
You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be entirely reasonable. Research indicates that people grieve differently— there isn’t one right way to grieve.
((((((Hug)))))))