But the idea of having a therapist at the age of eight - I mean, what are parents for? How can they be so blind to what are surely (in nearly all cases) simply their failings?
Now I'm not going to come out and say my parentals are all that great at parenting, they haven't been awful, they've never really been abusive, but they have always been and continue to be very remote. There is no great amount of communication, in fact in the cases where things should really be said there hasn't been anything said. It goes both ways but I'm the kid, damn it, it shouldn't be up to
me. I remember a few times where we should have had a dialogue and my mom would say "talk to Dr. Siegel about it" or "talk to your father". She knows damn well I'm not going to talk to my father about anything. I don't know if it's because I'm afraid of talking or because he's afraid of listening but we just don't talk. It's only become apparent in the last few years how eerily similar my dad and I are, and it's no more apparent than in our general unwillingness to confront things.
I'm working on it, of course. Part and parcel of my problems growing up was an inability to really significantly address my many fears. But with my friends it's become different, because they've taken a vested interest in me and I'm very sensitive to how they perceive me. So I turned to them, because I didn't really have anywhere else to go, my therapist was not an active enough part of my life that he could really spur me to change. Tellingly, I told my mom that I was going to open up to these people and she told me "If you open up to them they will turn away from you." This incidentally is what I believed for most of my life, but hearing my mom say it I realized how utterly wrong it was. Among other things that's why I decided to not to seek the counsel of my parents from that point on.
I don't really harbor ill feelings for my parents (although you know, with these things, it's more complicated than simple good or bad feelings). God knows they've made some bad choices. But outside of the emotional void they've been as supportive as they could be. The problem now is that the void of emotional support is so gigantic that it's difficult to resist being way too dependent on my poor friends. It's like coming upon an oasis after weeks of being stranded in the desert, even if it's better for you to sip you're going to gorge yourself. But they are
not my parents. It's hard.
Before, I don't know, I was always being told that in order to make things better you have to rely on yourself, and I didn't believe it at all. And it's not true, not really, you need a lot of things besides yourself, lots of support, but you can't expect things to fix themselves. It's just in my case I couldn't bring myself to really utilize the services of my therapist and it took my self-consciousness to be the motivator for my growth. My friends knew all about my neuroses and accepted them, but I couldn't stand being so sullen around them all the time, having them see me as the guy you always had to soothe before you had fun with him. And I realized that I basically had a choice between being sullen and having friends, and I enjoyed my friends enough that I chose to stop being such a sad-sack (coming out of my teens, it's hard to overstate what a sea change that was. Being depressed is oftentimes very comforting, in its way) and it's really shifted my entire being, over the last year or so. It's what my therapist always pushed me to do but I resisted him because I was afraid, and it took a desire stronger than that fear to overcome it.
tl;dr The point is, yeah, I come from a place of not really having effective therapy or fulfilling parenting, and maybe I'm not the best judge of such things. And I'm certainly not suggesting that therapy isn't worth it, that was not my intention at all, and lord knows that even for me there are things I
have to share exclusively with my therapist. I'm just saying, you could be going into therapy expecting things that they're not just going to give you, if that makes sense. Just be sure it's what you need.
Sorry for the jumbling, it's after 6 AM. I should really consider sleeping.
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Topic: Whatever, Let's Have A Goddamn Blog Thread, But Try And Keep It Reasonable (Read 756807 times)