Forgotten Post - I wrote this somtime last winter/spring before the miscarriage

The absence was due to stress and illness invoking their unholy reciprocal relationship with each other upon my life once more. I very nearly fell apart around Christmastime. I feel like I still might. I find myself thin-skinned and snapping at all the people I care about. I want to go home but sometimes I feel like I wonder where that is. This isn't about grad school. This is about me.

I had a run of what most people would call "bad luck" back in December. I was assaulted after leaving work by an extremely mentally ill person. It's ironic because I had just left the Institute, where all the 'crazy people' should have been safely locked up unable to do themselves or others harm. But I was accosted on the street about 30 seconds away from where I would have boarded transit. This could be a whole post on its own. Maybe one day it will be. A few days later, a friend took me to a spa to relax and unwind. During my massage, I was sexually assualted by the RMT. I'm furious about it now, but at the time, I was paralyzed with... sigh, I guess most people say "fear," but it wasn't fear. It was uncertainty. I kept telling mself that what was happening wasn't assault, and that I was just overreacting because I had been accosted by that man a few days ago. But when I left the massage room, I immediately started crying. Yeah, it was wrong, what happened in there. I'm following up on both of these ordeals, but really wish I could just sweep them under the rug and forget them. I have new profound respect for women who deal with stuff that is so much more serious than this. What I went through was peanuts compared to some, but I'm still all nerves and shakey transference reactions becuase of it.

We spent 5 days over Christmas is one of the worst states in America with Mr. Husband's dad. The "vacation" involved a semi-automatic weapon and being awoken Christmas morning by drunken/high tennants, and more than one call to the police department. FIL remains blissfully deaf and ignorant that we had a shitty time. I remain astonished that it took him a little over a year to ask his son how he was doing since his mom died FOR THE FIRST TIME. Did I mention that about ten minutes before my plane took off that Mummer called my cellphone to tell me that my dad has been diagnosed with frontal lobe syndrome/dysexecutive sydrome and that it is very advanced and started crying at me? There were no Christmas gifts in the states because FIL declared it what HE wanted. I also had to go out and buy all of my own food because he didn't bother to get any gluten-or-dairy-free groceries in the condo. So yeah, very merry indeed.

When we got back home, we hosted Christmas dinner for my family. It was very hard to see my father so far gone and... well, he's not really *there* that much anymore. It's like having dinner with a ghost image. He's regressing quite a bit as well, so there is drooling and incontenence and other not-s0-fun things for the family to deal with. Despite that, I have to admit that this might have been the best Christmas I have EVER had with my family becuase no one fought the entire day. No one really tried to get under each other's skin or push each others' buttons. It was like we were all just too tired for that. So yeah, a Christmas dinner where absolutely no one yelled or cried in my family. A first. So that's something...

I returned to work slowly, I went to do my research day at The Org. and get this: I got called into the HR Lady's office to talk. Apparently, someone put in an HR complaint because they were offended by something I said in one of my research presenations to staff. While discussing the concept of schaddenfreude, the fear of which can prevent people in high SES groups from seeking help for mental health issues, I joked, "Let it to [us] Germans to invent a word that means 'taking delight in the misfortune of others." I thought it was a fairly benign joke, and being of German heritage myself thought that I could get away with it in the same way that many cultural groups and commedians are allowed to make fun of themselves. What an HR lecture I got! At one point, I wanted to say to the HR Lady, "Uh, you know I don't work here anymore right? Like, The Org. does not pay me or employ me." But I bit my tongue and responded in the prescribed way remarking that I understood that it doesn't matter what my intentions are, it's how my comment was experienced by someone else. Later, I found out, that the person who made the complaint actually didn't care at all about what I said, but only did it to get back at someone in management for getting them in trouble for calling another staff member a Nazi. I can guess, but I'm not certain who it was. But I'm dying to know... for I would love to have a word with this individual about not using me as a pawn in their childish game of Fuck-People-Over-At-Work Chess.

Of course, I got sick again the day that my family came over for dinner and have had a cold/sinus infection ever since. I am tired. I am grouchy. I am soooo think-skinned and whiny and wah wah wah I feel all alone and misunderstood pathetic right now, that it is really really very sad. And now work is starting to pile up and I feel like my shoulder muscles are made from cast iron. I can't seem to start anything. I can't seem to get anything going that I need to. I'm arguing and fighting with my husband.

At A Loss For Cute Aliases

I don't yet have a cute alias for my new practicum supervisor, but I need one. It is now 4 weeks into my intervention practicum at this new site, and I have logged a massive total of 3.5 hours. That's not even direct service hours. That is total hours I've spent on-site. Period. I'm supposed to spend 8 hours a week there (one day a week with the option to come in on Saturdays if that is the only time a client can keep an appointment).

Day One: I check in the week before my first day to inquire what time I should arrive and if there was anything I should do to prepare for my first day. The response? My new supervisor hadn't got around to preparing for my being there and had her hands full with the new assessment practicum student. Could I please wait and start next week? I didn't really have a choice. It's not like I have any power in this situation and the new supervisor is doing me a favour by even agreeing to have me at the setting. Sure no problem! See you next week.

Day Two: I check in a few days before my new first day via email. I'm told not to arrive until 11am because my new supervisor will be busy doing an assessment and working with the assessment practicum student. No problem! I plan to come in for 11 and schedule another meeting at 9 am. Sometime between 9 and 10, I get an email (unbeknownst to me because I am in transit and in another meeting) from my new supervisor telling me not to arrive until 12:30 because she forgot that the assessment would run until noon and she has a meeting from 12 - 12:30. I do not get this email because I haven't undergone the surgery to make my smartphone part of my living brain. I arrive at 11 and am told by reception that there is no desk or office at which to put me -- I can't even wait in the waiting room because it is full -- I need to go away and come back in 1.5 hours. No problem! I go to the chiropractor and check in on some paperwork for my gym membership. I come back at 12:30. My new supervisor is clearly struggling to manage her schedule. We chat briefly about the feedback session she'll do and she throws me a file to look over whilst she runs off to another meeting. All the while she is talking to me, she is checking her own smartphone. She returns, I sit in on a feedback session with a family of an child with autism for two hours. Great! That's what I'm supposed to be doing. But uh-oh! My new supervisor has another meeting for half an hour. She suggests that I go watch some IBI therapy in practice with the ABA specialist. Okay, this isn't really why I'm here as I'm not training to be an IBI therapist. And hey, don't get me wrong, IBI is awesome and IBI therapists are a special cross between working-with-chidren-black-belts and angels and work really hard! But they are trained with much less theory and at the college level. I'm a PhD student in clinical psychology. I will never actually DO IBI therapy with anyone. Still, what else am I going to do while I wait, so I go... That's fine. I return to my new supervisor's office with the ABA specialist. I then sit in on their supervision session... Again, o-kay... Then my new supervisor tells me she has two therapy cases to attend to and I think, "Yay, here we go now learning the actual work!" But then she says that it is the middle of therapy and she hasn't broached the topic of having me sit in and she doesn't want to do that with these clients anyway. So I can go home. I briefly chat with the assessment student (who is junior to me in our academic lab) who laughs about how disorganized our new supervisor is. But hey, at least she is learning something and acruing hours.

Day 3: Again, I check in a few days before Tuesday to see what time I should arrive at the setting. I get an email response from my new supervisor saying she forgot to tell me but it is a holiday in her culture on Tuesday and she won't be in. I'm free to go in and watch IBI if I want. Uh-huh. I politely decline and agree to pick up a teaching gig for another professor who is also on holiday that day and needs someone to sub his class. My new supervisor tells me that she will also be away the next week, for another holiday.

Day 4: Like clockwork, I check in a few days before Tuesday to see what the schedule is and if I should maybe go in to watch IBI (even though that would be me just mindlessly gaining hours for something that would not actually be supervised by the psychologist, nor really useful to my learning). My new supervisor tells me she will check on Monday. At 10pm on Monday, I send her an email saying that since I haven't heard from her, I assume that there are no opportunities that day, so I'll stay home. I mention that I really hope there will be something next week because my program expects that I will be "more active" in the practicum by now. I get a terse email back the next morning saying that she has already explained to me that it will be a slow start to the fall and that I'm only there one day a week so it is difficult to get me therapy cases. She adds that the IBI people don't work Mondays so she was unable to check in with them about observing. Less than an hour after said email, I get a voice mail saying that the other psychologist is doing a consult at 1pm today and I should email her if I want to attend. So I do. I mention that I can come at 12:30 to briefly meet before the consult as I have NOT ACTUALLY MET this psychologist. This psychologist emails me one line: "I'm with a client until 1pm." I respond: No problem! I'll come for 1pm and thank you for having me. I arrive at 1pm. She's on the phone so I wait. She then gets a bit irritated when I don't magically know that she is off the phone. I go into her office and she explains that she has no information about this consult and will be finding her way as they go along, and that they client has not been briefed that I will be there so she'll have to ask her permission. The client arrives. This psychologist does a very poor job of explaining why I am there and I get the impression she is more than irritated that she has to deal with me last minute. The client is a mother of a girl with anxiety. The mother declines to have me sit in on the case or indeed this initial consultation. Time at practicum site: 5 minutes. Time it took me to drive to practicum site: 30 minutes. Amount I am pissed off: 4 X 8 hours - 3.5 hours I actually did practicum-related activities on Day 2 = 28.5 hours.

I am 28.5 hours pissed off right now.

For A Good Time Call...

There are prescribed ways to break up romantic relationships. Culturally speaking, there are also rules for what friends do when a couple breaks up. But there aren't  really any norms for breaking up with one's therapist, or how to support someone in the middle of a breakup.

Dr. Therapist and I have been together for a really long time. Around 10 years or more, off and on, but mostly on. For a while, I've been wondering if I'm really getting what I want and need out of this relationship. The therapy relationship is unlike any other you'll ever be in. It's all about you (if you are the client/patient) but both people in the relationship are open to being changed by virtue of being in the relationship. For a while now, I've not felt like some of the basic must-haves in therapy have been happening for me. We often talk about the basic therapy triad: three things that are essential across therapy modalities for it to be successful. They are, basically:
1. Unconditional positive regard - the idea that no matter how awful I am or what nasty, horrible things I say or do, the therapist will find something about me to think positively about, and will see my ugliness within a framework that says I am ultimately loveable.
2. Genuineness - that the therapist is honest, real, and in the moment with me.
3. Respect - the therapist is a model for respecting others and myself. This touches on the first point but is a little different. Respect also means that the therapist honours that this is MY therapy as well as me as a person.
The sad truth is that I have never felt unconditional positive regard from Dr. Therapist. He takes an old-school psychoanalytic psychotherapy approach and adheres to the "blank slate upon which to project" thing waaaay more than is useful with a client like me. I've brought it up and attempted to discuss it. But Dr. Therapist insists that I have hit upon the "limits of what therapy can do" for me. I disagree. The more I learn about my profession, the more I learn that there are many different ways of doing therapy and that client/therapist relationship "fit" might be more important than any other aspect of therapy (including modality, but I'm not entirely sold on that near-dodo-bird argument yet). I think it is important to feel prized and honoured (read: special) in the therapy relationship and I don't think more blank slate is going to do it for me.

So I started therapy-dating. I went on line and found the profiles of a few people I thought I might connect with, and essentially dated them in the therapy context. Most people (as is the case with online dating) I saw only once. Most of the time, the therapist looked fine on paper, but we didn't really seem to connect in the therapy room. This is an expensive thing to do, since more psychologists charge in the $160-$210/hr range. And on these first dates, I'm always the one who is paying. I had a couple of first date disasters... One specialist in sleep and anxiety that I waited MONTHS to get a date with -- I arrived early, as she requested in an email, so that I could fill out some forms, but the receptionist had no idea who I was. I waited for an entire hour (asking the receptionist twice to confirm my appointment and ask where the Dr. was) before I left. I told the receptionist that this wasn't exactly a professional way to treat a first time client... When I arrived home, there was a call from the Dr. "reminding" me about our appointment the next day. When I sent the Dr a copy of the earlier email confirming TODAY as the date, she attempted to blame the mix up first on her new receptionist, and then on the fact that she had just returned from a medical leave. This is a huge no-no as the therapy hour is supposed to belong to that individual client and the FIRST appointment is all about getting to know each other and establishing trust.
I had another female therapist that I thought was going to be a good match as she said she felt comfortable addressing my sleep issues and anxiety, she worked with a lot of graduate students and atheletes, and practised from a feminist perspective. Only in the second session did she bring up the fact that she wanted to use EMDR (look it up and laaaaaaaaugh) on me. If it had been a real date, I would have left before ordering. As it was, learning this about Dr. Pseudoscience cost me 2 X $105(student rate).

So I played the therapy feild for a while.

And then I met Dr. Dick. [And yeah, I laughed too, when he invited me to call him by his first name. I mean, c'mon, if there is a name with more alternative variations, I don't know what it is. The English has come up with at least a dozen alternatives to names like this just to keep God's Frozen People from having to say a word that is a euphemism for genitalia in polite company!] Dr. Dick was friendly and patient on the phone. When he accidentally scheduled another client at the same time as my first appointment, he took full responsibility and completely unpacked the impact of the incident with me in a mature and caring way. It also doesn't hurt that he looks like he could be the twin of one of my favorite high-school English teachers (who also happened to look a lot like Raymond Burr when he was relaunched the Perry Mason franchise). I felt immediately respected, immediately well-thought of, immediately like he was being honest and straight-up with me.

My conditions were met. I've got a new therapist.

It's hard to make this decision for a lot of reasons. I have to "start over" with a new person. I have to talk about things that I haven't spoken about for a long time. I have to find a new common language with someone. I also have to find a way to pay for all of this whereas Dr. Therapist was an MD and billing my provincial health insurance over the past decade. I think the weirdest thing might be telling Dr. Therapist about my decision. My biggest fear, of course, is that he won't seem to care. But then again, that's why I needed a new therapist. After talking about this kind of fear for years now, nothing has changed. I think maybe that's why it wasn't working... some of these older (psychoanalytic) styles don't allow for the therapist to become changed in therapy themselves. Anyway, it feels so strange. And it reminds me of many other relationships I stayed in long past the point of them being good -- just because I was afraid of change, afraid of hurting the other person with my feelings, needs, and wants, afraid of asking for what I needed because I thought I didn't deserve it. There have been a lot of times in my life when I stayed because I made the relationship all about the other person when it should have been about both of us. I can't stay like that in a therapy relationship when it is SUPPOSED to be all about me and what I need.

I won't see Dr. Therapist for a few weeks yet becuase he is away (another complaint I had was his frequent absences and interruptions to therapy). I have some time to think about how to put it to him in a way that is:
1. Respectful
2. Genuine
3. Regards both of us positively

... but mostly me.

Back In The Saddle

For the longest time, I resisted taking a break because I was afraid that if I stopped working, stopped the stress, stopped constantly DOING, that I would not be able to get back up to speed when school started. I was both right and wrong. I can get working again, but it sucks and I don't think I can get up to the crazy amount of working constantly and never taking a break again. That's actually probably a good thing. My break was excellent. Once my Dad's funeral was over and things settled down with end-of-life responsibilities and crying, Mr. Husband and I went up north for a week. We did not answer cellphones or check emails. It was actually rather glorious. When the toilet in our cabin broke, the resort had to give us the key to the nearest building with a toilet... the SPA. So we had access to a 24 hour hot-tub! Hey, make the best of the situation... right? It was difficult to pry me away from that glorious northern escape and my cache of white wine in little tin cans. When I got back home, I committed to maintaining a healthy "vacation of the mind." School started up and I'm tense. But I'm not the kind of tense I was.

PhD3. We are at that point where the noon bell has rung and we both stepped on to the dusty main street in town. All the townsfolk are indoors, peeking out from behind curtains. I flick my poncho to show my pistol as PhD3 chews on a cigarello.

Well, I have to get to work. I already have four articles to read, an interview to review, and a full-fledged data emergency to contend with. I wish I could use a laptop in a hot-tub.