Posted by Pfinstegg on January 27, 2004, at 21:31:02
Today I have been in therapy for exactly a year! I've been thinking over what has happened so far, and where I might be going during next the next year. Although I go twice a week, like so many other people here, I am going to a psychoanalyst, and so am lying on the couch all the time now and free-associating. Sometimes I look with envy at the discussions about what to talk about -or not talk about- in sessions. I don't have a choice, as I *have* to say whatever comes to mind, as best I can. Of course, you never do it totally, every moment, but you do try your best. It's just amazing how quickly the most impossibly embarrassing things come up- just the strangest off-the-wall things! But over time, you get (sort of) used to it happening, and when you get such consistently empathic and tuned-in responses as I do from my analyst, you do start to be a lot more comfortable with all these parts of yourself.
I can say that I've improved quite a bit as far as having less depression and anxiety, although it still comes and goes. I think I have a much greater capacity to hold ambivalent, or even conflicting, feelings about things in mind at the same time, instead of switching rapidly from one to another. I am finding that it is such an extraordinary relationship- one like no other- that it gets richer, more complex and more intimate and meaningful week by week, all the while ranging through child-like love, intense dependence, hate, rage, shame, mortified embarrassment, sexual longings, exhaustion- and then back through them all, over and over. I am hoping to recover lost memories of abuse which I know occurred from age 5-10. They come up in dreams and visual images, but it's almost impossible to put them into words, so far. I really feel that I'm becoming a *me* that I didn't know before, although the *what* is not too clear yet!
My analyst said at the beginning, "I hope that you will have as intense an emotional experience here as possible." He's made it possible for me to have that. I am the only person that I know of here going to an analyst, but I don't think he's very different from several therapists whom people have described here. Analysts are not at all Freudian any longer. Mine is anything but a "blank slate"; he talks quite a lot about all sorts of things- even special interests of his own, laughs with me, sometimes expresses and uses his own free-associations to help me understand mine, and, most powerfully, is an attentive, very tuned-in listener. He puts a lot of emphasis on the relationship between analyst and patient, on the reality of abuse, for many, on dissociation as a way people deal with the abuse, and on the helpfulness of regression (that's where the couch comes in). If he has a particular hero, I think it is Sandor Ferenczi, whose biography describes him as "the psychoanalyst of tenderness and passion".
Well, sorry this is so long -I just wanted to mark my first anniversary to fellow babblers!
Pfinstegg
poster:Pfinstegg
thread:306246
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040123/msgs/306246.html