Therapy Updates: Session Seven
After nearly two months my therapist knows me well enough to start identifying my patterns, and this week she hit nothing but homeruns.
We talked about the dissociation, how hard it can be to not slip into a frozen state any time I’m stressed, overwhelmed, need to drown out my internal process, or just need to empty my head for a few minutes. I told her plainly that it doesn’t feel like one issue but half a dozen, some that prevent me from functioning the way I’d like to and some that I think are mostly useful when used within reason. We went over how I feel at work when I turn to my phone for escapism, and some experiments I could do when I’m feeling overwhelmed that might help me re-center and keep working.
It was a productive conversation, but there were a few things she said that stuck with me all week. The first was that I tend to pull away from vulnerability and re-focus on other people’s behavior. She’s absolutely right. I do. It’s not just an issue in therapy, though. It’s an issue with my thinking at large. I focus on analyzing the patterns of others instead of shifting my own behavior to better cope with bad situations.
That’s not to say that my job, which was largely the focus of our conversation about dissociation, isn’t badly managed and next door to impossible to perfect to the degree that’s been demanded of me. I’ve still been set up for failure in a way that makes the job hard to focus on and even harder to feel like I’m doing well. It is to say that focusing on the bad behavior of management isn’t going to make my job any easier. Focusing on addressing my dissociation and redirecting away from the dissociative freeze certainly could.
It’s not just work, though. I can think of a dozen situations in which I’ve focused on other people’s behavior rather than getting my needs met. It’s a piece of the fawn response puzzle that I hadn’t put together yet.
I’ve spent the week redirecting myself away from analyzing others and toward meeting my own needs. It’ll absolutely take time to perfect, but overall, I’m already happier and taking better care of myself as a result. I’m spending more time gently guiding my brain to a solutions-oriented way of thinking and it’s working. I can’t stay there yet, but I think that’s just a matter of practice.
It all smacked into place in a meeting with one of my managers. She’s always been one of the nicer people I work with, and while the combination of demands from four managers is still rough, she’s one of the more reasonable managers I have. We talked it through, and she had solid ideas and solutions ready to roll out. I realized that while I hadn’t been focusing on this manager’s behavior in particular, I was making the same mistake at work that I was making in therapy. I was focusing on the people and how they treated me, not on finding a workable solution. I spent the rest of the day taking her advice, prioritizing her suggestions, and planning a way to better track my sites.
That one comment from my therapist has single handedly transformed how I’m approaching much of my day-to-day life. It just took me a few days to get there.
The conversation about vulnerability and pulling away from it also sparked another moment I’ve been processing since our session. My therapist insisted I’d been vulnerable at one point in our session and had diverted to talking about other people. I believe her, but I couldn’t put together what the vulnerable moments had been.
The question is, does vulnerability require being aware of it? To me, vulnerability is sharing things that are usually not spoken of. It’s difficult, a process of overcoming fear and pain. The problem there being, there are things that are easy for me to talk and write about that societally aren’t usually spoken of, but that I have no issue addressing. It could be I’ve been demanding a physical sensation from a body and mind loath to provide those things. That explains a lot about the reaction I get from people sometimes, all those moments in which someone clearly thinks we’re closer than we are because I’ve disclosed something common for me to talk about, but that typically go unmentioned.
All of that to say, one of my primary goals for therapy is likely a moot point. I’m already being vulnerable in therapy. I just can’t feel it. The problem is that I’m not at all emotionally connected to what I’m saying, not that I’m failing to be vulnerable, at least not entirely.
That’s a lot to work on between sessions, but I think focusing on redirecting my dissociation toward finding a solution is a good place to start. It won’t solve my problem of not being able to emotionally react to talking about my trauma, but I do think the practice of closing the loop on dissociation is a good place to start.
I’ll update you on how that’s been going next Monday.
