Catching Up on the Therapy

Whoa, well, as soon as I decide not to push the step increases, I ended up adding onto my daily count Monday and Tuesday as if I was still aiming for that. Go figure, LOL I had an incredible amount of energy Monday... so much so that I only got 3 hours of sleep that night, then went at top speed all day yesterday, then only 4 hours last night! How whack is that?

So today (Wednesday), I'm dragging worse than a drag queen, sweeties, lemme tellya! My dang bed looks sooooo good every time I walk by it. The only reason I'm not in it right this momento is cuz I am even hungrier than I am exhausted. Wait, wait for it, it'll make sense here in a minute, LOL. Hubs is off work and slept so late I thought he might be dead or something, but he just got up a few minutes ago and will be making us breakfast soon, so I just gotta hold out for those yummy scrambled egg tacos he's gonna make with the low-carb tortillas. Then I will probably sleep all day long. I can handle the day after one night of crappy sleep, but not two nights like that.

So I am trying to get my blogging done before that all happens. And of course, how convenient (not), I remembered I never blogged about my therapy sessions and how they were going. And being as I finished them last week (yay! no more trips to Houston every week!), I guess I'd better blog about it before I forget what to blog about.

[Sorry, had to take a long nap before I could continue...those tacos were sooooo good, lol)

Okay, so I don't really remember ... I think the last time I blogged about therapy, I was happy with the one-on-ones but getting bored with the group sessions. So, anyway, I ended up not going to any more group sessions. That was back around August 1st or so, and it has not been a bad decision at all. My therapist switched me to her partner, and I thought that was gonna be a bummer, but it ended up being wonderful, a great decision. The new lady has a sister who scrapbooks and had just gone through something similar earlier in the year! Get out! Right? It really made things click, cuz she understood the allure of the passion and the fun to scrapping and creating art, to just a regular everyday ole' person like me. And she understood the whole online thing, and she knew 2peas, which was where her sister got involved too much into the social drama that can erupt there and any board frankly, but of course I was not given a name and that drove me nuts for a bit, LOL. I wanted to know who her sister is. LOL Anyway, I was able to decide that while 2peas doesn't affect me that way, the smaller boards online DO. To me, 2peas is just way too big to get "involved and invested" there, and I've always felt that way. I mean, that's just the way it affects me, your mileage may vary as they say.

I did have a slight detour because of some negative words from someone online that I had thought was my friend, way back at the beginning of all this. I couldn't shake my negative reactive feelings, so I had to work it out in therapy. It seemed to me like I was more concerned with not being rude in retaliation for her hurting me with the comment, instead of being outwardly angry. It just festered and I eventually became really really angry. Dr. J really helped me thru that sa far as I could get, cuz I'm still disgruntled about it, to the extent that I wouldn't want to discuss it with the "friend", but I did get to a healthy self-interest point to say to myself and mean it: good-bye, good luck and good riddence. Dr. J and I also agreed that it was sort of a secret blessing that I was basically called dishonest for what, not hanging out on boards? Man, that is primo judgementalism, glad your life and self are so perfect {not!}, and you feel so confident about judging others so quickly.

As you can plainly see, it's a sore subject, but for awhile there, I was just taking all the blame, when I don't owe a bit of anything for that. Just being PASSIVE. Man, that's was my word of the month for July, huh? Dr. J made me realize that when people are faced with a life change and especially if it is hard to see and deal with, they are kind of in shock once they realize what's going down. And you know, they don't have the mental or emotional energy to go around to 4 boards and discuss with everyone individually, like, "so sorry, won't be on any more, thanks!!" I did that on my blog, and you read it if you wanna know what's up in my life, hello?

Oooooooo, this is also why I put off blogging about this, cuz it finally started ticking me off bigtime. LOL, okay, anyway, back to the story. Dr, J. said this was a blessing cuz it got my dander up and increased my success. So in a sad and twisted sort of way, I suppose I should say thank you to that person. Except, that ain't evuh gonna happen, LOL, possibly in 50 years. So okay, maybe that's out of my system for awhile.....

Dr. J also worked with me to uncover what else was driving me to live such a passive life, after a whole lifetime of not being that way. After exploring several aspects of it, we came up with some ideas. What I liked about Dr. J. was that she could identify behaviors well, and asks great questions to get to the causes for the behaviors. (Bad part is that ya haveta dredge up a lotta old memories to help her do this). It seems that I never actually "fought" my arthritii diagnosis back in 2002, I just seemed to accept it. But Dr. J. thinks I was tremendously overwhelmed by it because of the way it detrimentally changed me physically (I'd always been fit up to then no matter how much I weighed). So I gave up, and the passive behavior is characteristic of this. Really simple but so hard to believe that little negativity can wreak such havoc. But it can.

I have to say that this was a dreaded but positive experience for me. I'd seen a psychologist in my 20's to help me figure out my mom and why I did some of the same things she did, and to basically find out who I was (think Gail Sheehy "Passages", cleaning out your closet, which I was eat up with back then); then, about 10 years later Hubs and I had seen a therapist for a brief period for marriage counseling. Both times it was basically me/us talking and the professional never saying much at all. This was irritating to me, even though I know it is a common way of doing it. But Dr. J., she speaks her mind and often. It VERY MUCH enhanced the process. I cannot say enough about this. I told her my thoughts and she said that historically that's a much better way to connect with MALE patients and a much preferred way for MALE therapists, but things are slowly changing. Man, discrimination in the most unsuspecting places, huh? I sure coulda used Dr. J. back 30 years ago, lemme tellya. But oh well, water under the bridge.

Probably the biggest lesson I came away with is to live for me more, stand up for me more, do not step back into the shadows for anyone. I'm still realizing every week how easily this can happen to me, LOL. Seriously. Anywayz, that's the deal, Lucille. Case closed. I've got a gameplan about online behavior. Not gonna do the smaller message boards any more. Since I can handle 2peas no problem, I'll stick to that one only. My blogs are helpful for venting and expressing and communicating, so I'll keep those up. As for my buying supplies (and everything I buy), I now tell Hubs before I buy anything, which means I pick it out first and find the best buy. The very act of running it past Hubs keeps it down to what I need, versus what I want (which is almost everything, lol). Hubs ALWAYS says fine, so it's not humiliating or frustrating. I don't have to justify to him. He has learned that I already do that before telling him, and he's never really denied me anything anyway. The good in that is self-evident, but there is also bad if I'm out of control. But I really hate buying anything now, so I hope that feeling never leaves me. (Plus, gotta love Dr. J: she kept telling me what I'd spent on scrapping was not all that big since I never spend much on myself at all, so I need to allow myself not to feel guilt any more for it and just learn and go forward. Good advice.)

Whew! Now you can see why I'd been puttin' that off, lol...