Effective Therapy

I had what some call a "break through moment" this past week in therapy. I had been wandering all over the map (much to the chagrin of my therapist who kept trying to reign me in to the topic at hand), trying after 44 years of living to make any sense at all of my life. But this week was different (who knows, maybe it is because I am now paying out of pocket), but this time when I walked into my therapist's office I said "I want to know why... why did I betray someone who professed to love me so much?". And that was where it started. I could see it in his eyes, that "FINALLY! He's starting to get it" look. Then we did something really, really useful that I had never done before. We deconstructed all of my long-term relationships up to my last one. He then pulled out all of his notes from our sessions and started reading things I had said before, bringing out touchpoints between my wild, general ramblings and this very concrete experiment. What an eye opener. Each subsequent relationship creating an environment that allowed something inside to get off track and not providing exactly the type of environment that would help me bring it back on track no matter what I "wanted". In essence, some of the problem had been allowed to operate at a subconscious level allowing me to act somewhat split... I had compartmentalized two very important areas of human existence... I have "learned" to separate love from sex. There are other issues and I'll be delving into them as time goes on, but it was quite fascinating to hear someone else piece together a plausible trail and to tell me "If you don't get a handle on this now, assuming you want to, you will eventually repeat this same set of events." Good, now I have something to go on, to actually work with.

Sometimes the concrete is a much better realm than the abstract (sorry Plato).