The Couch Session

Remember when I was talking about the tidal wave? The massive wall of depression that was about to fall on me and devour me, and yet I was powerless to stop it.....

I have that same dreadful feeling as my appointment with my 'head shrinker' approaches. I know that he, or a counselor of his choosing is going to want to pry into my brain and cough up all my dirty little secrets. All the skeletons in my closet are going to have to be dragged out and tried on for size and analyzed for their particular impact on my once fragile infantile psyche.....

See I've been through this therapy shit already....many times! I can't believe I am even going to spill this to the entire world, but when I was 14 my mom had me 'committed' to a adolescent psych unit for 4 weeks (that was how long the insurance would cover)...she claimed I had tried or wanted to kill myself....which was a complete and total lie! She blurted out in a family therapy session that I made 'her want to kill herself'....rather quickly my therapy switched from WTF is wrong with you? To how the hell do we get this girl out of here? A dear friend's parents even went so far as to look into adopting me....(Love You Fessels!) but there I was stuck, for 4 weeks in a mental hospital. My stepfather whisked my mother away to Canada for a vacation...running I am sure from the things I might spill in my therapy sessions....he didn't quite think through his little plan to get rid of me. The 'experts' expressed concerns that they felt I had been sexually abused and put me in group therapy but I never coughed up all my secrets. I am stubborn as hell, always have been. Still am. And I am sick and fucking' tired of being asked.

Can't the results just suffice for the answers? Isn't it clear that I am fucked up? Do I really have to vomit up my past? Can't we just leave it in the landfill in the back of my brain and pile all my other bad but less traumatic memories on top it...pile it so high that maybe we can convince my brain it doesn't even exist?

I didn't intend to blog about this tonight but for some reason it is just pouring out of me and I am rolling with it....Let me paint a picture for you of what life was like for 12 year old me....My mom worked all the time, probably 2 jobs actually to pay the bills. My dad was a deadbeat who might slip her a $50 and buy me candy if he ever came around. Meanwhile my mother, as we know now, was suffering terribly. I am sure fighting the demons in her head that had to be starting to creep up on her even when I was a child had to be maddening and frightening.....Then along comes Mr. Wonderful. Mr. Wonderful who already has a wife...but he's taking care of that promptly. Mr. Wonderful who has met this troubled attractive woman with a busty blossoming beautiful young girl and swoops in to care for us. To rescue us.....at a price. So many things I see now that I couldn't see then. Things that happened within his own first family that are too disgusting for me to even think about and then he walked into our family.......but I was stubborn. I didn't make it easy....but I was smart....I knew I was being manipulated, groomed, prepared, romanced.....I kept my mouth shut . My mom seemed so happy. I would be blamed. I was always trouble and it would be my fault somehow. So this tip toeing ensued while I kept my silence. Then finally he makes his move....

He fucked with the wrong girl though....I've been a tough mother fucker since I was tot. I scared him off....and he stayed away....for a while.....

Long story short, in my late teens, as my mother is loosing her mind, divorcing him because she is having paranoid delusions about him, I make the mistake of telling her things that actually ARE true about him...but she is so clouded by her illness she disregards them. She divorced him. Four months later she remarried him. I suppose leaving an 18 year old girl a house, rent free, was supposed to be consolation enough for what I had had to endure.....they moved away and I didn't hear from them for several months.

I spent most of my nights alone, smoking pot, writing poetry and trying loose myself in the flow or words. I eventually consumed enough drugs to forget, for a while, that the real world outside my door was hell.

Fast forward 5 years later, to my wedding day. A day I cannot have my mother attend because she is convinced that my ex-stepdad (they have re-divorced by then) is going to murder me at my wedding....even tries to hire my half brother and my dad as hitmen....bad bad bad scene.....but I held my head high and had my wedding just as I'd planned....pretending not to hear the whispers of 'Where is her Mom?"......

Fast forward 4 months to a knock on my door in the middle of the night. My mom. Estranged from me. Asked to stay away until she would get help and stay on her meds.....asking if we can be a family again. Her eyes almost begging and screaming at me not to turn her away. I ask if she is taking her meds...knowing by the energy bouncing off of her that she is not. "No" she says defiantly. "Then no we cannot be a family again...." As she turned to leave I grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around to look at me. I looked her square in the eye and said "But I LOVE YOU! I Love You! I Love You! Nothing is going to change that" and I hugged her. She didn't hug back. She never hugged back...even as a kid...she always just limply put her hand at your waist...she left quietly....

She passed away 2 weeks later. God gave me the gift of being able to say goodbye. I will never forget his kindness for that.....

So see...there are reasons I am fucked up. And they are reasons I thought I didn't want to talk about but apparently just spilled them all to you...think I can just print my blog out and give it to my therapist and tell her to give me a call when she's gotten up to speed on things? Ha! And I can write this shit so much easier than I can say it. Some of the things I have written above I cannot and have not spoken about...I don't know why I chose tonight to purge. But there ya have it.

I just dread having to drag all of this back up again. I know how emotionally draining it is....how hard and sickening and frightening. Nothing reduces you back to being a child like recalling childhood trauma.