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It's like stumbling through the forest, with a poor map and a reserved guide. My guide has been my therapist and the forest was pretty thick the past 9 months of the year. What started out as casual meetings to discuss family issues turned into issues of friendships, anxiety, and power. Sometimes you don't know what the end of the path is going to look like and I think I'm still trying to figure that out. Right now, I'm stopping therapy for a while. The benefits are great, but the financial cost is high. Of course, financial cost is relative. There is no cost that equal a better quality of life, mentally and emotionally.
But the funny thing about my last session, and a few of the last sessions, is how she has been trying to coach me to think and try often to be self-reflexive. If I can challenge myself at every poor decision, maybe those decisions will become fewer. If I can recognize in myself symptoms of stress or anxiety or resentment or pain, then I will be in a position to do something about it. This kind of self-reflexivity seems so basic but it took us years to come to this point in our travels. I'm nowhere near the end of the road, so I hope I can move forward, on my own for now, with some increased sense of awareness.
Even as I write "on my own" I know that I need to work on making friends. That would get me a benefit of needing my therapist as much. Basic yet challenging for me.
The author of
American Gods opens chapter 19 this way:
One describes a tale best by telling
the tale. You see? The way one
describes a story, to oneself or to
the world, is by telling the story.
It is a balancing act and it is a
dream. The more accurate the map,
the more it resembles the territory.
The most accurate map possible would
be the territory, and thus would be
perfectly accurate and perfectly
useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
~Mr. Ibis
What does this have to do with Dave in therapy? I dunno. But it speaks to me.