Scaffolding

Many of you tell me you feel supported by your therapist. Some of you don’t quite use those words, but you talk about wanting a session when you’re having a hard time. Or about writing or calling your therapist when you are having trouble coping or reassuring yourself. And it just don’t get it at all. I don’t understand what you get out of it, or why your therapist would help with whatever that was.

This comes up for me in the context of therapy mostly because I’ve thought a lot about how therapy is supposed to go. I’ve paid a lot of attention to representations and recollections and carefully analyzed my own experiences as part of trying to find a way to make therapy work for me. The idea that people talk to their therapist to feel better is such a trope that it’s even used when the therapy is wielded harmfully, like when it reinforces violent narcissism in Future Man. Or as a joke like like when Felicia Day gets broken up with by her therapist in The Guild. But it’s not just a trope, it’s also a thing you tell me about your therapy. Even those of you who don’t feel a lot of support in other places in your life sometimes imagine that a therapy session will help you be calmer or otherwise improve your week.

And I just don’t see how that works. I feel like my therapy is useful now. I think the LI work helps me find new connections and new ways of thinking. But I feel like what my therapist gives me during this time is help doing the exercise – helping me by providing recommendations for how to work and expert observation of me doing work, just like a physical therapist might ¹I mean, theoretically. I personally haven’t ever been because that requires several steps related to health care that I have never done. But I’ve seen it happen to other people.. But I don’t feel like I get anything from them emotionally. I sort of don’t want to. Sessions where we aren’t working a specific technique make me feel distant from them, when I see how they don’t have a deep understanding of my feelings and are depending on me to supply all the answers. I’m not upset by that; I feel like that’s what I signed up for. But other people seem to also sign up for some other part. My therapist even offered another part, but I don’t understand what I’d do with it.

I talked about it with you today, and you said: “It’s like having a care giver figure checking in on me… [who] understands… me” ²You said another thing too, about the “next best thing”. Which I sort of ignored while it happened because my brain wants to reject any positive reading on the basis that even seeing myself in the statement is narcissistic, let alone the idea that I could do anything but harm in such a role. But I’m going try to give myself … Continue reading. Which I think helps me see the problem. I have no idea what a care giver might do for me, and I have pretty adverse experiences with checking in. I mean, I understand the concept of care but it’s hard for me to imagine that any of it is for me. Even care provided as part of an economic transaction feels like a thing that’s not for me, let alone someone thinking of me in terms that aren’t about my utility or my cost. I have never felt like there’s someone I could reliably ask for help, not when things are tough. Not when there are emotions or hard choices or unpleasant outcomes. It’s why the plan is always to run away – if I’m willing to give up everything and be “independent” I have great power to make problems disappear. When there’s no one to help, when all of the bits of my life that seem so overwhelming to everyone else finally overwhelm me, running away is the only option I have left.

This isn’t a criticism of you. I’m hard to support. And I don’t just mean that in the “I’m not allowed to have needs” way (though my brain is sure that’s true too). The things I need help with are sometimes very hard, because I let my life include very complicated situations. The things I need help with trigger your anxiety, which makes it hard for you to focus on me because you are so worried. You’re used to me being the one who reaches out, who finds the answers, who saves you from all the things that you find overwhelming (even as I am one of those things). And so when I am helpless on a topic it can be very hard for you. But I do need help. All the time. Just like everyone else. Even though my experience teaches me I shouldn’t need it and can’t have it.

My experience with “checking in” is even worse. I hear people talk about it sometimes. It can be phrased in ways like “checking to see if I’m dead”, which is clearly an idiom but since I don’t really understand the concept I don’t understand the phrase either. I’m not sure it’s a thing that happens to me, being checked in on. I at least don’t notice if it does. Occasionally I display something that’s hard for other people to ignore, like if my eyebrow control is temporarily overcome by injury, or if someone catches me bleeding. Those interactions are undesirable for me because they interfere with my ability to be invisible, but I don’t think that’s the same thing. I think checking in is about poking another person for some reason other than to quell your accute distress. And if that happens to me I don’t see it.

But I’m not 100% that’s right either, because I try to do that sort of checking in. Just asking for info about your life apropos of nothing. Or responding to some emotion I can read to ask you about it, how you’re handling it, what’s motivating it. Or just to try to prompt some conversation. Occasionally it works but often the response is defensive, which is inconsistent with the desire people express for “checking in”. Sometimes I can see it’s your anxiety driving that reaction; sometimes you feel differently about my prompt after you’ve had your own emotions. But I suspect somehow I’m not hitting the mark. And I don’t understand the concept well enough to know how to change.

All of which is to say I probably don’t feel supported by my therapist because I don’t feel supported at all. I haven’t been supported and am not super sure what it would look like or why I would want it, let alone how to arrange it. Which I guess makes me feel better about therapy, and also a little worse that even professional help doesn’t make me imagine having support. This is one of those things were I was broken badly when I was 4 and because other 4-year-olds learn this without explicit instruction no one has bothered to develop a way to teach it to old people. Where me asking the question makes people uncomfortable but rarely provides any insight. Often what I get is illogical platitudes that either assume the inherent goodness of something I know is often bad or are useless tautologies. It’s like greeting cards or holdiays but it’s even more opaque to people because they’ve known it for longer than they can remember and never needed to learn to share it with anyone.

I’m not even sure it’s relevant with respect to my therapist. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything there (which is a bold claim for someone who just admitted to not knowing what emotional support would look like). I sort of don’t like the interactions we have where such support could theoretically happen. But I should probably find a place for it someplace in my life. Even if it’s not for me I should see how other people do it, so I can be better when u try to do it at others.

Thus Spake Dave: I find your discipline daunting. He speaks in the context either of Collective Pain specifically and/or The Screed in general. But I know a secret. It’s not an expression of discipline. It’s a surrender to impulse. It’s me trying to use your FTP as a backup for my operating system, so I don’t have to do it myself. It does take time, and occasionally I decide I want to say something even though my eyes would choose sleep. But mostly it’s just the organization of today’s challenges and joys into single-paragraph chunks. I don’t even proofread this fucker. And I expect other people to read it and tell me about the important bits. Or the missing bits. Really I’m just trying to outsource my self management ³With medium-poor results to date. I make Shanda participate in that feedback but most days no one else does. Like @BPS I sort of dream that a computer might help me with this someday. Or that I will eventually train you to speak for yourselves. Other parts are working like I hope; I have definitely been able to do things that couldn’t happen … Continue reading.

Shanda told me that most of my writing isn’t as good as Collective Pain. I’m sure she framed that in a more positive way but my brain is pretty good at turning compliments into punishments. In any case she thought the feels were compelling and connected well. I can’t ever tell when I’m writing; sometimes I know I don’t have anything useful to say but the rest all feel the same during composition. I’m not sure if the qualitative change yesterday was part of why Dave Spaketh but I sort of hope not because I can only be good at this like 1 day a month, and you need to talk more often than that.

M did let me check in, and chatted with me about calendar events and hopes for a new season. About finding what normal looks like. And about the tools we might use to carve our own version of it. I have such mixed feelings when we chat sometimes: new information and attention that makes me feel like a human, coupled to fear that I’ll screw it up immediately by being too interested or poking the wrong buttons or otherwise being too much. Stumbling into a topic I can see is difficult and that I’ve been worried about and anxious to discuss, then panicking that I’ll never have another chance to understand how you feel about it. When that happens I sometimes let my perception of urgency overwhelm my intention of more thoughtful interaction, and I’m sorry to put that pressure on you. But I’m glad you put up with me, because you offer great insight to some of my rants. And you give me hope that someday I can find a path from here back to where humans live.

Work was slightly complicated today. I successfully ignored it until noon, did get to my noon meeting, and then ignored it again until eventually made it to the office at like 3. I had an afternoon meeting that’s usually at 2:30 but at various times today was scheduled as early as 1:30 and as late as 4 PM. It actually happened at like 4:20. So that was a bit tricky. But I did get 2 SRs closed and another updated, so if I can touch the last 2 tomorrow I’ll be in good shape with those again. I only picked up two new tasks today and neither is as large as an SR, so net progress on the work business scale.

My gym plans, my afternoon meeting, and my urgent comms all claimed time right at 5 PM but eventually I got myself sorted out and spent some time at the gym with E and Shanda. I was less scattered today when I got to exercising, with Shanda’s help. And I only got dizzy once; I am much better than last week but as my enhanced sleep schedule this weekend belies probably still not quite well on the breathing front. Still it was a good time, with discussion of knife making around my panting. And a sauna that was into the high 150s today; someone got it up to 131 before I even arrived.

Dog is still not doing well. A little better than yesterday in terms of noise but still plenty restless and with a clearly disturbed tummy. It’s hard to see him in pain but there’s little to be done other than offer attention when he wants it. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Got the rodent ramp done. It’s not perfect but I’d give it a PE stamp with a 1 pound per axle rating, which should be sufficient for rodents. And it looks pretty good. We’ll see if it actually holds up, or if it needs a rev 2. And I got through one of the things you asked me to do, that I had been ignoring since last week. I didn’t get to my tape face plans (I didn’t even get to my own face plans today) but I’ve rearranged my week to make that all go. At least in theory; Wednesday could be tricky if I pick up extra work tomorrow, but for now it still seems plausible without overworking.

I don’t know how I was doing bodily today. The morning was fine as I recall, but I didn’t check at the time. I didn’t get to lunch but did have some vending food at like 4 at the office. Shanda made supper and I ate again at 8. Went to the gym and was fine when I wasn’t dizzy, and I feel like I had plenty of exercise, but I also was dizzy enough to need to sit at one point. That will get old real fast, but it’s not a problem I had working out a couple of months ago, after years of doing almost none exercise, so presumably it is part of some transient condition (like the one that made me sleep all weekend). I’ve got a minor headache now; not sure when it started. I should try to keep better track tomorrow.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.