I'm not sure why I let this blog languish...or why I feel like posting again. All I know is that I feel the need to write.
Recovery is a strange, difficult progress. So far, it's been a meandering journey for me, full of stops and starts, detours, roadblocks, mountains, valleys, hidden dangers, beautiful discoveries, etc. Often it takes a crisis to get me willing to get moving in a new direction. A crisis brought me to therapy in the first place and, since then, much of the work I have done has been motivated by pain and desperation.
Months ago, I had another crisis: a panic attack so severe that I ended up in the emergency room, thinking I was dying. I scared the hell out of some of the people who saw me. Physically, I recovered quickly. Emotionally, I felt at the end of my rope.
So I pretty much blamed it all on Randy, my therapist. (Later, I apologized but told him he did make for a handy whipping boy. "Gee, thanks," he replied.) The upshot is that I decided I needed a completely different form of therapy, something more structured, less long term, with a definite and predictable duration -- in other words, EMDR. So I found someone whose website impressed me and who sounded nice on the phone, and off I went (with Randy's blessing).
Long story short, New Therapist and I were not a good fit. No, it was worse than that. To be completely frank, I think she was in way over her head with me...and possibly with any sexual trauma survivor. One example: she showed a shocking disregard for personal boundaries by touching me without permission when I was already triggered...and she acted as if she'd never before seen a PTSD-ish reaction to unwanted touch. Heck, I thought I was low key with my "Don't touch me!" It's not like I screamed or ran out the door or curled into a weepy ball or started having some full-blown flashback -- all things I've done in the past. She also seemed to think nothing wrong of unsolicited touch and acted as if the whole thing was my weird problem and an overreaction on my part. What are they teaching in therapy school? It's pretty bad when the client has a better idea of what is appropriate and what's not, and why.
I put up with things as long as I could, wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt, and not wanting to give up too easily. But eventually, I realized we were heading nowhere, and I was just wasting time and money.
Now I'm back with Randy. It's good.
Some might see my time with Bad Therapist as a senseless detour. But it turns out that I'm glad for the experience, but that's for another post sometime in the future.
In the meantime, over the next few weeks, I hope to be posting about my EMDR experience...that really wasn't.
