Free therapy

Today I was thinking back on all my old therapists. They have so much of my money, and they’ve squandered so much of my time. I thought perhaps you all might benefit from my plight of self-discovery

Therapist #1 – I worked with this therapist in high school. My alcoholic mother sent me to her because I had anger issues. Wonder why? It couldn’t be the result of my Mom drinking all night and that my friends called her Mike Tyson for obvious reasons. No, you’re right. It’s me. Her advice, “You know how there are always several roads ahead of you. Maybe you’re at the point where your intuition is confused. Perhaps by doing the opposite of what you feel, you may find the other road has less pot holes”. Ohh, good one. Ignore your gut feelings and intuition.

Therapist #2 – I started seeing therapist #2 after my mother entered a full time treatment center and my father left her. The coordinators thought “family” therapy was a good idea. Since I was the only one living in town, family therapy boiled down to just me. I was asked to bring in my journal one day, and randomly flip through the pages and read a passage. I turned pages and ended up on a poem I wrote about drowning in my sorrows. Given the commotion in my life at the time, it’s not abnormal to me that I wrote that. My father had left, my mother was a raving lunatic in a treatment center, and I was completely alone for the first time in my life. The lady told me I needed to be in a lock down facility and treated for depression. (As a side note, none of my other therapists have ever thought I have had anything other than situational depression). I was then told I could go to work. “You’re okay to go to work, aren’t you?” I left thinking, “Yea bitch, you just told me that I can’t cope in society right now because I’m so fucked up. Work is no big deal.” Needless to say, I never went back to that therapist again.

Therapist #3 was during my college years. Her advice, “Have you considered smoking more pot”. No, but you might be on to something there. I eventually stopped going because she suggested I read, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” with a boy I had been dating for about a month. I was 22 at the time. Can you imagine what he would have thought about that one?

Therapist #4 had a giant crystal in her office. The X started going to her before I did. I was mortified to realize he thought the crystal was some type of ottoman and had been resting his feet on it during sessions. I terminated working with her because she started doing Chakra and astrological work with me. I could have dealt with those ideas on a different forum, but paying someone $150 an hour to read my chart was a little out of my league. She also decided all of my problems were due to my ADHD. Again, something no other therapist has ever brought up to me.

Therapist #5 takes the cake. Three months before the wedding, I decided I wanted to call it off. I was unable to work and I felt like I was having a complete breakdown. I saw her in a couples setting, and it was quickly determined that I needed one on one sessions because I didn’t want to have sex with my fiancé. These sessions focused on my intimacy issues, which we also discussed with the X. This lady suggested a technique called Quiet Vagina by Masters and Johnson. She tells us the fiancé has to keep an erection for 30 minutes and place his penis inside me. Neither of us can move or act on the situation. Basically you just lay in this position for 30 minutes. Needless to say, the ride home with the fiancé was deathly quiet. We never tried quiet vagina, although when it comes to mind we look at each other and say, “Shhhh – quiet vagina” and break into uncontrollable laughter. That was $150 well spent for the laughs alone. I’m still not sure how this technique would have helped, because I couldn’t even hold hands with him at the time.

Therapist #6 – Miss Suzanna. I trust her the most out of all of them. She’s extremely educated and dedicates her practice to sex therapy. Which, of course, was what I thought was wrong with me. Turns out it wasn’t, but before we figured that out Miss Suzanna came to an early hypothesis of the problem. Turns out my vagina was all wrong. Yep, wrong. Not in a physical or structural way, but in a muscle memory way. You know how when you lift weights and you train your muscles to remember that exercise? She thought that my bad sexual experiences has trained my vagina to accept all stimuli as a bad situation. Therefore, my girl was all wrong and needed to be retrained. Wow. I’m happy to say that I didn’t have to retrain my womanhood. I should really call her back and tell her that my vagina is really very happy and says “Hi”. I’ve never had a complaint, and she seems to work like a charm.

At the end of my journey, I’ve learned there is nothing wrong with me. I was just searching for a way to control my situation and fix my problems. If I thought the problem was me, I rationalized that I could just fix myself. What I learned in the end is that there’s not a damn thing wrong with me. I may not know why I feel a particular way, or react in a certain fashion, but in the end I’m just human.

So, here you go. Here’s what I learned for approximately $30,000: There doesn’t have to be anything wrong with you. Sometimes things are just the way they are.