Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Finders Keepers

Are Facebook memories sometimes better left in the mind's own memory bank, or do we need a nudge once in a while? Is the nudge a healthy idea? Remains to be seen. This was just a note I wrote after a therapy session (and I had to stretch to figure out WHICH therapist this might have been, but I nailed her down to the idiot at (now closed) Maine Center, between 2012-2014: 

"Friday, I'm arguing with my counselor, telling her I didn't think cognitive behavioral therapy would be effective in tackling and resolving my issues at present, and she wants to try dialectical behavioral therapy, which I naturally poo poo, because it's not like I'm repudiating cooperation in session, I mean, what the fuck? Plus, there's the whole "I'm-going-to-get-in-trouble-again-because-we-touch-on-Buddhism" factor, which makes me feel guilty at church. (Guilty Protestants aren't as guilty as guilty Catholics, inasmuch as at least we still sleep around.)

She had arrived at the session 15 minutes late, at 9:15. I'd been waiting since 9:00. Common courtesy, at least as I'm being trained, is to grant the client the duration of the 50-60 min session regardless if it fucks up the rest of the therapist's schedule because arriving late was her own damn fault. What's worse? SHE had clinical paperwork to do about me. As I'm also being trained, the counselor does the paperwork either before or after the session, not WHILE the client is sitting there, thumb-twiddling, sipping water and reminding her to put her letterhead in the printer side-up this time, because she's a little computer-challenged. 

After the DBT smashup, I decided I want to engage the next several sessions in more existential discourse. That's when SHE poo pooed & crabbed that it was too intellectual and off-path for the decision makers within Medicaid to approve as a treatment plan, and asked me what life & death and the here & now had to do with anything related to my stressors. (It seemed too snippy to say, "I'm trying, right now, sitting here, to not die.") I was promptly shooed out at 10:00 am, her clinical paperwork still incomplete, after she twiddled through her calendar in order to make my next appointment, which isn't until the day after I turn 41 years old, which brings the whole thing back to existentialism, which probably confused her further.

Had I known TOC was planning on coming to me via text to pout about how everyone at work hates him, and achieve reassurance that I didn't hate him on Friday, I would've made a bigger deal in the therapeutic plan under "work on personal relationships," which ended up taking a back seat to "keep criminal record clean." He's preening his peacock feathers over a gushy missive I wrote, claiming to be undeserving. Sneaked into some overt video clips he watched at my suggestion (which he "enjoyed," when their purpose was to "tear his heart out and shove it down his throat," were some subliminally included clips from "Annie Hall." 

Recalling in hindsight that we share a huge love for all things Woody Allen, he happened upon a clip in which Allen's character pouted a bit more fondly that he and Annie had broken up. Utterly unplanned by me, the universe in the here and now, as fragile as humanity can crinkle, planted Indelible Imprint #5,684 in TOC's mind that will remind me of me, which is always a good thing."

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