and when you ran to me

Sean thinks that everyone should be in therapy. Everyone. Of course, he's a therapist so he has a vested interest in people seeing therapists, but I understand his point. He says that therapy is more useful to people who are functional. Interesting, that, because I remember jw saying something similar... like therapy is wasted on the sick.

There are reasons I've never sought a therapist, and they aren't anything to do with fearing the "social stigma" of seeing one. I've been accused of having that as a reason, but that's never been it.

The first reason was that I used to think that therapy was for people who had become "dysfunctional". Even in the lowest points of life, I've never stopped going to work, paying my bills, taking showers, eating, sleeping and so forth. I mean, of course I have sometimes been frozen temporarily, but never long enough to consider myself dysfunctional when I have tried to look at myself in a factual and objective way. And so, with a sincere belief that therapy was designed to help people who had stopped going to work, stopped paying their bills, stopped eating, stopped sleeping, etc., I believed I simply didn't qualify. I thought it would be like going to the doctor when you're not sick.

The second reason, and the one that persisted even as I learned that plenty of functional people seek therapy is that I simply didn't feel worth it. The idea of paying someone to sit and listen to me talk, ask me questions, be interested in my life, pay attention to the details and remember things from week to week seemed absolutely decadent. Totally self-indulgent. Egomaniacal.

I was raised to believe I was nobody special, and this wasn't an accident caused by neglect or misunderstanding. It was intentional. It was meant to ensure that I didn't walk through the world with a sense of entitlement, expecting other people to pay my way or do my work for me. Why should they? I'm nobody special. In some ways this starkly realistic sense of self was useful to me and made some parts of my life easier. Self-sufficiency became automatic. And I was spared some of the teenage self-absorption that leads to paranoia and discomfort. I knew no one was whispering about me behind my back. Why would they? I knew I wasn't interesting enough to warrant it. No one was laughing at my clothes or my braces or anything else. What would make me that special?

Simultaneously, however, I accidentally became convinced of something more than what I think my parents had intended. The notion that I was no more special than anyone else on the face of the earth seemed somewhat reasonable (though I really wanted to be special to them if no one else) but somewhere along the way I became convinced I was less special than everyone else. I wasn't entitled to anything.

And this is where my mind was when I felt that therapy wasn't appropriate for me. Why should someone sit and listen to me talk about myself for hours on end, week after week? What makes me so special?

Sean wants me to think I deserve that kind of attention even if I don't choose to seek it.

I guess attending church or belonging to a support group is kind of the same thing. A weekly affirmation of your value and your importance in the world.

I've been walking around feeling lost lately, wondering what could put me back at the centre of my own life... and thinking strange random things about wanting to belong somewhere, wanting some affirmation, wanting a network of support that spans a little broader so that Shawn isn't responsible for meeting all my emotional needs on his own. (He does admirably, but it seems a bit much to ask for.)

Now I'm wondering about therapy. I don't have a specific problem I want to work out. I don't feel like I'm coming undone. I just feel like I need some support.

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