I'm thinking about timing -- about the processes of therapy, of parenting, of relationships, and of finding meaning in one's life. I started this blog at the prompting of a therapist, but when she first suggested it, it was the wrong timing. I was in turmoil, as well as bored with time on my hands. I was processing the changes in my family and in my relationships, as well as full of opinions, passions, observations and meditations. I just couldn't stop time and write about the emotional whirlwind I was in at that moment. I felt pressured by her to take action; I resented it a little, and it made me wonder if she was paying any attention to my own processes, and to what I was and was not ready to do. It made me wonder about what therapists can and should do with and for their clients. Is the point to give concrete advice: blog, go to meetups.com and, well, meet up with a new group of people, buy some sex toys to rev up a stalled relationship, make plans to find a group home for your son when he's an adult rather than keep him at home? (These were all real suggestions made by my current therapist.) Or is the point to understand the client, to be emotionally reflective and supportive, to help the client find his own motivation and meaning in the story of his or her life?
The timing is now apparently right for me to try blogging. It is appropriate that my first stab at it is about therapy, among other things, because my history with therapists goes back to age eleven. It has continued, with periods of absence from the therapeutic relationship, for forty years. I was diagnosed with severe, even psychotic, depression at that age, hospitalized for 16 months, then started back to public school in 8th grade (a terrible place to reenter the social world of early teenagers with a then rare psychiatric label over your head). I continued half-heartedly with a therapist at the local mental health clinic, stopped taking medication at my parents' urging, and as I became more and more academically successful and socially comfortable on the margins, left therapy behind in high school.
When I was getting ready to leave for college (William and Mary), I was scared, throwing up everday, nervous about leaving my family support, but hopeful I would find intellectual and perhaps social fulfillment in a new environment. Instead, while I did well academically and was able to start in with creative writing classes from the beginning, which is all I wanted to do in college -- study literature and try to write it myself -- I unraveled emotionally, formed a destructive and all-consuming relationship, and spiraled downward by the end of the first semester so rapidly that I made a meek attempt at suicide, or really at cutting myself, and was told to leave and get help.
Then I was back in the world of hospitals, of "treatment," of medications and of interventions designed really to contain raging mental and emotional pain more that to cure or ease it. Many hospitalizations later, I returned to college and finished academically honorable but emotionally tenuous. My college-supplied therapist recommended I be hospitalized in a state institution (that happened to be in the same town) right before my senior year, so I left school and finished my requirements for graduation, again several hospitalizations later, at a college near my home. Then I got a job, my first permanent full-time job, at a start-up company with a charistmatic and dynamic but somewhat insane founder and director, extremely tight quarters, and a lot of adrenaline. I was swept up in it, and, despite another hospitalization, met someone there whom I fell in love with.
We got married and everything was new and intense between us. Both of us were lonely, hungry people and we fell together into a deep love and devotion to each other. We shared everything, including my continued emotional difficulties and my continued therapy with a psychiatrist.
Fast forward: after four years of married life as just a couple, then three children later, the really bad, the really soul-transforming kind of mental illness came back. When our third child was born, I went crazy. I had fantasies of jumping off the roof of the house, I talked myself into believing there was a dire and immediate need for me to kill myself, and sometimes even my children, as the keenness of their dependence on me and my own desperate desire to avoid abandoning them seemed to logically lead there. I never harmed them in any way, and I kept my increasingly disturbed thoughts private, but eventually I made a few suicide attempts and it was back to the hospital.
I got an extended course of shock treatments (ECT) and went through a slew of drugs before I found a combination that worked (temporarily: throughout my illness I have had to cycle through a lineup of drugs, as their efficacy and my mental state changed). I kept on with the same psychiatrist, and after about three years from the onset of this episode, I read and went online and came to the conclusion for myself that what I had was bipolar disorder. Type II bipolar disorder, characterized by deep depressions and "hypomanic" periods of energy, creativity, irritability, and in my case at that time periods of rapid cycling when I could go from depressed, even suicidal, to energized and driven in a period of a few days. My psychiatrist concurred with my opinion (usually the other way around, but we were a team of peers).
This was a liberating insight for me. I began to look at my life, my past and present and future, through the lens of this diagnosis, and what I saw was not debility and illness and doom but the possibility of living with the darker aspects of my makeup, working with and around them to craft some kind of life that had a shape, a story and some significance. I perceived a narrative where before there was only chaos and unpredictability. I considered that my experience could be used to help, understand and support other people struggling with the same darker aspects of their lives. I concluded that having this diagnosis in hand alleviated some of the crushing guilt I felt about not being a perfect parent, a perfect wife, a perfect writer, a perfect human being.
So when my current therapist advised me recently to stop thinking of myself as bipolar, to stop thinking of myself in terms of diagnostic criteria and to consider myself as having various "traits" that combine into a personality rather than having a personality that can be categorized as one diagnostic enty -- this urging on her part to abandon a way of thinking that had freed me and opened a path to creative and purposeful living was not welcome. The timing was all wrong. I do not feel confined to my "label." I do not feel it defines me utterly. It is a lens I use to look at myself and my relationships and the direction of my life. As such, it is essential to my well-being. For her to make such a suggestion, to press it on me now, betrays such an imperfect understanding of my history and my place in the flow of my life, and such bad timing that it's made me doubt first myself for "clinging" to the diagnosis and then her for lacking the sensitivity I need in a therapist.
Perhaps it's a temporary impasse in our relationship. Perhaps she'll never get the "story" of my life in such a way that she can play a positive role in it. Perhaps I'll gloss over it and keep at the therapy on a shallow level -- go to her for advice, practical suggestions, "counseling." Or perhaps I'll find another therapist. But I've learned that in psychotherapy, as in comedy, its all about the timing.
