Therapy, round one

The first round of therapy is officially a bust.

I’ve been going for fifty-minute sessions at the Wheaton counseling center once a week, usually on Wednesdays, ever since I typed up this outline of the issues. The counselor’s verdict: my repression is just one of those things that the brain does sometimes, and I shouldn’t worry about it.

This is kind of like hearing a disturbing noise from your car, taking it in to a mechanic, and being told that they don’t know what’s causing it, but you should keep driving anyway.

At least I picked up a few bits of information along the way.

—

I invariably teared up at every session. And I’m not a tearful person. I walk around campus with a distracted smile on my face so often that I’ve been asked about it.

Many things make me happy. (The satellite linkup to the future on tonight’s TDS? Jon, circa 2039, and still doing the hands-on-sticks gag? Awesome.) Sad movies don’t make me cry. (In those rare cases when they do—Click did, as did the end of the second season of Marimite—that’s a sign that it’s really, really effective.)

It wasn’t as though I were full-on sobbing during the sessions, but I was just teary enough that I needed tissues handy.

—

Two sessions ago, this took an even odder turn.

We had been talking about my writing; I was explaining how I used my research about repression and multiple personality to write about Yumiko/Yumie Takagi, the sweet and mild-mannered nun with a violent killing machine for an alternate personality.

The counselor asked, “Are you afraid you might have something like that?”

Well, no.

First of all, Hellsing is not exactly a model of realistic human behavior. Even taking a more realistic view, though, I don’t have the symptoms of multiple personality disorder. I don’t lose large swaths of time. I don’t even get headaches, much less encounter any direct evidence of other personalities running my life in my absence (clothes I don’t remember buying, voices in my head, and the like).

All I have, as far as I can tell, is a repressed streak of anger; an association of anger with cursing strong enough that I’m compulsively unable to swear; and two or three incidents in which all this has come out of its box and then gone back in, taking the memory of the incident with it.

It’s an unjustified leap to suggest there’s a whole split-off personality operating here. And whatever I’m repressing turns out to be, it’s not going to be a Yumie.

Are we all clear on that? Good.

This leads to the problem of why, when this question was posed to me, I was suddenly crying too hard to talk.

I remember this one time, when I was younger, at the ocean. I was in the water, though not so far that my feet were off the sand; then a wave came up from behind when I wasn’t paying attention. And all of a sudden I was immersed, salt and sand and hair in my face, with no idea which way was up.

That’s what this felt like. I was physically doubled over with the force of this outburst; for a moment it was hard to breathe.

Here’s what I was thinking: “Well, this is intense.”

I didn’t feel scared or sad or anxious; I felt detached. The next thing I thought was, “Okay, clearly there’s something going on here, or I wouldn’t be having this reaction.”

And then I got frustrated over the fact that I couldn’t explain that perspective to the therapist because my respiratory system was all tied up expressing emotions that I wasn’t feeling. I mean, where does it get the nerve?

—

None of this has actually brought me closer to understanding what’s going on inside my head. But it has confirmed my conviction that something is up.

It was last week that the therapist told me her belief that it was nothing to worry about. I brought up the car analogy in today’s session; the therapist considered it, intrigued by the metaphor. Then she reiterated that she had looked all around under the hood and didn’t see anything.

I’m getting a new mechanic next week. (Another school counselor. If this one doesn’t find anything, it’s time to move beyond Wheaton.) I would love to just keep driving, but this vehicle stalls on me every six months or so, and I don’t exactly have the option of getting a new one.