My therapist asked me a question today.

What does overeating mean to me?

Food is my best friend and my worst enemy, an evil entity that stalks me in unsuspecting moments. Food is a drug, not unlike heroin. Food is life. Food is death. It is why anorexics deny it and why I try to fill myself up with it. I panic and think I will die if denied food. When I eat I’m in my own little world where no-one can hurt me. I am a child in my mother’s womb. It’s safe and protective and for the duration I can block out the terrifying world where I just don’t fit in. Not unlike my therapist’s room.

If anorexics suffer guilt, repulsion and feel a sense of non-entitlement to eat even the barest amount of food, then I as an overweight person with a compulsive eating disorder feel a gigantuan sense of all-encompassing authority and empowerment to eat whatever I want, whenever I want and in whatever quantities I desire and f**k you if you get in my way.

We are working together to see if I can gain control of my eating. To eat the right food, in the right quantity and at the right time, three times a day and with a moderate amount of exercise thrown in is something I can only fantasise about. My doctor tells me it is part biological and part psychological.

Body-wise I was of normal weight till I was ten. Psychologically and emotionally I am still ten years old. I am now learning perspective taking, discovering internal strategies to manage intense emotions, recognizing an improved ability to reflect on thoughts and feelings and finding my sense of empathy and connection – all socially approved ways of managing intense emotions. Over-eating is not an acceptable pastime or hobby. In a world that equates thinness with success, then I am a failure - and yet I am the worst when it …

Going to school and coming home to your parent’s house afterwards is no big deal – unless you’re 47 years old and it’s your second 30th school reunion in four months and you need a crash-pad for the night.

Only this time it was with Brother School Mazenod - or Spazenod as we used to call it. This is the fourth I’ve been to from the same school and I have to say they get better and better.

I grew up in a very snobby, isolated rural area, went to a girls Catholic boarding school run by nuns in the Seventies (for the Australians think Picnic at Hanging Rock without the haunting music, Anne Lambert, the picnic or the Hanging Rock and for the rest of you think Dead Poet’s Society without Robin Williams) with limited access to boys, a Victorian mother and emotionally-absent father and much younger sister I just didn’t get. All the necessary ingredients to make a future long-term, fixated and obsessed psychotherapy client.

At the ten-year reunion everyone had fabulous careers, slim figures, natural hair, a one drink limit, sensitive and caring partners/husbands, a huge house with matching mortgage, no regrets, no wrinkles and a fantastic future.

At the twenty-year reunion, we were pretty much working mothers and wives with primary school aged children and a side-lined career, but life was still great, the house was a work in progress, our children all well-behaved geniuses, a two drink limit, one or two minor regrets, but the future was still looking mighty sweet.

Come the thirty-year individual and combined reunions and it’s a level playing field where insecurity and pretension was conspicuous by its absence. Most people were divorced, careers were slumped or dumped or reconfigured and reinvented, children were surprisingly normal and sometimes disappointing, our hairdresser was our new BFF and the mortgage had blown out along with our credit cards, weight, emotional baggage and alcohol bill. But everyone there without exception displayed a philosophical maturity that only comes with age and experience. It’s …

How many psychologists does it take to change a light globe?
It’s cheaper to get an electrician.

Therapists, psychologists, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are business people. First and foremost they have bills to pay, mortgages to negotiate, children to put through college and the myriad of other expenses we all have to deal with. That’s life.

I loathe being reminded I am paying someone to take care of my mental health issues. But that is the reality of the situation. I am handing over tens of thousands of dollars and in return getting a brand new personality – but unlike a car or a new washing machine, there is no twelve month guarantee. The therapist gets paid whether the client gets well or not and when he/she puts their fees up, that pay-rise increment over a week can equate to my entire wage. If I said that didn’t make me feel a bit bitter I would be lying.

My father, not a fan of the psychotherapy industry, gleefully tells me the story (over and over again) of someone he knows who spent his not inconsiderable inheritance seeing a psychiatrist for a recognizable mental condition and after watching his legacy dwindle away year after year ended up in a far worse condition. When this person ran out of money, the psychiatrist refused to see him. As I pointed out to Dad (over and over again) this health professional is running a business, albeit in the caring industry, and he still needs a certain amount of income in order to survive. I would not expect an electrician or a plumber to work for nothing.

What are the financial ethics and personal morals and values of therapy? I have read where some well-known psychotherapy authors and practitioners feel guilty about charging so much money just for some talk-therapy. I applaud their guilt. I wonder if medical doctors, lawyers, accountants and politicians feel the same amount of guilt, humility and anxiety when they charge more …

1. Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.

Sometimes I just want someone to put their arms around me so I can cry uncontrollably and wipe my nose on their sleeve. I don’t want to be told to pull myself together, pick my socks up, get a life, move on, build a bridge and get over it or take a spoonful of cement and harden up. I just want someone to validate and recognize my long-term pain and acknowledge it.

2. A Horse With No Name.

As a child of the Seventies this was my third most hated song ever, after Car Wash and Chuck E’s in Love. Now I am almost into my dotage, I am hearing this song in a different light. My take on it is that it is about solitude and/or depression, the desert being a sucking life-force, the horse being solitude or depression and the rider being the solitary or the depressed. Maybe it wasn’t what the song-writer had in mind but to me it’s all about finding myself again.

3. Behind Closed Doors.

In therapy behind closed doors no-one can hear you scream (or laugh). And that’s the way it should be. Family, friends and work colleagues don’t have the same tolerance level for my problems as my therapist does. I’ve finally, FINALLY stopped thinking that the check-out-chick and the garage attendant are my new best friends as well as spending my entire lunch-hour treating my indifferent work colleagues as a Psychological Health Support Management Team.

4. Remember (Sha la la)

This is what you have to do behind closed doors. Remembering the past in particular which is painful, regressive but kind of feels good in a masochistic way at the same time.

5. Bend Me, Shape Me.

The idea of talking to another person who is qualified to contort and twist your grey matter is so that they can bend and shape your mind into one that isn’t malfunctioning and sending off sparks at the wrong time, with the wrong person and in the wrong …

It is a cliche when clients fall in love with their therapists. But many movies seem to get the client/therapist roles all wrong. Movies often deal with transference lust rather than love. Most notably Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte, who consummate their transference issues on the big screen during Prince of Tides, before going back to their respective partners and boring lives. The scriptwriters got around that particularly awkward, ethical situation because Nick Nolte was not officially Barbra Streisand’s client, he was the brother of her client, which, although sails perilously close the edge of the world as we know it, technically manages to navigate its way through the tidal-waves of legal and moral violations. Just.

The Sopranos also managed to neatly satisfy an audience’s vicarious voyeuristic transference tendencies when Tony Soprano had a sexual fantasy scene which involved violently sweeping all accoutrements off the therapist’s desk except for the therapist Jennifer Melfi herself, and going for it in an unbridled, finally requited, sexual transference.

In a nutshell, erotic transference is where the traumatized client wants to have healing sex with the nurturing therapist. Eroticized transference is where the delusional client thinks the caring therapist wants to have healing sex with their irresistible self. However, if your therapist is suffering from erotic or eroticized counter-transference (for everything there is an opposite) and wants to have an unethical, illegal quickie with you, leave their office as rapidly as possible, preferably leaving a small whirlwind of dust in your wake.

Sexual fantasies however (on both sides of the couch) are apparently normal. A peer-reviewed journal provides evidence based research that 95% of male therapists and 76% of female therapists have sexual feelings towards clients. In real life a dual relationship (and not just of the sexualized sort) has vast potential to harm the client and puts an almighty question mark over the therapist’s ethics and standards. While therapy sex makes for great TV viewing, it …

There is a dark side to therapy that nobody wants to talk about; even therapists, especially therapists. It’s a Catch-22 where emotionally-promiscuous clients quickly fall into dependency with their therapists and problems occur when dependency, instead of the original problem, becomes the main issue. Weaning yourself off your substitute mother/therapist can be like trying to forcibly remove a security blanket from a two-year-old or an attempt to separate the ingredients of a corrupt Hollandaise sauce after the egg has curdled.

Michael G. Conner, Psy.D, author of the internet article, Transference: Are You a Biological Time Machine? gripes that “Transference is really difficult to recognize, deal with and understand, but it is incredibly interesting. I tend to avoid people who are “oozing” with transference potential.” His attitude is not uncommon as Borderline Personality disordered clients, seen by many as the cane-toads of Therapy World, tend to “ooze” transference. Seen in another light - dramatic, intense, super-heated, fierce and impassioned, but controlled and regulated thoughts, feelings and behaviours where you have easy access to powerful emotions can be an amazingly vital and life-giving source of art; think Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, Brian Wilson, Patrick Swayze, Marilyn Monroe or Heath Ledger.

Borderlines in therapy are hard work, and their recovery never follows the straight, narrow and linear path from problem to solution in twelve Medicare-covered insurance appointments that the Australian government would like us to believe. It took me fourteen years to learn that the Art of Borderline is in mindfulness, not madness. It’s in the knowing, harnessing, concentrating, focusing and sitting in the moment long enough to capture, guide and mold the lingering essence of the raging storm into something creative and constructive. Overweened therapy is not part of this process. When an emotionally intense person gets hooked on therapy, it’s hard to give up that dependency and become your own person; you just want to get legally adopted by your therapist and walk together hand in hand towards the quintessential sunset. So …

Jennifer Aniston’s therapist had the audacity and bad manners to pass away just as the Friends star was dealing with her ex-husband issues. Jennifer explains, “When your shrink dies, you just go, ‘Really? Is this some kind of cosmic joke?’ I will never forget that moment. It was devastating.”

It would be horribly devastating to me if anything happened to my therapist. Thank God she is alive and healthy. Although a bit older now, fourteen years more than when I first met her; with a few more wrinkles and laughter lines, slightly greyer hair and with a vaguely stiffer slightly arthritic countenance - although gravity (and genes) have been very kind to her. Over the years I feel she has gained a much younger, albeit more philosophical, existential outlook on life, an increased tendency to eat well, exercise regularly and look after her health in a big way which she is role-modeling, somewhat successfully, for me. In other words there is nothing ancient or doddery about her yet. She is aging well with much grace and dignity. She once told me she plans on retiring when she is taken away in a coffin.

So the chances of her falling off the perch (or should I say couch) is very minimal. I have arrangements with my long-term, highly-valued therapist in case that happens. I know who to contact in case the unthinkable happens. I know where my records will end up. But how do you do effective therapy with someone else when you are grieving your mother figure/supportive mentor/internalized role model? Are you allowed – is it ethical - to attend their funeral?

What are your rights if your therapist ends up with ill-health, in hospital, a paraplegic, a quadriplegic, has a life-threatening disease, or more likely, if she/he retires or moves to another state or country or simply gives up the therapy profession altogether? This happened to me once. My therapist of eight sessions decided I was cured, dismissed me and …

Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths and others scoot down the birth canal with their size elevens firmly wedged between their nose and their chin.

Personally I like to wear my favourite Chanel slingbacks between my lips because that way there’s no room to say anything I will never regret in the first place. Plus a full mouth means a pair of ears that’s not only listening intently but progressively learning in a very astute and meaningful manner.

My psychotherapist, whose black flatties are firmly planted on solid industrial-strength carpet, has been listening and learning very carefully for several years now. To her credit never once have I seen her stifle a well-deserved yawn, watched in dismay as her eyes glazed over or seen her slowly fall to one side suffering from stultifying sleep-inducing boredom as I tell the same old story over and over and over and over again.

She’s done such a good job on me that I now find myself wanting to study and collect books on psychoanalytic psychotherapy pretty much in the same way Angelina Jolie collects other people’s husbands and overseas orphaned offspring.

Psychotherapy is all about active listening and active listening is inherently exhausting. So is trying to promote and sell the “open ears, shut mouth” concept to a household of strongly opinionated teenage boys and men who start off every other sentence with “Just listen to ME………” accompanied by aggressive finger-poking in the general direction of the errantly perceived non-listening party.

Enduring long, pointless and quarrelsome arguments is part and parcel of parenting teenagers. Taking a leaf out of my therapist’s book I close my mouth and open my ears and let them rant and rave about what ails them at this particular point in time and space, without interjecting with:
“What you SHOULD do is this….” or
“What you MUSTN’T do is that….”

My parents once said about my younger sister that if she would only listen to what they had to say then she would never make any mistakes. …

Never miss an opportunity to heal yourself, no matter who it comes from.

Last week I started a new job and came face to face with someone I used to work with whom I had an overwhelming number of unresolved workplace issues. Immediately I was caught up in the fight or flight response and wanted to run out of that building screaming. Only when this happens to me I freeze like a deer caught in the headlights or am transfixed by the menacingly collective beady, narrowed, yellow eyes of a pack of hungry lions. I get so frightened I cannot think or move to save my life. I had run into an old nemesis for whom I had so many revenge fantasies it consumed a greater part of my life.

This woman was number one on my hit list of enemies I needed to self-destruct upon.

I stayed in this new job for a few days and got so engrossed in frantically working as hard as I could and hiding from this woman so much so that it was noticed I was not interacting with the rest of the girls. But they knew her and liked her and so they were the enemy, right?

On the way to work, I would pick off a small stem of white fragrantly scented flowers from a random garden and place it on my desk. It was my guardian angel protecting me against any evil spirits.

My therapist created an emergency appointment for me. I instinctively knew it was going to one of the hardest I ever had to face. I called her a people whisperer once because she has this uncanny natural ability to make me face my inner demons at the right time, in the right place, at the right moment and in the right manner – and with the right amount of compassion and understanding. With her more regressed clients she intertwines her personality …

I have a real job. I’m now a medical typist at a major Western Australian hospital. I thought I had landed the job of my dreams with high pay and good working conditions. It had a really good feel about it. Until I looked at the list of other typists I will be working with.

One of the girls who works there and is currently on annual leave till Monday is someone I worked with in a previous job three years ago. This woman and I were good friends because she has a degree in counselling and I was studying psychotherapy. We would stop after work and talk about our favourite subject, helping people, psychology and how the world works. I thought I had found a great friend with similar interests. I had no inkling of what was actually happening at the same time in a parallel universe.

One day without warning, I was called into the manager’s office. This woman had written an email to management stating I had threatened to kill her and resigned, effective immediately. She did the maximum amount of damage she could before disappearing in the ether. During the three months we worked together she was, to my face, a good friend, but behind my back she was spreading gossip and rumours. There was no way for me to predict this. There were no hints or suggestions of her two-faces. I had no idea.

I think, although I am not sure, because no-one actually told me any details, that the death threat was when I said in a laughing voice, “We work in such an enclosed space, sometimes I feel like killing you and so and so and I’m sure you feel like killing me sometimes as well.” Innocent things we have all said at one time or another. Management took this off the cuff remark very seriously and questioned me at length. I was very scared because this sort of stuff can …