Every time I leave the therapy session, I can never get a really true sense of how it actually went till I have spent at least the rest of the day, and sometimes the next, analyzing all the spoken words, visualizing the facial expressions, exploring the subtle nuances of tone and cadence and reliving the shared, attentive, attuned and mirrored body language or the complete lack of it.

While my therapist, bless her legal notepad and poised pen, goes onto her next client, effectively and professionally “forgetting” about me, I am left in a visceral twilight zone of mixed feelings, conflicting emotions, sweaty palms, tense muscles, shaking body and heightened senses with a dual conflicting head-space so intense the lack of concentration could cause a traffic accident. Sometimes I bask in the afterglow of a loving/kindness, merged warm euphoric connection and sometimes I’m stuck in the aftermath of futile envy, hostile resentment and impotent rage.

Luckily the latter doesn’t happen nearly as much as the former. One thing I have learned over the years is to own my own feelings. Therapy isn’t a walk in the park on a sunny day, it’s a hike up a steep hill or a climb up a snow covered mountain dodging all the obstacles of suppression, resistance, hiding, underplaying and even lying along the way.

The former is a blessing. It’s true attunement, connection, strength of character and progression. Your therapist is there to learn about you so she can support you. The more knowledge she has the more able she is to do her job well. I’ve felt every emotion under the sun with her but I’ve never felt judged or invalidated even when I spend weeks hiding the truth from her. If I end up feeling a bitter fury towards her, I take responsibility for it. My behaviour and feelings are self-induced and are not about her. Luckily she is authentic and well-balanced enough to know this.

There is always an underlying situation I am not addressing that is the cause. So when I walk out her door and want to drive my car into a tree I first have to work out why I feel this way. I can guarantee it’s not about the therapist and it’s not about her therapy and that it’s all about me, my family, my life and my mother.

I’ve always had my own personal golden rule about this. When in doubt, it’s always about my mother. Sometimes I can look underneath the bristling tension in the therapeutic relationship and ask myself what is the situation with my mother at the moment. Sometimes I am so regressed I am not aware that I have burning issues with her and that is when I can take it out on my therapist and have done a few times. My therapist knows me well and has this way of calling me back down to earth by asking me in a gentle manner about my mother. That’s when I have “reverse-transference” and reapply the negative feelings back towards my relationship with the woman who gave birth to me.

This is what a personal autopsy on psychotherapy is all about for me. Working out what feelings belong to whom and ascribing them as such, then dealing with it. And when I get it right and the “aha” moment happens, that’s when I can lie back in the euphoria of having solved a crucial puzzle rather than living in the misery of confusion.

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    Last reviewed: 17 Aug 2009