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 …

I went to see my therapist today.

After about fifteen minutes of settling in and seeing where my head was at, she pushed me back into the couch, pinned me down with grim determination and a steely glare from her icy blue eyes and said, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.”

At first I thought she was talking about me as I have gained a considerable amount of weight recently. But she was talking not about my appearance, but about my health issues which include the trifecta of diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. If the Perfect Storm killed George Clooney, then my own personal Perfect Storm will kill me as well.

I’ve lived by the maxim that “I defend to death my right to self-destruct”, but my therapist has a whole lot of other ideas and is reading off a completely different instruction manual. “Ve haf vays of making you healthy,” is her new motto for me and surprisingly enough I am finally receptive to her authoritative stance.

It upsets her that my health is not good, but she is not judgmental, sneering, condescending, disdainful or coming from a position of moral superiority and dispending wisdom from the safety of the clouds where the normal Gods reside, she is down there getting her hands dirty in the front-line trenches with me.

Ok, so the opening paragraph may have been slightly exaggerated, but I am a creative writer after all, and I now have to be very creative in getting my body back into shape and wellness.

My children have grasped the health and wellness issue in spite of their mother being addicted to food, alcohol and cigarettes. They, along with my therapist and husband, are dragging me kicking and screaming towards a healthy approach to life, the Universe and everything else. Along with my little dog who, due to lack of exercise has grown some very long nails, hidden by her long coat which recently got shorn and showed me, in such a visceral manner, just how much my health …

All my life I’ve wanted the perfect mother. Someone who has lots of time for me, understands my dilemmas, agrees with my viewpoints and is always there for me, warm and nurturing at all times. Then along came Coraline the Movie. Coraline, deeply neglected by her real parents, finds a wormhole in her new house, enters it and discovers the perfect parents in the shape of her other mother and her other father.

I also discovered my other mother, my perfect mother, through the gateway into the parallel universe also known as my therapist’s office, only she doesn’t call it a wormhole, she calls it a door.

She’s the one who nurtures me and keeps me warm and gives me the impression that I’m wonderful and fabulous. It’s easy to get carried away by a reverie about someone who looks perfect, acts perfect, gives insightful advice, smiles a lot and gives the impression she has her life under control.

This isn’t to say therapists are not being authentic. They are genuine - and armed with their university degrees, post graduate courses, professional development, books they’ve read, supervisors who’ve supervised, had peer supervision and using the sharpest tool they have been blessed with, their own personality, give the very best therapy they can.

But even though their personality clicks with yours doesn’t mean that therapy is suddenly a breeze because when that hour is up, you are out there in the real world again. When the wind blows cold and the freezing rain and sleet is howling a blizzard around your ears, where the only place you want to be is under your therapist’s warm wings again, it’s easy to see them as the perfect mother, rather like Coraline does at the beginning of the movie when she meets her doppelganger parents.

Therapists have their own issues, dysfunctional family members, health issues, idiosyncratic friends, money worries, aging concerns, aggravating partners and husbands, existential crises and sometimes their own narcissistic, borderline mothers. And it’s through this veil …

Ever been to a posh, expensive restaurant and looked around to see couples who are fiddling with the napkins, sipping their wine, staring into space and actively avoiding eye contact with the person they’re sharing a meal with? Chances are they’re the married couples out celebrating their zillionth wedding anniversary.

This year, the 24th Anniversary of the night we met at Pat Dalton’s 21st birthday in 1985, money was short, so we decided to go for a drive in the country on Sunday afternoon. Without the kids. Now this is the most important, crucial element in this outing. No teenagers, fidgeting, fighting and farting in the back seat. That sort of thing tends to kill the mood a bit.

So feeling mellow and chilled-out, we headed off to Bindoon and then down and around the 70 kilometre winding scenic drive that is the Chittering Valley where the scenery was greener than Bob Brown at a Wilderness Society meeting.

The conversation flowed like it was 1985, unlike what would have happened entombed in a restaurant where we’d end up blowing the weekly food budget on a thimble-sized meal of wagyu beef, garlic mash with a sprig of rosemary for decoration – and then paid extra for vegetables and still been hungry enough for Macca’s on the way home. What is it with restaurants these days that only half a meal is included in the menu price?

Instead we lunched on spicy pumpkin soup, fresh bread - apple turnover with cream for dessert - and bought a bag of oranges and mandarins from the side of the road. The first ones we’ve had for a while that hadn’t been sprayed with carcinogenic chemicals and stored in a cold-room for 12 months.

When we weren’t eating, the conversation segued seamlessly from one subject to the other, and we shared the bonding experience of watching a cow give birth in a paddock by the side of the road, chasing the afterbirth with her mouth and trampling all over the calf in her efforts. …

There are times in therapy when it just isn’t working. If you’re sitting on the couch, body language stiff as an ironing board, tight-lipped, teeth-gritted, glaring at each other with matching po-faced death-stares and thinking that the person who breaks eye contact or speaks first loses; then the therapeutic alliance vehicle has crashed into a tree. It is not pleasant, but it happens, and sometimes it can happen in good therapy.

For whatever reason the therapist just isn’t getting it, whatever “it” is. That resonant, spiraling, attuned, limbic dance of healing connection has faltered and a brick wall has been erected in the therapeutic play-space. This is highly unlikely to be broken down in the very near future, there’s twenty minutes left and all you can hear is the quiet, constant, irritating tick of the clock.

This is when it’s important to remember that the connection you shared in a previous session can be restored. It’s not a completely lost cause. Although if you can do that single-handedly without the therapist’s help, the chances are you don’t need therapy in the first place or the therapy you have received has kicked in and you can muster up the courage to face the fear behind the conflict with some potent tools the very same therapist has armed you with.

There can be so much heavy, intense, emotional investment from the client in the relationship that any discord can feel like a permanent, non-repairable rupture and for some that can feel like you’ve just lost your best friend. You can either work it through together with lots of “I” statements, flick imaginary elastic bands in their general direction - or change therapists. If you’ve had a previous good rapport, my advice from experience is to stick with it and work it through. When you’ve been therapist shopping most of your adult life, it could be a repetitive way of relating that comes from you and if that is the case, then all therapists will feel like an epic fail.

Painful …

Aristotle said: Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power; that is not easy.

When I entered therapy thirteen years ago, I was very angry; only I didn’t know it. I thought everyone else was the problem. My limbic system was out of kilter and went Chernobyl if I was crossed in any way; be it by my family, my mother, my co-workers, the vacuum cleaner, the dish-washer or the video machine, I would have a well-deserved brain snap. I could literally feel the poisonous, toxic hormones exploding, flooding and melting down my brain in a mushroom cloud of fear, loathing and impending catastrophe.

The amygdala is the emotional epicenter of the limbic system of your brain. When out of control, it controls you. It hijacks the way you react to stressful situations and unless your executive working centre, otherwise known as the neo-cortex can intercept, slowing it down and creating a calming, mindfulness situation, your life can end up one disaster after another.

It would appear, according to neuroscience literature and research studies that unresolved stress can, given time, create an over-active limbic system. Instant anger reaction was not under my voluntary control for a long time. It took many years and a gentle, wise, serene, cool and collected therapist whom I eventually role-modeled and internalized. She taught me to live in the moment, sitting on my hands, breathing evenly, counting to ten; all the while knowing my brain was being overwhelmed with toxic substances threatening to annihilate me. She showed me by personal example that the end result of being able to let go of anger would lead to health and healing.

I learned to release that rage through visualization, meditation, reflection and the attitude and wisdom of this too will pass. I had to push through the …

Why does cold weather make me happy? I love cold weather. I love rugging up to the eyeballs and splashing in puddles. The only time I go to the beach is in winter when I can watch the waves crash and pound on the beach and I am snugged up in the car with the heater on. This is a shame really because I live in Western Australia with arguably some of the prettiest beaches in the world.

I suffer from reverse SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), also known as summer SAD. I loathe summer. The waves of heat coming off the bitumen make me very cranky and I fiercely resent getting hot and sweaty before work and coming home on the train feeling like I’ve been dragged through a bed of hot coals. Summer Sadness generally affects people, mainly females, in hotter climates, and is probably caused by too much sunshine.

Rain makes me joyful and hail and sleet makes me positively ecstatic. It doesn’t snow in Western Australia. Sunshine on a winter’s day feels like God’s betraying me. Most of my depressive tendencies come out at the end of a long, hot season, because in Australia summer is a long, drawn out process, starting in November and ending in May.

Most people love the hot weather. I’m not sure if it’s my English background that’s inherent in me or whether I just hate the heat. On a trip to England in July once I had to buy thick shoes and a thicker coat, one that I was never able to wear back home in Australia – even in the grim depths of an oxymoronic “Australian winter”. The English summer is colder than our winter.

Only two other people I know love cold weather and one of them is my son who is very much like me, an indoor person, very booky and studious, who used to take a bandage to school on sports days so he could stay inside …

Thanks to therapy, my family is still alive and kicking and functioning reasonably well. We have our moments when one member gets out of kilter with the rest of us, and society, but by and large we seem to have a healthy respect for what we learned about each other during the six family therapy sessions we were observed interacting by several professional strangers.

One of the theories behind family therapy is that when one member of the family experiences problems, it is usually a symptom of the way the entire family functions and relates to each other in general. In other words, individual dysfunction doesn’t happen in isolation. That is why in family therapy, generally there are no problem children or scapegoats. Family therapists work on dealing with the family as a whole unit.

When we went, we spent the first half with a couple of psychologists talking about what was happening behind our closed doors, with another three or four psychologists behind a one-way mirror observing our interactions. Then we swapped places and listened to them talking about how we interacted and what patterns of behaviour they saw that needed intervention; who talks the most, who talks the least, who shuts down, who shuts them down and who thinks they know everything. Body language, facial expressions and uncomfortable shifting in chairs was noted and commented upon. But it was all done very tactfully. Pointing out people’s shortcomings in such a way that they not only are willing listen, but actually change their behaviour as well, is the domain of a true diplomat.

It was very confronting at first and all our backs itched considerably till we all got used to it, but it worked. We were able to understand how we reacted to each other and in what situations and how to deal with it before it escalated and how to debrief after something happened.

The leading psychologist was the most amazing lady who accurately pinpointed with laser precision just what and where our issues lay. …

Many years ago I was addicted to housework. I based my self-esteem on whether or not my stovetop and oven shone to perfection or the windows gleamed so invisible that birds crashed into them (I kid you not). I could be breast-feeding my babies and notice a speck of dust on the skirting boards and actually break mother/child suction to wipe the offending speck off my cognitive map. I made Bree Van de Kamp look like a slovenly, slack and sluttish Desperate Fishwife.

Over the years, I have relaxed my standards. It hasn’t always been easy, but as the kids grew and I went back to work, I realised it was either a relatively, reasonably clean house, Lynette Scavo style, or I ended up in a psychiatric hospital (again).

But lately, as a work from home mother, I find myself crying when I move the fridge to clean behind it or welling up with emotion as I pull the vacuum cleaner out or actively howling as I’m dusting the ornaments in the lounge-room. I’m feeling fine (ok F***ed up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional) till I actually get up and start any form of housework.

So where do these feelings come from? I have heard some women cry after sex. It’s the orgasm that releases some form of cathartic emotion reaction that appears to be indistinguishable from sadness and sorrow. I wonder if there is a correlation between housework and sex? But I don’t believe shedding pent-up tears is actually about scrubbing the shower or doing what they do on the Discovery Channel. It seems far too deep, complicated and personal and from a female’s point of view for that. I fall asleep after sex but removing orange juice stains from my cream carpet sets off an emotional reaction that can last for hours.

I have never heard of a man crying after sex. I have also never heard of a man who fights off the tears while washing the dishes and cleaning up curry and …

There are lies, damn lies and then there’s therapy.

While it would appear counter-productive to lie to your therapist it happens all the time for various reasons. Sometimes the lies are blatantly obvious, sometimes they are steeped in the unconscious and sometimes the lying is more by omission than sheer deceit.

I can’t lie to save my life. Face to face people know instantly the moment I’m not telling the truth. My English heritage gives the game away. I’m paler than a ghost and I glow in the dark. So when I lie, my face turns red. My children are the product of me and my red-headed husband so they really didn’t stand a chance when it came to telling porky pies (lies). I catch them out all the time when their face flushes a delicate shade of beetroot.

Even when I wear foundation, my neck flares up like the 4th of July and it’s so blatantly obvious there’s no point denying it – but I do. My facial expressions reflect what I’m saying (or not saying); I shift uncomfortably in my seat and feel a desperate need to scratch the back of my neck. Body language and spoken word are not in synchronicity with each other and it takes a brave client to connect the two and verbalize it without fear.

If I tell a lie over the phone my voice breaks and I swallow. This is why I try to tell the truth all the time. It makes my life easier when I don’t weave a tangled web to deceive.

I can’t even fib in an email, at least not to my very intuitive and shrewd therapist. She knows me so well she can spot an untruth 30 miles away – literally. But I still feel the need to twist the truth occasionally with her, until I’m ready to come clean. She’s also bright enough to recognize my need to protect myself and doesn’t out me till I confess, even when my face gets …