Posted by Dinah on June 23, 2009, at 20:07:35
My therapist's response to my asking for ways to keep therapy fresh and new was to give me a homework assignment. I told him he was trying to replace boredom with humiliation.
After a fair amount of verbal wrangling he said I didn't need to do it, that he wouldn't ask for it, and it was totally up to me.
I do want to please him. So I would like to do it. (Although I fear that if there is much of this, my esteem for him will seep away.)
It's supposed to be an exercise to understand and begin to change unhealthy patterns.
Some parts I suppose I can do. Although it's surprisingly hard to think of adjectives to describe people you've known all your life.
Some parts are just beyond my understanding and I don't know how I'll do them. I just talked to my husband about what unspoken rules in a family might be, and while he was generally helpful he agreed that my family didn't really have much that wasn't spoken. I might be able to consider the whole assignment merely stupid, and a punishment to me for being bored.
But I have a very bad attitude toward one part of the assignment. I'm supposed to draw a big oval, and fill it with pictures or symbols of... well... "Think of times when you were embarassed or let down, or when there was some upset or crisis that involved you. Starting with the earliest events you can remember from childhood, draw a small picture or symbol of the event." You're supposed to fill this large oval with these pictures or symbols.
I've told my therapist most of what would be in there, maybe all of it. I've told him the most humiliating and shameful, or upsetting events of my life. But I told him one at a time, layered with other things in the sessions. I don't understand why he wants me to recollect these things, and make a project of enshrining them in this oval, and talk about them all at once. It seems to me to be an exercise in shame.
He says it's so that I can let those things go. I think that's idiotic. I don't live in the past, but yes, those things have little spaces in my being. But they're little spaces, surrounded by more pleasant things. It's not like I'm going to have some stupid sort of ritual and let them fly away like bubbles released from a pocket.
I find myself very angry, and I can't help but think of it in terms of shame and humiliation.
Am I missing something that makes this less horrid?
poster:Dinah
thread:902818
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090614/msgs/902818.html