… then this must be the post-therapy diary entry! Yaaaay! *Kermit flail*

Yes, here I am again, mulling over what all went down today in my therapy session, and thus either continuing the process in my blog in a healthy and mature way that will lead to greater emotional growth and inner strength, or wallowing in a big neurotic pit of pointless self-obsessed self-centered self-analysis like a hog rooting around in his own dung.

Either way, you are all here to watch, and you have no idea how that gratifies me.

Come to think of it, that is probably for the best.

Anyhow, it was a fruitful session. I started off talking about my concerns about my own oral retentive nature, and I how I think the sexual abuse I suffered as a very young child (approximately three years old) at the hands of my father caused me to fail to make it into the classic Freudian anal stage, and instead I got arrested in the oral stage.

Genital stage? Sorry, not gonna happen. Not in my lifetime.

He seemed a little taken aback and uncomfortable with my use of the admittedly antique Freudian terminology and point of view. He basically said “Um, that’s analysis, and I don’t do analysis, I do psychotherapy”, although he said it in a lot more words than that.

(I am eventually going to have to confront him about his tendency to drone on and on, saying basically the same thing over and over again in different words. I don’t know if it’s because it’s early in the morning and he just isn’t fully awake yet, or he’s just not that articulate, but it is becoming increasingly frustrating to me and so sooner or later, I am going to have to ask him to be more succinct. I am finding it hard to get a word in edgewise, and that is not something that should ever happen in therapy. At least, not in mine. )

Admittedly, while I knew, as a psychiatrist, he had certainly learned Freud quite thoroughly, I imagine that not a lot of his patients spontaneously cite him when trying to describe their own problems. Just another of my little oddities, I suppose. I must not be the easiest patient to have around. I mean, I’m highly cooperative and try my best to make sure my big brain full of bits and pieces of psychological lore doesn’t get in the way, but fron the therapist’s point of view, I am probably more than a little hard to predict.

What can I say, my brain train runs on its own set of tracks.

My therapist did make one very interesting observation : he treats a lot of depressives, and they tend to come in two kinds : very angry and very skinny guys who don’t hold anything back, and big fat quiet guys who hold far too much back, and (this is the juicy bit) all of whom tend to be highly articulate and intellectually agile.

So apparently, I am one of a type : big fat passive chatty intellectuals. Big brains, big bodies, but not nearly enough will to make the whole thing work.

Perhaps one of us should form a support group for us depressed fatties. Not me, of course, it would be too much work and too much of a commitment. But if someone else did it, I guess I would join. Probably. Maybe.

But the big take-away from the day’s session was a lot of talk about my relationship with my father, and how I need to confront him about the abuse and all the other issues I have with him being, basically, a very bad father to me for my entire life, and I hate him around as much as I am capable of hating anyone.

After all, we’re all getting older, and it’s best to do this before the “shouting at a tombstone” stage.

I have had the idea of writing to my father in the back of my mind for a long long time, as a way of working out my own personal demons (a lot of whom look like him), but when I try to imagine doing it, I get so angry that my articulacy just dissolves in a white hote flood of total rage and I can’t imagine how I could put it into words without ending up just eating my forehead against the monitor and grunting.

“You… bad…. my life…. incompetent… stupid… asshole… argh!”

And then I would have a stroke and end up drooling on the keyboard.

But action is necessary. My therapist is right about that. And while we discussed the idea of my actually getting on a Greyhound to confront him in person, I cant’ really afford that, and honestly, I would be too afraid I would kill the asshole. It would only take one wrong word for me to snap.

I am not saying I want to kill him. I don’t even want him to die, unless I’m in the will and he’s a lot richer than I know about. I am just saying that I have so much anger towards him that I am deeply afraid of what would happen if it all came out at once.

I might not be able to control it.

Anyhow, that’s not gonna happen. But the letter thing… that is doable. I can pour out my anger into a letter and send it to him. I am good with words, it is something I can work on when I am able and then put aside if it all gets to be too much, and most importantly, while it will be a “poison pen letter”, I will not, in fact, be able to actually kill him with it.

When I am done writing it, I will likely post it here. That way, even if he never reads my letter, even if he rips it up and throws it into the garbage when he sees who it is from and guesses that it might not contain happy warm fuzzy content, the truth about him will be out there, on the Internet, for the world to see.

I hope he chokes on it.