Today was a therapy day, like every Thursday. So for those of you hoping for a break from all the meandering introspection lately, sorry, not today.

But remember, tomorrow is SCIENCE.

Today was a mildly unusual therapy day, as the session was ninety minutes instead of the usual sixty. Last week’s session started half an hour late, so this one was half an hour longer than usual. It was good of Doctor Costin to do that for me. I am so used to getting screwed over in that sort of circumstance, of being the person everyone takes for granted as disposable, that I was surprised when he offered and had to ask him if he was sure a couple of times before I believed it.

And even today, part of me felt like he was not really going to go through with it. I thought I would show up and we would have an hour long session like usual and he would not even mention the whole extra half hour extension at all.

Shows how poor my opinion of people is, I guess. I really have no faith in the reliability, thoughtfulness, or compassion of others. I tend to assume that everyone will view me as nothing but a burden and an irritating, and barely tolerate me at best, and secretly want to be rid of me as fast and as easily as possible, no matter what they actually say.

And hey, duh, I know that is pretty fucked up. People like me, they truly do. Intellectually, I know this must be true. I have ample evidence that some people find me funny and fun to be with and so on. And yet, it feels really weird even just to type the words. Part of me wants to erase this whole paragraph. It’s like I feel like I am letting out a terrible secret.

But it is more than that. The secret is one I keep from myself. It is a truth I have every reason to believe, and yet, I am afraid to do so. Afraid, I suppose, of crushing disappointment if I dare to believe that people like me (and that I deserve it, that’s the big one) and then it turns out not to be true.

A lot of the maladaptive nature of depression has to do with staying on the ground rather than risk falling ever again.

Not hard to see how that is a poor choice of coping strategies.

Today’s session was quite good. I went into it feeling tired and depressed and vulnerable, and I think that meant my defenses were down more than usual, and that lead to a particularly fruitful session. I held back less, and that is always good. I try not to hold back at all in therapy, but there is only so far that can go. Despite my seeming openness, I am a pretty tightly controlled guy. There is always a limit to how well you can suppress your social instincts.

One of the things we ended up discussing is the idea of being able to suspend judgement of myself. I have had the thought before, but I did not see how I could get from where I am now to that space. After talking about it with my therapist today, I feel like maybe I imagine a way there, or at least, a possibility.

I think that normal, emotionally healthy people have a strong and stable enough sense of ability that they have a deep reserve of stability in their self-worth. They have a safe zone inside themselves and a substance and solidity to their identity that lets it weather the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without changing much. The mountain is not much changed by the rain. But a puddle lives or dies in every single drop of it.

Now where does this stable, strong self-worth come from? I think it comes from childhood nurturing, specifically, the unconditional love traditionally associated with mothers. A person like myself, with a harshly judging father and an emotionally absent mother, plus other things happening in my early childhood that injured my sense of self, might well be left vulnerable by this lack of identity growth.

Note how my language just got all clinical and precise while I talked about these deeply emotional things? I guess that is just how I deal with this shit. Most of the time I do not even know I am doing it. I switch into that academic mode so seamlessly that it is like automatic transmission.

Which, as everyone know, costs you big time on performance.

But um…. yeah. Suspending judgement about myself. That is quite a concept. Part of me is terrified that if I suspend judgement, I will be even more self-indulgent, lazy, and worthless than I already am.

After all, no punishment, no motivation, right?

Wrong. Right now the punishment is so severe that it destroys the motivation, as well as the means to do anything. That is no way to run a railroad, my friends.

That said, learning to suspend judgement on myself will not be easy. It is the next logical step from just not beating myself up so much, but it is a much harder transition. It requires such a fundamental change in my usual lightning fast judgement and evaluation thinking style that I feel like I will almost have to grow a second brain just to hold it.

Not really, of course, that’s just a silly image to describe a feeling.

So here I am, on my mountaintop, ready to make my next sacrifice. Set fire to my grief, and let the holy fire turn it into nothing but ashes and smoke.

Creating a space within myself where it is totally safe and I am free from my own judgement (and the imagined judgements of others, of course) will be the next step. It still seems like madness to part of me, but a bigger part of me knows that it must be done.

Now to find a good-sized cave around here…