Why I’m having trouble blogging

… it’s because of the therapy.

Therapy is doing what it’s supposed to do… that is, it’s helping me express my feelings with increasingly dramatic adjectives.

Here’s a game:  One column contains words and phrases I used pre-therapy.  The other column has new words that I’m finding more suitable.  See if you can guess which column is pre-therapy and which is post-therapy:

Sad  …………………………………………………………………………………. Heavy with grief

Kinda vulnerable ……………………………………………………………… Completely exposed

A little down …………………………………………………………………….. Burdened

Angry…………………………………………………………………………………. Enraged

Anxious……………………………………………………………………………… Terrified

Fine, thanks, how are you? …………………………………………….. Oh God.  I… I just don’t know.

Why yes, it’s 2:15 ……………………………………………………………. [Breaks down crying]

And as I laugh at my own jokes (someone has to), I’m so aware of hiding behind them, too.  They give a satisfying non-answer to the question, “How’s therapy going?”

I can hear my counselor gently reminding me, “pearls before swine, Christine.”  The Internet is a pig, and my counseling stories are far too precious for its hairy snout.

But in my lighter moments, I’ll make the best counseling jokes I possibly can.

I wish all my assignments were like this one.

I have a short reflection paper due on Monday.  The assignment is to “spend an hour in prayer and in the presence of the Spirit contemplating what is good/beautiful/glorious in your character, and what aspects of your sin/depravity/blindness create the most relational challenge for you.”

If you haven’t ever sat down and asked God, “Please show me what is glorious in my soul,” you’re missing out. I don’t know why that isn’t a commandment in Leviticus.

Here’s my paper:

Last week a friend gave me one of the greatest compliments I could imagine.  She said I was the only person whose bathroom she wouldn’t be embarrassed to stink up.  We both giggled for a while, but I didn’t let on how very touched I was.  I do want to free people from shame and anxiety.  I want to offer such grace that even the biggest social stigmas become trifles.  This desire is one of the most beautiful parts of my character.

But this desire runs so deep because I still carry a fair amount of shame and anxiety myself.  And while one part of me refused that shame and invited my friend to a sense of freedom, I have also dragged others into my own depravity.  One of my very best friends once said that she found me too judgmental about her dating relationship.  She was right, and that judgment came out of my own shame, anxiety, and my flawed sense of right and wrong.

In my contemplative prayer, the idea of judgment came up frequently when I thought about my depravity.  As much as I want to be grace-filled, my heart is convinced it knows the full extent of right and wrong.  I don’t quite know where these ardent rules came from, but I sure have given them a lot of power in my relationships.

It seems clear that my ability to give love and grace to others is limited by how much I allow for myself.  I believe that for my time at Mars Hill, God is calling me to practice my gifts of acceptance, love, and grace on myself more than I have previously allowed.

Therapy

Mars Hill requires their counseling students to receive 40 hours of counseling outside the school with a Licensed Mental Health Therapist.  Licensed Therapists in Seattle charge at least $100 per hour.

$100 X 40 hours = ____

Yup.

Counseling students are going crazy with all this therapy.  We’re surrounded by therapists.  We pay $100 to talk about our parents.  We sit with our Practicum Facilitators (who are also therapists) twice a month and discuss why we were so anxious in Practicum last time, and why we panicked and said that one thing, and why we felt such shame for a whole week after we said it.  And then we talk for an hour about that shame, and our therapists teach us how to listen to it, be curious about it, wonder what other words connect to the word “shame.”  And then we find ourselves telling older stories, stories of really embarrassing times… times when we got it wrong, so wrong, again!  Can’t I do anything right?!?  Didn’t God promise me his Spirit of Love, so I could love others?  Then why do I just hurt people, over and over, why didn’t God change me like he promised?

Then you realize you’re talking about something different… not shame, but disappointment.  Disappointment with God.  How long have you felt that disappointment?  Oh I don’t know, since day 3?  What do you do with that disappointment?  Mostly I just ignore it and worship God with only part of me, a very small part, which really is no worship at all.  Then your therapist recommends that you journal about “What would a faithful God look like?”  And you think, that would be admitting in writing that I don’t think God is faithful.  And she says yes, that’s okay.  He likes that.  He likes to wrestle.  And through her kindness you see just the briefest glimpse of God, a terrifying and beautiful God that wants you to call him unfaithful so the wrestling match can begin.

But your 50 minutes are up!

So you head downstairs, to the student lounge.  Your mind is spinning and you feel that dammit, you’re losing it.  You’re losing that glimpse of God that was in the room during your therapy session.  By the time you hit the first floor you’ve already transitioned back to regular life.  Can I get to Taco del Mar before class? Then someone who knew you were in your 1-on-1 session sees you and asks, “How’d it go?”  And you say:

“Amazing.  We talked about shame.  And shame-cycles, and I realized that I just need to SIT in my shame, you know?  Just SIT in it!  And befriend it!  And love myself!  And we talked about how I hate God and need to wrestle.”

Which of course makes no sense.

Here’s what I’ve decided: describing therapy sessions is like describing dreams.  You just won’t be able to do it justice, ever. You can talk about the man who, in your dream, was your husband…but he wasn’t your real-life husband, and he made you go back to work at the coffee shop because he was mean and didn’t like how powerful you would become in graduate school, so you went back to the coffee shop and everyone made fun of you.  You can tell all that to your groggy husband when he wakes up but it won’t convey the horror and shame, the fury and dread that still linger even after the alarm went off.

Because only half of therapy is what you talk about in the session, the “aha!” and “oh, shit” moments of realization.  The other half is, as Buber would say, the I-Thou connection, the in-between, and the glimpses of the Eternal Thou.  Which Buber can describe only because he’s a late-romantic German philosopher, and most thankfully you are not.

So, many apologies to anyone who, in the next three years, will have to hear me describe my therapy (maybe even regularly).  I know how much it sucks.  And thank you.