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Saturday, January 21, 2006

New therapist, new challenges

Well I'm done with cognitive behavior therapy and my therapist Christopher was transferred so he sent me to a new student therapist named Rebecca. Now it's bad enough dealing with paruresis but I didn't think I could talk about it to a woman. I notice that I'm having trouble leaving Chris behind me and moving forward with Rebecca and she's doing her darnest to make me comfortable but it's not quite the same. I've got an email folder full of a year's worth of emails between Chris. Rebecca told me to leave it alone until we meet next weeknd. Anyway, seems now I've graduated to something called psycho-dynamic therapy. In this, she tries to get beyond my anxiety and paruresis and tries to get to the heart of the problem and find ways for me to become a better person. I was with Chris for three years so it's hard having to part with him and the thing is, ethically he can have no more contact with me at all. If Rebecca needs to consult with him, she can but I cannot. I have come to realize in a few short therapy sessions with Rebecca that "I have met the enemy and the enemy is me". What I mean by that I am my own worst critic when I do something wrong but I have little to no ability to reward myself for doing something right. I wish I could understand this but at this point, I can't. I do know HOW I got to this point....started with my dad telling me I was worthless and would never amount to anything when I was a kid. Obviously now I know he was just angry and his words were not accurate but just born out of his anger. I've been mistreated by a lot of people over the years so my homework assignment this week is to create a list of those people,excluding online people, who are my family, friends....in short, my support system, or those who should be my support system. Probably will be a short list. Also she gave me a form to fill out to give her an idea of my mental state and what she's working with.

As far as my paruresis goes, I'm now able to use a urinal when there's nobody else at a urinal in the same room. If they're in the stall, it's ok. It's a lot better than it used to be and I'm happy with my progress but I want to keep working at it. At this point, I use a corner urinal. I want to work towards using a urinal in the middle. I can't let what I learned in CBT slide away. It's valuable tools and like any tools, they do no good unless you use them.