Under wraps. Am I hiding?
Yesterday I learn about how the game works.
But there are no professionals who help—coach—someone like me in filing a complaint against a therapist.
There's no money—or not enough money—in helping someone who is not interested in suing but just wants some help in making sure their complaint is up to snuff.
There's not enough money, not a big enough pot at the end of the rainbow, for someone to do this work.
Which is go it mostly alone.
Square one also seems to be a place where I consider, too, not filing the complaint at all. I consider this option again when I see that Eileen's license expires in April. Maybe…she won't renew it.
Maybe. It seems to register something in me but not sure what exactly.
Truth. I remember creating Better Now years ago. Thinking the day I created it, I would reach it by week's end. But I think honestly I landed in Better Now around the time I began to draft the complaint. I was getting shot out of the rabbit hole into a new state of much greater clarity.
So I gave it all a good investigation yesterday. And in my heart too I allowed it to see-saw.
And I have not made a decision still.
It's been only two weeks that we have a our loaded gun.
What drives you to want to fire it?
I think not saying something is wrong. It's not me.
But what I've been pondering lately is that saying something doesn't mean I need to say something to the licensing board. I could say something in a book (though I think I tried that and failed), I could say something directly to Eileen in email or in person. I could continue to do what I'm doing now which is to publish the work online.
I'll draft another letter to Eileen?
What feels right. What feels good.
Imagine the day after we have filed the complaint. Does that day feel right. Does that day feel good.
What then feels right. What then feels good.
I think forgiveness feels somehow better. Or giving Eileen a chance to apologize. Or at least letting her know how directly much damage that therapy did and how long it has taken me to heal.
The risk is that I somehow harm myself in bringing, essentially, my complaint to her.
But there is something that is also unlike me to not be direct.
Complaining to a board feels like I'm hiding.
And maybe that's the part of me that says definitively that the day after filing the complaint does not feel in any way good.
I know that Eileen loved me beyond client which is why it was so fucked up. And I know too that this love harmed me. But it was love. It was love that kept her from terminating me so that I could do that on my own. She was and is a fucked up mess. But she really genuinely did love me. And I knew that. And she also tried to not love me—tried to put distance and dollars between us—but it ultimately really wasn't pure this distance—her love—and her confusion got in the way.
There was something flawed that harmed.
And there was something flawed that also helped. Her genuine inability to not love me, to not consider me special was something to me—it was a spark—a match that lit me, creatively, on fire.
And it's I think that love—flawed as it is and was—that makes it hard to do this.
I want it to be me before her—and it will be.
But "me" also includes love that I've felt—and gratitude.
Her love was careless—and harmed us.
Her love also was, S, and this hurts the most, a tease. It was not love we could have. Only love we could wish for.
Yes. A. Truth. That hurt the most. In all of it, this is what hurt me the most.
Eileen was unable to manage anger. And this is critical in a therapy to be able to do.
What we do with our loaded gun, how we live in this place called Better Now is about who we are in this world.
It's a lot harder than I could have imagined.
Who are we in this world.
I am struggling to envision the right road, the one that is both the me that I am and the me that I want to be.
Allow, allow, allow the meditation that will take us there.
In a few months it will be two years since I saw you last, since I made the decision to leave, since I jumped out of what felt like a burning building to save my sanity.
It was the most painful tearing apart I think I have ever experienced.
It was not the normal graduation from therapy—a little sad but ready to move on.
I stumbled into new therapy, twice weekly, and I suffered in sorting things out.
I suffered for a long time.
Until I began to suffer less.
Until I began to finally get clear.
I was able to finally see with clarity how traumatizing the therapy with you was for me. It took twenty two months to realize that what I was sitting with was just a ton of garden variety PTSD from the therapy. It has taken me this long—twenty two months—to get here. To know with certainty the animal that now sits in my lap.
I wrote a piece back in August called "Two Packs" and I'm attaching it.
It's about the pain of healing from confusing, chaotic therapy--the perplexing, iterative exercise in healing that you are summonsed to do daily.
I have been pondering now…now that I feel finally that I am in that place called Better Now, a place I thought I'd be in literally years ago, what to do with my experience with you.
How do I be the person I am and want to be around it which is to not be silent.
The therapy harmed me—deeply—and it has taken nearly two years to get better. But the cause of the harm was, in part, love.
So what do I do with this love—this flawed love.
Do I eschew it. Do I take it to the authorities. Do I take it back to you, to your doorstep, and leave it there?
What do I do with this entire experience? How do I live in this world with it?
I remember before I left what I wanted, what I thought I wanted, was an open door and an open heart.
I wonder if there was a reason for that now.
Something other than me being just too scared to say goodbye to you forever.