Fighting the Battle of Myself

I'm in a good place, right now, in this moment. In the past week (after too many things happened in quick succession to list), I've been able to own "I matter." I play with it, I savor it, I say it to myself and I hold it to my breast like a small, warm animal I must keep safe, experiencing a nascent joy as it pulses through me.

But I have to fight to keep it. I can sit with in for a few moments, and then grim armies at my gates will start their bombardments again. And they start to overwhelm me, and they close in and the sky starts to get so dark, and I have to struggle so fervently to pull this small warm thing back to me.

Did you know that I matter? I don't think I did. Not really. And then I started crying and people started listening. And then I started witnessing other people who believed they mattered. Who were so open and honest about how much pain they experienced from so many people in so many places who, in unremitting savage chants, pound like wardrums in the assault on our souls. And they were so open about that hurt, and still they held onto the belief that they mattered. I was in awe, that one could do that. And I thought "I want to do that. I want to own my hurt and my worth. I want to own myself." And I started trying.

Did you know that I get to decide? "Decide what?" I asked my therapist. "That's it. You get to decide." This, I did not know. I did not know that I get to decide who can make me feel worthless. I did not know that I get to decide what my expectations are and whether I'm reaching them. I did not know that I get to decide these things, and then I get to decide when to listen to others about change. That I don't have to be my father, who always decides everything, but I also don't have to be the scared little child who has to let him. And as I confront change and the child whispers "You can't, you don't know how, they always win they always leave they always win they always leave," I can hold that small warmth and say "I don't know how. But I learn to decide what "winning" is. I can learn to decide whether I'm succeeding. And I can learn to decide who I can trust not to leave." And I've started trying.

It is hard. It is hard to own my hurt, to realize how deep my self-hatred goes, fueled by a million things big and small each day that say with unthinking conviction "You are abomination. A repugnant punchline whose very existence is as much a testament of your deep wrongness as it is a threat to the wellbeing of Good, Normal people everywhere." It is hard to confront the abyss it fuels within myself and how that darkness warps me and my views of those around me. It is hard to break down in front of others and to let them see the immensity of the pain and terror and sadness as my words falter and then fall out clumsy and dull. And it is hard to rematerialize anew and not calcify or dissolve again.

It is hard. But I am trying. Trying to hold onto "I matter." And "I get to decide." And "I matter, and you do too. I get to decide, and you get to too." I am trying to remember that, in order to let you decide and matter, I don't have to erase myself. And it is so, so hard.

In this moment, I think I can do it: I think I can win this battle of myself. But it's going to be a hell of a fight.

The Limitations of Insight

Two weeks ago, I was sitting with a client who spoke very circumstantially. I would ask her a question and her response would trail into all kinds of spaces that, while related to the topic in her mind, were just packed with details to the point that they did little to answer the question. I asked her about these "complex" answers, telling her that it was difficult for me to follow and asking her "What can we do to help me understand you better?" Curiously, she smiled when I said this. I was quite surprised: I would have thought she'd be hurt and feel criticized or angry that I wasn't listening better. After we talked about some possible solutions (all to the point and direct, in contrast to before), I asked her about her reaction. She said it felt good. That, normally, she just assumed no one would listen, that their eyes would glaze over and they wouldn't care enough to even ask for clarification. But as I had taken the effort to try to clarify, she felt it was nice to be heard.

Therapy's funny like that. Both because of the surprises, but also in how you see yourself in clients. Because I do the same thing as that client. She and another client both had to raise siblings (and, honestly, their parents) in chaotic homes with antagonistic fathers. Both have flat affects making it difficult to attend to them because you can't feel them. And both don't know how to function socially without taking care of those around them. Despite some significant differences in backgrounds and manifestations, I know that dynamic. Of being so emotionally protected that others don't connect to you, of never feeling comfortable unless you're taking care of someone else with the attention off yourself, of feeling so incredibly alone and wanting to care for others so very very much because that's all you know how to do.

And I want to tell them, "You're stuck in a vicious cycle! No one will hear you until you expect to be heard, until you believe you deserve to be! The defenses you've adopted to survive your home life are maladaptive in this new environment. You need to love yourselves, you need to be more vulnerable, you need to trust more if you ever want to find what you're seeking!" But I don't. Because it won't work. Insight, alone, so rarely does.

Knowing the reasons why, knowing the solutions, knowing the effects of continued stagnation, all of this helps but it is not enough. I have literally asked my psychotherapist "What do you wish you could tell me that you know if I just believed it, I would feel so much better?" And she said that she wished I wasn't so cruel to myself. Just as she'd told me so many times before and so many times since.

And yet today, we did an activity in Sunday School today about thinking about what to forgive yourself for (as part of Rosh Hashanah). It made me incredibly uncomfortable because I didn't think I deserved to be forgiven for all the bad things I'd done. I couldn't think of a single thing I wanted to be forgiven for because I deserved to suffer for all of them. When we thought of hopes for the next year, it took me a few moments to get "I hope I die" out of my head. And I had to seriously consider whether I genuinely wished to die. To compromise, I settled for "I hope I get better" as in "I hope I can figure out how to stop being so terrible."

And I know how cruel that is. I know how incredibly unforgiving, how brutal and violent that is. I know that considering myself a freakish monster because I'm not cis is oppressive and violent and vile. I know that hating myself for all the ways I fail as a teacher, a therapist, a person, and a woman is anxiety inducing and miserable and wrong.I know that when my friends and clients do it, I think it's tragic. But when I do it? It's because I deserve to be punished for my failures and monstrosity. It's because other people just don't get how bad I am, how wrong I am. They don't really know. When they do it it's because they're being too hard on themselves, but I'm legitimately bad. If I was one of my clients I would be heartbroken at how unrelentingly callous I am towards myself. But as me? It's justice. And I just wish I had the courage to give myself the punishment I truly deserve.

The natural followup question, of course, is "So what do you need?" Validation, certainly: I genuinely wonder how others perceive my gender (particularly my face and voice), but I'm too terrified of the answer to ask. Empathy, definitely: it would be nice if people understood or wanted to understand just how inherently stressful it is to be trans on a daily basis. Concern and affection, too, no doubt. And I think I need to be better about soliciting those and letting myself be open to them too.

But, of course, knowing what I need is just more insight. Actually getting it is a different matter. And for my sake and my clients, I hope I someday figure out how.

A Prurient Proof

So, funny story: a week or so before flying to Montreal, I start talking to a young woman online who lives in Atlanta. She's smart, pretty, showed me glimpses of her *huge* diction... I'll spare you the graphic details. Anyway, it just so happened that, to save money, I was already scheduled to take a bus to fly out of Atlanta. And we figured that, since I was going to be there anyway, we ought to do lunch before my flight.

So we did. Her train was delayed so I got there first, and she surprised me by walking out of the subway tunnel with a bouquet of yellow roses. Not gonna lie: I swooned. She didn't know the area well, so we kind of wandered around until we found a sub place (for lack of anything else). She made some flimsy excuse for buying me lunch. We ate. We were both sleep-deprived, so it was somewhat awkward. But it was a nice diversion from thinking OMG SURGERY OMG SURGERY like a stock ticker in my head.

When our time was getting short, I suavely and subtly said, “I wish I could just pull you into a corner and make out with you.”
She said, “Yeah, that would be nice.”
Heartened, I took the classy route: “Well, the bathroom is a single room.”
She promptly responded “Well, I'm finished eating,” dropped her sandwich, and started walking. I, as you might imagine, swiftly followed.

Lovely, lovely makeouts commenced. It happened so fast it was almost unreal; I'm not used to other people taking the lead in matters of the sexy and sordid. Anyway, lurid details might prove superfluous, but suffice it to say I had somehow gone through life never being thrown against a wall and furiously kissed and now I have.

Eventually, as you might imagine, someone tries the handle outside and finds it locked. We start to compose ourselves when I discover that I have a huge erection.

Like, a huge one. Bulging against my jeans for all the metropolitan area to see, no doubt no way no how. And I realize that I honestly cannot recall a time where this iconic happening-to-penis-havers has been a problem. Two days before the surgery, and I'm going to have to walk to the subway station in downtown Atlanta beside a really hot girl with a giant hard-on. The poetry of the divine, indeed.

So I do what any sensible person would do and awkwardly angle my bag to cover the front of my pants as I walk down the street and wait for the subway.  Someone fortunately gives me their seat on the subway (on account of my luggage) and, aside from my date's amused grin, I escape major embarrassment.. Soon she gets to her stop and kisses me goodbye (*sigh*). And, as she's gone and I can finally stop being turned on, I think to my penis, resting smugly and far-too-snugly in my jeans, “Q.E.D., motherfucker. Q.E.D.”

It might be an understatement to say that I had the last laugh.

"What I Believe of Therapy"

I've been to a lot of therapists. But, with most of them, I've not received much “therapy.” More often than not, I gain some things, feel less understood, and end up more rejected than I did when I started. But one, particularly, was different. Certainly, I mistrusted her initially too. I thought she hated me, was hyperconscious of her affect at all times, was terrified of hurting her or horrifying her with how I felt,and found her as frustrating as most everyone else in my life. But she stayed. And so did I. And, eventually, change happened. It was not ideal. But I grew. I explored. And I ended up transitioning genders, changing careers, surviving the end of a romantic relationship and starting a new one. And most importantly, I trusted. When the time came, losing her was hard. But I felt more positive about it than I've felt about losing anyone else before. That, to me, is realistic therapy: Growth, change, trust, and termination that is affirmative not rejecting.

But the APA Code doesn't settle for realistic. It has those five wonderful Principles that compel every one of us to aspire for an ever elusive “better way.” And, being an idealist, I conceive of therapy in similarly aspirational terms.

In short, ideal therapy is a lot like ideal sex. It is a conscious risk, a giving of a bare and exposed self into the care of another who, if they so chose, could do so much harm or so much good. It is an act of worship, a spiritual experience that tells both parties that there is more to this existence than one's isolated, limited self. It is a connection, a celebration of humanity. It is Cat Power, it is Margaret Atwood, it is T. S. Eliot. It is real in an existence that forces us into self-imposed masks and externally-imposed definitions. I want to leave both experiences affirmed, I want to leave connected, I want to leave secure in the knowledge that I am a person of worth who will find that warm embrace again and again and again.

Ideally, anyway. As mentioned, this is an aspiration not a destination. But the more invested I become in my quest to learn how to love everyone I meet (including that most elusive of prey, myself), the more I veer towards soaring humanism, the more I see existence veiled in existential threat, the more apt my aspirations become. As a therapist, I feel like I am participating in something holy, but instead of prostrating myself before the divine, I am living and loving and suffering in congruence with humanity personified in the individual before me.

Certainly, psychotherapy is not reciprocal. But I would not consider it my “calling” if I did not feel that I get just as much from it as my client does. Certainly, psychotherapy is not desire of the other. But there are different desires which are uncovered and explored. Certainly, psychotherapy's medium is not the physical. But what my client entrusts in my care is so precious, so vulnerable, so fragile that I cannot help but consider it a gift. A gift that I do not take lightly.

Undoubtedly, I am somewhat grandiloquent in my rhetoric and my metaphor sent warning sirens flaring in the mind of each prospective supervisor who reads this piece. But when you ask me what I believe of therapy, this is the visceral response that comes to mind. I am not in this for money. I am not in this because I like to “help people.” I am not in this because I was clueless and had to “choose something.” I am a psychotherapist because I know what it is to suffer, I know what it is to despair, and I know what it is to change. I am a psychotherapist because it connects me to others, to the real like no other role can. I want to stand just outside the ring of fire and watch my clients fall to their demons again and again and again. I want to feel every blow they take. And I want to joyously watch them rise, as they look to me for smiles of assurance, until they finally emerge battered and bloody but victorious and trade their isolated inner struggles for the cause of humanity.

That's what I believe therapy can be. And that's what I'll work for it to become.

"Normal" & Abuse

I've been watching The United States of Tara, a show about a woman who has dissociative identity disorder (which causes what is sometimes referred to as "multiple personalities") and the effect it has upon her family. It's an interesting dynamic because, on a certain level, there's a great deal of dysfunction. Tara's alternate selves ["alters"] appear with no warning and inhabit spaces within her life that create a great deal of unpredictability and destructiveness. But on another level, despite these difficulties, the father is loving, the children squabble but mostly get along, the gay child is well-integrated, and Tara and her alters are not particularly threatening to the family. There is chaos and unpredictability, yes. But there are safe spaces, love, support and togetherness too.

Much is made about how "crazy" the mom is, although moreso in a "this is trying" way than a pejorative way. Yet I cannot help but watch and think "I wish I had a family like that." It doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, nor does it seem unrealistic. There are difficulties and hurt, but they are counterbalanced and cared about in compassionate ways. Tara's mental illness is a trial, but there is still a sense of closeness and a palpable sense of love that makes everything manageable. Hard, but manageable.

And it makes me wonder: How much of this is situational dramedy/cultural myth and how much of this accurately reflects contemporary American family structures? Many of the characters in the show focus upon how "abnormal" their family is. But their "abnormal" looks wonderful to me. Does "normal" exist? I don't think so. But perhaps more appropriately, are even the majority of family units close and loving? Do most people actually trust their parents? I honestly don't know.

I remember going over to my friends' homes when I was young and being somewhat shocked to learn that their parents slept in the same bed. My mother slept on the couch for my entire childhood, storing her clothes in the closet in my room and essentially having no space of her own. Not that my sister and I had those either, mind you. We were fortunate enough to have individual rooms, certainly. But if my father wanted in, he'd come in. Perhaps he would knock, but that gave you five seconds before he'd start to yell. "No" and "Please leave" or "Not right now" were not options.

Nothing was optional, where my father was concerned. Everything he wanted to do was mandatory. He'd even make us come out of our rooms to watch as he berated my mother (I don't consider such one-sided affairs "fights") and blamed us. As my sister says, " He would also blame everything on us.  So, as we would watch them fight he would point to that as an example of what our misbehavior (or lack there of in many cases) would cause."

When he did this, he would yell. Constantly. Bellow, roar. And you simply couldn't argue or speak. If he asked you a question, you answered, but his truth was the only one that mattered. My sister, again, "He would not let anyone else talk.  He would just sort of berate you.  I also found that he would not so much lie as stretch the truth during these yelling sessions.  He would take something said in one context and completely misconstrue it or the events surrounding it." You could not win an argument or ever be right because he would use just enough 'truth' to lend himself credibility but inflect the rest so he was always the sole victim. 


He would threaten to throw things we loved away or take them from us, and once he even threw my sister's cherished blanky in the trash to punish her (our mother fished it out).


Leaving him meant we didn't love him. Telling him "I love you" was met with "No you don't."


And my mother, as a result of him or her depression, more or less shut down. She wouldn't respond unless we yelled at her (we so often did). She would do pretty much anything you wanted her to do, with no sense of her self worth. I almost think of her as a ghost, with the image of her tapping on the door futilely as my father cornered us and berated us locked in our rooms, telling us she was insane and couldn't love us, telling us how wrong we were for hours and her milquetoast protests of "Families don't keep secrets" so painfully inadequate, exacerbating everything.


And I still don't know how frequent this sort of thing is. How many people primarily associate childhood with terror? When people say they don't get along with their parents, what does that mean? I know "normality" doesn't matter, exactly. But I would like to know how many people, in general, relate to this. Because I know being trans is different than the norm. Being lesbian is different than the norm. But is being abused different too? Is Tara's family the ideal or the plurality? And what does the answer to that question mean?


I know "normality" doesn't matter. But it would be nice to have more validation. I might make another post about this, but it was immensely validating to have my sister share her experiences [we're just now getting to the point of trust where we can do that with each other]. You really start to think you've made most of it up until someone else "No, this happened." And I almost want to make a television show that says "No, this happens. All around us. And it doesn't stop once you leave." But I suppose being a psychotherapist will just have to do.

Still and Moreso

It's true. I was so nervous when I was going to first meet Juliet, but then the only nervousness was just normal ex relationship stuff. It instantly clicked for me, because you were You, both *still* and *moreso.*

My ex, on what it was like to meet me for the first time a year after we broke up and I was well in the throes of transition [we talked about it the other night, but this happened about a year ago]. I just found it a really sweet way of describing what it's like to watch someone transition.

It's been about two years since we broke up, and I really value the friendship we've since found. I'm quite lucky to have and to have had such caring people in my life.

Empathy vs. Sympathy

"Empathy" is a strange creature. It's undoubtedly a virtue, but it's largely an underrated one. This is likely because it is so closely associated with femininity, which, as everyone knows, is icky. But even so,  I think empathy is also not as widely lauded because it's a quite difficult concept to pin down. We know (or think we know) what "courage" is. Likewise for "responsibility", "respect," "honesty." We had series about them in elementary school. We hear them preached about by parents, teachers, reverends for most of our formative years. But if you polled most people about what "empathy" means, they'd likely tell you, if they say anything at all, that it's the same as sympathy. And while it is similar, it is vitally and decidedly different.

To figure out the difference, let's start with the dictionary definition of empathy: "the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another." Put differently, empathy is a form of "experiencing" what others experience. Or it is the process of ascertaining and perhaps describing those experiences.

To start to grasp what that actually entails, I find it useful to compare empathy to sympathy. Sympathy is "harmony of or agreement in feelings, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another." In other words, sympathy is agreement with the feelings of another, while empathy is experiencing the feelings of another. Sympathy is a cooing "I'm sorry you stubbed your toe." Empathy is a grimacing "God, that must have hurt." Sympathy is "supporting our troops." Empathy is trying to grasp what it is like to be in combat/stationed overseas in a warzone.

I think I differ from most people in that I find empathy a great deal easier than sympathy. The reasons why are fodder for another post, but a lot of it is based upon how they're used. Sympathy is generally used to comfort or agree, while empathy is generally used to understand and validate.

Sympathizing is hard for me because I really don't think it's my place to "agree" with the way someone is feeling. ¹So too, if sympathetic comfort means telling someone "it will be alright," I'd consider that shallow, privileged, or ignorant of reality. When sympathetic comfort means "I hope you get better soon," it feels as if a person has nothing left to offer me but prayers. And prayers won't bring my partner back, won't make me not want to kill myself, won't make me appreciate a body and identity that feels fundamentally incongruent with my self. "I hope you get better" is what someone says when they have nothing left to say. And often, that's all one can do. Any one of us can only do or say so much in any given context. "I hope you get better" can be really sweet, it can be a vote of support, it can show that people care when caring is the only option available to them.

But, as a therapist, I don't want to merely wish that someone will get better. I want to help them get there. And so I empathize.

Empathy is one of the most significant reasons people go to psychotherapists. A therapist doesn't just wish you well, they ideally understand you. And, with that understanding, they can validate how you feel by saying "I (mostly) understand what you're feeling and why, and I think you are entirely justified for x, y, z reasons." ² They can propose solutions or help you come up with your own. They can find where you are and help guide you as you navigate your way through it.

Empathy makes us feel less alien. Empathy makes us feel hope. Empathy makes us feel that someone can understand us. Indeed, it is amazing how much duress comes just from the symptoms of not feeling understood. But it is equally amazing how much potential there is in simple understanding.

And that's part of why I run on empathy.


1 "Agreement:" When I say "agree with how someone is feeling" I mean when someone looks to you to see if they should feel angry or happy or sad. They often want you to say "Yes, feel angry about that football penalty! I, too, am angry about that penalty! Let us gnash our teeth and shout invective at yon official, posthaste!"

2"Validation:" When I say "validate how someone feels," I mean asserting that any given emotion is "ok" to feel. Often, people will experience a lot of self-doubt about their feelings. For instance, they may feel angry or hurt, but try to suppress the feeling for various reasons. Validation doesn't tell someone how to feel, it just tells them that what they're feeling is ok to feel. Validation might look like this: "I can understand how that football penalty would be really frustrating. Coming so close to something and then being held back can be really hard." The one validating doesn't have to have the same emotional reaction to validate, they just have to assert that it's perfectly reasonable/acceptable/appropriate for someone to feel that way.