Chapter 25 #2
As ordered, I thought about it. “What does ‘snap your rubber band’ mean? Like, is that literal? I reach into my desk drawer and slingshot a rubber band across the room?”
She chuckled. “Not exactly. It’s a common, low-key strategy a lot of people with anxiety use: you wear a rubber band or a hair elastic around your wrist, and when you need to snap yourself out of a spiral, you literally snap the band against your wrist. That tiny pain sometimes works to startle your lizard brain and break the panic cycle. ”
I looked reflexively down at my wrist where, yes, there was a hair elastic wrapped. Huh. Maybe? I gave the band a gentle pull and released it, taking a moment to consider the sting. “I don’t feel any different,” I told her, looking up.
“Well,” she pointed out, “you’re not currently spiraling. Try it when you are. But it doesn’t need to be that. Maybe for you it’s ‘phone a friend’ or ‘journal your feelings’.”
I shuddered. “I’m not starting a journal. That’s a level of navel-gazing I don’t think I can get down to.”
She shrugged. “Ok. Doesn’t have to be that. And you don’t need to decide right this second. Take the list home, think about what it says and what might work for you.”
“Mmm, ok.” I folded the paper and tucked it into my back pocket. “I feel like I’ve just been assigned homework.”
“Therapy homework is a legitimate treatment strategy,” she said. “They teach it in grad school and everything. But don’t worry, I won’t grade your work.”
“Well that’s reassuring,” I said dryly.
She sat back in her chair and studied me.
“Ok, we got a little sidetracked with our conversation about fear versus worry. Not that sidetracking is bad,” she added quickly when I started to apologize.
“But I had had another thought before we digressed onto that, so I want to go back to that thought.”
I tried to remember what we’d been talking about, but honestly, it was gone. I waited for her to elucidate me.
“I want to talk a little bit about your relationship with Jamison.”
Eurgh. I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds…unpleasantly touchy-feely.”
“And that’s, what, not manly?” she challenged.
I shook my head. “Nah. I’m not too concerned with looking manly. I mean, I’m a carpenter. But I feel like you’re going to ask me a lot of feelings questions I don’t have the answers to.”
“Probably,” she said brightly. “Suck it up. So here’s my first feelings question: do you feel safe in your relationship?”
“Safe?” I squinted at her. “As in, do I feel like he’s going to hit me? Or as in, do I feel like he’s not going to break up with me?”
She made a weighing motion with her hands. “Both, neither? Plus other options you didn’t name. Whatever comes to your mind when I say ‘safe’ is relevant.”
I thought about it. I was a six-foot-two manual laborer; I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about safety, so it was a bit of a reach to try to figure out what that word meant to me in this context.
“I guess it means whether I worry about him breaking up with me? I mean,” I laughed weakly, “I’m six inches taller than him, he’s not about to beat me up. ”
“Ok,” she said, regarding me steadily and not saying anything more.
Ok, so we weren’t going to laugh at that.
I guessed I needed to actually answer her question.
I sighed inwardly. “He says he wants to be with me, and he’s willing to accommodate me and my neurosis…
neurosises…neuroses? But I guess…trying to put myself in his place, I have a hard time imagining how much patience he can really have with me.
I mean, this is no longer a relationship on easy mode, and that’s all down to me. ”
“It sounds like that’s a feeling that challenges you, the idea that you’re making things somehow more difficult.”
“I guess?” What did it mean for a feeling to challenge me? Freakin’ therapist-speak. “It’s…not comfortable. I don’t like making life harder for him.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Are you making life harder for him?”
“Well, I mean, yeah. I’m blurting emotions all over him. We haven’t had sex for weeks; I can hardly even kiss him, let alone let him touch my dick. It certainly can’t be easy for him.”
“And do you feel you can make that call for him?”
It was obvious what the correct answer to that was intended to be, so I obediently said, “Well, no. But isn’t part of being in a relationship understanding what your partner is feeling without them needing to spell it out?”
“Is it?”
Ugh, I hated when she turned my questions back on me. “Yes?”
“I’m going to disagree, actually. I think part of a healthy relationship is being willing and able to explicitly tell your partner what you’re feeling.
We spend a lot of energy attempting to read minds when we don’t need to.
So let me put it to you this way: has he expressed to you that he finds your relationship - or you - difficult?
Is he behaving in a way that indicates he’s struggling? ”
“Well, I mean…” That wasn’t fair. He was too nice to be like hey, yo, you’re being really difficult. But I didn’t think she’d buy that as a justification. “He's being really gentle with me. Like, asking permission to kiss me when before he’d just haul off and do it. So I think he’s very…aware.”
“As he should be,” she agreed easily. “Good partners are always aware of their person’s state.”
“Wait.” I regarded her skeptically. “You just told me that we shouldn’t be trying to read minds, and now you’re saying that good partners read minds.”
She smiled self-deprecatingly. “Ok, true. But to me, there’s a difference between expecting your partner to read your mind and being an active partner who pays attention to cues.
Yes, they overlap, but not entirely. It’s appropriate for him to be aware of things that might trigger you; it’s not appropriate of him to expect you to somehow intuit that, say, he didn’t want you to take that phone call. ”
Ehhhh. Sounded fishy to me. I opened my mouth to tell her so, but she went on before I could: “So I think it’s valid for him to be aware - even hyper-aware - of your struggles at this point in time, and to do his best to accommodate them.
But I also think he gets to make the call for himself about whether it’s too much for him. ”
Thanks, I hated it. “But he’s too nice to just be like ‘Yeah, you’re too much for me’.”
“Do you trust him?”
“In what sense?” I countered suspiciously.
“To know his own mind and his own needs.”
Another question with a clear right and wrong answer. I sighed. “Of course.”
“So at what point do you have to just trust that he’ll tell you the truth?”
I heaved another pointed sigh, but she just continued to stare at me, waiting. “I guess,” I finally ventured uncertainly, “that I don’t actually completely trust him to tell me the truth, if he thinks the truth will hurt or traumatize me.”
She considered that. “Is that perhaps something you need to talk to him about?”
“What, ‘Hey honey I don’t trust you’?”
“No.” She shook her head. “More like ‘Hey honey I’m going to need you to be honest with me about your needs, because I don’t feel, in my current state of mind, that I can read them to the level I’d otherwise expect of myself’.”
That was a whole lot of words. I tried to imagine myself sitting Jamison down and telling him that, and mentally shied away. “That seems…really blunt.”
She nodded agreeably. “It is. But that doesn’t mean it’s not something that needs to be said to keep your relationship healthy.”
“But…” Even I could hear the whine in my voice. “Won’t it hurt his feelings, to hear that I don’t trust him?”
“Did I say that?” she countered smoothly. “There was no mention of trust in what I suggested.”
I thought back. Ok, there hadn’t been. “But that’s basically what I’d be saying.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it is. I mean, if trust comes into it at all, you’d actually be saying you don’t trust yourself, but really it’s not a question of trust. It’s a question of emotional capacity at this point in time. Yours is understandably low right now.”
“And he’s just expected to live with that?”
“Ah.” She tapped her fingertip on the arm of her chair. “Listen to what you just said. How did we circle back to what’s expected of him? We were talking about your capacity.”
“Well…” I thought about it. “Ok, point. But…”
She tapped her finger again. It made hardly any noise, but somehow it succeeded in shutting me up as if she’d banged a gong.
“Here’s another homework assignment: for the next week, every time you find yourself thinking about what Jamison can do, should do, is thinking, might think…
challenge yourself. Ask yourself what the real question is, framed in terms of what you actually can do and know yourself. ”
That sounded like a lot of mental gymnastics.
She must have been able to see that on my face, because she smiled slightly and simplified, “In other words, when you start worrying about your partner’s actions and thoughts, often you’re avoiding the real issue, which is your own mindset.
So challenge yourself on that. See what you come up with for alternate interpretations.
” She paused, considering. “And also,” she appended, “if it ends up actually being about him, once you’ve thought about it: talk to him. ”
I let out a hmph. Why did she have to be so logical?
I just wanted to wallow. Even though I knew that would, at best, accomplish nothing and, at worst, ruin things between me and Jamison.
So…could I do it, ‘challenge’ myself as Gay suggested?
I guessed I would have to try. I selfishly didn’t want to lose Jamison, even if I did think he’d probably be better off without me dragging him down.
“I’ll try,” I finally allowed. “But it’s hard. ”
“It often is,” she said with an agreeable nod. “But that’s not a strong reason to not do something that’s otherwise for the best.”
“Do they teach you these lines in therapy school?”
Her smile didn’t waver. “Absolutely. That’s why it costs so much: someone has to write all the lines.”
That got a snorted laugh out of me. “Fiiiine,” I whined. “I’ll try, for real. But sometimes I get so caught up in my head that actually saying anything out loud is…harder than it has any right to be for a normal human being.”
“Ok, well first of all.” She held up a finger. “I disagree that there’s any such thing as a normal human being. Everyone is quirky in their own way or ways. But second, if we discount that: if you can’t say it, can you write it?”
“That sounds even worse. ‘Dear Jamison,’” I recited theatrically, “‘I’m a human disaster and can’t talk, so I’m writing this to tell you that I lack the emotional capacity god gave a five-year-old and you’re just gonna have to work around that.”
She shook her head in amusement and reached for her laptop, pressing her thumb to the login button.
“That’s certainly one way to say it. I’m not going to waste my breath trying to convince you that you’re wrong, but…
you’re wrong. You have plenty of emotional capacity - and capability.
No, don’t argue.” Her index finger came up again, stopping me in my tracks.
“Our time’s up for today anyway, so I’m taking the win and declaring myself the victor in the ‘having the last word’ competition.
So here’s the last word: you are far more capable than you think.
” She looked back down at her laptop, then up at me when I hadn’t moved after a few seconds. “Go on. Shoo.”
I huffed out a breath and stood up. “Therapy school needs to give you a refund.”
She grinned. “I’ll let them know you said so. See you next week, Henry.”