I agree exactly. My doc, however, nods and smiles. If he asks me one question in 50 minutes I will probably fall off my chair. I have an appointment with another psych in March but I will have to say my two female psychologists are EXCELLENT. It’s not a male/female thing-I have had not okay women psychs and a wonderful male psych and I’ve definitely had the opposite.

I take breaks and fire people at will.

When I told my therapist that I was suicidal, she made an interesting observation, and asked an equally interesting question. The observation she made was that people who have been severely traumatized/abused have an understandable and often overwhelming need for control, and that sometimes the obsession with suicide was a displaced need for control, rather than a literal desire for death. She then asked me whether I wanted to die, or whether I wanted to stop suffering. It amazed me that they might be two different things, as I could not conceive of any end to suffering, or even any lightening of it. For whatever reason, she was able to effectively suggest that some form of lesser suffering was in my control … and as it turned out in the long run, she was right. I had been actively suicidal since the age of six, and so these ideas about what that urge might be … they were interesting. Because I’m not sure a six-year-old really understands what death is … but a child that age does understand that not being would mean not hurting. This, I think, is the notion so very difficult to hold, especially when someone has been suicidal since childhood … that it may be possible to have less suffering, and also still have life. Because of course when the nonbeing/nonsuffering link was made, we were very powerless, and had little or no voluntary impact on how much we suffered. That association is very hard to break when it is written in the conceptual wet concrete of a child’s mind.

You said: For fuck’s sake. Why does everything I happen to bring up have to come back to my relationship with C?

I’m going to take the risk of really pissing you off here. It’s because everything you “happen” to bring up does come back to your therapy, if you choose to bring it up in that space. There are ten bazillion things that any of us could talk about in therapy, in that brief fifty-minute hour. There usually is some reason why we, or our subconscious mind, prompts the things we throw “off the cuff.” And the patterns of language we use do reveal how we think about things generally speaking. What you describe as “botched,” someone else (me, for example) might describe as “tragic.” Simple little things like that are very useful cues for a therapist to see through your lens, and that, I think, is why he picks up on it. And I think that being seen, in that way, is profoundly uncomfortable for you, and so you dismiss it as him being self-involved or manipulative. Of course, I don’t know you, or him, but this is just my general observation … it seems to me that he is paying attention in quite a detailed way that might feel threatening.

The problem for the helper is that it is difficult to be around the agitated person without becoming agitated yourself. It’s catching, but so is the opposite.

The objective of course is physical relaxation, we are not in the realm of words but non-verbal communication and behaviour.

The helper has to create a safe, relaxed environment – they have to model the desired behaviour, they have to lead. Their posture, breathing, tone of voice, and facial expression must create warmth and safety.

And when you are the person who is physically agitated? You must seek out and model the skills of the people you know who have got what you want. They have got it sussed, whoever they are. The kind of people you would let touch you, who would relax you if they massaged you. What is it they actually physically do all day that keeps them so relaxed and together. It’s not some mystical aspect of character – but learnt skills.