The Absence of Caring

Therapy doesn’t feel like a place of relief for me anymore.

It’s not my therapist’s fault and she’s doing everything right… I just feel dread around it now. I don’t want to feel this way. I want it to be a place that feels like relief again. A place where even when I’m working through the hard stuff, I can feel like I’m not alone.

Right now I can’t connect, which means I can’t feel that way.

It’s just dread and anxiety and, if I’m being honest, grief and sadness and anger.

Not anger toward her, anger toward the way I was treated. Anger toward the history that still lives in my body. Anger at the parts of me that still expect things to fall apart.

I want therapy to feel different again.

I want the relief to come back.

I want the connection to feel reachable.

But this is where I’m at right now. Sitting with the dread, the distance, and the ache of knowing it isn’t her, it’s everything I’ve been through before.

And I’m still showing up, hoping it’ll change with time… but even before this last experience, it took me a long time to feel an ounce of comfort. Even when I’m being open about my experiences, it doesn’t change how unsafe it feels. My body doesn’t trust it. It never has.

My last therapist ruined it for me and I hate her for it, or hate it, the whole situation.

I hate that I ever stepped foot in an office with her presence.

I hate that I trusted her with any part of my past.

And I hate feeling this anger too, because this anger makes me feel bad. I don’t want to fucking feel it. I don’t want to care. I don’t want my energy going toward giving her failures the time of day in my life, but here I am.

Pissed.

Pissed that she did the exact same fucking things that caused wounds in the first place. Having to hold the blame of her actions of harm, just like I’m still holding the blame of the abuse I went through.

Pissed that she is smug and arrogant enough to blame a client for her inability to regulate her own emotions and look at her own reflection.

Pissed that the fallout of her mistakes landed in my lap, in my nervous system, in places I’m still trying to breathe through.

I don’t know what to do with all of this anger and pain.

I know what I want to do. But I have more coping tools now, and it’s not something I want to fall back on. Even if most parts of me want to yell this is your fault as I fall back on old coping methods.

Just thinking about being able to do that feels relieving.

And that’s its own kind of ache… knowing the tools that work the best are the ones I’m supposed to avoid.

Knowing that the things that once helped me survive can’t be the things I reach for now.

Even when they call to me.

And another part of me says fuck it.

Who cares if I fall into old habits. Who cares if just for today I let myself free fall. Who cares,

I know I don’t and I do and that is most of my reality, two halves fighting for what they want the most.