Craptacular Times...Present, Tense

Yesterday another therapist told me I might be too sick to work with her...but she needs to have another consult with me, just in case. I was so frustrated that I said, "What makes me so much sicker than every other mental patient walking around?"

She looked at me sympathetically and said, "Don't take it as a rejection." I was supposed to see someone else today, but between that and having to peel off a junkie friend who will not leave me alone AGAIN, and then being bombarded with abusive emails, I felt like shit this morning.

When you feel like shit, you do not "present well," as the saying goes, and I didn't want the session to go into the toilet within five minutes of my sitting down. So I rescheduled.

My junkie friend does not live in the same state as me (thank God), and we first connected through our shared mental illness over the Internet. Then we became close phone friends. I knew she played fast and loose with her meds, which I don't. But I was willing to let that go until she fell in love with a much younger man who doesn't love her, and is in rehab for marijuana and alcohol. That doesn't stop him from smoking weed and getting drunk round the clock, and soon she started drinking too.

It's always the same story, over and over...life spiraling downward, and she would call me and cry, "You're the only one who understands." I would tell myself that AA is all about attraction, not promotion, and ask a gentle question.

Then finally she called me, hysterical, with a big pile of cocaine in front of her. "I'm going to break thirty years of sobriety!" she sobbed. Although my first thought was, what sobriety?

But I haven't been sober this long for nothing. I yelled at her like a drill sergeant, telling her to flush the cocaine down the toilet, flush the business card it was on down the toilet, clean the table, and then I really went off, all the pent-up rage, and I told her she needed help and I couldn't handle it any more.

The next day she called me, mad as a wet hen, telling me how selfish I was to say that my sobriety was more important than our friendship. I told her I couldn't talk to her until she'd been sober for thirty days. She hung up on me.

I didn't hear from her for several weeks, and came to appreciate that I didn't need to experience that kind of chaos vicariously. Because that is what I had been doing for a long time.

So she called two days ago. After talking to her for ten minutes, my head was pounding, and I told her I had to run. Then I wrote her an email reiterating that I couldn't talk to her until she'd had thirty days of sobriety.

Instantly I got back an abusive reply, then another, then another, then another, then another...you gotta love email. After reading the first two, I just deleted them. But I was pretty shook up.

But the bottom line was, I was relieved. There's an old joke:
How can you tell when a junkie is lying?
When their mouth is moving.

Conflicts and Other Crap...What Else Is New?

This morning I had a consult with a potential therapist who told me I was too sick to be her patient...this is getting old.

It's basically just my damn diagnosis, not so much my behavior, and I'm beginning to think I should approach these things like a job interview! "Hi! I'm (Blank)!" (Bright smile) "I really want to get well, and I want to set therapy goals and have a great life! I'm the most motivated patient you could possibly have! Heck, even when I'm having a psychotic episode I'm Little Miss Mary Sunshine! Just with a deeper voice!"

Last weekend we went to a convention in another city, and took my service dog along. He performed amazingly well! Everybody oohed and aahed over the cute little service dog, and he did his job, more or less ignoring everybody unless told otherwise. (I'll try to find the picture of the workshop we attended, where the write-up afterwards identified him as a "Canine-American"!) He liked the hotel, and my husband apologized for worrying so much beforehand that my dog would bite somebody or misbehave.

The only yucky part was an assistance dog list I belong(ed) to. When I was going to leave, I wrote asking what I needed to take to travel with a dog, and mentioned the muzzle. Everyone on the list goes ballistic, I have a vicious, aggressive dog, etc. (This has come up before. My dog did have to be extensively trained because like me, he has PTSD.) I couldn't actually get any facts. When we got back, I wrote a glowing report, but made the mistake of mentioning that he growled when a total stranger, who I knew to be mentally disturbed, scooped him up when I wasn't looking and tried to kiss him! Not biting, mind, just growling.

This was all the list needed to go on the warpath. Put that dog down, never take him out in public, you and your dog are a disgrace to the Service Dog community, we give people cold chills at the mere THOUGHT of us terrorizing the streets of New York. Yeah, my psychokiller miniature pinscher...the final straw was someone suggesting that I wasn't a real person, but rather, a government plant because this was a group of people fighting for service dog access and here I was ruining it for everyone. He felt "Jerry Springerized," in his words.

And I thought I was nuts.

Here's the crazed beast in action:



So I wrote an extremely nasty response and signed off. This is the second dog list I've either left or been kicked off of. I guess I don't play well with others, except my dog.

Confrontation with Dr. Gottlieb...Sort of

I have to say, after all of the rage I experienced, the actual confrontation we had was sort of a let-down. I shoved the whole thing out of my mind until the night before, and then it was sort of an "oh, shit."

My husband counseled me to start off by repeating what Dr. Gottlieb had said to me about therapy, and how I was "baffled." (I guess that is better than beginning, "Listen, you lying motherfucker--") When I walked in, Dr. Gottlieb handed me an iced coffee (he'd had to run some errands before our session) and said that the first order of business was finding a therapist. I said, "We have to talk." He turned around and said, "Uh-oh."

I outlined what I'd heard from the other patient, what was on his page, etc. Anyway, his explanation was that the patient I'd met had been seeing him for fifteen years for "supportive therapy," which was basically hand-holding and helping her distinguish reality. When I mentioned that he had psychotherapy on his page, he said he should take it off. I countered, saying he'd updated his page quite a bit since I'd seen it last, so he'd had plenty of opportunity to remove it. Dr. Gottlieb said that these days he only saw one patient for real psychotherapy, and that he occasionally felt "thrown".

"You have major issues about your body, identity, sex, and men, you come from a traumatic background, and I would be constantly thrown," he said. "You need a real therapist."

"Are you afraid of me?" I asked.

"No. If I didn't want you as my patient I could have let you go years ago."

We went around in circles for bit, but I have to say I saw his point. Assuming he's telling the truth. I was staring into his eyes the entire time, and he seemed to be. I admitted that I have a history of therapists "falling in love" with me (my last therapist inadvertently called me "darling"). Anyway, he gave me a list he'd prepared of six therapists who he knew, all women, and said that my homework for the week was to call them up for consults.

Afterwards, my husband, who dislikes Dr. Gottlieb, pointed out that the doctor had been busting his butt for me for years, and that I should take him at his word.

A slightly funny incident that happened a few weeks ago: Dr. Gottlieb has only met my husband once, after my father's death, when I was suicidal. My husband was accompanying me to the neighborhood and was going to work from there, but he had to use the bathroom. So he came to use the bathroom in the doctor's office, and stepped out just as Dr. Gottlieb came out of his office to get me. Talk about awkward moments. They said a stiff hello to each other before I headed in to Dr. Gottlieb's office.