My son and daughter are both seeing psychologists, and they both report that it's been valuable for them, in helping them cope with bereavement, so I decided to check it out. Asher had also been seeing a psychologist, and he expressed much gratitude to her.
Our health fund offers twelve meetings with a psychologist at a discount. We've been paying the insurance premiums for years and (fortunately) barely ever exploiting the benefits, so I had that incentive, too.
I have a few friends who are clinical psychologists, and I could have asked them for a recommendation, but I decided to go through the bureaucratic process: I made an appointment with the intake psychologist. I figured that if she (it was a woman, as it turned out) made a bad impression on me, if she seemed superficial and insensitive, I didn't have to take her advice. I could still go back to our friends.
I spoke with her for about half an hour, and she seemed to know what she was doing. She gave me a list of four people she thought would be right for me, and the next day I called up the one at the head of the list, whose office, at it happens, is virtually around the corner from our house. So, for the first time in my life, I'm in therapy - which goes totally against my general "I can take care of it on my own" approach.
The intake psychologist, who was so soft-spoken I could barely hear her sometimes (unusual among Israelis - indeed I suspect that she's in depression) asked me, "Why now?"
My answer, which I hadn't prepared in advance, came quickly: "Because I'm ready for it now. I've gotten over the initial shock, but I've reached a kind of impasse."
I know I have to start working through things farther than I've been doing with this blog and in conversations with friends. Here I'm trying to write things that might be useful to other people who have had tragic losses - no shortage of them!
An irreparable rift like this in the fabric of your life can cripple you, and it mustn't. All the psychological problems that I had before Asher died remain in place, but his death has left me weaker, less capable of resolving problems - it's such a problem in itself that I don't have strength left over to carry on with my bundle of neuroses on my own.
I need help to come to reconcile the strong conviction that I must live the rest of my life as fully as possible, a sign of resilience in my character, with the almost equally strong feeling that throwing myself into life will be a betrayal of Asher's memory, a denial of grief. I must enjoy everything I do as much as possible, and I mustn't enjoy anything.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
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2 comments:
Please add "wise man" to the love letter I left you last month on your blog. I already told you I forgot to add "irreverent" to that list.
You are telling how you feel, mull over, consult, act. Hmmm. More love letter list items.
Thank you for triggering my responses.
Actually, after three sessions, I decided not to pursue psychotherapy for now.
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