I had meant to see my new therapist, Monica, twelve times and then consider if I thought things were trending in the right direction, but along about week seven or eight, it hit me that I’d fallen into a old and bad habit that was causing me a lot of misery: believing my thoughts.
It’s so easy to do, because they’re being thought by someone I completely trust—myself—and they come with an exciting full-color movie and stirring emotions. But almost none of them have to do with the present moment. Nearly all of them are about the past and future, which don’t exist, in that it’s ALWAYS NOW.
This is not to say it’s bad to plan (or save money) for “the future,” but there’s only ever one time: now.
So then I remembered, again, to identify thoughts as thoughts. I find it helpful to note them very explicitly, though some meditation teachers, such as Steve Hagen, say no comment is needed. For instance, “Having the thought that if I make the wrong decision about such-and-such, the entire rest of my life will be wrecked.”
Just noticing the thought is 90 percent of the whole thing. If nothing else, it means all of my thinking facility is no longer occupied in having the thought, because at least a little of my brain is now devoted to observation. But also, as a finishing touch, it gives me the opportunity to ask myself, “Are you SURE about that?”
I’ve been pretty devoted to my moment-by-moment noticing practice in recent weeks, and it has introduced a bit of spaciousness that is relieving, though also sometimes a bit disorienting: If things aren’t the way I thought they were, then how are they?
Oh, right, they’re like this: I’m sitting in front of my iMac, listening to Jonatha Brooke. I can feel my left foot on the floor, and my right, and my butt on the chair, and my fingertips on the keyboard.
I’d started therapy with a particular idea about what I wanted help with, but that idea soon faded away, and then I was just turning up weekly, as planned, with the vague idea that something was wrong with me, and if I sat in therapy long enough, it would get fixed: There MUST be something wrong with me; otherwise, why would I be in therapy?
Meditation teacher Howie Cohn often says that of all the wrong things our heads tell us, that there’s something wrong with us is the biggest lie of all.
I believe the mental model of therapy is that there’s some lurking demon that will finally be exorcised by a sufficient number of office visits and painful excavation. But I’m not sure that’s true. I think we’re affected by all sorts of things, by many things from our pasts, but I think the task of this moment is not to dredge anything up but just to see clearly.
As soon as I realized I was believing too many thoughts, I stopped going to therapy and haven’t missed it, though I did like this particular therapist a lot. I liked that she is smart and sees things clearly and also expresses herself with clarity. If I wanted to talk about some problem in particular, I’d certainly go see her, though if I had an update on a long-running saga, I’d go tell Deborah.
Monica handled my decision quite well, though she did offer that maybe there doesn’t have to be anything wrong with me for me to be in therapy. It’s always a bit awkward when someone is explaining why you need her expensive services; it’s hard not to suspect a self-serving aspect. (Which motive is certainly understandable. Of course a person who offers a service for money wants and needs to have clients, but it’s not good if that overrides in any way what is best for the service-receiver.)
I agree it would be nice to have someone listen to me chat about my life for an hour per week, but I’m not willing to pay for it. Doing that every week adds up. If therapy costs $125 a week, which it pretty much does these days, and you end up going 45 weeks of the year, that's $5625, which is net income, not gross. If you take home 50 percent of what you earn, as an example, that means $11,250 annual gross income is required for therapy alone.
That last conversation made me understand something about why I was so furious at Deborah so often: Every time I tried to leave therapy, she discouraged it, which enraged me, because I interpreted it to mean she thought there was something wrong with me, and I also suspected, slightly, that she was guarding her income stream. But now I think maybe she was just saying the same thing Monica said: that you can go to therapy without there being something “wrong” with you.
Maybe Deborah was trying to say she wanted me to have a comfortable, safe place where whatever I said would be received in a friendly way. It’s kind of sad that we had a hundred conversations about this that left me beside myself with irritation, whereas Monica presented it in an absolutely understandable fashion in thirty seconds.
It was extremely helpful, a time or two, to sit with a powerful feeling in Monica’s office and note how the feeling shifted moment by moment, and also realize, hey, I can do this!
I often note my physical sensations, anyway, but asking myself “What can I notice in this moment?” is a little different in effect from asking myself “What do I feel emotionally right now?” even though it all boils down to the same atoms moving around in the same way (I think).
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