therapy thoughts

My counselor tells me to stop and breathe. That I need to calm down, to slow down. She's right, so I do. I breathe once, and again, and once more, trying to make each breath as calming as possible, because I need to get back to talking and I don't want to waste her time. I forget sometimes that I'm here to get help, not to provide justification for coming.

We talk about intermittent reinforcement, which is when a rat pushes a lever, and sometimes a food pellet comes down the slide, and sometimes it doesn't, but the pellet that sometimes comes down is what keeps the rat pushing the lever. She says that we're rats who want pellets, so we stay in bad relationships trying to get those pellets, when the days we don't get them hurt so much that it's not worth sacrificing so much just to get to the days when we do. She's right, so I resolve to stop pushing the lever.

I explain how my emotions sometimes feel like a school notebook that is full of papers that are out of order and falling out and just a stressful, horrible mess that I need to somehow organize and arrange neatly in the prongs.

We talk about the "drama triangle" of perpetrator, victim, and rescuer, and how the people in these positions tend to change places over the course of an extended argument, and being in the triangle never resolves the issue. She's right, so I decide to get out of those triangles.

We talk about the mantra: "I didn't cause it, I can't control it, and I can't cure it," and how it would be beneficial for me to incorporate that idea into the way I think about and treat my family. She's right, so I memorize it.

I remind myself to breathe periodically, so she won't have to remind me, because I only have an hour, and I can't waste this time.

I leave feeling lightened. Verbalizing feelings and receiving affirmation for them is important, I realize. I need to feel that my emotions are valid, that they don't have to have a reason, but that they are important simply because I feel them, and because emotions are flags for us to perhaps revise a situation. My counselor had asked me if I wanted to schedule another appointment before I left, and I said I wasn't sure, like I did last time. The emotion-notebook is a little neater for now.