the living years
Excellent, productive counseling session today. I’m so grateful for her. She listens well, she’s thoughtful in her responses and in what she encourages and how she gently nudges the outcome of my mental groundwork in particular, healthy directions. Significantly, I feel like I can express myself well in her presence; there’s a quality to the dialogue that makes it easier for me to articulate (and in doing so, often come to a realization about) what I’m thinking and feeling. That’s no small thing.
I don’t really remember what prompted it, but I shared some of my ponderings about fighting in relationships, and my desire to learn how to “fight well,” and that topic defined the latter half of today’s session. I asked her if she could help me learn, and she replied “Absolutely” with such a definite tone that it made me smile. We delved a little deeper into the possible causes for my (perceived?) inability to fight well: My fear of abandonment that I still don’t know the source of and it drives me crazy, and the fact that, like I shared previously, I never saw my parents fight and reconcile, which, as I told my counselor about, it dawned on me that it was perhaps a more significant obstacle than I thought. I’ve always given them a pass because I knew they made the resolution to never fight in front of us kids with good, honorable intentions, but in the long run, it may actually have done more harm than good. Am I resentful to them for making that decision? Not at all—neither of them exactly had happy childhoods, and it’s really nothing short of miraculous that they turned out to be the fantastic parents they are. But they weren’t perfect, and I would be well served to start challenging my own convictions about key choices they made, ones that I’ve always bought into. When I think about it way, it gives me a lot of hope that I can uncover things that will enable me to gain some real confidence when it comes to future relationships. I’ve told my counselor that I don’t know what I don’t know when it comes to my past, but I’ve always had a vague sense of…something like foreboding, maybe, when I envision a new relationship, anticipating a similar pattern repeating itself. For the first time, I feel like I may have a glimpse of a real off-ramp.