Let’s be honest. We all have weight issues. Whether it’s our own or somebody else’s. We all have a standard for beauty or propriety or some form of conformity to a “fit” fitness that guides our perceptions. In part we have to. After all, a morbidly obese person can’t fit into an airplane seat or, if they can, they make it incredibly uncomfortable for the person sitting next to them. Well, maybe. Maybe not though for any physical reason, but for the reason that THAT much emotional baggage is hard to deal with day-to-day.
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I don’t often know what it is I’m there for. I know overall. I have issues or simply unhappiness. Life isn’t what or where I want it to be, and I need someone to help make it right. Of course you’ve been telling me that’s my job, but in reality “me” is made up of me and you because I’ve been talking to myself way too long already. Not to mention my spouse, mother, brother, best friend, etc. I don’t like talking to myself anymore so I’m talking to you. Actually, I just need help and you’re giving it. I’m paying you of course, or my health plan is, but I recognize that you also do this because you care. You enjoy what you do, and so I feel I’m with someone who cares about this for more than the dollar. Having been a mental health “consumer” for several years, I think I’m decently qualified to talk a bit about what it’s like to be in the chair opposite you. I’ve had several different therapists over some 17 years, all of whom have been helpful. Some have been better than others but I can’t fully say that there has been one experience or relationship that far exceeded the other. Basically because the bulk of the work fell and always does fall on me. As it should. In life you can have long fallow periods, times when your life is a struggle, where you aren’t getting all you want and don’t feel you will anytime soon. Perhaps some of us feel our entire lives are like that. Sometimes it can be difficult to imagine a moment where that ends, where you suddenly emerge from the blackness into the sunlight, where you accomplish what you set out to do, where you are suddenly free or safe, or somehow liberated from the chains of your previous state of being. What a world that is. To wit: I have a history of acting out. It started a short time after my parents’ divorce and resulted in my spending a summer at a special day camp for kids with “issues”. I wanted to talk a little about that. My acting out took the form usually of tantrums, tantrums induced by my teams losing. This included both my little league baseball and basketball teams and the professional and college teams in my town. Losing equaled an opportunity to blow up. And I took it. I took it and took it. It’s about power. After all the years, all the games, the heartaches, the hope, the praying and the fretting for all that mattered in my life: my mom, my dad, my brother, aunts and uncles and even my cat(s), I’ve come to realize it was always about power. Having it, not having it. What am I talking about? I’m talking about what leads to mental health issues. At least what leads to most of mine. For a long time I’ve had an ambition, a goal. It was a goal I began to put together in high school. It has stayed with me. Over time that ambition became something of a vision, something I felt I literally had to achieve. Without going into details, since we all have our goals and things we need to achieve, I’ll say that it is something I still feel with the same fervor I did 35 years ago. Which means that it’s been 35 years, and it’s still not done. I’ve been a sports fan most of my life. It started with baseball, moved on to football and has flirted with hockey and basketball (sports I can’t play as well). As a kid, I spent evenings listening to the radio, following the local teams. I’d get emotional about it. I’d want my guys to win. They wouldn’t often and I would live with that. Sadly. Toughly. I’d go to school the next day and be alright. Though for awhile there my mom was concerned I was getting too involved, too upset when my team lost. She even sent me away to a special camp one summer for kids with emotional issues. Well, my last post was a bit of a rant so I wanted to scale things back this time and try for a more meditative view of a subject. Once again it’s mental health (they all are) and this time it’s more pointedly about just what mental health is. Try as I might, I still cannot quite suss it out. Perhaps it’s like pornography. You can’t describe it, but you know when you see it. Perhaps it’s an attitude, a confidence or a sense of reality that someone has that somehow “feels” true. I really don’t know. I’m not trained. But even those trained aren’t always that healthy (are they?), which doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re trained to know. It just means you can’t always practice what you preach. For the last 30 odd years I’ve been noticing the devastation of college towns by the minions of former students like myself, adults seeking to reconnect with their college experience. This influx of wayward grownups has all but ruined Harvard Square, turned it into “glitz central” catering to no culture whatsoever and certainly to no student needing things inexpensive and a world that is there for him and not a CEO. |
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Copyright 2009 Carolina Partners in Mental HealthCare, PLLC |
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