If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’m afraid my third therapy session wasn’t very interesting. It was a lot of background info on my boyfriend and me. Stuff about our parents, how we were raised, etc. My father left when I was 3 and I never saw him again after that. On my daughter’s 3rd birthday he phoned to say hello. I’d left a letter at his sisters telling him he was a grandfather. It was a nice chat. A couple of months later he called asking me to wire a $50 loan to him. I said I didn’t have that kind of money. Two months later he asked to “borrow” $17. I knew that was a test so I somehow got up the inner strengh to say no. He said no problem, that he understood, that he’d come to California to visit but I never heard from him again.

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that once you start therapy, or sign up for a self-exploration workshop, things begin to bubble up. Somethiing that came up in the midst of an intense 1:00 a.m. conversation with my boyfriend is that I had a very strong, body-felt experience of being very afraid of being caught being wrong. Not being wrong, but being caught. I realized that I have spent my entire life being very, very careful not to put myself in any position where I might get caught. Of course, I got caught all the time. People do make mistakes. But my fear created a kind of dishonesty in that I put a lot of energy into not showing my cards. It will be interesting to see how this impacts my every-day interactions with people. It should help me be more open so that “The Thing” doesn’t show up as often. Eventually I’m hoping it just disappears.