Psyching Up – Becoming Liberated

Found my psychologist on facebook…  He’s got his locked down, but not as much as mine is.  I can still see all his friends.  He’s coming across even more strongly this spring/summer as a lib without a sense of humor, and it feels like when I’m around he locks tighter into his personal belief system and contests whatever I say.  Don’t know if he’s taking me personally, but I do know he’s not really supposed to do that except to counterpoint my point of view to give me perspective and make me think outside my box.  So I’m sitting there watching him Monday, noticing how easy it is to get *him* talking, and I just sit back and let him blab on because it seems to relax him. 

I’m wondering if my personality is overwhelming for him (I do admit I’ve annoyed him on purpose a few times just to see if I could) and he is on his guard, and I’ve always gone right for the weak spots in people when they challenge me.  If we really are to this point, I should be looking for another psychologist, but after some thought, I decided I’m too lazy to start all over with someone else, and I’m so screaming bored with talking about myself, untangling everything in my life that made me ~me~ that other people don’t get, etc, I’m gonna stick with this guy, but it’s obviously up to me now to take charge of how the sessions go.  My challenge- get around his defenses and talk about something real that I need help with, instead of wasting time comparing pros and cons of this or that way of thinking.  The guy just isn’t intellectual enough to keep up with the deeper philosophies, and I think it’s really bothering him that I can so easily skate around morals and ethics in noncommittal ways.  I have a few opinions, but I’ve already realized a long time ago that opinions can change and that having opinions doesn’t necessarily affect the reality around my life.  In fact, I believe opinions are rather useless in most instances unless they directly relate to the way I behave toward other people, and we all know I tend to believe the person in front of me is more important than any opinions I might have.  I think I’ve lost him somewhere in all that.

So I’ve decided we need to focus.  I originally walked in his door for a reason, I need help interacting with other people, and over time he assessed my GAF at 50 and determined I have Asperger’s.  I really do have a serious social deficit that I am helpless to fix on my own, have spent a lifetime trying to figure it all out, and the only way I can see I’ll make any progress is someone actually working with me one on one.  Over 4+ years this ‘relationship’ with him has deteriorated into the typical psychological visit, things like insisting that I should go try to see my dad more, in spite of my physical challenges with traveling (severe fibro + hours of car = days of misery), and actually got stuck on that one for a couple of months over the holidays and after, and that had me wondering if *he* was the one with the dad issue or something.  I’m not the one with the dad issue, my dad doesn’t even have a problem with it, where is this coming from?  Anyway, yeah, we need more focus.  This last visit I took in a joke I printed off the internet, some taxidermist in Texas had fashioned a very realistic coyote hanging onto the back of his pickup for dear life, and people kept mistaking it for a dog who was trying to get in.  The receptionist laughed her head off.  My psychologist got upset thinking about the mental anguish all those poor people were in who thought the ‘dog’ would get left behind, or worse, die.  Which put a very uncomfortable angle on the beginning of our session, because that immediately branded me a bad guy for even thinking that was funny.  He completely missed the genius behind the artwork this guy put into the 3D comic strip that his truck had become a medium for.  The detail was fantastic.  And seriously, how can a dog really hang onto the back of a pickup like that and never move?  And I’m not sure another person’s mental anguish should be dictating what artists (of any kind) shouldn’t be doing, because by that argument alone we soon won’t have any art in the world.

Random trivia, one of my fave movies is Equilibrium.  Plot summary on imdb.com, “In a futuristic world, a strict regime has eliminated war by suppressing emotions: books, art and music are strictly forbidden and feeling is a crime punishable by death. Cleric John Preston (Bale) is a top ranking government agent responsible for destroying those who resist the rules. When he misses a dose of Prozium, a mind-altering drug that hinders emotion, Preston, who has been trained to enforce the strict laws of the new regime, suddenly becomes the only person capable of overthrowing it.”

We are obviously on different planes of existence.  I see him drowning in over concern for others and then forgetting I’m a needful person who came in for help.  I’m right there, right in front of him, but the ideas he has in his head are getting between us.  To have a guard up like that in a psychologists office, to actually take me that seriously that he needs a defense, if he really feels like I’ve been assaulting his sensitivities for 4 years, I’m at a loss.  I’ve made it through a lifetime of Asperger’s with no one giving a crap about my sensitivities.

Anyway, we need to focus out of that and onto a project.  I’ve decided that next time I go in, I want to work on my facial recognition problem, which I wrote about in another blog post, if you’d like to comment, since I don’t allow comments on my personal blog).  It’s a very serious problem for me.  I won’t reiterate what I wrote in that article, but I do have a recent example.  Scott and I were looking for an arrangement to put on his little boy’s grave (lost a baby many years ago) in a big warehouse type place full of flowers and stuff, when I heard my name called out.  Practice time!  I have had terrible problems with running into people and never knowing who they are, but I’ve been developing a plan on how to deal with it.  So I turned around with a smile, had no clue who I was looking at (but seemed vaguely familiar somehow, that’s a plus), and gave a great big hi back, and ~then~ did a cute little double finger swoop and said, “Tell me your name again.”  It WORKED.  No one ever tells me their name, and I had never asked before because I always felt stupid not knowing who the heck, so my plan was to *get that name*.  And she immediately said she was L’s mom, and I’m like Oh, yeah!  *big giant hug*  It was my brother’s mother-in-law, hadn’t seen her in years, but once I connected with the file info in my head, it all clicked.  And it really is like that.  I can’t rely on seeing a face to know who someone is.  I couldn’t even remember Scott’s face in my imagination while he was at work for some years unless I looked at a picture.  I see things in other people’s faces that look like parts of Scott’s face, but I can’t put it all together into one file in my head that says THIS is Scott’s face.

Even with my psychologist, I couldn’t remember what he looked like once I left the office.  I had a vague blur of specific details that wouldn’t congeal.  The closest I could come was thinking he looked somewhat like Tom on Kathy Griffin’s staff, but side by side, no, not really.  He also kinda reminds me of a guy I worked with over ten years ago, but, no, not really…  After 4 years I am able to congeal his face in my mind ok, but it’s still not a sharp picture.  Like right now, I have no idea what his nose looks like.  It’s a blur on the image in my mind.  So I think that’ll be a pretty good project to distract us from our little bickering over correct thinking.  He doesn’t need to save me from myself, and my family handles me just fine, no sense in making issues out of non issues.  I go see him because I need help with something, not because I’m a child who needs to have the finer lines of political correctness demarcated out for me.