Resistance

I bet y'all have long since stopped checking for updates from me. I hope everyone's doing well. Special thoughts of love in particular to Kiosh and Killsbury. Your entries recently have given me pause.

In thirty minutes, I'm about to meet my new therapist. See, when you're going to school to become a shrink, there's this lil requirement in the curriculum to, like, get your own head shrunk. Some of you may remember when I was last in therapy. It was a painful, drugery of a routine for me, and it was also enormously transformative. I have a lot of grief in my life and mounds of unresolved issues that I keep fairly well contained and in check. But they weigh on me. I use the word "weigh" very intentionally here. So, needless to say, I'm looking toward this new round of therapy as both a welcome addition to my life and as something I'm quite dreading.

School is fantastic! I'm loving being a student again, and I'm doing well. The academic environment, using my brain in a way it hasn't been used in years, the relationships with classmates and professors, even the hundreds of pages of reading every week--it's all been just phenomenal.

I'm fascinated anew with the psychoanalytical term "resistance." This is the conscious or unconscious blocking or avoiding of delving deeper into emotional material or issues. In a therapy session, it might take the form of silence, "drawing a blank" or "not knowing what to say." It might manifest in body language (squirming around a lot, averting eye contact). The important thing to keep in mind about resistance is that it is always present, and it's a key to the therapeutic process. When a client/patient (both such inadequate terms) is made conscious of resistance, it can allow them to tap into the deeper meanings behind it.

I've had an awareness of resistance as it operates in my life for many years, and the one idea that keeps coming back to me is that point, when I'm writing something, where I have to stop or change the subject instead of exploring the deeper, scarier topic at hand.

Like how I just ranted about "resistance" when I should have been writing about the real things on my mind...

Love you all!

--Bree

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