The-rapists of the mind

Catching up on my voyeuristic reading into the minds of my friends on blogger

and I am surprised to note that G. has a male therapist.

I was in therapy for oh, I don't know, about a decade??? And until she went crazy, my therapist was a woman. Not to say she wasn't a woman after she went crazy, but rather that she was no longer my therapist. Not that I would have rejected her for being crazy -- that would just seem terribly hypocritical of me - but I wasn't given the option. She kind of up and disappeared. Sort of.

Anyway, when I first began therapy, she sent me to a male psychologist with an office in Newtown for a while since it was apparently evident to all that I was so unbalanced that I shouldn't be let loose in the world without medication to even out my brain, and her qualifications apparently didn't include the right to prescribe mind-altering chemicals.

This turned out to cause more problems than it fixed. The first time that I saw this guy, he knew from my referral information that I had issues with eating. As in, I did it as little as possible. I used to think I was quite clever in quipping that I managed to exist on a diet of caffeine, nicotine and sugar. And it wasn't far from the truth, it just wasn't as clever and cute as I thought it was at the time.

So I show up for my appointment, and I am fighting the urge to run out of the office, and he disappears into a back room off of his office and comes back with what? Soup! Sits down down at his pompous desk, turns to me and says in all seriousness, "you don't mind if I eat while we talk, do you?" WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE?

Every time I went to see him, he would try to get me onto a scale in his office so he could demonstrate to me that I was unhealthy. I think I only got on it once, and after that more or less told him to go fuck himself about the scale. I would be in a bad mood for two weeks before my appointments to go see him, and depressed for a week after. Of course, I was more or less depressed all the time anyway, but my point being that just the thought of having to endure this pompous asshole for 45 minutes once a month more or less ruined the rest of my month.

I quickly came to the conclusion that considering a lot of my "issues" were rooted in problems with male authority figures, having a therapist, even a supplemental one that I only had to see because he had the godlike ability to dispense drugs, was entirely counterproductive, not to mention a horrendous mind-fuck.

Luckily I found out, clever creature that I am, that I could stop torturing myself with this asshole and just get my primary doctor's office to write the scripts for me! I only wish I had realized it sooner.

The therapist-patient relationship is a very dangerous, precarious thing, and at a certain point definitely requires a leap of faith. I can't pretend to know what's best for other, but I definitely know that for me, having a male therapist would never in this version of reality be to my benefit. Unless maybe you're of the ilk that think a great way to get over the fear of heights is to jump out of a plane and think it will miraculously cure you in a day.