50 First Dates with a Therapist: #2

You can read about my first date here.

As it turns out, my second date was AWESOME.  I’ve been putting off writing about it because one of the first things she said to me was something along the lines of, “wait a while to talk to other people about your experiences here.  If you have a great moment, and then turn and tell your friend about it and all she says is, ‘oh’ then you’ll doubt your great moment.  It won’t feel as important or essential when, indeed, it was.”

So I didn’t tell anyone anything.  Just that I’d found a great therapist.

She’s a yoga instructor, a Reiki practitioner, and an all-around powerful woman.  She’s doing Phoenix Rising Yoga with me.  It’s part talk-therapy, part body-work, part drama-therapy.  It’s right up my alley and has completely changed my current self-perception.

And the first date?  We did a lot of talking.  It was good talking.  And then she had me sit on the nice squishy yoga mat.  We started to work through some ideas and to physically balance and ground myself.  I have no recollection of what we were talking about, but the tears started rolling.  And here’s where the epiphanies started coming in:

The physical sensations I felt as I sobbed (Yes, wholeheartedly-lose-your-shit-sobbing) were virtually identical to when I have an “IBS” flare-up.  With the exception of nausea and abdominal cramping.  It was unreal:  Waves of imbalance, tingling up and down my spine through my face and head, like I was falling.

I’m not going to blame all of my IBS (or whatever it is) on the spiritual mess that I’m working my way out of:  I’m having real physical symptoms.  But, damn it, there’s much more to it than the inability to digest animal fats.  There is so much more.  I wrote about opening up those boxes, and I was right, I really needed–and need–to open up those boxes.

Every week, I am more and more reluctant to visit my therapist.  Because I know I will sit down on her yoga mat and eventually I will cry, eventually she will ask me a question that no one has asked me before, eventually I will discover something that I thought I already knew, eventually it will hurt.  But, in the end, it will also feel better.

And the more I work with her, the more I want to shout out to people, “GO TO THERAPY!”  “Pound the pavement and find someone you like.  But go see someone.  Pull out the pieces of your spirit that are sucking away your life force and put them back in the right places.  If little me, little me with the seemingly perfect childhood, can have so many ‘issues’ then I bet you’ve got ‘issues’ too.”

But don’t you worry folks, just because I’ve got one therapist to date doesn’t mean I’m not looking for another one…one that’s covered by my health insurance.  So stay-tuned for my third date.