I Can't Make You Love Me

I am not sure what happened in session last week. We reached a point where everything seemed surreal and concocted and airless. The ping pong of transference and counter-transference left me absolutely breathless. I have never been in therapy like this.

Yes Dr. B., you are what I would want: young and deeply feeling and good. I have been an excellently appropriate client - why would you push me to feel something for you? Did you? I'm not naive and I don't often completely misinterpret relational dynamics. So what the hell happened?

All I know is that it was terribly uncomfortable and amazingly comforting. I've got to get my thoughts in order before our next session. More on this to come, but for now, here's a Bonnie Raitt cover by my understudy, Adele.

I Had to Come Back

I'll admit it: when I haven't been completely apathetic about writing, I have been cheating on you with another blog. It only has a handful of posts, but they are dark and depressed and angry. I needed to come back to the Herald. I've done some good stuff here - stuff that when I re-read it I find it relevant and accurate.

I think we all know that I rarely have any long-term guilt over cheating so you will just have to cope.

Now, where to begin...

I moved. To a city. It wasn't really my best idea but circumstances necessitated and I left the old homestead bitter and angry and so, so disillusioned. I got fucked and had to leave and people who should have done differently didn't. So time to move on.

I have a new therapist - this one is considerably different from his predecessors. He's young and very handsome and tender and a hard-core existentialist. Nothing, and by nothing I mean NOTHING directive or cognitive-behavioral. He is exactly what I need right now.

So we've been sifting through stuff - meaning, myth, desire. I will write more about it later but for now I will say that I have always modulated desire. Always. No such thing as pure, unbridled, rapacious want. Always genetically modified. GMO'd love, mutant yearning. Aspirations by Monsanto.

And he's inviting me to make it pure. I don't know if anything good can possibly come from that. Dammit, please don't make me want it.