She chuckled. “Not exactly. It’s a common, low-key strategy a lot of people with anxiety use: you wear a rubber band or a hair elastic around your wrist, and when you need to snap yourself out of a spiral, you literally snap the band against your wrist. That tiny pain sometimes works to startle your lizard brain and break the panic cycle.”
I looked reflexively down at my wrist where, yes, there was a hair elastic wrapped. Huh. Maybe? I gave the band a gentle pull and released it, taking a moment to consider the sting. “I don’t feel any different,” I told her, looking up.
“Well,” she pointed out, “you’re not currently spiraling. Try it when you are. But it doesn’t need to be that. Maybe for you it’s ‘phone a friend’ or ‘journal your feelings’.”
I shuddered. “I’m not starting a journal. That’s a level of navel-gazing I don’t think I can get down to.”
She shrugged. “Ok. Doesn’t have to be that. And you don’t need to decide right this second. Take the list home, think about what it says and what might work for you.”
“Mmm, ok.” I folded the paper and tucked it into my back pocket. “I feel like I’ve just been assigned homework.”
“Therapy homework is a legitimate treatment strategy,” she said. “They teach it in grad school and everything. But don’t worry, I won’t grade your work.”
“Well that’s reassuring,” I said dryly.
She sat back in her chair and studied me. “Ok, we got a little sidetracked with our conversation about fear versus worry. Not that sidetracking is bad,” she added quickly when I started to apologize. “But I had had another thought before we digressed onto that, so I want to go back to that thought.”
I tried to remember what we’d been talking about, but honestly, it was gone. I waited for her to elucidate me.
“I want to talk a little bit about your relationship with Jamison.”
Eurgh. I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds…unpleasantly touchy-feely.”
“And that’s, what, not manly?” she challenged.
I shook my head. “Nah. I’m not too concerned with looking manly. I mean, I’m a carpenter. But I feel like you’re going to ask me a lot of feelings questions I don’t have the answers to.”
“Probably,” she said brightly. “Suck it up. So here’s my first feelings question: do you feel safe in your relationship?”
“Safe?” I squinted at her. “As in, do I feel like he’s going to hit me? Or as in, do I feel like he’s not going to break up with me?”
She made a weighing motion with her hands. “Both, neither? Plus other options you didn’t name. Whatever comes to your mind when I say ‘safe’ is relevant.”
I thought about it. I was a six-foot-two manual laborer; I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about safety, so it was a bit of a reach to try to figure out what that word meant to me in this context. “I guess it means whether I worry about him breaking up with me? I mean,” I laughed weakly, “I’m six inches taller than him, he’s not about to beat me up.”
“Ok,” she said, regarding me steadily and not saying anything more.
Ok, so we weren’t going to laugh at that. I guessed I needed to actually answer her question. I sighed inwardly. “He says he wants to be with me, and he’s willing to accommodate me and my neurosis…neurosises…neuroses? But I guess…trying to put myself in his place, I have a hard time imagining how much patience he can really have with me. I mean, this is no longer a relationship on easy mode, and that’s all down to me.”
“It sounds like that’s a feeling that challenges you, the idea that you’re making things somehow more difficult.”
“I guess?” What did it mean for a feeling to challenge me? Freakin’ therapist-speak. “It’s…not comfortable. I don’t like making life harder for him.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Areyou making life harder for him?”
“Well, I mean, yeah. I’m blurting emotions all over him. We haven’t had sex for weeks; I can hardly even kiss him, let alone let him touch my dick. It certainly can’t be easy for him.”
“And do you feel you can make that call for him?”
It was obvious what the correct answer to that was intended to be, so I obediently said, “Well, no. But isn’t part of being in a relationship understanding what your partner is feeling without them needing to spell it out?”
“Isit?”
Ugh, I hated when she turned my questions back on me. “Yes?”
“I’m going to disagree, actually. I think part of a healthy relationship is being willing and able to explicitly tell your partner what you’re feeling. We spend a lot of energy attempting to read minds when we don’t need to. So let me put it to you this way: has he expressed to you that he finds your relationship - or you - difficult? Is he behaving in a way that indicates he’s struggling?”
“Well, I mean…” That wasn’t fair. He was too nice to be likehey, yo, you’re being really difficult.But I didn’t think she’d buy that as a justification. “He's being really gentle with me. Like, asking permission to kiss me when before he’d just haul off and do it. So I think he’s very…aware.”
