The thing about
psychotherapy and its ilk is that it's hard to tell, especially during the process, if it's doing anything other than annoying you. Anecdotally, that is; this is based on my many years of experience with the sport. I'm not even really in therapy at the moment, other than brief checkups to ensure that my
drug mix is still treating me right - or, more importantly, that it's not treating me
wrong.
Sometimes, though, you find yourself doing something banal like washing dishes when all of a sudden you have a Thought. A Thought which hasn't just come to you out of the blue, but feels like it landed on you like a massive piece of river ice from upstream with no warning. In my limited experience, this usually means that therapy dug something out of the ground, worrying it up through the strata and the mud of emotions and self-deception. That little kernel sat there, newly exposed, and then ice started to form around it, and it kept growing until one day it collapsed the riverbank it was sitting on and floated off.
Around a few bends of said watercourse sat you, perhaps watching the water, perhaps fishing, perhaps skipping stones, perhaps plinking at ice chunks with a .22 while drinking beer. Doesn't matter.
In my case, today, I was washing dishes. This isn't quite as banal as I make it sound; I hadn't washed the dishes for around four weeks. There were entire alien ecologies lurking in there. I had scraped and rinsed them, so it wasn't, you know, forestry work, but it involved dealing with a lot of primordial muck.
Oh look! There's a connection.
Anyway, today I realized something about my ongoing unhappiness, which is the source of much of my whining, writing, drug-taking, therapy and so forth. I realized, as the ice chunk slammed into me with no warning, that I'm unhappy possibly because I have no idea how to be happy - and in addition, I realized that at some level I don't think I deserve to be happy.
Therefore, I'm not.
That's a really nasty, evil thing (or pair of things) to realize about yourself while elbow-deep in soap and algae.
But it's true.
Where to go from here?
Dunno.