Psychotherapy And The Wonderful World Of Bloggers

Today I have been for my penultimate psychotherapy session with my current therapist. He is a lovely man and therapy with him has been good. We talked today about it being so near the end of our work together and he asked how I felt about that, especially in light of the disastrous termination of therapy that I experienced last year. There is no doubt that having a very experienced therapist makes a big difference, but as with all things people have to be trained and I am sure that in the future my previous therapist will be very much better at handling termination of therapy than he was with me.

I will miss my Tuesday sessions, not least because they have been responsible for a bit of structure and routine in my life for the last eight months. Today we talked about a wide range of subjects not all of them things that I would have considered as subjects for discussion during therapy. I said that I felt that while I still find it difficult to talk about my feelings when we are in a session, something that I don't think I will ever feel comfortable doing, one really positive thing to have come directly from this therapy was joining the knitting group.

It was as a result of one of our sessions that I made my first tentative steps into the world of the knitting group. My therapist encouraged me at a time when things were particularly difficult to take that first step and like blogging it has made a difference to my life. I haven't been for two weeks (the first week because of the trauma of becoming homeless and then last week because I really couldn't face it so soon after my surgery) but tomorrow I will be going and taking with me a finished item for all to see. I have just a few rows left to knit on the shawl/stole that I have been knitting for the last few weeks. I actually started it a day or two after my last visit to the knitting group and today I will finish the last of the 554 rows. It will still require blocking to show it off in all its glory but that is something for later.

I talked about going to the knitting group tomorrow and having this wonderful work of art to show to all. My therapist then asked why I had not talked more about my knitting in my sessions with him. His question was "Did I not think that he would be interested?" After thinking about this I suppose that I didn't think of it as being a subject for therapy, but following a complicated pattern and creating a work of art, as this shawl is, probably says quite a lot about me that I find impossible to express orally. One thing is certain, I will be taking it with me to next week's session to show him what I can do.

We also talked a little about my blogging. He has never asked for details of my blog and I have no idea whether I have given him enough information to be able to find it that easily, but one of his comments leads me to believe that he may have come across it at some time. He spoke of my ability to express myself in my blog in a way that I find very difficult, if not impossible, to do face to face. There is no doubt that blogging is a way of expressing my frustrations and pain and despair without having to burden someone with what I need to say. After all, you can carry on reading each post if it interests you but you don't need to continue to read if you find that what is being said is not interesting or thought provoking. I have always tried not to write post after post about how depressed that I am. There are only so many ways in which you can say it and I don't want to come across as someone who whines continually about how bad their life is. My life sucks; it's not how I thought it was going to turn out but it's a whole lot better than that of many other people out there.

This brings me nicely to what I wanted to say about bloggers. I know that it is something that I have said many times before, but it is worth saying again because I think that it is very important. There are some really nice people out there in the blogosphere and the supportive comments that I have received after my last few posts show how much we care for each other, even if we never actually meet. I may not be able to deal with comments as quickly as I would like owing to my limited Internet access at the moment, but logging in today as I have and finding six comments on my last post, all very supportive and kind, has reduced me to tears in the public library. As someone who hates showing emotion in public, I think you will understand just how much the sentiments expressed in these comments has moved me and saying thank you just doesn't seem to be enough, but it will have to do for the time being.

Once I am settled into some more permanent accommodation and have an Internet connection that I can access all the time, I will try to write most days again and to include photographs of whatever I am knitting so that you can keep up with how things are going. Once I have finished the shawl today, I need to head back to the socks so that I can get them all knitted and the patterns written ready for entry into the competition. I have five pairs to complete although socks grow a lot faster than the kind of lace knitting that I have been doing over the last few weeks, so while it may seem like a huge mountain of work, I think that I should be able to manage it without too much trouble.