Off The Couch

Tonight was my last night of group therapy. After about five years, christ it might have been more I really don't know, I decided it was time to move on.

As one might imagine, I was the Mr. Carlin of group. It served me well, but after awhile the problem I had was going over the same shit time and time again was not really solving any problems. If there is a pot hole in the street, you will only get so far trying to dig into the history of the street to determine why there is a pothole. Ultimately, you still have to fix the pothole. And while some might say, true, but if you don't find out why there was a hole there then another one can appear, I would counter that the actual cause of the hole no longer matters after so many years. Fix it and learn how to avoid other potholes or stop them when they are still little, and suddenly the root of that hole won't matter.

Obviously that goes against much of what therapy is about. I'm not saying there isn't value to finding out how some bad habits, attitudes, behavioral patterns, etc. were formed. But it has to be more than that. It has to be more than, well you weren't given this as a kid or you didn't get that. At some point it has to be, how do we learn to navigate these feelings and bumps in the road so they don't cripple us.

I'll miss some of the people, not all of them. I won't miss my shrink so much. Right now, I'm tired of him. I have spent the last year or so seeing him as someone who picks up on what others say or what I say and then parrot it back to me as some deep insight. Truthfully, he seemed lazy.

Of course, I was plenty lazy there too. I resisted engaging much of the time. It was supposed to be a place to say anything to anyone, but having spent much of my life doing just that and not exactly getting the results I wanted, I tried to stay in control. I also at times found it hard to reconcile my need to show restraint of pen and tongue in the outside world and then do the exact opposite in group. That doesn't mean, by the way, that group is meant to be an insult or hate festival. But if I spend my time trying not to get pissed off at all the idiocy I see in the outside world, then what is gained by coming into group and doing it there?

Part of group was designed to help learn about relationships and interactions, but I found that there were only a few people I was even interested in practicing that with for ninety minutes. And the one chick I wanted to be with in there is engaged and will spend the next ten months talking about her wedding and I was certainly getting tired of being asked how I felt about that.