Art Therapy, When It’s Not Therapy

As I’ve mentioned before, I was in therapy from a very young age. And there seems to be a very strong idea that art therapy is second only to play therapy, as far as children are concerned.

Guardian Angel by M

And because of that, I’ve hated art therapy, for no other reason than that I felt it was kind of forced on me. Don’t get me wrong, I love art. I love creating, I love drawing and writing and painting… I just hate it when you slap the term therapy on it.

But a lot of the time, that’s what it is for me. For example, that little sculpture up above, that is the first thing I have ever sculpted that didn’t look awful. In fact, I think it looks rather nice. That’s because I wasn’t just sculpting for the sake of sculpting. That little figure now sits atop a small wooden box that holds the cremated remains of my guardian angel, Travis. He passed away three years ago this September, and I still mourn his passing.

It was… rather annoyingly emotional to admit that I kind of needed to do this.

I found it relaxing, and I was actually proud of the result, which is rare for me.

It doesn’t change anything. I still miss him. I still strongly dislike art therapy. But I guess I do recognize it as mildly useful.

When Being Responsible Coincides with “Growing Up”

This entry is actually titled “When Being Responsible Coincides with “Growing Up” and Why I Think That’s Bad”, but that sounded a little negative to hit you with from the get-go. So I’m hitting you with it from the post-get-go.

On the first visit with the new therapist the other day, I accompanied M in. Zhe wanted me to front the entire time, but it’shir therapy, not mine.

So as I listened to them talk, and M mentioned that zhe was starting to actually be hir own person, and was actively participating in hir environment and how cool that was (though zhe left out my hefty role in that, probably for the sake of less confusion), and the therapist said, “Well, that’s good, that’s a part of growing up…”

Wait wait wait… Who ever said anything about needing to grow up? This is so not about that. In fact, this is about hir being less grown up. Zhe has been more mature than the average twenty-five year old since before zhe was seven. Zhe learned how to interact with people, how to not be emotionally overbearing, which fork to use… Well, maybe not that, but you get my point.

This is about zhe being okay with being hir and having emotions. Come to think of it, I don’t think there’s a stage in life ascribed to that benchmark, most people just sort of enter life as themselves, with emotions and opinions…

Perhaps that’s something people take for granted.

New Therapist… Blargh…

Well, this morning I finally got to meet my new therapist. He’s… Okay, I guess. We were running a little late so we didn’t get to do much past clarifying a few things in my file and *cringe* going through the basics of dealing with emotion.

I think I’ve said this before, but I’ve been in therapy since I was five or six. He’s only my sixth therapist, but I have heard the “basics” to no freaking end. So, yeah, that kind of annoyed me.

He also asked about cutting. I do have a history of self harm, back in middle school, I didn’t really have any other good coping mechanisms, so I cut. Enough to make my mother really nervous. But these days Claudia and Viktor are the only cutters, they do it because they’re sadomasochists, not because they’re depressed or can’t express their emotions, they do it because they like inflicting and receiving pain. I don’t really let them play with others because Claudia doesn’t evaluate the safety of situations and I’m not sure if Viktor would observe and adhere to someone’s limits.

But when I told him they cut, he continued to imply that it was an expression of my emotions.

Now, I can’t really put too much on his shoulders, as he has little to no experience with DID (the only therapist with experience that my insurance covered just retired, hence my need for a new one). But you would never suggest that someone was acting on someone elses emotions.

There’s just too much of “all of the alters are different parts of the same person” floating around for anyone to go into this without dispelling all the myths on their own.

Guess I have to train this one, too, haha.

Therapy as a Young Person

Due to various things in the childhood of the body, we were put in therapy at a very young age. Five or six, to be sort of exact. Due to manifestation of a certain personality, Mayn’s mother thought it would be best to do art therapy as a way of dealing with emotions (as she knows she internalizes emotions, and is therefore not the best role model).

Each of us remembers various things about this therapy, though the memories are almost entirely Mayn’s, which is good, because, as far as we can tell, zhe was the one (or maybe one of the ones) born in this body.

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Two Golden Retrievers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I remember the therapist herself, she was a very nice woman. My sisters also worked with this therapist, so I spent a lot of time out in the waiting room. It wasn’t so bad, because then I could work on homework and talk to whichever sister wasn’t in a session, and it was a really nice little waiting room.

And they had therapy dogs. I don’t remember the names of the two dogs they had, but I remember they were big, burly, Labrador mixes. There was a golden blonde one who had been there a while and a big black one who was a little shy that had only been there a year or so. But I remember Bear.

There was a book in the lobby, a little like a scrapbook, but it only had pictures of the one dog. He had passed not too long before I started seeing the therapist, and I remember wishing very much that I could have known him. Almost like when a dear friend tells you about someone they knew who passed, and you wish you could have known that person, because they sounded so wonderful, and they were important to someone, and maybe they could have been important to you.

But maybe other people never get that feeling.

Anyway, therapy involved a lot of talking about my siblings and school, but mostly making bowls and spinning around in the big black spinny chair. I remember I was so good at changing the subject and avoiding talking about anything meaningful, that the therapist had to set rules about when I could play. I could only make things or sit in the spinny chair if I talked about something important first. I think I shut down in one of the sessions, but I honestly don’t remember. I do remember that when she would broach a subject I didn’t want to talk about, I would turn in the chair and face the wall and I wouldn’t talk. Even when she changed the subject, I refused to talk.

Maybe I held the foolish belief that if I just ignored it and didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t be there. Everyone knows that never works, but as children, and even as adults, we often like to hope.

Of course, when we left the room and I went out to the lobby, I’d put on a new face and go happily play with the dogs like an average kid while the therapist talked to my dad. We weren’t going to talk about those things I didn’t want to talk about anymore, so it was okay to be there and do things.

Then more scary things happened and we were Lee for a few years. We began seeing a new therapist, not just alone, but with my parents. This therapist diagnosed us with Clinical Depression.

In those years, we were a person who pretended to be happy and healthy and incredibly average, and the perfect, most well behaved child who only misbehaved on very rare occasions, and when we did, we punished ourselves more than anyone else ever could. But in reality the person everyone saw felt almost nothing. I think I was behind Lee most of the time, so sometimes there was genuine happiness and genuine pain, but I didn’t start to take control more until I was ten, because things were getting sort of safe again. And then scary things happened again and we were Lee all the time, and no one else was near the front for a year. And then, out of nowhere, we were Talyn. And Talyn was pretty cool.

I use the phrase “we were [name]”  as a way of saying “this is who the front was at the time, and if anyone else was near the front, it was always in the passenger seat, never the driver’s”.

So Talyn came out to the therapist we’d been seeing for five years at this point. No, he didn’t come out as having headmates, he came out as transgendered, because the body was female and he was very much not. So then there was the diagnosis of GID (Gender Identity Disorder), and then therapy started being more about that and less about depression. But that was good, because Talyn didn’t need therapy for depression, because he is not and has never been depressed.

Then, after a while, life was pretty awesome, so I decided that maybe it was safe again, and it would stay safe. But there wasn’t a clean switch between Talyn and myself, it’s never that simple. I slowly started venturing toward the front. That’s why I never knew Talyn was there, because it just slowly started being me. And I was kind of okay with being a guy. But I’m not a guy, and it was like GID all over again, but from the other end. So we stopped transitioning.

That created some interesting problems with therapy. Then, when I realized I was sharing my body, it all made a lot more sense. When I first started actually looking around and basically shouting out into the darkness for people to stop hiding, I found Korso, Viktor, Fredric, and Claudia. That’s why it made so much sense. Three of them were guys, so of course I would try to transition.

It always felt a little off to me, but I guess that’s because I was wrong.

At this point I started seeing another therapist who had experience in DID. I was still in family therapy, as there were still a lot of unresolved issues, but it was nice to have someone who I could talk to without my parents in the room.

If I would actually talk to her.

It seemed as though every time I started to trust the world enough to simply live in my own body, something bad would happen and I would run away again. So most of therapy was just dinking around and trying to get a feel for the therapist’s perceptions.

Now that I no longer see that therapist, I kind of wish I had actually done more work with her. I kind of wish I had let her talk to some of the others that she honestly did want to try and understand.

But almost everyone’s hindsight is 20/20. Almost.

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We would all like to make a note of the fact that simply writing this has actually helped a lot with remembering things. For the longest time, we all believed that Myn was hidden away for the longest time, and never near the front, but now we realize that zhe was there, kind of, sometimes.

It’s all a lot more complicated than we thought it would. And so is this post.