(originally written at my livejournal)
My heart is still broken by the viccissitudes of diary-x but bravely I soldier on by reporting on Valentine’s Day, past and present, “content manager” be damned. Livejournal, by the way, seems amazingly informal to me…I have resisted, all day, the urge to do a thousand little posts about what I ate for lunch (spinach/cranberry/gorgonzola salad followed by a nice FAGE 0%), what my hair is up to (behaving surprisingly well with a minimum of product, threats, and cajoling), and ways in which I think stopping over in Fiji on my way to New Zealand this summer will be awesome (all of them).
Anyway, today I have celebrated Valentine’s Day by slipping on the icy back porch stairs this morning and wearing a sort of low-cut shirt and hippie-compliant lipstick to work. After work this evening I have therapy. This is a scheduling thing, not an appropriate-manner-of-celebrating-the-day thing, I assure you. Although I have to say, my relationship with my therapist is one of the more satisfying ones in my life: she listens to me whine, wears really cute boots, and doesn’t charge too much. I’m thinking of bringing her flowers tonight.
Actually I had something similar happen to me about five years ago, when I was learning how to be a therapist myself. I had this very weird placement at a big mental health agency and it was sort of killing me. I was the youngest person they’d ever had intern there and I saw six to seven clients per eight-hour day…which, yes, means I didn’t get to eat lunch too often when you factor in the copious documentation you have to provide for each session and also all the crying with your head down on your desk because learning how to use the DSM-IV is really unintuitive and ridiculous and you get a lot of paper cuts and it’s quite difficult to remember the difference between schizotypal and schizoaffective.
I had this client with whom I was doing a really horrible job. He spent a lot of time talking about how fabulous he was and how everyone else in the world was stupid and didn’t appreciate him and how he was poised on the verge of greatness and how I was really pretty lucky to have him as a client, considering I was only an intern and all. I was young and stupid at the time so mostly I just parroted his statements back at him, trying that whole reflective listening thing, which is useless because, as we all know, behavior change is best effected by judgmental harangues and consdescendingly unsolicited advice from strangers.
After a couple of sessions he started to get more personal with me, asking me about what would happen if we ran into each other outside of session (“at a club or something”) and when was the last time someone had walked up to me on the street and told me I was beautiful. I would look at him, sort of stunned, when he’d say things like that and feel really uncomfortable and not know what to do, and say something wimpy like, “Ho ho, we’re not talking about me here, are we?” I talked to my supervisor about it she’d say “Mmm. That’s really inappropriate,” and then go back to telling me the richly rendered details of her various relationship crises.
So on Valentine’s Day this guy gave me…dun dun DUN!… a box of those awful cough-syrup-tasting conversation hearts. I know! This is pretty much strictly forbidden in most therapeutic relationships, not only because conversation hearts suck, but also because of the astounding amount of paperwork you have to file in order to cover your ass. He gave them to me and I stood there blinking, going, “Uh…I…what? Conver…who? Therapist? Buh?” He flashed me a smarmy grin and said, “Oh, I’m giving those babies out to everyonetoday.”
People, for a measly box of conversation hearts, I had to write three separate notes detailing the events (“Client reported he was ‘giving [these] babies out to everyone, and mentioned others to whom he had presented similar gifts over the course of the day, including the girl at the UPS store and the girl at LensCrafters. Preliminary analysis indicates a preponderence of ‘U R Hot’ hearts, and a surprising dearth of ‘Be Mine.”‘) and have a meeting not only with my supervisor but also with her supervisor. And then! Then, the next time he came in for therapy, I had to be all scuffing my feet and looking down at the floor, telling him that he couldn’t give me gifts because it’s Just Not Done. He responded by telling me that he didn’t care because the girl at the UPS store and the girl at LensCrafters were way hotter than me anyway.
I hope everyone is having a lovely day today and that you are not afforded, as I was that day, reason to look up Axis II disorders in your DSM-IV.