Last night, Jack and I met with our third marriage counselor/therapist. Oh joy! Third time is the charm? yeah.
Actually, I like this guy. Our first therapist was fine, but she retired. She admitted she was out of her depth when we started having challenges with the Boy. The second therapist worshipped doctors, which was not a good thing. She had wanted to be one herself but didn't make it.
"You know doctors work long hours, right?" she said to me condescendingly. Yeah. I've been with him for decades. I know the drill. "You are going to have to accept that," she said. The "suck it up, buttercup" attitude did not sit well with me. I hated it.
Anyway, this guy seems reasonable, more into the root cause of why things don't work.
"Do you have any addictions?" he asked both of us. "My definition of addiction is something that you do or use to avoid feelings."
Avoid feelings. Yeah. I've been avoiding feelings. Lots of 'em, joy and happiness included. I go to work and I don't have to think about the Boy or Jack for eight hours a day. I work out at the club and watch guys play volleyball while I am on the elliptical. I bitch and drone on to my friends about the drama in my life, which completely distracts me from the agony and pain of knowing the Boy is struggling with his own demons.
Which got me thinking about the Boy. His addiction is screens. Netflix, YouTube, SnapChat, Instagram, video games all kept him from feeling. When the screen was off, it was meltdown city. The feelings didn't go away, they were just hidden, blocked.
As I learned years ago when Ada died, grief waits. Feelings wait. They don't go away. They sit there and wait to be addressed, and when they are not, they come out sideways, perhaps in unhealthy and unproductive ways. They scream at us, begging us to pay attention.
Now the Boy is in a place where they take away the addictions, the distractions, so he can focus on his feelings. So he can pay attention.
Feelings are important, especially in our intellectualized world. They are messengers, telling us what we need to heed. Some times those messages are confusing, or leave us not knowing what to do. This is the hard part, and I wish I had an answer, but I don't.
-- to be continued. I gotta go to work.
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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