Thursday, January 7, 2010

Breaking up is hard to do....

I broke up with my therapist. Yes, I have a therapist. Well, use to have a therapist. All the cool kids have one. Anyway, after nearly five years with this woman (FIVE YEARS!!) I finally decided I was done shitting gold coins to pay her and that I deserved a vacation more than I needed therapy. Ok, maybe that's not ALL true, but for the most part it is.

After the kid was born, I sank into a pretty deep depression. I felt like the world was on my shoulders and not a soul was there to help me. After 9 months of feeling like crap and crying at the drop of a hat, I finally called my OB and asked for recommendations for therapists. The person he told me to call was really just a headhunter so to speak. I met with her and she evaluated me and recommended someone in her office for me to see. The woman she thought would be perfect for me was a ginormous German woman in a hideously plaid suit (think 70's sofa fabric) and a Kate Gosselin-esque hairdo. Now I know you can't judge a book by it's cover, but I just couldn't get past her appearance. $200 later I went home and told my husband it wasn't going to work. He chided me for basing my decision on her looks, but I just KNEW she wasn't right for me. So I pulled out the list of alternative names, looked at it and then put it away for awhile.

3 months later I still felt shitty enough that I called one of the people from the list. The deciding factor was how close her office was to the house and work. That's it. And apparently that was enough to keep me with her for nearly five years.

10 months into this gig we moved to our current home in the midwest (you may remember we use to live in DC). At first the therapist suggested we do a few phone consults and she would try to help me find someone local. Ok, great! Only she never really put in the effort and I was just as lazy. So for the past 4+ years, I've been doing phone therapy. It's worked out pretty well and I will say she's helped me though a lot of stuff. But ever since the summer I was starting to feel like "Why am I paying her?" I knew what i needed to do to fix things and it found myself searching for things to talk about with her. I felt like she was trying to make issues out of things I mentioned when there were really no issues to be had. For some reason I kept holding on. 5 years with someone is hard to just throw away.

In October of this year I was notified by my insurance that I had reached my coverage limit for therapy. This limit was reached in AUGUST so everything from September on was out of my pocket. Ouch. Especially since all this time I'd been paying DC rates. So after shelling out thousands of dollars (literally) to pay for my sessions, I decided I was done. Now this isn't something we had discussed in our sessions. There was never a set endpoint or a phase out period. So earlier this week I called and left her a message that I wanted to take a break and felt like I could go at it alone for awhile. I fully expected her to call me back and at least acknowledge the message. What did I get? Nothing. Not a peep. Now part of me is glad since I hate confrontation and dealing directly with any sort of sticky situation (see why I had a therapist??). But I honestly thought that after 5 years, she would have SOMETHING to say. But I guess not. I also guess it's a sign that maybe she wasn't really that interested in me. I was a cash cow for her for 5 years and now I'm done and she feels like it's just as well. On some level I feel the same, but I think I also feel like I'M the one that got dumped.

Now I'm off to stuff myself full of ice cream and oreos and watch sad, sappy love stories on tv.

Nah, I'm actually off to see what kind of amazing vacation I can take now that I've got a shitload of cash burning a hole in my pocket.

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