There’s something in your history you don’t hand to people.
You’ve tried the short version of it once or twice, watched the other person’s face while you said it, and gone back to keeping it to yourself.
That isn’t a flaw in you. Most people aren’t built to hear a heavy thing on an ordinary Tuesday, and you found that out by testing it.
So it sits where it sits, and you work around it.
Before this practice I spent about a decade working for state government, with very emotionally unstable people.
What that decade mostly did was make me hard to shock.
People tell me things they’ve kept from other clinicians, and the whole reason is that nothing happens on my end when they say it.
You can say the worst sentence you’ve got, and it won’t change how I talk to you for the rest of the appointment.
You Don’t Have to Explain It Yet. Email sgutkn@gmail.com.
Nothing here requires you to go back through the whole account of what happened.
The details belong to you. Leave most of them out and the hour still does its work.
Some people lay it all out in the first month. Others never do, and both of those go fine.
One is CBT, which is where the practical skills come from.
The other is existential therapy, which is talking, and some of what you’re carrying is going to want talking more than it wants a technique.
I’m not a trauma specialist, and you should have that before you write to me.
Those two tools give you something to use in the weeks when it’s loud, and somebody to think it through with in the weeks when it isn’t.
There’s a kind of therapy with a plain name and no drama in it, called supportive therapy.
It amounts to steady company through a stretch you have to get through anyway.
That’s one hour a week where the skills get room to work and you’re not doing any of it alone.
A good deal of honest work is exactly that, and it doesn’t need a better name.
My email is sgutkn@gmail.com. One or two lines will do.
Say which part of it you’d want help with.
Wanting to hear how I sound before you send any of that is fair enough. Ask for the free consultation instead.
You've been using it on people who decided what you meant before you finished. Use it on somebody whose whole job is hearing the end of your sentence.
Send me an email. Tell me what's going on, in whatever words you've got. Ask how I can help you.
If you'd rather talk first, say so. The consultation is free, by video or phone.