or how the muse is ultimately my savior.

by jennifer kiley

4.19.12

I came upon a post from a blogger that i follow regularly. He was talking about when therapists go on vacation and the dependency a client feels and how the separation may affect the client/therapist relationship. it was the right time for me to find this post. for me the vacations of my therapists have depended on the therapist i was seeing as to how i would react to there going away for awhile. one therapist i was extremely attached to would take a complete month off every summer. she would arrange for another therapist to see me. one time she made a tape of stories she read so that i could feel connected to her. nevertheless i would feel extreme pain in her absence. one of those summers a person we both knew and loved died suddenly. I went to the memorial service but a few days before the service a man called me to advise me to leave my therapist alone before and after the service. so that is what i did. she spoke at the service. I could feel her pain and i felt mine. i wanted to hug her after the service but i heeded the warning. after she returned from her summer vacation i told her about this man who had called and what he had said. she said that it would have been okay for me to come over to her for a hug. she was surprised i didn’t. (I must say at that moment i became angry and upset that i had lost out on that opposrtunity to give and seek comfort from someone i cared about whom cared about me.) that was a while ago and because of insurance i lost that therapist. where i am now is why i am writing my reaction to that post. vacations for therapist can be quite difficult on their clients. but in most cases the therapist prepares their clients for that separation. what doesn’t get prepared for is when a therapist is out sick. when it is one day here and there throughout the year, that is something one can adjust to but over the past month – 3 weeks - i see my therapist twice a wee -, my therapist has missed 4 appointments out of 6 that were scheduled.  i have seen her only twice in April. I go twice a week because i need to see a therapist twice a week. I have also been going through some very intense emotional times and have been in some serious trouble trying to keep myself from losing it and doing something extreme on multiple occasions. i tell myself it can wait. i’ll be able to make it until tomorrow because i will see my therapist then. but in the morning my partner wakes me up to tell me your therapist is out sick again. she is sick actually quite often and has cancelled many times since we have been seeing each other, which has been for 16 months. i do not know how to deal with this. i am feeling very angry inside and last night i really lost it and freaked out but then i thought i would see my therapist today but once again another call saying she was out sick. is it unfair of me to want to ask her to arrange for me to have a backup therapist that i can work with if this is going to keep on happening? talk about separation and dependency. i just feel like we are making progress and recently i had some breakthroughs about what is going on inside me and i really thought we would have been talking about these things over the past weeks. but the insights are slipping away. what would you do if this were happening to you and for whatever reason you therapist had to cancel on an all too regular basis. i need my therapy and i am not getting it. i enjoy my therapist butt her absence is affecting my relationship with my partner and emotionally i feel like i am having a hard time keeping it together. i do my writing. in fact, i am excited about a screenplay i am working on. sunday night turned into an extremely manic and produtive night. the innternet went out on my street and with every effort thwarted trying to get it back on line there was no success. so that meant no facebook or twitterr or tumblr or wordpress or any other contact online plus no emails. well, i thought maybe i would watch a film for my screenwriting course but instead i was drawn to my laptop and my magic screenwriting program and over the course of an undetermined amount of time into that dark night i started writing the outline to my screenplay. before this i had been doing tutorials on the workings of the program and creating characters and jotting down lines and writing scenes and thinking about where i wanted my screenplay to go. by the time it reached approximately 5am i had the first complete draft of my screenplay. i must say i was quite surprised on the twists and developments that occurred. my muse was truly inspiring that night. since then i have written some notes into the screenplay and came up with a rather intriguing ending to the movie. where once i felt a romance would grow i found that i had taken off into a totally different genre. i am very pleased with where it is going. a manic state can be a promising state if worked creatively. so there i am from one state into another. very unpredictable. i have a roller coaster inside my head which may find me ended up in the strangest places. so from feeling depressed and somewhat inconsolable to feeling high on my creative self and how generous and giving my muse is to me. so we will have to see how this all turns out. hopefully, writing this post has led me back into creating more regularly on these pages.