This Tuesday past, I visited my counsellor and she asked me to tell her about my goals for our sessions.

I told her that I wanted to… 

• get an objective critique of the ‘healing’ I’d accomplished through ‘self-directed’ learning
• explore alternate tools to manage my mental and emotional health
• learn more about basic emotions like ‘fear’ and ‘guilt’ and the roles they play in my life
• minimize the current affects of past traumas
• establish apropriate emotional/mental boundaries
• be taught to believe that I can ‘succeed

Even as I ticked those points off on my fingers though, I felt I was forgetting something, and it wasn’t until later that I realized I had another issue… a huge ISSUE… I needed to deal with.

I want to figure out ‘why’ I so often feel that people are failing to take me ‘seriously’.

At this point, I’d lay dollars to doughnuts that it’s a throw-back to infantile fears of ‘abandonment’, and that life experience has not only failed to discourage or disprove that possibility, but encouraged it. It’s likely linked too, to the roles my ego plays in contructing my perception of ‘reality’ and the natural human tendency to seek validation or ‘salvation’ from others. Despite being rationally conscious of this, however, I suspect that I am essentially incapable of dispelling the mental and emotional impact this ‘need’ has on my psyche without further effort.

The good thing about this, though, is that counselling may help me take the resolution of this issue to the next level – to learn how to stop making the habitual connections between other people’s actions and my feelings of being ‘abandonned’ and ‘hung out to dry’…

I’ll have to remember to talk to ‘C’ about that next time!