Oh, she's gooooood

Although the inner guilt machine churns out an endless, "you should be ashamed for having to spend your money on this" loop in my head, I have to admit that my therapist is earning her money. Totally.

For the record, I don't think therapy of any kind is a waste of money. It's just that for some reason I have trouble reconciling spending this much money doing something I'm still really pissed I couldn't do on my own, which is sort out the layers of grief in my poor addled brain. I'm angry with myself for needing help when I thought I was doing so well for so long.

But, I'm told, trauma is cumulative. Losing the twins was just enough additional sorrow, confusion and anger to make all the grief of the past 5 years suddenly no longer manageable. At least by me alone, anyway.

Sometimes I find all the blathering I do while I'm sitting on my therpist's cracked blue leather couch (clearly I'm not the only person who sits there on a regular basis) kind of useless, but I think the fact that I'm talking virtually non-stop for 50 minutes every. time. I. go. probably means that it's not as useless as I think it is.

Someone with THIS much to say obviously needs to be heard.

But when she really earns her money is when she takes something I've said, turns is around and shows it to me in a completely different way.

I told her I'm completely overwhelmed by the reality that we might never had a child, biological or adopted. No doors have closed, but the possibility of a childless life for us is certainly increasingly more probable. Or possible, let's say.

I said I'm paralyzed by this. I don't know what to do - don't know who I am if I'm not a mother to a living child. I don't know where to go from that jumping off point.

She looked at me, thought for a second and said, "Well no wonder you're overwhelmed. You've spent the last 5 years with tunnel vision - on a single-minded mission to conceive. You've spent all that time and energy trying to get pregnant, being pregnant or dealing with loss, and now there's a real possibility that that door might close."

"And if it does," she went on, "a whole bunch of new doors will open - ones you've had shut for a long time while you've dealt with the business of trying to have a child, or ones you've never even considered opening. Suddenly there are a myriad choices for you to make, and you're just not used to it, as focused as you've been on that one, single, solitary goal. Of course you're overwhelmed."

Ohhhhhhhhh.

And I think that's exactly what I said, while I was busy sighing one of those blissful sighs of incredible, shoulder tension easing relief.

I know that I'm overwhelmed, but having someone explain why - and validate the way I've been feeling in the process - is invaluable.

So while I still feel guilty for having to fork over our hard earned dough, I know she's earning every single penny for every single knot in my head, heart and shoulders that her words manage to loosen.

Worth every penny indeed.