My Jay

Jay is my shrink.

I have to admit, he is ok as far as therapists go. He doesn’t seem to suffer as much from the God-complex as most shrinks do. It is a disorder very prominent in medical and psychiatric practitioners, which causes the sufferer to believe he or she is inherently superior to most other people. Not unlike people suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, these practitioners believe they are “special” and unique, and that they can only be understood by other “special” people, namely, other shrinks and docs.

Although Jay has his moments where I can feel him slipping into his God-mode, he is usually able to maintain a fairly equal relationship with me, which is quite refreshing after my last dozen or so shrinks.

We met at a seminar.

Jay is a self-proclaimed expert when it comes to patients with BPD and self-harm behavior. I had never met any professional that has a good understanding of what it feels like to be a cutter, so I was going along for the ride. One thing I love (and that I get away with, since any obnoxious, provoking or society-deemed-unacceptable behavior is subscribed to me being a borderliner, and therefore I “can’t help myself”) is putting mental health professionals on the spot. Outsmarting them. Beating them at their own game.

As soon as I walked into the room, I took one look at him and I knew he was no match for me. He looked late thirties, blonde, and, well, tiny. Like too many thought-provoking questions might just blow him over. He didn’t smile. In fact, he had an air of arrogance about him. I thought, “Here we go. A therapist with a dozen or so degrees, masters and what not, thinks he is going to teach us, the layman, about his area of expertise”. I was wearing a sleeveless top. On purpose. To expose what he would surely recognize as my borderline acting out.

But as he started talking, I was genuinely surprised. He kind of did know what he was talking about, although it was still from a “I am the therapist and I am discussing a patient” point of view. But he wasn’t as patronizing and belittling when it came to discussing borderliners as most shrinks are.

Since I was getting bored with my then-therapist (we must have had over eight sessions, so time to move on), I stayed back after the seminar, and chatted with Jay. We made an agreement to catch up after the Christmas holidays, somewhere in February 2007.

And that was how it was settled.

For two whole years I have allowed him to have a look into my head on a weekly basis, and we are about to start our third year. Before Jay, my longest therapeutic relationship had been about six months, and it ended horribly with both the therapist and I unable to let go of each other. So after that had ended I had resolved to never let myself get that attached to a shrink ever again.

I do not know what changed. I guess in my file it would say that I am getting better, although I don’t see being a borderliner as an illness, and therefore feel no need to recover from it.

The reason I am writing about Jay is that he is on holiday for six weeks. I see him twice a week, so that adds up to twelve sessions he is making me miss.

The borderliner in me knows exactly what to do.

I refuse to have any contact with him at all. I will not write him and I will not accept any post cards from him. I will not make use of any crisis numbers and I refuse to do any kind of therapeutic work during his break (such as keeping track of “my emotions”). If I want to make him feel the full brunt of my wrath, I will make sure that I end the last session before his break, prematurely. I will be silent for the first half of the session, which will be followed by a full-scale tantrum, after which I will walk out. This should have him worried about my mental stability while he is sipping cocktails on some tropical beach. During his break I will indulge in any form of self-destruction I please. When he comes back I will give him a detailed report on how much, how often, and how badly I hurt myself, after which I will say I don’t feel like talking about it. I will then spend about three or four sessions in silence, making him work for his money. By this time he should feel inadequate, incompetent and defeated. Self-doubt is slowly creeping into his thoughts about whether he handled saying goodbye to me for six weeks right, and he is starting to get desperate. All the while, I will be enjoying watching him try and try again, and fail miserably every time.

Yet it seems I can’t do this to him anymore (I have done this to him numerous times over the last two years). Nobody has ever stuck by me for this long, so he deserves a little credit for that.

Shrinks are always trying to sell you this idea, that the perfect revenge for therapeutic abandonment is showing your therapist you don’t need him at all, by spending breaks completely self-harm free. They try to make you feel as if that would be the worst thing you could do to them, because it would show them you don’t need them.

Every borderliner knows this is crap.

They want you not to hurt yourself, and they’ll try to achieve it by any means possible. Real revenge is ending up in hospital while your shrink is away, or the ultimate, killing yourself.

I know all this, but despite that, I am into the third week of his leave, and I haven’t done a single self-destructive thing yet. I have thought about it. Fantasized about it. Maybe I should cut myself twelve times, once for every session he missed. Or maybe once for the first session, then twice for the second session, three cuts for the third session, etc. Or I could cut it back to six times (no pun intended), once for every week he missed.

But there is something stopping me, and I haven’t quite figured out what. Some days I swing back and forth between hating him and missing him.

I think one of the hardest emotions to feel is sadness. I have tried everything over the years to numb feeling sad. I hang on to anger, because if you are angry you don’t have to feel sad. Sadness is such a passive emotion, it kind of just washes over you to a point where I sometimes feel it will consume me. Anger, on the other hand, is very active, you are in control. To avoid feeling sad, I have also hurt myself so I could get high on my natural opiates, which pretty much block out anything I was feeling before that. I have tried my hand at drugs, party pills, and concocting dangerous cocktails consisting of tranquillizers, sleep meds, painkillers, and whatever else was in my cupboard. All this in an effort to avoid feeling the one emotion that scares me. Sadness.

I don’t know what it is about being sad that I hate. It seems like such a weak emotion. You are all over the place, it is icky with all the crying and tears, and it shows how vulnerable you are. And when you are vulnerable, people can take advantage of you. Perhaps it is that fear that makes me scared of being sad. The feeling that people will take advantage of me once they see me at my weakest.

In the two years I have known Jay, I have tried so hard not to ever cry during our sessions. Sometimes I make him leave the room and wait in the waiting room, so I can compose myself. Even though I know he knows I have been crying, I can at least hang on to the fact he didn’t actually see me crying.

And even now, in the comfort of my own home, I find myself fighting to hang on to anger instead of allowing myself to say “I miss Jay and I look forward to seeing him again in a few weeks”.

So I still haven’t got that one quite figured out yet. To be angry or sad. To be emotional or depressed. To act or to experience.

Thank you for reading.

Yours truly,

GI