Therapy termination has caused me issues and brought up pre-existing ones. My progress with new relationships and building a supportive social network has felt challenging.
I’m currently without a therapist. My most recent one, John, had one great session of IFS with me and then he moved to a different practice and I won’t be able to continue to meet with him due to financial and insurance reasons. He reached out to me and was respectful about it and even offered to have a termination session with me. I didn’t need one and so I declined, but it was nice of him to offer.
I think I’m interested in continuing therapy and have been searching for a therapist again. I think it was the right call for me to get a new therapist after Aaron Gleaves. I’m glad I didn’t let the way that he and Stacey mishandled things with me make me too scared to connect with other people. That would’ve been like if I’d let my awful ex-husband scare me from ever dating again. People who treat me poorly aren’t worth throwing my future happiness away for. They just aren’t.
As hurt as I’ve been about Aaron breaking up with me in such a crummy way, that’s how I was able to meet Tim and then John, who each contributed to my healing and self-improvement. Does that mean I’m glad about or okay with the end of my experience with Aaron Gleaves and Calmed Counseling? Absolutely not, but new, beautiful things can be built on the broken, fertile earth of the old, and that’s exciting to experience.
A couple of things I want to interject with here. First, in my single session with John S. Paul, who works in Abingdon, Virginia, he surprised me by talking to me about my bad termination. I wasn’t planning to talk about it much at all, but he went into it and left me feeling very comforted. It feels incredible when a therapist does a good job of communicating about things that are sensitive and sometimes even awkward. I’m grateful to John for that.
Second, if people choose to leave you for whatever reason, let them go. Being raised a Mormon with their forever mentality and in a home with a controlling father had screwed me up pretty thoroughly in that regard. I’d either avoid connections altogether out of fear of being trapped in forever commitments, or I’d cling too tightly to whatever relationships I had.
The abusive marriage I ended up in was never ever going to work, and I reached a point early on where I wanted to leave. But even though I was ready, I was shocked when I realized how the forever mentality, along with with regular human fear of change and the religious fear of eternal judgment, made my own family not want to support me in leaving, but instead they continually tried to “support” me into staying with someone who was dehumanizing and violent.
Third, I feel strongly that after relationships, it’s important to resist the urge to untangle the yarn past the point of it being productive. It’s tempting to try to understand why something painful happened. Sometimes we get to understand exactly what happened and why and that definitely makes getting closure easier. Learning from our experiences is good, but there’s usually a point where we can’t figure out the rest of the story with the information we have. That’s when it’s best to let the tangled ball of yarn go instead of devoting our time and energy into something that is no longer benefitting us.
I’ll never fully understand why my ex-husband chooses to be such a destructive and disrespectful empty soul of a human, but what I do understand is that he wasn’t, isn’t, and won’t ever be healthy enough to be part of my life. That’s all I need to know. I can research personality disorders and that can be helpful in letting go and in teaching me what to look out for in the future, but getting caught up in the how and why of something changes nothing about the reality of my situation. I figured out that it was best to stop untangling the yarn before I started getting diminishing returns.
I don’t know if Aaron Gleaves disliked me months before we ended, or if he suddenly stopped caring what happened to me after our rupture, or if he never cared about me as a client in the first place. I can ruminate about how I think he cared. Or maybe was I just naive and thought he cared, but he never actually did. I can wonder if maybe the ending was sad for him too on some level. I can think that he got more and more annoyed with me as time went on and was finally too sick of me to tolerate being my therapist any longer. Any one of those ideas might be true, or it could be a combination of them, or even something else I haven’t thought of.
Unless Aaron ever wants to have an honest conversation with me about it, I won’t know. If he decides to explain his feelings about it to me in five years, sure, I’ll listen to what he has to say. Does that change what I need to do right now? No. Aaron Gleaves is a grown man who abruptly decided to stop being my therapist. Those are the facts I have. I don’t know his why and I don’t know how it’s affected him. I’ve bounced between thinking it’s less hurtful if he hated me (easier for me to say fuck him and good riddance) and thinking it’s less hurtful if he got sad too (I wasn’t totally a nothing to him). But either way, I experienced it as a loss and need to work through it.
This entire process, all the way from Aaron Gleaves dumping me, to dealing with abuse from some of my siblings and subsequently choosing to cut ties with them, to me being the one to cut therapy short with Tim Irving and then IFS therapist John changing his work situation, has made me think deeply about what I want to get from and what I’m willing to give to my future relationships.
When I used to talk to Aaron about dating he said that a man needs to “come correct”, in other words I don’t need a fixer upper. I absolutely agree with and appreciate his advice and I won’t try to fix or change someone in the hope that maybe they’ll be good for me at some point in the future. This includes being overly patient with dudes who make the bare minimum progress so that it looks like they’re working on things, when the reality is that it’s never going to be enough progress in a timely enough manner to be on the same page with me.
My emotions are mine to regulate and everyone else’s emotions are theirs to regulate. Same with individual choices. I’m only responsible for my choices. Responsibility comes with accountability. Funny how controlling men never want that part.
I look forward to a longterm relationship with a guy who expresses his emotions in a healthy way and lets me express mine in a healthy way.
Two individuals being responsible for themselves while being supportive of each other. That’s what I want. If I never get it then I guess I’ll just be a single person who has improved a lot as an individual. There are worse things than that.