These little blog posts have been helping, because otherwise I tend to block out sessions. I don’t know why. Possibly because they involve recalling trauma or something, I don’t know. </exhausted sarcasm> I’ve been procrastinating on this one…

Anyways, so last week at some point in time was Session the Fourth, and boy, am I glad I got a recommendation from my psychiatrist for a psychologist. My psychiatrist has won national awards, something I found out by accident and that was never told to me or displayed loudly in the office or anything.

Anyways anyways, my current psychologist seems to remember previous sessions, or at least review notes before I enter the room. This is something I’ve not seen in prior psychologists, who either (a) liked to take time out from the first five to ten minutes of our conversation to review their notes while engaging in polite skin-deep conversation, or (b) were too busy/lazy to read their notes, or lost their notes, and wanted me to recount my problems. Every time. Neither is very considerate, especially on the heavy trauma scale.

This guy is different, though, man, and, like, remembers. Like remembers three sessions back. This is the best I’ve seen of any psychologist I’ve ever had.

Also, there are a lot of psychologists who are exceedingly eager to look for signs of recovery, such that they will claim you’ve recovered from diagnosed chronic PTSD within a year of seeing them, which is highly unlikely, and not true at the times that this has happened to me. I don’t think that’s going to happen with this one.

Anyways x 3, we talked about why I’m not used to change, or perhaps, change of certain kinds. Like people leaving my team at work; I react badly enough (i.e., I get very distracted and mournful, not aggressive, but in a way that’s somehow worse) that I’m often the last person told about such news, despite being relatively senior on the engineer stack. Obviously something of a career blocker. I wondered why I wasn’t used to this, or reacted in such a depressed manner; I mean, I even act this way towards people I don’t like leaving. ((There was one case of And There Was Much Rejoicing, however, which goes to show how very, very bad that one situation had gotten.))

The reason I thought I had no excuse to freak out at people leaving is because I grew up in a family where, honestly, people leaving would have been a good idea, in terms of lowering the insane amounts of physical abuse factor. I always wanted my father to leave, for instance, even though my mother didn’t. That, in fact, led into a tangent where I realized that it was always me trying to shield my mother from my father, physically with my body even, from an extremely young and tender age. It’s my first memory, in fact. But I don’t remember her ever returning the favor. Well, she bought me toys after certain situations, but that was kind of it.

Anyways x 4, we worked alongside of that, and it’s probably because the situation at home was so unstable, that I simply don’t like work situations that destabilize. This included being in one team that hung together despite the massive amounts of so not working; I didn’t like that situation because it was inherently unstable. Otherwise, my teams have been very stable, up until people depart for other teams/departments/start-ups/companies.

(Hmm, right now, I just realized that probably applies for any situation, career or not. Flamewars affect me very badly because of the way they destabilize situations, unless they don’t actually destabilize anything due to (a) happening all the time combined with (b) being so inconsequential that even I can’t get worked up over it. For me, that’s programming language, memory allocation, and code editor wars.)

And then we ran out of time, and that was pretty much that, and next time I don’t know what’s going to happen.

I am kind of glad he didn’t ask about the living room spending-time-more-in homework, because I didn’t get that done, for weeks, although I try every so often. Maybe he doesn’t remember. On the other hand….