Theraphied - Or - It's Not Okay To Touch Me There

Yesterday after work I had an appointment with a psychologist/therapist. It's the first time I've ever really seen a proper one, and I have to say that the experience was really quite pleasant. My initial thoughts about what it would be like were the stereotypical "Lie down the couch...How interesting...Yes, yes...And how does that make you feel?", but it was so much different.

I've got what I suppose you would call mild OCD and ADD (nothing really severe, but enough to annoy myself and others on occasion), coupled with a little bit of neurotic behaviour and general anxiety (triggered usually via the realisation of one or more phobias that I have...)

Anyway, I'm sick of letting this stuff control various areas of my life, so I figured that I should do something about it. I mean, let's face it, nobody wants to hang around a guy who is constantly stressing about something. So basically we went into her little room, and (after I had been told my confidentiality rights) we sat down on these really comfortable chairs and she just asked me a couple of questions and let me talk about myself a whole bunch. It was pretty cool. Occasionally she'd ask follow up questions to things I said, or ask me to clarify something a bit further, and the whole time she was scrawling notes, so at the very least I felt as though she was listening to me.

Because it was the first session, we talked about a fair few things. We talked about why I initially decided to see her, which lead into a discussion about the problem I was having yesterday with not getting work next Friday, and then into one about my general fear of being some kind of "bum" and not having enough money to survive. Then I told her that people have mentioned that they think I have OCD and ADD (or, as Andy likes to call it, ADOLB - Attention Deficit Oh Look Birdies!!)

From there we spoke about why people think I have ADD, and then about the OCD stuff. We spent a lot of time talking about the OCD stuff - it was really pretty cool. For instance, I didn't know that I was already using the strategies that they wanted to teach me to handle them, without even realising it! Then I got this nifty poster which showed me the way OCD creates a cycle (which I will talk about in a separate post some time) and I got information on how to break that cycle.

Then my hour was up, and I had to go home, which kinda sucked cos I was really getting into it.

Oh, I also got homework - I have to make a list of my phobias and rank them from most severe to least severe. I'll do a post about that one too.

Anyway, after we got home Andy and Spud and Lydia and I were discussing how I have this weird semi-phobia of people touching me in certain places. It's not okay for people to touch me anywhere beneath my belly button, or above my knees. It's also not okay for people to touch the back of my legs. I didn't know just how not okay it was, though, until we decided to do some pseudo-scientific tests last night.

Andy touched my belly, and my thigh. When he touched my belly I wanted to get away, but I couldn't cos I was stuck in the chair and moving out of his touch would have involved hurting something. When he touched my leg, I was very uncomfortable, and eventually it started to physically hurt. I wanted out of there bad.

Next I shut my eyes, and he repeatedly said "Is this okay?" and "How about now?", for the first little while my brain was going off and I started to curl up into a ball because I didn't know just how close he was and whether he was going to touch me or not - it was not nice. Eventually, I realised that he wasn't going to do anything, and I felt fine, but then my brain soon realised that he would have figured out that I figured that out, and would have gone back to trying to touch me, and the cycle started again. It's really odd, because I don't mind being touched with objects...It's just people-touching that really bothers me...

So yeah. I guess the moral of this story is that therapists are really nice, and touching me anywhere other than my back without warning is likely to get you unintentionally attacked.