Loving the evolving relationship with my inappropriate but highly effective therapist

Yes, I have an inappropriate relationship with one of my therapists.  But it is out in the open, and the therapeutic benefits are real.  The nature of how it is inappropriate is actually a central part of how and why it is so healing. Can that make sense?

This ripple in what is professional has been growing and growing.  And while it threatened to get out of hand at one point, it is now very much in mutual control.  You see, when I am with her, and this has happened from the very first time in session with her, I get a very powerful “mommy” energy from her.  Channelling the Divine Mother has been a central part of what magic she holds for me.  I don’t know if other therapists have encouraged their clients to suck their thumb, or do other forms of regression, especially when there is a fetish that sits on top of the core wound that motivates such things, but we have been there, and it has been helpful, in context.

She was annoyed with me a session ago, annoyed that I gobble up our time telling silly stories and avoiding speaking about the real issues.  She loves the stories, who wouldn’t, but she is also motivated to heal.  She asserted herself in a dominant way, demanded I reschedule, and just yesterday, asserted herself in session, demanding my focus, and pushing me to confront things.

And this, I did.

Through a mixture of hypnosis, meditation, and talk therapy, we stayed focussed on rage, fear, resentment, shame, and found it in my body, this fetid, squalid, suppurating wound, this gunky green-black sludge filling my gut, and I felt like vomiting, and she asked me to breathe into it, to own it, to love it, to feel it, to confront it…and we stayed there as I did, and talked about the things which emerged.

How my mother stifled me, gave me a feeling of being crushed, suffocated, as if she had cut off my arms or had bound me.  How claustrophobia is a real feeling for me, how the parallel nightmare of being suffocated by my wife, existing from the early days of our relationship, was there as a recurring nightmare.  Why love people who crush your spirit?  And they will do it if you let them.

She (the therapist) encouraged me to let it go, to not carry the toxicity, but to see it, feel it, wallow in it, and recognise that how I feel is my own creation.  We got here as I shared with her my suicidal feelings that have emerged as my divorce reaches an acute phase, and this creeping fear that my wife is not just trying to crush me, but is crushing me…and that the essence of her case against me is punishing me for being trans.  And of course, this is symbolic of how she suffocated me in our relationship, and is, in a way, symbolic of how my mother did the same.

Star Child was mistaken to think that I was turned into a trans person because my mother would often tell me that she wished I was a girl.  “Oh, why couldn’t you have been a girl?” she would lament, particularly when she was mad or frustrated with me, when I wouldn’t obey, or be compliant, or do what she wanted.  And of course, that’s what I wanted, but I can’t imagine I would have been any more compliant.  Or why she would have thought so, other than that her own submission must have been associated with being female, the dutiful wife, the slave to her children, oh, how she must have suffered.

When we moved house a year and a bit ago, I came across a letter from my mother that I received at about the age of 16, when I went to live with my father and she moved away to be with her new husband.  She poured her sorrow into it, apologized for being an unavailable mother, for not being there for me when I was a baby.  I didn’t remember the letter from when I received it.  But was also not mature enough to read it.  But this time I just stood there weeping, tears streaming down my face.  Every now and again my children come across my like that, lost, transfixed, weeping.  Silently.

These are beautiful tears.  A lament for the way that we prickle and scratch each other even when we are filled with love.  A representation of our failings.  Failings to rise above.

My mother and I often had resets.  Our relationship was stormy and dysfunctional, and would reach a breaking point and then end up in tears and hugs and promises to be different, to be gentle, to be kind.  But it never lasted.

I couldn’t stand the oppressive weight of her disapproval.  Nothing satisfied.  Nothing was ever good enough.  She was unhappy with herself, with her life, and therefore also with mine.  She was unhappy that I wasn’t a girl, and then when she discovered there was quite a bit of girl in me, was even more unhappy lest I become a ‘fag’.  Heaven help those who are outside of the mainstream.

And yet ‘Queer’ is the most delicious label I have ever felt applied to me, that I have applied to myself.  Yes, I am Queer and very proud to be so.

My mother wanted to keep me as a baby because she reminisced about how “easy” it was to control a baby.  I was in diapers for an inappropriately long time, with a pacifier formally for an inappropriately long time—I think she made a show of throwing mine out when I was 6 or 7.  I went and fished it out of the trash, and then when that one was done, used my meagre allowance to buy a new one.  Despite this ‘intervention’ she encouraged my continued use of my security blanket.  Fussing over it more than I did.

Perhaps she lamented the loss of the baby she never had, the baby that was lost because of her divorce, her fear, the absence of her bastard husband, my abusive father…a man who hit her, verbally used her, shouted at all of us.  I can feel sorry for her.  And she died a terrible death, suffocating from a cancer that spread to her lungs.

And I wonder of this, as her little sister, a beauty icon beyond compare, my favourite aunt, the most glamourous woman I have ever encountered (and I am not exaggerating)—in her day, on the cover of Vogue and other such magazines, always a chic dresser, and achingly cool—also died of suffocation.  In this case, an auto-immune disease claimed her, one which Dr. Gabor Maté in his book XXX, attributed to childhood trauma.  And I ask myself this, was there a common thread in that family home when they were growing up that led to both of these ways of dying?

My voice will not be silenced.  I will not suffocate.  I have fought back my whole life.

My rebellion against my mother, my attempts to reclaim my body sovereignty, was to deny my mother touch.  I would not let her touch me.  Her physical presence was enough to make me feel as if I was suffocating.  All those years of emotionally manipulative control, of sexually inappropriate contact, of sexualising me, and of literally locking me into a completely stuffed closet when I was bad, leaving me to cry in the dark, to feel the plastic of the dry-cleaning bags get into my mouth, stick to my face, in that awful, dead, warm, still air.

When I was tied by an absolute Queen of Shibari, these fears emerged and somehow we managed to cross over that terrain and I was transported, allowed to deal with this fear in a safe and pleasant way.  I understand that Shibari will be for me a very important form of therapy, as being immobilised goes straight to the darkness.

Ex-Mistress either intentionally or accidentally blundered into this on an outing when she strangled me, lifting me off the ground by my throat in an arm lock from behind me.  I have never slipped into sub-space faster and more completely.  I was aroused to such a degree that I thought the skin on my you-know-what would rip.  Instantly.  But when I tried to discuss it with her, I think that the words I found to seek to understand, to discuss it with her, somehow offended or irritated her, so we never went there again, and I never got to understand.  Now I guess I do.  And now I think she was insulted by the insinuation in the questioning that the practice is dangerous.  It is.  Life on the edge, right?

But what of this?  What if my burning desire to be female, to change sex, is simply a desire to be the kind of woman that my mother never was?  What if I want to feel in my body that I can do better?  Is that ugly.  It seems as if it might be.  And since I am not sure of the answer, I have to conclude that there is truth in it.  That my motivation is in part competitive.  I don’t think that it began that way, as I was born with an ache to be female…but I do think this is an added layer, has become part of my defiance, part of what gives me the strength to see it through.

When my other therapist asked me to become my own Mistress, and to be the Mistress for my slave self that my slave-self needed and deserved, at first, I thought it sounded good, but ‘how on earth?’…but now I feel it taking shape.  And yes, slave me is also responding.  And I am quite pleased with the immediate result, which is to get me back focussed on exercise, diet, body and self-care, professional self-care, and a strength to fight my wife which I need.

I am also back in regular therapy after going through a period of only calling to book when I was in deep emotional hot water.  At times, self-care can be goosed along by other people.  In this case, my lawyer pointed it out.  She’s been a bit of a therapist too, not asked for, nor offered, but because she is relentlessly tough, and for that, I appreciate her counsel.