Sam
So, Sam from the GBTQ workshop and I have been co-counseling pretty regularly for perhaps six (?) weeks now. Forty-five minutes of attentiveness and focused conversation. The first few sessions involved a lot of autobiographical information sharing. They confirmed a lot of what I had been able to glean from knowing Sam over the years: A Midwestern WASP, but not the kind one bumps into at the eastern private schools. Sam's parents were small business owners just barely keeping up with their bills. All it took was one catastrophic event to knock their economic, emotional and familial underpinnings out from under them and as a result, Sam was set up for a lifetime of being the "Good Gay Son".
Strange as it may seem, Sam is the first gay person I have ever had regular sessions with and needless to say, we have a lot in common: our homes are virtual fortresses of warmth and comfort against the "cruel" world outside. We both have mild to acute OCD which in a counter-intuitive sort of way makes it impossible to make decisions about clutter and disposing of things that have long since served their purpose. We're very good at organizing junk.
And - oh, yes - we're both adult children of alcoholic parents (ACAPs) one more link in a long line of gay acquaintances who either drank heavily themselves or grew up in the same household with an adult who did.
On the plus side, it makes us extremely empathetic; we tend to gravitate toward the person using up the least oxygen in the room rather than the most. On the minus, we're usually the last to recognize when a relationship is over or beyond saving; and, again - counterintuitively - we love crushes. I think that last piece is because we know deep down inside that nothing of consequence is going to happen and therefore represents no threat to the carefully built fortress that protects us against the world. Falling in love with love is one of the biggest cop-outs ever invented by mankind.
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But, strange as it may seem, all of this familiarity with his material makes it nonetheless difficult to counsel Sam. The difficulty is trying to stay objective when you have made exactly the same mistaken decisions based on similar "frozen needs" or "chronic material", as they say in RC.
And, lately, because my counseling schedule has become so amped up, I find myself attempting to quit my caffeine addiction for longer and longer periods during the week. This weekend, for example, I've had to go an entire weekend without coffee because of back-to-back RC events - a one-day workshop on Saturday and a Sunday morning session with Sam. As a consequence, I actually feel worse despite hours of fairly light-weight talk therapy. All the inadequacy and self-loathing that caffeine tends to mask just kind of seeps up through the seams and sits there unless I grab another session from someone (which I almost never do) or act out on it, most often by climbing into bed and literally pulling the covers over my head.
And, yes, I am here to report that Sam often experiences the same thing.
Strange as it may seem, Sam is the first gay person I have ever had regular sessions with and needless to say, we have a lot in common: our homes are virtual fortresses of warmth and comfort against the "cruel" world outside. We both have mild to acute OCD which in a counter-intuitive sort of way makes it impossible to make decisions about clutter and disposing of things that have long since served their purpose. We're very good at organizing junk.
And - oh, yes - we're both adult children of alcoholic parents (ACAPs) one more link in a long line of gay acquaintances who either drank heavily themselves or grew up in the same household with an adult who did.
On the plus side, it makes us extremely empathetic; we tend to gravitate toward the person using up the least oxygen in the room rather than the most. On the minus, we're usually the last to recognize when a relationship is over or beyond saving; and, again - counterintuitively - we love crushes. I think that last piece is because we know deep down inside that nothing of consequence is going to happen and therefore represents no threat to the carefully built fortress that protects us against the world. Falling in love with love is one of the biggest cop-outs ever invented by mankind.
.
But, strange as it may seem, all of this familiarity with his material makes it nonetheless difficult to counsel Sam. The difficulty is trying to stay objective when you have made exactly the same mistaken decisions based on similar "frozen needs" or "chronic material", as they say in RC.
And, lately, because my counseling schedule has become so amped up, I find myself attempting to quit my caffeine addiction for longer and longer periods during the week. This weekend, for example, I've had to go an entire weekend without coffee because of back-to-back RC events - a one-day workshop on Saturday and a Sunday morning session with Sam. As a consequence, I actually feel worse despite hours of fairly light-weight talk therapy. All the inadequacy and self-loathing that caffeine tends to mask just kind of seeps up through the seams and sits there unless I grab another session from someone (which I almost never do) or act out on it, most often by climbing into bed and literally pulling the covers over my head.
And, yes, I am here to report that Sam often experiences the same thing.