Here's the thing. Counseling sucks. You pay a stranger to listen to you ramble. Or, in my case, you pay a stranger on a sliding scale so that you can spend a lot of time staring off into nothing trying to think of something to say. Counseling for me ranges from slightly annoying to really, really, really frustrating.
I'm going to keep going, though. And after some consideration, I've decided that the reason I'm going to keep going isn't just that at some point I'm going to have to tell my District Committee on Ministry that I'm crazy sauce and at that time I should also probably be able to tell them that I'm in counseling.
I'm going to keep going because it's a discipline, and like most disciplines one engages in it faithfully not because of some immediate payoff but rather because one trusts that it has a long term formative effect.
The discipline of therapy, for me, is that it makes me be honest about my feelings, at least once a week. It's not that I'm always dishonest about my feelings. It's that I often try to ignore them, to pretend that they don't control me, when in fact they are the raging currents that drive most of my life. So counseling makes me face that, makes me talk about it, and--the hope is--brings me to some level of acceptance about what it is that I'm feeling.
And then, of course, it leaves me with that frustrating "so what" question that I can only try to answer with the rest of my week.
It is frustrating. But it's a checking-in point in my week, a guidepost that I desperately need.
This Lent, I'm not giving up on therapy.
Even though, seriously, I want to.
Thanks for the great write up David. I want to give up after every session, and feel the same way that you do. This post will make me stay at least another month or two....Cheers!
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