If I could afford it I'd go into therapy and try and unpick it, but I can't at the moment . . . Do you mean nudge me towards therapy? We are back to the financial issue... .
I hear that therapy is something you've considered but that it currently feels out of your range. Can you identify a specific problem you'd like to address? What type of therapy or therapist do you feel may be a good fit? How many sessions do you think you'd need to get somewhere? How much do you think they'd cost? Can you figure out a way to swing that amount?
FWIW, when I found this site a little over a year ago I was struggling to understand a spate of intense dreams about a relationship I had as a teen. While I learned a ton here, about six months in I got to a point where I felt like I needed to take it offline to explore the issues I'd discovered here in a deeper way. As a freelancer in a creative field my income stream is unpredictable so embarking on an open-ended course of expensive weekly therapy didn't sound like a good idea, but I knew it wouldn't hurt to at least gather some information. It took anther few months for me to get going, but eventually I started researching local T's and sorting out the cost. I knew I wanted someone nurturing who was experienced with trauma and personality disorders and picked someone off the internet because I liked her picture and credentials. (It turned out to be a great choice.)
Then I had a conversation with my husband letting him know that there was something going on with me emotionally that I needed to discuss with a pro. (He is supportive, by the way.)
I got on the waiting list of the person I picked. We had an excellent first meeting where we talked about the issues I thought needed addressing and how long I wanted it to take (6 sessions was how much I was willing to commit to financially). She thought that probably wasn't enough but agreed to take me on anyway. I had mapped out mentally how I thought those six sessions might go. We spread them out over a period of months to mitigate the cost. And then once we reached six we revisited our agreement and decided to keep going for another six and so on.
One of the things I've learned in therapy is how as a child of a narcissistic parent, acknowledging my own needs for care and support can feel very, very hard because I learned at a young age that it was my job to take care of my parent's emotional needs and that it wasn't really OK for me to have emotional needs of my own. This made it super-hard to reach out. But I'm so glad I did.
You sound like a creative, resourceful person. How would it feel to direct some of that toward yourself?
