Posted by Tabßitha on October 8, 2002, at 0:52:42
In reply to mother - and Freud? help!, posted by Medusa on October 7, 2002, at 8:12:29
Medusa,
It may seem odd to talk about your mom when your problem is needing to get a job, but therapy can be a strange process. I've been talking about my procrastination habit for years, and it's resisted all sorts of attacks. Last week the therapist tried a new tack, she tried to get me to feel compassion for my fear of moving forward. At the time I thought it was a pointless exercise, but now it seems like the pattern is finally crumbling. My point is, you never know what will help. Blocks like you're experiencing are complicated.
You can't get away from mother issues, sadly enough. It's a lifetime task to untangle that early influence. All that stuff is worth looking at, but is the therp helping you make any progress on the jobhunt in the meantime?
When I was totally stuck on job search stuff, my therp would ask me what was the next thing I needed to do, and how long was I willing to work on it. At first my willingness was about 5 minutes, but considering I'd been avoiding the task for years, that was great progress. She'd also ask me how long it might reasonably take to complete a task such as updating my resume, and I'd realize I'd been torturing myself for months over a task that might reasonably take only 4 hours to complete. Somehow I finally got thru it all, one torturous step at a time, and ended up with multiple job offers.
I had all that fear of success, fear of happiness stuff too. Fear of losing the only connection I had to my mom, which was being like her (depressed and victimized). I'm still working on that stuff. Any progress on core issues like that makes a huge difference in the rest of your life. You have to take care of practical stuff in the meantime though.
poster:Tabßitha
thread:1237
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020829/msgs/1242.html