A THERAPY DILEMMA
I recently made the choice to suspend all my therapy sessions with my local shrink. I should have known better than to seek psychical help from a former community health worker, who doubles up as a mental health profession, in our petit commune. You all know that those medics are privy to everyone's medical report, hence discretion to them is like chewing water, an impossibility which does not sit well with their nosy selves.
Anyway, at first, Doctor Fatima
blew my mind with her ability to enter the sunken place and fish out repressed information
out of an unconscious person. But lately, I feel that the stoic psychiatrist
has become rather depressed and overly clingy, over-sharing her business with a
psych patient, who happens to be me. Consequently, I have become my therapist’s
therapist, and it is exhausting for me to have to listen to her marital woes every
time I go in for a consult.
Still, it feels very awkward, when
my shrink cries me a river all the time, and more so about her cheating
husband. As a result, I have the mind to ask for a full refund of the down
payment of all the hours she has taken from all my sittings. At this point, it
has become even harder for me to freely speak on my challenges, for she is now
in the habit of hijacking my sessions midway, only to flip them into her life
confessions.
The way I see it, the doctor is
lucky to have a husband she can cry about. What about me, the single like a
pringle Betty Baijun? Come to think of It, group therapy would have been ideal
for me to attend, some five villages away, for the sake of privacy but only the
alcoholics were privileged to get decent counsel. The rest of us had to wing
it, mostly by leaning onto Jesus.
Perhaps, I should have taken the
divine route, instead of settling for localized clinicians. Now, the joke is on
me. Needless to say, I feel a strong urge to put up serious boundaries between Doctor
Fatima and I, for the sole reason that she is now insistent upon us
trauma-bonding over coffee, in the after-hours. Sincerely, all I needed from my
head shrinker was a professional insight into my impairments but instead, all
she wants to do is to push them aside, and make hers front and Centre.
God, I should have known better
than to seek advice from a non-theistic. Instead, I should have sort the divine
services of one reverend doctor pastor Tom, for it would have been much easier
to deal with a church minister, than a woman scorned. In any case, I must draw
the line somewhere between my mental fragility and her marital woes.
However, if I take the chance to go
ghost on her, I am afraid that her loose mouth will spill out all my medical
secrets, which now that I think about it, I should not have been so open as to
rut them out quick, fast and easy to a resident shrink. Yet again, is Doctor
Fatima not a certified therapist? Everyone knows that the patient-doctor
confidentiality holds not so much water within our locality.
Even our native pastors spill our
very ugly secrets at the pulpit, during their everlasting sermons, such that if
you listen to them with keen intent, you can easily tell whose unflattering
story line was being brutally shared at a particular Sunday service, all in the
spirit of discipleship. Besides, everybody will believe the community doctor
over me, should she decide to generously share my medical information to all
and sundry.
Therefore, I have decided that it
is best to grant her a listening ear every now and then, while I come up with a
game plan to dismiss her for good. The worst of it is that doctor Fatima wants
to use me as a honey trap in her crooked plan, aimed at catching her
philandering husband red-handed, yet, I am more of sour grapes and less of a
honey comb.
Nonetheless, she is insistent that
I sacrifice myself for a noble cause, a rookie move which will only be of
benefit to her, while it kills my reputation, adding psychosis to the already
long list my mental shortcomings. But what can I do to slide off easy from her
crazy self? She has all my details at hand, and even knows where I live. At
this rate, I might have to either move to an undisclosed location or seek for
an asylum abroad, anything to claw this wench off my back, for real.
It is no wonder that her husband is
out in the streets, frolicking with pretty young things. But wait one minute,
perhaps I could convince her to dump her vulturous husband and spare herself
the blatant shame, disrespect and embarrassment he has inflicted upon her. But
what if I get caught up in their drama, and be accused of the unthinkable,
provoking the doctor to butcher me mercilessly?
On second thought, I will not risk
my life, for I know that a series of unfortunate events will begin to happen to
me, whereby I will be caught up in the rapture of the doctor's wrath. In any
case, the locals are talking and the streets are watching her cheating husband
paint our locality with his philandering acts. Come to think of it, why are
many men never satisfied with drinking water from their own cisterns? The fact
is that the grass is never greener on the other side of infidelity, because
karma sits pretty on it, eager to dish out justice, karate style.
Anyhow, I have finally made up my
mind not to seek any more mental recourse from human beings in general. Maybe I
am better off praying for lasting solutions to my persistent problems, than to
be vulnerable with mere mortals, for it never ends well. As for Doctor Fatima,
I wish her Godspeed.
