Dear Aunt Chelsea:
My therapist left me high and dry. She said she would treat me until my permanent therapist got back to work — which isn’t so. She stopped the sessions for June. This left a sour taste in my mouth. I used to trust therapists. Now, I feel they are a dime a dozen. There is only one therapist who I trust, and I hope he comes back again real soon.
Cynical Helena, in Chelsea
Dear Cynical Helena:
Although it’s been years since Aunt Chelsea muscled in on the local lemonade merchants by hanging her shingle on a wobbly wooden stand and charging a nickel for psychiatric help, she’s well aware that her status as this newspaper’s resident advice columnist more than qualifies her to make sweeping judgments based on little, if any, real information. No extensive backstory for THIS gal, thank you very much — a bare bones description of the problem is all I need to flush out the festering emotional wound and wrap it up in TLC (Tough Love, Cupcake!). So thanks for the vote of confidence by writing in, hon. Now, let’s get down to the business of shrinking your head.
Anyone who uses the word “trust” twice in one paragraph clearly has what is commonly referred to as, well, “Trust Issues.”
So I trust you’ll take my advice when I tell you to not write off all of humanity (or, at the very least, all therapists) just because old faithful went away for a month and placed you in the care of a crackpot colleague.
You can wrack your brain from here until next Thursday and never correctly guess why the testy temp stopped your sessions cold. Speculating about the motivations of others is a thankless, and almost always fruitless, task. So why work yourself into a tizzy, Helena?
I’ll just bet the bee that’s set up shop in your bonnet stems directly from an inappropriate amount of time and energy spent trying to figure out “why” — and then constructing an exquisite tale of betrayal and woe, to unspool like a tight ball of nanotech yarn, once your regular therapist breezes back into town. My advice is to forget about the wrong that’s been done to you, and focus on addressing — with candid honesty — the problems that drove you to a therapist in the first place. Good luck, dear…and keep me updated on your progress!
Do you have a personal problem at work, the gym, the bar or the corner coffee shop? Is there a domestic dispute that needs the sage counsel of an uninvolved third party? Then Ask Aunt Chelsea! Contact her via askauntchelsea@chelseanow.com, and feel free to end your pensive missive with a clever, anonymous moniker (aka “Troubled on 23rd Street,” or “Ferklempt in the Fashion District”).
