Don't diminish yourself
What makes you feel small, and how can you change it?
Very few of us are solidly holy or evil. We are composites of both, mixtures of the black and white. Just as life is a spectrum of gray hues that blend the absence of what we needed with the presence of the good things we received.
Ben and I settled in to the leather chairs facing each other in my therapist, Tom’s, office. My nerves were on edge that morning, after having heard that my father was in a hurry to get home once Ben and I returned from the hour couples’ session. I thought it best to voice the cause of my agitation upfront, so I turned to Tom and said, “Ben and I were just invited to speak together at a marriage conference in six months, and I have no idea if my parents will be willing to help us by watching our kids while we’re away.”
Tom’s eyes widened. “Did I know you both did that - speak at groups?” I shrugged. “We wrote a book together on parenting, but that was years ago. This is the first time we’ve been asked to speak together. But I’ve told you about my writing before, Tom. You didn’t show much interest in it.”
We were all seated at this point, and Tom clenched the armrests of his chair, his knuckles turning white. I felt my chest tighten, bracing myself for whatever he was going to say. I knew it wouldn’t be good, but I maintained eye contact with him. “You don’t know if I’m interested in your writing. You can’t make that judgment about me,” Tom retorted.
I rubbed my forehead before responding, “It’s not a big deal. I’ve read a few excerpts from my reflections and essays that I felt were relevant to particular therapy sessions, but we don’t have to talk about that right now.” Ben sat motionless next to me, staring straight ahead. I continued, “Ben took some time off work to be here today, and I know he has some things he wants to discuss with —”
Tom didn’t waste a breath, barely allowing me to finish the sentence. “That doesn’t matter. We need to clear up this issue about your writing right now.” There was urgency in his tonal inflection, but I felt increasingly uncomfortable, disregarded. “No, we don’t,” I insisted. “I want to respect the fact that Ben is here with us and would like to share. We can come back to this point about my writing the next time I have an individual session with you.”
The back and forth continued, Tom maintaining his stance that we must clear up this issue immediately, while I continued to calmly decline and redirect the conversation to couples’ therapy. By the third round, Tom relented. “I don’t think you’ll be able to keep a clear head at this point,” he sighed, speaking directly to me. He still had barely acknowledged Ben’s presence.
We had spent over thirty minutes on this useless diatribe.
I shut down, quietly listening as Ben spoke. I felt small in this moment, erased. My cheeks flushed, and I hung my head. Shame swallowed me, and I noticed I felt like a child again, admonished for…what, exactly? After the hour ended, I stood to leave without speaking a word to Tom. He hollered down the hall as I whirred past, “Please come back!”
Ben and I sat in our SUV to gather ourselves for a full five minutes before exiting the parking lot. “What just happened in there?” I asked through tears. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I feel disrespected. I took time off of work weeks ago to be here today, and the entire session was derailed.”
I wasn’t sure if this was meant as a slant against me or Tom, and I didn’t ask. Instead, we rode the rest of the drive home in silence. At the time, a conglomeration of emotions flooded me: anger, embarrassment, shock, confusion, disappointment, frustration. I can distill it into one sentence now, one I would hear months down the road from Natalie Goldberg:
Restlessness is connected to regret.1
Deciding to distance myself from this incident, I stewed on what had transpired before taking action. But once I realized why I felt small, I had resolved to essentially fire Tom - an unprecedented act for this highly insecure introvert.
I regretted mentioning to Tom that I felt he didn’t care about my creative work. I regretted arguing with him in front of Ben, as if Ben were invisible and his time didn’t matter. I regretted spending over a year trying to work on my personal growth with a man who ended up dismissing my time and feelings.
The most empowering choice of midlife so far has been this: to decide that I would find a new counselor and explain to Tom that I was severing the therapist-client bond between us. To decide that I would not be shackled by someone else, but that I would emancipate myself.
Don’t diminish yourself. The caverns of my subconscious tossed me these three words as leverage to substantiate, maybe even justify my intentions moving forward. If I treated myself with respect, that meant I had the agency to decide who has access to my innermost thoughts and regrets, and who does not.
Tom does not, I realized, but the epiphany was this: that I had the courage, the gumption to walk away from what had become an irreparable professional relationship and that I would respectfully deliver the news to Tom.
Until this juncture of my life, I had either a) tolerated disrespect until I detonated with rage, or b) kowtowed to the demands of others even when doing so was detrimental to me. And if I ever admitted to myself that I needed to break from a person who was emotionally harmful, I would not have spoken directly to that person about it. If ghosting had been a thing in the 90s, I would have waved the banner high.
Something was altered in me that day. I rehearsed what I would say to Tom, but only after replaying the entire scenario several times in my mind. I shared my first thoughts with my spiritual director, when the situation still held a high emotional charge and my memory was fresh with the details. She said, “To escalate when a client expresses uncomfortable emotions is completely not acceptable. The entanglement was painful to read. A therapist is supposed to be the "grownup" in the room, able to deescalate troubling emotions and keep a client's humanity intact, and not be a slinger of violence. He seems unworthy of your entrustment of emotion, confidence, and soul.”
I didn’t want to tell Tom that I couldn’t return after this incident, but I knew I had to. Revisiting the question, Who is worthy of my trust? reframed my perspective, so that I understood this was not only about Tom, but about everyone in my past with whom I have given custody of my “emotion, confidence, and soul.” To defend myself against future verbal assaults from Tom became a symbolic act of restitution for the younger versions of myself who accepted diminishment as rightful punishment, who denied her worthiness of respect.
This is not about forgiveness, or the lack thereof. I am not writing about who was right or wrong in this circumstance. Had I known that Tom would become incensed by mentioning my perception of his lack of interest in my writing, I would have refrained from saying anything until the topic seemed pertinent to the overarching therapy session. I admit this. But because Tom was in a position of power in our therapist-client dyad, he was more culpable for guiding the conversation instead of hindering it.
The thicker issue regarded self-respect, in which the diminutive parts of me that never questioned someone’s accusations or onslaught of anger stood up and chose to walk away from what was harmful, became a way for me to confront the regrets of my past and to make peace with the unhealed wounds I still carry.
Sometimes we feel small because a person treats us abusively, and when we find ourselves cowering emotionally during an interaction that doesn’t seem to fit the context of our initial reaction, it’s likely a trauma response called an emotional flashback. These are deeply ingrained wounds that originate from long ago, usually in childhood. That’s what happened to me the day Tom turned the tables and demanded an account of proof that he did not like my writing.
I’ve come to a point where I recognize that my writing doesn’t suit everyone, so I felt indifferent as to whether or not Tom enjoyed reading my work. What hurt was that he ignored - or picked apart - the selections I’d share aloud during our sessions, the thoughts I’d penned or typed that easily wove into the fabric of very tenuous and vulnerable expressions of the present day. And the message I internalized was this: You are sharing too much. No one will like you if you do that. Stop talking. Stop reading. You’re getting too deep, too heavy.
This wasn’t Tom’s fault, I knew, but as my (trauma-informed?) therapist, I hoped he would have recognized what was happening, or at least been curious enough to inquire - in a safe manner - why I was so upset. Why my writing meant so much. Why I felt he overlooked it. My interpretation of his reaction was derived from narratives imprinted in my heart from a young age, mostly from a critical grandfather (though I loved him dearly) and mother (whom I also love).
Today, nearly nine months after I left Tom’s office for the last time, I am easing into sitting with the truth of my life: every horrific thing that’s happened to me by people I loved, while also holding empathy for the people I love who hurt me. Very few of us are solidly holy or evil. We are composites of both, mixtures of the black and white. Just as life is a spectrum of gray hues that blend the absence of what we needed with the presence of the good things we received.
Don’t diminish yourself isn’t just an imperative for me. It’s a plea I extend to you, that you listen to the hollow places in your heart that are desperate for you to nurture them. I can’t guarantee anything will come of this, except to say that you might find something childlike buried underneath the layers of your wounds. It is pure, innocent, content. That is the part that whispers to you what you most need to hear, and you will recognize it by its ability to stand against what is harmful and stand for what will heal you.