I’ve met with my new therapist now. Her name is A. (Ok, so it’s not A., but, that’s what I’ll be calling her in my blog, following in the tradition of D. and B.)

I had to rush a little to get there since I had a house meeting right before, but in the end, having opted for the tube rather than waiting for a bus, I arrived bang on time.

A. met me at the door and we made our way up a narrow-bordering-on-claustrophobic (if you’re so inclined) staircase. My first observation about A. was that she has a nose piercing. For some reason that makes a difference. One of my previous therapists (incidentally also called A.) had one, too – and so I took that as a good sign. – Don’t worry, I’m not really saying that a nose stud wearing therapist is automatically a goodtherapist, but for me, well, it’s something to identify with, somehow. (For those of you who don’t know me by sight; I’ve had my nose pierced a few times in my life, and am currently sporting both a lip and a tongue piercing). So, as I said – to me, that was a positive first sign; a vague sense of kinship.

The second thing I noticed, having sat down I the none-too-comfortable and slightly too deep chair was that she had a book by RD Laing sitting on her bookshelf. That also made a difference because RD Laing, apart from having made the profound and oft-quoted statement that “life is a sexually transmitted disease” also happens to be one of the founders of the organisation that runs the community I’m living in, meaning that chances were that A. wouldn’t be completely unaware of the ethos of this organisation.

The actual session went reasonable smoothly. As always it’s a little difficult to know at what end to begin when asked to talk about yourself, but I got through it in something that could potentially, and somewhat optimistically, be called chronological order. Also, I spent some time talking a bit more specifically about why I was coming to see A. now, about what I felt hadn’t worked so well with B. and how difficult it has been for me to make the decision to seek out someone else to work with, having arrived at the conclusion that B. simply wasn’t the right person for me, yet at the same time being very aware that I may be setting myself up for rejection again.

I’m not going to go through this first session in detail, because, in many ways, the precise ins and outs of it don’t really matter, but I can say that I felt really good coming out of it. I felt that that unidentifiable something that I’d been missing in my sessions with B. was definitely there, and that I was somehow back on track again. It’s just one of those things that you just know.

I feel like I took a wrong turn after my sessions with D. ended, but now I’m back on the road I’m meant to be on again. It’s a road less travelled, but it is, without a shadow of a doubt, the one I’m meant to be on, and with some trepidation I am looking forward to seeing what’s round the next bend.

xx

PS. I appologise profusely about the lame heading, but in my defence, I know at least one person who’ll get what it’s a reference to, and who might possibly find it mildly amusing..