I hope this won't be seen as disruptive to the tone of the thread, but I wanted to mention some times when therapy has helped people a lot, and a time long, long LONG ago when I blocked my mother temporarily. I apologize if I'm making the thread too argumentative. That isn't my intent.
I want to mention that at times on this thread and elsewhere on Gransnet people do sometimes advocate seeing therapists without necessarily calling them therapists: grief counselors, for instance. Therapy can make huge differences in the lives of people who need it. For instance, someone on this thread sometimes mentions therapy that has helped people with borderline personality disorder; soldiers with shellshock--post traumatic stress disorder--often manage to break free of their horrific memories and bad dreams after therapy.
There is sometimes a profound need for it in someone's life--for such soldiers, for instance. At one time I had a student who was almost catatonic, barely able to make sense, who did not turn in any assignments and spoke so oddly in class that her classmates stared at her oddly. In my office she happened to reveal in a halting, roundabout way that her father expected her to sleep with him. I got her to the university counseling office that same day and the university found her a free dorm room and a full scholarship. She didn't even have to go home to get her clothes. They sent someone to pick them up. I ran into her four years later and she was an articulate medical student--something I would never have expected her to become, granted how bizarrely she behaved in my class. We were PROFOUNDLY happy to see each other. In her case, therapy and social support turned her life around.
An instance of temporary blockage: my mother had many good qualities, but . . . despite having insurance coverage for medical care and dentistry, she never sent me or my siblings to a dentist and only took us to an MD when we were really, really sick. We were not Christian Scientists. The three of us eventually thought "Hey, people my age go to dentists . . . maybe I should? When we got around to it, in our late twenties, each of us had cavities in the double digits. My brother had 23. All three of us have memories of going to an MD late in an illness and having an MD very upset with her: the same brother was sick in bed with fevers for weeks but got no better and had to have the swollen glands under his jaw lanced and remembers the smell as horrible, and I remember a doctor telling her my tonsils "were like golf balls! Why didn't you bring her in?!?" I think, with hindsight, that my mother thought that having a sick child indicated that she was in some way a bad mother. At any rate: after the birth of my son, we had a lovely arrangement--every night she called and I would tell her how my day with him went turned out to be an asthmatic in childhoodwhen my baby was three months old he got pneumonia, and my husband and I were terrified. After a sleepless night involving two trips to A&E he was much better. That night, when I told my mother about it, she began shrieking at me: "You're a bad mother! You're a bad mother!" again and again. I froze; my husband had to take the phone away and ring off. She called the next night at the same time and . . . I just couldn't speak to her for months. I didn't block her, but when she called for the next two or three nights I didn't answer. We didn't speak for months. Eventually we came to a family gathering at her home and things were patched up somewhat, but that precious period of closeness to my mother when I was post-partum was gone.
Much later in life when she was a widow I started calling her every night at the same time, which was a very good thing; she was understandably lonely and needed someone to talk to. So that was the equivalent of a temporary phone blockage.
, shingles is very painful; get well soon 