the shrink who called me

A former shrink called me this week. Now that’s a feeling, the phone ringing, a former shrink’s name onscreen, a person I parted ways with years ago pretty abruptly. I was curious, but wary, so I let it go to voicemail.

All therapists in my experience make it difficult to end the relationship. I dislike ghosting and won’t lie, but what options do I have when it just isn’t working anymore and they refuse to hear it? One shrink I really liked (not this one) just could not keep appointments. He completely forgot our second or third session and I forgave him after he apologized but the next week I again sat in his waiting room well past my appointment time, wondering where he was. He hurried through the waiting room, saw me, yelled he was coming right back, he just had to get to the medical marijuana place two floors down. I said nothing, just packed up my stuff and took the stairs down to the street and ignored his phone calls pleading with me to come back. We’d been discussing boundaries and I guess I learned that lesson.

*

Anyway. The calling shrink. I’m retiring, she said, and thought a nice way to close her practice would be to call her clients. You and I, we had a few conversations, she added, to encapsulate a relationship that had lasted for several years.

She helped me with a few things but I ended it after I realized she was never going to try to learn more about a neurological condition that has caused me huge amounts of pain and grief and shame. When I mentioned the shame, in particular, and how I struggled with it, she said well she didn’t want me to feel shame. Neither do I, I replied tartly, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was, in my mind, I DID feel shame. But I don’t want you to feel shame, she said again. We went around and around. I left her office weeping with frustration.

I called her a few days later and left a voicemail cancelling my upcoming sessions, and telling her I needed to take a break. She called me to ask me to come back a few more times, but I didn’t pick up, but wrote her a card reiterating that I was done.

And I was, until the other day.

Her call brought back all those feelings of frustration and anger. At first I was inclined to call her back, to be honest about how it ended, but now I wonder what good it would do. Is she looking for absolution? Closure? Well, join the club. I feel my choice is binary, either to lie, thank her for her service and blithely wish her well, or be a meanie and tell her I’m still battling the thing she wouldn’t help me with.

Neither feels good. So I’m just going to leave it. The way, maybe, she left me.