Found Notes

Recently found some notes I jotted down while attending a workshop at The Gathering on Mental Health and the Church at Saddleback Church. Here they are:

• Enjoy speaking to individuals and small groups.
• Anxious when hear mental health professionals discussing mental health crisis intervention. PTSD for me. Difficult past experience. Do not want to go back there.
• Anxious interacting with and seeing those more severely disturbed than I, those functioning less well with their illness. I, too, feel other. Other than the most disturbed.
• Boundary issues: church groups, organizations of all types, employment workplaces, all threaten me with the risk of loss of self to the group.
• Crisis intervention, hospitalization, peer-to-peer and family-to-family NAMI groups provoke fear in me. Once again, goes back to boundary issues. How do I protect myself, maintain some emotional distance? How do and whether I can say no?
• Fiction writing? Fictionalizing personal experience? Once upon a time, in my late twenties, I had a boyfriend who was also a poet. He recommended that instead of journal writing in first person, I should write in third person, fictionalize it, distance myself from it, be less self-absorbed and more creative.
• Maybe now I participate in writers groups and group therapy and later Toastmasters. That’s all I want or can take on right now.
• Do not, should not join/work for/volunteer for ANY organization, be it corporate or congregational.

OMG, just today on April 24th, I realized (or realized again, for this should not be news to me) that my fear of being engulfed by a group stems in part from family of origin dynamics. How many years of therapy have I had, anyway? Since age 18! I’m 50 now. AND, I once was a psychotherapist. Come on, Kitt. Get with it. Wake up. Grow up.