A funny thing happened to me when I finished my training as a Marriage and Family Therapist. The day I woke up as a graduated, licensed therapist, my world changed -- not in the way you might think! In a single day, I went from your average, run-of-the-mill friend, daughter, sister, wife to someone who had X-RAY vision! I'm not kidding!!! People who would talk to me before I finished school suddenly ran away, as if I had super-human powers! I think they actually thought that I could SEE their underwear! It was actually such a problem for me that after my divorce (yes, therapists do get divorces), I actually told guys who potentially wanted to date me a "little-white-lie" when they asked: "So what do you do?" I said, "Well, uh. I'm a consultant!" The conversation usually didn't continue along the lines of my profession after that because I'm sure they thought I was in some kind of sales. Good enough!

So I've been thinking about this whole idea lately and I've already suggested to you that I have some real problems with the mental health profession as I've seen it. One of those problems is that mental health professionals put themselves up on a super-human pedestal -- and so do their clients. The therapist is the near-perfect, super-human sage with infallible advice. WRONG!! My response to that is to jump down and show you just how very human I am. Yes, my friends! I'm going to show you MY underwear!! (No, not literally!!!!)

Ok. So January is the time for new beginnings. And . . . . I've got a story to tell!

I started working out in August of 2007 with my personal trainer. And, as you read in my last post here, I was really loving the body I've been building! So by Thanksgiving time, I decided that I'd been working hard enough to be able to just indulge in the cornucopia of food that would be before me for the next month with reckless abandon. Thought it wouldn't hurt and that I've been working hard enough it shouldn't show up on my increasingly fit bod! Besides, once a year indulging isn't awful!

The feasting didn't really begin until a few weeks before Christmas.

I haven't added an entry to my diary lately because I've been in a lot of transition and reflection. I am not even quite sure where to begin this entry because I've been having so many thoughts about so many things. Perhaps, it is best to begin chronologically. That goes way back. Way, way back. I almost want to begin in January 2004, when I married my beloved, Michael. But it actually goes back so much further than that . . . . to my first marriage.
During my marriage to my first husband, I began and completed my education. It was during the education that I began to catch a tiny glimpse of what my future could hold. As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I looked forward to helping people change their lives for the better. But first, I had to change my own life for the better. Along about the time my training ended and I finished the licensing process, it became very clear that my first husband was unwilling to do the required emotional work that would allow us to maintain a marriage that was alive. When I left that marriage, I left almost fourteen years of being belittled by him (and in some measure by myself because I had to have agreed with him to stay, right?) and really began the work of re-building my self-esteem. In fact, the therapist I had already been working with for a year had this to say during my first session after leaving the marital home and moving back in with my parents: "Good. Now we can get the real work done." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Well, he replied, "Everything we have been doing up to this point has been to get you out of that marriage that was killing you. Now, we can start working on helping you heal." I had not even imagined that I hadn't even started working on myself until he spoke it! His comment really gave me pause.