Stranger Than Fiction, 25

My hours at work gradually picked up in 2005.  I was becoming very proactive in my psychotherapy and actually stood up to my therapist, whom I thought liked rather too much the sound of his own voice.  He accused me of controlling things and I retorted that for this reason I have very good boundaries.  He couldn't argue.  After blowing up at him once or twice I made sure that he respected my need for and right to air time and for the first ten minutes of every session I did the talking as I tried to give him a good and thorough picture of what had been going on in my life over the two weeks since our last appointment.  It took some work and time to train him but he eventually became compliant and actually came to enjoy this form of discourse.

I lost all contact with my father and brother.  I no longer was able to contact them.  They did nothing to contact me, though they did have my voice mail contact information.  I concluded after a couple of tries that during the course of my therapy it would be better to stay away from them, since I was recovering from the effects of their abuse.  It was a great and tragic loss and now that my father is dead from Alzheimer's (we never saw each other by the way) the loss has a grave and resonant permanence.  I have opted to live with this.

This was when my recovery really began to take off.  I did almost all the work but my father did work well at conducting me during our sessions.  I also had a dream about him that proved to be uncannily accurate.  He thought I had almost all the details right. 

I was still attending fundy church.  The new church "plant" was established in East Vancouver and I became a regular attender.  The pastor, even though seeing me as very useful to his church, and was willing to meet me for coffee, always kept me at arms length, unlike others in the church.  I became increasingly uncomfortable there and when he preached a sermon against same sex marriage I left his church and denomination forever.  We have never reconciled and recent encounters have suggested quite clearly that he has chosen to hold a grudge against me.

Life in my apartment building was still a bit of a struggle, especially now that I was no longer part of their church, and that I had basically come out as a liberal Christian.  I withdrew and kept to myself in my own apartment and generally avoided the managers.  To this day I still find them to be rather nasty, vindictive sorts with incredibly small narrow minds.  I am just glad that they are seldom present here now.