This covers day 28 of 30 for the Hypnotherapy Project, which I'm collaborating on with Los Angeles-based hypnotherapist Greg Beckett. You can read more about this experiment, what motivated it and what we hope to accomplish here; you can read all of the entries in chronological order here.
A funny thing happened at the end of my last week: I started flipping out about the whole thing ending.
Don't get me wrong, I knew I'd find plenty of use for all of that extra time I'd be getting back come Monday. (The project was due to end on Saturday, a "tape day" for me, so much less of a time commitment.) But I'd come to rely on and look forward to this everyday therapy, this daily confab with a good friend who was also on the path but whose job at this juncture was taking care of me.
I am not used to being the one taken care of, or cared for, you see. This became abundantly clear during my five-month incarceration in Cedars Sinai and my own apartment while recovering from my Crohn's onset. As I've discussed before, when you're unable to walk up a flight of stairs sans assistance, you learn pretty fast what it's like having people help you out. (Topline: hard, at least for some of us.)
Add to that what my actual shrink calls my (lack-of-)entitlement issues, and you can see where this time with Greg was some heady stuff. Talking when I wanted to talk, about myself and some high-level, non-immediate issues, it was like being a sophomore in college again, only with someone way smarter and more experienced, who mainly wanted to talk about you.
I got a little lax in that last week. My notes are sketchy in those last few days, and I was busy enough to feel okay with putting off my updates until I wasn't so busy. Greg's notes are sketchy, too, but he has down that we did a live recap of the doorways trip, which makes sense since Thursdays are big days for me and Day 28 was a Thursday.
Four weeks of intensive growth is splendid, but a bit overwhelming. And writing from four days after the whole shebang is over, I can see that while things have begun to shift in this heady time, the real growth will happen much as it always does, slowly and over the long term.
At which point, of course, it will seem to have happened all at once. The 10-year overnight success, personal growth edition.
xxx c Image by tobym via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.