My brilliant therapy plan failed. I will be referred to a new therapist, and I can't see him anymore due to the way my insurance works. Pretend I've just spent a long paragraph explaining why my insurance won't cover my old therapist if I'm working with a new one. I can't get around it by paying out of pocket because he's part of my HMO, and the doctors don't have control over who they can see. Also, he's moving up in the ranks and is taking on more administrative duties and less clinical work, so soon he probably won't be seeing patients anymore. We will meet next week to sort out the details of the referral. This will be our last session.
I feel okay right now. Maybe it will sink in later. I've been through bigger changes. I will survive. But it's brutal to lose a therapist (hell, a human being) who you've been with for so long, who knows more about you than anyone else.
It has taken me a long time to understand how therapy is supposed to work, and for years I just saw him as a person I could openly talk to. I wasn't following any sort of treatment plan, I didn't even realize that was a thing. He was just a person to me. So while he's been my doctor this whole time, he has felt like my friend. In many ways, he has felt like the closest friend I've ever had.
It took a minute to grasp that I can't see him anymore because of something so impersonal as insurance, and there's no way around it. I cannot see him. Anywhere. Ever. This is bewildering for someone like me who struggles to understand relationships anyway. How is it that someone who feels so thoroughly like a friend is not actually a friend? I've always been aware of this theoretically, but what I know and what I feel are rarely in line with each other (which, incidentally, is exactly what my new treatment is aimed toward fixing).
So while I completely understand the situation and am not angry at anything, it's still a struggle. My brain gets it, but my heart doesn't understand how a bunch of technical rules about money can dictate whether I can sit with a person I like. We are just two human beings, a just couple of fancy monkeys, but this situation feels so cold and inhuman. I'm not blaming him. He's a really nice guy who I believe genuinely cares about me, it's just a sh*tty situation for a tender-hearted person like myself.
But I don't want to have a bad day over it. The future looks good. He's putting in a request for the Kaiser machine to crank out a referral to the right therapist for me based on some set of criteria that is, like, whatever it is. I'm lucky to have that. Many people, even very sick ones, can't get treatment at all, and some of them die. I have access to the right treatment at the right time. This is a good thing.
But it's completely heartbreaking.