Right now I am thinking about changing my therapist or giving a try to another - female therapist. My main issue so far has been that here in my country we do not have any gender-specific therapists. so many of them claim that with their experience and education they can treat any situation. At the same time, I became aware that some of our general therapists have dealt with TG patients before, but they do not openly admit this, so finding out who is competent and who is not has been quite a pain in the butt. So far, I have had about 2 months of active sessions once per week but my overall feelings are that we are sort of having a general therapy, talking about my childhood, family, relations with my parents etc. Each session brings up more issues to touch upon and he keeps claiming that we still have a long journey and many areas to cover, including my sexual experience etc. But.. With each session I sort of get the feeling that we depart from TS-related stuff into some other vague psychiatric areas, which can be explored until one of us will be fed up with this. Sure, we can have this exercise for years, I have to give him the credit that he actually helped me to restore my shattered family ties with my mother to the extent that she almost seems like accepting the situation. But that is not a gender therapy. I have no idea what gender therapy is like, but what I have read here and what we are doing in his office, are two different things.
Still... today we had another therapy session, we talked about some sense of internal guilt about many things and at the end he asked me why I am not talking about HRT anymore. So I told him that I have chosen the approach of "Less talk, more action", repeatedly told him (apparently he forgot) that I got into contact with endo, did the blood tests and my HRT is bound to start in one week, and he did not seem that much interested in this. Therefore, I am not really sure that he will be able to provide sufficient support in terms of therapy, when I will be facing new issues with the HRT. I am quite sure that he will keep scaring me away, talking about how I might be perceived by others, that I will be exchanging male sexual experiences for God-knows-what which might not be even functional and it will not as functional as "real" female parts, and am I really sure I want this. Another point, which usually has the effect of internal mental facepalm for me is "Am I sure that I wont be happy to live as effeminate man? Now is 21st century and nobody would care much about how I express myself" Apparently, my attempts to explain the main difference between transwoman and effeminate man do not get much response or recognition, because we keep getting back to this from time to time. And I am spending 70 bucks for this each week. Still, he is good and experienced as the general therapist.
So, as I said, I am inclined to try out a female therapist, who happened to be my good acquaintance, but I never knew that she had degree in psych too... And when my HRT starts, even if I dont have the therapy on a weekly basis, I suspect that I will be in a need of someone with whom I can share and talk, even if this is like once per two or three weeks only.
I also finally realised that here I do not need therapy, per se, to get the hormones - I rather needed some luck, good friends and connections, so doing the therapy has been my personal choice and despite all the above-mentioned issues and some struggle, which still goes on, I do believe that it came out better with what I got, than if I would have done this without any therapy at all.
