My Therapist Doesn't Understand Me

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Every day I find myself cruelly straddled between my solitary life and my social life. The solitary life is easy: you wake up, forage all day, go back to sleep, repeat. The social life is ridiculous. I can't relate to people my age. I can't do small talk. You'd have to get me drunk to drag me to a funeral, wedding, Christmas party or office party. And even then I still won't go because I'll just end up facing the walls anyway.

I tell my therapist my extreme apprehension about trying to connect with "normal" people but she refuses to see it. She tells me to hang out with the people here. I would if I could, but socializing is like dragging my naked body through a field of broken glass then taking a bath in hot lava. Well, that's extreme, but you know what I mean.

More and more I feel myself turning into Chris McCandless. Right about now a permanent vacation to the northern Alaskan frontier seems appealing. I get shunned by people anyway because something odd or inappropriate slips out of my mouth every so often which makes them turn away. My therapist thinks I could just simply and easily join Meetup groups or connect with the folks at AA. She just doesn't get me. I'm frustrated because I'm still connected to the social life and I want out, total seclusion if possible.

When I was a teenager, I used to think about being Jeremiah Johnson.

He wasn't anti-people. He just wanted to live the solitary life amongst Nature.

Because I think most people, even if they hate other people, still require a social world to keep themselves 'alive' so to speak.

Your therapist might understand that socializing to you is horrid. But she's probably concerned about what will happen to you if you cut off all socialization as being something even worse. I'm assuming you're correct in your own assertation that you will indeed be happier not socializing, but I'm like, myself an example of someone who needs social context in order to live yet I periodically strive for isolation only to find when I get it I'm more miserable.

Social isolation causes most people depression. Telling your therapist you simply don't want to socialize isn't going to change that.

Tall-P is right; be more like the boy from Hatchet, emulating Chris McCandless will get you killed, he was an idiot who thought he knew more about nature than he really did, wound up starving with no food, then dying by poisoning himself with peas that built up a deadly toxin in his body.

Possibly your therapist would do better to discuss the relative merits of socializing and hermitizing, rather than just assuming that you're wrong to stay isolated. I guess it'll come up again, so if it does, maybe you could just ask "why do you think it's so important to mix with people?" Then you can make up your own mind whether the therapist is right.