Posted by daisym on September 17, 2004, at 21:16:12
In reply to Re: Just Need to Babble - sorry, long » daisym, posted by Dinah on September 17, 2004, at 9:35:40
<<<I was thinking of you and your therapist the other day. I was asking the sort of questions that seem pretty understandable to me. "Will you be here" "Are you leaving anytime soon", lots of questions like that. And I stumbled into "Please always take care of yourself.", which was part of the entire litany. But he answered by very carefully saying that he had a wife and child and he would take care of himself for them. It felt like a little handslap. Like he was telling me to be very aware that he wouldn't take care of himself for *me*, a *client*. And I didn't say anything, but I wailed to myself that I wanted Daisy's therapist. That he would have understood that that question was merely a continuation of the other questions. That for some reason I was feeling in need of reassurance. Your therapist would have understood that it was the most primitive ego states calling out for reassurance in the face of fear. He may have pointed it out or examined it. But I'm almost sure your therapist wouldn't have slapped a big "client" label on my forehead for being so presumptuous.
Oh Dinah, you know I love you, but I really, really need him right now. So I'm gonna keep him for me right now. In fact, one of my best friends asked me about a referral and I didn't give it to her. But then I confessed to my Therapist that I hadn't given his name, or his wife's, to my friend. Thank goodness he said it was so much better to keep it clean and he thought I made a "healthy selfish" decision. And he gave my friend another referral, not in his office.
OK, that isn't what I meant to write about. I'm struck by your take on your Therapist's comment. Of course I wasn't there to read inflection and tone, but I would have take those facts "wife and child" to add weight to his assertion that he is taking care of himself. Like he has MANY important reasons, not just clients. I bet he didn't mean to set you back across the white line of his life.
That said, I would agree that my therapist would label it for what it was, a primitive need for reassurance for consistency and safety. Given the week you had, of course you needed this. I think I wrote about this above to Falls, but when I really let my youngerself out yesterday, she went for the gut in her questions about whether she could trust him or not. When I talked to my therapist on the phone today, I told him I thought he might have felt put on the spot with her questions. I said that there was a long moment when all of "us" were waiting to see if he would say the right thing. To see if she would decide to trust him and continue to express those deeply buried needs and questions. He asked me how I thought his response was and how well "she" took it. Though it makes me squirm to talk about it today, in complete adult mode, I told him he said the exact right thing and gave her what she needed to begin to release this pain to him. He said he felt that, that he had not seen her so completely in the room before and the intensity of that moment stayed with him all evening. (me too).
But then he spent the next 15 minutes reassuring the adult me that it was completely OK that we went that deep and there were that many tears yesterday. So he does understand all my complex needs for reassurance, about different things and in different ways.
I'm sure yours does too. He knows you pretty well.
I'm sorry this got long. One of the residuals of long weeks for me -- long posts.
poster:daisym
thread:391233
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040911/msgs/392157.html