Couch 248: Curiouser and Curiouser

I have not seen where you are talking about the pain of the loss - the focus I have read about here is on getting him to act differently - not you wanting to talk about your fish connection. That is where I am saying it doesn't seem to line up - you say you want to talk about the pain but your descriptions here are about getting him to act differently. I mean - the it is so small, and how would it hurt to have the fish there, and so on - that is about how he acts - not how you talk about pain.

I am just giving my observations on it -if you don't think they fit then okay..

We have talked about the pain and his trying to understand it. I just don't write every single moment from my sessions here, so I can understand why you got a different impression. Like he was also saying he wanted to understand what it meant for me to have the fish in the office, if it was about my having a sort of presence there, and we discussed that a couple sessions ago.

So - what else then do you want from him? He discussed it - where do you go next? From here it looks like you still want him to do something else.

Keep practicing the self comfort techniques- even if they are not perfectly doing what you are looking for -these things seem to take practice.

Or you could look at it like these sorts of entanglements are what is therapy and that you are raging against the human condition until acceptance or change comes. So the conflicts you have with him are the process of you acting out until whatever happens so that therapy can be said to work.

"I think you should be more explicit here in step 2 - Then a miracle occurs."

This is sidney harris - i wonder if its the writer sydney j. Or someone else? - answer 2 people.

I think we haven't fully discussed it all yet--the specific topic of the fish, yes, but more the bigger topics that have come up from it.

And yes, the self-comfort stuff definitely takes practice.

For the last part, I do think some of the therapy is in the entanglements and acting out. Working through conflicts now in a way that maybe I couldn't as a kid or teen, for example. Though I'm unclear as to where the end of it all is, I suppose. Is this still helping me--both therapy with this person and therapy in general? Not expecting anyone else to answer that, it's just something I'm thinking about. What's the endgame?

Also stuff I'm thinking about in terms of writing the memoir because where does that end? Will I have come out of therapy on the other side, transformed for the better? Will I still be muddling through, trying to have faith that it will help, whether with this person or with someone else? Or will I have stepped away from it and realized it's best to mostly go on without it? (Aside from maybe a short stint when something acute happens, like grieving.) That I've learned what there is to learn, and now it's up to me? Again, I'm not looking to anyone to answer these, they're just thoughts in my head.