Posted by Dinah on May 4, 2007, at 9:29:10
In reply to Extreme Honesty -- really long, posted by Daisym on May 3, 2007, at 20:47:07
I don't think there's any such thing as too extreme honesty when you have a well established relationship with a therapist. I don't think that there is anything you could say to your therapist that would be too much for your relationship to hold. I'm not actually enormously fond of my therapist's oft repeated statement "I didn't run screaming out of the room" although it's become an inside joke, and therefore valuable to me. But it does represent something. I've given him the ugliest, the neediest, the most Dinah's motherish of my thoughts, feelings & behaviors, and it didn't affect the underlying relationship. I think you have the same type of relationship.
Yet still I test and push, because it doesn't seem like this could be true.
As far as suicide is concerned. My therapist has said that he'll care if I'm gone. He's said it softly, he's said it angrily. But the one time that got to my gut was when he said nothing, but winced. That's the time I promised to let him try to help me first, for as long as he's my therapist.
Of course your therapist cares! He cares about you, Daisy. He's invested a lot into you, and you know what they say about where you invest, that's where your heart is. How could he not care? About you, Daisy, not client 463 and not his professional reputation.
Although I've never talked to my therapist about sexual dreams in which he had a part, because I don't think of him that way, we did discuss it in terms of posts. I'm sure it occurred to him that I may be, in a veiled way, talking about him and his answer probably kept that in mind, but he conveyed more or less the same thing your therapist did.
The other day, I told him that I got upset sometimes when he talks about his family in terms of his future, because to me *he* is my family. I reminded him of how I used to call him during the evacuation with any bits of information I thought he might find useful because I learned he wasn't listening to WWL radio, and told him that wasn't *entirely* to have a reason to talk to him. It's because I saw him as much of my family as anyone else. And I told him how ashamed I was of feeling that way, and how intrusive of me it felt, and how I never ever wanted to tell him. And he said that he was really touched to be thought of that way, and how could he possibly be upset?
I confess that there may have been some fallout, in that he seems reluctant to mention his family now, and I think he misunderstood the context of my being hurt when he talked about his family. It wasn't *all* the time. I'm not jealous of them or anything like that, and I don't get in a tizzy if he mentions them. This was a particular type of mention. Something about priorities or something that rather clearly excluded me... Which is right and fitting and I shouldn't have been upset. Drat. I'm doing it again.
It's very hard to do what we do as long term therapy clients, Daisy. Very hard. But part of what's hard is that extreme honesty that we really should give. Your therapist can take it. Heck, even my therapist can take it, and my therapist is not your therapist. :)
poster:Dinah
thread:755643
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070419/msgs/755742.html