Posted by fallsfall on April 7, 2005, at 7:51:39
In reply to We had a fight, posted by All Done on April 7, 2005, at 2:13:56
I'm sorry, Alldone..........
My gut reaction is that you need to follow this through to completion. That you need to keep pushing your view (which seems right to me, by the way). That you need to explain to him why his procrastination and disregard of the contract he signed bothers you.
My therapist and I have agreed that my superego is much stronger than his. But I accept that his is probably reasonable. He has said that I have enough superego for both of us... We were able to come to agreement about the goal we were working toward (him getting "enough" money, me getting as much from the insurance company as possible - and my requirement that everything *I* do be by the book). I did have to allow that he had the right to choose to be less "ethical" (I hate to use that word, it is more that I need to follow the letter of the law, where he is OK with following the spirit of the law) - it was important for us to work out that his requirements *were* different from mine, and that neither of us had the "right" to force our requirements on the other. But that we needed to find a solution that would meet both of our needs. The process of working through that with him taught me about myself, about how other people can be, and about compromise. Excruciating, but valuable.
Of course, you may (when all is said and done) find out that your therapist has "morals" that you can't live with. But you've been with him for a while, right? And in general, he seems pretty good, right?
That period of time with my therapist was really, really, really tough. Dinah calls it "fighting to relationship". It is very much like that.
It is OK to be angry at him - for things like not calling the insurance company when he said he would. He deserves that. It was very hard for me to stand up for my beliefs against my therapist - I'm used to having him tell me what I'm doing that is "not helpful", and accepting what he says. But in this case, there were things that I *knew* were important (i.e. contracts) and I wasn't willing to compromise my values - I wasn't willing to purposefully do something that I knew was wrong. So we tried to figure out what was really important to each of us and were able to find a way to make us both happy.
Stick with it. Like you said before, there are an awful lot of topics rolled up into this issue. It is NOT comfortable, but I think that it will be beneficial in the end.
IM me if you want.
poster:fallsfall
thread:481011
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050329/msgs/481047.html