Posted by backseatdriver on July 3, 2008, at 14:00:32
Hi Babblers,
In a thread above, Lucie asked me about how I came to learn that my feelings in the presence of an other (my T) were reliable sources of information about not just me, but that other. In particular, how I discovered that my feelings were a good indicator, in some ways, of his.
This is autobiographical and long. Please forgive me for going on like this. I wouldn't, except that maybe it will help someone.
A while ago, I had a long intense relationship with a self-absorbed person whose behavior flummoxed me so much I went back to therapy (after being out for a year). My therapist realized that what I really wanted from her was not insight into my own behavior but insight into *his*. It is easy to get involved with an uncaring person when you don't know how to tell or feel (same thing) if someone cares about you. I was having this problem over and over. My deficit in this area was getting me into hurtful relationships.
So my therapist sort of put me through a therapist boot camp. In the process -- this was my therapist's good idea -- I learned a lot about my own deficits in understanding, feeling, hearing, sensing, knowing when people care.
The work involved a lot of reading and discussion. I'm bookish anyway, so we were playing to my strengths. Here is the reading list, if you are interested: Alice Miller, especially _The Drama of the Gifted Child_ and _For Your Own Good_; Otto Kernberg, _ Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions_ and _Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis_; DW Winnicott, _Holding and Interpretation_; Adam Phillips, _The Beast in the Nursery_ and his book about Houdini.
In the midst of all this intellectualizing, though, she'd therapize. Much mirroring, support, asking me to reflect on how I was feeling, to articulate my feelings. Just to learn the words for what I was feeling (as opposed to say, how my body felt) was huge. She gave me a vocabulary for that.
At the same time, I resisted feeling anything for her apart from a kind of vague benevolence, at best. I am ashamed to say this, but through the whole thing, I secretly considered her unintelligent and had contempt for her. She was very maternal and accepting and this made me very, very anxious. I couldn't get close to her this time around. A problem, I thought, for my next therapy.
I got out of the challenging relationship, out of therapy and, basically, out of town. Then, seven years down the line, I got hit with another depression. So I'm back in therapy again, this time with a man who, on first and even second glance, is kind of chilly, reserved and a bit interpersonally ... odd. A loner, kind of wounded, brittle, thin-skinned, a largish fragile ego covering painful feelings of inferiority and, alas, ambivalence toward women.
Definitely not the warm maternal presence of Therapist #1.
Which sounds awful, but it's actually good news. By (mostly gently) keeping me on my toes emotionally, he makes me really listen to him and to myself. He gives quiet signals of his regard for me, really quiet signals. (If the signals were loud, I wouldn't believe them! As I discovered with my other therapist.) I have to listen and feel, and then decide on my own, on the basis of *my* feelings, rather than on what he says (or what I can force him to say), whether these signals are real or not.
If I asked him, "Do you care?" and he said, "Yes," I would almost certainly wonder why I had to ask in the first place.
I should point out that I'm not always right about what I'm perceiving. Sometimes, I perceive correctly and then misinterpret (e.g., my T is tired, I pick that up in the first minute of the session and then incorrectly assume he is tired of *me*). But I am also learning that much of the time, I can trust myself. I am learning, also, the limits of my own abilities to perceive and empathize. If I feel like I need more certainty, that's when I'll say something. Like, "I'm feeling unsure ..."
My ability to believe in his caring is, I think, a pretty good indicator of my mental health at the moment. It takes practice, I have found. I feel like it's a mental discipline, like a martial art, to not destroy the good feelings or dismiss or diminish them, at least not right after the session ends! But I find that with practice I am able to hold the feelings, they feel really real, for longer and longer.
One thing that's really helped is having all this reading and experience behind me. I can call up case studies and vignettes, or even just lines from the reading I did, and it makes me feel more confident about having faith in caring, in love, in the reality of the interpersonal realm and the weird fact that what guarantees this reality is actually intrapersonal. The truth of it isn't "out there" but "in here."
Oh, another book: Samuel Shem's novel, _Mount Misery_ -- about the psychotherapeutic training of a psychiatrist -- actually shows this process in slow motion. Gradually the fledgling shrink comes to know and trust his own responses to his patients as sources of information.
Yours,
BSD
poster:backseatdriver
thread:837849
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20080616/msgs/837849.html