Posted by backseatdriver on December 21, 2008, at 12:49:29
In reply to Re: Anyone ever send your t a 'secret santa' gift???, posted by Recently on December 19, 2008, at 19:39:05
Oh, this is such a vexed issue for me. My T does not accept gifts.
For him gift-giving is an implicitly aggressive and rebellious activity, because it goes against his policy. Thus the gift-giving always needs interpretation.If I am tempted to give him a gift, we talk about it. Sometimes I give him a "gift" of praise, but if the praise is too fulsome he gets suspicious.
I don't know if my gift-giving is actually covertly aggressive or if the problem is *his*. E.g., gifts make *him* aggressive because either no gift is truly good enough for him and/or he is not good enough to receive any gift that he actually likes.
Standard ambivalent funny business, in other words. He has a self-worth issue that makes mine look positively garden-variety. He wants to be loved exorbitantly -- his fees are *quite* exorbitant -- but can't stand it when he is. Loved exorbitantly, I mean. He badly wants what he doesn't feel he deserves, but if he has worked for something and therefore "deserves" it, he devalues it. Because it didn't fall from the sky like manna from heaven and prove that he's perfectly wonderful despite or even because of his flaws. Good heavens.
As you can see, one thing I require in a shrink is the opportunity to feel superior to him. He's off now for three weeks and I think I must be feeling a wee bit angry about it...
Anyway my point is: A T's response to gifts may tell you a lot about your T as well as about yourself. I wouldn't hesitate to explore all the ramifications of a secret santa gift, and in fact to do the same thing again next year just to see if new stuff comes up. Therapy is serious business, but it is also a kind of play, and the secret santa thing strikes me as really good to play with, in the serious way that therapy demands of course...
poster:backseatdriver
thread:869514
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20081219/msgs/870051.html