Posted by Solstice on February 23, 2011, at 12:33:23
In reply to Re: I think the weather in h*ll must be chilly » obsidian, posted by Dinah on February 22, 2011, at 20:04:02
> I think it might have been (gasp!) just growing up.
>
> Yuck.
>
> But it also might be that sometimes receiving what you've been wanting isn't so great. He cares about me, he trusts me, and he's been himself with me far more than he ever did before. Nothing terribly inappropriate. Just unguarded perhaps. Using his own way of speaking instead of gearing it to me. I don't think it's precisely self disclosure because he's not disclosing more than he ever did. But it feels different. The boundaries are still there. But the personal in room boundaries are looser than they used to be in often vague ways. Again, nothing inappropriate. Just different.
>
> I reminded him of a time in the last year or so when I told him I felt like our positions with respect to each other were changing. That it was like one of those flip books where one minute we were where we should be in respect to one another, and the next minute my perspective was more level. On the same level. Equal. More side by side and less face to face. It was almost a physical experience and it almost made me dizzy and disoriented. I think maybe it's a continuation of the same thing.
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> You can't feel safe from the world with an equal, or a friend, or a peer. Or I can't at least.Dinah.. you have such a brilliantly precise ability to hit the target. I've never thought of it that way, but reading how you put it, I do know what you mean about not feeling safe from the world with an equal.
What you're talking about here is probably exactly what happens in healthy families between parents and children. After they go thru the fits of adolescence and young adulthood.. they end up landing in a spot alongside their parents - much more eye to eye. Of course, during the earlier struggles, they first have to see how abysmally imperfect we are.. and then forgive us for losing our awesome "my dad can beat up your dad" super-powers :-) But in the best of parent & adult-child relationships, parents remain a trusted resource.. where the adult child can still go when they need to know someone's in their corner.. when they need guidance.. stuff like that.
Maybe with our therapists, we can end up more eye-to-eye than when we saw them as our safe fortress... but let them be in the role of 'life-mentor.'
I'll tell ya, this last week or so I've gone thru a miserable crisis in my therapeutic relationship. I've been overlooking and 'excusing' a particular imperfection in my therapist that finally sent me into a crash & burn when it showed up at *the* wrong time.. when after a series of stressors tapped into some profound personal vulnerabilities... and I needed my therapist to be perfectly therapeutic.. and what I got felt therapeutically sloppy.. in part due to those 'looser' in-session standards you referred to. god-awful painful, is all I can say. See T tomorrow evening.. hope to work thru enough of it to balance myself..
Solstice
poster:Solstice
thread:979635
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20110206/msgs/979669.html