Testing the Therapeutic Relationship

I’m really proud of myself.  I may have crossed a line with Andrea.

I’m too uncomfortable to give much detail.  I will say that in working out the financial elements of our relationship I may have asked for too much.

In the new year things SUDDENLY seemed to come together for me, and I have felt incredible ease and relaxation.  Until this happened!  One of the huge results of my work has been that I don’t feel existentially fearful or anxious.  Until this happened.

Since a therapeutic relationship is a real relationship but unlike any other relationship, you don’t have the same kinds of every day things to relate around.  I pay her to keep the relationship about me so we can stay focused on my healing.  There are not a lot of mutual things to share in real life.  But there are the little things of a therapeutic relationship that can be important and have meaning to talk about – how it feels waiting in the waiting room, what it’s like when she greets me, how we end the session, what it’s like to page her for extra assistance in the week, and money.

I’ve had lots of experience with her talking about the first bits.  I’ve gotten so much out of that.  I remember talking about the challenge of paging her and how it’s not like a regular session because she’s not prepared for me, in the mindset for me.  It can feel risky to want and need her outside of our regularly scheduled times.  That conversation changed everything for me, and our relationship grew exponentially in trust when we could talk about that.

But money.  We have struggled over the years talking about it.  We’ve made a lot of progress.  It has felt great to receive her understanding about how hard it is for me to talk about.  I vividly remember an experience where I felt really great explaining myself and some frustration I felt about how I worried she misunderstood me.  I was blown away that she wanted to know.  Since then she has referenced that frustration and assured me that she cares that I am sensitive in some areas.  That was amazing.  Still I and our relationship has a bit to go when it comes to money.

So earlier in the week, after asking for something that made me uncomfortable, I immediately wanted to retract my request.  I felt incredibly ill at ease.  All of my good feelings of the past few weeks disappeared.  My heart ached.  I kind of returned to my old manic habits.  Well, I didn’t return to the habits but I felt the kind of anxiety I learned to identify when I was manic.  It sucked.

I actually found another way around the financial situation so I didn’t need what I asked of her.  Thankfully I could do this and relieve my anxiety.

What I am proud of is that before e-mailing her to retract my request, I stopped and opted to take a different tact.  I decided to wait until we could talk about the situation so that I could see, without interference on my part, what her reaction was.  While this whole situation does leave me existentially anxious even to this moment to some degree, I am in a relationship with her that has proven over and over again to be safe.  (I am glad I reached back inside of myself and could remember that.  That’s just the kind of thing that can be super hard to recollect in moments like this.)  What if I stopped assuming how she will respond?  The beauty of my initial request to her was that it was authentic.  I was making it because I trusted myself and because I was sympathetic to myself.  So I don’t want my anxiety to have me backtrack on that.  And I want to use this experience to learn how to be okay with the not knowing of how she will respond and build confidence, if necessary, around how to work things out in a relationship if I cross a line OR EVEN if we disagree over whether I crossed a line.

So I decided to wait until she e-mails me.  The unpleasant thing is that I haven’t heard from her.  I think she would have replied by now except that I imagine that she is involved in disaster support efforts related to Haiti since she once told me she has responded to past hurricane  tragedies as a mental health professional.

This sucks for me except that one of my favorite thinkers Clay Shirky posted his “A Rant About Women” yesterday, and his words have become like the strong voice of support I would hear in my head or in real life from Andrea if I were facing this issue with someone other than her.  What he wrote nearly echoes what Andrea and I have been talking a lot about lately in therapy.  Here are a few excerpts (without a lot of his interesting context well worth reading):

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

What was so interesting to me is that here Shirky identifies exactly what I was fearful of – that Andrea would think that I was narcissistic.  Even a little bit.  Even temporarily.  I was worried that suddenly all that she knew about me would be forgotten and lost.  All that history gone because of one bold request.  And this fear shook me.  Rattled me.  Even though she and I have so much amazing history between us.  Even though she has encouraged me to spend a couple of years being a bull in a china shop, pushing the envelope on what I think is acceptable, and getting a truer sense of what is rude and less acceptable instead of automatically self-censoring.  Even though she has explicitly said that people easily forgive their friends who are obnoxious sometimes.

More Shirky:

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

Andrea and I have been talking about this exact thing.  In my family I “pre-managed” everything so that I would be within safe limits to have my mother’s affection and support.  I could make life safer for myself by not being too much of this or that to reduce my mother’s ire, but I’m an adult now.  Now I can relax.  Now I can trust that my judgement is enough.  I don’t need my goodness or value or wonderfulness reflected back to me by everyone in the outside world.

This is why I am so passionate about “becoming attachable”.  When I am attached, I have this capacity to take the nurturing and love and support that I have internalized from Andrea and fend off the sense that I have to conform to others.  When I am attachable, I have a place to go to in my heart other than having to seek the approval of the masses or even Andrea.

I’m in a little mini-crisis right now with Andrea where my sense of attachability and my sense of self is being tested.  But this mini-crisis mirrors the individuation process of adolescents.  I’m pushing and testing to see if I can be I can be myself, my authentic self, the self I trust, take big risks with my nurturing parent figure, and still survive.  Like more mature adolescents (not just younger adolescents purely wanting to distinguish themselves from their parents), I am hoping that I can be my big, bold self and still be loved and accepted even if I am not the same as Andrea, even if I offend.

The answer to this question about my relationship with Andrea is an unequivocal – yes.  I actually know that that’s true if I can relax long enough to remember the history of our relationship.

Really, the more important question I am trying to answer is – can I be my big, bold self and still be loved and accepted within myself.  This is where the neurons in my brain are learning to connect.  I think I’m pretty close to yes, but it sure will be nice to be talking this out with Andrea and to not have to work this all out by myself.

In the mean time I’m glad Clay Shirky ranted.  He helped.  And I feel freer to go off into my weekend less pre-occupied and more capable of enjoying life with my husband.  That’s what I want.