What I Think the Therapeutic Relationship is Trying to Tell Me

 

I have recurring therapy dreams where I go to an appointment and other people are in the room during what should be my time. I’m angry because she should know better. I’m hurt that she doesn’t care enough about me to give me one hour of her life. During the dream, I feel a twisting countdown as I watch the clock, hyperaware of every passing second that I won’t get back. I want to express my feelings but feel helpless to do so. There’s even part of me that feels relief to have one of my deepest fears confirmed. To not have to worry about it anymore.

Whenever I have one of these dreams, I email her the gist of it. They clearly mean something – after all, my brain is determined to keep rehashing it. A few weeks ago, the day after one such dream, she glanced up from reading my email and looked over her glasses at me – I know whenever she looks over the top of her glasses, she’s about to say something very direct (which I almost always appreciate).

“What is it that you want to tell me but can’t?”

I pointed out that if there were something I was consciously aware of, I would have certainly word vomited it all over her email at some point. But it did lead us down a road of discussion about the therapeutic relationship and how fucking weird it is.

People frequently say they wish they could be friends with their therapist. And maybe that’s the truth as they know it. But that’s never felt quite right in my experience. Maybe it would feel more applicable if I was lonely for friends. My son once told me I collect people. It made me think of baseball cards with the faces of all the people I am lucky enough to consider friends. Or like Pokemon cards — different strengths and weaknesses and enough of them to fill the gaps in my life. At least, I assume that’s an applicable comparison; I don’t really understand Pokemon. It doesn’t mean I’m not lonely, but I’m not lonely in that way.

I’m also very aware of how much I don’t know. How one-sided the attachment is. How one-sided the knowing is. I suspect I know more about her than some clients know about their therapists because, honestly, I am not going to dole out vulnerability to people who don’t find a way to be real to me. If I asked her how her week was going and she said, “let’s explore why you wish to know that,” I would have peaced out of there long ago.

Half my friends are therapists – I harbor no illusions that I know any more about my own therapist than I actually do. I’m sure my friends’ clients don’t know quite a few truths that I know – truths that make them even more real, for all their beautiful and sometimes painful humanity.

That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate her for who she is — I actually do suspect she’s someone I would value knowing in the real world, too. But ultimately, what I realized was that though I do think it would be fun to go out for a beer and laugh and share vulnerability that goes both directions, that’s not actually where my need lies.

What those thoughts are really asking is if, knowing all she knows about me, she would consider me worth knowing in the “real world?”  She’s known me for nine years, and she has seen a different variety of the puzzle pieces of my psyche than anyone else.

Side note:  I hate the term “real life” or “real world” when describing what happens in the day-to-day vs. in a therapist’s office. It implies that the therapeutic relationship is less than, rather than simply different than – that it’s not “real.”. If we can come around to it just being another way to be, we can better value the relationship for what it is rather than what it is not.

She knows who I am… but she doesn’t have to make a decision based on that. She can have unconditional positive regard for me because she doesn’t have to make those decisions about where I fit into her life. It’s pre-ordained. The constructs that make therapy work are the same constructs that sometimes make it painful.

What I seem to be balancing some amount of worth on is if someone who knows me as fully as she does would find me worthy even with conditional positive regard. Which is just really saying, “will people love me for who I am?”

I just want to know that the full reality of me is worth paying attention to even when it’s not being paid for.

I hope that as therapy becomes less stigmatized, we will begin to have a more defined slot in our heads for the therapeutic relationship. But that still won’t make it easy. Because no relationship that matters ever is.

There’s also a lot of vulnerability in a relationship where the sole connection will someday be severed. A relationship that can be severed so completely by things other than death, things I have no control over. A relationship that is both real and a business transaction. This is where I get tripped up. It doesn’t matter how much I respect the therapist/client relationship for what it is; it’s also a relationship that will end. Hopefully not soon – but I’m perfectly capable of worrying about it now.

I don’t like feeling helpless. That’s why I quit therapy, in my head, at least once a week.

I guess I should thank my subconscious for those dreams because, evidently, my head won’t quit therapy.