TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: Come on in.

CLIENT: Thank you.

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: Good morning.

THERAPIST: Good morning.

CLIENT: So it's a, I feel like you know it's been a whole week since I've seen you and it's hard to pick out what the most important thing to talk about is.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Give me a moment.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Are you, are you bothered by my suggesting that I might quit a couple of weeks ago?

THERAPIST: Horribly.

CLIENT: (laughing)

THERAPIST: (laughing) Response number two. (laugh)

CLIENT: (laughing)

THERAPIST: Bothered in what way?

CLIENT: I think I mean any or on the upset spectrum. Yeah. [00:01:11]

THERAPIST: On myself?

CLIENT: Yeah, or, yeah.

THERAPIST: No.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Did I seem bothered? Or maybe you worded that -

CLIENT: No, I didn't think you were.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: (pause) There's a sense in which it's a situation where (pause) where you could interpret it as a threat to leave (pause) conditional on something changing. Which wasn't what I was intending to do, but it's a you know, so in some sense a plausible interpretation of the events. (sigh) (laugh) [00:02:13]

THERAPIST: I have something that's formulating in my mind, but it's not fully formulated. But do you know what --

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Which is, which is just to say that there's an interpretation of what I have done that is to do what Tanya has done to me.

THERAPIST: That is what I was thinking. That you have threatened.

CLIENT: Yeah, that's the like yeah, the key word in some sense. [00:02:40]

THERAPIST: Yes. If you don't do this, then I'm going to do this.

CLIENT: Right. Which is really not how I phrased it or what I meant, but -

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Um (pause)

THERAPIST: But you were wondering in a sense if I felt, if I felt that way.

CLIENT: Yeah, I guess so.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Yeah. Because now I'm not a very nice feeling. So -

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: If you felt that way, I'm sorry. I really did not want to do that to you. [00:03:10]

THERAPIST: Well certainly thank you for your consideration.

CLIENT: (laugh)

THERAPIST: I didn't feel that way.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: I felt there probably are a lot of levels to understand this. But on one level you were trying to communicate something to me that you needed.

CLIENT: Yes. Without it being a clear sense of how to do that within the boundaries that apparently I had set up for our relationship. And so I had to in some sense transgress those boundaries or something like, well transgress sounded like a good word and then it wasn't really what I meant. Transcend? Step outside of those boundaries in some meaningful way in order to say it, I think. [00:03:57]

THERAPIST: Well maybe that's the question, is it stepping outside or violating, right.

CLIENT: Fair enough. (laugh)

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Fair enough. I mean I think that I felt like within the boundaries that I had largely constructed from nothing, it was still an unacceptable action for me to stop coming, so. Because this is a voluntary arrangement under any construction. So, so not having a clear way to articulate that I needed something different, I could still do that. I think that was the (pause) [00:04:48]

THERAPIST: Well that's what I was thinking when you used the word voluntary. Because the initial construction I, that you threatened to leave, I don't have any volition in that.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: You're going to do this if I don't do this, that's you know it's being held at gun point practically it's not you know volition.

CLIENT: Right. (pause) Which actually does bring up a question that I haven't thought about in a while, but I did wonder about for a number of sessions is, are there conditions under which you would stop seeing me? [00:05:35]

THERAPIST: Not that I can think of.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Did you have?

CLIENT: No, I didn't think I was doing anything that would like -

THERAPIST: Threat.

CLIENT: It was just more like a, this goes to the question of voluntary, right. I'm here voluntarily, are you? The answer is pretty clearly yes in some sense, but and then you're saying like (pause) yeah, I'm not sure. (pause) [00:06:17]

You know there's a sense of which if there's no condition under which you would stop seeing me, voluntary becomes a (long pause) voluntary becomes interested in a sense. To say that there's no condition on the choice or something, it's just [00:07:07]

THERAPIST: There are no, but they are my conditions.

CLIENT: Yes. Yeah. (pause)

THERAPIST: I don't feel beholding to other conditions.

CLIENT: (pause) Hum.

THERAPIST: And it's your actually related specifically to you. There's really nothing I can, no conditions that I can imagine that would come up between the two of us or with you that would lead me to want to stop seeing you. But even that is want.

CLIENT: Okay. Okay. I think I was asking you, I meant to be asking a more general question, are there conditions in which you would stop seeing a patient. [00:07:54]

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: Okay. Okay. That was where the confusion was coming from then.

THERAPIST: Oh, yeah.

CLIENT: Okay. I got you. Well (pause) thanks for both answers then, I appreciate it. Okay. (pause) Okay. Thank you, that's been interesting. [00:08:27]

THERAPIST: Yeah, where, what, where did what I just said go?

CLIENT: Well, I was very confused when I thought you were saying there was no condition under which you would stop seeing a patient in a general sense.

THERAPIST: You said you.

CLIENT: I did say that yes, I did, absolutely. Uh-huh. So you answered the question I asked. And I just thought I was asking a different one. Or meant to be asking a different one. So I was confused in that. But then, it's not your fault, I was make (pause) you know when you ask an ill posed question and someone answers it, it's not really their fault for having answered the question you posed incorrectly. (sigh) (pause) [00:09:16]

So where did I go over there? I went over, I went to try, you know, I went to say okay, well that's good, because it would make sense that you would have some conditions under which you would stop seeing patients. It seems (pause) it seems I don't know, I can't come up with a word, that is the thing, it seems difficult or strange or hard to be in a position where you couldn't leave. Which of course seems in some, or where you are constrained by your own like larger sense of I will not do this to not leave. Which of course sounds a little bit like the position I'm in in my marriage, to me. [00:09:57]

THERAPIST: It sounds like that to me too.

CLIENT: And so (pause) so I went to just being grateful that you wouldn't, that you can't imagine conditions under which you would want to stop seeing me.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: I appreciate that. You know when we had the conversation a couple of weeks ago, I think it was just two, maybe three? [00:10:26]

THERAPIST: Maybe three weeks, so yeah, a few weeks ago.

CLIENT: Okay. I guess I really appreciate several things. One that you were not attached to any particular theory of me. And so were willing to admit that you could be constructing things incorrectly or be wrong. Many people find it hard to be wrong or to admit that they're wrong. And so I appreciate that. And I really appreciated you saying that you cared about me. That was, those were helpful things. So, thank you for those. (pause) [00:11:06]

So that's where I went to over there to answer that question. It's just kind of tied up in all of these threads. (pause) [00:11:21]

THERAPIST: I can certainly be wrong also. I certainly know I don't always know. I, you know you always don't know some things. You know some things and you don't know other things. And I think that the things that you don't know are sometimes more important than the things you know.

CLIENT: (laugh) That's the truth, yeah. (pause) Those are hard things for a lot of people to realize or admit. (pause) And so you know, over the last several years I've spent a lot of times in meetings with scientists where sometimes people can face those facts and sometimes they can't. And it really matters whether you can face them or not because (pause) because of what you just said. You just really don't know and often you don't even know what you don't know. And those things sometimes matter. And so it can be really good to (pause) have what I would term humility in that sense. [00:12:45]

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: Recognition of one's boundaries there, so. I appreciate seeing any of them, so. [00:12:59]

THERAPIST: Are you also curious of my relationship to obligation?

CLIENT: Oh yeah. I mean I'm very curious about what you do and who you are, and you're relationship to obligation, yeah.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Yeah. (pause) Absolutely. And there's this, you know there's a sense in which I just wish you were a friend of mine because I really like you and I [00:13:33]

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: You know you have a lot of the qualities of many of my friends. (laugh) I don't actually have that many friends that are very close. I've tended over my life to like have one or two very close friends. And then a group of friendly acquaintances. You seem to have many of the attributes of someone that I would be very close friends with and so it's, well. (pause) [00:14:01]

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: So yeah, I'm very curious about it, all of these things. And one of the ways that I, when I'm not in therapy, come to understand the world better is through talking with my friends about how they view things. And so, yeah, I think, I think not only am I curious about how you view things and what your obligations are or feel like they are, it sort of makes sense that I would be. [00:14:25]

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: But that might be too much rationalization, I'm sure.

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: (very long pause) So over the course of the last several sessions, I feel like you've talked more than you had in some of the previous sessions. That might not be accurate, but I guess it's an empirical question. But I felt that way and I prefer that mode of discourse in some ways. I like it better. [00:15:25]

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: I certainly wasn't consciously doing it.

CLIENT: (laugh) Okay.

THERAPIST: I mean sometimes I might think oh I need to be whatever, but or quieter, or more active, or whatever. But I wasn't consciously doing it. It's interesting.

CLIENT: Well there was once or twice that I asked you for an opinion and you were willing to give that. Maybe that plays into my perception of how much you're talking then. [00:15:53]

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: I don't know. (pause)

THERAPIST: I very much privilege space. If I'm going to err on one side or the other, I'm going to err on giving people space versus not, that's how I think about it. And I have my sort of political, sub political in a very general sense side, feels that that's something very much lacking in society in people's -

CLIENT: (laugh)

THERAPIST: There's no odd space, there's a lot of things coming out of people. Not a lot of space.

CLIENT: Hum. I think all of that makes sense. [00:16:51]

THERAPIST: It's certainly one of the reasons I think I tend to appear quiet and just very thinking a lot. I feel very engaged and active, but I think probably tend to be quiet more often.

CLIENT: (pause) That makes sense. Thanks for explaining.

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: I guess I'm not surprised by the explanation. You've, I feel like you've framed the first part before.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Wanting to leave space. But I find the broader societal question interesting. I think you're probably right there. [00:17:37]

THERAPIST: Um-hum. It's something I think about.

CLIENT: (laugh) (pause) What effect do you think that has? [00:17:53]

THERAPIST: Probably so many, but I don't know where to start.

CLIENT: (laughing) Okay. Okay. (long pause) So that was one, I guess class of things that I wanted to talk about -

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Things between us. And I guess, I'm struggling to move to anything else that want to or should talk about, you know. Struggling to move to them I guess. [00:18:53]

THERAPIST: Struggling to know what they are?

CLIENT: (deep breath)

THERAPIST: Or knowing whether to talk about them?

CLIENT: Um (sigh) probably just struggling to talk about them. I guess I'm yes, it's the, in some ways it's the same story as last week. I am just upset and angry and hurt and (pause) and I'm still in the same place in some ways. And in other ways it's very different. (pause) [00:19:36]

I think it might have been Wednesday, but it might have been Thursday of last week. Tanya came back from the job that she started last week and we were talking some and she asked me if I was okay, which (sigh) which is hard for me. Because when asked a question directly, I (pause) I have a very, very strong preference against lying. And when the question isn't one that's, you know one that's you know, one of the societally polite ones, like hi, how are you, I feel like I have an obligation to give an answer, and an honest one. [00:20:17]

Particularly in my relationship with my wife. I feel like if she's asking a question, she means it and I have, I have either the choice of saying I don't want to tell you, lying to her or telling the truth. And the lying doesn't seem like a good option and I don't want to tell you, is rarely a really good option either. Because most of the times it will cause as many problems as it will solve. (pause) [00:20:51]

So I told her that I was still angry about what had happened and where our lives were. And (pause) the conversation went well in the sense that she can handle it now. And over the course of the conversation it, I felt like it, anger was not as much the important thing, because there's some question of like in the anger there's still like a responsibility element. But leaving that aside and I'm also hurt a lot. And that doesn't, for me that doesn't have as much to do with responsibility, that's just an events thing. So I, so I shifted the discussion to that being the key but (sigh) (pause) [00:21:58]

So I mentioned that what you suggested that couples counseling would probably be a good way of working to rebuild trust. She had some trouble understanding what the trust issue was. Which I eventually was able to articulate as, I have a hard time having this conversation because I don't trust that you'll be able to handle it. [00:22:20]

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: Which is a large part of, I think, the issue. (pause) The question I'm struggling with now is like how many more facts are important to the talk about with you, to give you a clear or at least mostly clear picture of what's going on. (pause) [00:23:18]

Alright I'm going to tell this, this section of the story as quickly as I can, because it has a lot of details. But the details aren't really the important thing, it's the story. [00:23:28]

So we were supposed to go to Dover, Delaware this weekend to go to her brother's graduation. He wasn't actually going to graduate from college, but he was going to walk. He needed to take some classes over the summer to make up for ones that he failed like last semester when he decided that he didn't really want to be in school anymore. [00:23:46]

The position which I can understand. But it also sounds a lot like depression to me or laziness. It feels like it falls into one of the two categories. So like either he's, he doesn't want to be there, so either he's just not doing it out of some I don't know what, or he knows when he's due to get out of being there, and he can't bring himself to do it. Either to quit or to just buckle down and finish the last semester and a half or two. [00:24:16]

Being unable to do that sounds like depression to me. I could be wrong, obviously. You have the training here, but having had a lot of friends in the academic world, it seems like that's a pretty clear sign. At any rate. So it turns out that we find out on a Thursday or a Friday, we were going to leave Saturday morning and come back Sunday evening. Turns out that he had failed a class this semester also and so he wasn't even going to be able to walk for whatever reason. So the plans were up in the air for a couple of days because Tanya's family wasn't sure what they were going to do. [00:24:59]

They decided on Friday they were going to drive up anyway. Probably about the time they decided to leave they decided that. So they drove up. And similarly we decided what we were going to do. I've been knowing that we have to do this, I've been repairing our car which had a leak in the radiator reservoir, which leaves the radiator. It's not a big deal, but it turns out that was masking a leak in the water pump, so the water pump is a big deal because it's kind of running fluid down into the same place. [00:25:27]

And really not, I figured that out about 3:00 Friday afternoon. It was just not any way in the next four hours that I was going to do a repair that I'd never done before to this car. And you know most repair shops close at 5:00 or something like that. So it was just kind of, it became nearly, it became impossible for us to drive, and nearly impossible for us to get there. We still hadn't decided if we were going to go or not. So that decision took a lot of I think energy out of both of us. [00:25:58]

Tanya felt a whole lot of guilt about any decision not to go. But it turns out didn't really want to go in the first place. Just she felt like she ought to go. Hence the guilt was overwhelming enough that she felt she had to go. I never really wanted to go because he has to finish classes in the summer. It's not exactly clear what we're celebrating in the graduation moment, because he's not really graduating. It's just sort of a (pause) you can stand up with your class when they, I don't know what his graduation would look like. Mine no one actually walked across a stage, you just stood up. In a crowd of 1500 people, it's not really a thing worth doing. [00:26:44]

It seems like a celebration when it's actually done is a good thing, but. It's just I really didn't want to go when it was of that level of importance. And not it's a very different picture. Either we're going to comfort him or tell him that we love him. And those are good things, they really are. But I'm not sure that that's a position that I need to be in right now. Like supporting another member of the family. [00:27:14]

THERAPIST: Supporting him, that's so passive/aggressive.

CLIENT: What do you mean?

THERAPIST: His role. Clearly he probably knew he maybe was failing a class. It would be good to really check in and let his family know.

CLIENT: (laughing)

THERAPIST: You want to be, that's not an insignificant point. He's not a victim. He failed a class. Unless like there was some great injustice done that he was doing well and the professor had it in for him or something like that. He probably knew he at least wasn't doing well. And given his track record that this might be a possibility and that his entire family had organized their lives around this. Such that you know it would be the responsible thing to at least find out so his family wouldn't have to be put in this situation. I imagine there was a lot of anger that went into this.

CLIENT: (laughing) Probably, yeah. [00:27:59]

THERAPIST: That's not an insignificant point though.

CLIENT: (laugh) Fair enough.

THERAPIST: Don't you agree?

CLIENT: (laugh) Fair enough. (pause) Humph. I am pretty sure that's not a point that anyone in his family thought about.

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: (sigh) Which makes all of those decision making things more complicated because it's sort of like they just have radically different standards in some ways. So it's like (long pause) [00:29:03]

Anyway so we eventually figured out that we could rent a car.

THERAPIST: I probably threw off your story with that.

CLIENT: A little bit, but that's okay. It was (sigh)

THERAPIST: Well go on, I have really helpful comments, but yeah, please go on.

CLIENT: Yeah. Anyway, so we figured out that we could rent a car much cheaper than it used to be when we were both under 25. But that still doesn't occur to me quickly because it's only been a few years since I've passed 25, so like, you know you can rent a car for like $50, $60 a day. Or, I'm sorry, $30 or $40 a day if you rent it from the right place. That's really not [00:29:44]

THERAPIST: Hotwire is $13 bucks a day usually.

CLIENT: Okay. Fair enough.

THERAPIST: Even better.

CLIENT: Better than anything I found. But that's good to know for next time we're looking.

THERAPIST: I've recently been on it for $13 bucks a day is great.

CLIENT: Awesome.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Thank you.

THERAPIST: It's cheap is the bottom line.

CLIENT: Yeah. But then you have to have like, you have to have some advanced notice for most of these things because they run out of cars in the places that have them cheaper. If you try to rent it from downtown Denver for example, it's typically going to be much more expensive, so. Anyway, so I found a place that we could get to easily. Because that's the other thing, we don't actually have a good way of getting to many places that rent cars cheaply. Not, because the car's not really useful to drive at the moment. [00:30:27]

Anyway so we got to the point where we could do this car. By the time that I got to clicking to accept it, they had rented out all of their cars from the lot, so it was just very frustrating. And then it just becomes like a question of do we keep chasing down all of these leads. Every other place is now another $30 more expensive. I don't really want to be doing this anyway and it's turned into a whole lot of work to not only get the car ready to go, but like make this decision to and (pause) and in a sense I'm doing it for Tanya for whom it's, it's a thing that she's doing out of guilt. [00:31:10]

And I know that it's very likely because she's going to see her family that it could be really good and a wonderful weekend, but exhausting. Or it could be really bad and also exhausting. And so for the next several days after we get back, one or both of us going to be dealing with the fallout from the weekend. And so it's just like an immense amount of work for very little payoff. [00:31:38]

And I just, (pause) and I think that the key feature of this story in some ways is that I didn't really have any sense of how to balance our needs in this situation. Like I have absolutely no sense any longer of like how important my needs are because the balance of the relationship has been so far out of whack for so long that like from my perspective it just doesn't matter what I need if she's going to kill herself. Like we need to not have that happen. So prevent that from happening, whatever it takes. [00:32:22]

And so (sigh) it's easy to fall into that same pattern for something that actually really doesn't matter. (laugh) But it's still going to be a lot of work and make things much worse. So we didn't go. And she's pretty distraught, so she called Chad. I don't think she was like actually suicidal, but I think she was in this place where she was trying to prevent getting there, which is a nice change. [00:32:48]

THERAPIST: So she was distraught that you guys couldn't go, or that her brother had failed, or all of it?

CLIENT: I think all of it. I think that her brother failing, that she feels some responsibility for like not being in touch with him. And not knowing what's going on in his life as to why that happened. I think for not going she feels guilty because she ought to go and do this thing. And we've also been not really fighting, but not happy for some time at this point. Like (pause) trying to make a hard decision. [00:33:24]

I guess she had also been working for most of that day. So it was like her third day in a row on a job that she had just started. It was a long day. So she was already tired to start with. So it's just a (pause) a bad situation. [00:33:37]

THERAPOIST: And how did you feel about how distraught she got?

CLIENT: Well that's a (pause) I felt fine about it. Like I think she was fine in some sense. (pause) The thing that I had a much harder time dealing with was how distraught I was. Like I was, I was just angry that being asked to do this and figure this out, and really did not want to do any of it. And couldn't really think clearly from a just like emotionally overwhelmed standpoint. So (pause) I think your question is the right one to ask in a lot of ways. But in this instance like I didn't, I didn't feel like she was melting down uncontrollably. So I wasn't so distraught at where she was just to, I don't know. (Big sigh) [00:34:34]

But it felt like it was my inability to participate in some sort of reasonable decision making process.

THERAPIST: This is so and now I feel like my needs or my interests, I don't want to say my needs are trumping where you're going with this, because what you're saying seems so central. But I also heard this as a story about how low Tanya's family's expectations are of other people. And how, what a low bar responsibility they have.

CLIENT: Hum.

THERAPIST: Their responsibility is just such a low bar. Like even, you know not informing the family ahead of time that I might you know, that their son might fail a class and this might like, that that wouldn't even be expected of him.

CLIENT: That's really interesting. Yeah, I feel like if I talk directly to David, Tanya's father, he might have said something, you know (pause) indicating that that wasn't really great. But yeah, I think they all very much still feel an obligation to go. So it's like the bar is low in one direction. [00:35:38]

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: But not in the other, right. So they still have this obligation to go do this thing. And really want to or something.

THERAPIST: But you can almost say in a sense they're skirting their obligation to their son to actually make him a responsible person by just pretending like he can do whatever he wants and that it doesn't have an impact.

CLIENT: Hum. (pause) I mean certainly we've had, we've had that sort of, we've talked about that idea at some lengths, I feel like, over the last several months in terms of like at what point if I'm doing everything for Tanya, am I doing anything helpful at all. (pause) [00:36:33]

THERAPIST: Well in that case I wouldn't say that you were, in this case I would be much more likely to use the word skirting.

CLIENT: (laughing)

THERAPIST: I don't feel that what you were doing was skirting. I think that in some large picture it could be unproductive.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: But I think you could also say at what point do parents no longer have obligations to their kids in the same way they do when they were kids? The whole story actually seems quite strange to me. Because it's one thing if your kid is graduating in three years, but needs to take a few extra classes and you go to see them walk. They've already, they've failed classes which is why they're not graduating.

Going to a graduation under those circumstances is a little strange to begin with, wouldn't you want to make sure that your kid graduates. I mean the whole story from start to finish is actually kind of an odd story. Even though I know that's not why you told it.

CLIENT: Yeah. Well I mean it's very interesting to hear you say that because I mean it's felt odd to me the whole time. Like when the question first came up, it was sort of like well why would we even go. Like why is this an event. But that was my question, so now I have to wonder a little bit whether like I told the story in some biased way or whether you just (pause) see the world very differently from the way I interpret them as seeing it. [00:37:52]

THERAPIST: Did you, did you like feel like you could ask that question? Or did you just let that question go at some point after it all?

CLIENT: Well I mean like, I think I asked that question of Tanya.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: But I didn't ask it with any expectation of getting any answer.

THERAPIST: Hum.

CLIENT: I think I, maybe I made the statement that I did not understand why we're even doing it. Maybe I didn't ask the question, why would we do this. (pause) I think there's a sense in their minds in which it's just like well, the graduation day thing happens once, it only happens on the graduation day. And so if you can be a part of that, we should go and participate in that and celebrate his accomplishment of graduating from college. [00:38:46]

It just, I have a hard time really getting a hold of that construction because this fundamental sense in which he won't have graduated from college and celebrating on that day doesn't even matter. Because like it matters if he does graduate, that you had to put, there's no guarantee that he will or something. So I don't know. [00:39:10]

THERAPIST: When I realize that we're going very close to a lot of the issue around responsibility and so forth. But not only is he not, did he not graduate. But he's not graduating because of behavior that just happened really. Like it was this year you said.

CLIENT: Um-hum.

THERAPIST: He just started failing. It wasn't like he started failing his freshman year but then did three years of really good work, you can't, it really doesn't make as much sense. I mean why would he all of sudden start passing everything.

CLIENT: (laughing)

THERAPIST: Which of course he didn't.

CLIENT: Right. (long pause) (sigh) (pause) So I think this is all really interesting. And it sounds a little bit like it speaks to, I mean there's a sense to which I think that part of Tanya's problem, the reason it got so bad was, could be described as skirting the issues. Like she was really upset and really depressed at Brown. But couldn't acknowledge that that was the problem and just do something about it. And so it was sort of like, I feel like there is some analogy [00:40:29]

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: To the way you're suggesting her family's handling this that I think might be apt as an analogy and might be correct as their description of, as a description of how they're handling this.

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Like basically he decided somewhere over the course of last summer that he didn't want to be an elementary school teacher anymore and I think has been at a real loss as to what to do since then. And I think that's the reason that he failed all of these classes in some sense. Like loss of purpose. But there's no clear dealing with that. Or it's hard to deal with that. So. [00:41:07]

THERAPIST: And I think it's very confusing for you. As it's inherently confusing I think in that you know what, at what point is Tanya responsible for her feelings and her behavior. Even if she is suicidal and she can't control that. Are there things she can control? Make her more responsible for that reality, that doesn't lead to what happened.

CLIENT: (deep breath) Well I think the answer is yes. I mean there is the sense in which she is doing really well right now. Like she's doing really well in the, I feel like she's improving certainly on a week time scale. Like she's more or less better every week. It hasn't been that long since she was suicidal. So there's this, so I ought to be really happy. I feel like I ought to be really happy that she's well again. [00:41:59]

But a part of me is just really angry. It's like well you're here now. Why could you not be here when you needed you, or when I needed you several months ago? Why could you not find whatever it is you found all of a sudden and be this person? And there is some ways that's not really a fair question. But in some ways in which I think that's a, that that's the same question of what you were just stating. Like in what ways is she responsible for the reality in which she is suicidal? [00:42:37]

THERAPIST: Um-hum.

CLIENT: Not so much the suicidality, but the getting there.

THERAPIST: Um-hum. And then I guess for you what then, what is your responsibility to her and to yourself?

CLIENT: Yeah. And the question that you're now asking, there is, like what is my responsibility in helping her create that reality in which she is suicidal?

THERAPIST: Yeah, I'm not asking that question because I don't think that's an interesting question. I don't really I feel like it's interesting that you posed that question.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: I feel like you have a responsibility in whether -

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Even if you were like 150 percent enabler, it's still her responsibility.

CLIENT: (laughing)

THERAPIST: I mean it's sort of like well I'm an alcoholic because my husband is enabling me. He might not be helping, but I don't see people I mean that's interesting that you asked that question. I guess on some level you must feel that way.

CLIENT: (sigh) I certainly wonder about it. Like because at some point you have to, I have to wonder about something, right? I have to wonder about whether it's, (laugh) I mean essentially for our entire marriage and for the six months leading up to it, she's either been depressed, having an emotional affair, suicidal, or some two of the three. Like that's (pause) at some point either I have played into that, or I'm really bad at making choices or something like so, yeah, I guess I wonder about it. [00:44:34]

THERAPIST: Boy I'm really glad you said that, because I that's really helpful for me to know that you're struggling with that question, which I it wasn't a question in my mind. Because clearly it's not something that yeah. But the fact that you're concerned about that, you're trying to make sense of that, is very helpful to know.

CLIENT: (deep breath) It's also helpful to know that the question is very easily settled in your mind. So. You know like [00:45:04]

THERAPIST: It is in a reality sense. But there's something going on in your mind that's making you -

CLIENT: Yeah, but -

THERAPIST: Ask that question.

CLIENT: Absolutely. But sometimes a little bit of reality is just, it's helpful sort of like -

THERAPIST: Well I think a lot of reality is helpful, so don't worry .

CLIENT: (laughing) Okay.

THERAPIST: Okay. We just need to stop this here, so I will see you next Wednesday then.

CLIENT: All right. Take care.

THERAPIST: Take care.

CLIENT: You too. [00:45:31]

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