TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: I just have one question about statements and yours doing the statement. Did you-

CLIENT: I have a check for you this week, I forgot to bring it last time, I'm sorry.

THERAPIST: Yeah, no worries. I didn't know if I forgot to log you, because you usually pay at the beginning of the month and I'm thinking [unclear].

CLIENT: No, that was me.

THERAPIST: Okay. I wasn't confused. Okay, great, no problem. Thank you.

CLIENT: Sorry about that.

THERAPIST: No worries, I was just-I looked at my bookkeeping and I wondered what was that.

CLIENT: So I've had an e-mail from my friend and his wife Saturday morning. He had been-she had taken him Thursday to the emergency room because he was suicidal. So he's been-Frederick apparently has a southeast branch, he's been there since then, so. And she just e-mailed me because she knew that I had been dealing with-or Tanya and I have been dealing with this for some time and she wanted to know like what's going to happen, what is going on. So I shared with her some of my experiences in that process, like what she could expect for the next week or so. [pause] That's been an interesting process. It's sort of like reliving some of the times earlier this year previously, but a little less intensely. [2:45]

THERAPIST: Reliving it how?

CLIENT: Um, in a sense of many of the feelings that just come back it's like are the same. But, you know, there's not anything that I can do or really need to do in that situation, but-other than provide her with whatever support she asks for and wants. And also... But it's still like... I just feel very intensely the horror and the shock, and the I guess fear and guilt and sadness that all went with those experiences for me.

THERAPIST: Mm hm.

CLIENT: I felt like part of what she was asking is what are the range of possible outcomes from this hospitalization. So I sort of told her about three of Tanya's six hospitalizations that I felt like covered the spread of her outcomes. So the first time was really-she basically got better by going to the hospital and was only there for three days, and that was really good. The last time she was in and out of the hospital for three months, or two months because it... it would take the pressure off just enough that she was okay and she'd come back out into the world and the pressure would be back on the same way. So that was sort of that process of thinking about the individual ones as in some sense reliving them all, so it would... [pause] But with all of the emotions more raw than they would be just thinking about them the wrong way. [5:00]

THERAPIST: Mm hm, mm hm.

CLIENT: So I don't have a real good explanation for why that is exactly, but it seemed to make sense. [long pause] There was an added layer of complication to it in that Stephen is one of my friends from graduate school, so he graduated a couple of years ahead of me and is doing post-doc Harvard. So it's also this feeling for me of like, well, is this just-if I continue in this academic trajectory is this... And my friend Franco, who was applying for faculty jobs this summer and stopped because he was getting essentially the advice that what they wanted-what the job wanted was someone who was just not him. Just basically him getting a bunch of bad advice all at once and not being able to deal with that and the stress of wanting jobs all at once. He just dropped the search and was going to do it next year. And that will be fine. Stephen was also applying for faculty jobs now but... So I haven't-he and I are not as close, so it's not like I'm going to see him every week or something, but... [pause] There's a sense in which it sort of undermined my belief and/or faith in that particular job path also. [7:30]

THERAPIST: Why did he get the sense that what they wanted wasn't him, or what about him did he feel they didn't want?

CLIENT: So Franco's in a political science program which has kind of a wide range of people. There's people who do theory, which is actually like abstracted from reality in most every possible way. Sort of more like political philosophers who don't want to be philosophers. In other words, people who do-call it methodology, but do essentially statistical analysis on a variety of different things. So he sits far on that end of things. But that's the less popular end of the field, and he's drifted fairly far into the statistics end of things. And so the advice he was essentially getting was that he needed to be more middle of the spread in order to get hired at departments, because everyone in the department gets a say in the decision and there would only be one or two people who cared at all about his particular skill set.

Which-and I suppose, you know, that it's bad advice in some ways. [pause] Yeah, it's actually just bad advice. I feel like he could go to his faculty advisor and ask, "What do I do to package myself for the job market?" and they would essentially say, "Be a different person." And that's not-it's really not helpful advice in any way, particularly like a month before the applications go out, there's nothing to change in that amount of time on the academic timescale. [pause] So I don't know what exactly went on with Stephen to cause this particular thing. It's fairly clear professional stress was a major piece of it. [pause] [10:00]

And I guess I sort of have this question of like, if everyone I know in this-you know, in any field of academia, but even in chemistry particularly, is under an enormous amount of stress all the time, that really seems to take the fun out of it for a lot of them. Why would I want to do that? That's been a piece of the whole I think also. [pause] But I don't have a really clear assessment of how much that's impacted by the general sadness that has come on, so.

THERAPIST: Mm hm. [pause] There are so many things that have happened that have left you very disillusioned.

CLIENT: Yeah. [pause] That's an interesting word though, right. It has a negative connotation I think, but if you had illusions about how great reality is isn't a good thing to have those sort of dismissed or seen through? I don't know. [12:20]

THERAPIST: It depends on how you work through the feelings around it. The sort of process of disillusionment isn't meant to sound really bad if the illusions really sort of have you bump against reality, but there's a process of how those are managed. [You know, that can make the difference?]

CLIENT: Mm hm. [very long pause] So I think I understand that in a general sense. And no, I don't have a hard time like just wrapping around my head around it in any sort of specific context. What does it mean to manage it so that it's not... [pause] [14:30]

THERAPIST: Well, I guess, you know, like thinking about it, and especially thinking about nihilism, is does it lead you down a path of hopelessness, or does it lead you down a path of this isn't possible but there are good things that are possible?

CLIENT: Hm. [long pause] Tanya and I had an interesting conversation last night. We were sort of talking about responses to-she had a big [unclear 15:49]. Like it's been far less acute in any sense for her. I mean, Stephen was more my friend than hers, but [unclear]. But she knows him and his wife Jenna reasonably well, but not... At any rate, so towards the end of the conversation she suggested that she felt like everything was horrible anyway so this wasn't a particular surprise or change in the world in some sense for her. Which I was reminded about what you said, what you just said.

THERAPIST: How did you feel about her statement? [16:45]

CLIENT: I found it very interesting. [Hopefully we/I clearly? 16:53] don't feel that way. And even when I tell her that I feel like nothing has a justifiable worth in the somewhat grand cosmic scale, that... you might remember I felt good about that. In fact I-like that was a helpful thing, that wasn't like a... That was really like on some scale everything's worthless if you zoom out far enough. That sometimes we're different for me then. So it was kind of interesting to hear that perspective. You know, somehow I guess I would have thought that that might hurt Tanya somewhat, hearing that that was her view of the world, but it didn't.

THERAPIST: Do you think that was her speaking or her depression speaking? [18:00]

THERAPIST: I think... I don't know. I don't know that the two are separable right now. [pause] I'm going to go ahead with this metaphor, but it might not be that clear, so sorry in advance. I've been working a lot kind of on the edge of quantum mechanics because of the type of chemistry that we're doing. So every particle has some set of descriptive numbers, and each particle has to have an individual unique set. And under certain conditions you can describe a particle with say two numbers, S and L, but under other conditions S and L become bad quantum numbers and you have to use the sum of them, which we call J, and that's a good quantum number. So in this case I feel like I'm not sure that Tanya and Tanya's depression are good quantum numbers to describe Tanya. But I don't know if that's clear at all.

THERAPIST: No actually.

CLIENT: I'm sorry.

THERAPIST: No, it's okay. It might be a failure of my understanding. So you say they're not good quantum numbers, meaning they don't represent her? [20:00]

CLIENT: Yeah, you can't use them as a descriptor, because it's not complete in some sense. Sorry, it was the metaphor that came to mind and I couldn't move away from it so I thought I'd try. So in some sense I guess that means I think that that's her depression speaking, I don't think that's really who Tanya is or who the Tanya that I used to know is. But I think it's also the truth, that's how she feels right now. [very long pause, over one minute] [22:00]

Yeah, so I guess I found Tanya view particularly interesting because I just really don't-really don't feel that way also. I felt there were a lot of horrible things in the world, the last several years have been particularly bad for me and for Tanya, but I think there's a general sense in which the world hasn't been a great place for the last several years. The financial market's crashing, and that really impacts a lot of people. So there's been a lot of bad things in my life right now, or at least a lot of hard things, but I... [pause] Yeah, I guess I'm not hopeless, just [inaudible]. So that's kind of [unclear].

THERAPIST: What do you have hope about? [23:30]

CLIENT: [pause] I think I said I feel a general sense of hope that someday I'm going to find what I should be doing in some sense of "should." And someday I think I would be happy doing it. Yeah, I mean, in the shorter more practical reach I feel hope about getting a couple of papers out the door in the next few weeks. I have a little bit of hope about actually finishing my dissertation in six weeks. I'm a little agnostic on that question of whether it's actually going to happen or not, but... I'm vaguely hopeful. [pause] I do still have hope that eventually I will sort out... my relationship with Tanya in one way or another. I don't really know what that's going to look like. I do have hope there. [pause] Yeah. I have hope that one way or another I'm going to finish my dissertation soon, I mean like it will happen soon in a sense, and after that in some way my life will be better because I will be out of this strange limbo of doing laboratory chemistry without any sort of laboratory at all. We're only laboratory two, [unclear 25:47], which is fine, but just wrong a lot of ways. So I hope that that phase of my life is coming to an end and we will complete that and I can move on to better and happier things. But also with that we'll have learned a lot during this time and can take that forwards. Those are some things.

THERAPIST: [unclear]? [26:15]

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: [unclear] [long pause]

CLIENT: I guess I also have hope that bad things can happen and I cannot lose my equilibrium entirely. When Tanya was hospitalized I got like essentially nothing done in January while dealing with her hospitalization. Obviously there's not any-there's very little for me to directly do with Stephen, but I have a lot of the same emotions to deal with in some sense. [pause] But then I also want to-I really do want to support Jenna and Stephen as much as I can, as much as they want. So I've felt like I've been able to do that, and also been able to get some work done over the weekend, particularly once this week started. And a lot of that was in the meantime, just I felt like I'd balanced experiencing and dealing with and thinking through the emotions, and then going back to get some work done when I could. So sort of assessing where I was in a moment and not trying to work, that it was futile or something, so that I could deal with the emotions. But then once it was dealt with not brooding, I'm not wallowing in it, but going back to what I needed or wanted to be doing. Sometimes I feel good about it. I'm hopeful that I can do that again. So that's good.

THERAPIST: How is it good [unclear]? [30:00]

CLIENT: [pause] I mean, it's going well. I like Dr. [Forsyth?], and Tanya does also. [pause] Did you ever talk with him?

THERAPIST: Actually I'm going to be talking to him today.

CLIENT: Oh, okay.

THERAPIST: But we have not-

CLIENT: I was just curious.

THERAPIST: Yeah, no, we haven't gotten a chance to yet but we propose to today. What were your thoughts about that?

CLIENT: About talking with him?

THERAPIST: Mm hm, yeah.

CLIENT: Oh yeah, just curious as to what will happen. I don't know how well you know each other. It seems like you know each other better than Dr. Jannis.

THERAPIST: Yeah, I know Dr. Forsyth [inaudible].

CLIENT: Anyway, because I feel like you have a little bit different styles. But I don't remember very clearly our couples counseling sessions, because there were only a few of them, it was almost a year ago. So I don't have an enormously clear sense of how different your individual counseling style and your couples counseling style is. Are. [pause] I'm just curious as to... how that would... [pause] Yeah, I guess I'm curious as to how different your takes are on what is going on and what is happening and things like that. I find it an interesting and a little bit amusing question. I'm not sure why I find it amusing, but I do. [32:30]

THERAPIST: Do you have particular thoughts on anything? Can you imagine what he and I would [unclear]?

CLIENT: Um... So that's actually an interesting feature of the difference in styles. In some ways I have a better sense of what he might think than I feel like I have a sense of what you might think. I feel fairly confident that you have thoughts and opinions, but I feel like they're a thing that you keep intentionally isolated at least some of the time. Maybe I'm not describing it well. I find one of the particular traits of your interaction with me is that I'll ask some questions and you will say, "That's a good question," and leave it there and wait for me to do something about it. That's not how you respond to every question, but I feel like that's a deliberate thing on your part. That's what I guess I mean, that there are some internal states that you don't allow me access to. [pause] [34:15]

THERAPIST: And you feel differently about [him?].

CLIENT: Um... I feel like he plays a little bit different process, at least in-of sort of maybe something like [unclear 34:36] attempting to get at what is going on. But I also feel like he has a strong interpretive framework of past experiences impacting present experiences, and most of... it seem like most of what [unclear 35:01] we've been seeing him much-for much less time than we've been seeing you, but it seems like most of what we've talked about has in some sense been reflected through that interpretive framework. And that's fine. I think it's a-if you're going to start with some general model of the way people work, that's probably a pretty good one. You may very well share that one, but there's a sense in which I don't-you don't put it on the table quite the same way. You look kind of puzzled or intent, or something.

THERAPIST: Really I'm sort of taking in what you're saying and thinking about it a lot of different ways.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: And it's not about that, but I was also curious about your comment about certain states that you don't have access to, or even [unclear] have access to. I was curious about that. What do you imagine those are? [36:00]

CLIENT: So this is a particular perhaps strange feature of me, is that like if you don't want to answer a question sometimes I'll try to figure out why, in terms of why you would do that. But usually I take that as a you want me to do a particular thing, so I comply. So I take that as like you should think about this question more. Or that is a good question, we should talk about it some more. But I'm not going to give you an answer. Or something like that. And that's any... And we talked a long time ago when we were having conversations about my confusion about therapy, about like me feeling like there were boundaries, and that there ought to be some boundaries, or at least I might expect that you would have some boundaries. You know, there was one time I asked you how you were doing and you said, "Fine," and it was clear that we had had a in some sense normal interaction that was not appropriate for the context. Like how are you doing is not a question that it seemed like you felt was relevant to our sessions here. So I switched to good morning.

THERAPIST: Hm, intentionally.

CLIENT: Oh yeah. Yeah, that was incredibly intentional. I felt like the how are you doing question was... and so in order to... Yeah, I guess I feel like if I came in here and asked how you were doing, if you were having a bad day you would not tell me. And so respecting that what I see as a desire for privacy or something like that. I don't attempt to access that, I try to leave that separate for you. So I don't-so in some sense I tried to not imagine how you were doing. Because that's private for you and that's private for you, so I want to respect that. [38:20]

THERAPIST: So on the flipside then it would-somehow I find it intrusive, and you don't want to be intrusive.

CLIENT: I don't want to be intrusive. Yeah, the you would find it intrusive is a complicated one, because certainly you... [laughs] [pause] Yeah, you would-I don't want to make any claim about what you would or would not find intrusive. [pause]

THERAPIST: Well, I think what you're talking about now is extremely relevant. To you, to understanding maybe-certainly another layer that we haven't really got to. Because the thing that comes to mind about what you're describing is maybe that's sort of a longing to have more access to the parts you feel that I'm sort of shutting off. Not allowing yourself to go there.

CLIENT: I mean, I feel like-I feel like we started to have a conversation kind of in this vein many months ago.

THERAPIST: Yes.

CLIENT: Does that ring a bell? Okay, all right. Yeah, I think I told you then that I feel like you're a person that I would want to be friends with, but our relationship here precludes that in some ways. So yeah, maybe that's true, [but I just don't know?]. Yeah. [40:20]

THERAPIST: I guess we then had-you know, I know we did talk about it. But I do think there's like another layer to it. I certainly don't think about it as denying access, like there's sort of parts of myself I sort of seal off for the purposes of privacy or [unclear]. But, you know, and it does speak to like what we were talking about with boundaries a while back, that maybe you sort of-your first thought is like sort of this issue of boundaries, or what we shouldn't or can't have access to, and then things follow from that, versus what you might want or long for.

CLIENT: I see. I see.

THERAPIST: Like that somehow that awareness, if it's your awareness. I'm not sort of creating it-

CLIENT: [laughs]

THERAPIST: -with something that I'm doing. But that that sort of precludes other things... that you may not allow yourself to feel. [long pause] [42:00]

CLIENT: Yeah, I think that's right. But I'm also having a little bit of a difficult time... I think that's so right that I'm having a difficult time taking any-going anywhere with that. I feel like in some sense maybe it's almost as if you're saying my hair is blonde. I would say yeah. But... where does that get us?

THERAPIST: Well, your hair is blonde is a fact, and what you're saying maybe what I just said feels pretty much like a fact too.

CLIENT: Like the fact of how I interact with the world.

THERAPIST: Mm hm.

CLIENT: And so yeah.

THERAPIST: But it's a fact, and that comes with probably lots of feelings and motivations and concerns. So there's more to the fact than that you were given-genetically you're blonde.

CLIENT: Fair enough, yeah. [pause] Yeah, I'm really not quite sure. [long pause, one minute] Yeah, so I'm really not sure how to attack this at all, so perhaps sitting here trying to find any direction I still have [trouble forming?]. [unclear] what's going on with you. [45:10]

THERAPIST: With-I'm sorry?

CLIENT: The key to the what's going on with you look.

THERAPIST: [unclear] Well, I-[clears throat]-excuse me. We're going to have pick this up. I'm just also just looking at the time. It's too bad. This is interesting and important, but we'll have more sessions to talk about it.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Okay? So I will see you next week. Take care.

CLIENT: You too.

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