TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: Hi. Come on in.

CLIENT: Morning.

THERAPIST: Morning.

THERAPIST: Is it less clear where to start today?

CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah.

(Pause): [00:00:55 – 00:01:15]

CLIENT: It’s raining.

THERAPIST: Yes, it is.

THERAPIST: This is an accurate observation from a scientist.

CLIENT: Thank you. (Laughs) So I’ve been writing my thesis for the last week. I guess I’ve been writing it for a whole long time now but I’ve been putting into its final form for the last week or so. I’m supposed to turn it in in a week. I still don’t know if that’s going to happen but I’ve been working at it.

(Pause): [00:01:47 – 00:02:20]

CLIENT: This is, I guess – you asked if was difficult to start today or more difficult to start today. (Pause) I’ve been away for a week and thought about a lot of things that would be interesting to talk about and then here I am and picking one is like – becomes very difficult.

(Pause): [00:02:46 – 00:03:09]

CLIENT: So here we are.

THERAPIST: Yeah, and you usually have particular things that you want to talk about at least initially.

CLIENT: And I think some of that is because if I don’t then we end up sitting here like this for a little while and in find this uncomfortable.

THERAPIST: I was thinking that’s not typically my experience. And my experience and obviously, you know better than I do in terms of what you’re thinking, but – is that you actually have things you really want to talk about – not that you bring them in so we don’t sit in silence.

CLIENT: Interesting.

(Pause): [00:04:00 – 00:04:08]

CLIENT: Yeah, maybe I try to order them so that we don’t sit in silence. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think I actually do want to talk about.

(Pause): [00:04:17 – 00:04:56]

CLIENT: I think I have a less clear idea about what to say about anything that I want to talk about than usual, is part of it today. So I talked to my mother this weekend, which is actually the result of you asking about my parents several weeks ago. So I sort of in thinking about it realized that I don’t talk to my parents as often as I talk to you at this point which was kind of a strange realization. So I feel like part of that is that we have an appointment every week and I come to that and that makes it so I made an appointment to talk to my parents every week so that’s been good.

So I was talking with my mother this weekend and she told me that my younger sister’s husband is leaving her so –

THERAPIST: Was that a surprise?

CLIENT: (Pause) Yeah, yeah. I mean they have one daughter who’s about three and she’s pregnant so yeah, it was a little bit of a surprise.

(Pause): [00:06:15 – 00:06:25]

THERAPIST: Would it not have been a surprise if that weren’t true?

CLIENT: (Laughs)

THERAPIST: Were they – did they seem unhappy?

CLIENT: (Laughs)

THERAPIST: Usually if you think two people are happy together it’s a surprise that someone’s leaving regardless of the context – especially even if they’re not pregnant.

CLIENT: Sure. Yeah, I think I mentioned – particularly her being pregnant, again as like an indicator of some sort of particular investment in the future like as a way of suggesting that they were, at least a few months ago, happy, or something like that.

(Pause): [00:06:58 – 00:07:32]

CLIENT: Yeah, I don’t really know. We’re they happy should be a relatively simple question to answer but I don’t know. I don’t see them very often and I don’t talk to my sister as much as I did when we were younger.

(Pause): [00:07:46 – 00:08:00]

CLIENT: I think mostly because of distance but there are some other things that are going on there and I don’t really, I don’t entirely understand them, so –

(Pause): [00:08:05 – 00:08:34]

CLIENT: A decade ago when they first started dating she had talked to me a whole lot. It was just like where we were at that time. Yeah, I don’t know. It was never a tumultuous relationship. He’s in the military. He wasn’t when they started dating. He comes from a particularly – I don’t know what the right nonjudgmental word is – but crappy home. The home life was a wreck. (Pause) So they dated for a while and then he dated someone else and then he enlisted I think because he wanted to die and it seemed like a good way to do that. They started dating again while he was –I don’t know – I guess after he got back from boot camp they started dating again and eventually he got deployed. They got married somewhere in all of that and he came back. Some PTSD. Jessica told me earlier this summer when we were trying to reconnect some that he had been suicidal on several occasions before. So – (Pause) I still don’t know what I want to say about this but I’m sort of telling you some facts.

THERAPIST: Well, you’re telling me facts that make it seem like it’s not that surprising, because he was already troubled. So doing troubling things like as people break up but in the context of having your wife be pregnant is a particularly bad time.

CLIENT: (Laughs) Yeah.

THERAPIST: Shows kind of a lack of judgment or responsibility.

CLIENT: Is that your view or is that you trying to say what might be my view?

THERAPIST: It’s interesting. I don’t know. I mean people do split up when – under the circumstances but it does seem kind of dramatic. Consciously, I think it was more my view.

CLIENT: Okay. Okay.

THERAPIST: But you were wondering if you were – if I was assuming that you would be thinking that too.

CLIENT: Yeah, I think so.

(Pause): [00:11:57 – 00:12:12]

CLIENT: I guess you have – not very recently, but sometime in the past sort of viewed the language of responsibility which of course is a language I understand very well but I was wondering whether that was the language that was familiar to you or native to you or whether it was one you were speaking to communicate with me.

THERAPIST: Probably both.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: But not as intentionally communicating to you, but I imagine I think about that when I see you on some level.

CLIENT: Sure. Okay. Thanks.

(Pause): [00:12:44 – 00:12:50]

CLIENT: The reason I didn’t just say, ‘yeah, it’s not a surprise at all,’ is that when I was talking with Jessica she told me that they were like doing really well and that was like just a few months ago. So –

(Pause): [00:13:12 – 00:13:21]

CLIENT: Yeah, so I think I’m sad for her because she has been in love with this guy for like a really long time and he’s sort of been in and out of the relationship in a lot of ways.

(Pause): [00:13:32 – 00:13:55]

CLIENT: I think I feel very badly for her that this thing that she really wanted and in some ways wanted most in the world is really being denied to her and it sucks.

(Pause): [00:14:13 – 00:14:21]

THERAPIST: How does she feel about him being suicidal?

(Pause): [00:14:21 – 00:14:33]

CLIENT: I think, terrified. But I don’t know. She didn’t tell me about it when it was happening, so it was sort of like mentioning a thing after the fact as a like mostly as a way of relating to or of saying that she knew some of what was going on for me.

(Pause): [00:14:49 – 00:15:11]

THERAPIST: So you didn’t know about this beforehand. You only learned about this when Tanya became suicidal.

CLIENT: Yes.

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: Actually I learned about this like six months ago so Tanya had been suicidal for quite some time, so –

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: I knew he’d been depressed and I knew that PTSD was a diagnosis or a part of it or something but I didn’t know about the suicidality.

(Pause): [00:15:44 – 00:16:33]

CLIENT: Talking about it with my mother was an interesting tour in rationalization or something like that. So she feels very badly for Jessica and is angry – not with Jessica. With Ralph. But one of the ways she expresses being angry with him is in saying that she feels badly for him that he’s essentially throwing this relationship away, or this family away. (Unclear).

(PAUSE): [00:17:19 – 00:17:32]

CLIENT: Sorry. I got distracted by wondering why we were talking about this. (Laughs). Anyway, she was upset about it but it was interesting to see her (laughing) (inaudible). She noted several times that like this was final in some sense. He’d left a few months ago or a month ago or something to go hike the Appalachian Trail, the story being something like, ‘well with another child on the way there is never going to be a time when this might happen again. So I want to do this.’ So he did this thing. Then he came back and said he was leaving and it wasn’t worth going to any couples counseling which they’d done before or anything like that. It was done. So they’re in the process of separating financially and legally.

(Pause): [00:18:32 – 00:18:50]

CLIENT: So my mother sort of emphasized several times that he was leaving her. So I asked her whether that was a particularly important point for her, feeling like the answer was yes, but she sort of just said that there was a commitment that had been made that wasn’t being kept and I don’t know, I guess I was particularly struck by her not wanting to say, yes, that was important to me.

THERAPIST: Do you have ideas as to why she wouldn’t want to say that directly?

CLIENT: Not really. Not really.

(Pause): [00:19:33 – 00:20:18]

CLIENT: I have a general sense that my mother is very anti-divorce and I also have a general sense of my mother as not liking this guy very much because she doesn’t. She’s tried very hard to accept him and come to like him and recognize the good things in him but ultimately she just doesn’t like him that much. So I guess I was interested to see her to try to fit those two things together in the face of him leaving.

THERAPIST: (Sneezes) Excuse me.

CLIENT: Bless you.

THERAPIST: Thank you.

(Pause): [00:20:52 – 00:21:05]

THERAPIST: (Sneezes) Excuse me.

CLIENT: Bless you.

THERAPIST: Thank you.

(Pause): [00:21:07 – 00:21:41]

THERAPIST: What were you thinking about?

CLIENT: I was thinking that I hadn’t mentioned this to Tanya yet, because I found out two days ago. So I haven’t because I just don’t want to talk about it with her.

THERAPIST: Why not?

CLIENT: I don’t know exactly. That was part of what I was thinking about. I think I just don’t want to talk about the subject of divorce with her.

(Pause): [00:22:03 – 00:22:25

CLIENT: Because I think that has the potential to panic her and I really can’t deal with that right now. That’s not – it’s not likely that that’s the entire explanation. That’s a piece of it. I guess I should note that since you don’t know this because you can’t, that we saw some friends from college over the weekend – or a friend from college and a new girlfriend. It was good to see him. I hadn’t seen him in several years but something about the social setting caused Tanya to rapidly melt down later in the evening, so –

(Pause): [00:23:22 – 00:23:27]

CLIENT: Which is something I don’t really understand. I sort of hear her describe it as a part of her that really hates herself but she can like leave that part alone when she’s by herself – like she doesn’t have to face it but somehow when she’s talking with other people that part gets to have a larger voice afterwards or something which is – as a non-expert here sounds a little odd like an abusive relationship with herself. Like she won’t let herself see her friends without punishing herself for it afterwards or something like that.

THERAPIST: So you were telling me that in the context of it was already hard for a few days for Tanya.

CLIENT: Yeah. And I’d been working very, very hard to try to get my dissertation done. I don’t have the time or energy to deal with her melting down. So – it would be nice if she could keep her shit together for a week or two weeks while I finish this thing.

THERAPIST: Does she know that?

CLIENT: How do I say that without like –?

(Pause): [00:25:02 – 00:25:19]

CLIENT: So I sort of think that’s the thing that should be obvious to a casual observer, so saying it is not like a helpful thing. And also like saying it will generate in her a new set of expectations for herself that she behave perfectly for the next two weeks which she is inevitably going to fail at in some way because she will have set the bar ridiculously high and it will itself cause her to like start to be upset with herself but that will cause a response in which she has to keep it together so she can’t talk about how she is with herself and that’s just going to feed back into itself. So saying it seems like it has the potential to cause the problems it’s trying to avoid. So, no I haven’t said that. Does she know it? I don’t know. That’s a different question. I sort of interpret that as like well, did she just say that to her because that would seem like a reasonable thing to do.

THERAPIST: This is a very, sort of general observation but I was thinking that the times you’ve come in here that I can remember where you’re not clear about what to talk about seemed like the times you’re most upset about things.

CLIENT: (Laughs)

(Pause): [00:26:38 – 00:26:52]

CLIENT: Yeah, I do seem to be upset, don’t I?

THERAPIST: You do.

CLIENT: Yeah, I think that is a – (Pause) Yeah, I think that is a correct observation.

(Pause): [00:27:11 – 00:27:29]

THERAPIST: And I’m not sure if it’s that you don’t know until you come here that you’re upset about things. Maybe you’re fearful of talking about how upset you are.

CLIENT: Yeah, I am. That’s a very interesting question. I think there’s definitely a piece of like – it feels really, really weird to get here and then start talking about how upset I am.

(Pause): [00:27:51 – 00:28:06]

THERAPIST: Why do you think?

(Pause): [00:28:06 – 00:28:20]

CLIENT: I think the first thing that came to mind is it seems rude. That’s sort of a strange response maybe, but –

THERAPIST: You should really not talk about what upsets you in therapy. It’s not appropriate.

CLIENT: (Laughs)

THERAPIST: It’s against all social etiquette.

CLIENT: (Laughs) I think more like, ‘good morning. I’m really upset.’ Or something like that is just very abrupt.

THERAPIST: Well, then you don’t have to say good morning.

CLIENT: (Laughing) Thank you, but that seems rude.

(Pause): [00:29:07 – 00:29:26]

CLIENT: How am I supposed to tell you that I value you as a person without maintaining at least a modicum of social norm?

THERAPIST: Telling me how you feel is valuing me as a person.

CLIENT: Yeah, I feel like that’s a general theme that you’ve suggested a number of times in a variety of different ways. And I really appreciate you reiterating that. I guess not having -you’ve said many times that I have odd feelings about this relationship in general but that feature particularly is sort of like – there’s a sense in which it seems like self-indulgent and out of balance but that’s not exactly the right word. Sort of like I –

(Pause): [00:30:24 – 00:30:37]

CLIENT: Yeah, I see – I have a hard time telling you about my problems as valuing you in some way.

(Pause): [00:30:48 – 00:30:53]

THERAPIST: Well, you’re sharing something with me. (Pause) You’re sharing something about yourself with me.

(Pause): [00:31:00 – 00:32:14]

CLIENT: So like I said, it’s a general feature of which I – yeah, I hear you, really appreciate you phrasing it that way but I don’t know whether I really understand. But I think it’s important in some way. Yeah, so when I was a teenager, I was relatively happy. I wasn’t always happy. One particular example is I was – I had a large crush on this girl who was a friend of mine and it was totally not reciprocated. It’s just the way things go. It’s a fairly common story. Well, you know. It feels very intensely difficult but I didn’t really ever talk about that with anyone. I certainly didn’t talk about it with my parents who I actually think would have wanted to talk about it with me but I don’t understand this thing that you’re saying. I think that’s a part of that.

(Pause): [00:33:47 – 00:34:14]

CLIENT: So my dad is an engineer but his father was a carpenter so he can do things with his hands. So when I was young we built a deck outside the house which was fairly sizable. It was fun and I learned a lot and it was just really nice to spend time with my dad. So we kind of have worked on projects like that for a long time. It’s like, I know how to work on cars because he repaired our cars because he had five children and one job. Plus, I think he liked it. So that was sort of to say that I grew up in this like environment of sort of self-reliance and being able to do things and also stewardship, talking about that being a big thing and so I don’t remember how old I was at the time but I had some report due at school. I must have been like 10 or 12 and I finished it and then I asked my dad to print it and the thing he did at the time was like he would take – maybe I was younger. He would take a 3-1/2” floppy into work and he would print it there. It’s like 7:30 in the evening now. And apparently he didn’t want to go back to work that evening and in his view if I had wanted him to print this I should have mentioned it sometime before right at the moment I wanted to print it when it was due the next day. So his response was essentially, ‘your failure to plan is not my emergency,’ which I think he meant in a very tightly bounded sense as in anticipating one’s needs and asking for help in a time scale that makes it reasonable. But I think I absorbed that perhaps a little differently than he intended. So I clearly remember the story very well a decade and a half later, so it stuck with me a little bit. And those were the things that seemed relevant and that was the end of the things that seemed relevant.

THERAPIST: So aside from what his intention was, what do you think your interpretation was?

CLIENT: I have a hard time remembering exactly what my interpretation at that time was. I think I felt immediately like – in the immediate aftermath – like he didn’t want to help or something like that.

(Pause): [00:37:19 – 00:37:39]

CLIENT: But somehow that – yeah, I don’t remember that part as clearly which is interesting. And it’s sort of – it feels internalized to me as related to like my sort of present approach to my relationship with my advisor. If I can figure it out on my own, I don’t ask him about it. That’s horribly inefficient for a lot of problems, but I also learn a lot in the process. So it seems related somehow to ‘don’t ask for help unless you really, really need it,’ or something like that. I don’t know.

(Pause): [00:38:24 – 00:38:59]

THERAPIST: My thought was well but then it could become a much bigger problem.

CLIENT: (Laughs)

THERAPIST: You wait until you really, really need it.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Then it is an emergency. It could be an emergency.

CLIENT: Well, certainly my frustration with Tanya is that that is exactly how she handles problems.

THERAPIST: How so?

CLIENT: The phrasing I just gave.

(Pause): [00:39:20 – 00:39:33]

CLIENT: Yeah, I don’t know. I think he printed the report, by the way. But that feature is less memorable than just the moment of it.

(Pause): [00:39:56 – 00:40:06]

CLIENT: Yeah, I think maybe I took away from it like, ‘even in asking for help you should be considerate of others,’ or something like that which is kind of a different thing from the thing I just said but seems more relevant to our interaction here where I have a hard time understanding or grasping this thing that you’re saying.

THERAPIST: Right. Because in that construction it’s important to be considerate of others, considerate of others in what way. What are you being considerate of?

CLIENT: Right. Well in – in that context it’s like be considerate of the fact that he may not want to go back into work and so if I rearrange how I do things I can make it easier for him to help me. In the context of relationships with friends it’s normally been something like share with them but also try to share in both directions or something like that. So then in the context of this relationship I’m more lost.

THERAPIST: I was going to say – it’s confusing.

CLIENT: Yes.

THERAPIST: Because your need might feel burdensome to me?

CLIENT: Oh yeah, yeah. I come and talk about all these awful things. That just seems like it ought to be burdensome. Certainly having them is burdensome in some way to me.

(Pause): [00:41:56 – 00:42:07]

THERAPIST: Yeah, I might want to qualify this but my first thought was, ‘it’s burdensome if you don’t know what to do with it. It just feels like sort of indigestible, like swallowing something you can’t digest and is sort of heavy.

(Pause): [00:42:26 – 00:42:35]

CLIENT: But if I can’t digest it, how are you going to?

THERAPIST: I have a different digestive system.

(Pause): [00:42:41 – 00:42:53]

CLIENT: And this sort of brings us back to the things we haven’t touched on for a while but normally I feel like my capacities exceed that of the people around me. I don’t necessarily feel that about you but it’s sort of like the general stuff again. Your response is still the same in some way –

THERAPIST: That’s a very good point. Not that I feel that your capacities in this respect exceed mine -

CLIENT: (Laughs)

THERAPIST: But that you’re feeling about that fits in well with what we’re talking about.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: That if you feel that you can’t take care of something, that somebody else might actually be able to.

CLIENT: Yeah. It seems unlikely to me. Not always, like there are certain circumstances in which I recognize other people having, being superior or being able to do something or handle something that I can’t but that’s not the default setting, or something.

(Pause): [00:43:53 – 00:44:24]

THERAPIST: It makes it tough to have faith in other people.

(Pause): [00:44:24 – 00:44Z:43]

CLIENT: Well I’m pretty good at sounding out most people to get a sense of what they can handle which compensates for that difficulty I think. In general, I don’t feel like I’m – it’s okay to sound you out – which brings us back to that other subject, so again, I’m sort of lost in this particular relationship. I think revealing larger features of my interaction with other people which is –

THERAPIST: I absolutely agree. I absolutely agree. James, we’ve actually run out of time for today.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: I hope you have a good Thanksgiving.

CLIENT: Thank you. I hope you do also.

THERAPIST: Thank you. And I’ll see you next Wednesday.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Okay, great.

CLIENT: The following Wednesday if all goes well, I won’t be here.

THERAPIST: Okay.

CLIENT: Because I’ll be defending Tuesday.

THERAPIST: Okay. Okay, great. I’ll note that.

CLIENT: I’ll let you know.

THERAPIST: And remind me next Wednesday if that’s okay.

CLIENT: Yeah. Thank you.

THERAPIST: Bye-bye.

END TRANSCRIPT