TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

(Silence through 00:02:00)

THERAPIST: Hi.

CLIENT: Hi. I’m glad to see you. How was your trip?

THERAPIST: Oh, it was very good. Thank you.

CLIENT: Good.

THERAPIST: Thank you very much.

CLIENT: Did you get engaged recently?

THERAPIST: A couple months ago, actually.

CLIENT: Yeah. Congratulations.

THERAPIST: Thank you. Probably about three months ago. Thank you. Did you notice it before or did you just notice recently?

CLIENT: I noticed at the beginning of January.

THERAPIST: Yeah. November. It was sometime in November.

CLIENT: That’s great.

THERAPIST: Thank you.

CLIENT: I’m very happy for you.

THERAPIST: Thank you.

CLIENT: We had two sessions in the same week last time I saw you. Did they feel very different to you from each other?

THERAPIST: Not from previous sessions. Did they feel different from each other?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Meaning those two sessions?

CLIENT: Those two sessions.

THERAPIST: Not to me. Not noticeably different than comparing the other sessions. [00:03:00]

CLIENT: I see.

THERAPIST: There’s no real variation in sessions.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: I didn’t think those two sessions were dramatically different from the two other sessions we might pick.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Did they feel different to you though?

CLIENT: Oh, yeah. So, I went home and I slept for the next two days. I was pretty sick at our second sessions last week. (pause) It’s not that I didn’t feel that it was useful. I just felt like it was very different over here and I was kind of curious about how different it felt over there.

THERAPIST: It was different because we met twice or because you were sick?

CLIENT: Because I was sick. Yeah. No. The day felt very different to me because I felt like I couldn’t engage further at a certain point. (pause) You start shutting down the external systems or the least necessary systems first to maintain power in the core or something. [00:04:15]

THERAPIST: Yeah. It didn’t strike me. I mean I knew you weren’t feeling well, but it probably felt more different than you, from your perspective because you were the one not feeling well.

CLIENT: Okay. Just curious. (pause)

THERAPIST: I’m glad you’re feeling better.

CLIENT: Thanks. Me too. It was just a cold. I slept it off. (Silence from 00:04:50 to 00:05:35)

Yeah, I felt that session was interesting. There were two points that sort of stand out now. One was sort of suggested that my mother was lost when I was growing up and that may have had some effect. That was a very interesting suggestion. I’m still am not exactly sure how to engage with it. I thought it was very interesting though. [00:06:00]

The other was I sort of, I said something like I didn’t need an advisor when I came to Illinois which I don’t think that I actually believe that. I think that’s actually symptomatic of the mental state I was in. It’s like I think you won’t be surprised to say that I desperately want an advisor, but if I’m told I can’t have it, then I don’t need that anyway. It’s fine. It’s sort of like a shell to protect the desires or something like that. (pause) [00:07:00]

I felt like some of those walls were up during our session last week and I guess I’m not surprised to hear you say well, that’s not unusual in our sessions.

THERAPIST: You felt more walls were up?

CLIENT: Yeah, but not all of them were up, so I felt like we still had productive conversations and I wasn’t hiding anything in particular. There’s nothing I’m protecting other than I couldn’t chase down things when you sort of were bringing them up if that makes sense. (pause)

THERAPIST: You were very aware of feeling different.

CLIENT: Yes. (Silence from 00:07:52 to 00:08:52) Tanya has been self-injuring again. She had cuts on her thighs, so that’s happening.

THERAPIST: Did she stop for a while and then just start?

CLIENT: Yes. Yeah and it kind of comes and goes. It’s more present recently. She’s also been suicidal off and on in the last couple of weeks, like three weeks or so. So, yes. I was sick and you saw me and then that weekend she was, I was better, but she was suicidal and kind of not as bad as it was this time last year, but suicidal. [00:10:00]

I don’t know. By Tuesday, it was sort of gone again. It’s like as Dr. Jannis (sp?) suggested, this is a very common pattern when things start to get better and then the suicidal ideation comes back. Part of, it’s part of the healing process or something. It’s plausible. It’s plausible that’s what’s going on in this case. I certainly believe him that that’s a thing he has seen before that is commonly observed, but...

THERAPIST: Are you skeptical?

CLIENT: Not of, again, not of that being a common pattern, but I’m skeptical of any single interpretation of Tanya’s illness or a projection of what the future will look like. (Silence from 00:11:15 to 00:12:00)

THERAPIST: Are you worried?

CLIENT: (pause) Not, I don’t know. Not any more than normal, I guess. I guess I’ve been something like afraid that she’s going to die or is going to continue in this pattern indefinitely. For long enough that or she might die now is not particularly scary. [00:13:00]

That’s not exactly true. The other feature about fears, I mean we’ve talked about fears some, but it’s probably the emotion I have the most difficult time recognizing in myself. Even more so than other emotions, my response to fear is to suppress it or I like the word crush because fear is a thing that stops you from doing what needs to be done. These are things you need. [00:14:00]

I’ve dealt with it, but not by like spending a lot of time in it or overcoming it or eliminating it. I know you actually asked are you worried, but that seemed related or it did when I started to answer.

THERAPIST: So, fearing that fear can be paralyzing.

CLIENT: I’m sorry. Can you say that again?

THERAPIST: Fear that fear can be paralyzing. You said something that needs to be crushed that prevents you from doing what you need to be done is a fear that fear can be paralyzing. [00:15:00]

CLIENT: (Laughter) Maybe.

THERAPIST: That’s what came to my mind.

CLIENT: The maybe was not meant to be dismissive. It was more like you’re suggesting like second order fear of fear itself. It’s part of the discussions I have, I think, a very developed ability to crush it. Second order. Probably. I was talking to my friend, Cody, who I played volleyball with in college. He’s been doing tai-chi recently, so he’s kind of drifted from martial art to martial art. Tai-chi is different from the ones he’s ever done, so he said he was standing there with this relatively elderly master and he said push on my chest, so Cody did. Then he said now stop pushing on my chest. Cody said okay, I can do that and stopped and the guy said no, really, stop pushing on my chest. So, they did that for about five minutes before Cody finally figured out how to stop pushing on his chest. [00:16:30]

I can’t remember exactly what the master said to him, but it was something like you don’t have to be afraid of that and Cody said his response was I’m not afraid internally and then he said oh, no, I’m terrified. So, I feel like that’s... I understood that experience I think, although that moment of realization of I’m terrified is a difficult one to find. Sorry. You’re looking at me very intently. [00:17:30]

THERAPIST: I mean it was a striking thing that you said.

CLIENT: It’s okay. I don’t mind you looking intently. I just found it amusing in that moment. It’s sort of like imagining when you’re looking at me that intently it’s like I’m wondering what you are thinking about. I feel like I look at things intently when I’ve found a really interesting problem or something like that.

THERAPIST: I was thinking about terrified in particular.

CLIENT: It’s a good word. (pause) [00:18:45]

Yeah. I can’t remember the source, but I saw a suggestion recently that lack of trust is fear which I think we have talked about in some ways before, but it’s sort of (pause) I’m not sure it’s really strictly a one to one thing. It sounded about right which would suggest that I have a lot of fear because I don’t trust a whole lot of things. (Silence from 00:19:50 to 00:20:50)

THERAPIST: I started thinking that about blind trust and how that’s sort of a product of fear too. You know, like I started thinking like you were describing how the leader of the organization said don’t read this, don’t read that. That not reading that is a symptom of fear too, because you’re afraid of what you’re going to learn. So, there’s a blind trust. The blindness is, I guess, the fear.

CLIENT: That’s really interesting. How much space is there in the middle? (pause) [00:22:00]

Yeah, it’s really helpful. Cody talked about, so Cody and I are friends for a lot of reasons. One of them is that we just have a very similar world view and that’s I think is constructed out of a lot of experiences that are similar, but at different times in our lives. He had a near death experience his freshman year of college. I was like a sophomore in high school at the time. So, he’s a few years older than I am. I think that trauma shook him in some ways, but more particularly here, we both have a sort of strong awareness of our circumstances that surround us. [00:23:00]

You know, some people will walk anywhere in a city at any time of day in a blind trust that everything will be okay. Some people are more alert and some people are perhaps hyper alert. We straddle that line, I think between alert and hyper alert which maybe means we’re far in to the hyper alert section and unwilling to admit that. I’m not really sure. He was suggesting in talking about that anecdote that I just told you that this was a thing that was just like really deep seeded in his family. He’s got an 8 month old son now and so he said, you know, visiting his grandfather with his son, his grandfather who used to be an amateur boxer, talking about oh, he’s got good hands. He’s got good reflexes. He said that was cute the first time. It was kind of fun. [00:24:00]

After a while, it sort of struck Cody as odd. What a strange way to be interacting with a small child. It’s like related to his own deep seeded fear or something at all times. His father moved from Texas, which is kind of on the coast to [], which is kind in the mountains. He bought a gun. They’re all very liberal pacifists, although they’re also a little aggressive. It’s this very weird thing for his father to have a gun. He said it’s all about fear. That’s very clearly why he did this. There’s something about living in that part of the country that makes him uncomfortable, although, it’s much safer than where they used to live. [00:25:00]

You’re suggesting, so, I have sort of been saying this is obviously a deep seeded part of me also. It’s one of the reasons that he and I are friends is that shared approach to the world. So, you suggesting that fear is a can come in the other direction as blind trust. My mother is terrified of a lot of things.

THERAPIST: I’m not surprised.

CLIENT: (Laughter) I didn’t really think you would be.

THERAPIST: I mean, it’s very fitting of your description of her. I don’t mean to judge.

CLIENT: No. That’s okay. It really, you know, I’m telling you because I sort of had a things came together realization that’s worth sharing. It doesn’t go much farther than that. [00:26:00]

Somehow that all made sense at the same time. It’s like yes, if we both grew up in environments where the adults around us are a particular kind of terrified or a particular kind of afraid, it makes sense that it would produce a similar response in us.

THERAPIST: What kinds of things? When you say your mother was very, very fearful, what kinds of things?

CLIENT: So, it’s a little bit hard because she has many of the same beliefs, but I think she is less fearful now than she was when she was younger in a lot of ways. [00:27:00]

In general, I think she’s afraid of (pause) something like moral decay in America. Like, if we don’t hold vigorously on to a very tight set of beliefs, everything will rot and that will cause, I don’t know exactly what. Maybe the destruction of everything. America ceasing to be whatever it is that is good. That’s sort of one thing which I guess many different specific fears are subsumed in to.

THERAPIST: Would the sort of outcome be kind of chaos? [00:28:00]

CLIENT: Interesting. Either chaos or something like an authoritarian control by the wrong people.

THERAPIST: Like a cult.

CLIENT: No, those are the right people because you know you don’t realize it’s authoritarian, right?

THERAPIST: Or you don’t realize that it’s wrong.

CLIENT: Well. You know, this is the thing, right? Most cults are built around some good premise with a whole lot of bad things. It’s like I don’t know that you would say that relationships are wrong, but you would say that abusive relationships are bad or I would hope that you would say something like that. [00:29:00]

I don’t know what I think about religion more generally, but cults have a tendency to be abusive religious organizations. You know, the people who are in the cult of anti-cultism might go so far as to say that all religions are cults in some way, but maybe that’s the cult of that religion. It’s very complicated. So, like there are people who spend all of their time getting other people out of cults. That seem like it requires a very similar mindset to the people who are in the cults of just like undiluted commitment to the cause. It’s not that I think that they’re not doing good things necessarily. I just think that at some point it drifts too far. [00:30:00]

Maybe now we’ve drifted from talking about my mother to a particular fear about myself which is for the right cause, particularly when I was younger, I would do anything which I was younger a year or two ago.

THERAPIST: What comes to mind? Any specifics?

CLIENT: About?

THERAPIST: When you said I would do anything for a particular cause.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: What comes to mind?

CLIENT: I guess the most recent story; I can’t remember which hospitalization it was. I think it was down in Englewood. That would have been maybe her second hospitalization. It felt like she went in on a Friday morning, like early in the morning and no one saw her on Friday. No one saw her on Saturday or Sunday either. So, she has been there for three days. Knowing that the first time a large part of, she was out in three days because a large part of what was helpful was going there and there being another option. Things got done very quickly, so I felt like not only were they not treating her. [00:31:30]

They were making it less likely that she would allow herself or decide to be hospitalized again which to me said they were making the large scale problem dramatically worse. If you close off that outlet, what is left? I thought briefly about whether it was necessary or useful to forcibly remove her from the premises.

THERAPIST: Meaning the hospital?

CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah, the secure ward of the hospital.

THERAPIST: Because then that option would then be, feel more feasible.

CLIENT: You know.

THERAPIST: I understand.

CLIENT: (Laughter) You know, I won’t go so far as to say that there was a, it was more like this is not helping. She needs to not be here than a yeah. I think there are a lot of good reasons that I didn’t do it.

THERAPIST: I understand this wasn’t like okay, now I’m going to do this because this is a great idea. You were talking about an idea that you had. [00:33:00]

CLIENT: It was definitely an idea. You know. She needs to be out. It will take three days if she signs a release to get out. Maybe I should light the hospital on fire and then go take her. I think before the question you had stopped me, well, that would probably hurt a lot of other people. Not worth it. That stopped me. Anyway. That’s just the first one that comes to mind. I have no idea how that strikes you, but (pause) I guess I want to impress on you that if I had not had one or more objections, I could have done it. [00:34:00]

If I had believed more firmly that would be helpful. I guess that’s a major objection that I don’t think that this is going to help in the long run.

THERAPIST: You were giving this example. If I remember this correctly, you were giving this as an example as sort of people who take people out of cults are can themselves sort of create a cult.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: So, I guess I was trying to then put that together with what you were describing as an example.

CLIENT: Maybe that’s why that particular example was fresh enough. You know, when I was younger, like 16 or something, I really felt like war was an important thing. I mean there are people who want to destroy your country. You have to go kill them. That belief horrifies me now. You know. [00:35:00]

Maybe you’ve read [] (sp?) or maybe you know something about the holocaust and one of the particularly horrifying features of the German people is that it was relatively easy to get them to do these horrible things by telling them that it was hard, but that it must be done. I’m definitely, naturally, sensitive to that kind of argumentation. I think I have sufficient skepticism at this point in my life to not be that susceptible to it. It’s not totally clear in this. All this thinking about the cult has sort of shaken it somewhat. Shaken me somewhat in the sense of like clearly it still has effects on my world view and belief structure, but I don’t recognize all of them yet. I’m sorry. That really has drifted to a lot of topics all at once. [00:36:15]

THERAPIST: I think they’re all related.

CLIENT: They feel related.

THERAPIST: Because you started talking about fear and that of all of the emotions that are difficult for you, fear is really the most difficult. Then you started talking about how your mother was fearful.

CLIENT: Well, you know, I had prompting, sure.

THERAPIST: Well, I didn’t prompt you by saying by the way, is your mother fearful? I said blind trust.

CLIENT: Fair enough.

THERAPIST: You associated it to your mother being fearful.

CLIENT: Fair enough. Yes, I really did.

THERAPIST: Did you feel like I was pulling for is your mother fearful? [00:37:00]

CLIENT: No. Not at all. No. Not at all. I thought you were, you know, (pause) I don’t know if the word pleased comes to mind, but that’s not the right shade of meaning at that response.

THERAPIST: Do you feel like I’m looking for something? Do you feel like I’m digging for something specific?

CLIENT: So, I expect at this point that you have some set of theories about me because that’s how I interact with the world. I expect you in some ways to be digging for evidence that supports or undermines those theories. Not in a, not in a like cherry picking evidence to confirm theories that are wrong, but like actually probing for what’s going on. [00:38:15]

THERAPIST: So, would I be pleased with that particular thing about your mother, per se or just...

CLIENT: In that case, I think, sometimes I also think that you, in your position of not being me, know different things about me than I know about myself. I also expect you to be pleased when I come to recognize something that you have already recognized, because I feel like that’s part of why we’re here. I think it was more that feature. [00:39:00]

THERAPIST: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have thought of that. I wouldn’t have thought that was why you thought I’d be pleased.

CLIENT: Oh. Okay. So, now I’m curious. How far from how you approach this endeavor are my feelings about it from, how far apart are we on that subject?

THERAPIST: In terms of what you said about theories?

CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah.

THERAPIST: I mean I was thinking about it that certainly a theory is a way or organizing information.

CLIENT: Absolutely.

THERAPIST: Maybe even more accurately organizing experience. Information is a part of experience. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. I certainly think about, first of all, I think we’re emotionally better off if we have a way of organizing experiences in a meaningful way. [00:40:00]

I mean if there’s no organization to our experience, it’s just, we just experience chaos. So, I think from the psychological perspective that we all need that. We need that process. Things just can’t seem random. Our feelings are just, from one moment to the next, random and there needs to be a way. We need to have a way of organizing our experience psychologically and then certainly, in this endeavor, I think about my organizing my own experience of you and helping you to organize your experience. And to the more sort of not necessarily complexity to it, but the more meat to it, the better in a sense. If you have a very, not for the sake of embellishing, but if you have something that is very, very sparse, there’s nothing. It’s flimsy.

CLIENT: Yeah. You have very little explanatory power. Yeah. [00:41:00]

THERAPIST: Certainly one way of organizing experience, which therapy gets a think rightfully bad rap is everything is attributable to one’s childhood and there’s a one to one correlation.

CLIENT: (Laughter).

THERAPIST: You feel this way because this happened. You feel this way because this happened. I don’t ascribe to that at all. I think it’s ridiculous. I do think what happens to us matters, even if it’s because how we organize it retrospectively. I think all of our ways of organizing our experiences have to include something about our past, even if it’s about our past reinterpreted. That’s why I think that understanding what happened or your experiences itself is a bit of a misnomer because it’s assuming that these thing happen and now you’re understanding it retrospectively versus the understand as part of the organizing. I think that way about it. That was kind of a long winded answer.

CLIENT: No. It was great. Thank you.

THERAPIST: Sure. [00:42:00] (pause)

CLIENT: I’m not really sure what to say in response to that. Thanks. I appreciate your sharing your views on the subject. I like them. I’m not really surprised to find that I like them at this point because I feel like if I disliked them strongly what would have stopped us from meeting at some point. [00:43:00]

I like the complexity too. The world is complex.

THERAPIST: Well, we do look at the .

CLIENT: I felt like we were close to being out of time.

THERAPIST: We’re close. That clock is like a couple minutes fast.

CLIENT: Okay. (pause) Yeah, I don’t have anything else to say now. I’m sort of dealing with things. So, I’m going to ask this. Do you feel happy and fulfilled in your life? [00:44:15]

THERAPIST: I do.

CLIENT: That’s fantastic.

THERAPIST: What brought up that question?

CLIENT: It’s just one of the questions that I have about you.

THERAPIST: Did you have a thought of how I’d answer that?

CLIENT: I hoped that you would say yes because I want you to be happy and fulfilled. On the other hand, if you really hated your life, I don’t know that you would really tell me because I feel like you have a very high level professionalism. [00:45:00]

THERAPIST: So, it’s not clear whether you would actually get an answer.

CLIENT: I feel like I got an answer. You sort of, I don’t know. Either you hate your life and really, really, really strongly suppress it, which I don’t think is the case about you at all. Or, you are happy and fulfilled in your life.

THERAPIST: So, it seemed like I am so either thinking it will.

CLIENT: Both you seem like you are and that the response was sort of genuine and immediate. You didn’t have to sit and think about it for a while. You’re just sort of yeah, of course I am. I don’t think you can give that answer unless it’s true or you’re really practiced at lying hard. You know. There’s a class of answers that you could have given that would have given no information content. I’m glad you’re happy. [00:46:00]

THERAPIST: Well, on that note we need to stop. I will see you next week.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Okay, great. Okay.

CLIENT: Thank you.

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