TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

[00:02:22]

CLIENT: Hello.

THERAPIST: Hi.

CLIENT: So, I came here early, thinking that if I sat in the building for a little while, I might be able to speak more freely at the beginning, so. Eh, it my answer on the success of that. Anyway… (pause) So, I’m conflicted as to how much preface to give the following questions, so I’m going to give them exactly this preference. So, have you gotten married?

THERAPIST: Yes. [00:03:22]

CLIENT: Congratulations.

THERAPIST: Thank you.

CLIENT: Is your spouse biologically male or female?

THERAPIST: Where did that what does that it’s an interesting question.

CLIENT: (laughs nervously) I’m happy to talk about why.

THERAPIST: Yeah. I’m happy to answer it. I’m just curious.

CLIENT: Oh, okay. I guess can you you sort of phrased half a question. Would you mind like, so where does that come from, is that the -

THERAPIST: Yeah, like what what is your thinking in asking that question or where do you of all the questions.

CLIENT: I don’t know.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Is, you know, I’m reminded of your response to my question of why did you become a therapist. I’m not exactly sure I can access the internal state.

THERAPIST: Right, right, yeah that’s true.

CLIENT: But it is a thing about which I have been curious for a long time. So, why am I curious about that in particular? I think it’s an important part of identity. I’m sort of curious as to who you are, or something like that. Not that it so the thing is, like it’s not actually important to me, what the answer is, but I’m curious about it. Does that? [00:04:44]

THERAPIST: I mean basically, you’re curious if I’m gay or straight, I mean crudely, that’s the terms people use.

CLIENT: Yes, I’m curious about that also. (pause) Yeah, I think yes is a sufficient answer there, yeah.

THERAPIST: Is that something that you tend to be curious in general about with people or is there something particular about me that you think about?

CLIENT: In general, I’m curious, because it’s sort of an important part of people’s identity. Most people, there’s not a lot of question one way or the other, for one reason or another. There’s context to meeting them, so it’s clear relatively quickly. The context to meeting you is that you are an intelligent woman in and around academia, who clearly espouses some feminist views and also has interests in lesbian psychology, and lives in the city of Denver. So, I would say the odds are eh, don’t know. Certainly being pregnant raises a different set of questions, but it doesn’t actually speak to this question, because there’s… But answering this question then tells me a lot about your pregnancy, I think. [00:06:26]

THERAPIST: How so?

CLIENT: Well, so if you were gay, then you were trying to get pregnant. If you were not, you were not necessarily.

THERAPIST: But it sounds like the books, there’s something about the books that made you think about it, looking at my reading books.

CLIENT: Oh, no, sorry, I gesture them because it’s easy.

THERAPIST: But you were referring to seeing my books on lesbian psychology.

CLIENT: Sorry, that’s also on your interests on your website.

THERAPIST: Oh, is it?

CLIENT: Or, on one of them.

THERAPIST: Maybe.

CLIENT: Maybe I’ve conflated the two a little bit but yeah, you definitely you know, you have The Advocate in your office, that’s the name of the magazine.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: But, yeah, the books also. I told you, (shaky voice) when we first started that they were like distracting in some sense, because they’re there and they tell me something about you. It’s like this whole other field of information that is open to me here that wasn’t when I was sitting over there. [00:07:33]

THERAPIST: Right, right. Well, he is biologically male.

CLIENT: Okay. Were you trying to get pregnant?

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: Congratulations.

THERAPIST: Thank you.

[PAUSE: 00:07:50 to 00:08:17]

CLIENT: Yeah, I think that concludes my question. Oh, there’s the other one, the other big one. So, my mother was also 42, or she had a child at 42 also, but that was her fifth child so it’s a different story. You know, that’s a preface to saying, like I know something about pregnancy at your age and I also know something about first pregnancies, because both of my sisters have had a first pregnancy and a lot of my friends. So, are you okay, has this been hard? Is the baby okay?

THERAPIST: I’m really okay, but it is my first pregnancy, but I’m curious about you’re assuming that it is.

CLIENT: Oh, I asked you.

THERAPIST: Oh, did you already ask?

CLIENT: Yeah, I asked if this was your first child and you said it was your first biological one.

THERAPIST: That’s right, I did say that.

CLIENT: You had a couple of stepchildren, which is why I asked if you had gotten married already, because that sort of implies that you had.

THERAPIST: That I had gotten married. Well, I think I’ve referred to them as my stepchildren for a while but yeah. [00:09:19]

CLIENT: Okay. That I wasn’t sure about.

THERAPIST: Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: In what ways would you think about my not being okay?

CLIENT: To hear other people tell it, pregnancy can be challenging, physically and emotionally. You’ve been doing it. I feel like I don’t need to tell you, like what, what might have been hard. You know, the small risks of a wide number of diseases go up, both with first pregnancies and with older mothers and fathers. So, those are sort of the medically, I guess, is the one word answer.

THERAPIST: So, am I okay, is the baby okay.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm. [00:10:22]

CLIENT: Yeah. (pause) Yesterday, you suggested that I was protective of you, and that’s certainly true. I am also concerned about you and curious about you. These are so, um. And today, I feel like instead of not expressing my curiosity, in order to protect you from it, I am expressing it and letting you to respond how ever you want to. So. But this was the harder thing that I didn’t do yesterday.

THERAPIST: Harder? [00:11:25]

CLIENT: Harder than telling you about knowing some more things about you than I had.

THERAPIST: And harder because you’re worried about asking too much?

CLIENT: Yeah, yeah, that’s yeah. I think that covers most of it.

THERAPIST: What does it feel like, knowing more?

CLIENT: It feels nice. There’s some relief, because nothing catastrophic has happened, by virtue of asking. There’s also, you know, it’s I am glad that you are doing okay. I’m glad to know a little bit more about you, not that it tells me in some sense, not that it tells me very essential about you, but they also seem like… I guess I am of two minds and I’m expressing both simultaneously as to whether I know you or not. I feel very much like I do know you. One of the interesting things about reading some of the things you’ve written is that your voice is very consistent between those different my different exposures to you.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm. [00:12:41] (pause)

CLIENT: So, thank you for answering the questions.

THERAPIST: Sure. Does knowing any of those answers sort of change the way you think about me or fill in a picture differently? (pause)

CLIENT: Only knowing that you were trying to get pregnant, when you were not yet engaged. That, I guess raises the other questions. That’s very interesting. That presumably says something about your interests or values, but I don’t know exactly what and I’m curious about it. It’s not that I had left that outside of the possibilities, but it was not one that I had sort of thought was high in likelihood. Anyway… [00:14:40]

THERAPIST: It seems different than your interest or values.

CLIENT: Historically, certainly, but one of the reasons that we’re here is that my values seem to be in some sort of flux or a logjam or something.

THERAPIST: How?

CLIENT: Or to have hit a point where too many of them conflict for me to be able to figure out what I should or want to do. (pause) And it also sort of raises the possibility that this is a longstanding desire of yours, that has finally come to pass. If that’s the case, I’m very happy for you. I’m still happy for you if it’s not. [00:16:17] (pause)

THERAPIST: It sounds like you’re working hard to try to put my experience together somehow, see how it all fits together.

CLIENT: Yeah. Is that you phrase that like that’s not something that you would assume.

THERAPIST: Not necessarily. I’m just kind of trying to name it.

CLIENT: Okay, naming is good. Yeah, definitely, that’s sort of like… On most subjects, I am fairly curious and you’re a subject that has grown increasingly important to me, so I’ve perhaps grown increasingly curious, but it’s not like I mean these are all longstanding curiosities and the shortest standing ones relate to your pregnancy, because that’s the newest thing on the list, I guess. So I guess I am also seeking greater intimacy with you, I think is a way of describing that. [00:18:04] (pause)

Well, I do think that people can have a great deal of intimacy in entirely anonymous situations or nominally anonymous. That’s (pause) I don’t know how to end that sentence, so I guess I’m just acknowledging if it’s possible in other ways then, knowing more about you, but this is a way in which I am seeking intimacy I guess.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

[PAUSE: 00:19:11 to 00:19:51]

Do you feel like it’s something that you’re seeking because it’s important in its own right, given sort of our relationship and work together? Do you feel like it’s also something that you’re seeking because it feels like it’s lacking in other areas of your life?

CLIENT: Yes. I think that’s exactly right. And in some sense it’s important in our work because it’s lacking in other areas, both. You’ve suggested for some time that our work can help with loneliness, I think. I interpret that to mean both immediately and also in a developmental sense. I told you about the guy who says you make your own luck yesterday, but there’s a sense in which this project is one of remaking luck. To hang on to that all the time, more than because I’m really attached to the idea. I can see, you also see at that time, regarding trust, practice was a thing that we could do. So I think that’s all of that is playing into this. [00:21:11]

THERAPIST: So maybe it would also be helpful to focus on that loneliness and what feels like is lacking in your life.

CLIENT: Yeah, that’s right. I guess I did open saying I was conflicted as to how much preface to give, but one of the prefaces I thought about was saying I feel very lonely. But, I felt like that, saying that at the beginning colors the context of the questions, in a sense of like, I don’t know, asking you to do this thing because I am lonely or something, as opposed to like that might put more pressure on you to respond in a particular fashion, which (nervous chuckle) I haven’t asked many of these things before because I don’t know where your boundaries are, and I certainly want to ask them in a context that might place more pressure on your boundaries in some sense. Not that I actually think that you can’t take care of yourself. I’m pretty confident that you’d refuse to answer if you didn’t want to answer, or demur in another way that was not quite so, harsh perhaps, but… Sorry, that’s a lot of talking, sort of tangentially related to the suggestion you actually made, of talking about the loneliness, but…

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm. [00:23:15]

CLIENT: So my (hesitant) I’ve been talking to both my parents and my older sister a lot more in the last several months. My parents, because so, I see my friend Franco a couple times a week. We go for a walk on Tuesdays and then we and Tanya have a game’s night on Saturdays, and that’s really good, but we do particularly the walk we do regularly, because we sort of schedule it and do it. So, I was coming to see you regularly and so I was seeing you ever week and I see my advisor every week, but let me talk to my parents. I haven’t a lot for a long time, because they never call me because they don’t want to bother me or something. I’ve never been quite clear why. I don’t call them, in part for the same reason, because I sort of know what their daily schedule is like and often the times that it’s convenient for me to call, it’s dinnertime at home. You know, so I have been talking to them more frequently and that’s been both good and bad, it’s been.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm. [00:24:30]

CLIENT: It’s hard to (pause) it’s hard to talk to people every week and not talk about some of the most important things. I don’t talk with my parents or with my sister about divorce. I mentioned that I had talked some with my dad but he brought it up. Anyway, so Vivienne, I’ve been talking to more frequently because I actually can’t remember if I told you this, but so her husband is a police officer in the town that we grew up in and one of his other officer’s wives was hit by a car and killed while running along a road near their house, in January I think. Did I tell you that?

THERAPIST: Mm-mm. [00:25:42]

CLIENT: Okay. So that was really traumatic for Vivienne, who knew her, and also, I mean there’s like 16 police officers in the town, so it’s not a large town anyway. So that really like shook Vivienne in many of the ways that, you know, nearby death shakes people. I expect you’re used to those more so than I am, sort of like the idea that like this is it and it could end any time. I felt like she often is contained by her fears or apprehensions or something, so as a result of that has sort of been working very hard to not put off things that she wants to do. It’s a horrible situation but that’s a really good thing that has come out of it for her. So anyway, so she’s been calling me regularly. We set a time and she calls me, because that’s something she really wants, and I want it also, but I have a hard time telling her the important things. [00:26:55]

Anyway, so we talked yesterday. I don’t know why I’ve given you quite so much introduction to all of that. It seemed important to say, but less so in retrospect. Yeah, I don’t really have anything more to say than we talked some yesterday. I’m very curious about her internal life and what’s going on for her and talking about that with her. She’s curious about mine also but I’m more reticent to discuss it. So, we talked briefly about that at the end and she sort of said well, I feel like I’ve talked this whole week, or this, this all the time today. Not all the time, but I’m curious about what’s going on with you. Yeah, but I feel like this happens a lot. I was like yeah, that’s probably not just you. Okay. [00:28:02]

(shaky voice) Learned early on, I can remember conversations with my dad about this action when I was a teenager, to how to prompt someone else to talk so that I didn’t have to, which makes for really awkward conversations with my dad because we’re both doing that and so neither of us is talking. We’re getting better at that. Anyway, so she concurred that not only was that what was going on, but she had noticed that that was going on also, it’s just that she was not able to stop it from happening in some sense. So that was nice.

THERAPIST: What do you think that reticence is about?

CLIENT: So, when you came up the stairs to the office today, I have in my pocket, an envelope, so on the envelope, sometimes I write down things that I think about, that I want to talk with you about. So, I had that envelope in my hand at the time and my impulse on hearing a noise in the area, was to put away the envelope. I’ve realized that’s not really an answer to the question, but… (pause) You know, I’m actually willing to take the envelope out of my pocket and hand it to you and let you read it. It’s written so that you couldn’t really infer everything that I am thinking from it. That’s part of the point of writing it, the way that’s written. But I’d be very reluctant to show it to anyone else, let alone let them touch it. [00:30:23]

THERAPIST: Have you ever thought about why your dad is like that?

CLIENT: Yes, but I’ve never really come up with an answer. Part of the answer, my dad, I think would give to that, is that he doesn’t have very much to say. I don’t think that’s really true but I’m pretty sure that’s the answer he’s given several times, to sort of related questions. So I don’t know. You know, I’m again, reminded of your answer to the question yesterday. You aren’t sure that you ever really have access to the internal state or the internal reasons for why you became a therapist. That idea is one that I have been thinking about in the preceding week, not in those terms at all, but… [00:31:51]

So there’s one of the fundamental ideas underlying quantum mechanics is that every molecule has a single function that describes it perfectly, and we call that the wave function for sort of historical reasons. We can never directly access the wave function but if we could, it would tell us everything about the molecule, literally everything that there is to know. Mathematically, we can write this function, we do write this function, and then we can operate on it with other functions, and that returns back the wave function unchanged, but it also gives us a number or some other value. And for every function with which we can operate on the wave function, there must be a value, and that value must be observable in some way. This is sort of like a fundamental idea. So, our access to the wave function is only through perturbations of some kind. We apply an electric field or a magnetic field to the thing of interest and we are able to measure, usually an energy difference, and that tells us something about the internal state.

I don’t know if that was clear at all but it seemed like it was a way for me, of apprehending that, or of relating to the idea that the circumstances that I am now in, and my responses to them, particularly my responses to them but knowing the circumstances also, tell us something about my internal state and the structure of my internal whatever. [00:33:50]

So I feel like one of the tools that you often, or have at least a few times used, is to change the function that you’re applying, is asking how I think about someone else having a similar idea, or something like why do you think your dad does that, sort of. (shaky breath) Having said that, it seemed a lot more useful in my head than it did to say out loud.

THERAPIST: It started with my asking the question, what do you think the reticence is about.

CLIENT: Yeah, and I… (pause) The reticence is about trying to protect myself. From what? I don’t have a good answer to that. I feel like there is a good answer to it but I don’t know what it is, so.

THERAPIST: Do you ever tell Tanya that you’re lonely? [00:35:39]

CLIENT: Not often. (pause) She’s told me a couple of times that she’s lonely. (pause) You know, there’s a sense in which I used to trust her a great deal and was not lonely with her, and that’s really not the case now. [00:36:46]

You know, I feel like it takes a lot of trust or something, for me to share my internal life and I don’t know why. I think it’s important for us to talk about but I don’t have an answer.

[PAUSE: 00:37:16 to 00:38:18]

Yeah, my thoughts have petered out and I’m just sad.

THERAPIST: Can you tell me about that sadness?

CLIENT: I think it relates to the idea that I have lost a great deal of intimacy in my life and I don’t see any real prospect for getting it back. There’s a sense in which I don’t want it back with Tanya and that’s horrible, I think, but… (pause) I don’t know, you believe in the truth so there’s the truth, but I still want it.

THERAPIST: You don’t want it with Tanya because you don’t think it’s possible or because you feel you’ve been burned and you don’t know if you can trust again? [00:39:44]

CLIENT: So those two are kind of entangled. So I don’t… (pause) Part of the trust for me was thinking she was a particular person or a kind of person or something like that, and I don’t know that that’s true. I’m not sure I can place my trust in a person who’s intermittently trustworthy. (pause) Or at least, that’s I mean that’s, you know, like… (sighs) If you treated trust as a signal and it does this, I feel like, or trustworthiness as a signal, it’s always going to vary a little bit because people can handle different things from day to day. But with Tanya it varies, you know, it drops below the baseline for periods of time unpredictably, and even if it were entirely predictable, the result of it’s a sense in which I can ask you these questions at the beginning of the session, because I trust that you can take care of yourself. Not like sometimes or not like if I’m cautious enough and framing it in the right way enough, you can take care of yourself, or like actually trust that you can take care of yourself. But if the signal is intermittent, then I can only trust when I was reliably predict where we are in some sense, but that’s not really it’s not the same thing. So I guess that speaks to, I don’t think it’s possible with her, or for me with her.

THERAPIST: I guess I want to understand what trust means for you. So if you trusted her in a period where she’s not trustworthy, what then is the result? [00:42:37]

CLIENT: Yeah, that seems like a really good question. (pause) You know it seems like the sort of large scale answer is one or both of us gets hurt. I’m not sure that’s specific enough.

THERAPIST: Well it’s something for us to think about, because that implies that you fear that or there’s a sense of danger around that. So what that danger is, is very important, and does it really exist.

CLIENT: Hmm. Mm-hmm. (pause) Yeah, I think that’s I agree, that that makes sense and that seems right. I’m having a really hard time getting a grip on anything to respond with.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm. [00:44:53]

CLIENT: (pause) You know, I mean I’ll start with the obvious one because I can’t find anything else, but I’m afraid that Tanya will die and it will be my fault. But that’s not it, there has to be more than that. I don’t know how to get to the other things. (pause) It seems sort of like I’m afraid that I will rely on her and be disappointed or disillusioned also, separately from the other one.

THERAPIST: Well, this, you know you were saying good reasons and bad reasons to leave Tanya and, you know, if you have trust issues, that’s a bad reason to leave, because you don’t trust her, you know trust issues, right? [00:46:58]

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: For example. So I feel like this is very much, this, what I’m about to say is very particular to your issue in terms of sort of life after disappointment, that when you feel disappointed in a person or an experience, that sort of you’re edging into despair, rather than believing that there could be life. Not necessarily, but there could be life. Being open to that possibility, I think is uniquely your struggle. (long pause) Does that make sense? [00:48:03]

CLIENT: Yeah. Sorry, I’m just trying to process that in a way in which it’s new information.

THERAPIST: Well, maybe it isn’t.

CLIENT: That’s fine. You know, not everything needs to be new information. Sometimes it’s still important. (pause) No, I think that’s right. I think it’s very deeply true, but I don’t have a clear sense of what that implies about what I should do or how I should alter things or something, which may be a confirmation of the suggestion. [00:49:43]

THERAPIST: That’s something for us to think about for sure. We’re going to need to stop for today, okay?

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: So, I will see you next Wednesday though.

CLIENT: Thank you.

THERAPIST: Okay. Take care.

END TRANSCRIPT