TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

No voice until [00:02:35]

THERAPIST: Good morning.

CLIENT: Morning. I feel like I haven't woken up. It was raining so I didn't ride my bike today, so that sped up everything in the morning. I had another appointment. I'm trying to get more centered. (laughs) (pause) We do didactic stuff in the program room I'm in and also the actual clinical visiting hours. One of the didactic things we talked about yesterday was around shame. It was a very interesting take on it based on a kind of contemplative space of going into the feelings and observing it and giving it space and seeing what it can tell you and what you know about it. [00:03:51] The actual activity wasn't (snickers) really working for me. I think that's just because I didn't get the first part, so I was kind of confused. But it was interesting to be in that space and to realize my thought patterns were getting very shaming about the fact that I wasn't connecting with the activity or that I wasn't feeling what other people seemed to be feeling. (pause) [00:04:50] Shame isn't something that I have really given a lot of thought to personally, but the more I do think about it, I can feel definitely areas of my life for which I had shame for a long time and how that kind of affects how you live, even after some of it has lifted. (pause)

THERAPIST: How do you feel it has affected you? [00:05:56]

CLIENT: I think it has made me really defensive and, at times, very closed off from other people. I think because for such a long time I never really thought it was okay to let people know everything about me, it was hard to suddenly change that; and so I can feel . . . Your question was "how does that affect me?"

THERAPIST: You had said even after the immediate experience it sort of has lasting effects, so I was curious about those lasting effects. [00:07:03]

CLIENT: I can interact with someone and approach what I've started to consider a level of sharing and intimacy and vulnerability that is genuine, but it's also not true, let's say. When I'm interacting with someone in a work setting or even sometimes with friends, I can enter into a conversation and say and do things that are vulnerable, per se, disclosing things about myself, expressing things that have happened, things that people perceive as a vulnerable thing; and for me that's not vulnerable. [00:08:07] It's a very I don't want to use the word calculated but it's something that's completely within my range of comfort and there are actually other things that would be more vulnerable. But that facilitates rapport and is perceived as that, as being sort of vulnerable. I think that has made it difficult in those moments to find people that I really enter into those vulnerable spaces with authentically. I don't think that my view here actually negative, I think it's actually a really positive thing in my professional life because it allows for there to be a mutuality in vulnerability when I'm providing spiritual care to someone. [00:09:09] I can enter into a vulnerable space with them that feels to them like there is a mutuality to the experience, but it doesn't actually force me into a vulnerable space, which would be unhealthy for me when I'm in that role. But with my friends, that's not the place I should be. I should be more comfortable to go to those spaces. (pause) I think the other part of it is that I've always felt negative feelings around my body, so that's been a struggle for a long time. [00:10:07]

THERAPIST: Negative about?

CLIENT: Mostly just the size and the kind of composition. I've had a bit of weight fluctuation in the last five years and growing up I wasn't very slim or athletic looking. That was definitely difficult for my self-esteem. I could always feel body-conscious. That added another layer of defense, I think. [00:11:05] It would be an uncomfortable situation when I'd have to take my shirt off. (pause) I also think that it's somewhat tied into my family's commitment to health and exercise and all of those things that I didn't always connect with and feel comfortable with; and so I think I took on some sort of relationship between my weight and my parents' regard for me. [00:12:04] My sister was anorexic/bulimic for a while, for quite a few years, and it's still something she struggles with. It's never been that for me. I think I am getting to a pretty healthy relationship with food, but it's definitely like if I'm at a more comfortable weight and I'm going home, I feel much better than if I'm not. It's not huge fluctuations, it's just kind of that I get stressed in the winter and I gain a few pounds. Usually in the summer I'm more active and I tend to eat better.

THERAPIST: What do you see for you as the relationship between stress and eating? [00:13:00]

CLIENT: It's a very high relationship the stress and being bored. When I'm at home and I have nothing to do, it's like the thing that happens more often and so I know that I need to have more of a conscious mindset around that. I definitely notice it when I'm stressed. I get kind of impulses to eat.

THERAPIST: Does it comfort you, the food?

CLIENT: It makes the stress kind of go away, but there isn't an instant gratification like "I feel much better now." It kind of makes those pangs go away. There isn't an instant gratification like "I feel much better now." It kind of makes those pangs go away. [00:14:00] Yeah. The other part of it is that I think for a really long time I was very disconnected between when I was actually hungry. Probably in the last two years I've been getting much more in touch with when I'm actually hungry and then eating when I'm hungry and realizing when I'm not hungry and not eating then, even if it's a time that I would generally eat. It's like if I'm not hungry, it doesn't make sense to eat. When I do feel hungry I'll eat then. It's been an interesting kind of line, figuring out the difference between being bored and I want to eat or I'm stressed and "I'm actually hungry right now." [00:15:08] That's a nuance that I think is only becoming more clear recently.

THERAPIST: Had that always been true for you, that it's not clear where the need is coming from? You said over the last five years, so I don't know if it's a relatively new development.

CLIENT: Yeah, I would say it has been pretty consistent. (pause) If, as a kid, I would be eating too much, my parents would correct that not on a global scale but on an acute instance kind of scale and then I would feel bad about myself and my body because of that. [00:16:13] (pause) It's also this interesting kind of like I'd love to be healthier and that's something that I'm striving towards, but I don't want my self-worth and my self-esteem to be tied up in what my body looks like. But yet, I need to find, or at least I have motivation to have a healthier body and I want the metric to be health and not weight. That's a very complicated place to navigate. [00:17:05] (pause) Interestingly enough this shame exercise, when thinking about it, it's like I'm not actually going to get to a healthy, both mentally and physically, relationship with my body and food by working at it from a place of shame. I need to have compassion for myself and when I am stressed and I have those impulses to eat, I can't respond by feeling bad. But I have to recognize that and be able to generate some universal self-regard. It's a really human thing to feel. This is telling you that you're stressed right now and that's okay. [00:18:11]

THERAPIST: It seems like a really cool exercise.

CLIENT: Yeah, it was.

THERAPIST: I feel like, in a more general way, that's sort of the goal of psychotherapy, a forum or type of therapy to allow a lot of space for whatever emerges.

CLIENT: Yeah. [00:18:54] (long pause)

THERAPIST: Did other things come to mind during that exercise?

CLIENT: I think shame around sexuality is one thing that came up and, for me, that's a very insidious under-the-surface, ingrained one. It's not one that I mentally struggle with every day, but it's like I can't get away from it in a lot of ways because, on some level, it still feels isolating. [00:20:07] (pause) One of the things I think about some of the time (chuckles) is the relationship between sexuality and the body. Within our culture there is a really, really less prevalent now but I still feel a very strong relationship with being gay and having a toxic body in terms of HIV and I think that's borne out of the AIDS crisis; but also this cultural milieu. When I was growing up I remember when I had my first sex ed class in grade five or grade six. [00:21:06] My major thought was that I don't think I could ever have sex with a woman. I don't know why I thought that, but I just thought that. The second thing was that I don't understand why anyone would have sex because you'll probably get someone pregnant and then you'll get Aids and then you will die. I had a really good sex ed. It was factually based. It was comprehensive. It was inclusive. It was in a public school in Switzerland. It's hard to find, other than the Finland and Denmark, (chuckles) better sexuality education in a public school; and yet, as a 12-year-old or 11-year-old, that was what I thought. [00:22:00] So there's something in the water or something in my mind that starts to make these assumptions. Sometimes I find it freaks me out to go get an HIV test, even though I don't engage in high-risk behaviors. I'm very safe. I do everything I can and I shouldn't be worried about it, but yet it freaks me out. (pause) Sometimes if I'm getting to know someone, it can feel like you're getting to know this other potentially threatening person to your health, which is a very twisted mindset to be in. [00:23:05]

THERAPIST: It's certainly not comfortable or exciting or pleasurable.

CLIENT: Yes. And that isn't to say that I haven't had pleasurable or good relationships with folks, but there was sometimes this kind of feel of shame around it, I think. I was sort of dating this guy for the last few weeks and we were hanging out on Saturday. It was a very weird situation where we were kind of hanging out and then halfway through, we both kind of ended the date. [00:24:04] We still hung out, but it was weird. We both named the elephant in the room, which was that this didn't actually feel like a date and we weren't acting like it, and then we talked about it and talked about our relationship which was a really great space to be in. It was very weird. I've never really been in a situation where you kind of meta-analyzed what was going on. One of the things he said was that he didn't feel like I was very open with how I was feeling or deeper parts of who I was with him. I can say that I generally wasn't. I was pretty much convinced that he wasn't a good match for me so I think that was part of it, but I also wonder how much of that was just because I just was in that state of non-disclosure. [00:25:12] That was an interesting experience. (pause)

THERAPIST: You had mentioned a relationship from a few years ago that you described was "terrible." I was curious about that experience.

CLIENT: His name was Phil and we went to high school together. We dated for probably the last four months of high school and then we went off to two different universities. Basically we lost contact for two years and then he moved to the city I was living, to Toronto that was a year. [00:25:58] Then he moved to Toronto and I think I saw him once or twice his first year in Toronto. We started talking and it was just terrible from the start because he didn't tell me that he was still dating someone else when we started dating. There was a lot of grief and a lot of anger and upset, but I hadn't found anyone romantically in the university that I had any relationship with, not that I had overly tried. I was really kind of nervous about trying. I really don't know why. I don't think I went out on any dates. I don't know why I didn't. (snickers) [00:27:00] So the start of the relationship was really rocky. It started to get better and then it was very much like he had a lot of affection for me and I had affection for him, and that was good. I enjoyed hanging out with him, but he wasn't very good at communicating or talking about what was going on for him even worse than I am. (chuckles) He was just in a very different world, like he was very much into going out to clubs and school was sort of important, but not really important. He had a group of friends which I really despised because I thought they were really shallow and catty and not very pleasant to be around. As we were dating, there was this constant pull of me interacting into his world with his friends, but he would never really come into mine. [00:28:11] It kind of became this year in the middle of the relationship of me having to constantly decide which of my lives I was going to have. I was somehow convinced that if I let go of him that I would never find anyone else. We had a lot of fun together. We had a lot of good times. We had a lot of chemistry, as well, which was nice, but I had to give up a lot of time with my friends and a lot of time doing things I really liked. He would kind of get upset that I was spending time doing other things. [00:29:01]

It was a really painful separation and when I had to choose whether or not I was going to live in this house that I had started, again, I chose not to because I felt torn the entire year. It was like I knew that my heart was in the house and this relationship was pulling me away from it, so I figured I wasn't in a space where I could give up the relationship yet. Then the relationship completely deteriorated because I knew I was applying to grant schools that weren't in Switzerland and I knew that he wasn't a good fit for me and that he wasn't very supportive in. All of the things that I was interested in, he wasn't. That kind of started this six-month process of us breaking up which involved him flirting with a lot of people and sleeping with some of them and things like that, which was a very painful exercise. [00:30:17] It's also very weird in that there was a lot of stuff that he was very hesitant to get involved with that was in my world. And then after we broke up, he had a friend transfusion and (snickers) like a life transfusion in a lot of ways. I had always tried to get him to go to this [ ] (inaudible at 00:30:43) which is indigenous deejays remixing pow-wow music and club music, which is really great. [00:31:01] I was like, "You should go to this. It's a really cool kind of event," and he never wanted to go. I tried to get him to do activism stuff and get him involved in campus and he would never do it. I always tried to have critical conversations about race and sexuality and gender and he wouldn't really have it. Then all of a sudden, he transfused his life. (snickers) This is his life now. It was a very weird process to watch and do that from afar. (pause) We talk off and on, but it's really surface and he's making a lot of the same dumb mistakes he makes all the time, which is not fully committing himself to a relationship and always searching for someone better. I definitely felt in that relationship like I had to give up a lot and that really hurt, but there was the gratification of having someone there and there really hadn't been for a while. [00:32:15]

THERAPIST: And is that conflict part of what made it terrible or was it more how the ending protracted into?

CLIENT: I think both. I didn't like who I had to become in the relationship. In some ways, I had to subvert a lot of who I was, but then I had to keep a lot of who I was because I was studying theology and that was distinctive. There was just this weird tokenizing of my identity that happened within his peer groups. [00:33:08]

THERAPIST: Tokenizing?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: I've never heard that word I don't think.

CLIENT: Like I was the one religious person that he knew, and so in his friends group, that was my role to be their religious person. But yet I still had to interact with them the way they interacted with each other and I couldn't let my religious beliefs get in the way of that. But I still had to maintain the idea in this space that I was "a religious person" because that's how I was supposed to interact. It was weird. And then the break-up was awful. Yeah. We would break up and then get back together and then break up and we would just go back and forth. [00:34:06] We were living together for a while and that was awful. (pause)

THERAPIST: Sort of like another experience where you felt like you couldn't be genuine.

CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. (pause) (sighs) It should be one of the places where you feel most genuine. (long pause) [00:35:33] One of the things I took away from that experience was this tendency for me to drop everything for a romantic interest. I have this odd relationship with this seminary student. When it started, one of the things that I tried to be very intentional about was to not do that. A lot of it had to do with this conference that I was planning to organize and so one of the conscious decisions I made was that if this thing is going to happen, it's not going to impact my role here and that's' going to come first and whatever this is, it's kind of secondary. [00:36:28] That felt like a welcome change because it felt like personally I was in some control of the situation. But it also felt like I wasn't just running into the arms of a person who expressed attraction to me just because it was something that I was craving that I could actually choose it and it wasn't all . . . That's not exactly what I'm trying to express. I feel like if this person is truly attracted to me and wants to start a relationship or whatever, then they will value the fact that I can't sacrifice this conference that I'm organizing for them; and that it doesn't mean that in my free time that I won't choose to be with them, but I don't need to give that up. [00:37:43] That was really a great feeling. It was one of the first times that I felt really strong in standing my ground, as awful as that phrase is this week.

THERAPIST: This week?

CLIENT: The "stand your ground" law in Florida.

THERAPIST: Oh, I've heard about that. Sure.

CLIENT: It has also marked a shift recently of I'm going to see this guy in a few weeks. We have a mutual friend out in the West and we're going to go spend a week with her. He's going through a lot of life transitions. I know that he will want to be with me for that week, but I know that's not something that I can do right now. Emotionally I can't start to get involved with someone who doesn't have their life in a space that is suitable to them. [00:38:53] He doesn't know where he's going to be working. He just had a recent break-up with someone that he was together with for a very long time. He's no longer working in the same job. He doesn't know what he wants to do with his career. He doesn't know where he's going to be living. It's a whirlwind of questions. I know that if I was in that situation it would be very comforting to find someone to be with, but I know that that's not going to be good for me because I can't place my (pause) . . . I want to, to use an agricultural metaphor, if I'm going to start a relationship with someone I want to make sure that the soil is right or, at least, has access to water and sunlight so that it can grow. [00:40:01] When one person is a dust storm of chaos, that's not going to lend itself to a relationship that will bloom. So what I've been thinking about, what I've been stressed with, is what is he going to say when I tell him that this is how I'm going to interact with him? That I want to be friends and I want to support him and I want to continue the friendship part of our relationship, but I can't be sexual with him and I can't continue down this road that we were sort of playing at for a while because he's not in a space that makes me feel ready to invest, if you will. So on the one hand I feel a lot of trepidation about that kind of conversation, but I also feel supremely strong in that decision, which is something I don't think I've felt before. [00:41:10] The same thing with my ex. He always hints that when I come back into town he wants to hang out with me, which is usually co-word for "sleep with me."

THERAPIST: Those are two very different things that are interesting when used interchangeably.

CLIENT: Well, if you know a lot of gay men . . . I wish we were actually more precise with our language (chuckles) because it would eliminate a lot of problems. But yeah, I'm ready to kind of say, "Nope. That's not something that I want to do." I feel strong in that decision, which feels really great. Again, trepidation about the conversation, but it also feels like this is my boundary. This is where I can let my heart go. [00:42:06] Part of me is like, on the one hand, I have a kick-back of whether I'm just putting more walls up, but I think deep inside of me actually those walls can be very good. They keep out things that need to be kept out. Tomatoes need a framework to grow from.

THERAPIST: They also need stakes that they can be anchored on.

CLIENT: Exactly. You need to tie them to them sometimes, and so this is me tying our relationship to a stake. [00:43:01] This is how it's going to be and I think this is how it will allow it to actually grow. There is going to be restriction in the relationship.

THERAPIST: Do you feel that maybe part of your feeling that you need to compromise may be something essential in who you are to be with other people or to be accepted? Do you feel that comes from your family?

CLIENT: I think probably. I think that as a kid I always felt very different and I always felt that I had to play my family of origin's cultural game to be in the loop. I really (pause) didn't feel nurtured or fed by a lot of it. I felt kind of forced along for the ride. [00:44:02]

THERAPIST: I think about this memory that you have of your mom rewriting your story. It's a dramatic example of that.

CLIENT: Yes. Yeah. (pause) Yeah. (pause) I know my style had a lot of accommodation in my conflict resolution. For me there are usually a few core things that I won't compromise on, but there is a lot of minutia that I don't really care about. It's when I'm not clear on what are actually my core principles and what are minutia I don't really care where we eat for dinner, but I want it to be a vegetarian meal that I find enjoyable. [00:45:08] Sometimes to avoid conflict I'll be like, "Okay, I'll go anywhere," even if there isn't something good. I think that extends from my family, of having to . . . Like I remember in high school I was getting ready to join the chess team and I was still swimming. I hated my swim team. They were the most homophobic, sexist teenage boys ever. That's an unwholesome demographic to be a part of and I didn't feel like any of them actually liked me. I always felt completely outcast, but I was also fluent in the forms of interactions, that I could get by. I was able to step aside and not get hazed, for example, because of how I could create relationships with people and avoid situations and all of this stuff. [00:46:22]

So I despised it. The only thing that got me through the three or four years I played, one of the years was the coach that I had. He was really great. He would stop a lot of the crap that would happen. Not all of it, but a lot of it that he could see. That was, I felt, kind of a safety bubble around that. I liked the sport itself, but the actual environment was so toxic. In grade 10 I was trying to get more into chess team and it was taking a lot more of my time and I was trying to figure out how to tell my parents that I didn't want to swim any more. [00:47:09] I also really disliked my coach. This was a new coach. He was even more bigoted and a very macho, masculine-type guy. I just avoided the conflict and I tried to get out of going and never directly confronting them or talking to them about it until a few months in. They were like, So you've not been going for a long time?" I was like, "Yeah. I've kind of not been going. I want to do this other thing." The actual getting to that conversation, confronting, that had to be done for me. [00:48:00] They basically asked me what was going on because it was really hard to be like, "I actually don't want to do this anymore," because, in a lot of senses, swimming was one of the only sport sports that I actually enjoyed and I was not terrible at it. That combination really did make my parents feel good about my life because sports was a really important metric for them. And so to tell them that the one thing I felt like they really valued, not to say that they didn't value other things, but do say I didn't want to do it any more was hard. They took it decently. Most of the time these things are much worse in my head than they are in reality, which is always good to remember. (chuckles) [00:49:02]

THERAPIST: That is good to remember. On that note, we're going to need to stop, but that is sort of a good final note. Logistically, I could meet at 5:30 on Friday if that still works for you. I know we had talked about another time for this week.

CLIENT: Yes. Can I e-mail you? I need to check. One of my friends asked me to help her with something on Friday, to help her move some stuff, so I just need to make sure what time that's at.

THERAPIST: Okay.

CLIENT: I'll get back to you at the end of the day.

THERAPIST: That's fine. And then for next week, we have Tuesday at 3:00 and Thursday I could do at 11:00. Would that work for you? [00:50:04]

CLIENT: Yes.

THERAPIST: You had said in the morning. Okay. So Tuesday at 3:00, Thursday at 11:00, and then I'll wait to hear from you whether the Friday works or not.

CLIENT: Okay. You said 11:00 on the 1st. Great. Thank you.

THERAPIST: Great. Very good. Take care.

CLIENT: You, too.

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