TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: Are we good on insurance information or do we need anything else with that?

CLIENT: Yep. Yeah. Overestimate what the copays were going to be because I overestimate what the amount is.

THERAPIST: Also next week we're on for Monday and that's all I've got.

CLIENT: Yeah. (chuckles) I'm sorry about the confusion about Thursday versus Friday.

THERAPIST: No, no. We must not have talked about it because we were both confused.

CLIENT: (chuckles) So we're not meeting tomorrow?

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Do you want to meet tomorrow?

CLIENT: Not really.

THERAPIST: Okay.

CLIENT: I want to have the afternoon free so I can go buy a costume for [...] (inaudible at 00:00:55), the concert I'm going to Saturday.

THERAPIST: Oh, is that this weekend? Okay. [00:01:05]

CLIENT: The theme is Wonderland versus Neverland, and so they're asking everyone to costume as either an Alice in Wonderland or a Peter Pan character. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do yet. I think it mostly depends on what I'm able to find in the bargain bin. (chuckles)

THERAPIST: Is she doing what she wrote about Neverland?

CLIENT: Probably. Probably along with a whole bunch of other...

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: (yawns) So I've been taking voice lessons. That's going really good. I've been singing in the choir. I wasn't while I was in grad school because I just didn't have enough time, but I was in my church choir for a couple of years before that. The idea of singing was really [fraught] (ph?) for me because of a bunch of stuff that happened when I was a kid, which I'm going to get into fairly soon. [00:02:08]

THERAPIST: You've told me some of it.

CLIENT: Yeah. My current choir director convinced me to join the church choir after he heard me give a sermon. He was like, "Your voice is just so wonderful, you have to sing." I was like, "I can't sing." And he was like, "I don't believe you," (laughs) so I joined the choir. He's been really supportive and my vocal instructor has been really supportive. We met on Monday night. I went straight to her place from here well not straight over, I had an hour and a half to get dinner. I went over and she said she wanted to move me off of exercise books and she suggested that she could pick some songs or I could bring in music I liked; but she wanted me learning real songs instead of exercise book stuff. So I e-mailed Kat; she's an artist whose concert I'm going to last night and I said, "You know I really love your music and I've been taking voice lessons. My instructor wants to take me off of exercise books. Is there any way I could buy a copy of the sheet music of my favorite song that you've written?" [00:03:09] She wrote back this really, really sweet, supportive reply thing saying he was so glad I was doing voice lessons. We have a mutual friend in common. She said, "She has already told me a little bit about your journey into becoming comfortable with your voice; and that's just so wonderful. Unfortunately, I never wrote sheet music for the song that you want so I can't give it to you, but I have sheet music for these other three songs if you want any one of them. No charge because... " You know. It was just so sweet and it was so supportive and it was just such a huge contrast to the not just lack of support but lack of anti-support I got growing up. (chuckles) I ended up having to leave my desk and go hide in the quiet room at work because it was so touching I was crying. [00:04:08] (pause) It's just every time I think I've come to grips with the ways my parents failed me and every time I think I've dealt with it and I'm ready to move on, something just reopens it and it's not fair.

THERAPIST: Nope. Not even a little. [00:04:52]

CLIENT: (pause) You know there was a time I was like eight years old, seven years old, something like that. I was in second grade and we were supposed to sing the Star Spangled Banner for some school event or production or something. I don't know. Little kids do that sort of thing all the time in elementary schools. And I was absolutely terrified of singing it wrong and people laughing at me, so I asked my parents to teach it to me. My mom gave me a sheet with the words and asked me to sing them with her and she was just (pause) she was really mean and cruel about it like "You're flat, you're flat. You're singing a monotone. Why would anyone want to listen to you sing? Maybe you shouldn't sing." And, you know, in hindsight I guess it's always in hindsight I've heard my mom sing Happy Birthday or things like that and my mom will deliberately sing things off key. She has a really bad ear and she's close to tone deaf and she knows this, so she'll just deliberately sing things so egregiously wrong that people will think that she's joking and not realize that she actually can't sing. And so I realize that she was probably feeling very stressed and anxious and put on the spot when I asked her to teach me this song that's actually really difficult to sing right. But I can't figure out why she took that out on me. If she knew her ear was bad and she does, otherwise she wouldn't sing so outrageously, deliberately wrong. Why would she then sit there and humiliate me and mock me and make fun of the fact that I was flat? [00:06:58] (pause)

THERAPIST: I don't know. I can come up with all sorts of reasons, but it doesn't mean that I can make it excusable. Sometimes when people any time have been criticized it makes them more sympathetic to people in that situation, and sometimes it goes the other way.

CLIENT: (pause) [00:09:04] When I was in middle school I desperately wanted to join the band. I wanted to join the band and learn to play a musical instrument; and my parents refused because the way my middle school was set up you were allowed to take one elective. Five of your six hours had to be P.E. and an English class and Social Studies and Science. You got one elective and my parents absolutely insisted that I be on the Academic Competition Team elective class because (sighs) you couldn't just be on the Academic Competition Team, you had to take the class for the Academic pentathlon team. And if you weren't in the class you couldn't be on the team. And band was you got one, and it's just so... (pause) [00:10:11] And I won the pentathlon both years that I was on the team, both years that I was in that school. I was the state champion, but it was a stupid, pointless competition that no one cared about and my parents were like, "You won't be able to go to Yale if you don't do this." Well, no. Yale doesn't fucking care what you won when you were in the seventh grade. Like... (sigh) And then when I was in high school the excuse was, "We can't afford to rent the instrument," which is bullshit because they rented a saxophone for my sister so she could play in her middle school band because we had moved by that point and her middle school let her have two electives. So they were able to rent the saxophone for her but not for me. Also, by that point, my dad was earning $250,000 a year, so don't tell me he couldn't afford to rent a fucking band instrument for his kid. Like, really. [00:11:10]

THERAPIST: Yeah, that's bullshit.

CLIENT: But by that point, (snickers) I had already been pegged as the brainy one with no other talents and my middle sister had been pegged as the musical one and our youngest sister had gotten pegged as the athletic one, even though my middle sister hated being in band and didn't want to be in band. (laughs) It was just they were such bad parents. And it's not... I'm tired of just tripping over ways that they screwed up. Like I'm tired of having to revisit this question of being okay with (sighs) (pause) I feel really spoiled and privileged and whiney being the flip side about it. [00:12:48]

THERAPIST: It's bad.

CLIENT: (sniffles) I'm sorry.

THERAPIST: Not at all. It's like you were often treated horribly.

CLIENT: (sniffles) And it's not just that in many ways they treated me as an asset rather than as a person, but even as an asset they kind of fucked up maintaining the asset. (sniffles) Like you don't take a prize thoroughbred and tie it to a plow and plow a field with it, for God's sake. (sighs) That was a horrible analogy, but...

THERAPIST: I guess I understand it that you're not just being used, you're being badly used.

CLIENT: I mean I guess in some respects it worked out well for me because I got a degree from an outstanding school that lets me find a good job relatively easily, that pays remarkably well, that allows me to have the money and be here to do things like take voice lessons. I don't know. [00:15:15] (pause)

THERAPIST: I think you would have wound up at an institution that good or something where you would want to go anyway.

CLIENT: Probably. (sighs) (crying) (pause) [00:16:30] How long does it have to be before I can stop wishing they were different? Like when can I get to the point that I'm okay with them being the horrible people that they are? (sniffles) (pause) [00:17:27]

THERAPIST: Probably when you don't love them in quite the same way that you do.

CLIENT: Well how do I do that?

THERAPIST: Well... part of it anyway involves sort of getting some perspective on what it was really like and how awful and painful and horrible [...] (inaudible at 00:18:35) and it's sometimes not personal, actually [...]. I think it's sort of what you're doing.

CLIENT: (crying) (pause)

THERAPIST: I guess anything [...] (inaudible at 00:19:18) very painful and it really takes a while, sort of on the order of a bunch of years. I know you've already spent a bunch of years. (pause) I wish I had better news about that.

CLIENT: (sniggers) (sniffles) (long pause)

THERAPIST: [...] (inaudible at 00:21:47)

CLIENT: Part of me is worried that I know that this is my parents' voice in my head that I'm just being melodramatic and attention-seeking and you know. No one has a perfect relationship with their parents; like everyone has areas of friction between them and their parents. Maybe I'm just being a spoiled princess and I'm just stirring up trouble. (pause) [00:22:53] I guess I just want reassurance that this is outside the norm of parenting mishaps that everybody makes.

THERAPIST: Yep. This is outside the norm of parenting mishaps that everybody makes.

CLIENT: Really?

THERAPIST: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You tend, as much as anything, to sort of protect them and feel overly responsible; like look away sometimes from some of the really painful stuff. I'm actually usually more careful, conservative about getting your point of view; but I think actually what you're sort of defending against or struggling to be able to see is generally along the line of how bad it actually was and how cruel they often were clearly and unusually so. It's much more of that than the other side which we often see, which is people not wanting to take responsibility for stuff. It's clearly more of the first. That's actually a harder thing for you. [00:25:24] We're not just talking about a couple of instances where some things were really stressful or unusual when the three of you were really little and nobody was sleeping and there were financial circumstances you know whatever. That happens, too, but that's not what we're talking about. (pause) [00:26:17] Yeah, when you tell me a bit about what your father grew up with or without, I can imagine what that was like. It's amazing he came out of that at all, but he's a very scarred and very troubled fellow who did some really horrible things in a kind of ongoing way. [00:26:57]

CLIENT: At least he raised his own kids. My dad's brother and his sister both, when their kids were about five, decided they couldn't handle being parents and sent their kids to my parents to live with them.

THERAPIST: Oh?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: How old were you at that time?

CLIENT: This was before my parents had me. I came along after they'd been married seven years, so they had Bradley and [...] (ph?). My dad had those two boys before he got married and so when he married my mom, she inherited his two nephews and they had them for about five years. They had my cousin, Robin (ph?), a couple of years after they got married, so they had all three of those kids for a while and then they sent Bradley and [...] them back home and they had Robin. Robin was probably about eleven when I was born and he stayed with them the first year of my life before his parents took him back. [00:28:07] I don't know if my dad's siblings are [...] (inaudible at 00:28:09) parents. (pause)

THERAPIST: I see. Yeah, you don't like, yes, people sometimes get mad at their kids. It's a rare parent who doesn't raise their voice, but it's like they really didn't have any idea of who you were and were not interested in what your interests were in any way. They were sort of very cruel, like deliberately mean. Yeah, they [...] (inaudible at 00:29:29). There are some, certainly, but it's pretty bad. (pause) [00:30:10]

CLIENT: My mom's birthday was a week and a half ago, and I hadn't called. I've been getting daily e-mails from my sister saying mom is getting more and more upset and I can't relent enough to pick up the phone and call. I feel horribly guilty about that.

THERAPIST: You're too upset and angry with her that you don't want to call? [00:30:47]

CLIENT: It's just her birthday was election day and I knew she was going to say something stupid and offensive and horrible; and I didn't want to deal with it. I wanted to enjoy election night with my friends. I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy election night yet, (laughs) but I was watching the results with my friends and I didn't want to deal with my mom's bullshit. Then the next day she posted something horribly offensive to her Facebook about how maybe her state should just secede. I was just like I cannot even like what is this bullshit? And then it got to be three or four days later and I was just like yeah. And then she sent an all-caps e-mail out to me and my sisters and our husbands saying, "I have to know what you want for Christmas so I can do my shopping on Black Friday. If you do not send me a list before Black Friday, you get no presents." I was like you know, no presents would actually be really good because the presents she does get are complete crap that indicate she has no idea what I like and she doesn't even read the lists that I send her and it's enormously stressful for me to put the lists together. I hate asking for things and it's just a huge shit-show every year. I'm not even going home for Christmas. I'm just going to suck up whatever fall-out there is from them from saying "no", because it can't possibly be worse than spending Christmas with them. I just yeah.

THERAPIST: We need to stop for now. I'll see you on Monday.

CLIENT: Okay.

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