TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: Email. I have to look again at those dates.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Not next week but the following week would be great.

CLIENT: Yeah, that's fine.

THERAPIST: My question for you is do you have a sense about the Thursday time, whether you want -you can have either the 8:30 or the 5:15. I just wondered if you knew which one you want.

CLIENT: I'd rather keep the 8:30.

THERAPIST: Okay. You're pretty sure?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Okay. In that case I will…

CLIENT: It's far easier for me to get here at 8:30 than to get all of my work done and get out of work by 4:15.

THERAPIST: Then I will let you know if other 8:30s open up.

CLIENT: Great.

THERAPIST: Would you want to know about 7:45s or 9:15s?

CLIENT: Nine-fifteens are too late, 7:45 maybe.

THERAPIST: I don't foresee any of either opening up. My class ends this week.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Okay. [0:01:07.0]

CLIENT: I kind of hate my job right now. Last week I had almost a full week of like good productivity. I kind of crashed Friday afternoon and got nothing done after about 2:30, but… Then over the weekend, I really meant to spend a couple hours Saturday finishing up stuff I needed to get done Friday but I hadn't gotten done, but I just couldn't bring myself to focus. I had three task features which probably would have taken an hour to two hours, if I were highly focused, to get done. I got one done Saturday and then I just kind of collapsed into a puddle of tears and Dave talked to me into taking a break and then you know, after an hour I was like, I don't want to go back to work, let's you know, watch TV for the rest of the evening. That was upsetting but then Sunday I got quite a bit done, which is too late, given that some of these jobs require 48 hours of computational time to finish, so nothing was ready for me to present today at group meeting. Whatever, I could say they were running at least. [0:02:31.0]

But the next couple of things I have to do at my work are just -I don't know why I'm resisting doing it. I have all of these experiments that are complete and I need to come up with a good way to record results, and the results are this horrible mishmash of -there are literally hundreds of log files and report files and data files that are generated by the build process, and so there are half a dozen scripts that can harvest data from a variety of the outputs, and then there are a couple of files where we don't have a script but you can run search commands if you open up the file. It's tedious and time consuming and I'm always afraid that I'm forgetting something or overlooking something and… yeah.

[Pause: 0:03:26.3 to 0:04:19.5]

CLIENT: So there's that and I don't know if there's anything new to say since last week, on the subject of work. It's still really hard.

THERAPIST: Ah-huh, yeah. Are there other things that come to mind?

CLIENT: Not really.

THERAPIST: I guess that sounded a little bit to me was you talked about work stuff from a kind of sort of -I can't quite find the right word, but let's say an external point of view like through habit.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: And then you're kind of starting -this is when you started to kind of get inside of the experience a little more, that you paused. The scripts, there's this and there's that, and then it gets confusing and overwhelming. [0:05:23.4]

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Period. I can imagine why you'd want to stop there, I think, and I'm not telling you, you have to go any further.

CLIENT: Right, right.

THERAPIST: I'm just saying it struck me, the way it happened. I can imagine you might feel a sense that you should be going further and talking more about it, but I just made clear where that's coming from and that you don't have to.

CLIENT: You're smirking at me.

THERAPIST: No, no, just the way you're smiling at me, you look appreciative or something. I don't mean to be smirking. Sometimes I mean to smirk but not this time.

CLIENT: (chuckles)

THERAPIST: I will try to tell you when I mean to smirk, or why. [0:06:23.2]

CLIENT: So yeah there's that and then hmm. There's some stuff going on in a couple of friendships of mine that have me feeling terribly insecure and second guessing all of my actions and you know, terrified that I'm going to lose all of my friendships and end up dying alone and unloved in a box under a bridge.

THERAPIST: That doesn't sound like a good outcome.

CLIENT: No. I just… So, I have one friend who I met I don't know, four-ish years ago?

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: We met at a convention and then realized we lived local to each other, so we started hanging out, and the friendship was developing, I thought fairly well, like slowly because we were both busy and we didn't see each other all that often, but okay. And then last summer, there was an event that she invited me to at a bookstore, it was a reading by an author who happens to be a friend of hers. So I went to this reading and a bunch of her friends were there who I didn't know, and then during the Q&A session I raised my hand to ask a question and you know, got an answer that was I felt unsatisfying, from the author. So I was talking to my friend afterwards and I was like you know, I found this answer really unsatisfying, and this is a thing that I've been thinking about a lot and I don't have an answer, and I've been looking on the Internet and I don't see an answer there and I just, I don't know where to find the answer and I'm very frustrated. And so we were talking and two other friends of hers came up to me and just started being really rude to me about you know well, obviously the answer is blah, and you should have done this. I was like okay (A), no it's not, I considered blah and it wasn't and (B) I've done all the things he suggested and they don't work for me, and (C) I don't appreciate being talked down to as if I'm five. And then her friends just kept being rude to me, including her roommate, who said some really nasty things to me. And then I just, I broke down, I cried in public, which I hate, I hate, hate, hate. It was like the first time I've cried in public in years. [0:08:47.3]

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: So it's like a really sensitive topic, and so my friend took me aside, I kind of cried on her shoulder and I vented a little bit and said some really mean things. The next day I realized I said some really mean things.

THERAPIST: Toward -mean to…?

CLIENT: To her, like you know basically fuck all of you.

THERAPIST: Okay, gotcha.

CLIENT: You know, fem lesbians, you can all fucking go to hell because you know, fuck you. She's a fem queer woman and you know, and it really wasn't fair or right, or in any way appropriate to take that out on her. So I contacted her the next day and said look, I said some things last night, I was really angry and I said some things that were really mean and really wrong, you know unjustified, and I'm really sorry.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: She said you know that was really frustrating but I understand and it's okay, and I accept your apology. But then like she hasn't contacted me, she hasn't initiated communication with me since then. I've run into her at parties and we've had pleasant, cordial conversations, but nothing like what we had before and you know, I've invited her out for brunch a couple of times and she has always had a polite excuse. So at this point, I'm just operating on like this friendship is over and we can continue to be cordial to each other when we're at mutual friends' parties, but I'm very upset about this because -I mean obviously it's her right, I said some really angry, mean things and you know, she has every right to not want to spend time with someone who can't keep their temper under control, that says angry, mean things. (sighs) It's really upsetting to me that that's how it went down. [0:10:37.7]

THERAPIST: It is.

CLIENT: Like it used to be that I lived in a scarcity economy of like interpersonal relationships, where I had very few friends and the ones I had were kind of shitty but you know, that was all I had, and so I clung to my friends like you know, like a lamprey or a remora or something, just like latched on. That's not the case any more but it's still, just like every time I think about her or like see her name on an invitation for a party invite or see her commenting on a mutual friend's Facebook page, I'm just filled with anxiety that I'm going to destroy all of my friendships just like I destroyed my friendship with her and… yeah.

[Pause: 0:11:26.2 to 0:12:57.4]

CLIENT: So that happened last summer and then this thing with Edson happened in November, December of this year, where you know, a big catalyzing factor in everything going to shit as quickly as it did was you know, my expressing my opinion on the topic of gender relations and privilege, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean it's completely different in that you know, Edson was probably bad for me and I was not thinking clearly and it wasn't a relationship I had any investment in and you know, a completely different type of friendship and relationship. But the same reason for why it all imploded, right? Like I couldn't keep my mouth shut. Except I don't think I was in the wrong in any of the conversations that I had with Edson, and I was in the conversation with my other friend over the summer. So that's another difference. [0:14:01.0]

THERAPIST: That seems…

CLIENT: Salient, maybe?

THERAPIST: Yeah. I mean perhaps in terms of the difference, but certainly in terms of how you think about what happened, what's happened.

CLIENT: Yeah. But one result of this is that I found myself not expressing my opinions around friends of mine, like not talking about things that are important to me, for fear of alienating more people, and that's unfortunate.

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: There was a Kickstarter, perhaps you've heard of it from other clients. I know [inaudible] has talked about it a lot online. Anyway, it was called Glitter & Madness. It's an anthology of stories about science fictional nightclubs, was the theme, but a lot of the copy, you know marketing copy and press copy, around the Kickstarter talked about how awesome it is to be crazy and being you know insane, and it's awesome. [0:15:23.8]

THERAPIST: I'm not sure I know what a Kickstarter is.

CLIENT: Guess. A Kickstarter is a mechanism for fundraising.

THERAPIST: Okay, that's what I thought. Yeah, like a crowd sort of sending angel investments.

CLIENT: Yes.

THERAPIST: That's what I thought. I just didn't know if this was that. Okay. And this is an online, like a site with stories and content about -on that topic.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: That has a business model such that people who invest in it. Okay.

CLIENT: So yeah, so the these people, Michael and Lynn Thomas, were raising money for this anthology, and they had already gotten a number of big name authors to promise to contribute stories for the anthology, including a very good friend of mine, a woman named Jeanette.

THERAPIST: Jeanette?

CLIENT: Yeah. We met, and it was kind of like many of my friends, a couple of years ago, and hit it off immediately and you know, write letters to each other and talk to each other and call each other all the time. Jeanette is a lovely person and I love her dearly, but I was really not happy about the way John and Lynn were putting together their marketing and advertising for their Kickstarter, because the theme was science fictional nightclubs, like nightclubs, roller derbies, drug use, et cetera, et cetera, and they were using all of this language around mental illness. [0:16:58.0]

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: Being crazy, being insane, being schizophrenic. It's like that's not fucking cool, like being crazy is not fun, being crazy is not an awesome night out at the roller derby, it's really not.

THERAPIST: Nope.

CLIENT: And a couple of people spoke out about that, and Michael and Lynn got very defensive and Michael was like well, my daughter has like Aicardi syndrome, so I know what it's like to be non-neural typical, so I can't be discriminating against people with mental illness. So basically, shut the fuck up. I don't know if you're familiar with Aicardi syndrome.

THERAPIST: I'm not.

CLIENT: It is a syndrome whereby the connecting sheaf of neurons connecting the right and left half of the brains is missing. Children born with Aicardi typically don't live past ten or twelve, and they have extreme mental disabilities, motor control, verbal development, reasoning skills, everything gets hit.

THERAPIST: I see. So it's like a form of retardation among other things. [0:18:00.9]

CLIENT: Yeah. It's a really horrible disease.

THERAPIST: It sounds really horrible.

CLIENT: But it's not the same thing as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, you know being crazy.

THERAPIST: Right. It completely isn't and even if it was, his project still doesn't make any sense, right?

CLIENT: Right. And I found myself, you know Jeanette asked me how I felt about this and I was like well you know, this is your career and we all do things for our career that aren't ideal, and I'm really looking forward to reading the story you're going to write. I didn't say anything about the things that mattered because I was afraid of things going down the same way with her as they did with Edson or my other friend last summer. It's really upsetting.

THERAPIST: Yeah. [0:19:03.2]

CLIENT: And so then I get into this horrible spiral of being afraid of offending people and driving away my friends, and then being afraid that because I'm not expressing myself, I'm boring and people will stop hanging out with me because I'm not interesting enough to hang out with, and then it's just this horrible inside my head, because this horrible place of you know well, why do you even bother trying to have friends anyway, you always fuck it up. You weren't meant to have friends, et cetera, et cetera, and it's just, it's awful.

THERAPIST: Yeah, very awful. In a way, it kind of goes back to your angst about your anger, because I guess that's where it starts. [0:20:31.3]

CLIENT: Mm-hmm.

THERAPIST: And it's not just sort of any opinions that you're afraid of sharing, but it's your…

CLIENT: The ones where I'm angry, yeah.

THERAPIST: Those ones, yeah.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: I'm just sort of feeling, I'm going to talk a little bit about that, which is it's not obvious to me why not expressing sort of angry opinions that you have would make you boring. I can understand you would feel disconnected, and I'm very clear that your experience is that you know, you worry it will make you boring, but it's sort of not obvious to me why that would be. In other words, I'm not doubting you feel that way and that you have a reason for it. I just am not sure what that is. [0:21:47.7]

CLIENT: I'm not sure I know what the reason is either, because it doesn't make any sense now that you point it out like that. I don't know.

THERAPIST: The other one is, the other question that comes to the fore, I wonder what your worry is or it can be, about the anger that can be destructive, where you worry about being destructive socially. I guess one thing I gather is that… like okay, it can be very hard for me to tell how much of this actually happens this way in the world and how much of it you worry about. [0:23:13.4]

CLIENT: It's in my head, yeah.

THERAPIST: Right. So I'm not going to try the limits.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: But I really feel like it could be very difficult for you to modulate the anger or sort of be diplomatic once you get rolling, I think, but I'm not sure, and if that has something to do with why you at least feel it can be so destructive in your relationships, and if that's true, why is that so scary? Sure, your dad is obviously the poster child for that kind of thing.

CLIENT: Yup. I don't want to turn into either of my parents, they're both horrible people. Not only are they horrible people, they're desperately unhappy. I think that scares me more than anything, that I might end up lonely and resentful and hating the world like them. [0:24:33.6]

THERAPIST: I think you also love them. I might be wrong.

CLIENT: I do. Laughed a little bit because I just had a conversation with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago. Her parents were really horribly abusive, more so than mine were, and she has a little four year-old daughter and we were talking about, so she was raised in very conservative, like nut job land, evangelical Christian churches, and they taught that you know, parental love for children is pure and unqualified and it's the closest thing to unconditional love humans kind of experience, blah-blah-blah. We had this conversation about how that is completely not true, that there are so many parents who condition their love for their children on you know, do what I want, be who I want you to be, et cetera. [0:25:47.2]

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: You know? And that it's actually the other way around, that children love their parents unconditionally because we have to, because we're dependent on them for our you know, for food and shelter and all of our needs for you know, many, many years, before we become even remotely close to independent, and how it's really hard to kind of overcome that. Yeah. So yes, I love my parents even though in many ways my life would be easier if I didn't. Maybe not love. Maybe more like obligation to perform familial duty. I'm not sure, it's hard to tell, because the well is so poisoned. [0:26:50.6]

THERAPIST: My hunch is love, in addition to other stuff, and also, I think you may feel quite a lot of sympathy for them, as much as --

CLIENT: They don't deserve it. Sorry. I'm cutting you off now.

THERAPIST: (laughs) Okay. I don't doubt that you hate them. I'm not saying anything you say isn't true about how you think in a lot of ways you feel about them, you've told me you were happier in the time, those two years, right, that you didn't talk to them.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: You have told me a lot of despicable things about them. I'm not second guessing any of that stuff.

CLIENT: Right. [0:27:53.7]

THERAPIST: I just think it coexists with love, attachment, and I think considerable sympathy for their suffering. I don't have a point in saying that.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: Although I think that is related to ways you worry about being like them, the attachment you have to them.

[Pause: 0:28:46.7 to 0:30:29.0]

THERAPIST: I think you feel and have really felt for a long time -I don't know if when you were really little but it's really for a long time, that your relationships with both of them are a horrible disastrous mess.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: And I think you feel you recreate that mess in one way or another, in other sort of contemporary situations in your life, at work or with friends. I guess I want to be clear about something, because I could imagine you hearing what I'm saying as suggesting you're a fuck-up, which is not at all how you've been. I mean if you are -[0:31:54.5]

CLIENT: No, it sounds like you're saying that I think I'm a fuck-up, which --

THERAPIST: That is true.

CLIENT: -is quite accurate. (laughs nervously)

THERAPIST: I think you're probably a loving daughter who's having trouble letting her parents go.

[Pause: 0:32:10.8 to 0:33:48.4]

THERAPIST: What's coming to mind?

CLIENT: I'm thinking about this kind of weird liminal situation I'm in with another of my friends, Cricket. I don't know if I've talked about her here before or not, but for background, most of my successful romantic relationships, actually all of my successful relationships, started with people who I was already friends with and not in any weird, creepy like trying to get out of the friend zone kind of way, but in just a you know, romantic feelings developed after there was a friendship.

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: None of the people I've dated because you know, we met and went on a date or met online or you know, after seeing them in lab for the first time or whatever, and none of those actually like went well and they all ended disastrously badly, and while you know, obviously past relationships ended, all but one of them, they ended in what I would consider good ways. I'm still friends with most of my exes. [0:35:04.3]

THERAPIST: That's great.

CLIENT: But anyway, so with that little bit of background, I have this friend Cricket who I've known for a couple of years, and I realized in the fall, that I had developed a crush on her, as I do sometimes. And so like I finally like admitted this to her about a month ago, and told her you know, just so you know, like I hope this doesn't make things weird or awkward, but I have totally developed romantic longings towards you in the last you know, how ever long and you know, would you be amenable to considering this. She is in a poly relationship with two other people and that relationship had been completely closed to new people until last summer. And so she replied and said you know, when I heard that you were dating Caitlin, I got really jealous, and I had to sit down and examine those feelings because like where is this jealousy coming from, this doesn't make any sense in you know, poly relationships. You know, I would like to see where this could go but like oh my God, I have no time for any relationship right now. My kid is leaving for college in three months and you know, I have a deadline for this novel that I'm writing and like can we put this off until July? (laughs) To which I said yes of course, because what else can you say? [0:36:33.1]

THERAPIST: What else are you going to say, right.

CLIENT: But I mean we're friends, we see each other fairly often, like we're at each other's houses for dinners or parties or game nights. We went to a burlesque show together last night and it's all just very sexually charged and I don't know, I don't want to upset this careful balance of you know, I don't want to be pushy and make her feel like I'm not respecting her boundaries.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: Yeah. There's not really anyone I can talk to about this because it's not like we're dating, and I don't really want to -if it were just my feelings, I would be fine talking with friends of mine, but because it also involves someone else, I don't want any chance of gossip starting to spread.

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: So like I don't know, there's not really anything to work through, it's just you know, awkward for the time being. [0:37:40.1]

THERAPIST: Well, a bit frustrating I'd imagine.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: You must be into her.

CLIENT: Yeah, she's awesome. Also, her boyfriend wants to sleep with me and I do not return those feelings at all. He's a good guy, he's a friend of mine, I like him, but there's no tingly feelings.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: So yeah, it's all just very awkward. [0:38:41.8]

THERAPIST: You're just not attracted to him?

CLIENT: No. He's very, very straight and very, very toppy; not traits I'm particularly into. Not that there's anything wrong with being straight or dominant.

THERAPIST: No, that wasn't at all how you put it. That's just not the flavors you like.

CLIENT: No, they really aren't. (laughs) [0:39:47.2]

THERAPIST: That's a while away too, July.

CLIENT: Yeah. The thing with Caitlin didn't work out, and I don't know if I mentioned that.

THERAPIST: No, I don't know that you mentioned her maybe?

CLIENT: We went on a couple of dates towards the end of December and in January, and yeah there were no -there was no chemistry. [0:40:55.4]

THERAPIST: How did you meet her?

CLIENT: We've been friends for like four years. Caitlin is a friend of Cricket's, Cricket introduced us. Caitlin is smart and cute and I feel nothing towards her. And she had never been in a queer relationship before, had only dated men before and had this epiphany that she thinks she might be bi or maybe lesbian, and she doesn't know and is terribly confused. That was like last summer, and then in December she asked me out and I was like okay, sure. That was very clearly her first homosexual experience, and she kind of freaked out about it.

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: So, you guys hooked up?

CLIENT: Yeah, yeah.

THERAPIST: It sounds like apart from that, you just weren't into her. [0:42:00.7]

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Is that right?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: I wanted to be into her because you know, on paper she is everything I am attracted to; smart and funny and cute.

THERAPIST: And a friend.

CLIENT: And a friend, yes. Yeah. So I was a little bummed about that not working out but it was clearly for the best for us to stop trying to make it work.

THERAPIST: Yeah. You're bummed it didn't work out but you weren't hurt because it just wasn't working.

CLIENT: Yeah. [0:43:05.4]

THERAPIST: Part of these possibilities. Why don't we stop for now.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: I'll talk to you on Thursday.

CLIENT: Yeah.

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