TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
THERAPIST: Is it too sunny over there?
CLIENT: No, that's fine.
THERAPIST: Okay. Not too sunny over here.
CLIENT: Okay. This last week, oh my goodness. I don't even know where to start, there's so much to cover. Yeah. So, Monday night, I met with my friend Jodie and the guy who insulted me, Tom, to basically well, rewinding a bit. I posted something cryptic to an account, which is kind of a private web blog, and Jodie send me an e-mail saying, "I'm pretty sure this was Tom, it was Tom, right?" Like this sounds familiar to me. I was like oh, I guess I wasn't as cryptic as I thought I was. So she and I talked. I went into some detail and she was like, "That is so not okay." But anyway, Jodie has been dating Tom off and on for like seven years, so that was super awkward, but she really encouraged me to confront him and tell him to just stay away from me, just so that I could feel safe moving around in our social circle. So I did. [00:01:40]
So she arranged it. She asked Tom to come meet her at her place, and I went over there. I wrote down a list of bullet points. It was basically what happened Tuesday night was not okay with me, that it wasn't something I was expecting, and I certainly didn't consent to it, and that I have I don't want to engage in [BDS?] and play with him ever again, and I don't want him to be affectionate or cuddly or flirty with me again, and not to approach me, either in private or in public places. I didn't feel like I have enough social capital to ask him to not go to events that I go to, but I did say that, you know, if we end up at the same dancing event, I don't want to dance with him. [00:02:45]
THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.
CLIENT: And I emphasized that, you know, even though I had been talking to Jodie, I had not asked her to choose between us and had made no requests about any action she might take. I was very clear with Jodie that whatever she did, I would not hold it against her or judge her for it.
THERAPIST: I see.
CLIENT: So, Tom at least sat down and was quiet and let me say what I needed to say, and then he apologized and agreed to all of the things I asked him to do regarding not contacting me, not being physically affectionate. I guess the proof is in the pudding. I don't -
THERAPIST: Right.
CLIENT: I don't want to give him too much credit until I actually run into him in public. Yeah.
THERAPIST: That sounds like a good start.
CLIENT: Yeah. And then I left and he stayed and talked to Jodie. Appropriately, she did not tell me what they talked about. She said she was doing okay emotionally, so that's you know, over with, thank goodness. That was really hard. [00:04:05]
THERAPIST: I bet. (pause) Well, good for you.
CLIENT: It was really… I don't know, I still blame myself somewhat, for having gotten involved with him in the first place. Like there's a part of me that says, you know, with hindsight, which is 20/20, if I had never slept with him the first time, we wouldn't have had this not a relationship, and then I wouldn't have lost a friend over this, because we had been friends before we started sleeping together. (sighs) Yeah, it sucks. I'm also really annoyed that throughout the conversation on Monday night, I kept feeling the an urge to like care-take for his feelings, like are you okay, like how are you feeling, I'm sorry this is so hard for you. I mean, I didn't actually say any of that out loud, and hopefully if I had, Jodie would have blacked me for it, but like it was so really hard to fight down that urge to worry about his feelings, when really, like his feelings should not have been you know, my concern at all, even a little bit.
THERAPIST: Mm-hmm. [00:06:06]
CLIENT: So yeah, that's frustrating. (pause) [00:08:10]
THERAPIST: What else is going on?
CLIENT: Hmm?
THERAPIST: What else is going on?
CLIENT: Oh, lots of stuff. There's yet more political stupidity at my church. I wish I didn't come Saturday. Spent most of the day Sunday with Ashley, that was really nice. So, I'm part of this anti-oppression team with my church and one of the things we decided two meetings ago was we need to get our church listed in national databases, as an open and affirming church, one that's welcoming to LGBT people. And so Moira, who is a lesbian woman in our parish, did some research and found the organization for after school churches. So, she e-mailed me about it and then I e-mailed two other also LGBT identified people in our parish, who had said they were interested in doing work around this issue and being involved in leadership. I said, you know, Moira did some legwork on this, I think it's a great idea. I want to get going on this, I think it would be fantastic if we got listed before seminary students arrived in the fall, because we always get anywhere from five to ten seminary students coming to our church. [00:09:50]
THERAPIST: Like as interns kind of?
CLIENT: We usually only have one or two interns, but seminary students are encouraged to have a regular Sunday church community that they go to, that's not school.
THERAPIST: I see, yeah.
CLIENT: So they have a spiritual live that's not tied up with whatever is going on academically for them. And a lot of them end up at our church. We have a number of priests who graduated from the local Episcopal seminary, who are members of our congregation. We also have several professors from EDF, so our members of our congregation.
THERAPIST: That's cool.
CLIENT: It is, it's really cool. We have a wealth of resources in our parish that served us well in the past. But anyway, so I said that and I said you know, I think this is a good outline, or a timeline, by the first week of June, let's write the welcome statement that integrity requires, then we can take it to the vestry meeting, which is on the second Tuesday in June, run it by the vestry, spend all of June and July communicating with the congregation about this. Then, you know, if the congregation doesn't raise any concerns, then in August we can put a sign on the outside of the building, post the welcome statement on our web page and submit our application to integrity.
THERAPIST: Gotcha. [00:11:07]
CLIENT: That immediately got pushed back, saying we need a process, we can't do this because Julia is on sabbatical over the summer. Julia is our rec there.
THERAPIST: Yeah, Julia is the one you've had all the trouble with.
CLIENT: Right. She's our priest in charge. People might object. And then, so there's this documentary called, "Too Cold Out There Without You," which was made by Chris Fike, who is a transgendered priest in the Episcopal church, about his journey and transition and the challenges he faced within the church. Being a priest, he wanted to transition, and it turns out that before his transition, he was a member of my congregation. But he was ordained in 1999, which is about eight years before I joined the parish.
THERAPIST: I see.
CLIENT: So, I don't know him, I've never known him, because by the time I joined, he had a job at another church. So then Moira suggested that we show his documentary, but she kept using the wrong pronoun and name. Yeah. And, you know, we have to go slow and make sure we don't upset people and I'm like, we have like three people who are out as queer, who were elected to our vestry. We had a gay priest our last rector, before Julia was gay. We have like multiple out gay people, were marching in a pride parade. Our bishop is gay? Like, why is this even… Like what the fuck? Also, the bit about we can't do this without Julia, just like makes me boggle, because it's wrong ecclesiology, it's just wrong and, and, and… [00:12:59]
So, I got that e-mail this morning, right before I came here, and I'm pretty angry about it. I was thinking, driving on the way here, that this is not the first time, like I've just been filled with rage over what I consider to be a fundamental moral issue in my parish. Treating LGBT people with full respect and dignity and standing up as an advocate in a culture that is very hostile to LGBT people is I consider that a moral question, like not a question of strategy or tactics, just what is the right thing to do. And there has been stuff with race and there's been stuff around like this might have been before I started coming to you, but there was massive drama over having ungendered bathrooms.
THERAPIST: I see.
CLIENT: Because we're rebuilding the parish house from scratch, so we were designing architectural plans. Massive drama over whether to make the bathrooms ungendered or not. It was just… (sighs) I don't know. I'm worried that, you know, my current instinct, which is just to talk away from it all, might just be my tendency to overreact and want to burn bridges as soon as I don't get my way. But on the other hand, there's been a great deal that is upsetting to me in this parish, and for several years now, I've been kind of wrestling with this question of do I actually even still believe in God. I don't know. So, yeah, I don't know.
PAUSE: [00:14:49 to 00:15:56]
THERAPIST: I'm thinking about how much easier and more comfortable it is for you, I think, to be angry and assertive about this.
PAUSE: [00:16:12 to 00:18:05]
THERAPIST: I imagine it's because what happened with Tom, he really intimidated you.
CLIENT: Mm-hmm.
THERAPIST: And maybe you were well, I guess this is the way we talked about it. When that happened, something switches off or shuts down for you, which I think secondarily is terrifying as well. And it could be that some of the rage you have when you get angry about other things and your tendency to actually or to at least want to really swing into action about it, which you also worry about.
CLIENT: Yeah. [00:19:54]
THERAPIST: Is partly like a way of reassuring yourself that you've not been rendered kind of passive and helpless. In other words, I think you both tended to have in mind, you know, sort of a fairly straight line between your father's rage and react too, and your own, which happily is not quite like his and has not caused you as much trouble, but I think you worry a lot about that as well.
CLIENT: I did in the past. [00:20:55]
THERAPIST: I think there's probably some truth to that connection, but also not the whole story, and I think this might be another piece of it. Does that make sense, is that clear?
CLIENT: Well, that -
THERAPIST: At least conceptually.
CLIENT: Yes.
THERAPIST: Okay.
CLIENT: The idea is that I get angry about things that are safe to get angry about, and out of proportion to what's deserved.
THERAPIST: It is that you get angry and worry you're going to lose control and do something, in part as a kind of like reaction to the fear you could be helpless. You know? [00:22:06]
CLIENT: Right.
THERAPIST: Treated badly, usually what it comes up around, and rendered kind of impotent, and so there's almost like a kind of a counter phobic reaction to that.
CLIENT: What does counter phobic mean?
THERAPIST: Well, because like when you sort of overreact, because that may show you're not afraid of it, so that -
CLIENT: Right.
THERAPIST: I saw a boy years ago, who had been in a lot of kind of chaotic and dangerous situations, and he was very small, and he used to like to kind of go out onto the fire escape or climb up on high things, and there was a lot of like doing things to show he wasn't afraid.
CLIENT: Yeah. [00:23:13]
THERAPIST: Which was kind of a reaction to how scared he was. He was trying to manage it. So like, stuff like that. Does that make sense?
CLIENT: It does.
PAUSE: [00:23:26 to 00:25:44]
THERAPIST: I guess, like you were saying, the other thing I'm doing and raising the possibility, what I was just describing, is something that I imagine makes you anxious, which is to point to the part of you or the way in which you can get very, very scared.
CLIENT: Mm-hmm.
THERAPIST: And freeze, and I'm saying that's important. I don't I'm not going to say, but I imagine (pause) it might be uncomfortable for you.
PAUSE: [00:27:12 to 00:28:51]
THERAPIST: I guess I'm wondering if you're having like some echo of that, very worried and kind of paralyzed feelings when I mentioned it.
CLIENT: I don't know. I think I'm having more of an avoidant reaction than anything else right now.
THERAPIST: Mm-hmm. What's on your mind?
CLIENT: Oh, I just a whole lot of things, all of which are completely irrelevant to my life. It's been jumping from topic to topic the last few minutes.
THERAPIST: That's fine, you can mention things that are irrelevant. [00:30:04]
CLIENT: I think it's good for me, to stay on this topic.
THERAPIST: Okay.
CLIENT: You're right, it is uncomfortable and unpleasant to talk about or think about. Yeah. (sighs) (pause) If your theory is correct, I need to imply that the areas of my life where I can get angry and assertive and, you know, do something dramatic, like say fine, I quit, I'm leaving, those are just ways to feel like I've re-taken control, but yeah, using the example of my church, walking away from my parish just because two people made me angry, that's not really being in control, although it might give me the illusion of being in control and having power. That sucks. That's something to think about.
PAUSE: [00:31:48 to 00:33:59]
CLIENT: I still think it's wrong to say that the leadership can't make decisions without the rector.
THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.
CLIENT: But that's really not worth burning bridges over.
PAUSE: [00:34:21 to 00:36:39]
CLIENT: (sighs)
THERAPIST: What is it?
CLIENT: Oh, still thinking about the situation with Tom and Jodie and how it sucks. On Saturday, I'm leaving, and I've been avoiding even thinking about that. It's been very frustrating to Dave, because he's been reading guidebooks, you know, the things he wants to see and do, and I've just been completely refusing to engage at all, and that annoys him because he likes looking at guidebooks together. When we planned our trip out west, we did a lot of that and he's just… Yeah. (pause) This is really petty and selfish of me, but Ashley leaves for vacation the day I get back, which means it will be at least three weeks, the first time I'll get to see him out since the most recent date, which is kind of irritating. That's going really well, I want to see him again, but like neither of us have time before I leave for China. [00:38:22]
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: And then he's moving, (inaudible). Yeah. (pause) [00:40:13]
THERAPIST: Do you imagine there will be moments on the trip, with your family, similar to what happened with Tom?
CLIENT: Oh, I'm sure there will be. (pause) I don't seem to have any middle ground when it comes to my parents. Either I cave in and just do what they want and then seethe about it afterwards, or I'm, you know, completely nuclear. It's really hard to maintain healthy, sane boundaries.
THERAPIST: We should finish up.
END TRANSCRIPT
