TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

CLIENT: Hi.

THERAPIST: Good morning.

CLIENT: Good morning.

THERAPIST: Yeah, you told me you have to drive through Fairfield to get here.

CLIENT: Fairfield? No. I'm down on Cheshire Street.

THERAPIST: Oh.

CLIENT: Under the underpass, and then onto River (ph).

THERAPIST: Uh huh. Fairfield is like two hours west. I was joking. I was being facetious.

CLIENT: Oh.

THERAPIST: Fairfield is like a couple of hours to the west of here.

CLIENT: Oh, I thought you meant Fairfield Street, which is like a kind of little alley in Cheshire that (crosstalk at 00:00:41).

THERAPIST: Oh, no. [laughs]

CLIENT: Actually, it is halfway between Cambridge and Dupont Square, but...

THERAPIST: Sorry, no, I wasn't nearly that knowing.

CLIENT: [laughs]

THERAPIST: My (inaudible at 00:00:50)

CLIENT: It's like two blocks long. I was like, "Why does Brian know about Fairfield Alley? That (inaudible at 00:00:55)."

THERAPIST: [laughs]

CLIENT: [laughs]

THERAPIST: For some reason, I was thinking all that I know about it is that you live to the north, which doesn't make any sense (inaudible at 00:01:03).

CLIENT: I'm here and [that's what matters] (ph).

THERAPIST: Good. I'm glad you made it.

CLIENT: Ugh. [sighs] I don't know where to start. What should I talk about?

THERAPIST: Whatever is on your mind at the moment.

CLIENT: I couldn't forget the (inaudible at 00:01:28) coming back.

THERAPIST: Probably.

CLIENT: Ugh.

THERAPIST: I can handle a thing, even if (inaudible at 00:01:43) irrelevant or (inaudible at 00:01:44).

CLIENT: Sure, sure.

(pause)

CLIENT: I don't know. [00:02:00] I don't really feel you bringing this up, because it seems like the solution is obvious but I'm having trouble accepting the obvious solution is to just calm down and chill out.

Ashley: things have been going really well. We've been on five dates. I haven't seen him in like three weeks, because-I saw him on Sunday, and then there was the week of prep for leaving for Italy, we were both busy. Then I was in Italy for ten days. Then the day I came back, he left for his vacation that he had planned months ago. He's not back in town until next week, Monday.

Then the Sunday immediately after he gets back is this monthly singing event in Ithaca that we've been going to together-I mean, "been going to," we've been twice, because it's monthly. We've only been dating for two months. [00:03:00]

If I'm being rational and not getting all spun-up about it, odds are we will probably go to the singing event together and then go to his place and cook dinner. I'll stay over, and that'll be great.

But I've just been terribly anxious for the last day and a half. Maybe all this time apart was giving him an opportunity to change his mind. What do I do if he comes back and he doesn't get in touch with me? Because all of our dates so far, I've done the first communication.

There's this advice blog that I read called Captain Awkward. One of the things that Captain Awkward says is that for introverts and socially-awkward people and geeks who weren't properly socialized, it's really hard to tell when you're going too far and being too pushy with initiating relationships or even just friendships. [00:04:02]

One of the things she says is people who like you will act like they like you. Part of the advice she gives is after you've planned a couple of meet-ups whether it be friendly or romantic take a step back and see if they initiate contact with you.

That's really tough for me to do, because it's hard waiting for someone else to initiate. Sometimes people don't initiate, and then I get really wound-up and anxious and unhappy.

I don't know if her advice is just bad advice, in this case which has been known to happen. Maybe I am being too pushy and I don't realize it, because I'm really bad at reading social cues.

Yeah.

(pause)

[00:05:00]

THERAPIST: The obvious advice just to initiate and to ignore that or-and what's the-apparently the obvious thing is not so obvious to me. What-?

CLIENT: Well, according to Dave, the obvious thing is to stop overthinking things and just put it out of my mind until Ashley gets back from his vacation and has Internet again.

THERAPIST: [laughs]

CLIENT: He's camping in West Virginia and has no Internet, so he can't contact me, even if he wanted to.

THERAPIST: Obviously. Okay.

CLIENT: [laughs]

THERAPIST: I know why [with me] (ph), just putting out of your mind would not occur to me as the obvious thing.

CLIENT: [laughs] Not an easy thing for me to do.

THERAPIST: Or for most of us, as far as I can tell.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: (inaudible at 00:05:54) [00:06:00]

CLIENT: Yeah, I guess the thing that I'm really concerned about is what if he doesn't actually like me as much as I like him? Going on dates and sleeping with me is a fun distraction, but he doesn't actually have any drive to see me if I don't initiate.

(pause)

[00:07:00]

CLIENT: There's a lot of stuff tied up in this (ph). Almost all of my relationships, I've been the asker and not the askee. Does that make sense? I asked Dave out. I'm trying to think back, all of my relationships-yeah, I did the asking, except for Jenny. She asked me out. There was almost perfect 50/50 parody (ph) between who planned dates and initiated the, "When am I going to see you next?" conversation.

THERAPIST: With her?

CLIENT: Yeah, with Jenny. With everyone else I've dated, I've been the primary initiator. It always makes me anxious and upset. [00:08:00]

With Dave, it took three years to convince myself that he actually wanted to see me and was not just going along for the ride because nothing better had come along.

That seems to be working out well. We're coming up on ten years together, so... [laughs]

THERAPIST: Yeah, you seem to have been right about that.

CLIENT: [laughs] But being the person who is just better at wrangling schedules and figuring out when we're going to see each other again doesn't necessarily mean that I'm more interested. It just means that I'm better at that skill, but it's hard for me to believe that especially because there's so much social messaging about how women are supposed to be asked, not doing the asking. Certainly, in mainstream culture, it's seen as a little bit gross and desperate for a woman to do the asking in any opposite-sex relationship. [00:09:00]

Of course, I could talk for hours about societal gender norms and how they're messed-up and evolutionary psychology is just kind of bullshit and on and on and on. [laughs] That doesn't (crosstalk at 00:09:18) things I've internalized.

THERAPIST: That would be nice (crosstalk at 00:09:19).

CLIENT: Right? Certainly, I can go into queer theory and queer relationships. You don't get to follow gender roles because you're (inaudible at 00:09:35) gender, and then there's...I could go on, in theory, for ages and ages about this stuff, and how it's wrong and stupid, but I still feel it. That's a little bit frustrating to me on a meta level, because I know I'm playing into a bunch of cultural narratives that I don't believe in, and yet I can't stop myself from playing into them. [00:10:00]

(pause)

[00:11:00]

(pause)

THERAPIST: Yeah, clearly you'd much prefer to handle or even talk here about this situation with Ashley in a kind of conceptual way, whether to do with our culture and society or, I don't know, even dating (inaudible at 00:12:15) person like (inaudible at 00:12:15).

I think mostly because it's so disorienting and you feel so anxious about...like you're feeling really get to flying around when you just think about, "Oh my God, what am I going to do?"

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: I think that's probably coming, in a way, you're kind of trying to ward off even talking about it, as well as in the moments when you're thinking about what you could do for out there, because it's really disconcerting. [00:13:11]

CLIENT: Yep.

(pause)

THERAPIST: I guess there are two things that make you really anxious in the question whether how to reach out to him. [00:14:00]

One of which is it might mean that you're a desperate loser who, I don't know, is kind of forcing something or really wanting something that the other person really doesn't or is (inaudible at 00:14:23) about anyway.

The other, I think, is maybe more subtle, which is that you really have no idea what's going on. You can't read the cues; you can't trust your intuition about it or your sensibility. That you're [at sea] (ph).

CLIENT: Yep. I don't like that feeling.

THERAPIST: You don't know what to believe, sure.

CLIENT: I have evidence that I have misread interpersonal situations pretty dramatically incorrectly before, in the past. [00:15:01]

The one that's coming to mind which is in a totally different context is my interview for the job I have now, where I thought the interview went really well and then I found out months after that that my interviewer thought I did really badly.

Yeah.

(pause)

CLIENT: I could (inaudible at 00:15:49) up other situations where I thought someone was hitting on me and when I broached the topic, they were appalled and horrified, or situations where I didn't realize someone was interested in me and found out weeks or months after the fact that they were really disappointed that I didn't get the message. [00:16:09] Situations where the person explicitly told me what they were feeling or thinking.

For example, this guy who I've known for a long time, when we were in college. We had known each other three years? He's uniquely (ph) attractive, but wasn't really on my radar. Invited me to go to a concert with him and then go to a friend's party. I read it as just purely-we both like the same music, let's just carpool together. He thought it was a date. I did not realize it was a date. [laughs]

Literally three months after the fact, he came up to me during a quiet moment in our dorm and said, "You know, so that date that ended really badly, I was just wondering, would you mind telling me why you weren't interested?" [00:17:09] I was like, "That was a date? I didn't realize that was a date." He was like, "Yeah, that was totally a date and you didn't seem interested in getting romantic or physical afterwards, so I let it drop, because that's what nice guys do." Then I was like, "I had no idea."

I really, really don't trust my intuition, because it's almost never right.

(pause)

CLIENT: On the other hand, I don't know how to ask for just clear, explicit communication without sounding completely neurotic. [00:18:00]

(pause)

[00:19:00]

CLIENT: I find it's really easier to acquire clear, explicit communication around sex than around emotional things. It's very easy for me to ask direct yes or no questions, like, "May I kiss you?" "May I take off your shirt?" etc., when they're about physical actions. "I want to know how you really feel about me," is much, much harder to ask probably a lot more invasive, too, I don't know.

(pause)

[00:20:00]

(pause)

THERAPIST: Just because of the context, I would think that it's easier to ask somebody about sexual stuff. Is it clear why that (inaudible at 00:20:56) concrete, if it was intrusive, because (inaudible at 00:20:59) didn't like, particularly after the first question. At the context it's at, it sounds like the questions are appropriate.

CLIENT: Right. Yeah. The context does make it pretty obvious when the next question is appropriate and when it's not.

THERAPIST: Is that a big part, you think, of what makes it easier?

CLIENT: I think so. It's almost pretty obvious-it's almost always really obvious when asking the question won't be received badly. The answer might be, "No," but it's okay to have asked the question, right?

THERAPIST: Right, yeah. [00:22:00] If the person's shirt is off and you ask them to take their pants off...

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: ...they could say, "No," but not like the question came out of nowhere.

CLIENT: Right, right. The first time I had sex with Ashley, we were at my place. We were going to go out for dinner, but the restaurant we wanted to go to was really packed, so we decided to just order take-out and take it back to my place.

We had been at my place. We had been eating dinner. Then we washed dishes together. Then we're sitting on the couch really, really close. The, "May I kiss you?" question was very obviously not coming out of nowhere. There was context to suggest that it was a reasonable thing to ask.

THERAPIST: I'm smiling because that just reminds me-is it Woody Allen, maybe, where it's this married couple that's in bed and he tries to initiate something but his wife it's Woody Allen, I think, or (inaudible at 00:23:07) like, "Not here!" in bed together.

CLIENT: Right, right.

THERAPIST: Which that may be (inaudible at 00:23:18) exactly your point, that context.

CLIENT: Sure. It might very well have been that I misread the situation and our personal space level were just differently aligned. He might have said, "No," but I was reasonably confident that the question would not be taken poorly.

THERAPIST: Right, which does seem like it's your concern in fact relates to all the examples you gave, where you wound up feeling you were just really on a different page from the other person and hadn't known it.

CLIENT: Yeah. [00:24:00]

THERAPIST: In a way, that made somebody feel bad.

CLIENT: Right usually me.

THERAPIST: Not mostly in the situation with the friend of yours who thought you were on a date, but I understand that mostly (inaudible at 00:24:27).

(pause)

CLIENT: I think this all ties back in to I really don't like looking foolish. When it's become apparent that I've completely misread a situation, I feel foolish and I feel as though everyone around me thinks I'm foolish. [00:25:00]

(pause)

THERAPIST: I'm sure you're right about that being a central part of this. I also think there's something else which may kind of converge with that or may be different.

I think you probably often feel like pretty alienated at some level. Maybe I'm (inaudible at 00:25:59) here, but even in situations where you were kind of hitting (ph) on people or know that there are some ways which you're on the same page; I guess I have the impression somehow that you can nonetheless feel that sort of in some deeper way.

You feel like you really could be or are on a very different from the other person. Maybe you're connecting, you're around what's in the context at that moment, but that there's some other way in which you feel like maybe you're actually really (inaudible at 00:26:39) that distance on very different place.

CLIENT: Well, that sounds about right for me.

THERAPIST: When these kind of disconnects happen, like you're talking about, in addition to feeling quite shameful, it also points at this sense of alienation or affirms it in some way. [00:27:09]

(pause)

THERAPIST: It's quite painful.

(pause)

THERAPIST: Probably tying with some sense of there's something very much the matter with you.

CLIENT: Mm-hmm.

(pause)

[00:28:00]

(pause)

[00:29:00]

(pause)

THERAPIST: What's on your mind?

CLIENT: Oh, I'm just thinking about I still haven't decided whether it would be better to e-mail Ashley a couple days after he gets back from his camping trip and say, "Do you want to go to the singing event together on Sunday and hang out after ?" or let it sit and wait for him to contact me.

(pause)

THERAPIST: Are you saying in part that you're sort of frustrated with me, like, "Ask Josh if (inaudible at 00:30:00) let's talk about that. Apparently he forgets."

CLIENT: [laughs]

THERAPIST: [laughs]

CLIENT: Maybe a little bit, but certainly that was not the conscious motivation. I don't know. I can kind of get obsessive about certain questions and just not let them go and worry even arbitrarily long amounts of time and not be able to let them go.

(pause)

[00:31:00]

(pause)

CLIENT: I think the real problem here is just this underlying sense of alienation and not understanding how people work. How do I fix that? Is there any cure for feeling fundamentally alienated from the rest of humanity? Is there a way to not feel alienated or is just something that I have to come to terms with and accept?

THERAPIST: At first. [00:32:00]

CLIENT: Yeah (ph)?

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: How does that work?

THERAPIST: In a very general way. Okay, there's ideology and there's intervention. Ideologically and for somebody else, in the version of it that we're talking about-well, it's actually (inaudible at 00:32:40) about any version. It probably comes a lot from experience, starting very early. I find myself thinking of, which I meant a few minutes ago before you asked, is that you probably very often felt like the people you were closest to were just not in it with you or on the same page with you, in some very fundamental way. [00:33:11]

Even with simple things things you'd been curious about or excited about or upset about. The other person was just unlikely to be really in that with you at the moment. It was absorbing their own thing, had a very different view of it that they were trying to convince you is the right view or quashing your view. Stuff like that.

My guess would be that that was probably a pretty chronic thing, pretty pervasive.

CLIENT: Yep.

THERAPIST: That's not just what you expect, but how it probably feels. [00:34:05] That doesn't just shape what you expect from people, though it does shape that. It also affects what it's like to be with other people. Sometimes, even you are able to then do things that confirm that or that sort of produce that outcome. That's ideology.

Intervention is...it's a very self-serving, like it's therapy or analysis, with probably some reference to history and somebody tells the story about how this happened in a more particular way and what the actual experiences were, but also a lot with an emphasis on what's going on in here between us, or at times in your life.

(pause)

THERAPIST: Sort of involved attending to the ways that somebody's (inaudible at 00:35:52), why a thing or dynamic in their life. [00:36:00]

(pause)

THERAPIST: Where you (inaudible at 00:36:15) come forth to confirm in a very emotional, usually anxiety-filled way (inaudible at 00:36:22) rest of us. How this crops out, how it bothers you, and that helps you work it through. For example I'm just making this up, well not entirely worried today (ph) talking to me about something that seems dumb to talk about.

CLIENT: Right.

Where again, it's not just that you anticipate that I'll be like, "Oh," internally I'm rolling my eyes, "Oh my God, I can't believe (inaudible at 00:36:54)." What your actual experience is, that I must be on a very different page and couldn't-there's like a chasm between us, I'm really just not going to understand what this is like for you. [00:37:11] Or have an interest in understanding it.

Anxious to bring up, because of course you're going to find out it's true. It's going to be very painful. There will undoubtedly be times where inadvertently, that does happen, and that sucks. Then there's all this (inaudible at 00:37:29).

There may be other instances, [things you're not even aware] (ph). Something like Asperger's Syndrome or moving from one culture to another, one family to another very early. Having a drastic change in [family life] (ph), something like-or any parents who just happen to be very different. Sometimes you see [a kid with] (ph) ADHD and this, that, and the other thing, and the parents just don't have it and are very different people. [00:38:03] Or the opposite, where there's different kinds of cause for that alienation. The treatment is essentially the same. Part of it, you can work it. It's not the part about it being Asperger's or different from their parents, but the part about how that felt, how that shaped, nobody thinks about that.

END TRANSCRIPT