TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: Good morning.

CLIENT: Good morning. (pause) Dave promised he would do the laundry yesterday when we got back from our parish retreat. After dinner — we went out with friends for dinner. When we came back, I was really tired because I had done all the driving for the retreat, and Dave swore he would get the laundry done. I put all of my pants, like every pair of pants I own, in the laundry. And I went to sleep at like 9:00.

I got up this morning, took a shower, had breakfast, got dressed — well, got mostly dressed. I couldn't find the laundry basket, so I was like "Where's the laundry?" He was like "Oh, that's still on the dryer. You're not leaving for work for another hour, right?" I was like "I see Brian this morning. It's on the Google calendar which you check." He was like "You didn't tell me." I put it in the Google calendar. (sighing)

[00:01:03]

And our laundry isn't actually in our unit. It's in the building, but there's no direct access from our unit to the basement where the laundry is. I have to actually leave my apartment and go around the building to the other entrance to get to the basement. So I had to like find pajama pants, and go (chuckles) to the laundry, and bring it back, and it was a thing, and that's why I'm late. I'm sorry."

THERAPIST: Okay. (pause)

CLIENT: (sighing) Sorry. (long pause) Anyway. (long pause)

[00:02:08]

THERAPIST: So what comes to mind?

CLIENT: (sighing) I don't know. (pause) I'm still really tired even though I went to bed early. (pause) So my parish's retreat was this weekend. We left Friday right after work. (pause) (blowing nose) Excuse me. Got up to the campsite. I was feeling really antisocial, so I just went to our room and went to sleep. Dave went to the evening prayer service and hung out with people until late.

[00:03:00]

And then Saturday there was programming in the morning. I don't know. I found part of the programming really boring, but then the person running the program told us, you know, "Go and make art and then come back and talk about your art." And that was not boring, but I found it really challenging and stressful because, you know, being asked to just go make art on command is, you know, difficult. (blowing nose) And I'm apparently allergic to the summertime.

THERAPIST: I'm sorry to hear that.

CLIENT: (pause) Yeah, then in the afternoon there were activities. I signed up for what I thought was going to be helping children make crafts, but it turned out to be adults making crafts.

THERAPIST: Oh.

[00:03:57]

CLIENT: Making props really for Sunday school. So the way that the Sunday school program works for the younger kids is there are all of these props to deal with the various Bible stories that the kids have. So when the adult is reading the story, they put the props on the floor in order and create a kind of diorama as they're reading the story. It's nice for the kids. So we made some props for that. (pause)

I'm glad I decided to skip the boating because the water looked really cold. I just sat on the dock watching the water, and it was much more pleasant than getting splashed with cold icky lake water. (pause) Yeah. Then there was dinner and the talent show. That was actually kind of fun. And a bonfire.

[00:04:56]

And then some of the teenagers decided to start telling scary stories, and that was the point where I decided nope, I'm going to go back to my cabin now. No scary stories for me. Anyway, it was nice. It was like summer camp but for grownups and shorter. (long pause)

It was really nice and I really enjoyed it. It reminded me why I love my parish so much and why I stick around in spite of all of the variety of nastiness that has happened politically within the parish. And I really do feel like this is my family in a very real and important sense, but at the same time there is — I clearly didn't fit in.

[00:05:56]

Like, for example, we were making props for the Sunday school and we have these little wooden figurines about this tall, and we were painting them to look like, you know, people. And one woman in the group kept painting them all this peachy-pink color. I was like "These people are Middle Easterners. They're like Jews from 2,000 years ago. They wouldn't have been peachy-pink in color." And she just got really offended at that. So, you know, I mixed up a bunch of different flesh tones and started painting, you know, a bunch of them brown and black and various shades of not-white. (chuckles)

And then we moved onto making characters to represent our contemporaries in the church as opposed to Biblical figures. These two women kept grouping them, you know, mom, dad, boy-child, girl-child.

[00:06:58]

I was like "Well, some families have two moms and some families have two dads." (chuckles) So there were two shapes of little wooden figurines, and they kept insisting that one shape was female because it looked vaguely like a person wearing a skirt and the other shape was male, even though it was mostly just a cylinder with a head attached. I was like "But women can wear pants and men can wear dresses, especially if we're talking about people from the Middle East 2,000 years ago when everyone wore robes." Like it was very frustrating. (long pause)

[00:08:00]

Yeah. (long pause) (sneezing)

THERAPIST: Bless you.

CLIENT: Excuse me. (pause)

[00:08:54]

My sister has posted these really long, gushing, overly-sentimental, trite things on Facebook for Father's Day yesterday. I couldn't bring myself to be gushing or sentimental. I did call my dad, told him happy Father's Day, and asked him what was new. His response was "Same shit, different day. Life isn't worth living. I don't know why I continue living. Everything is the same. There is nothing good." (pause)

So then he asked me what was new with my life and of course, there's nothing I can talk to my dad about in my life. Like I certainly — [not that I was poly] for obvious reasons. My parents would just flip. So I can't talk about relationships.

[00:09:54]

I can't talk about church. That upsets dad. So I couldn't talk about the parish retreat. I told my parents I was taking voice lessons and piano lessons and their response — like I told them that a couple of months ago, and their response was "Why? That's such a waste of time." It's like there is absolutely nothing important in my life that I can tell my parents about. I've got nothing. (pause)

But of course, that set my dad off on another round of depressive ranting about how life isn't worth living. "You just get up, go to work, come home, might as well be dead." It was just really — it's pitiful. (long pause)

[00:13:41]

I don't know. I just — thinking about my family is deeply distressing to me, that's all. (pause) And I have friends who have teenage or even adult children who have sane, healthy relationships with their kids, and their kids tell them things about their lives and they have like real relationships. (pause) I don't know why I can't have that with my parents. Well, I do, because my parents are terrible and trying to be honest with them would only end badly, you know, in a more [meta] sense.

[00:14:42]

THERAPIST: In a like (inaudible) sense.

CLIENT: Yeah. (pause) And a woman at my church, she's in charge of the Sunday school program. Her kids are all grown and married and she does not understand any of her daughters at all, and is an artist. She went to art school, works as a graphic designer, has her own printing business. Her partner is an architect (chuckles) and her kids are all [pragmatists] (chuckles). One daughter is a civil engineer, another is a doctor, and she just does not get her kids at all or their interests or their hobbies. They're little space aliens to her, but they still have conversations about the things that are important to them and they tell their mom pretty much everything. Even if she doesn't understand, she's, you know, loving and supportive and that's wonderful. (pause)

[00:15:45]

I don't know. Why can't my parents be like that? It's not fair. (pause) That's kind of a useless thing to think because, you know, the world is what it is and I can't change it. So wishing it otherwise is a waste of time and energy. (long pause)

[00:17:06]

THERAPIST: Well, I think it makes you worried actually to talk about how upset and unjust it feels to have parents like yours. I'm not sure about this, but I wonder if you — I have no doubt you sort of thought and felt the last thing you said about it being useless, [but it also felt a little like bait to me to come in and disagree with or something which] —

CLIENT: Not intentionally.

THERAPIST: Yeah, sure. I know it wasn't intentionally that. But it could have got us into like a kind of back and forth about the validity of your feelings or something —

CLIENT: Right.

[00:18:04]

THERAPIST: — which I think is less anxious than actually —

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: — putting them out there in the way you had been.

CLIENT: (long pause) Like I think in a very real sense, my parents don't understand that their children aren't their belongings.

THERAPIST: Mmmm-hmmm.

CLIENT: (long pause) I think they just fundamentally don't get that we're each our own person with our own, you know, rich inner life and hopes and dreams and desires, challenges and struggles. (sighing)

[00:19:12]

My parents just don't understand that. It sounds ridiculous when I say it. Like how can you not understand that, you know, other people are other people? It seems ridiculously obvious.

THERAPIST: Uh huh.

CLIENT: I don't know.

THERAPIST: Well, it's one thing to know in your head and another to act that way. (long pause)

[00:20:38]

CLIENT: (sighing) (long pause)

[00:22:42]

THERAPIST: (inaudible) it's hard to talk here, even if you know in your head that I'm likely to, you know, listen or —

CLIENT: Mmmm-hmmm.

THERAPIST: — not be critical of the things that you say. I expect [essentially that you] feel like that.

CLIENT: Mmmm. Yeah. (pause)

THERAPIST: [You feel like I think] — or there's just this general feeling that you don't have a right to what you're saying or it's frivolous.

[00:23:46]

CLIENT: Yeah, a little bit. (long pause) To be honest, there's still a part of me that thinks that being depressed is still just a moral failing and if I just tried harder, I could stop.

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: (pause) I understand all the ways that's wrong, from a medical perspective.

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: But it still feels that way, that I should just be able to snap out of it, that I'm just malingering. (sighing) (long pause)

[00:27:43]

THERAPIST: I guess there's a way that would make therapy altogether a farce, really. (pause) I mean, if the thought is that you're just malingering essentially.

CLIENT: Mmmm-hmmm.

THERAPIST: (pause) And we both sort of, in a way, just have some kind of like bullshit idea about the value of what matters to you —

CLIENT: Right. (long pause)

[00:29:05]

I mean, I don't think this is a farce. I don't think it's been a waste of time. But at the same time, I have no concept of what being healthy might look like. Like I don't even know what that means anymore. I don't think I ever knew what that means, so maybe I shouldn't have said anymore. (pause)

THERAPIST: We should stop for now.

CLIENT: Yep.

THERAPIST: See you on Wednesday.

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