TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
CLIENT: I'm not sure this is going to be a very good day. I like couldn't get to sleep for like a half hour, 45 minutes last night and then I had a dream that woke me up a 4 and I couldn't get back to sleep for another, at least an hour that doesn't happen to me very often. So I didn't sleep that well. I dreamed of Dan (sp?), actually Britnay, his wife. I dreamed that I'm renting their house in Philadelphia and either Dan was in Oman or both of them were but (unclear). I think there was more to the dream but -
(Pause): [00:01:18 00:01:37]
THERAPIST: (inaudible).
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CLIENT: I don't know. I don't actually remember very much about it anymore. I just remember (inaudible).
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CLIENT: (inaudible).
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CLIENT: I remember in the dream saying, 'no, I don't want to talk to Dan. That's not a good idea.' Even though, like, I desperately did. But even in the dream thinking clearly like that would be a really bad idea. (Laughs)
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THERAPIST: (Whispers) I don't know what to talk about.
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CLIENT: I have been feeling less ready for it hurting suddenly and (inaudible).
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CLIENT: (inaudible).
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CLIENT: Geoffrey is coming to town on Friday. We're supposed to have (unclear) with him. Poor Frank. I forgot about my tutoring got moved to Friday so we're going to have to (unclear) drive to (inaudible).
THERAPIST: (Cross talk) (inaudible).
CLIENT: Yeah. I think I will feel better about all of that like later on today. Right now (inaudible) about it.
THERAPIST: Uh huh.
(Pause): [00:07:07 00:07:49]
CLIENT: (Whispers) (inaudible).
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CLIENT: (Crying) Things just don't stop. Like I don't know.
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CLIENT: Should not be (laughs) sort of like (unclear) just like pulling teeth to get them to just like brush their teeth and put their clothes on in the mornings and their dad sort of said off-handedly to me once, 'it's like they're surprised every morning that they have to get dressed.' It's always a surprise to them.
THERAPIST: (Laughs)
CLIENT: (Laughs) It's sort of like that. Like, 'oh, I have to wake up.'
THERAPIST: Uh huh.
(Pause): [00:09:29 00:09:46]
CLIENT: Like starting when you're doing a multi-day hike or a multi-day kayak, starting out in the morning, like your muscles are like, 'you've got to be kidding me.' Like, 'oh, this is not happening.' And then you just like you get used to it. And it stops feeling so hard.
(Pause): [00:10:13 00:10:23]
CLIENT: (inaudible).
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CLIENT: I don't whether it's harder to talk today is because of having kind of a rough conversation yesterday or (unclear) all day. It's one of those like, it seems reasonable to conclude this (unclear) but it's not what it feels like.
THERAPIST: Sure.
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CLIENT: (inaudible).
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CLIENT: In some ways I feel like my major accomplishment last week has been giving my, the (unclear) problem that they don't know how to solve. It's terribly funny. (Unclear) theology in my (unclear) was the things I said in reply to like memory loss and to feeling like I had lost myself, my sense of self was fractured or much less clear, has made me really not know what to do with what Christianity has to say about the self or the soul, like I just don't think, I haven't seen, I haven't seen that. So like when I was right before I started doing ECT, I heard a sermon that sort of helped solidify some things that I'd been thinking about like suffering, and God and Jesus that I'd never really had very much use for but sort tended to, 'okay, well I can see why' how this works and that was really important to me spiritually, and then I forgot about it. Like totally forgot about it. It was gone and then like a month or so ago I read a journal entry I had written describing it and was like, 'oh yeah, that was really important.' And that kind of came back. But like theological anthropology is like the branch of theology that deals with the human person and like the person's relation to God and like I just don't know what to do with this. I haven't seen anything on that and nobody I've talked to has seen a good discussion of that.
THERAPIST: Un huh. Like how does theology account for like the theology sort of contingent on a kind of continuity of the self that was destructed for you by the ECT?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: And that's a problem because those things apparently happen.
CLIENT: Yeah.
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CLIENT: So now that's something I've sort of been reading about. You know things that are horrible and scary, so let's write a paper on it.
THERAPIST: Un huh.
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CLIENT: And as far as I know, and I don't know very much my Christian theology relies pretty heavily on like Plato and maybe a soul that's like pre-existing and exists after death and is a more or less static thing. And this just doesn't work very well for me anymore. I don't think it ever really did but like especially does not right now.
THERAPIST: Uh huh. Yeah.
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CLIENT: That feeling is fading in some ways like I'm feeling less fractured. (inaudible).
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THERAPIST: I'm wondering if -
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THERAPIST: Part of what's disturbing you is the prospect of like getting help and of things actually getting better.
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THERAPIST: Perhaps, though I know it was difficult and disturbing, what we were talking about yesterday could be quite helpful in sort of proposing that the way the world has kind of inevitably felt and been sort of so painful and even relationships have been met with oblique and sort of painful actually has something to do with your psychology and history and you know, which means that there's kind of a glimmer of possibility that that could be different where it isn't necessarily a fact of a sort of reality of the world, or something like that. And maybe that's really quite disturbing. Not because there maybe something wrong with you, but more so because it means that things could be better or easier. It's a little like the dream. It struck me sort of as ironic when you said something about you had a dream about Dan, or Dan was far away in your dream or something like that, in that I understand that that was true. He was in their house in Oman in the dream, but of all the things that you could dream about you should dream about moving into his house in Philadelphia.
CLIENT: (Laughs).
THERAPIST: (Laughs)
CLIENT: (Laughs) I actually hadn't thought about it in that way. But yeah, yeah, you're right there.
THERAPIST: He was kind of far away but he wasn't. You know?
CLIENT: Yeah. Except the house is actually different than their actual house in Philadelphia. But no, no, I don't think that's wrong (laughing).
THERAPIST: So, again, that would be an instance where the way it sort of looked to you or seemed to you as you were going over the dream was that he was very far way. In a sense this was true but in a larger sense, he was not. And that was (unclear). Your statement in the dream itself, which was, 'I really don't think it would be a good idea if we spoke,' or we were in touch as though you know -
CLIENT: Yeah. (Laughs)
(Pause): (Laughs) [00:25:19 00:25:32]
THERAPIST: And then in what you're talking about now, there's a way that -
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THERAPIST: You're sort of describing to us immediately in your own experience is things slowly, and in a piecemeal fashion, coming back together. You know, you had the experience of losing that event but actually you're also (unclear) because it came back. You read about it, (unclear) was written about it. But you also remembered it
CLIENT: (inaudible).
THERAPIST: Or had some contact with it and you sort of, again your explicit focus is on how disturbing it is that theology doesn't account for what happened to you. I can see how that's disturbing, but again it's sort of in the context of actually things coming back together and not so that you can sort of recognize that in the first place.
CLIENT: It sort of freaks my theologian friends out a lot more than it freaks me out.
THERAPIST: Uh huh.
CLIENT: I'm sort of like, 'well, yes. Huge gaps in theology. (Laughs)
THERAPIST: Right.
CLIENT: (Laughing) What did you expect?
THERAPIST: (Unclear).
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Right. But my point is, you seem perhaps, to be gravitating towards like what's more disturbing or upsetting in the context of things that actually could feel good or be positive (unclear). (Pause): [00:27:27 00:27:41]
CLIENT: Do you think things will get easier? Or can get easier?
THERAPIST: I certainly think they can.
CLIENT: Okay.
THERAPIST: That was the question I wanted to ask.
CLIENT: Yeah.
(Pause): [00:27:54 00:28:11]
THERAPIST: I really do think that the prospect of them getting easier is quite disturbing.
CLIENT: Yeah. But like it seems counterintuitive when you say that. But at the same time like you sometimes can say things and you're just sort of throwing them out there and sometimes you say, 'I wonder if this is happening,' when it's clear that you're pretty clear that this is happening. And this feels a lot like the latter. (Laughs)
THERAPIST: I see.
(Pause): [00:28:40 00:29:31]
CLIENT: It's not something that I'm really aware of but it's kind of (unclear) to think about.
THERAPIST: Sure.
CLIENT: I'm having a hard time getting a handle on it.
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CLIENT: I guess it's -
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CLIENT: Would it be that I just don't want to change? For me to work differently I sort of set myself up to happier and that wouldn't be easier with the aim of ultimately being different and it' hard.
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CLIENT: What it feels like is that I'm terrified of the idea that things might not change.
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CLIENT: (inaudible).
THERAPIST: Un huh.
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CLIENT: For a long time when things were going well I didn't think they'd ever be bad again and when things were bad I didn't think they'd ever be good again and I've sort of gotten to the point where even when things are going really well that feels like part of the same cycle.
THERAPIST: Uh huh. Do you mean like it's just a matter of time before the bottom drops out again?
CLIENT: Yeah.
(Pause): [00:35:01 00:36:08]
CLIENT: I guess it feels like what I said. I can't really tell that's what's going on with me, but it feels to me like the sort of claim that you make when you feel pretty sure of it and I tend to believe you or you tend to be right. (Pause) But I don't know what to do about that.
THERAPIST: Sure.
CLIENT: So I'm sort of like sitting waiting for some kind of internal recognition and it's not really coming.
THERAPIST: I see. Yeah.
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CLIENT: A lot of feeling guilty but I can deal with that. That I was expecting.
THERAPIST: Your faith in your experience not lining up?
CLIENT: (Laughs) Yeah, I guess so.
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CLIENT: Can I ask am I right in that? Like is that a claim that you're actually wondering about or something that you're pretty sure is going on?
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THERAPIST: (Unclear) clear.
CLIENT: That might not be a fair question, but whatever (laughs).
THERAPIST: Sorry. You mean what I just said, or the claim that I made before?
CLIENT: The claim you made before.
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THERAPIST: I think you're asking me now about my faith in what I said. Or like to the extent to which I have faith in what I said or felt like it was more tentative. I don't mean you think that like I don't hear your question critically -
CLIENT: Yeah, I guess that's what I'm saying.
THERAPIST: But I think that's in an effort and why not, to alleviate your anxiety about the disconnect.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Between what I said and how it feels (unclear).
CLIENT: Yeah.
(Pause): [00:40:13 00:40:27]
CLIENT: Well, so far (unclear). It's an ongoing thing like trying to figure out how you do your job.
THERAPIST: Sure.
CLIENT: It helps me deal with things.
THERAPIST: Uh huh.
(Pause): [00:40:45 00:41:11]
THERAPIST: I guess the reason I'm hesitant to answer is because I think to I don't know how to answer this directly, but to really (laughs) I can think in this particular instance I'm concerned about like foreclosing in answering on the I think this issue of you and like lack of faith and confidence in what feels like authority is actually a pretty central one so I think the issue of your question is pretty central and to answer your question directly would kind of side step that.
CLIENT: Okay.
THERAPIST: So (unclear) go back and answer a (unclear) question and answer -
CLIENT: No, no. It's okay. I mean I didn't really expect you to answer it and also I think you probably shouldn't. (Laughs) Like I think you're right.
THERAPIST: And I can think of other instances where I could answer that pretty straight. Like 'are you sure what you're saying or are you being tentative?' Or, 'it really sounds like this to me,' or, 'no I'm just really throwing that out there.' But in this particular case it seems to sort of quicken this particular issue.
CLIENT: Okay.
THERAPIST: Like, for example, in another instance, if I said, 'oh no, I knew you felt really horrible yesterday,' but I actually think that was probably a blip, you know, where I think it really had more to do with the circumstances than like your (unclear) and you said you know you seemed you're not sure. I mean I can imagine actually answering a question like that in instances like that, but -
CLIENT: Yeah. Also to be clear, I feel like I don't blame you for not answering very many of my questions in part because I tend to ask unanswerable questions. (Laughs)
THERAPIST: (Laughs) Yeah.
(Pause): [00:43:39 00:43:55]
CLIENT: I still don't know anything.
THERAPIST: Yeah.
(Pause): [00:43:56 00:44:06]
THERAPIST: We should stop.
CLIENT: Yeah.
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