TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

CLIENT: How's it going?

THERAPIST: Good.

CLIENT: So, have you listened to those?

THERAPIST: I have listened to a few of them.

CLIENT: What's the quality?

THERAPIST: Very good, actually.

CLIENT: Really?

THERAPIST: Why?

CLIENT: I'm thinking about maybe getting one just like that. I'm just not good technologically. I have something that's a bigger version of that and I can't – that seems really easy to use.

THERAPIST: It's been very easy. It's more expensive than they usually are but it's worth it.

CLIENT: A hundred bucks.

THERAPIST: Yeah – 150.

CLIENT: (Whispers) (inaudible). [00:00:32]

THERAPIST: You're using it for what?

CLIENT: I'd like to try to record our practices and I usually just do it on my iPhone but a lot of times I forget. But that will just keep going right? There's no limit on the time?

THERAPIST: A number of hours. Twelve hours or something.

CLIENT: So I could just put it on and you can probably edit that.

THERAPIST: Yes. Sure. CLIENT: So yeah, we could just leave it and forget about it.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: So I decided something yesterday. I was talking to my friend Drake. Not this Drake but another Drake. I got to chill out. The whole, like – I was up till okay – get a load of this. So (unclear) are running a different electronic type thing on garage bands. Around like 12 o'clock or so I just got so absorbed in it that I don't know why, like an idiot I didn't plug in my adaptor, I mean the whatever, it's the Mac, the cord so it shut down. I lost a shit load of tracts. I was (unclear). [00:01:45] So instead of – the good thing though I was instead of just being like losing it and getting upset I was up till 5 in the morning redoing it. That's all great, but something's going on here. I mean it's good – I mean I like it in the sense that that's awesome, I'm in a place now where I'm working, fuck ADHD. I was super focused, you know. But I think I've got to like, when I talked to Drake he liked helped me – I didn't really say anything but he's been into music and stuff and he's more into promoting and selling and producing and all that, different kinds of music, but still it's the same concept. And he was like, man, you're not going to really see – he's like you're really not going to see much in terms of how the record's been doing not till like six months – actually like a year. He's like because the life of a record is three to four years. And when he said that in my mind I was like why am I, I'm like constantly – it's like I've worked so hard on this thing and there's so much pent up – it has nothing to do with the record. Do you know what I mean?

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: It's just me. That I just want immediate – I want people to hear it. I want it to be out there. And it doesn't work that way. It's not the record's fault that I'm bringing psychological issues to it. And then I relate that to the electronics – it's as if I'm running, I'm sprinting. On the one hand it's good. I feel super like – that record's done, like I'm just – the [nomics] (ph). [00:03:45] I'm trying all this experimental stuff. I'm recording, I'm teaching myself how to work. That's great. But I gotta calm down a little bit. You know. Does that make sense?

THERAPIST: It does.

CLIENT: And even with the electronics. I'm already like, is this really good. It's something like I'm already like being an asshole to myself about it. I just taught myself how to use this thing. I'm making the kind of songs I never would make, kind of dance-y more indie, dance-y stuff that I would never do. So just fucking relax, just have fun and play it for a couple of friends and make it just be fun. Then if it's something, it's something. You know? Yeah, so that was really good to talk to him just be feel like you know I do have to think of it now like a business kind of. You don't get – when you open a practice or whatever you open or start you don't get returns immediately. I mean you gotta be patient and you know.

THERAPIST: I'm glad you've made sense of what you're saying because there has been, it's like a fever pitch intensity for a while that has felt good but part of what you're trying out that two end sides connect and is currently, but it's been intense and maybe there are times where it feels like what would happen if you could take a deep breath and kind of go to sleep instead of finish that at night. What would happen if the intensity calmed down a little bit?

CLIENT: Well, and the thing I reminded myself too is, again after talking to Drake, the thing feels like I also have to remind myself – I don't know why I'm not treating this the way I treated my book. I guess poetry is so different. It's just such an internal, intimate, so I wasn't like, oh, well this book better win the Pulitzer, you know. I was just excited that it got published by a prestigious press. But with the music I don't feel that way. It's such a mass – this kind of music is such a mass thing. It's just you can't help it. That part of you, you want people to hear it and validate it and you don't want it to get lost in the vacuum. But that doesn't make sense. They're both art and you have to be like, you know what? What's it going to matter? Let's say tomorrow a million people hear it. I'm probably going to be as wound up as I am right now. Do you know what I mean? I need to remind myself that that's me, it's not a – and Drake made that point. Like, he was reading my mind while we were talking, but he's like, you know it's never going to be enough. It's like when you work so hard on something that's an art form, it's never, it doesn't matter how well it does, if you're looking for some kind of something out of it, it will never be enough. Of course, that's totally true. You have heavy rotation on MTV. And then I'd be like, yeah, but that's not really – I'd find something and I don't want to be like that.

THERAPIST: Well if what you're looking for is a kind of deep recognition that it's something you can hold rather than something the masses could provide that they can't provide that.

CLIENT: Exactly. Today for example, I woke up and a friend of mine who I haven't seen in years, I mean years – and even back then we were friends but more like really good acquaintances, I woke up and he had written a review of the record on his Facebook page. I don't know this guy to ever write. He's a kind of conventional, kind of square, really good guy, but you know. It was so sweet and so like honest and just how much he loves the record and has giving these, you know it's not even my kind of genre really, but he's like, it's so good. So instead of just savoring that, you know like again, I immediately got kind of caught up in I want more of that and how do I get more people to write. Do you know what I mean? Instead of just enjoying it, this guy went out of his way to – it's like my mind is constantly – you know? I'm definitely not savoring is all I'm trying to say. And not only that I'm already way ahead. I'm getting way ahead of myself.

THERAPIST: Like you – there's not this basic take in what's really there (unclear) and that is there. [00:08:44] It's [ameliorable] (ph) what more –

CLIENT: Yeah. And the thing is it's – look at the kickstarter thing. It's as if that's ancient history. Do you know what I mean? Whatever, $5,000. That's you know, that's not a good way to be.

(Pause): [00:09:05 00:09:25]

CLIENT: But it's hard because it is an old thing and that's the problem. It's like I know intellectually, but there's all this old stuff that's like finally we're back to – but the problem is I'm not 17. So because of that I think there's like this rush to feel like I've got to get things done fast and that's a harder thing to – it's hard not to let that make you feel very, very stressed and anxious.

THERAPIST: Not to mention that even at 15 while you may have been incredibly prolific and then weren't for a period, even then you still didn't have this foundation of recognition from your own – from your mother, where you just had that inside you and then could write. Because you wanted to write or create or play music because you wanted to, but even still there may have been a driven-ness to get seen or known, going on even then about what was missing.

CLIENT: Yeah. No, of course.

THERAPIST: Did your dad – you're always talking about your mother in this realm, did he understand what an artist you were?

CLIENT: Not really. I mean if he did he died before I could really find out, you know. I just know that he didn't really discourage me. He never discouraged me from writing. So, I don't know. That's something I'll just never really know about how he felt. He never told me to stop playing. He never told me to be quiet.

THERAPIST: He never – you know. He didn't tell you to be a dentist.

CLIENT: No. He didn't tell me to be anything.

THERAPIST: Not even what he was?

CLIENT: I was just thinking about that. Yeah, he never told me like, let me teach you about cars. But their whole family is like that. My dad's side is very unusual that way. They just really don't – they're just very unusual.

THERAPIST: Don't what?

CLIENT: There's no like be this, be that. They're just very, you know. Just be, like just be here, let's just be together, enjoy. They're very happy, I won't say happy-go-lucky, but kind of.

(Pause): [00:12:03 00:12:13]

CLIENT: I mean these are all very hard – I mean my uncle, my dad's older brother, I mean the guy worked like crazy shifts at an auto plant. They lived in fucking – it was a shitty place but it just – it's not that everything was perfect. They had issues, but there was something like just kind of just yeah, there wasn't that intense like, what are we doing, or how do we get a better house, and why do I have this shitty job and other people have all this money, and they don't have that for some reason. They don't have that gene.

(Pause): [00:12:49 00:13:16]

CLIENT: I think another big thing, too, was I got a – it's definitely more so than any other recent time it's become much more like schematic or whatever, I'm very focused on like – so I got to –

THERAPIST: Like you grab your chest.

CLIENT: Yeah, like I always feel tight here, you know, I feel like I'm tight, like I want to wake up but I'm like all kind of wacky and I don't want to get into that place, you know what I mean?

(Pause): [00:13:48 00:13:55]

CLIENT: I think all of that is partly, probably at some level I'm super worried that like it's kind of like other times when everything's so great, something bad's going to happen to me. You know what I mean? Or, yeah, it's all combined like I'm not used to what's going on so I feel just you know.

(Pause): [00:14:13 00:14:30]

THERAPIST: A sense of fear that something bad is going to happen in the future could be, in a way, actually the fear that something bad has happened already and did; that just places itself out as anticipating rather than – in a way for example in this process where you've been and things are going so well and changing for the better so quickly on the one hand is great. It's real. It's really happening. But on the other hand also is sort of like what's – so what's still there? You know, that even while they're going so well all this stuff in the past that didn't and you have feelings about, like the kinds of things what will be there waiting for you is this kind of calmed (unclear) right now. [00:15:23] It's good and it's there and it's real, but if it weren't as racy what's going to come up?

CLIENT: It's also the fear that I worry that I'm just going to be like this now. Do you know what I mean? Now that everything's going pretty well, you know, that I'm just going to be in this state of high anxiety all the time and feel, you know what I mean? And that's the thing about anxiety, it's always a vicious cycle. It just feeds on itself, what's so hard about it.

(Pause): [00:16:04 00:16:11]

THERAPIST: It feels like there is so much more we have yet to get to know about it is even. I do feel very hopeful that what you are feeling right now once we understand it will not feel this way to this intensity one day and that there will be more that will settle out the things that are stirring right now even in doing well, that what it means to be doing well could have so many layers of meaning. Like for example your surpassing your father, you know, or your forgetting your father. Your father really being dead if you've moved on. And these are just – it could be –

CLIENT: Yeah. The same with my mom, too.

THERAPIST: Exactly. How much you've held for the family, hopes and dreams and fantasies. I mean you've been this repository for so much in your history and your family that there's a lot riding and that could get straight even when you're doing well that I think we have yet to kind of unpeel all of the layers of what that means even.

CLIENT: Yeah, I have thought, not in that way, I think it's the flip side of the same coin but I have been thinking that maybe part of it too is that just like the record's out in the world and my book like for the first time which I didn't feel this way with the book but I think because of all the work I've been doing here and stuff, like now I feel like I'm out in the world. Do you know what I mean? Like I feel like yeah, I whatever, I live in the same house, my family's all around here, whatever, but now I feel – something feels unmoored like I feel like, yeah, I will probably at some point play a show somewhere far away or I will – like I can tell, you know what I mean? I can taste certain things and that's I think scary, unsettling, because I think it also connects to, like wow, because then I'd feel like – not that I'm completely alone but I am. It's as if I'm – I don't know how to explain it, you know, I'm completely cut from the fucking shitty umbilical cord to my family that – and I have no brothers and sisters and like I am, this is it – I am living my life and my life is me which is you know – there's all this stuff, do you know what I mean?

THERAPIST: I totally hear you.

CLIENT: Like I'm embracing these things really as careers now, I'm doing things seriously. Things are going relatively, you know, pretty well, you know – hopefully will continue and my mom's getting older. Do you know what I mean? Maybe there's something going on there, too. Do you know what I mean?

THERAPIST: So you're saying it's related to what I have been saying that there is something, if you're just leading your own life at last and sort of just doing it, it is liking cutting a cord to the ties that kept you – they probably kept you feeling safe in a way that you at least had that foundation and the foundation came with so many strings attached. To cut them is terribly like letting loose and then where you land.

CLIENT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a big part of it. I just feel. It's both liberating and terrifying.

(Pause): [00:19:57 00:20:15]

CLIENT: Because yeah, it's something that other people experience in their 20's. Some people made that cut in that more, very American kind of, you go off to college and that's it. You can't look back at the house or I don't know, whatever. They really kind of separate themselves you know? And I don't – for me it is complicated because I do love my family, like I do feel like I do have something special other people don't have. But, it did come with a heavy price that was really shitty. So now it's like it's just like reconnecting with that 17, 18 year old. It's also reconnecting with the person I would have been in college and then left home and then moved or whatever people do. I don't know if that makes sense completely.

(Pause): [00:21:18 00:21:26]

THERAPIST: Also, just to put it another way, even an idea of other people who cut that when they're 18 and go off to college or whatever, even when that's actually happened in the physical separation in a different way, a lot of people remain still unconsciously tied. They're still – (cross talk).

CLIENT: Yeah, that's true. Yeah I was thinking about that.

THERAPIST: They wanted to be a doctor because that's what their parents wanted them to be.

CLIENT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

THERAPIST: I think you're actually talking about the kind –

CLIENT: It's a psychological bind.

THERAPIST: Yes.

CLIENT: Whatever. I looked all over the place.

THERAPIST: You spent four years in Oregon.

CLIENT: Yeah, I've done all kinds of things. I've traveled. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah and I guess that's a good point. In a way I've been putting myself down by saying, other people, they can move wherever the fuck they want but they still have psychological baggage and fucked up things that they can't get away from.

THERAPIST: And sometimes never do.

CLIENT: Yeah, yeah, no. Yeah. That is one thing I'm very well – that's not something I take granted. I know how far I've come and how awesome I'm doing overall, like that I have no doubt about. Because all I've got to do is hang out with your friends and you see all the stuff people are dealing with or not dealing with. I think in a way that's what it is. Like even all this stuff is really good. It's all healthy. I think it's a healthy thing that's happening. It's just so shockingly new and kind of like just scary and also it gives me a lot of energy but I kind of don't know what to do with that energy like I feel constantly amped. And that's a good thing but it's also like you said, you've got to be able to say okay, I've worked on this for many hours, now I'm going to just chill out and I'll get back to it tomorrow.

(Pause): [00:23:44 00:23:50]

THERAPIST: I do think you're bringing up though today something is being on top of it, just blanketly good and that you're just getting used to that. The idea of it is both liberating and terrifying to let go of one's internal objects, is a kind of death of the mother and father who live inside you.

CLIENT: Let me give you an example. Like if I look at my everyday – I mean I'm only thinking of this now but it's kind of blowing me away now, I have been noticing that wow that's weird, I don't go to my cousin's house. I don't – I've really kind of cut myself off. I don't keep in touch with people. My cousins live right down the street. My godson. For some reason I'm just kind of done. It's not that I don't miss people, I just – I don't know how to explain it. I think it's like I feel like, you know what? That was many, many years of being up each other's butts all the time and that was great in many respects but I'm just kind of done. You know, I'm just – but I think I haven't processed what that means. It's not like, okay, now I'm done. Like that many years of being so tight and literally spending so much time together, it's a little odd now. So I think it brings up a lot of things.

(Pause): [00:25:14 00:25:26]

THERAPIST: It could bring on terror of – okay you're done on one hand but you've got to be done separating and being alone again and I just keep thinking that there are feelings that might as a child's and what would talk about this as a time alone that every person spends falling asleep in bed at night that was terrifying for you. Yeah. And in a way your family does that kind of togetherness and what happens to your center, what comes to your mind? The terror must (unclear). [00:26:07]

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: What haunts you in that when things calm down, what does alone feel like?

(Pause): [00:26:17 00:26:26]

THERAPIST: Or, why had alone come to feel so bad? CLIENT: Right. Well, that's the thing. In some ways, existential alone feels bad, but that's the thing, the other alone – the everyday alone has been feeling good. I enjoy it. I like to come home and just – so I think some of it is yeah, they're like two different kinds. There's the everyday that makes you very content and happy with – but yeah, I think it's the bigger, it's the more like, you know. (Pause): [00:27:05 00:27:38]

CLIENT: I can feel that it's super healthy and I can just tell. And the way I can tell is through the change in my interactions with other people. Do you know what I mean? Like with a friend I was saying about the writing, you know, like just the way I feel among other people now is so different that I can just tell that whatever's happening as much as I might be freaking out, it's super healthy. Even on Monday night I went to the bar. I know these like bartender type people and whatever and this guy, and this other guy, were – they're good acquaintances, they had a D.J. there like one Monday out of the month. That's kind of fun. And I kind of – it's Monday night so I kind of like to blow it off but so I went and I went alone which I didn't want to do and it was cool. Like I didn't feel uncomfortable, not that I would have before but I would have felt a little – we're friends but we're not – so I'd feel weird if I was still, like am I supposed to hang out with them? But we're just going to – I just didn't care. I had a beer. I saw plenty of kind of acquaintance type people, said hi, chit-chatted. It was fine and I just walked around and said hi to this person and went over there and then came back and talked some more but like before I was leaving I went over and just sat next to them while they were spinning and I didn't feel weird. I just hung out for a little bit. And then it was like all right guys, I'm going to take off and it was totally fine. Dave was like, how you been, man? What's going on? Like, in the past I would have been weird about that. Like, what am I, you know? Am I trying to make these people my friends or like, do you know what I mean? They're happy to see me. It was like, AP's here, all right.

THERAPIST: Probably excited you came?

CLIENT: Yeah. You know? Again, instead of old, I would have brought all this old stuff, like are they really paying enough attention to me? Do you know what I mean? Like, those people are their real friends. That's their real crew. I'm just kind of like tagging along. Like I would have – just ridiculous. Like, who the fuck cares. I'm just here to say hi. They're happy to see me. I had a couple of beers and I'm going home. It's pretty simple. So things like that are feeling way, way, way, way, way better to the point where in the moment I'm not thinking about this stuff anymore. Or like going to a party with Kelly. I just didn't care who was there and like I didn't know anybody there. Who the fuck cares? And I was totally fine.

THERAPIST: This is what you're describing about how it can be both liberating and terrifying to move from a place of feeling kind of paranoid and retreat into the world is looking at me and it's all – like it reflects on me – into a place of knowing, no they're not. Really, they're not.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: All of a sudden you get to not care. And they're not looking which is as kind of like, I'm alone, and that person's over there doing the same thing alone and that person's over there doing the same thing. That's the terrifying of the – in the paranoid place you can still feel like there's a world around you. This place gets depressing in an odd way, too.

CLIENT: Well it's both and that's the crazy thing. It's also awesome because I noticed that my interactions are so much better as connecting with people on a very real level.

THERAPIST: Real contact is possible and yet it's also real contact with another who has their own separate subjectivity and their own fantasies and their own mind.

CLIENT: Right. Yeah.

(Pause): [00:31:51 00:33:11]

CLIENT: Yeah, it's probably, I mean one thing I was thinking too was that a lot of times when I feel this way, you know how sometimes I'll come and I'll be like suddenly I'd watched a movie and I sobbed. I wonder if sometimes that's what happens with this, like I just feel, you know what I mean? Maybe it's just like emotion that's kind of bubbling like trying to get out or something like that.

THERAPIST: It sounds like there's a lot of feeling there. You've often said that once it came out of you you'd feel calmer.

(Pause): [00:33:51 00:34:01]

THERAPIST: It is a lot. This is a lot that's been happening.

(Pause): [00:34:04 00:34:24]

CLIENT: Is it called something, like is there a word for these different stages, or something?

THERAPIST: There's some languages to describe this progression from the paranoid schizoid to the depressive position in orientation to the world.

CLIENT: That's what this is.

THERAPIST: That's a piece of what I think you're experiencing. I don't think that captures all of it. There's just a lot going on. Why do you ask that?

CLIENT: I'm just curious. I mean, it's interesting – I mean it's not just interesting, psychoanalysis – you know, there must be in psychoanalysis certain things, like certain markers or certain whatever. Technical terms.

(Pause): [00:35:05 00:35:32]

THERAPIST: There's a theorist named Wilfred Bion, a very, very well-known post-Kleinian object relations theorist.

CLIENT: Post what?

THERAPIST: Kleinian? Melanie Klein. Who really thinks about the process of analysis as waking up the patient's capacity to dream as a focus and the idea being that there can be at the beginning of this process, pockets of deadness inside where things are not knowable and dreamable and creatable yet. And I think you're in this place where there are links being made so that things are coming alive and get to be known even – I don't even mean consciously, but in dreaming as the place to begin to process and have emotional experience, begin to have images and begin to have words for all this stuff that's been stuck inside without words for so long and yet in that process it doesn't mean everything's hunky-dory because to begin to dream for example, there are vivid images. There's terrifying things in dreams. There are crazy and strange things in dreams. And I mean dreams as you know, mostly like fantasies or night dreams also, but as things come alive there's – it's scary. It can be scary. Like what is there of life inside? And I think that's – a lot of that is happening right now. CLIENT: I do think of it like waking up. It definitely is, like that's what I was saying, it's kind of like being renanimated after being frozen like, sort of.

THERAPIST: That's why I think about this theorist, because he describes it as literally you cannot wake up. You can never fall asleep and you can never wake up from that dead space and like that's so – you're literally at the level of not being able to sleep but also not feeling like you're totally awake either.

CLIENT: What's the guy's last name?

THERAPIST: Bion. He's British.

(Pause): [00:37:50 00:37:58]

CLIENT: Yeah man, I think that is part of it, too. It's like I'm getting in on myself. That's crazy too.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: I mean let's stop for a second. Yeah, you know. Do I want a relationship with Kelly? What kind of relationship? I mean all these things are – that's all a lot.

THERAPIST: Right.

(Pause): [00:38:19 00:38:31]

THERAPIST: Even thinking about a child, let's say it's going well for a toddler getting to know the world and your sense of yourself is overwhelming and that's why they come back and touch base all the time with mom and I think also a piece of what you're saying is what if you're doing this and I'm feeling alone in it? This is a lot to take on and actually I think it hasn't helped that I was away last week, and that you're away this week.

CLIENT: You're right.

THERAPIST: This is a touchstone place.

CLIENT: I was thinking about that like, oh, man. Friday.

(Pause): [00:39:07 00:39:17]

THERAPIST: Not as a desperate needing but as a literally, a kind of touching base and holding all of this.

CLIENT: Well there's something to be said for consistency. Do you know what I mean?

THERAPIST: Yes.

CLIENT: It's not a crutch, it's just like it is like going to the gym, or whatever. Because when you don't you feel a little – you know.

THERAPIST: Exactly.

(Pause): [00:39:36 00:40:56]

THERAPIST: I got the same thought when I got your message. Really, Friday? CLIENT: Oh yeah. I know on my way over I was like, fuck, maybe she'll have some wacky openings next week. (Laughs). Not wacky openings, but –

THERAPIST: I might.

CLIENT: Oh yeah? Cool. Okay.

THERAPIST: I'll let you know if I do.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: We're doing, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday though?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: Our regular routine? And I should be here until summer vacation. At this point I don't have any –

CLIENT: Cool.

THERAPIST: Plans.

(Pause): [00:41:30 [00:41:50]

THERAPIST: Your plans had to be Thursday, Friday (unclear).

CLIENT: Yeah, it's sort of spring break. These were the dates that just kind of worked for those days, you know?

(Pause): [00:41:58 00:42:32]

THERAPIST: You're somewhere.

CLIENT: What?

THERAPIST: You're somewhere.

CLIENT: No. My shit's pretty relaxed. I feel calmer.

(Pause): [00:42:36 00:42:51]

CLIENT: I just need, I'm getting better, I just have these moments. You know a lot of times it's good, like here especially towards, before I leave to feel more decompressed.

(Pause): [00:42:59 00:43:04]

CLIENT: And I'm able to like not intellectualize like it's like, wow, it's nice, it feels good to feel kind of good. Like my jog. I don't know. It's okay. And once in a while I'm able to just feel that instead of saying it to myself.

(Pause): [00:43:20 00:43:25]

THERAPIST: Which is actually different, you know?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: You're just living it. CLIENT: It's huge, huge.

(Pause): [00:43:30 00:44:26]

THERAPIST: So have a good long weekend.

CLIENT: Thank you. Thank you very much.

THERAPIST: And I'll see you Wednesday for sure, I'll be open Monday as well.

CLIENT: Awesome. Thanks, Tricia. Is it Easter Sunday?

THERAPIST: It is, yes.

CLIENT: Have a good Easter.

THERAPIST: You too.

END TRANSCRIPT