Transcript: Episode 291
291. In Session, Part 2
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
We are continuing our discussion about the book In Session by Deborah Lott. And then this line was just a killer line of how true it is after what we have been through trying to find a therapist over the last year and then our therapists dying of COVID. Like this was really funny. It made me… Oh, we laughed so hard. It said, “A woman who has experienced what she considers transference for one therapist, and is beginning treatment with another, may dread its onset, be on the lookout for its telltale signs, and fight it off like a relapse of the flu.” That was just funny. And so, she takes that and talks about how there's a difference between reality and the symbolic, and how there is so much a therapist can do to nurture us and help us and support us, but that it is symbolic in that it is contained to the office for their presence. And the reality is that we take with us what we learn from that and then implement it ourselves, as opposed to that person actually like literally coming home with us in our pocket, or literally being our parent or our friend or whatever. But because we know that, she talks about how we don't want to put it at risk. Because we this symbolic is so fragile, we don't want to break that spell and lose it. Especially when we are survivors of relational trauma.
And she says, quote, “Women in therapy know that good clients do not call their therapists between sessions too often, do not make too many extra demands, do not ask too many probing questions about their therapists personal lives, or expect therapists to disclose how they really feel about their clients. We have never ever asked the therapist direct questions about anything. So if there was ever something that we didn't understand, or didn't know, or were curious about, or had concerns about, we have never ever asked those questions. We did have a few conversations with a therapist after we left therapy, and were picking up something and transitioned out of that.
And she said-. This is so common. We hear this all the time. You all it's in this book in print. We hear it so often from friends, from people at work, from other people in therapy, from emails to the podcast, we hear this all the time and it is right here in this book. She said, “More than one woman in my survey compared therapy to prostitution in a dissonant mix of the professional and the private. ‘Therapy is like seeing a prostitute,’ Jenner wrote, ‘even though it feels awkward and embarrassing. You have to hurry up and take your clothes off so you can get what you came for. After you relax some and are feeling extremely vulnerable, you have to be quick about putting your clothes back on so someone else can use the room.’” And then she says she adds to that. She adds to that. She says, “The room of course is not only the issue, someone else is also going to use your therapist. That person you feel so close to, the one who shares the secrets you've never spoken out loud, will say goodbye and then turn around and share equally special intimacies with others.” I think that that is something that is so powerful.
We had the experience twice where there was a breakthrough in therapy because of something the therapist told us that was so powerful and meaningful to us that we were able to cling to that long enough to step towards, as they say, a particular issue, or a particular altar, or a particular something internally, and start working on it in therapy. But then heard that same line used in a public setting. And that also made us throw up. Like literally. Not just feeling nauseous, but like left the meeting we were in and went outside and vomited. Because it felt like such, not just a betrayal, but like a violation. We felt so used and so foolish that we had fallen for something that was just like a line that they say to everybody and not actually something that was specific to us. And I think, really, that was the first time—thinking about all the different therapies we've been in with all the different therapists—I think that was like our awakening to this isn't actually about us; they are just doing their job. And I have completely misunderstood what our relationship is about. And we need to lock things down real quick, it felt very unsafe to us. I'm not saying that that was a correct response. I'm just saying what it felt like in the moment and how we processed that. And we did not know what to do with it. And now, because this was a public thing. And let me be clear that that therapist did not say publicly anything that we had said, it was just a line that we had believed in so much that had given us hope to engage in the therapeutic process. But when it was used publicly we realized that that's just what she tells everybody. And really, I think what we realized was that in this case therapy was really about her. That that's just who she is. It was not at all about tending to us or what we needed. And that maybe that's why we had been stuck.
I don't even have words for the feelings of that experience. We were shocked, first of all, and then felt so incredibly unsafe, but we were not in a situation where we could get away, actually, like literally could not leave. And so which really is our worst nightmare anyway. But that's how things had unfolded. And so I think that the walls went up and there was this dissociative step back to where, okay, what has been happening in therapy is that this circle of us have been able to be present and participating and were trying, but that is flipped and they are, they have not been out since and we are not letting them out. And then it became like a trauma response, right? Like what you do when an abuser is in the room. You stay very still. You make sure that on the outside it looks like nothing is wrong. And you wait. You stay still, and you wait until you have your opportunity to slip away, and then you disappear. And that is basically what we did. Which of course makes it hard to like address anything or repair any rupture, because that was like a small thing. But for us to change everything. It changed everything and it destroyed like five years of work. Because everything we had based it on-. Which is our fault. That's not the therapists fault. That was our fault. It was our foolishness is what it felt like. That we had been tricked. That we had been manipulated. That we had been coerced. That we had been trapped. That we had been mocked, even. I don't know, there's so many layers to it. But ultimately, like, it was a runaway and get out of this and make everything look normal on the surface so that nothing is detected. Because if we are detected, our lives will be in danger. That's what it felt like. We went into straight up trauma response, the abuser is in front of us mode. That's how strong that transference was. That's how strong those feelings were. It was devastating.
She says, “To be in therapy is to trust someone about whom you cannot collect information to protect yourself, whom you cannot observe in the usual social settings. No matter how much a client invests in time, revelations and emotional expressiveness, the relationship cannot progress beyond certain limits.. It is doomed to end by design. It is inherently tragic to become so close to someone that you can never completely know and are destined to lose. That made me weep. I mean, literally weep. I'm not saying that as a metaphor. I mean, I had to go in the back, sit on this swing by the fish pond, and I just had to swing and cry for maybe two or three hours, just tears pouring down my face, hard body racking sobs that we have been crying for two years now. Because that is so real. And it's so hard and it seems so futile. And why pour your whole being into someone who's just going to leave? And how do you do that transference relationship? How do you do the relationship at all if you don't do that. Because my instinct now that we have a new therapist is, okay, I will go to therapy, and I will show up, and I will learn things, and I will do the work that I'm supposed to do. But I'm not pouring myself out into you. I am not giving you any pieces. If you are the container that's supposed to hold me, I am not pouring myself out into you. Because I know how that goes. You're just going to take the container and walk off. Or you're just going to knock it over and spill me everywhere. Or you're going to drop me and it's going to shatter. And don't you dare tell me that that's not what's going to happen. Because I know. Because I barely survived it. That's where I feel about therapy right now, if you want to know.
She says, “The therapeutic relationship becomes the test case, the mold breaker, the relationship after which every other relationship will be different. The client may come to believe that if she fails in the therapy relationship, she will fail in every other relationship that follows. But if she can succeed in therapy, she will take that success with her everywhere.” That's exactly what we lived with the therapist from before. When that was going so well, our marriage improved, our relationship with our children improved, we started making our first friends, we came out on the podcast. We made colleague friends with ISSTD and came out with the podcast there, and started developing friendships. We met Peter and became friends with him. We went to Healing Together for the first time and met other people with DID, and made friends with them. And it was this powerful exponential thing where because we had that relationship with the therapists that was safe and healthy and good and healing, we were getting stronger and bigger and more connected to ourselves and to the world around us. But when we lost that, everything else started to shut down. And we had to scramble to hold onto any of those pieces. And then the pandemic happened on top of that, making things even more difficult and more disconnected and more isolating. And that's a lot of trauma, and feels like a lot of failure, and feels like we lost all of those connections and relationships. And it's not true, but it can feel like that on some days. What is still progress is that there are some relationships and friendships that we did on our own without her that we have been able to maintain. But everything internally and externally connected to her, we lost. And again, I mean that same phrase, I keep saying, but that's what it felt like: It was devastating.
She writes, “Clients are susceptible to developing disproportionate feelings because the therapist means so much more to them than they mean to the therapist. The very rules and limits of the therapeutic relationship are likely to induce profound feelings. Of course, a client is predisposed to be hypersensitive to a therapist behavior when she relies on the therapist for so much. She confides deep emotional material, must pay dearly for brief snatches of the therapist’s time, and is never sure who she really is or how she really feels. As one person put it, ‘the whole situation of deprivation in therapy is a trap. What else can you do but desperately want what you're not allowed to have any of.’”
And then she talks about situations where clients found out that their therapists were not who they thought they were when the—remember she talks about the symbolic and the reality—when the reality clashes with the symbolic. And I think the example I can think of that I experienced with that is that we had a social worker once that because they were a social worker, we made the assumption that they were progressive, somehow, in caring for people. And they were so relational in nature that we assumed that they were progressive in social justice and that way. And I'm not even talking about politics, about how someone votes or not, or what party they belong to. And I'm not talking about that. But we had shared some specific writings. We had shared, we had read, we had read some of their writings. And because of that, we made assumptions about what they believe spiritually and how that applied to social justice and what they would stand for or not. And that's on us for making assumptions. But when all of the protests happened last year, and Black Lives Matter became a thing. I mean, they always mattered, but using that hashtag and having those conversations, and people were really called out for white fragility, and for racism, and for privilege, and for protected status and different things where it was really really important for individuals and for companies and organizations to step up and speak out. I kept waiting for that to happen and it never happened. And so I sent them information and was like, “This is what it looks like when you're saying this. Do you understand that this is what you're saying.” And it really was very personal for me with two daughters with brown skin and the experiences that I've seen them go through. It matters to me as a person with my own disability and a mother of children with disabilities. And so called her out just directly of, “hey, you're not saying this. And when I expected you to say this, you wrote something else.” And she went with the ‘love everyone and all lives’ matter stuff. And while I understand what her intent was, what happened was that white people who were being mean to black people used her, like shared what she shared, to justify what they were doing. And I thought, how did I not know this person was a racist? And the people that were sharing that and following that actually caused some direct damage to our family in ways that they don't even know about. Which isn't their fault. But I thought, “Why of all people did you not use your platform and use your voice to say that, ‘yes, all lives matter, but these people are the ones who are hurting right now.’ Like you're the one I would expect to go to the hurting person.” And they didn’t. But of course, that was about my own abandonment issues, right? Like That was my transference. But it really wounded me.
And that was the example of what I thought of when when I read this section of about reality clashing with a symbolic. And it was another example of someone not being in real life at all who I thought they were in my head. And so again, that moment of me feeling crazy because I have made up this person in my head that's not a real person in real life. So how much of our relationship is actually real of what I thought, and what is real? And am I real? Are they real? And between that and dissociation, plus, again, the isolation of the pandemic, it was a really confusing year of just trying to figure out what pieces are real or not, what is safe or not, and what I could do about it or not.
And then in the context of therapy, this author talks about it as idealization or overvaluation, meaning thinking that they are better than they are. And she says it's the most common unrealistic assumption that clients make about their therapists. And that it's because we want to see in them the traits that our parents did not have. Which just makes me furious. Like, at that point, I had a lot of visceral reactions to this book. And at this point, I just threw the book across the room. Because, ughhh! Because I know my therapist is not my parent. I know it. I know it. I know it. It could not have been pointed out to me any more blatantly. Like, I get it. I get it. And yet, it feels the same in so many ways when you lose it, or they don't respond, or they don't keep the promises like so. There's a lot of triggers that happened in our therapy trauma, not in the good therapy, that makes it kind of hard to sort out. You all, we can't do this by ourselves. [Laughter] Oh, it's so hard. But we have a new therapist and we're trying. We're trying.
So as part of that she talks about attachment and dependency. And now, I know that I've heard from ISSTD and some presentations last year about how in the past there was, there were not enough boundaries. And so sort of the therapeutic world responded by having overly strict boundaries. But now they're saying you have to have some flexible boundaries because people can't develop healthy independence if they don't have opportunity to experience healthy dependence. And the key there is healthy dependence, right?
But here she talks about transitional objects. And how it's not just the therapist that is the transitional object. And she said, “A client may carry the therapist’s crinkled business card in her wallet. Not just so she’ll have the therapist’s number in case she needs to call him, but as a sort of talisman to ward off harm, as always present reminder of their connection.” And I, that's true. We have every appointment card we ever got from our therapists from before in Oklahoma, the one that we drove to see from even when we moved to Kansas City, we have every appointment card. We still have it. And there were two times in those four or five years that she wrote something to us, and we have those. They are tucked in with the appointment cards in a children's book that she gave us one time, and that's all there, it's on the shelf. Because we lost that therapist it hurts too much to look at it. So it's on the shelf and we don't touch it. But it used to be in our car all the time. Because we've literally needed it to breathe. That's what it felt like the entire pile of five years worth of appointment cards. I can't even tell you. Like it's super embarrassing to talk about. But it's real. And she talks about it in this book, and about why we do that, and what it means to us, and how it's because we didn't have any other attachment objects, and how we didn't have other transitional objects.
I will say, we have two things. Well, it's really three because one of the things is three things. And I, it, I. It feels too sacred to talk about specifics. But we have four things, I guess, really, it's two things, but there's four objects, but it adds up to two things, which I can't explain the math of that right now. But we have two things from our childhood, from very early in our childhood, and they are referenced in the book, and we still have those things. But until this moment we've never talked about that out loud. And it wasn't even until the book that the husband even realized that that's where those things were for. He knew that one of them is something we sleep with every night—a little baby blanket, I can tell you that—and then the other thing is like three small objects that we carry in our little, it's not a purse, but like a wallet thing like that we keep with us all the time. That if you’ve read the book, you you know what it is and where it came from. We have those things, but we don't talk to people about them, we don't share about them very often, and we've only shown one therapist and didn't say why it was significant, but she saw them. But even those things are objects of grief as much of it as attachment.
So now that we got that far in therapy to actually attach to someone, and then also lost them, like it was such a trigger of grief beside all the other layers that we just couldn't. And so those appointment cards are just up on the shelf. And we should burn them or throw them away, or something. Like it's ridiculous. But we can't yet. And I don't know why we're not going back to that therapist. We cannot go back to that therapist. We just need to let them go. I don't know. It's just a difficult thing. But she talks about it in the book about why we do that. So again, at the very least it helped us feel less crazy because it was written in the book.
She said, “For some clients, the mere presence of the therapist brings comfort. The therapist’s consistency and tolerance, the reliability and ritualistic quality of sessions, becomes associated with sanctuary and safety. The therapist’s very presence may then induce a state of calm and comfort in the same way that the mere appearance of a mother may calm a lost and screaming child. I think, again, that that is a beautiful and good thing to experience, and also why it's so devastating when you lose that. So it was helpful to understand on both counts.
She also said that on almost every survey the women wrote that they had a need to feel special, and how, quote, “Wanting to be special is understandable. To see yourself as merely another client is to be reminded of just how skewed the relationship is, and of how emotionally dangerous it is to feel so much about someone who is not equally emotionally invested. To be special means to have reached the therapist on some more personal level to be appreciated for more than one's fees. To be special is to be needed back.” And when I read that I didn't even make it to the swing before I could cry. And I think that for us, at least when we're talking about our therapy traumas, when we go back to the relationships of where we thought the care that we received was unique and specific to us, and found out that it wasn't, it was just what they do, that there is such a break in—it’s more than a rupture somehow. [Short pause] It's a break in that attunement and a break in the presence. Because you realize they're not being, they're doing. And you realize that it's not actually real, it just felt real. It's like that moment when Katniss shoots the arrow to the lightning and it shatters the arena. If therapy is the arena that you can see all of your own stuff play out, then that is the moment—the shooting of that arrow into the lightning—is the moment where you realize that you're just looking at your own stuff and it's not actually about how the therapist cares for you or your relationship with the therapist. And that can be a very painful thing when there are violations in therapy or ruptures in therapy or betrayals in therapy. Healthy good therapy, can hold that and maintain it so that it stays safe. But when you lose that, it's devastating.
And then she says this. Well, she says “hot house.” Is that the same as a green house? I’ve never heard “hot house.” So I don't know what is a hot house. But I think from context, it means green house.
She says, “What is most important to understand is that the love that occurs in therapy belongs to the situation. It is a hothouse flower that cannot be taken out of the room and survive intact.” So, it is a very real relationship, but it is confined to the context in which it developed. And in healthy, positive healing ways, that can be a powerful experience to be able to appreciate and visit what was good and beautiful, and let it be where it is good and beautiful. And it can be very painful when you're yanked out of there before you're ready to leave and someone smashes the flower pot. That's just tragic.
I want you all to understand how powerful this book is even though it's an older book and maybe everyone else has already read it. But I can't believe that we just now found it. And we are going to talk about it some more because it is that powerful. So we are really going to keep going and we will share some more. If it is too sensitive of a topic for you, feel free to skip these episodes. We will name them all In Session. But if it is a topic that you need to explore or feel some resonance or attunement with, then you can listen and we will just sort of go through the book. And again, it is called In Session: The Bond Between Women and Their Therapist by Deborah Lott. Thank you for listening, and thank you for still being there.
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