Just to be on the safe side, you might also try on the possibility that you could be concerned about being inept yourself. I'm not saying you are, by any means -- just checking if you ever think you are.

It sounds to me as if she had some concerns about perhaps being too disorganized -- so that for a moment, what you said became a none-too-comfortable bit of her therapy. Sounds as if she made a nice recovery, though.

Good catch, ECHOES. I think what you've described there is exactly the recipe for getting stuck in a decision you make to protect yourself -- and observing yourself doing it as you just did, the recipe for getting unstuck.

A little off topic, but perhaps not entirely:

In my first job, right as I was starting college, my boss gave the appearance of being the most uptight, meticulous, obsessive-compulsive guy I'd ever met. I'd been struggling to keep my drawers at home organized (they'd never stay that way for long ) and was shocked to find that he kept the wide drawer of his desk completely disorganized. When he needed a paper clip or something, he'd dig around and quickly fish one out. Whenever it took him too long to find the paper clip he'd open a new box, dump it in, and stir for a bit. To my surprise, his "system" turned out to work so well for him that I adopted it myself for a while. He himself turned out to be one of the two best bosses I've ever had. I expected him to use his obsessive-compulsive act to make me wrong and keep me in line (where could I have picked up anything likethat?) but it turned out to be just his way of training me to work to a very high standard. As soon as I demonstrated I could, he'd acknowledge it, back, off, and let me work.

One time when I was about four I was staying with my grandparents for a while. My grandfather had been a merchant seaman, presented himself as something of a tough guy, and was teaching me to be a big boy and not cry. I figured he was obviously impervious to trivial annoyances like pain and if I worked very hard to grow up and was very lucky, I might someday become like him. One morning I was watching him getting a fire going in the woodstove. I took a thin strip of kindling, lit it in the fire, and laid it across the back of my grandfather's hand to test his reaction. To my surprise he jumped, yelled, and demanded to know what I was doing. You mean... that "me tough guy, you wimp" stuff had just been an act?