Sky, I hope you do not mind me continuing to hijack your threat to ask hankster something.

Hankster, I'm curious-- but only if you want to share-- I was struck by this self-disclosure by your T and your prompting of it and I remembered the back-and-forth bit we had in a thread I started a week or so ago. I think you felt like my T's disclosure of his childhood trauma of his Dad beating his Mom was too much, but you are actively seeking out what I would consider a more personal disclosure (to me) about how your T relates to his or her intimate partners.

I am not trying to say you are wrong in any way, I'm just trying to figure something out for myself. I don't mean to imply that you are wrong in your assessment about what makes you uncomfortable (that's even silly for me to suggest, as this is clearly something individual) or that there is anything wrong in what your T disclosed. Also, I don't think that you said to me that there was something wrong with what my T disclosed. All this is to preamble that I don't mean to be all lawyerly and cross-examining you, and feel free to ignore this if it isn't something you're interested in discussing any further.

I guess because much of my work involves people who have been traumatized (usually by family members, as adults and/or children), I'm fairly politicized, in a way, about disclosures of childhood histories of abuse. Part of being abused almost always includes silencing of the victim-- if not literal silencing, then at least the silencing of emotions. I feel that disclosures of abuse work against both this personal (by the abuser) and our cultural silencing of abuse (nobody wants to hear about it) and that, ultimately, there would be a lot less violence in the world if people talked openly about it.

I remember something from a year or two at a community group that I frequent, who meet on saturdays to knit and eat. One woman started talking about being assaulted by her first husband many years ago, how she got out of it, how it had changed her. You could just see the opening up of other people occurring as she was talking. She probably didn't fit anyone's image of a battered woman-- high educated, very successful in her profession, very strong, a leader in her field. Some people followed that up with some disclosures of their own or people they were close to. It was an incredible normalizing of being abused that just seemed to strip away this underlying cultural belief that abuse is shameful and those who are victimized should never mention it. To me, disclosing a history of abuse is an act that is not personal in the sense that it is not about what the victim did, it was about what the perpetrator did, and the perpetrator should carry all the shame and silencing that usually people (including ourselves) assign to the victim.

Maybe it's just because of the work I do, where people tell me their traumas all the time, that I don't feel that disclosures of trauma are very personal.

And in my session this week, I was able to ask T about my perceptions of him when he did disclose to me. And, I'm not sure I mentioned it before, but he told me that his father was violent towards him as a kid probably in the first session I had with him 5 or so months ago. This wasn't new information, as those who beat their kids often beat their spouses, especially if the spouse is trying to protect the kids. But when he said that the cops had hauled his Dad out in handcuffs after beating his Mom, the expression on his face got all jumbled up and it seemed like he got pulled back into some emotional place and it took him a couple of minutes to find his way back and center himself. My guess is that that memory just evoked a bigger emotional response than speaking more generically about past trauma.

So I asked him about his emotional reaction and getting pulled away, to check my "read" on what was happening. At first he responded to my question in a way that was explaining why he was still impacted by his past, at times. Then he gave me a couple of examples from his present life when he'd been impacted by his past. I thought maybe that was TMI. He apologized for disappearing, and I said I wasn't sorry, that it made me think about why I felt like I *had* to check out whether he had really checked out. It was a very open and honest exchange and there was some more there, but it was all pretty comfortable and good. He ended our session by asking me if he had said or done anything that I wanted to check in about, which really validated my sense that it is okay to ask him about anything.

I guess I have one final parting thought about exchanges in self disclosure in therapy. It does feel like to me that his disclosures in general make me feel more comfortable about making my own. That there is more of a partnership in the process when he relates to me in that way from his own experience. From this angle, I think it would draw a pretty large circle around what I'm comfortable with. Things that would be over the line would be some kind of disclosure around experiences of sexuality or anything that fell in the category of making me feel like he was treating me like an intimate partner or potential date or something like that.

I think about the maybe TMI disclosures he made this week, and about the benefits and costs of saying something along the lines of "say this, but don't say that". I think it will chill the discussion in a way that wouldn't be productive to me. I think I don't necessarily need a lot of control over what happens in therapy because I feel safe and open. That perhaps I'm in a place where I can take what's offered to me and if it doesn't work, just leave it there. Processing every single uncomfortable moment in therapy makes me want to jump out a window. I think I could benefit by being pushed out of my comfort zone and not feeling the need to react as often.

I'm not exactly clear about what I'm getting at here, so I should probably just leave it alone. But I'm also struck when you reported your feelings in response to your T's personal disclosure:

"Me: When you said that, the smile disappeared from my face.
T: Yes, you have said, and I know, people are worried about anger from their T's. What does that mean to you?
Me: No, it was a FAKE smile that disappeared. It's a relief! My muscles are relaxed now! It was a smile I had to have to deflect / defend all the time, to prove everything was all right when it wasn't. I also sighed from the top of my chest, like from my heart."

What that says to me is that your T's honest disclosure about his (?) difficulty in interpersonal relationships brought authenticity to your ability to relate to her in that moment. And that's kind of what I'm getting at, that one of my goals is to allow my T to freely "talk back" to me, including the disclosures that result from that, in the service of allowing me to be who I really am in session.

Anne