How do you secretly feel about this? Do you agree with them? My husband has to help me sometimes by saying, "I don't hear any nouns". When I told my therapist that, she brightened up noticeably and asked, "Can I say that too?"

We struggled for 7-8 years with my "avoiding" her by doing my jumping subjects and trying to avoid letting her be on the "same page" I was. Once or twice she asked me to do free association but it was a disaster, I was off any path we had me on and lost in the swamp in less than two thoughts :-)

The first time I saw her though, ten years before the above 7-8 years, I had a year or more of the silence most sessions. We did not know me enough and she was still new to being a therapist so we didn't deal with it well, we were not a good team until nearly 15 years later. At the end of the first bout of therapy with her, she was teaching me to acknowledge what the other person said (by rote; I hated it and complained and struggled against it) as I'd do my jumping, giving no clues to the other what the subject was since I was doing a lot of thinking inside my head in-between subjects and the other person could not see inside my head So, when she responded to something I said, we were making me acknowledge her response in some way, say, "I hear you, you said. . .". It was nearly impossible for me at that time.

I can see how related my silence and acknowledgement struggles of 1978-87 were to my run-around, keep-off-of-my-page, no nouns, struggles of 1996-2003ish were (therapy went to 2005 but we eventually fixed and added tools for dealing with the underlying issues I had that were causing the difficult behavior). I figured out what some of my problem was; my mother had a brain tumor and had difficulty talking/making sense when I was just learning to talk; even now, when I get anxious or excited, my speech gets noticeably less comprehensible and I "lose" words.

I was struck by your being "too loud" as a child, as if you were trying to drown something or someone out? I know I'm one of five children and all of us at the dinner table with our parents and sometimes childhood friends, trying to get acknowledge/heard could be difficult Maybe you were trying to be heard and, since you were a child, didn't know that volume couldn't help if the other was "deaf". Quick movements remind me of a nervous, scared animal too? Such an animal (think rabbit :-) only has one other, opposite trick in their book, sit absolutely still and, wait for it. . . silent. Your quickness won't get you away from your therapist like the loud quickness keep away the acknowledgement that your parents weren't listening/caring for your needs? What does that leave?