Lol hankster, girl you know I usually agree with you! And I would here if I could see any evidence of Franki's T actually being critical. The best I can see is her "frown", which Franki says she "knows" means disapproval, but it's not clear to me how she knows. If she asked T, "Why are you frowning?" and T said "Because I disapprove," I could dig it. But as I and Echoes said, there are a lot of reasons people frown. My T sometimes does the same thing, and in his case it's an empathy frown. Actually, because I was often so out of touch with my negative feelings, his empathy frowns helped me realize that he was reflecting how I felt inside, that I was burying out of shame or guilt or whatever. Not always. But a lot of the time.

All I see is T saying, "That must have hurt," which my T also says sometimes. If it did, I might say "Yeah, that did hurt." If it didn't, I might say, "Well, no, not at the time, because..." And if I was burying the feelings so well I couldn't even feel them I might say, "I don't know." I also see her T saying, "Why might your mom have said that?" which my T also asks out of genuine curiosity, and my answer is often, but not always, "She was just trying to protect me." Seeing things from my mom's perspective has actually helped clarify a lot of things for me... it's helped me acknowledge my own hurt, but also be forgiving of her for any hurt she caused. There's no overt criticism in any of those questions... that Franki perceives criticism says more about her than it does about T, who is just asking, "How does that make you feel?" Without that question, what is a T to do??

In fact, it's Franki who's trying to squeeze something out of her T. She openly says she was trying to get her T to admit to not having kids, which is pretty manipulative and, to be honest, pretty cold. I know women who chose not to have kids and have been happy with that decision, but I have also known women who don't have kids because of miscarriage/stillbirth, failed marriages/partnerships, infertility, difficulty adopting, SIDS, etc. The sorrow they carry has lasted, for some, well past menopause, and trying to get one of them to admit they don't have kids to prove a point seems pretty harsh (I'm assuming Franki doesn't know why T is childless, and so these could be one of the reasons). And the thing is, Franki does NOT sound like the cold, manipulative type -- quite the opposite. I imagine if she did finally succeed in getting T to say, "Yes, you're right, I don't have kids," and that was followed by, "I had three miscarriages and a stillbirth, and after that I just gave up," I don't think Franki would be doing any victory laps. So anytime we do something out of character, I think it's extremely important to examine. Beyond just the fact that these questions are about T, not Franki's own emotions, which should be the real focus.