I wrote a long response and then the computer ate it. Bah.

Thank you, all. I was worried about the language thing because it might seem as if a) I was criticizing his Swedish which is perfect with just a slight trace of an accent, and/or b) I was going "ooh look at me I have native-like proficiency in a foreign language" - which I don't, of course, my spoken English has a very noticeable accent and I have to search for words sometimes. But he was genuinely fine with it, not just complying out of politeness. Snuffle, you make a good point about the Jante effect - that's probably part of it, and getting away from my own cultural frames where I feel like an alien a lot of the time is definitely another part. I'm obviously an alien in English, but it doesn't matter as much because it's expected. If that makes sense. And it was such a liberating feeling, I was able to access my thoughts so much more easily. It's a very strange thing.

One very clear difference between this T and the previous one is that while I'd generally forgotten most of what we'd talked about in the session a couple of hours after it ended (with some exceptions such as our last session), this time I'm still processing it in my mind 25 hours later.

I'm worried now, though. I'm bound to screw this up sooner or later. Maybe I will start lying to him, too, the way I do as a knee-jerk thing (the letter my friend wrote mentioned this, as well as what he (friend) thinks are some reasons why I do it) and he'll think I'm doing fine and stop therapy with me. Or his fees will turn out to be exorbitant. I should have asked him about that. So far I've been seeing him in his capacity of a doctor, which means I pay almost nothing cos of socialized medicine, but I have a feeling therapy will have a different fee scale. Or maybe it won't - I'll just have to ask him.

Or H will wonder why I need to see another therapist. Not that I have to tell him, I suppose. T asked me a lot of questions about my relationship with H, yesterday and we spent most of the session talking about that. That was very tough, but probably necessary. Once or twice I found myself saying things I didn't even know were in my head, but which felt relevant and important once I'd said them. I'm taking it as a good sign that I did that - I'd only ever read about that and marvelled at the notion of saying things without spending ridiculously long planning exactly what to say and how to say it. I'm going to have to ask to revisit some of the things we talked about though, because I think I wasn't quite upfront about some things. That is not so good.

I do go on once I get started, don't I Sorry. I just need to process all these things, and coaching RL friend is not around this week.