T came out of her office wearing a knee-length black jumper with a orange/white/black striped shirt, a long multi-strand silver necklace, black tights, and mid-calf high-heeled boots. By far the most stylish thing I've ever seen her wear. I told her she looked cute; she thanked me and said before she left the house that her H asked her who she was and where was his wife.

I started out by talking about my new (1.5 weeks now) anti-depressant/sleep aid, Trazodone. I said last night I'd took my meds, got sleepy about 2 hours after that, managed to get to bed and set my 3 alarms. I woke up at 11 am having turned off all 3 alarms. I remember none of this. She asked if I could reduce the dose. I said I could cut it in half. She said she wondered what it would be like to sleep though an alarm. She's never needed an alarm. Then she said she took antihistamine eye drops last night and she was still "high" from it. I said, "Eye drops?? Are you serious??" She said her daughter noticed something was wrong with her at lunch. I actually 'd.

She asked me what I wanted to work on. I said I had 3 things. One was to finish the work on shame related to maternal touch, one was in my purse, and one was on my iPad. The conversation went like this:
T: Which door is the prize behind, Monty?
Me: *Smiled coyly*
T: What's in your purse?
Me: Something.
T: Do that first because I don't like surprises.
Me: I actually wanted to do that last.
T: It's not really that I don't like surprises, I don't like waiting for surprises.
Me: Mmmm-kay.

I made T a CD of Christmas music with a light-scribed holiday pic on it and wrote a nice inscription inside the cover. She oohed and aahed over it and thanked me.

I then asked T about her Thanksgiving and was she able to see her son, who is in the Navy, was stationed in Guam, about to head to Afghanistan. She told me that he was a nurse and in training during the week at a nearby Marine base. She said he would changing from a Navy officer to a Marine officer while he's in the Middle East. She said he attended a 3 hour training on how to use a sleeping bag. Weirdness at this point. She sat like she does sometimes (when she's wearing pants), in a modified figure four. If I allowed myself to look more than the 0.005 seconds that I happened to glance down there, I'd have seen straight up to her underwear . A couple of weird thoughts passed through my mind:
"Is she coming on to me?"
"Is she doing this to see if I'll look?"
"She must have forgotten she was wearing a dress."
I hope the last is the case. She realized then that I was distracting her and asked me to start/finish the shame work related to maternal touch. We'd look at the iPad if we had time. So, I talked about my shame screens; moving away (hiding my need) or moving toward (manipulating amenable persons to get what I want). Then I went into critical awareness. I realized about halfway through that when I answered the questions on paper, I was intellectualizing. So she had me put the paper away and answer the questions in the here and now. I made the point that in the first world, vulnerability of any kind is looked upon as "weakness", that society judges people who have needs. Or, if we have needs, we can't show them. T started to smile. If we do show them, then we open ourselves up to judgement, embarrassment, and shame, especially for a need perceived by many to be a need we should not have as adults...something that should have been met in childhood. Society tends to sexualize touch between adults. People can use the "I don't have any needs" attitude to hide their own shame related to touch and anything else. By this time, T was beaming. I asked why she was smiling and she said because in her opinion, I was exactly right. She asked me what I learned overall by completing the exercise. I said it gave me a heightened awareness of the feelings that trigger shame (sexual, peculiar, untouchable, needy, and pathetic). I said it helped me understand what I just talked about and that I have manipulated certain people to get my need met. She said very good.

I told her I had bought a new camera and I wanted to show her a few pictures I had taken with it (on my iPad). So she came over and sat down next to me and the next weird thing happened. She put her knee against mine when she sat down. As much as I crave touch from her, I actually moved. I showed her several pics I'd taken. One was of me. I told her it bothered me a bit because I could tell I looked older. She asked, "Older than what?" I said, "dirt," then changed my answer to, "than I was." She said, "You have not one wrinkle on your face." I said indeed I did; couldn't she see the fine lines under my eyes. She bent close to the picture and said, "Not there." I put my face near hers and said, "Look at my face." She said, "Still not there." I said, "You have bad eyesight." Another pic was of my poodle, Obie. She got excited (she grew up with toy poodles) and asked me questions about him. Then she asked me if I had any pictures of my dachshund/husky mix. She relayed that she had a conversation with her H (in which she did not identify me or that it was a client), about the particular mix. When asked if he had ever seen one, he said no. She said she knew somebody who has one. Then much discussion ensued as to what it would look like and who was the mama; the husky or the dachshund. Her H maintained it had to be the husky because the dachshund "would explode". She maintained that it had to be the dachshund because how would the dachshund reach the husky. I told her the mama was the dachshund, she had a litter of five, and one looked like a mini-husky. When she saw the pic, she was amazed. I think she thought my dog would be hideous. He's actually rather cute.

Then she jumped up from the loveseat and said, "I have to show you my babies." She grabbed her iPhone and showed me a video of her rescue dog Lucy (her favorite) and her Boston terrier, Scamp (her daughter and H's favorite). So I got to see a bit of the inside of her house.

By this time, we'd run about 10 minutes over. She said she wanted to get in her car and take the long way home so she could hear the CD and that she was planning to sing along loudly. I took the opportunity to ask in what general area she lives and she told me .

I didn't pick up my stuff and asked for a real hug. The one time I decide to really pay attention to it, she gave me an a-frame hug and tried to pull away 3 times. On my way out the door I told her "thanks for everything," a sentiment from the CD cover, she just patted my arm and told me to have a good weekend.

Anybody else get mixed signals here? Was T really "high" from her antihistamine eye drops? Had an off day? Isn't real? I am perplexed. My session was yesterday. I emailed her in a panicked state earlier today related to my job changes and she never replied.