maybe both.
when i started therapy and was so clueless about the process, T1 would ask me endless questions about my FOO and I remember looking at her and saying, why do you want to hear this? It's not YOUR family. No, she admitted, but it's yours. It just seemed so bizarre to me that she would want anyone to recount all that **** and especially about people she had never met. IRL you tell people family stuff & it goes in one ear and right out the other.

that was phase I. Phase II was when I started trying to imagine what it must be like to sit there and listen - attentively - to stories of abuse, abandonment, neglect, and worse, every day, every week. No wonder they burn out.

Phase III was when I finally realized that the story I was telling was MY story. Not just a story, told with no feelings (I had buried my feelings long years before). This was my story.