Having a hard time right now so excuse the ramble, I'm trying to distract myself by waffling about therapy.

Some really bizarre stuff has been going down in my T sessions. I posted about somatic countertransference a while ago - I have hypersomnia and am often tired and sleepy. In my therapy sessions, I'm wide awake but my T often yawns. (Which is a common response to trauma and dissociative energy, so ignore all those articles that say yawning automatically means your T sucks.)

Well, it gets weirder. I have dissociative amnesia and have a lot of memory blanks. My T normally has a really good memory, but he's been really forgetful over the past couple of weeks. I remember things we've talked about, but he's been forgetting whole conversations. I'll refer back to things he's said earlier in the session and he won't remember them.

I asked if he'd caught my memory problems and he said actually, yes, that's kind of what's happening. He knows I like to research and look things up, so he suggested I look up projective identification. This definition seems to explain what's been going on: "Projective identification is examined as an intrapsychic and interpersonal phenomenon that draws the analyst into various forms of acting out."

Last week, he was talking about how the rules are basically turn up, pay and don't bring a gun in and shoot him, and I made a passing, flippant comment about whether a paintball gun would be okay. During the week, I fantasised about messing up his room by actually bringing a paintball gun in and firing red paint at the walls. (I've never been paintballing and don't know what the usual colours would be.) Today, he told me that, during the week, he had found himself having fantasies (as in made-up visions, but not welcome ones!) where I brought a paintball gun in and fired red and yellow paint at the walls.

So I'm often tired and sleepy, but my T is the one who yawns during sessions. I have lots of memory problems, but my T is the one who forgets things during sessions. I made a flippant comment and we both imagined almost exactly the same thing. It's like we've created this joint headspace, he's actually taking on some of my characteristics and there's some kind of unconscious overlap. I wondered if anyone else has experienced something similar.