Whoa. I really don't think that this about me and my T. I don't know why you feel strongly that I'm trying to get my T to be "perfect," but that just isn't the case. Even my T would agree this isn't the case. She's said to me many times that one of my good qualities is that I'm very accepting of the people closest to me and that I give them space to be who they are. She says it's good that I have a diverse range of friends, and that we don't try to push our values on one another. I've actually referred some of these friends to my T (and they now see her) and I think she has a pretty good perspective on the way I am in close relationships.

I agree that my T can help me, even if we have a different moral compass. I learned early on that we felt differently about certain things, and that was never an issue for me. What initially bothered me in this specific instance was that T SAID she believed one thing, and then acted the opposite way. It caught me off guard and surprised me. It made me have to go back and re-evaluate who I THOUGHT T was. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it DID catch me unawares. It made me think: "Is T being hypocritical? Hypocritical things usually bother me. Is T telling ME one thing, and then behaving differently HERSELF. If so, does this bother me? Does this make my therapy less effective? Do I trust T's judgement when it comes to relationships?" Since we don't have control over our feelings-- we just have to feel them-- I decided to write a couple of posts about how I was feeling about my T's revelation in order to help me process it. I'm not saying my feelings are "right" or that T is "wrong"-- I'm saying I had an emotional reaction to T's disclosure. That's probably why T's aren't supposed to disclose too much! Clients can't help but feel certain things about certain pieces of information, and when something doesn't fit with your "T schema," you're forced to reflect and re-evaluate and try to figure out who your T is NOW. That was admittedly difficult for me. But I really don't think that means that I wanted T to be "perfect"; I certainly didn't think she was perfect before! I've always seen my T as human. She has made little mistakes before, and it hasn't been a big deal. For me, this was kind of big news, and it was something I needed to feel and process.

You say that you think my T isn't feeling like a respected partner here-- I don't really get why you think that, either. I'm pretty sure that isn't how my T feels. My T seems to think everything is "just fine" between us and that the issue was that she just repeated herself last week, causing me to think she didn't hear me the first time. She thought it was a non-issue so she just wanted to move on, and talk about something else. The real issue-- much more than her self-disclosure-- is that I don't feel I'm being heard! Again, I didn't feel heard today when she kept saying the issue was the repetition; the repetition wasn't the problem. The problem was that she was trying to TELL ME how I felt, and she was wrong, and I felt that I had to defend myself against her putting feelings on me that I wasn't having. I was trying to tell her that she can ASK me how I'm feeling, but I don't like being TOLD how I'm feeling, when I don't feel that way. If she's getting how I feel totally wrong, how can we effectively process how I DO feel? How can I work on things efficiently when she thinks the wrong thing is the problem? I tried to get us back to what I was actually feeling and what I wanted to work on, but she kept cutting me off before I got to finish. I think it's okay to want to be heard in therapy, and to keep saying "no, you're not hearing me" and "no, I don't feel that way," and "no, this is the issue I'm having" each time she gets it wrong. How can we work on my issues if she doesn't understand what they are or how I feel about them?