I guess it's possible for little baby steps to be too small. I take baby steps, and it's just not enough. I think it really is all about balance, and I am just no good at balance. I'm at one extreme or the other. I have these fragmented ego states (not DID because they have always been co-conscious, but something like that only less severe), and they don't want to work together. Either I interact as the whiner who just wants to complain all the time, or as the student/professional who draws from careful research and words things just right but it overly intellectual. There are other parts too. Somehow I need to integrate them and balance them. The whiner gets me into trouble, and I've been working on keeping her at bay, but she is also more real even if I hate her. The student/professional part comes across as rather contrived or made up sometimes. She doesn't do feelings. That gets rejected too.

I chose this T because I took a class (a distance class, where I saw her on a TV screen but she didn't see me) from her and she was very helpful, and also warm and caring, in the class. Her comments on my homework were therapeutic. I loved going to her class, and would go home and email her afterwards, and her replies made me feel good. I am a good student, and the student/teacher dynamic worked very well. She seemed to like me as a student too, and even posted my work as an example for the class once when most of them weren't getting what she wanted, and I nailed it. By the end of the class we had started to talk about issues and me needing more therapy still after the previous therapist was no longer available. I wanted to keep the communication with T as a teacher, while I was torn because I knew that the only way to keep her talking to me was as a client, and I knew that I needed more therapy and was not willing to start over with someone who didn't know me at all, but I would have rather had her as a friend or mentor. I can't think of anyone she reminds me of, really.

Thanks for the explanation of philosophy. I have a lot of interest in the continental branch. I can see how logic has its place too, but the history and the ideas feel much warmer and user friendly to me. I didn't realize that there was such a division. Hmm, that's interesting. Sounds a little bit like the kind of split that is in me. I wonder if integrating those two sides of philosophy would have any chance of working out? And if not, I wonder how much chance there is that my parts could really work together.