My boyfriend, of 6 years, always asks about therapy… I find it hard to explain to him. Explaining it to him makes me sound a little on the crazy side and I don’t want him to worry about me. My T and I have a continuing dialogue from session to session. We often connect things to past conversations and we use a lot of metaphors. Sometime I find myself unable to really explain the metaphors—I understand them and talk with my T. about them, but when I talk with my boyfriend they come out sounding kinda strange. Like my T and I talk about three different aspects of myself and have assigned them the big green person, little red person and little, little blue person. It’s a concept my boyfriend really can’t wrap his head around. If I took the time to really explain all of it I think he would get it—but I feel like some of it is private and I don’t want to share it—that leaves holes and makes it hard for my boyfriend to follow the “story.”

And my boyfriend always gets angry at the people who have abused and neglected me—he can’t understand why I am not angry—I get tired of justifying why I am not angry—every time we talk about therapy I have to say, no I am not angry and then he goes into a speech about how angry he gets…I don’t like to make him angry.

Also, it takes awhile for me to process my therapy. Sometimes I need several days to write about it and think about it before I am ready to share with anyone—my boyfriend always wants to know right away. If I don’t share right away, he just moves on and seems to forget it. I think he assumes I don’t want to talk about it—which is not true—I am just not always ready to talk about it right away.

Things have changed over the last couple months. He just got sober and all our talks have changed. The focus is on him, not me and my therapy.