Last Monday's session:

(This is rather disjointed because I wrote half of it immediately afterwards, and the rest almost a week later. Also, for some reason I keep switching back and forth between direct quotes and summary. Sorry about that.)

I sat down. There was some awkward silence. I squirmed around a bit.

T said "how's you?"... He always says that. Not "how are you?"... "How's you?"

I said "I'm... Ummmm... Errr..." and continued with the awkward silence.

T said "okay. I'm guessing you're feeling... anxious?" I smiled. Nodded. He said "well, I thought that might happen, so I have something to tell you to help with that..."

He told me he has a dog. A black labrador. He said that his dog tends to communicate by making sounds... He makes huffing noises, and sighing noises. I laughed.

There was some further silence. I sighed. I said "ah - there! I'm communicating like your dog." He said "well, usually my dog sighs like that when he's happy..." I said "hmm... No. I guess I'm not then. But I'm not a dog, anyway, I'm a cat."

He said... "I'm pretty sure you're a human. But I think cats usually communicate with their eyes. Mine does. Angrily. I don't think he's a very happy cat."

I said "is that because he lives with a labrador...?"

He said "no! They get on well. He doesn't like me though. He looks at me like he hates me."

I told him that cats smile with their eyes. When they blink slowly - that's a cat smile. He said his cat usually just stares. I said... Oh, okay. Well, yeah, that is aggressive cat language. That does mean he hates you.

He thanked me for confirming that for him.

We laughed.

He asked if I felt less anxious. If his telling me about his dog worked. I said yes - but that he needed to stop being so likeable because I was still annoyed with him.

He said "hmm... You say you're angry with me?" I said "actually, I said annoyed."

He said "okay. Annoyed. Tell me - I'm interested."

I told him that it had taken me a couple of days of thinking about it (a lot) to work out what he'd been getting at with his idea that 'no-one is good enough' for me. I told him that I'd been mystified, because he seemed to think it was an important insight for me, said it had been 'a theme' of my therapy - but I genuinely couldn't remember ever saying anything about it. He looked surprised.

I said that eventually I remembered that we'd spoken about my feeling that I could never get close enough to people, and that he'd theorised that it was paradoxically a way that I kept people away. By not letting them live up to my impossible standards. He said "yes - no-one is good enough..." I told him that it wasn't the same thing. That lots of people are good enough for me. Most people are. I like people a lot. But I never feel close enough to them. He said "so you're making a distinction between 'close enough' and 'good enough'?" I said yes... Absolutely I am. They're completely different things. He nodded.

I explained that his latching onto this idea, in response to my criticism of him, had really bothered me. That it magically turned any problem I had with him into my 'pathology', that it allowed him to escape accountability by making it all about 'my stuff'. He said... "So it feels like you can never win?" I said yes. Although that does pretty much sum up my feeling, in retrospect I think it was an interesting choice of words - and certainly not the words I would have chosen. I guess I'm not entirely imagining the competitive vibe between us sometimes.

I said that I get it. I understand that I have patterns of relating to people that will also play out between us. I get that it can be very useful for me to look at them. I don't deny that at all. But also, sometimes, he has to accept his part in things. He has to acknowledge his mistakes.

...and he agreed. Emphatically. He said he understands my feeling that way. He got it.

Thank f**k for that eh?

I told him about a dream that I'd had a few nights before. The first dream in which he had actually been himself, not some twisted, weird version, or a completely different therapist obviously meant to represent him.

In the dream he had said I was worthless... but I knew he hadn't meant it in a bad way somehow, and so even though I was deeply hurt, I didn't feel able to express myself and tell him about it. I was curled up on the sofa unable to speak or move or do anything. In contrast he was talking a lot, and moving around a lot.

He asked what I made of it. I said... It's just how I feel sometimes, I guess. He asked if I felt that way now. I said no - I don't feel that way at all right now.

He asked if I felt better about things. If I felt that anything had been resolved. After a pause, I said yes. Pretty much. I said that I felt okay, except...

He has two clocks in his new room. One on the table to the left of the sofa and one behind it. In moments of silence, it's very noticeable that their ticking is out of synch, and it creates this weird hypnotising effect. I had mentioned it a few weeks ago, the first time we had a session in that room. This session it had started really bothering me again. So, I told T. I asked him why he hadn't tried to get them in synch... he said "I have! Twice! They just came out the same! What are the chances...?!"

...I laughed a lot at that. I said he should get a different clock for the table. He said he was going to - a digital one.

He asked if there was anything else I'd specifically wanted to address this session. I said no. He asked about my relationship with my partner...

So I talked about my relationship with my partner. It was hard. I don't want to go into it again. I hate talking about it. It was good, though - T was attentive and empathetic and all those other things a T should be. He seemed to totally understand me. He validated some feelings that I really needed to have validated.

He did give me a stupid analogy about a rose bush, though. He said "are you interested in gardening, Luc?" - all out of the blue, which was briefly intriguing - and I said "I don't have a garden. I live in a flat." and he said "oh - okay - it's just, I wanted to explain something with a reference to gardening, but if you're not a gardener then..." and I took the piss out of him - "what, is it some really obscure horticultural reference?! I mean, if it's about watering a bloody plant, I think I'll manage to understand..."

I did understand. He said that a relationship is like a rose bush and you have to cut bits of it off to keep it healthy. I dunno what part of my relationship he was implying I should cut off. He just loves a stupid analogy.

There was another long-ish quiet period at one point. I was weeping silently. Feeling a bit overwhelmed with emotion, trying to get my thoughts to make sense. Suddenly, T grabbed the clock on the table and irritably pulled the batteries out of the back of it. I smiled through my tears. He said "sorry - it was stopping me from being present with you."

It was a nice moment.

I guess I got sick of talking about my relationship at some point, and, changing the subject, asked him about the spare chair he has in his room. I asked him if it was a chair for invisible people to sit in - referring to the gestalt 'empty chair' experiment. He said it's mostly for him to sit on while he plays his keyboard (which he consistently seems to call a piano for some reason), but that he sometimes uses it as an 'empty chair', yes. He asked if it was something I was interested in. For some reason I didn't answer his question really and instead grabbed the opportunity to argue with him again about how Fritz Perls was actually a violent misogynist. T continued with his rhetoric about how it was all totally normal 'back in those days' etc etc. We didn't get anywhere with it.

The topic somehow swung back round to my relationship, and I started to get upset again. I said that I was going to have to go to dinner with my partner and his parents after the session, and so I needed my head to be a bit clearer.

T asked if there was somewhere natural I could go in-between then and dinner-time. I said no - I had to go to Boots (a chain pharmacist) to pick up a prescription. He said that the fumes from the perfume counters in there would be so strong (they are! I have to cover my nose and mouth when I go in there!) that I'd be totally out of it anyway and not care what was going on. I joked "are you suggesting that I get high?" and he said "no - it's not like I said you should go and smoke crack! I was just messing around, to help get you into a different mood..."

I said... I know. I know that's what you were doing, T. Don't ruin it.

He always has to ruin it.