Today's session was greatly dreaded, but went better than expected. The time had come to try talking to t again about how I wish he was my dad and how I wish I could be part of his family. This would normally be a very very difficult subject for me to raise anyway, but is especially so because last time I tried things went really badly.

So it was good we could talk about talking about it.

We worked out:

- the young part is the one with these real strong wishes,

- the good girl (one of the 10 year olds) thinks it can happen if she's good enough somehow. Quiet enough or good enough. Just need to find the right key,

- the miserable 10 year old strongly believes he is repulsed by even the idea of me joining his family. Believes he feels the need to protect his family from me. But he needs to hide these feelings from me for t to be successful,

- the adult knows full well these things can never ever happen and it would be very bad therapy if they ever did and we would go running a mile if they did and report him to a board somewhere and yeah, we know we really don't want or expect it to happen,

- the angry teenager - this one was so interesting. She is normally very cruel and nasty to the younger parts when they express these wishes. Belittles them. Tells them how useless these stupid wishes are. T said that he thinks she also secretly wishes for these things which got scoffed at. But he said that when people rebel about something, it is because they care about it. If they didn't care they would ignore it or leave or hide from it. But rebelling engages the object.

I had to smile in t because of course that comment brought up big outrage inside. Even now it makes me laugh. Of course she would rebel against that idea and be outraged by it. Makes me think he must be right.

But in the end it all basically comes down to the fact that I need to accept these feelings and wishes are real and reasonable (ie of course someone with my experiences would want a good father/family/etc). I find that so hard to accept. They aren't reasonable - they're useless. It's so pointless wishing for things that can never happen. Waste of energy and gets us so upset.

T explained the difference between reasonable and useless and we understand we have to accept this to move through it. But argh! I hate acceptance! It can just bugger off and go jump in a lake.

I hate how so many things just boil down to learning acceptance.