I keep questioning myself about the incentive to continue ; I keep agreeing with your posts, and kind of clinging to them like a life raft, but something I don't understand wants more of the process even while I distrust it. All I know is I am a mess lately, when I have always been very high functioning in work and relationships. I feel brokenhearted about my T, but nothing happened except I abruptly stopped believing that we had any kind of precious relationship. I take stock of all the secrets I told in the name of learning to set aside defenses, and I wonder if I will recover equilibrium or make it through the process and I miss the defenses . I think the aspect of therapy in which you pretend as if you have this higher love ("agape") while at the same time holding in mind it is contrived, you pay for it, and you both have significant others and real lives is very unnatural. It feels intimate inside the moment , so it is like you then betray that intimacy over and over in your real life, then you go into therapy and betray your real life with this crazy gazing eye to eye intensity. It's like going to a really good movie, and suspending disbelief in order to fully enter its universe, except you are a character in the movie and so is T and it feels real until some inevitable practical moment smacks you in the face . I am just not sure it is wise to be so intimate with someone not showing up as a real person.