Trust me. Tell me. Trust me. Stay the course . I will be right with you.

So this the crux of my confusion. This is a particular language in my experience outside of therapy- language of real friendship , language of love.

These words too are exact, literal quotes of what my therapist says to me.

The music and the words don't go together. The words say See this through; I will be right by your side. The music says- when the session is over, he is over.

The discrepancy between what the words mean in a socially fluent daily life world, and how they might be a metaphor-only for something I don't understand in therapy, is very confusing to the uninitiated.

I dont know the answer, but I know how much emotional pain it brings not into the room with T, but outside it back in real life. I am not isolated. But therapy is isolating only in that my focus in my T is heightened and on the real people in my life less.

I am not sure if I will stay the course, bc I am not sure he is right by my side, even if he has a really pretty way with the English language. Tell me ( leans forward, blue eyes look in mine) Trust me. You can trust me. Maybe he is. Maybe that is a metaphor and my prefrontal cortex can deal with that but not my heart . I understand the story of therapy and one's relationship with a psychologist trained in psychodynamic therapy is supposed to truly be the story of a conversation with oneself.

But there is the fact of matter, the fact of the second person there who is not just a tool to use though they may frame themselves to be that. Is trying to know your T a straight up evasion of trying to know myself as one poster above suggested? Or is trying to know a male stranger in my space before telling him my innermost secrets and skeletons only natural?

I want to know to whom I am speaking, and who, when he talks to me in such intimate words- I will be right with you- trust me- is speaking to me. My T seems to sit with me in the paradox he calls " a paradox ". Yes, this is a real and yes this is all artificial.