Piaf yesterday. (Not sure it’s all in order.)

I wasn’t really upset with her anymore about telling me last week she had an opinion about No. 3 but wouldn’t tell me because it would seem condescending. I sent her a letter about it so we could discuss it this time.

She opened with the letter and handed me a copy with intralinear comments (I hand wrote and double-spaced it). This made me laugh.

The key part was the attached. I’ll probably remove it soon.

We settled on “rules of engagement” (her term, not that I don’t think it’s apt). I wouldn’t leave upset and she, if she didn’t know what to say, would say so and ask to think about it. Immediately we ran into this because I commented that in the pictured comments, she seemed stuck. She said she did. I asked if she felt stuck often with me. Yes, because I had high standards but low expectations. I asked if she felt stuck more often with me than other clients.

Piaf: Yes.
ATAT: Why?
Piaf: Let me think about that.

(She’s getting asked about that next week.)

Somewhere in there she suggested I should be a therapist because I knew what to say better than she did. I stared at her in horror and told her she might consider that flattery but I did not. (It is easy to know what to say to oneself.)

After that the discussion turned to my meltdown Monday, where I left yoga class in tears and went home and bawled, which made me return to my previous med dose instead of trying to go off it. She kept wanting me to describe it, what it felt like. I went through several metaphors, like peine forte et dure (a medieval torture method that involved weighing someone down with rocks—it means hard and forceful punishment). We finally settled on despair.

She made her frequent point again that my life seems to be very painful and hard. I made my frequent point in return that I didn’t think it was that hard (First World problems, therapy is a First World phenomenon by and large) and I wanted to act, not reflect on how hard things were.

After that we circled back to her misstatement last week. She wanted to know about a comment I made in the letter, which was that she hadn’t actually given me any help with No. 3. I said that was par for the course and told her about my current solution, swearing at any thought of No. 3 to get out of my head. She said she’d take it.

There may have been more, but I’m boring myself by now.