Great metaphor. I know we all have what we seek inside ourselves, at least I knew it for myself long ago. I don't think I was looking at a therapist to give me what I was looking for. I knew I had all these things inside. I just didn't know how to access them and I thought that's what a therapist was supposed to help me with. I still think this is a therapist's job, which many of them don't do. They instead replace a client's own resources with a therapist's beliefs and guidance system. May be this is what others look for in therapy, but that wasn't my case.

Have we met? Because I was looking for the same things, but, I think, I did understand it from the beginning. Well..as I am thinking now..may be these things were not my desire from the beginning when I started seeing my first T. I think, I had some other desires at that time..those you mentioned came later..But I definitely knew what I wanted when I started therapy. To my first T's credit, he did ask me about my goals and I told them what they were. Also, to his credit, at some point in therapy I felt like I achieved them and I had new ones. See, that's why I can't definitively say that my entire therapy experience sucked. That's why the trauma of emotional violation was so horrendous..because I actually wanted it to continue to work for me and to produce results and hoped that it would.

I don't believe anyone can help us complete ourselves. That's the main spiritual concept that many spiritual schools of thought promote and they advise anyone who wants to grow to grasp it fully. Otherwise, we waste our lives always searching for the "right person", the "right relationship", the One who'd finally complete us and make us "happy". People have trouble understanding this concept though. That's why so many people are obsessed about relationships, and I am talking just any relationships, not only with therapists.

I, as a normal, not so enlightened person in the past, was obsessed about relationships as well. Before I got married, like any girl, I was trying to find "the One" and having friends was very important to me throughout my life, like, I believe, it's important to the majority of people. That said, I never thought about a "relationship" with a therapist in those terms. I never saw it, consciously or unconsciously, as something that would complete me. I didn't even think in the beginning that my interactions with a therapist are "relationship". I was thinking that I would visit some sort of a doctor who'd tell me how to "fix" my problems. As primitive and naive as it sounds, I feel that this view of a therapist and their role is much healthier than that of an "intimate" helper who has the need to engage in the "intimate relationship" with me in order to help me.