Saw my T for the first time this week.

He asked how my weekend had been. I started off by telling him how I was upset after the last session on Friday, I was a bit sad. So when I left and saw a cat right outside his office, I was very happy and petted it for 15 minutes or so. Then when I got up to leave, it took my hand with both front paws and bit me! So I had to go see my doctor, he put my arm in a cast so a possible infection won't spread, so I couldn't use my right hand until yesterday evening! I was frustrated after because it kind of prevented me from thinking about my last session, since I was angry at the cat instead.

T asked what might have caused me to be sad. I answered that I thought about it even though it was a bit hard due to the cat thing. The main issue I could make out was that he tells me to calm down so quickly. Like he asks what I feel, I say for example 'sad' and almost right away he goes 'okay, calm down, do XYZ to calm down...' and then I don't feel anything anymore because the tiny amount of emotion that was around vanishes due to calming down. And then I'm confused, because he just asked about what I feel, and now he makes it go away instead of working with it...

He said I have a way of making people wanting to take care of me. Like with one of my friends, I used to behave in a certain way and then he'd try to calm me down and hug me. And I do the same thing in therapy and he also reacts to that. And sometimes he maybe helps me too much, since a goal of my therapy is to learn how to do it myself. He should stay back more.

I said it's not mainly that he helps me calm down, it's that he does it so quickly. He doesn't know how I feel, so telling me right away to calm down doesn't help, especially when I feel so little that it all goes away as soon as I do the things he tells me to do. I then also mentioned that I was sometimes a bit scared he'd get mad if I didn't do what he wanted me to. For example last session he told me to sit upright to calm myself down. But at that point I had already calmed down by just doing some breathing stuff and trying to focus on how the chair felt beneath my hands. But he wouldn't stop bugging me about sitting upright until I did.

T: "Yeah... I'm kind of a control freak, in private too...". He said thanks for letting him know, that he knows this is his issue and that he needs to work on that. He explained that we are a team and both work together, so it's good when I tell him what he's doing wrong so he knows. He also explained where that thing with sitting another way came from. He said if I lie down, I look helpless and dependent. And that usually therapy tries to avoid dependency. So his idea is to sit differently because that influences your feelings. He said there's studies that show that if you are for example sad and smile, you feel a bit more happy, just because of the movement. Even if you are not really happy. So he had the same idea with my posture.

I answered that sitting like this lets me feel better and I'm more comfortable like this. He replied that we'd already talked about this a few times. And that it's most important that I feel like I can think properly and feel properly. So if it works better like this, then it's fine. He just needs reminders sometimes.

We then went on to talking a bit about some issues I currently have with friends as well as parents. It was mostly a light session. In the end he again thanked me for bringing up what bothered me about him and said he'd try to work on it.