I'm trying so hard to manifest progress from last year's set of holidays. It's so difficult not to experience what you call slippage, spending more time with perpetrator than in the rest of the year combined ( as you pointed out) and losing more time with you than all year simultaneously.

It takes will power and work not to suddenly devalue therapy itself bc I am on my own now to implement what I've learned and try to stay psychically "alive" in our relationship while you turn your attention to your real life and take time off from me.

The enticement to say to myself how you don't care , and fear you- that you don't work hard bc you have little kids at an older age, that you are independently wealthy and work 4 days a week at the best of times while criticizing the weeks I work 7, that you aren't a warm and huggy therapist . . .

The evidence though is that you do care: since last year's catastrophe of Christmas, in which our experiences were so disjunctive we couldn't find common ground, you literally haven't missed one session with me. I almost never lose time anymore, and I understand defenses and reality rather than abiding in a world with monsters under the bed.

I don't want to go back to fear of you, thus losing the progress. That depends on my ability not to dissociate , give in to magical thinking, experience envy of your family or rebellion against your more conventional values outside the therapy office; remembering your poetic speech and blue eyed attentiveness as it was last session is the only way not to re-experience loss upon loss upon loss .