@atisketatasket: Oh she is an intelligent person, alright. She has been invited to be a guest speaker at major conferences. The research papers that she write are well-received.

I have another hypothesis. See, this hasn't really been a problem in our work until about one year and a half into working together. A possible theory is that in the first year and a half, I didn't share much about myself. So she was probably more inclined to give empathic responses, acknowledge, and validate. But now that she knows a lot about me, her immediate response is to jump into interpretation or analysis, connecting the dots.

The missing opportunities shoots me down a lot. There are some things that I've been holding back from sharing with her for some time. And I finally share it. It's like a bird flying for the first time in a long time only to be shot down when she doesn't pay attention to it, give it any acknowledgement, or emotional feedback, and instead prematurely invites "Z" interpretation. Patients only try so many times only not to try anymore if they're not going to be heard.

But still, it's important to take things one step at a time instead of making a huge jump on the chessboard. And as a schizoid who bottles up my feelings and denies them, you'd think that she, as a therapist, would be proud that I'd want to connect more with my feelings. Insight and self-reflection are important. But so are the right brain side of things.

And speaking of parsing words, yes. Sometimes I feel like her interpretations are too wild, it's almost like we're engaging in a game of wordplay association. For example, in the dream sharing scenario, it's like she heard me use the word "mad" and simply associated it with our recent texting incident. Or when we were talking about money-related stuff and I said, "You're rich," the next session, she said, "Perhaps you meant that you feel that I'm rich internally and you're poor internally." What is this?? A game of wordplay association? I only blurted out "you're rich" because it costs $35 to rent the therapy room. And I wouldn't be needing to rent it if you didn't move and I didn't want to cover that cost on top of my weekly expenditures.

And speaking of best therapists, when I was in in college, I saw a psychologist at the university's counseling center for a couple of times. That dude was by far the easiest therapist to talk to. He leaned in, would nod his head and go "yeah, "yeah" while I'm talking and when I catch my breath, he would mirror me, paraphrase, acknowledge, and empathize to show that he gets it and is on the same page as me. And I would continue sharing and talking. It felt good. It felt... therapeutic.