I had a session on Thursday, and it's taken me a while to process it. I'm still puzzling it over in my head, so thinking out loud here...

The bulk of the session was taken up by a conversation about perception and self-doubt, and the ways that living with someone whose perception is skewed makes it challenging to trust myself. The self-doubt takes over because of the way boundary-setting conversations in particular derail to focus on me and what I've done wrong, said wrong, on my obvious ill intent. The ways that living with someone who cannot see or own their own behavior clearly is frightening in itself, and I start to wonder: Where are my blind spots? And I become hypervigilant about what I do and say to prevent accusations.

We both used mirror analogies.
T's was about relationship and the ways that the people around us reflect us back to ourselves. He takes what he sees and reflects it like a funhouse mirror, distorted and twisted, so that's what is reflected back at me, and I cannot see my undistorted self.
Mine was that it's like living with a mirror with a hole punched out in the middle. Around the edges, simple interaction and superficial relationship, is mostly intact though it has cracks running through. The closer one gets to the middle the more fragmented the shards get until the empty middle, and trying to flow around that fractured reality was slicing me to bits, and I am reflected and distorted in sharp bits and pieces.

Then at the end of the session, and this is what keeps puzzling in my head, as we were wrapping up, t said in a sort of...complimenting, almost...voice, "And you didn't cry this time!" Which half took me aback. Really? "Is not crying a good thing?" I asked. And she said something about a stronger sense of my self and holding things together.

It was our session wrap-up, so I didn't get a chance to pursue it, and I still find myself puzzled by the idea. Is that a measure of progress, not crying? It seems to me that the crying I do in therapy is pretty damn situationally appropriate and a part of expressing what I am feeling in the moment as I discuss the impact of the disastrous pieces of the life I am currently immersed in.

Ooo. I was thinking as I started that I am mostly intellectually curious about the question of my crying, but it seems I am having a feeling or two about that. Hmm.