Do you guys ever feel like you're being told to state the obvious over and over and over and over?

A lot of my therapy has been like that. I'll describe what's going on in my life. My T will ask me how I feel about it. I'll stumble around and try to describe how I feel. Then T will say "what would happen if you said this [to the person involved IRL]?" And I'm like "I don't know -- it never occurred to me."

That same T exchange has happened approximately one billion times now. I'm finally starting to get it. A couple of days ago I got an email from a friend asking me something I couldn't figure out how to respond to. My typical method of dealing with that is to not answer the email until I've figured out exactly what I want to say. Which sometimes means I don't answer for a long time and then people get all pissed off at me for (supposedly) ignoring them. This time I did things differently -- I sent a note back saying I'd gotten their email and was thinking about what they'd asked me but couldn't figure out how to respond just yet and would write back when I did! And I gotta say, stating the obvious like that is really helpful. I mean we had a whole healthy exchange on the topic and then I got a chance to really think about it without pissing anyone off.

So why did it take so long for me to figure out the obvious?

It seriously never occurred to me to actually state how I felt about something. And I know we'll have this exchange in T a couple more billion times yet. It's helpful.

Sidony