Quote:
Originally Posted by Anne2.0
I don't see this as a situation where your T was unwilling to disclose "a random thing." He disclosed the answer to the precise question you asked but did not volunteer additional information that was not asked. In the T world and in other kinds of communication, it is considered healthy and respectful to not put information on someone that they don't need or want to know. Your interpretation of this is he is holding some kind of invisible and unarticulated boundary, so you chose not to ask any additional questions. And you go further and over-interpret that as something about you and what he was thinking.
It seems like a situation where you blamed him for not giving you what you wanted to know, when you were too afraid to ask. Sometimes what people give back to you is a function of you and how you communicate, not about them or their weird thoughts about you. I'd encourage you to check your perception out with him and see if it really was a situation where he would not have answered the question, if you'd posed it.
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I can be guilty of thinking like this and often go down the rabbit hole of thinking 'my T won't share anything with me... I hate this relationship etc etc'. and then be annoyed by it. Sometimes I feel I almost make my self annoyed before an incident happens. E.g. Once we were talking about him going on holidays for a week and how that makes me feel. I then brought up how I was annoyed as he wouldn't tell me where he was going and his response was 'But you didn't ASK me where I was going?' I realized he was right, he then shared with me, I felt more at ease and it was no big deal. I think my presumption of him not disclosing is possibly many things with on being a form of protecting myself from feeling rejected if he chooses not to answer.
It made me realize that some of his non-disclosers are because I don't specifically ask. In my head, it sometimes feels like I have but no I haven't. He can't mind read. It seems as you say many T's don't volunteer extra information they are not asked unless they see it as specifically beneficial for the client to do so. Perhaps it's just the way they are trained or perhaps it is a way of trying to make people communicate their wishes more directly.
In saying all this I can see why you would find this annoying LT. It didn't play out as a normal conversation with someone else might do. It would be interesting to see his response if you were talking about pets again next time and asked him directly if he had a snake and see what he said.