At first, he tried to make his point again, (i.e. that he wants me to stop resisting his attempts to get me to talk with him about my relationship with my BF).Then he thought to ask me what words he actually used, and I provided them ("I am tired of holding the responsibility for your mental health"). That made him pause. He said, "did you think I was telling you that I did not want to work with you anymore?" I said, "yes, because the point of therapy is to hold some responsibility for my mental health, and you told me you were tired of doing that." He said that a) that is not the point of therapy in his view and b) denied that he felt that way. I told him that I didn't believe him. I said, "the words people use are important, meaningful." He said, "do you think I'm not in touch with something in myself?" I said that yes I thought that.

And then he went on about boundaries and the conditions of treatment and how he doesn't want me to keep getting mad at him for bringing up this topic; he doesn't want to be the one leading me to talk about this. He says I can say, "I don't want to talk about this" but then talk about it anyway, or like give it 20 minutes and then say "that's enough," but that I can't dig my heels in and refuse. He kept saying, "this is the treatment that you have consented to." I told him that it felt like he was asking me to bite my tongue or to magically change my attitude about this topic, and that those things were sh**y ideas. He said that no, he wants me to be more reflective and curious. I said I couldn't just flip a switch and make that happen. And then he went on about how he thinks me getting mad at him is just a distraction so that I won't have to talk about things with my BF.

I'm still furious with him. But also I had a panic attack later in the day and I emailed him in distress, so there's that.

I can't stop thinking about an exchange that happened in my psychoanalytic fellowship last night:

Instructor: I treated a patient four times a week for nine years, and he was very devaluing of me the entire time.
Student: He must have found your relationship to be useful, though, if he kept coming back. You must have been doing good work with him.
Instructor: Maybe, maybe not -- patients can attach to bad objects.