Just had my first session back after about a one month break (cause I was away). It was nice to see him again. Talked to him... About some sensitive stuff between me and my bf. Sex stuff. He was really good with listening and repeating to make sure he understood. I think I've come to a good understanding now. Was a relief to talk about it. I guess I felt like my bf was pushing me away / wasn't interested in me sexually whereas... Performance anxiety. I think that was the thing. Which is fine by me (we can work on that together) whereas the other... There wouldn't be a we :-(

I've never talked about that kind of stuff in therapy before... Was hard... But not as hard as I thought it might be. Stuff that is harder about my past and stuff like that.

I asked my t whether he had been to the US (in the context of telling him how I found it) and he was like 'I grew up there'. And I asked him where and he said 'Long Island'. So... That was a kind of surprising thing for me to learn about my t... Wonder when he moved to Australia... Thought I'd be prying to ask too much more... I don't know why this makes a difference to me, but it does. Hard to explain. Changes things in a good way... It is like he has a connection to this new part of my life that I'm fostering. Maybe that is it.

I wuv my t.

I grew up on Long Island, too. Maybe I know your T? I'm sure he's a bit older than me. :-)

Sounds like a really good session. Do you think the separation helped at all in regards to the ease in telling him some uncomfortable stuff?

I'm afraid to ask my T questions. He doesn't self-disclose personal information too much. I also feel like I'm prying if ask. Lately I've had this itch to ask, as if I'd be taking a real big, exciting, bad-*** risk. Could I be any lamer? Probably not.

Welcome back. :-)

I hear there are lots of people living on Long Island ;-)
Still, guess it is possible that you know him. You know, I don't know how old my therapist is. I do wonder, but don't imagine I'll ever ask him. He could be anywhere from 36 to 44 I really have no idea. Am hopeless at assessing these things... If I had to guess... Maybe 39. But I really don't know.

I think the seperation helped because I find it easier talking to someone who feels more like a stranger than someone who has a presence that stands out as a person in their own right (if that makes sense). I guess we are fairly well matched too, now, so he knows the kinds of background things to say to keep me rolling along and to help guide me to seeing different things. And his repeating things kinda helped because I was talking around the issue a little and he was able to repeat them in a on the ball kinda way...

I'm afraid to ask my t questions, too. Partly because I'm afraid of the answer. Some things... Can change things significantly. I remember not being happy at all when he told me that his wife was going to have a baby. That was two big wowzas in one go. Firstly: he has a wife. Secondly: he is going to have a newborn baby. I would have preferred not to have known that. But I guess I'm used to that now... Second thing was finding out about his attending a church on the net (damn you why can't you be an atheist just like me?????).

I thought about buying him a copy of Dawkin's 'the god delusion' for x-mas but figured that would probably just be either preaching to the choir or antagonising people who weren't initially sympathetic...

Maybe the bad *** risk...

Is about

1) The inevitable 'why do you want to know and what would x and y and z answer mean to you.

2) Receiving an answer that you (potentially) don't want to hear?

But then there is something compelling...

I wonder when my t moved to Aussie. I wonder if it was about getting into Medical School or if it was unrelated (training as a doc in Aussie would have cut off his chances of practicing in the US). Not sure how I can ask this in a sensitive way... Maybe I could find the couragae to ask his age... Now, that would help me with google ;-) Though you would think that I could find where he trained via google... Am I kinda bad *** in my own whimpy way?????

[tulips30]

If you are "a bad *** in a wimpy way" then join my club! I feel the same way about asking personal questions directly. But, hey!! Google is around for a reason. Right? I google everything I can think of about my t. I figure I'm not hurting anybody and it satisfies my curiosity in a safe way.

Funny thing is....I actually found my t. thru Google. It sent me to a list by Psychology Today of t's in my area. Each were listed with qualifications and a photo. I spent a lot of time looking thru each and I ended up with a teriffic t. I don't suggest that it's the best way to find a t., but it worked for me. The other good thing was that it gave me a lot of info about him I would not have known. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Plus, now I have his picture

tulips

Yeah, I guess you do get some basic information that you wouldn't get if you picked a therapist online. A pic is a nice thing to have, I think :-)

I'm ambivalent about googling for more dirt than they have freely disclosed... And yet... I do it anyhow...

;-)

[Kiya]

maybe he wanted to live there all his life and had to have a good enough career (accepted) to live there... much like myself. I want to live there but I know it is hard to get in. One has to do a career that is needed.

Yeah, I don't know too much about it... I guess I know it is expensive to live there... He is a psychiatrist, so I guess they do alright financially. But I was wondering whether he moved to Australia for Med School because of some difficulty getting a place in the good US programs (they are VERY competitive). But who knows... Maybe he moved before that. Or maybe he trained in the US and then moved... Google isn't being very co-operative... I'm working on it ;-)

Sorry, my answer was probably confused. Do you mean about moving to Australia or about staying on Long Island? I'm not sure how hard it is to immigrate from the US to Australia. It is fairly hard to immigrate from NZ or Australia to the US - not sure why I imagined it might be a little easier the other way around. But then, I don't know.

[sunrise]

Welcome back, alex.

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
Thought I'd be prying to ask too much more... I don't know why this makes a difference to me, but it does. Hard to explain.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">I can really relate to that. My T self-discloses quite a bit sometimes, but I always felt this had to come from him, rather than me asking. That I was a passive recipient of his information. But a few times in the last months I have actually asked him stuff about his life. After all, we have a relationship, it should be OK for me to ask. And he answered just fine. It was a big step for me. But once I asked something and I felt a bit of a wall. There's a boundary. I'm sensitive, so I backed off. It is like a regular relationship, having to sense when is too much, the liberties you can take, etc. It's a dance. It's real life.

[Perna]

My T always did the "How old do you think I am" quessing game thing instead of answering questions. But she was the one that tried to get me to talk about wanting to go live with her and almost taunting in the "everybody has that fantasy, it's very common".

It took until a long time in therapy before we addressed the fear of asking questions because they won't get answered thing versus the asking personal questions and it's not about T but about me.

I think it's kind of like "silence" and T's not a whole lot more sure when they're supposed to break it than we are sure about when and what questions it's okay to ask and their knowing when to answer and when to stonewall, LOL.

Yeah. I think I remember hearing somewhere that it was okay to ask - so long if you could accept 'no' as the answer. My t self-discloses a little too much for my tastes... But then I think that it was mostly around his trying to explain why he didn't know exactly when his time off would start (due to the nature of delivery).

I'm ambivalent about finding out anything more. Though I do google a little. Still ambivalent, I guess.

I wouldn't like to guess peoples ages because I always end up insulting people when I guess.

I think therapists are meant to think about whether it would be more helpful to answer the question or to explore the question. In this case... I was saying something about how I didn't really realize that each state had a different flavor... And it turns out that my bf and him were raised in the same state. Though... A different part of it - so a different flavor again.

He also said 'thats how come I know a little of the East Coast geography' because we were having discussions about how far it was to drive from here to there and so on. And my memory is a little %#@&#! up... And so now I guess I'll defer to his knowledge lol.

I guess I do feel a bit closer to my t knowing that. Moving to the US vs staying in Aussie will be a decision that I'll be faced with at some point... Nice to know it is a decision that he faced at some point, too. In this case I'm glad he answered.

There is a 15 year age gap between me and my bf. It gets to me at times. I asked my t (a while back) if he thought it was too much. He paused for a bit... And said that he didn't think he should answer that. I think that that was the right thing for him to have done in hindsight. Hard to know as a t, I guess.

[Perna]

My husband is seven years older than I am but I have three older brothers (and he, as eldest sibling has three younger brothers) so I can deal okay with the age difference until I start thinking about who's going to die first and looking for areas his age might be getting to him (he'll be 65 in August). My energy and health are changing as I age and I can imagine now, like I couldn't when I was younger, how that actually is/works.

My T once joked my husband was "much" younger than she is. I know she got her doctorate in 1971 and had her son around then. I wouldn't think she was more than 35 to have her son back then. If she was 35 in 1971, that would make her 72 this year.

I graduated with my BA in 1972. I know she did something other than school/psychology before getting her PhD though. Assuming it takes around 5-7 years to go through grad school and adding a year because in 71 I was still a year shy of my bachelor's, she was "at least" 6-8 years older than I am I figured. I think she's around 69 or so now; she retired 2 years ago and assuming she worked a couple years past 65. . .

It was funny, I was nervous telling my parents about my bf because I wasn't sure how they would take the age difference. They ended up taking it really well, though. (Probably because of where he is placed in life and they worried that I'd end up with a druggie or an unemployed artist or something like that. Cringe at them. Cringe). Not quite sure how many years there are between my father and my stepmother. Maybe 7 years or something like that with my father being younger. He said that it wasn't so much about objective age, though. That his body is packing up before hers is (he has been quite hard on his over the years) and so he feels older than her - with her looking after him with his health ailments much of the time.

My bf is really healthy and fit. I have these leg injuries that make me hobble a bit and I can't do impact exercise or run. Haven't really gotten back into exercise after that, either, and so he is much more flexible and less creaky than me lol. So in that respect... He seems much younger. He is fairly grey, though. Mostly because of stress, I think. I have one or two grey hairs but was surprised to learn (fairly recently) that quite a few of my friends are really very grey (at around 25 or 30) and so they dye their hair because of that.

Part of the age thing is him seeming much further ahead with his life. He has a tenured job already and I'm just a lowly grad student (he has absolutely nothing to do with supervising me or grading my work or anything like that so those issues don't come up). But... I really really like him. And there it is.

Lol about how you worked out your therapists age. I have nothing like that to go on. Can't even find out where he went to medical school (or when). Sigh. Damn google...

[Perna]

Use your university's library and find his dissertation; that's what I did :-)

I had to laugh; I was looking at the abstract of my T's and the title was really long and my brain couldn't put the two halves of it together. I understood every word and I could follow up through the first half but then when I went to understand the second half and put it with the first half, I would always have "lost" the first half. I told her about that once and how that was why I didn't buy hers, I figured if I couldn't understand the title even then there probably wasn't going to be much of "her" in the writing. She laughed and explained about psych doctoral dissertations in that time/place and what they had to be on, etc.

That is a great idea only... He is an MD rather than a PhD. So... He didn't do a thesis / dissertation. Thats how come I'm not finding much via google. You would think I would find something about what university he attended... Only... It is a lot harder to find out about p-docs than it is to find out about clinical psychologists... I've tried googling his medical registration number... But no luck. ;-)