Posted by littleone on November 4, 2004, at 20:45:19
Quite some time ago, I confessed to my T that I had this yearning to touch him. And I don't mean in a gooby, sexual kind of way. More like if you saw a priceless vase, looking at it isn't enough. You'd want to ever so gently touch it almost as though you are checking that it is really there in front of you.
I actually gave him that explanation so he wouldn't misinterpret my meaning, but he just sort of waved the boundaries flag in my face and moved on to the next topic. I felt so blah after the whole thing and was especially careful with what I revealed to him after that.
Anyway, a little while ago I got the s**ts with him over something and threw that incident back in his face. I told him that I know all about boundaries and in fact I probably only felt safe raising that with him *because of* the boundaries and the safety they provide.
I started to fade away a bit then and don't exactly remember what he said, but it was something along the lines that he wasn't able to discuss it at that earlier point because he didn't know how closely his definition of touching aligned with my definition of touching. I got the impression that if I raised it again further down the therapy track, he probably *would* discuss it and our definitions.
Mind you, it's just occurred to me that he dodged it again. He didn't actually talk about touching, he just talked about talking about it. ARGH!
It just makes me feel like I've been left behind, standing there scratching my head and going "huh?".
I can certainly understand that the same term/phrase/idea/concept can mean different things to different people. But I also kind of thought that as long as you clarify what that term means to you, in a way that the other person really can see your meaning, then you should be able to discuss it. eg like how Dinah's T explained himself in Miss Honeychurch's Meaningless Musing thread.
As an aside, this all kind of happened before we started talking about the possiblity of childhood abuse, so it is possible he suspected there was some abuse and wanted to learn about that before proceeding with a talk about touching.
*sigh*. I don't really have a question here. Just having a rant and trying to sort things out in my head.
On second thoughts, I do have a question. Do many of you have experiences in therapy where you raise something, but your T won't really talk about because he thinks *you* aren't ready to talk about it? Either he has said that outright, or you just get that impression because he so neatly sets the subject aside.
poster:littleone
thread:411906
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041104/msgs/411906.html