Posted by mair on April 9, 2005, at 5:44:51
In reply to Re: I tried., posted by Dinah on April 8, 2005, at 22:20:05
Dinah - I've done what you're doing on a couple of occasions when I've been aware of bad stuff going on in my T's life - steering away from certain topics for instance. She would (and does) hate the fact that what I know about her life may keep me from talking about certain things and sometimes she'll raise what's happening with her just to provide me an opening. And I've gotten the "it's not your job to take care of me" speech although my retort has been that given my trouble feeling connected to her, that i should care about her feelings is not necessarily a bad thing.
And part of my fear before is the worry that she'll stop self-disclosing things that I think I should know or might otherwise find out from another source anyway. This came up once when I confessed that I got worried whenever she got on an airplane. Her response of "I just shouldn't tell you where I'm going," was the worst thing she could've said. Fortunately I was able to tell her that in a later session and we got it sorted out.
When you tried to talk to him about it, did you present it as an anger thing or along the lines of telling him that you've noticed that you sometimes slip into the same patterns in how you deal with him that you did with your parents? That doesn't seem to me anyway to be as threatening an opening and may not necessarily lead to any of the feared results.
mair
poster:mair
thread:478473
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050409/msgs/481930.html