A gift

Here I sit, the end of the day. And I look at what I think I’m doing. It happens a lot. My guys are so needy, they look for so much. They need me to love them and I do what I can to find the parts of them worthy of my love. Worthy? Hubris???

Today I had a session with Mr. Stewart. It was exactly what it should have been. We’ve had two sessions of angst, after I told him to shut the fuck up. They were horrible hours where my own anxiety was out of control; I can only imagine where his own thoughts were. Finally, thanks to years of training, I understand that I am absorbing his anxiety. My own reaction (countertranferace) is the clue. Christ, where is my head to take hours to understand??

Imperfection is intolerable to me.

Center down, relax, just have a conversation. Stop pushing so hard. I want it all, now. My fear that he will do something, or the system will do something to take him away from me makes me crazy.

For seconds, sometimes for minutes, I feel that I hold him. He stops fighting and he is mine. At this moment I need to find the best of myself and open that to him. But there are so many factors fighting against that; what does he leave my office with?

And today we entered one of these moments. I can’t predict these, they are unimaginable and not to be choreographed. All I can hold is my centering thought. He needs to feel and understand that I see him, that all of his craziness and all of his fear is only static. I see him.

I can reach beyond his internal chaos when I remember to do so. It is nothing to me. It is everything to him. And each time I do it, it is like something new. He can’t remember; he becomes so immersed in his own pain that he can’t hear. He told me today I am one of the hardest people for him to read, that what I say and my tone sound incongruent to him. I think it is because I am pushing him, and he feels this is judging.

He asks me in the last session if I will transfer him to the next psych. Why would he think that? How have I betrayed him to believe this? Intellectually I know this is his fear. Emotionally I feel the loss of him. This is where I finally understand what is happening. He is so afraid I will discard him that I have become afraid he will discard me. We are in a horrible cycle of fear. As each of us becomes more anxious, our behavior becomes more untrue. We cannot find the essence of what is happening.

So I take the plunge, and I tell him my fear. That I am being so pushy and obnoxious that he is going to get up, walk out of my office and never come back. It is his fear reflected, but not less horrible because of it. I am rigid remembering the moment, now.

And he gifts me. He looks at me, beyond my age, beyond what I look like, beyond being other, beyond his preconceived notions of my essence; his soul looks at me. “I will not leave you.” He has transcended his own fear to reassure me. He gifts me.