Factor X part one: Episcript.

From: When I hear his truth, there is contact. 22nd November 2021.

I left the room weighed down by ambiguity, 

an unknowing.

The feeling of a locked door 

and I'm trying to find keys, 

or more accurately it is as if there is something under the surface.

As if gravity is wrong.

So what did I pick up?

When I voiced the the two most obvious feelings of ambiguity and uncertainty, I was taken aback by his response. 

Being told that I'd crossed a boundary by being honest didn't and doesn't make any sense to me.

Is this is a reaction formation?

Who knows! I'm not a psychodynamic therapist. But we all speak human - and a reaction formation is a way to dump a strong emotional reaction elsewhere. It is usually an overly socially-correct response, the phrase methinks that he protesteth too much comes to mind. 

The insane thing here is that no prohibition exists, or rather, there is no boundary about what can be spoken of, or not spoken of in therapy. I am paraphrasing his words there.

Fundamentally there is a vast difference between, saying and doing!

All this I've said before.

Now I'm leaving the sunlit path, and I'm heading for the darker, damper, ill defined and treacherous path that leads downwards. The rest of this post will be a descent, a Katabasis, and my exploration of the Chthonic realms. Though this post is inspired by my therapy (!) with Kit what follows is, I want to make clear, only my speculation. 

It is time to ask, what was factor X?

And factor X has two strands befitting the letter X!

1. My countertransference. 
2. And psychic paedophilia. 

I bow down before the Gods of the Underworld. It has been a long time since I was called precious, and given the honour of wearing the collar. But something of that time, of submission has left me with a fearlessness about human feelings, sexuality and the desire to bring back from the subduction realms, truth. 

There is power in submission, it has given me strength.

August 2021 - and the first intimation that things were far more complex in this therapeutic relationship was that what I picked up about Kit without him ever talking about himself  - proved to be strangely accurate. Certainly his shirt was of a certain style - was that enough? No, nothing else gave any clue. Four months later I randomly found a YouTube of him and I felt worlds collide. How could the visions have made so much sense, how could they have been so true?

My favourite quote from Gendlin goes like this:

"Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.” 

So, why did I not dare to immediately go beyond recognition - and tell him about my feelings? 

Because the future is made by our actions in the present. I didn't want more pain, I wanted bliss and already I felt that it was very easy for me to say the wrong thing to him. 

On her knees now, this sub decided to do what she does best...to listen and use her intuition.

More music needed.

Sensibly I agreed with myself that before I could say anything about this to him I needed to clarify and understand my own feelings. I knew that falling in love with one's therapist opens the gates to Hell. And no one needs more of that - especially a rejected submissive who understands that her pain is only worth anything when it is transactional.

Meanwhile visions continued as ripples of resonances and intimations, no longer fully fleshed out as before. 

My final one...

So what was happening? 

I remember a conversation in which I mentioned Stalker (Tarkovsky) and he reacted strongly to the word - and his house is blurred out on Google maps - and I got the impression, because he heard the word in its English sense, and there was a disproportionate reaction, "I'd never want to watch a film about stalking!" (Stalker is absolutely not about being stalked!) I thought, has he had experience of being stalked? And when I said I'd seen him on you tube and now 'so much made sense' - this is where things started to change I think.

And a little later -  this time a conversation that rapidly headed South, regarding the ethical code. 

Who would have ever imagined that siding with Brian Thorne could be contentious? 

Again, I will use his word - his reaction was disproportionate.

The problem seemed to be that I would question rules?

More music!

At this stage I was certain that he knew what was going on in my poor heart; that he must have known that I was in love with him. And I knew that he was compelled for his own reasons to frame it as a challenge to order and orthodoxy. 

I say this because I know that my feelings for him had been obvious before I really admitted it to myself even, because I'd videoed myself (zoom call) and I had been shocked at how transparent I am. Clearly hanging on every word - I dialled myself down after that!

So why did he disproportionately frame love as a wilful disrespecting of ethical conduct? And what was it about the Brian Thorne dispute that caused him to see me as wilful!?

Brian Thorne!

Unless something radically changes in our communication, it will remain a mystery. But you know when a conversation suddenly becomes a tail-spin and you have no idea what happened? The Brian Thorne conversation was that!  

I assumed that I'd been given a message loud and clear.

Unfortunately it was before I started making recordings. 

So let's get this clear, there is nothing transgressive about a client falling in love with a therapist. This is just human. And how it pans out has to be navigated with care! As I've said previously, if both people think there may be more to it than transference and both people wish to alter the frame of their relationship, then supervision, a three year gap between agreeing that the relationship can be fully explored perhaps...and then tentatively engaging, this seems compassionate and respectful. No one needs to seduce anyone into anything! And it certainly isn't a dual relationship when the client is never going to be a client in that relationship again.

Meanwhile I'm not going to go any further with his view; framing of it as some kind of crime doesn't sit well with me. Nor does the reason why I was able to get so much right about him need to be unpacked beyond I tend to look for synchrony when I talk with clients, and though I was supposed to be the client, I had everything switched on. I was listening to hear his emotional tone, the themes that repeat and how he used language.

What needs attention is this, the countertransference that I believe I experienced.  almost killed me, and so that does need exploring!

The clue came from his video - the teaching video I could only watch some of the other night - so this has only just fallen into my consciousness, only just started its work of making sense...

In his most recent teaching he is talking about love, secular love (yes there is a polarity between spiritual and secular in his discourse). A bashfulness in his reply when someone in the audience mentions the petite mort, do I really see blushing? And then the key point - betrayal by a kiss. He talks about sexual love as an obsession. The object of desire is beautiful and unobtainable. And the typical scene - 'I want them, they don't want me, I want to die'. In other words, for him there is a poison-joy in seeing someone disappointed and being able to say to them "that's not what you wanted to happen" a gleeful moment in witnessing someone having hope and happiness crushed out of them. 

He explains this while smiling, as if it is a ridiculous joke to take desire seriously and the audience laugh in response to the comedic delivery. 

The video was uploaded a few months ago. I don't suppose he read my annotated transcripts? But if he did I'm sure it confirmed exactly what he believes to be true. It is a common enough story, but is it? I'd put it in his terms as being unable to deviate from his script...As in, he dare  not deviate - or be defiant (?!) - OK, I'm not a fan of transactional analysis. But to stick with their language, it is clear that Kit handed me a hot potato (his episcript)

“The Episcript is a condensed version of a person’s script, including the tragic ending, which the individual tries to “pass on” to someone else, as he would pass on a potato too hot to handle. The recipient is someone the individual can influence through Child-Child transmission such as his offspring, spouse, patient, student, or co-member of a leaderless group.” Fanita English.

And it is clear that I intuited his version of love, and because it was beyond my power to talk with him about it, it acted on me like a curse. 

That is, after all how the episcript functions.

Here ends part one.

Part two must be darker still..