Into the woods...

So far I have focused on spirit..

Soul is different...

"From the intimate, inner and psychological point of view, the forest is the place of the soul's operations, of inner transformations and purification". Cirlot, Figuras del destino, 43.

All I know is that during the year before I told him about my feelings,  I was haunted by the song at the top of this page -  And when I was thinking of asking for my session notes, I was haunted by another song.

Erik Davis explains the divide.

By soul, I basically mean the creative imagination, that aspect of our psyches that perceives the world as an animated field of powers and images. Soul finds and loses itself in enchantment; it speaks the tongue of dream and phantasm, which should never be confused with mere fantasy. Spirit is an altogether different bird: an impersonal, incorporeal spark that seeks clarity, essence, and a blast of the absolute. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman uses the image of peaks and valleys to characterize these two very different modes of the self. He notes that the mountaintop is a veritable logo of the “spiritual” quest, a place where the religious seeker overcomes gravity in order to win a peak experience or an adamantine code worthy of ruling a life. But the soul forswears such towering and otherworldly views; it remains in the mesmerizing vale of tears and desires, a fecund and polytheistic world of things and creatures, and the images and stories that things and creatures breed. Erik Davis.

The subject of soul...began with my request for open truth, for emotional honesty; for our roles to be dissolved, for feelings to be spoken of as worthy of respect. But instead I found myself as Actaeon, my hunting hounds turned against me...as if I'd glimpsed in him something that I was never supposed to see or recognise.

Why did he make that choice?

To turn against the soul, to take refuge in pure spirit? 

To assert an intellectual, bloodless purity?

Weeping, he heard a child in the distance, chanting a nonsense rhyme: Tolle, lege, tolle, lege. “Take it and read, take it and read.” Taking the rhyme as a message from God, Augustine went inside and, employing a bit of textual divination popular in the ancient world, randomly opened up a copy of Paul’s Epistles, and let his eyes fall where they would: “…  put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”Augustine snapped. He was born again, a soul freed from the urgings of nature by the fleshless message of a book...Erik Davis.

Still seeking factor X.

And now we are deep in the woods. 

I'm listening now to the recording made on January 3rd... after he'd received my recording.

1. Hearing annoyance in his voice as I try to create dialogue.
2. I try to reply to his statements, he talks over me.
3. He tells the story - I though you had given me a chocolate bar. Your bashful tone of voice when you left before Christmas. I didn't see that coming. 
4. His tone is both incredulity and complaint.
5.  There is something in the re-enactment of his surprise that is for my benefit? Emphasising his incredulity - but also, there are dramatic pauses, which I have learnt not to interpret as invitations for me to reply!
6. I reassure him...that it was OK to have simply left it, but we both know that it wasn't ok at all.
7. Was he doing this as a provocation, trying to make me upset, angry?
8. There is dramatic pause that I fill with explaining that I'm good at 'containing my emotions so it wasn't his responsibility to have noticed my feelings...' I don't believe this, but I understand it. 
9. I'm denying him the satisfaction of getting an emotional reply from me...because this provocation feels a lot like something my husband would do - creating uproar to justify his anger!
10. He doesn't 'dialogue' or respond in a meaningful way to what I've said.
11. He tells me that there is only one bit he didn't understand - again, trying to make things into a joke?  
12. I repeat that I was assessing, that there was a degree of liminality. This feels like the safest approach!
13. No reply to this.
14. He says that the conversation could be difficult....
15. He wants it to be difficult?
16. I get the 'clients come back' speech again.
17. I continue to try to make this a dialogue.
18. He isn't doing dialogue, plenty of therapeutic yes from him.
19. He tells me that he is saying no because I'm a client as far as my college is concerned.
20. I say that therapy ends.
21. And he tells me that clients come back.
22. Therefore I've been given a status I can never escape from, rather like 'service user', I feel objectified, dehumanised...rendered into a thing.

What is actually happening here?

The avoidance of dialogue, the avoidance of questions.

Too much unsaid - so I write...