The 3lack 3ox.

 "I am the slaughter at your altar. That's where my need for you begins..." M. Gira. The Beggar.  "I wasn't talking about you, I was talking about my principles, my ethical rule, that once a client always a client because you never know what the future is going to bring, and people do come back" I could not understand for the life of me why Kit thought I'd ever return as a client. But then... he wasn't 'talking about me '.  And the feeling of being so utterly rejected, disliked even, by one's therapist, was such a corrosive poison it has taken? I was about to say, it has taken this blog to cure me. No, it is not over yet. He just about rubbished all that was best, all that was most alive and all that was most able to keep me alive. But hey, he was just helping me face reality...by remaining unable to say what had actually happened... Whatever! His statement; clients, people, do come back to see us as therapists, is true. Kit went onto sa...

Every so often I think that writing this blog is cowardly! Then I think I should make a complaint to his ethical body. That I should step forward and see how the judgment goes. But then I remember exactly why it is I'm not doing that, and why it can't happen. Denial works, it blocks resolution. It freezes repair. It keeps the anger going... And then I start to ask, what needs to happen instead? And it is simple really,  I would like to receive an apology.  I certainly deserve one. When I feel that I am being cowardly, I read his published articles. They don't provide any definitive way to identify the factor X, that led to his robust denial process but there are enough of his statements (things he said to me), expressed through his fictional case study characters, to remind me of the underlying misogyny.  Denial has become one of my favourite subjects as a result of my experiences with Kit - so let's have a brief run through of how denial is used. Person A tells person...

I began this blog with the intention of making sense sense of what had happened to me during therapy. I listened to all my sessions - which I'd recorded - and I set about publishing the transcripts here, when the therapist - Kit - refused to acknowledge that what had happened during therapy, though no rules were broken, though he had done nothing wrong, had nevertheless left me feeling suicidal. Underlying this is my question; what makes rules that are maintained to 'protect' the client, be so damaging? In October 2023 I decided to take this a whole step further - I set out my intention to explore the role of Eros in therapy, and more importantly how therapists can navigate their own fears and sense of vulnerability when Eros becomes the third party in the therapy session. The question now turns towards power dynamics, how can a client - who already feels vulnerable, recovering from horrible life events, unsure of themselves, identity already damaged - raise their fears and...

Quote taken from this source.  [+]   All we know for sure from the various writers of the past, such as Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil and Euripides, is that Cassandra will never be believed.  No matter how real and true her words.  Nor will anyone ever believe even after it has happened, that she had known how things would be. But why Cassandra came to suffer so, the writers of this sad story do not agree. Simply put, Cassandra was  cancelled  by the God Apollo. Nietzsche in  The Birth of Tragedy (1872) contrasts Apollo as a God of light and knowledge - calm and reason, with Dionysus as a God of ecstatic emotions and drunken rampage. But the story of Cassandra and Apollo does not support this simple division. This story was written in a time when   Greek society valued hypermasculinity. A time when sexual expression was defined by status, not gender, not love. A free male Greek citizen was at the top of society and women only one notch above slav...

I'm wearing my purry, furry, fake leopard coat.  He says It reminds him of his childhood... Both of us laughing. He tries it on.  And then he says the strangest thing?  "I've never seen a coat like this in the flesh" Then - oh my heart! - he remarks so deliciously on my warmth seeping from the coat into his skin... "Goodness - you're warm!"  Just for a few seconds it is as if I have held him, breathing animal heat and a golden radiance into the void of darkness and separation, confronting the narrative that fixes us in time and space. And then, the spell is broken. But talking instead about music...lost music. As if heard in fairy hills...And then my assignment. He is telling me that the presenting issue a client brings is often like a thin crust over the real problem. And in response I divert us down an intellectual worm hole pursuing the importance of paradox in therapy - and more to the point - what would a meta dox be?  Here now in 2023 my ability to...

He - "How are you"? Me - "I'm fine..." And I would say " Fine! Hey how are you"?   But I don't.  I've been told that I'm tangential, and if I talk it will be labyrinthine; long, coiling, discursive.  Tangential.   His silence, is wide open waiting.  Even though I do this silence thing myself too, I feel obliged to fill it. I go full tangential - I'm talking about episodic and autobiographical memory, and the work of Tulvig  and I know that anything like this is considered cold, and CBT, and he will see it as  tangential to the relational work of therapy.  But I have assignments to write, and I'm chasing Evan George's statement that 'our' work is to help people create future memories. I love that idea, future memories! That we step through past, future, present - to find the better in the past, to place instances of good memories into a functional sequence, coherent and believable and possible. Using memory is such ric...