It has taken a long time, but I can see now that I am recreating with her the dynamic I have carried since my early years, of feeling that I was the grownup taking care of everyone else – the one holding the key – rather than the child who needed care and worried about her poorly dad.
This dynamic that shapes many of my relationships – of seeking to be the one who offers care and never the one receiving it – is so hard to lay to rest because it protects me from awareness of my own vulnerabilities.
One of the many things my analyst is helping to bring into consciousness for me is how, without realising it, I act as if it were me who is the therapist, and she who is my patient, rather than the other way around.
Something I have learned from experience, as a patient in my analyst’s consulting room, and as a therapist to patients in my own consulting rooms, is that to build a better life you have to make your unconscious conscious.
Session by session, micro-interaction by micro-interaction, she observes and interprets the ways in which, despite myself, I seek to escape my own position of being the patient, attempting to use her as a pawn in this unconscious chess I play.
