I'm Really Trying, Here

So, I've been struggling a bit with figuring out how to present this week's flip DeeP exchanges. Yes, therapy has its moments of high comedy, but you also have the serious aspects of delving about in the muck between your ears. When you're plunging headfirst into Dealing With Things, specifically, The Shit You Do Not Want To Deal With, it can be less fun and more excruciating.

So, you have to work, and you have to do it, and by you, I mean me -- I have to do this. I have to get in there and fix the shit that's holding me back and making me depressed and then I'll be fine. Or closer to fine. (But not in the Indigo Girls sense, I don't think.) In the meantime, I spend time on the couch crawling out of my skin and fighting the urge to get up and run away. I also cry a lot.

A lot of the funny exchanges stem from the fact that a big way that I avoid the more uncomfortable bits is by throwing out little glib barbs and being generally joke-y. And lately, as we roll up our sleeves and get serious, I've been less barb-ing.

DeeP apparently is tri-lingual. He speaks English, French, and some other language which he refuses to tell me about. I think he refuses to tell me out of some weird boundary issue, also because I think he's afraid I'll make fun of him. He's correct, of course.

It has become an ongoing thing, a nice deflection point, that every week or so I ask him again, "now, what is that other language you speak? Is it Finnish?" And he just half-smiles and refuses to tell me.

Last week he informed me, with the air of some kind of psychic who was sensing the chilling presense of a dead loved one in the room, "I think I'm getting closer to telling you what language I speak."

I just stared at him, mostly because he was acting so corny.

He said, "It is an indication that I'm feeling less threatened by you, I think, which is good. You're letting down some of your defenses."

I said, "Therapy is so ludicrously meta."

He said, "Sister, you have no idea."

So, this week, as I was melting into a jiggly pile of weeping emotional jell-o on his leather porn couch, he said, "You know, I'm so amazed at how you've really taken down your defenses with me in the last couple of weeks!"

I hiccupped through my tears, wiped some snot from my nose, and said, "It's because I want you to tell me what language you speak."

He still didn't tell me.

Bastard.