Posted by Dinah on September 29, 2003, at 13:19:46
We continued in today's session the topic from last week. My anger that I couldn't trust my family. But this time with a twist.
My therapist thinks, and I would agree, that trust is the major difficulty I have in most relationships and the thing that keeps my relationships from being as deep as they could be.
I think that as a relationship builds, you disclose a bit more, and see how the other person reacts. As you find a person trustworthy on a certain level, you go a bit deeper. And if you hit a roadblock, where you want something that someone can't give, you try a few times at that level and then you accept the parameters of the relationship. And it's fine to settle for that. That the relationship can be perfectly satisfactory where it is, even if ideally you might like more intimacy.
My therapist thinks there is a flaw in my relationship skills there. That it's limiting in life to accept those parameters. He suggests saying something like "I enjoy our friendship and would like to bring it to a more intimate level. If you're also interested in that, maybe we could work on it." And then if the person is interested, I tell them where I'm having difficulty in trusting them more fully and what I need from them, and invite them to do the same.
I think this is a very strange idea. I can see doing it with my husband. We're bound to each other by law and by obligation. I've done it with my therapist, with very good results. We struggled and wrestled our way to a better therapeutic relationship through quite a few roadblocks. But he was bound by ethics and by financial interest to try to work through it.
But to try this approach with friends seems very odd indeed. First of all, wouldn't it be likely to hurt their feelings? And second, people don't change substantially all that often. Is it really worth jeopardizing what you have in an attempt to build a deeper relationship that most likely won't work out anyway? A friendship would have to be pretty strong to begin with to survive such a thing, I would guess.
What do you guys think? Is my therapist a bit touched in the upper works? Or are my relationship skills even more lacking than I had thought?
poster:Dinah
thread:264237
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030925/msgs/264237.html