I didn’t really want to read a particular book that I am reading for my therapy homework, which my therapist mentioned to me. I can tell from the other literature that my therapist cites that he shares a taste in books with my father. I am not sure if it is quite literature more than it is modern Christian self-help.
Am I comfortable in navigating these spaces, and can I navigate away from shame using texts from the same context that always made me feel shame and question myself?
Is this person someone who I can work with? It’s always difficult to tell whether or not you’re in a situation that could get better, or one that you should try and improve. It’s exactly the type of thing that I am trying to work on in myself: not necessarily seeing something as all good or all bad, or even the future of the relationship as either all there or not there at all.
People generally seem to be very firm with this kind of juncture, their boundaries. Even if people say that they’d prefer some kind of happy medium and to come to some compromise with the other person, a lot of people in many different situations are comfortable with either cutting other people off entirely or having exactly the relationship that they would desire. Maybe this is in part because the more ambiguous kind of dynamic can mean a lot of misunderstanding, and then a lot of pain; people are so complex that it’s actually just really hard to function together without structure, a confluence of layered expectations and complementary styles of communicating about those expectations.
I’ve been on a couple of different sides of this dynamic. In the case of my therapist, some part of me doesn’t want to take the Christian self-help