Epiphany

Tit for Tat

Tat:  Damn this dilemma that you have manufactured, more or less, out of thin air.  What is the way out of this maze?  The purpose of point and counterpoint was to demonstrate those inevitable contradictions that would be revealed in my evaluation of the circumstance, and in yours…  You and I are three dimensional creatures who see too often the realms that we inhabit as photographs and postcards.  These two dimensional views, elaborate and detailed, fall apart like jigsaw puzzles when we try to explain them, defend them, when we delight in the cleverness in our analysis mistaking insight for truth.

I have reread your letter.  I do not call misunderstandings injuries… you imagine a conflict where I see a confusion.  You have sanctified our roles before, and again, and again, and your attachment to the aughts and aught-nots has managed in this muddle to catch me in the nets of your perception.  My choice, coiled there amid the stanzas is to either succumb with willful dumbness to your terms and numb my own version events, my own sensations, or to let the last decade of our "work" and our "relationship" slip silently below the surface.  I actually think I could do the latter with nihilistic dispensation, satisfied with memory, your face coming back in parables written in future dreams…

but before that can happen with a modicum of maturity and grace, might it be better for us to meet and face to face sort out the meanings that we might mistakenly take away from this together with benefit of clergy as it were, or was, or might be.  I know (although it would be more politic to say that I suspect) how you will hear my three initial suggestions for a way forward.  I fear that these will seem as challenges to you and may--in asking you to bend those aforementioned proscribed roles threaten this dialogue with an early terminus.  So, prior to my stating these, I ask the indulgence of your ear for my perspective and (that given) your honest weighing of what I would uncomfortably call my stipulations for this dialogue

which are:

1.  To do justice to the complexity and nuance of this situation, I request a block of time larger and more flexible than the 50 minute hour.  While there is certainly a usefulness to these traditional parameters, I believe it would be a disservice to understanding to stop abruptly and try to keep this conversation in so small a box.  I would suggest a target of two hours with an openness to bringing these various threads together within an hour and a half or stretching if needed to two and a half hours.

2.  It would be my preference that this meeting occur outside of your office.  I am loathe to describe the ideal setting as neutral ground, but there is certainly an appeal to contextualizing this meeting not with the same furniture as our decade-long client/therapist.  We are meeting to push reset on this relationship, meeting to find a new solvency.  I fear that the familiar will define the future, and that now toxic air will breathe out of the past a new pollution from which we cannot recover.

3.  Lastly, I struggle profoundly with the idea that there be the expectation that I pay for this reconciliation.  I beg for your deference on this point basing my request on two divergent but, at root, related issues. First, since my reading of this situation (succinctly and thus very inadequately put:  the advent of the issue of my tardiness as a distraction from a conversation that would have been challenging for you, namely the meaning and purpose of your strict adherence to your own artificial boundaries of councilor and client) places, in my mind, the onus of repair with your self-awareness and not mine.  This was obviated for me in our last two sessions in which you said more in each truncated conversation that you generally do in a whole year of weekly appointments.  To the other side, there is the awkward challenge that you posed to me in our final meeting in December.  You were concise in your assessments:  you perceive the exceptions you have made in my regard (conspicuous in your forbearance of my tardiness and in your adjustment of your fee) as symptomatic of some general disservice you have done for the growth of my soul.  I recognize and appreciate the compassion and flexibility that you have showed me in regards to money over the years.  I want to be clear about that.  But I confess that your stated frustrations would make it very difficult to continue seeing you at a discounted rate and it would be untenable for me financially to pay almost half of my take-home pay for weekly therapy.  It is these complexities that have led me to request that this meeting be about dialogue and not dineiro.  I will simply not feel comfortable paying you less than your standard fee, at this juncture and--particularly if you agree to meet for two or three hours--the cost would be prohibitive and, in light of a thousand serious things we need to say to each other, one more dimension to a difficult topography.