Leia Has A Session With A Client

The woman in front of me is feeling anxious. She is chattering, telling me about her life in fast-paced, disorganized bits. “And then he said I hadn’t done the job that I’d been assigned. It’s just like him to say that. Why are men always like that? Maybe I should go and work for a woman instead. But I always end up with a male boss. Not that there are a lot of female bosses around. But also, I don’t know if I’d get along with a woman boss. Sometimes, when women are super bossy, it annoys me. And I think, I could do that, I could be a boss, but I’d do it differently. People are too bossy in those roles, I think. It’s all about giving power back to the people who do all the work on the ground. We’re the ones who actually know what’s going on. And do all the work. It’s just like we were talking about, with my dad.” 

She takes a breath, and I sense my opening. “Let’s take a breath together”, I say. “And let’s slow it down.” She relaxes by a few milimeters. My body is leaning forward in my chair, my hand stretched out towards her, as if I could hold her attention still that way. As if I could keep the avoidant rambling at bay with an act of will on my part. I can sense another wave of it coming. “It sounds like there is a part at play here”, I say. “A part who wants your boss to be different.” The labeling seems to help her a bit, creating a sort of focused lens for her energy to flow through. Maybe it reminds her that we’re here to run a process, achieve a goal. She takes another breath, leaning back in her chair. Her facial expressions shifts too, becomes more coherent, more focused. “Yeah. Yes. The part wants him to act differently towards me. It wants him to care about me and what’s true about the situation. It really wants him to care about me. And about what’s fair.” She seems younger, and both more fierce and more vulnerable at the same time. 

“And it reminds you of your dad” I add. She nods, slowly. “Yeah. He’s like my dad in that way. He doesn’t take the time to see me. He thinks he already knows what I did. Already knows everything. He doesn’t need to pay attention to me. He won’t even look at me.” I sense that there is an exiled memory nearby. “Stay with that”, I say to her. I feel my breath, as we make space for it all. This is where the real work starts to happen, here, in those long silent seconds where we don’t say anything. Where we just support this exiled energy to come through and show itself. I’m in this career for those moments of unearthing something, of letting these bits of experiential truth come together. It’s at the same time mundane and profound. In some sense, nothing new is added. We both already know intellectually that the way her dad treated her is causing many of her present difficulties. It isn’t news, isn’t a new fact about the situation. And yet, as she is touching something in herself, it is completely new, as if we’re hearing it for the first time. A little revelation, of something already known that is revealing itself experientially. 

After a few seconds I look more directly at her. She seems yet more relaxed, but her face has the scrunched up tension pattern of someone who is very deliberately not crying. When she notices that I’m looking  she does it more, as if the looking is making her want to cry, but it is also making her want to not cry, at the same time. “How do you feel?” I ask. “Hurt.” She answers. “Hurt. I feel hurt.” She says it with conviction and yet there is a small edge of surprise, too. Like she made a little discovery about herself, about her own experience in the moment. It’s like she’s become a fuller person, like there is more of her here. I nod, and send my attention out to her again. I know that more content will come out, but only if I resist the urge to fill the silence. She takes a deep breath. 

“My dad.” she says. “There’s a part of me that’s saying that I’m not good enough. And underneath that, there’s an even younger part that just feels hurt. It’s really young and it feels really really hurt. Just really really hurt. And then the other part comes in, saying that it’s my fault. That I’m not enough. That it makes sense that he wouldn’t love me.” I notice her sliding off. “Stay with the younger part, if you can.” I say. “Where do you feel it in your body?” She thinks. “In my stomach. Like there is a churning sensation, and a dropping.” “What does it want to do?” I ask. “What does it need?” “It’s angry,” She says. “It’s angry that he doesn’t love her.” I nod. “Yeah. That makes sense to me.” “But why doesn’t he?” She asks. She’s crying now, silent tears that are running down her cheeks. 

I know the session is coming to a close, so I resist the impulse to nudge her further. Instead I bring our attention back to the present. “How do you feel about your boss now?” I ask her. She thinks for a while. “I’m angry.”, She says. “He shouldn’t be assuming so much. Why does he think he knows what I did? He doesn’t really know what I did, what I’m like.” I nod again. Her anger makes sense to me. “Does this seem like a good enough stopping point to you?” I ask her. She nods. “Yeah. I have to think about this more.” I send her off, reminding myself that we did some good work today. And yet I feel a little disappointed, too. Like maybe Julian could have done more. Like maybe I could have done more. I wish I could talk to Julian right now, to ask him about it.