How goes it?

And that is typically how it goes. It starts off with some excitement, energy, motivation and it ends with "not such a good idea." Not that we're at the end, necessarily. What is this syndrome about?

I ask with the expectation that I can answer. The syndrome is the realization, or feeling, that I cannot answer.

So can I or can't I?

We don't know yet.

If I believe I can, I will proceed. If I believe I can't, I might as well stop right here. Is there any value to trying and failing?

Is there any value to trying and succeeding? Is there any value to anything?

If there's no value, there's no absence of value.

I seem to be unable to write a paragraph with more than one sentence in it. This is because I reject my thought as soon as I come up with it. I can't go on. I must go on. Becket managed to write a lot of stuff so the disease from which I'm suffering need not be terminal.

I have a patient who told me that her father would treat her excitement with "oh, that old thing." It was new to her but old to him and he'd let her know that what she was excited about wasn't exciting. It was naive, foolish, something to be made fun of. Maybe he was nice about it, not so much making fun but saying "how cute that you think this is something new." He was being affectionate (maybe) but she took it as dismissal. And now, when ever I assert anything to her, she dismisses me.

The dismissal sometimes takes the form of "I don't want to hear your ideas, I want you to listen to mine." At other times, it takes the form of "This is a subject that I know a lot more of than you. I've studied it for years."

The first form of the dismissal is more to the point. It's not about the content, but the form. Her relationship with her father was about who gets to dismiss whom and she is recreating it with me. I've told her this and she dismissed it, saying something like "you put it in your language and I reject your language. Why can't you use my language?"

Her language is that of her religion. I believe that, historically, she sought to appeal her father's proclamations to a higher authority. He may dismiss her, but God is on her side. To tell her this would be dismissive. It would be saying, your most intimate beliefs are a sham, a defense mechanism, a way to pretend you have won a battle you actually lost many years ago. I want to tell her "You are in therapy because you can't accept that loss," but, of course, telling her that would be useless. My job is to get her to be able to tolerate the loss in her relationship with me.

In my phrasing of it above (my language), I'm the authority, and thus the conflict is re-enacted between us even when she's not here and I'm just writing about it.

I started today's "entry" dismissing myself--the well known defense against being dismissed by others. By you, my (imagined) readers. If I can't get out of this paradox, how can I expect my patient to do it? I can write here about it and yet I am still its victim. That's why telling her about it is useless. My knowing about it is useless to me.

Or maybe, it isn't because I've managed to write all this.