I said I was afraid that pushing further would make Daniel feel like he had to choose, and that I wasn’t sure which way he’d choose.
Martin said: “What does that tell you about the trust?”
I said: “That I had less of it than I thought.”
“Or more honestly,” Martin said, “that you had reason to be uncertain, because the evidence up to that point suggested he’d prioritize avoiding his mother’s discomfort over your actual needs.”
I looked at Daniel. He was looking at Martin.
Daniel said: “That was true.”
We went to Martin twice a month. Not every session was that direct. Some were about smaller things, the habits of decision-making that had gotten us to the situation: the way Daniel said “I’ll handle it” and meant “I’ll defer it”; the way I said “okay” and meant “I’m not okay but I don’t want to fight.” We were identifying these patterns not to assign blame but to have a different way of operating.
I don’t want to oversell this as a transformation. It was work. It remained work. There were sessions where we were tired and slightly annoyed and Martin asked a question that neither of us particularly wanted to answer. There were weeks when the original habits reasserted themselves and we had to catch them. The Patricia situation was resolved. The habits that had made it worse were a project.
A project we were both working on. That was different from before.
A Later Visit
Patricia came in January, by invitation.