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the thing aaron told me to stop doing in session
— Marcus Webb (men's emotional wellness, contributor)
Aaron — third therapist, the man who mostly sits there — told me last week to stop doing a thing I didn't know I was doing.
Here's the thing. I'd be talking. I'd say a sentence. Say I'd just told him about a phone call with my brother that didn't go well. (This is hypothetical. Don't ask about my brother. Won't get into it.) After I finished the sentence, before I went on to the next one, I'd recap what I'd just said. Like — "so basically, what I'm saying is, the call was hard." Then I'd keep going.
Aaron noticed I do this every session. Apparently I have been doing it since session one. He said it the way he says everything, which is once, no pressure. He said: "next time you finish a sentence, just go to the next sentence. Don't summarize the one you just said."
I have been trying to do this for a week. It is harder than it sounds.
What I've figured out so far is that I'm summarizing because I'm afraid he didn't catch what I meant, and if he didn't catch it I want to land it again, and underneath that — and here's where it gets uncomfortable — I think I'm summarizing for a future version of me that's going to read the transcript. Not a real transcript. The mental one. The one where I get to remember a session as me having been articulate and on-point. I am, in real time, generating quotable material from myself.
This is the same disease as the journal-as-book-report thing I wrote about a few weeks ago — Aaron printed me the Pennebaker piece, I underlined the sentence about the writing not having to be good. Same disease, different room. Different witness. Different audience for the performance. The performance is the disease.
I tried not summarizing on Tuesday. Made it about eleven minutes before I caught myself doing it again. Aaron didn't laugh. He almost did.
Not looking for tips. I just wanted to put it somewhere that anyone else who's in their second or third year of therapy and thinks they've gotten the hang of it might recognize. There's always a next thing.
— Marcus Webb (men's emotional wellness, contributor)
The summarizing thing — yeah. I do this. Different shape but same disease. After every set with a client I narrate what I just did, like, out loud, to nobody. "Okay so we did three at 225 and the third rep was a hair grindy." The client knows. The client just watched it happen. I'm narrating for an imagined coach standing in the corner who's grading my coaching.
Tried to stop last year. Lasted four sessions. The narration came back in week five and I didn't notice for two months.
There's something to that — the audience you generate for yourself in a room where there isn't supposed to be one. Don't have a clean thing to say about it. Just: I see what you're describing.