Supervision, and whose container

Supervision with Priyanka this morning before the ten o'clock. I brought the one I always bring, the client who has not moved in four months and who I am starting to dread in a way I do not like admitting to. Priyanka let me talk about the case for about ten minutes and then asked what I do with it at the end of the day. I said I have a drive home. She let that sit there, which is a thing she does and which I also do, and which is extremely annoying from the receiving end. I know exactly what the silence is. I have a whole repertoire of the silence. I have taught the silence to second-year students. Eventually I said something about how everybody needs a container, and she said yes, and whose is yours, and I said this is, and she said this is supervision and you pay for it. Not unkind. Accurate. I have been treating a professional obligation as my support structure, which is a thing I would catch in about four seconds if a client described it to me. Then the ten o'clock arrived and I put all of it down and did not pick it up again until I was in the car.

Because from the inside it does not look like a gap, it looks like coping. I am not falling apart. I get to work on time, I do good work, I come home, I am kind to my fiancé and reasonably kind to my dog. The version of this that would worry me in a client is not "has no support" but "has arranged her life so that nobody is positioned to notice." And I would say that gently, over two or three sessions, and she would get defensive the first time, and the second time she would go quiet and then agree with me a bit too quickly.