These Made up Sentences Represent the Most Powerful unconscious agendas through which Ali and I organized our interactions with each other, painful agendas of hope, connection, and loss through which we related. We each wanted the other to do something. Ali wanted me to love he run conditionally and to help relieve her pain; and I wanted to be helpful to someone who was in pain. I discovered that something fundamental in me wanted her to recognize that she needed to change. Because our pain and desires were unconsciously somewhat at odds, Ali and I often entered into clashes such as those represented in my article. These, then, were the conflicts that we brought into the room with us.

One of the interesting tensions underlying several of the discussions of my article is the examination of different paradigms of relatedness and the relationship of these paradigms to “conflict”, unconscious or nonconscious. Another tension is organized around meanings of the use