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A patient has a dream that she is with her Buddhist husband on one of his retreats. She is not participating very much, but instead is using the time for biking and other nonmeditative activities. Then, she is in her living quarters when the teacher comes in and speaks to her. He says he is disappointed that she is not putting more of herself into the retreat, and that she needs to take her meditation more seriously. She knows he is right, and she feels bad. Among her associations to the dream are her bad feelings that she is never able to follow through on any of her self-improvement programs such as yoga, exercise, or improving her diet. She is overweight, which is one of the symptoms that brought her to therapy this time. One of my associations is that she has been having difficulty making both of her weekly sessions ever since she increased from once to twice a week, at my urging. She always has seemingly good excuses due to her successful and extremely busy academic career, and she has had to make changes in her prior commitments in order to fit the new session in.
In the following week she is late to one of her sessions and feels this is indicative of how out of control her life feels. In the week after that she calls the night before a session saying she has food poisoning and won't make her appointment the next afternoon. I am aware of feeling irritated when I get this message. I think: how does she know