Busted

What do you do if you and your partner disagree on how to handle an issue with your child?

Let's say it's an issue that rankles, so one day you bring it up at a meeting with a social worker you're seeing for your child. And the therapist pretty much sides with your partner and even suggests that it would be helpful for you to get therapy (which you've already had lots of). She asks you if you were to let go of the vigilant worrying you do for your son, what would be left? What would be underneath? And she suggests that maybe it would be grief or maybe it would be something else.

If you're me, you sit on it for a while and do nothing.

Then you ask a friend who's seen the same social worker for her child what she thinks. "You're talking to the wrong person if you think I'll talk you out of therapy," she says. "All I do is therapy!"

Then, because you're so stubborn, you convince your partner that a second therapist, a cognitive-behaviour therapist, should weigh in on the matter. You're pretty sure this therapist's opinion will be more in line with your own.

So off you go. The second therapist suggests that this is more to do with you, your relationship and parenting styles. She isn't willing to criticize your partner's approach. She feels the issue is something you together should keep an eye on, but at this point she isn't red-flagging it and she isn't supporting your version of how to handle it (that hubby follow your precise recommendations).

Which brings you all back to the point that maybe there was something to what therapist number one had to say about you. That maybe the 'problem' isn't outside you, but within you, something that you have to take a closer look at.

Meanwhile, hubby is sitting on the couch, fighting heavy eyelids to stay awake and focused on therapist number two. "She never got to the point," he says afterwards. "I didn't really understand why we were there."

Busted, you think.

I guess you can never have too much therapy.