What is a mouse breather?

“He's such a mouth breather. Why do you hang with him?”

And the adorable little mouse breathers now have a space in my imaginative visual vortex. They're just so cute.

I suppose there might be some obscure sect that inhales rodents, in the way that there are snake handlers. Or an odd addiction to sniffing the critters. But I've seen neither hide nor hair of such practices.

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Oh dear. I'm picturing tiny little breath masks for rodents. Maybe they're working in a hospital, or seated on a plane where the masks drop out of the ceiling. Doing CPR on a fellow murid who got away from the cat just in time.

Cute as the notion is, I think the phrase you're looking for is mouth breather. As in someone who breathes with their mouth open. There are a number of medical conditions that can cause chronic mouth breathing, when the nasal passages are blocked. But calling someone a mouth breather outside of a medical context usually means you think they're slow or stupid.

And I have seen the idea used in a couple of murder mysteries, where a victim was tied up and their mouth taped closed, leading to unintended death by suffocation. It lives in the same story space as the rare thin- skulled individual, where a tap that would make an ordinary person unconscious becomes a death sentence.

I’m wondering about attachment and transference with the therapist and the idea of escape and fantasy? How much do you think your strong feelings, constant thoughts, desires to be with your therapist are a way to escape from your present life? I wonder if the transference serves another purpose than to show us our wounds and/or past experiences, but is a present coping strategy for managing what we don’t want to face (even if unconsciously) in the present—-current relationships, life circumstances, etc. Can anyone relate to this concept of escape in relation to their therapy relationship? How does this play out for you?