It feels like T is pushing me away, and I feel really threatened by it. I hate this stuff. I am sure he has my best interests at heart, but our last session felt very distancing to me. Is this the kind of thing I am supposed to discuss with him? Or should I just chase those threatened and pushed away feelings into a corner of my brain and not acknowledge them? (When you know an unsettling thought or feeling is perhaps not "justified", should you just ignore it? I don't do CBT--a highly regarded form of therapy--but isn't that what CBT is? Willfully ignoring thoughts and feelings you think may be irrational?)

What happened was T talked to me about this form of therapy he is becoming more and more interested in, Lifespan Integration (LI). LI is a relatively new therapy that works by connecting ego states through time, and is used to treat trauma, among other things. He went to a workshop on it recently, but has had some training in it prior to this too. He described it to me, and parts sounded familiar. He said he has used elements of the therapy in his work frequently (and I have experienced some of these), but he is now wanting to do LI more formally too, with entire LI sessions using the LI protocol.

He wants to use LI for trauma work (he is a trauma specialist). He said it can be very healing, and is much faster than talk therapy, which can take years and have limited utility for trauma. We have talked about his trauma techniques before, and he has said much the same about EMDR. The quickness of EMDR is a big reason why he switched from using Psychodrama for trauma to EMDR. However, he says LI is much gentler than EMDR. It is equally direct, but doesn't have the potential to itself be traumatizing, which EMDR sometimes can. He commented that he doesn't know if one needs to do LI every time, or if you can mix and match LI and talk therapy sessions.

I think he wants me to do LI with him. He did ask me to work on my "timeline", which is a key, client-generated resource used in LI. I don't know that I need more trauma work, frankly. I like our current talk therapy. I thought we took care of my key "stuckness" by doing EMDR on certain traumas in my past. I didn't know I needed to do more trauma work. I like talking to T. I have anxiety that if I don't have more trauma maybe I don't need to see T anymore. Is this what he is trying to tell me? "Let's get with the program, Sunny, finish your trauma work, so you can get the hell out of my office." Is he seeing our sessions as not sufficiently productive or therapeutic? I have struggled with the thought that part of why I continue to see T is because I enjoy his company rather than just for therapy. Maybe he is thinking the same and doesn't want that to continue.

He said things about LI that were really disturbing to me. He said with LI, you don't need to spend so much time developing a relationship with the therapist. You can go right in and do the work, which doesn't foster a dependence on the therapist. The client learns to depend on themselves instead--to heal their younger ego states--and the healing of the therapy relationship is not so essential. This seemed to be a good thing, he was saying, because then you can do your healing quickly and not spend eternity on the T relationship. Blah blah blah. I'm sure I'm not reporting his words with complete accuracy but rather what I heard. It all made me feel like he finds developing therapeutic relationships with clients to be tedious, undesirable, overly time-consuming, a necessary evil, etc. He also used this word "dependent" which was very disturbing to me. Does he think I am dependent on him? Am I? I have felt securely attached to T, but I have never thought of myself as dependent. Does he see me as some leech who sucks on his blood to survive? Am I?

Is he trying to push me out the door? Is he uncomfortable with our relationship? Does he see it as pointless and he wishes we had never developed it?

With all this in mind, it is hard for me to even contemplate doing LI with him as, despite any possible merits of the technique, I am now seeing it as a way T is trying to distance himself from me.

My first feeling is to want to leave therapy. If he doesn't want me there, I don't want to be there either. For me, the relationship has been a key part of healing, and if T doesn't want the relationship anymore, why continue? It would be too painful to me for our therapy to be reduced to following LI protocols.

If I try to look at this unemotionally and rationally, I could see that LI might be interesting to try. It encompasses elements of ego state therapy, which I have loved. And I have often wanted to work on my teen-early adult years but felt that T didn't want to. I could perhaps use LI to work on this era, if he would let me.

This other feeling is that LI is "flavor of the month" for T. First psychodrama (before I knew him), then EMDR, now LI. Perhaps T is thinking, "sunny is always so willing and capable in therapy, I will use her as a guinea pig for this new therapy I am so keen on. I can experiment on her and see if this LI really helps. I am glad she is still around so I can test out these new techniques and ideas on her. Even though she really still shouldn't be here, at least I can get some use out of her."

We have gone back to having weekly sessions for the last month or so, after having been at every other week since January. Maybe T sees this as backsliding.

On my way out the door, T mentioned again to work on my timeline (this involves writing down one positive memory or image, in sequence, for each year of your life). I asked him if I did that, could I leave out a 20 year period? (I was kind of trying to joke that I could not recall any positive events from the 20 year period of my marriage.) He said, no, not unless I had another diagnosis I had been hiding from him. I'm sure he was just joking, but I hate the "diagnosis" word, and I did not think this was funny. It felt clinical and distancing to me. Like I am a patient and he is a clinician. Also, recently he has begun taking notes during our sessions, which he has never done before, and this feels clinical and distancing too.

I think I need to cancel our session next week. I need time to think about all this. The uncomfortable thing is, I just can't cancel therapy and not see T anymore (which is what my impulse is). I still have to see him outside of therapy as a coach. For example, I saw him yesterday in this role, and will again next week too.