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Hi Perna,
[reply to your first post]:
I guess that’s one of my fears: telling her how I feel about her face to face. I’m afraid to do that. I’m afraid to see discomfort or annoyance on her face, or maybe just a look that tells me I’ve said the wrong thing and she doesn’t want me to express feelings of attachment. Or the fear that she will reply with, “Well, therapy is about YOU. It shouldn’t matter how you feel about ME” or “The feelings you have toward me are really about your mother and not me.” I guess I’m afraid to take the risk and see what her reaction is. So it’s easier saying it in an email. It’s still a risk, but not as scary. If I email how I feel, then if she lets me down, I’m over here and she won’t see me get upset or cry. I’ll be kind of protected at a distance.
I think I’m extremely scared of witnessing rejection. Like, it’s hard enough to hear her say in a voice message that she’s too busy to respond. But if I was there face to face, and she said something that was disappointing or felt rejecting, I’d see it in her face and hear it in her voice, and it would be so much more devastating. Does that make sense?
Having said that, though, I know you’re right when you say that you can’t really share yourself fully when you’re not face to face. I know if I told her how I feel about her in session, she wouldn’t say she didn’t have time to reply. But what WOULD she say? It’s the fear of not knowing that keeps me scared.
Sometimes the idea of being rejected feels like a fate worse than death. I’ve suffered it a few times in my life, and the hurt was like being burned straight through to my core. I’m sooooo sooooo scared to feel it again! I don’t want to! I’ll do most anything to keep it from happening again. I don’t want to put myself in any situation that leaves me open to rejection. Yet my attachment to my t does. It makes me vulnerable, and I keep on ducking for cover even when the bombs aren’t dropping. Because I keep thinking I hear the drone of the planes coming from the north. And rejection is the bomb that will tear me to pieces.
[reply to your second post]:
OK. So I hear you saying that I’m playing my role and t’s role. Maybe this is what my t calls “mindreading.” She says I have a problem with this. That I decide what I think she is thinking or feeling but I am often wrong. It is hard for me to realize it if I am wrong. Because I take the things she says and does, and then a story forms around it that seems to make perfect sense to me, to explain why she said or did whatever it was. It all seems to fit perfectly, so I think that MUST be the true story. Because how could I fit the facts all together into a believable story if it was not true?
But then Treehouse took the same facts and made it into a different story. So now I’m thinking. . .”Oh gosh. Well, maybe my story ISN’T right.” But you know, the way I had it figured out made so much sense I thought. It FELT like the true story. It really FELT that way. So it’s hard to convince myself that maybe I’ve fit the pieces together wrong. It’s like I took the pieces of a puzzle and put them together and it made a picture that looked real. But then Tree took the same puzzle pieces and made a different picture that also looked real. But only my picture FELT real. So I tend to believe MY picture. Pretty narcissistic, huh? It’s not that I want to believe my story, because my story means I’m an invisible piece of nothing. But it FEELS true, you know?
Maybe my making up wrong stories comes from my childhood. Feelings were not discussed, problems were not talked through, there was not an openness to sharing internal thoughts and emotions with each other. We were all walking around in our own internal worlds. So if you wanted to know something, like how mom or dad felt about you, or why they did what they did, the only thing you had to go on were clues. Phrases of words, or actions, but no explanation for what they meant. So I always had to try to piece it all together to try to understand what the &(^*^& was going on. When some bad or painful situation would happen, I’d sit and ruminate and analyze about it, trying to figure out what happened and why. Trying to find some reasons that made sense. Because nobody would explain it to me or help me understand. I was just a big bundle of pain and chaotic feelings, knowing things were going very wrong, but without a story that made sense. So I made up the best story I could that made sense to me for why something happened:
(Family pulls out of the driveway and heads toward the highway; they are moving out of state; I’ve just left behind my cat, my best friend, and a favorite teacher; I’m sobbing in the back seat)
(Dad): Cut that *^*&^ out or I’ll give you something to cry about.
(Me): Feel a stab of pain go through my heart, combined with anxious fear.
Thinking, “Oh no! Dad yelled at me. He must be mad at me. If he’s mad at me, I must have done something wrong. I don’t know what I did that was bad. But he is always yelling at me, so I must always be bad. What is wrong with me? Why am I so bad? My dad probably hates me. I hate myself.”
And that’s how the stories happened in my head. And I believed the stories. Because nobody else was giving me any other stories to explain things.
And that’s how the stories happen today too, whenever somebody says or does something that hurt me that i do not understand and that they do not explain the reason for. I have to figure it out for myself. Because I need to put all the random pieces somewhere to make a picture I can understand. Otherwise there is nothing I can see or feel or know or hang onto. Otherwise, everything is hanging in mid-air and the world does not make sense. Things are all random and relative, and I can’t find the meaning. And that’s a scary, scary, unsafe place for me to be!!!
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