Quote:
Originally Posted by darkrunner
When you say people outside of therapy don't know the REAL you, is that because they don't know about your trauma history? Therefore they don't know how bad and awful you really are, and if they knew they wouldn't love you?
Maybe you are still weighed down by shame, the shame that really belongs to the perp. Maybe once you work through that and begin to accept all of that as part of you, but not necessarily what defines you, then you won't feel like you need T's love so much.
Maybe you need to continue therapy until you can understand and accept that who you are to the rest of the world - to your H, your kids, your friends - IS EXACTLY who you are in the therapy room.  |
This makes me kind of speechless. In a good way. I never thought of it that way...or, like oceanwave said...that T has shown me that someone can love me even knowing my history....and so maybe I can accept other people's love, even though they only know the me they see.
I don't know. It's a lot for my brain to wrap itself around.
I was remembering a moment in therapy yesterday. We were talking about my feelings, and I can't remember what T said, but I said "that's easy for you to say, because you're sitting over THERE" (meaning, in his chair, being the T, having the "power") and he got right up, came and sat next to me on the couch, and said it again. I told him that wasn't what I meant, I meant that I was talking about the power differential, and he said he knew that. But, I don't know, it was one of those moments that made me feel like T was there WITH me, that everything feels kind of awkward and hard, but that T is with me and we'll muddle through the mess.
And, yeah, I DID just come out of a big period of trauma processing...and it does make sense that my feelings for him would be big. He's the only person I've ever told, it feels like my biggest, yuckiest secret, and he just sat there and accepted me and loved me and let me have my huge feelings and stuck with me.
I'm reading a book called "Attachment in Psychotherapy". It says for people with repeated trauma in childhood, the therapy relationship IS the therapy. I get that. I just hope I get to the point in the book where they talk about how to learn to move past that.
Or, I hope I just learn to allow myself to feel how I feel and go to therapy once a week, and just let it be what it is.
