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Elysium · Nov 23, 2010, 11:10 PM

Well...I had my third session with my new T today. I don't know what to think. This time of year is terrible for me, as it is for a lot of us here, and I am missing both of my old T's a lot. I've been crying on and off for the last couple of days and the depression has hit me full force.

So here's the deal. Today, I wanted, no...needed to feel connected to someone. I needed to feel like I had someone who cared and who was a healthy force in my life. I really needed to connect with my new T today and I don't feel like that happened. I needed to be able to come into her office and snuggle into her couch and just be able to cry and get all the heaviness off of me. What happened wasn't even remotely what I needed.

Now I have no doubt that this T is good at her craft. She is well educated in Trauma and Dissociative Disorders. She certainly has enough initials after her name to show that. She works with children and adults and has her own play therapy practice. She is also on the faculty of the large University in my area, so I'm not even going to pretend that she doesn't know what she is doing.

My issue is.....and some of this may be related to things I experienced when I was younger....in our first session, she hands me a three page questionaire and asks if I can answer the questions to give her some insight into what sort of issues I was working on. Although I hate tests and handouts and such I was okay with this because I felt it was the easiest way to give her a bird's eye view of myself. So the first couple sessions were okay. I started connecting....slowly, but it was moving in a good direction. Today just blew that connecting feeling out of the water though. She said she wanted to touch on a couple things before we started to talk about the things I wanted to talk about and we ended up on the topic of my career and the issues I've had in the past at work. We discussed how I have, at times, been my own worst enemy by being so assertive that it turns people off and puts them on the defensive. I totally agree that I have done this, but I can see it now and I am working to change the way I communicate. What really irritates me, and just flat out pisses me off, is that she spent the ENTIRE hour and a half session talking about HERSELF and how SHE learned to communicate effectively with people so that she could be a more effective communicator.

This just shut me down. I didn't feel engaged. I know that she was attempting to teach me something, and I know I need help in identifying how to not communicate ineffectively, BUT.....did she have to talk about herself ALL session? I left her office more depressed and dissociated than when I came in.

I know she's not a mind reader, and that in a perfect world I would be able to tell her that, although I appreciated what she was doing her best to teach me, I really needed to get some stuff off my chest, but I thought that would be rude and I didn't want to make her mad. At the end of the session, she gave me another three page handout, which she of course wrote, and told me I should read it and that it would help me learn how to better communicate.

I felt devastated after the session. I feel so alone right now and I want so badly to reach out to my old T for comfort, but I know we are supposed to be scaling back our phone time so I can transition to new T. I honestly left thinking to myself that it was a complete waist of my time and that I couldn't believe I paid her that much money to sit and talk about herself the whole time.

What's wrong with me? Am I being a bad client? I am really a mess right now with all the changes that have been taking place in my life and I'm wondering if I am being too harsh and if I should just stop whining? Both my old T's were Social Workers and I found them both to be very supportive in a caring, non-clinical and compassionate way. This new T is a Psy D. and I can feel more of an analytical undertone and I don't like it.

I don't know what to do. Parts of me want to find a different T. Other parts of me say that that wouldn't be fair to the new T. I know that a lot of folks here have had issues with T's, but this is the first time as an adult that I have felt so conflicted with a T.

I kind of don't want to go to next session, and that's new for me too. Most of the time, even when I know it's going to be miserable, I go so I can just be in T's company and feel comforted by her presence. I don't get that warm and fuzzy feeling with this T.

I just don't know?