I leave in 1 hour for my t appt, and I need to get some thoughts on an important matter. . .

I'm thinking about reducing my sessions with my t. I've already emailed her to let her know that i want to talk about this, and why. Having to miss so many sessions lately has shown me how attached I am to her, and how much my separation feelings get triggered when i can't see her. It's not just sort of hard, i mean it is extremely painful. I think i am too attached to her. Separation shouldn't be this hard, but it is.

I understand that my attachment problems go back to childhood with my mom, but they also very much come into play with my t. Some part of me must be looking to my t as kind of a mother figure. So when she goes away and i have to miss my session, i start feeling the same awful way i did as a child when my mom left on business trips and I wasn't going to see her. No amount of reasoning with my intellectual mind takes away the awful emotions. Of course i know that i'm an adult now, that t is not my mom, and that this is 2011!! But some part of me must not know it!! Or maybe my feeling abandoned was just so bad as a child that anytime anything reminds me of it today, my body just reacts with panic. I suffered a horrible rejection and abandonment several years ago, which seems to have made my initial attachment/abandonment issues twice as painful and embedded.

This "paring down" of sessions, because of my t's taking so much time off, has really been a clear reminder to me of where my therapy is headed, and where it is going to eventually end. The only way to successfully end therapy is to learn to tolerate more and more separation from my t. I'm scared about how difficult it already is for me just to miss a few sessions. As painful as it is, i think i need to enforce these separations by reducing my sessions on my own.

With missing repeated sessions, it feels like pulling a bandaid slowly off of a wound. It's hard to tolerate the lingering pain when my t keeps leaving and i keep getting triggered. Eventually i know she is looking at retiring soon anyway, so it is just a matter of time. It seems like the easiest way to get through this separation pain is to drastically reduce my sessions. Since i am already partway through this separation agony, why not rip the bandaid off quickly and push myself through the pain to the other end? Then it won't hurt me every time my t takes time off and i have to miss a session. I won't keep feeling it over, and over, and over each time. If i can disconnect more now, it may hurt like I%&^(, but it won't hurt so much when the ending comes.

My t has told me before that with enough support from her and hard work in therapy, i won't need her as much, and the ending will not be so painful or feel like an abandonment. But I'm starting to doubt this. She has already supported me alot, and i still feel like i need her alot. We've worked together a LONG time, and i still feel separation pain when she goes away. Termination still terrifies me. I've learned an awful lot over the years, but i don't see myself becoming less dependent on her. Because of the way the therapy relationship is set up, it has to end, and i have to become more independent. There seems no easy way to do this except to endure the pain of separation. I just want it to stop. If i can't avoid it, i want to push myself through it, even if it feels like an abandonment to child parts.

Thoughts anyone?