Hi Omers,

I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with 2 t's when it came to dealing with your child part, and that it still hurts. I think t's need to be SOOOO careful when they encourage/elicit/invite the hurt child part of us to come forward, they need to be sure that they are going to be able to handle what comes up. In my t's case, she's a very caring, kind person. And i think she wants to help my child parts. But when i actually let that part of me come forward and express needs, she is hesitant to meet those needs because they DO, in fact, resemble the needs of a child, and I'm an adult.

For example, i've needed frequent email responses from her. If she tells me she is too busy to reply to me, that really hurts the child part of me deeply. It triggers old stuff from my childhood when my mom was too busy for me. So then i get angry and feel hurt. Well, if she then goes into an explanation of how only infants should need that much contact/responsiveness and not adults, which i am, that makes me feel tons of shame and i feel like there is something really wrong with me, and i shouldn't need what i do. Now i know she is just trying to reason with me, and she says that she was not attaching any negative feelings to that observation (that i seem to need her to be there 24/7 -- which is actually an exaggeration). But how else can i take that statement, other than as negative???

I guess in some ways i feel like i'm being "corrected" or admonished not to be like a child, when i do have parts of me like a child. So i end up thinking, well if you don't want me to have needs like an infant or small child, then stop asking me about my child part and what she needs.