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Originally Posted by ChristineEsq
Peaches,
I too can soooo relate to your post. I recall once receiving virtually the exact same response as the one you received from your T. Almost word for word, in fact. They must have a manual or something.
What this type of "clinical response" amounts to for me, however, is a waste of love or care on my part. Like I'm putting out all this energy and getting stonewalled and it really hurts. I feel like it should be spent on someone who cares that I love him/her and, ideally, returns the affection. But when I expressed just that to my former T (i.e., "I feel like caring so much for you is a waste because it seems like it's all the same to you."), she responded by jerking her neck back and saying, "Whoa...that is not true." I was so relieved and touched to get that reaction because I had tried so many different ways of getting past the textbook, automaton responses to how she really felt (if anything at all).
My former T was physically affectionate, however, whenever I needed that...perhaps that is why she thought I should've assumed that my feelings for her meant something.
That said, I think we clients are just not granted access behind those walls our T's put up. I had a very hard time adjusting to the psychotherapeutic relationship because that dynamic was so foreign to me at the time and I still believe that intense, interpersonal (and yet...not personal) psychotherapy is not for me, so I'm not going in that direction with my new T. But I do feel your pain.
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Hi Christine,
The more I read these responses and think about your post, the more I think you are right. . .it's not that our t's don't care. . . it's that they do not often express that caring verballly. . .for whatever reason. My t told me once that people have told her she is "hard to get to know." So perhaps she is reserved about herself in daily life as well as in the therapy room.
Once when i accused her of emotionally withdrawing after I'd made some expression of closeness and how it's hard for me to let myself be vulnerable, she told me "I don't always like to feel vulnerable either." I'm not sure what she meant exactly. Do you think that my telling her how much she means to me makes it harder for her to stay clinically objective??