Quote:
Originally Posted by kirk
It is very interesting what you are saying about all of your emotional energy going into therapy and withdrawing much of your emotional energy from others in your life. I can recognize that very clearly from my therapy, and that has been going on for many years. I never really thought of it as being wrong. But now that you put words on it I can see there may be a problem. I always thought that it was important to put your emotional energy in therapy to make it work. And I don't see how the therapist can prevent that. My therapist was very available, and very professional. He sincerely did his best, and he was good in what he was doing. But something went wrong somewhere. He did sometimes or maybe even often say to me: "Your life is not here in this room. Your life is out there". So he actually tried to make me change this. But for some reason I couldn't.
You say that it took a long time to dig out. How long? Did you manage to do that on your own, I mean without seeing another therapist?
|
At first, I did this on my own and with help from those on the board (who are putting up with this cross-talk so if you wanna take this to p.m. that's fine..I did just pm you). Then I saw another T who works in a very different way and I am now dealing with practical things in my life (like cleaning out my clutter, for example, and issues of financial stability).
So...a lot of my current therapy is taking the form of "life coaching" stuff, rather than analytical therapy. I am, it turns out, allergic to analytical therapy. i just AM! So, my termination disaster was much differerent than yours but I did find, to my eternal and persistent dismay, that I had used therapy to DODGE life, not to confront it. The pain upon learning this was huge, huge huge. Much like the pain that I experienced when I learned that a long-term romantic relationship was not going anywhere, but was one that I had spent untold dollars and YEARS on. I was literally engaged for seven years. It needs to be made into some kind of black comedy. (I'm sure it has already).
I had to confront my own
pathological persistance, and learn about the roots of it...where it came from and how I could collude with a therapist to NOT DEAL with this issue, and how a painful therapy relationship played perfectly into my own ordeals.
I went through worlds of pain, but I came out the other side. I am doing well with my new approach, but I am concentrating mainly on matters of the mundane, which is where I should have been living in a larger way for a long time. That's what I should have learned in my old life with the 12 steps, but well, backsliding is part of the whole journey, I guess.
I learned a very bitter lesson, spent a lot of bank, and yes, I did it to some extent on my own, to some extent with friends, and in a more minor way, with a therapist...
Hang in there. You can do this, and you will reach a place of greater understanding, day by day.