Damn! Who's the crazy one in THIS scenario??
I think you put your finger on something really important here:
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T has a pattern too. She owns every positive emotion she feels regarding and/or about me. She has never owned up to feeling negative emotions regarding and/or about me. She becomes defensive, then denies she feels anything. She's fine. She doesn't feel negative emotions about clients. We can't affect her that way.
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What interests me is that she doesn't use "techniques" because she knows you will detect them because you're a MH professional -- but knowing that you are a MH professional, she also expects you to believe this. It's a bunch of poop, and reeks of denial. If she is not accepting her negative feelings about her clients, that is so obviously going to get in the way of her work with them. You feel negative emotions about the people in your care, and you KNOW the answer is not to deny your feelings, but to recognize them and work through them on your own time such that you can be present for them.
I mean with all of this:
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"Well for one, we weren't arguing. I was not angry."
"I'm not angry at you. I don't feel anything regarding your email. Your email doesn't hurt me. Clients can't hurt me."
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For one, I feel like you could take the second out of a poorly-written novel about a therapist who isn't coming to grips with her personal feelings about her clients. For another, she must not have realized that she was displaying physical signs of anger. We could argue about what specific facial expressions mean, but nothing says anger/embarrassment like red splotches. You know perfectly well she's angry and she's saying the opposite, and that is just so not... therapeutic.
And this stuff is just hostile:
Quote:
"If you wanted an appointment so damn bad, why didn't you call the office? I don't handle appointments via email."
"Because you lost your train of thought? How many times have I lost my train of thought and you told me you understood that. Do you actually think I'm stupid when I do that? Have you been lying to me"
"The end of therapy upsets you? Why the heck would you get upset over the truth? I should be able to speak truth without upsetting you. And why do you need my support to talk about the hardest stuff? Why can't you just talk about it because you know you'll be better once you do."
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That's some unprofessional stuff right there.
I will say that sometimes, Chopin, I get worried that you can be more preoccupied with T and what's going with her than with what's going on with you. But here, how could you possible be able to focus on yourself when she is up, down, all over the place? Putting words in your mouth and speaking for you? It's not a wonder you feel beat up.
I think you're right to point to what she says about not feeling negatively about clients. That's just not the way things work. And this shows pretty clearly how her failure to acknowledge and appropriately confront those feelings is just going end up exploding in the office. It sounds like she was using the hour to do just that, to vent those feelings and misgivings and frustrations, because she's so insistent that she doesn't have them that she doesn't use her own time to deal with them. Doesn't sound like it was therapy for YOU.
I'm so sorry you went through this
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