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Hi Tinyrabbit,
I took your advice and talked to her this past session. She told me that the reason she has suggested that I consider another therapist is because I’ve told her on several occasions that she has done something that has been “retraumatizing” to me.
This is true. What has happened a few times is that she has allowed discussions of trauma (or trauma work) to flood me emotionally without offering enough help to cope with it – essentially, I went away feeling like I’ve gone through the trauma all over again, feeling extremely depressed, and needing 2-3 days to recuperate. In each case, it felt like a replay of my childhood because whenever I was going through a terribly hard trial and needed help/comfort, my mom would ignore it and look the other way.
So my t said that she felt very bad that I had these retraumatizing events in therapy with her. She felt responsible that she didn’t provide what I needed at the time to prevent that from happening. She wants me to feel better, not feel worse! So ethically, if therapy with her appears to be damaging me in some way, she is legally and ethically required to remind me that there might be other t’s with more experience and skill who might do a better job working with my issues. She said she does not want me to find a new therapist, but she must remind me that it’s my option to do so. I understand now and realize she doesn’t want to get rid of me. She just wonders at times if she has enough skill to help me.
Hi Skysblue,
You’re right, I did make an assumption. I assumed that my t didn’t want to work with me anymore. But really, she was just concerned about whether she was doing a good enough job with me, and if a different t would be able to help me more. I just freaked out because any mention of going to see somebody else sets off my abandonment alarms big time!!!
Hi Granite,
You honed in on an important point. . . My disappointment in t because of repeated experiences of feeling overwhelmed in therapy, and experiencing t’s reluctance to offer more comfort as an abandonment. I think you are correct in saying that this probably has not been worked through to a resolution. T has told me that in the future, she will try to do a better job of gauging how I am doing, and not let me get flooded. But I think that, after it happening several times, I’m pretty skittish. Also, she has let me know that I can ask her to sit next to me or hold my hand if needed. But my shame about needing it, and my knowing that she has been reluctant to do it in the past because of my SA as a child, I don’t feel comfortable to ask her to do that, even if I need it. The reason is because I always felt like, with my mom, that she only did things for me out of obligation, and not because she wanted to. So with t, I just can’t ask for something that I know she is/was reluctant about doing. I would feel like I was manipulating her to get comfort, and I would hate myself for that. But it kind of creates a standstill when it comes to doing trauma work. . .I can’t handle the emotional overwhelm myself, but I don’t want to ask her to help me more. I guess I just need more coping skills first.
Hi Pbutton,
I realized after I sent her the message that I was focusing too much on how I thought she felt, rather than my own feelings. I have such a bad habit of what my t calls “mindreading!” It is so ingrained in me. I know it would be better for me to just ask my t in person if she wants me to go elsewhere. But I am afraid to ask and afraid to hear what she says, so I don’t ask. Instead, I go away seeming like things are fine. But then later, it still bother me. So I try to figure the situation out by analyzing things my t said or did. I end up making assumptions which I am sure are true. And then, feeling horrible about it, I bring it up in an email to her. By then, she says I have created a whole story that is just not true. But I just don’t see it at all when I am doing that. I think I am understanding how things are! It’s frustrating! Usually, it is not until I see my t again, and we talk about it, that I find out why she said what she did.
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