Hey white iris :-)

I'm glad you described the situation in more detail. It helps to know what you mean by the sorts of triggering things that you find your therapist to be saying...

Is there any way you could bring yourself to print off (or copy paste into word print) your post and show your therapist?

I understand why you found what she said to be triggering. I've never had anybody tell me I should be thankful I'm not worse off but I'd feel pretty upset if someone told me that when I was telling them how distressed I felt. It is invalidating of your distress.

What your t was doing though... Was to provide you with strategies that she thought could help you to alleviate your distress. Some people find that reflecting on how things could be worse helps them to feel better about the way things actually are. If one was looking to change ones emotion then that could be helpful.

But sometimes one isn't looking to change the emotion, one is looking to actually feel the emotion and work through things. You needed her to accept that you were distressed. To tolerate your distress without trying to change it. To tell you that it was understandable that you were feeling distressed. To just sit with you in your distress so you didn't have to bear it alone. So that you could decide what to do with it. To tell her more about it... Or to indicate that you wanted to know how to make it stop.

It sounds like she misjudged things a little. But it also sounds to me like she cares about you and she was trying to help you even though she did indeed misjudge the situation.

I'm thinking that you guys should be able to work through this... Maybe it is that she really can't tell what you need. Maybe you could work out signals or some way of indicating to her what you need. I know this is hard... But they aren't mindreaders. I always find other people to be surprisingly dense when it comes to them reading my mind and figuring out what I need :-(

Sometimes it can be hard because I really really really think it is bloody obvious what I need. If they don't notice then it is because they aren't paying attention or because they don't care. One thing I learned in DBT, however, was that even though I was pretty damned sure it was bloody obvious... It really seemed to be the case that... It wasn't obvious to others. I had to learn how to communicate what I needed to my clinician. We had to talk about it and figure out some signals.

IMHO that is what is going on (breakdown in communication). You have a chance to learn better communication skills (that should generalise back to real life too as you learn to verbalise what you need)

:-)

Please don't give up sweetie.