Thread: Email feedback
View Single Post
 
Old Dec 04, 2013, 08:12 PM
ListenMoreTalkLess ListenMoreTalkLess is offline
Veteran Member
 
Member Since: Feb 2012
Posts: 575
I think it's a great letter when you are focused on yourself. In a few isolated places, it feels like you reduce the power of what you're saying about the effects on the termination on you by fingerpointing at her and/or making assumptions about what she thinks or feels. I think that the issue with these few places is that if you want her to *hear* you (as opposed to maybe you just want to say these things, which is perfectly legitimate), you can be more effective by sticking with your "I" statements more closely.

These are the places I think you shift out of "I" statements:

To do so would reinforce the idea that I need protecting, that I am fragile. It is pathologizing. And there is nothing wrong with me. I'm still unclear why you feel you need to take away my autonomy in this way.

Actually, what I have seen is that when someone asks for a third party to be in a meeting, it's the asker who is the one who is perceived as fragile. Employees who won't meet with their supervisors without their union reps, students who won't meet with faculty without another faculty member. I'm not sure why this is about your autonomy. She's told you that she's not comfortable meeting with you without a 3rd party present. It's about her, not about you.

I understand too that you are able to forget me.

Unless she said this to you, I don't think it's right for you to put that on her. Statements you make about you not being able to forget her are poignant and compelling.

I truly hope that you have sought further consultation about what happened between us. I still feel that you badly mismanaged your countertransference. This is understandable, you are human after all.

This just strikes me as telling her how to do her job, using terms of the art of psychotherapy, in a way that is inauthentic. Unless she told you that she had countertransference and didn't manage it as she wished she had. It sounds kind of snarky. To me it's a different thing to say how something affected you to expand into what someone should do in the future as a professional.

Please be careful with your clients. Please be aware of the power you hold. Don't forget that people trust you with their lives, and that that is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. My experience of somatic therapy with you is a discussion in and of itself. Suffice it to say that I hope you keep in mind that you need to fully inform clients about developing areas of competence.

I think this comes across as a lecture that doesn't have the stones behind it. Her future professionalism and clients are not your concern; your healing from what she has put you through is. Personally, I would stay focused on myself and the aftereffects.
Thanks for this!
likelife, scorpiosis37