I try to remind myself that it's a privilege to have the ability to have one hour of help each fortnight and I try to make the most of what I do have.

I think the therapy relationship amplifies unhelpful patterns of behaviour that occur in real life. So each time something happens that triggers my I’ve been abandoned, forgotten, or rejected sensors, I try to take notice of the way it turns out. If I feel completely okay or even a little bit better once I find out why I’ve been “abandoned, forgotten, or rejected” then I try to hold onto that. The next time it happens, I try to remind myself of what happened the previous time. Except each time it happened, I’d be tested by something that seemed far more difficult than the time before (this was always the real rejection happening now).

To actually make a difference, as awful as it always feels, I’ve found that it needed to occur a number of times (ouch). Eventually those sorts of situations didn’t hurt me as much in therapy or real life. I’m now much more able to be open-minded when something like that happens, rather than jumping to conclusions that do me no good. I’ve found that eventually it moves beyond being able to imagine something happening that would not be about being rejected (like you did this time), but it actually begins to feel much more okay and survivable when it happens. I think that eventually something clicks and suddenly it’s not just thoughts that may or may not be true, but a whole new understanding of those sorts of situations that develops.