I had another session with T today (even though we usually only do once a week) because I’d had a session with her yesterday and brought up some attachment/boundary related stuff and I felt fairly distressed when I left and like we hadn’t really dealt with what we needed to deal with, so I asked her if we could have another session today, to which she agreed.

And it did not go well at all. It felt like we were two people having a disagreement instead of a therapist who is completely attuned to her client (which is how it usually feels because she’s good at that). It felt like she was being super defensive at pretty much everything I brought up.

I was trying to be super honest and open with her. I told her that I felt really vulnerable even bringing up the fact that I trusted her so much because I was scared she would think I was too dependent on her, and how upset I was yesterday when I felt like that was basically what happened.

I told her that I really started trusting her when she broke her own no contact between sessions rule a few times when I was very distressed and wanted to call her, and I told her that I was upset at a few specific things she’d said yesterday that felt shaming.

I told her that some of the things she’d done over the past few weeks really felt caring to me, and her response (as per usual) is, “I care about all my clients,” and I mentioned to her (again) that it upsets me when she says that, and I tried to use the NVC tool that she’s been teaching me and I said, “When you say that, I feel really anxious because I have a need to feel cared about by you as an individual because that is necessary for me to trust you, and when you just repeat that you care about all of your clients, that makes me worry that I might be interpreting your ‘caring gestures’ incorrectly.”

And she got super defensive at that and said that it’s my issue that I need her to say that and to stop “badgering” her about it; these are her boundaries and she’s not comfortable saying that she cares about me. And then she went on about how clients come and go and therapists have lots of clients and can’t care like that and how some therapists won’t even let their clients call between sessions…I’ve had many therapists before and not a single one of them had an issue with saying, “Yearning, I care about you and I really want to help you succeed…”

I know these are my therapist’s own boundary issues and she has the right to set her own boundaries; it just annoyed me that she didn’t even want to admit to me that they were HER issues, not mine.

What she said was pretty much that I needed to figure out why I wanted her to care about me and how that applies to other relationships, which I don’t think is super fair, because I don’t actually have this issue in other relationships; this is genuinely an interpersonal issue in regards to her and my comfort level with her. It just felt to me like she didn’t want to make herself vulnerable by saying, “I care about you,” and that didn’t sit well with me.

And pretty much the whole time (when I mentioned that several things she said upset me or made me feel ashamed) she was super defensive and said I was criticizing her and these were my protector emotions stepping in to make me less vulnerable.

Usually I’m actually pretty good at noticing when I’m treating her badly or projecting stuff onto her, and today was genuinely not one of those days. I wasn’t yelling, being sarcastic, criticizing, or belittling; I was very calm and I was using “I” statements. So I don’t know if maybe she was seeing something I couldn’t see or if she was just feeling defensive or what…

To be fair, she is a really good T and we work really well together and I’ve made a lot of really good changes with her. I’ve told her more in seven months than I told a past T in four years, and I really don’t want to go find a new T. But I don’t know if this need to be cared about is going to go away or if we can work through this or not. When she refuses to tell me she cares about me even after I told her I need to hear it, this makes me doubt all of her caring gestures, and it makes me feel like maybe I can’t trust her or like I got “tricked”.

But it sounded to me like she was telling me I had failed by contacting her twice between sessions and that I needed more than she could provide...like I was asking too much of her and like I shouldn’t ask so much of her, and that felt like she was conforming my worst fear of depending on someone and them telling me I shouldn't, and she KNOWS I have these issues.

She said she wasn’t trying to shame me for needing her, but it felt like she was – she pointed out that I wanted an extra session this week (which I explicitly told her I didn’t need if she wasn’t okay with it) and that maybe I needed to pay another $130 a week to do some DBT group therapy, which my father is NOT going to pay for and is thus out of the question (and her response to this was that maybe I should see her every other week instead of every week, although I have no idea how that would solve the problem).

I feel like maybe this stuff is all in my head and it's just old patterns about attachment and she wasn't actually saying or didn't actually mean stuff the way I heard it - maybe she DID say it’s okay to need her (the session wasn’t actually THAT bad; she did pretty well with a lot of things) but I just didn't hear it that way.

So I have no idea what to do.