Hi MKAC,

I'm going to respond before reading any of the replies which is something I rarely do because I want to keep my thoughts clear in my head.

I think you're struggling with a few different issues here. The good news is that I think there are several possible approaches, and they all have potential for positive outcomes.

It's good that you worked through this rupture with CT. Yes, there is a lingering echo of those feelings that may never go away. I'm not so sure that is a bad thing, providing you don't misinterpret those feelings in a way that is damaging, because it sounds as though those feelings come from the very intimacy issues you struggle with.

But to go forward from here has benefits either way. If you stay with CT, you have the benefit of hitting the ground running, but more than that, you have a potentially stronger relationship now because of the rupture. The fact that you have established intimacy doesn't permit you to run away from those feelings; I see this as a positive. If you want to work through the intimacy issues fully, I believe you can best do so by NOT convincing yourself to remain in the "I'm just a client" bubble.

The challenge is that without the distance of that bubble, it does make it more daunting to get deeply into the trauma work. But I guess the ultimate benefit is also that going deeply into the trauma while experiencing yourself as loved in this relationship can also reap the most satisfying rewards in my experience. I'm not sure that I could have healed as deeply if my trauma had remained solely "mine." I needed to have both the traumatic knowledge and the emotional pain equally shared and borne by someone else with me in relationship and experience that relationship not just survive, but grow beyond it. I do think when the relationship is parental, rather than romantic, it is an easier shift for both client and T. But your T seems up to the challenge if you can find a way to accept the genuineness of the "therapy love" relationship.

On the other hand, working with PT primarily on trauma sounds like a swifter progress. But can you do that while keeping your innermost trust under wraps? It feels like a somehow incomplete healing to me. But I wonder if it wouldn't be helpful to see him exactly for the purpose of getting whatever you perceive as the worst out? Get it on the table, spoken, examined so as to get some objectivity about it?

Would it be possible that doing so would allow you to return to CT able to revisit those aspects that seem too painful to visit currently? Would that help you to be more ready to risk and receive the kind of healing congruent with love that I think you fear?