Quote:
Originally Posted by feralkittymom
You're not nothing. Nor flawed. But maybe who you are--or were meant to be--you were never allowed or encouraged to discover. Therapy could be a safe space to explore this in real time with your T.
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Thank you. I actually tried to talk a bit about this whole performance thing with T today. It was a good session, after a slightly crappy start where I basically just babbled a lot and he didn't respond in any way, for the first ten minutes or so. I didn't g t very far in the performance discussion, but it was a start. Towards the end of the session I even managed to ask the thing I've been wondering about for a long time: does T ever react emotionally in any way to what I say? I'm no good at reading other people and T is a master of not showing much emotion, and I've been assuming that things I say don't really affect him. And I felt horribly presumptious when I asked. I mean, who am I to think that a T who has been meeting people for over 30 years can be affected by anything I say? But it turns out that he is, sometimes. That was rather powerful for me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by feralkittymom
I understand well the terror of the long silence. It's like a virtual shunning. That was my mother's way: either exploding or silence, nothing in between possible. It can only leave a child assuming the responsibility for the relationship, and since we can't change others, we try and try to change ourselves. But it was never our responsibility. There was nothing wrong with us to change. The difficulty comes in believing that in our bones.  |
Yeah, and the change takes time.