You're onto something here Leah, my relationship with my mother was never healthy, and no, as it stands I am not really able to be myself, to hold my own boundaries, in a relationship. I am learning how to do that. I am actually learning who 'I' am. In the past I have always become what the other person wants me to be, because that is what I taught to do. My own self was never respected or even regarded as having the right to exist. My mother used to tell me that she hated to hear me talk about myself. In one of my earliest sessions with T I told him that I was afraid to let anything of my own out for fear it would be taken from me. That was what I grew up with.

Now I don't mean that my T should be finding me friends, but that my T gives me an idea of what to look for in a friend. The model of how to do relationships that I was given by my parents is far from healthy. I need T to help me make a new blueprint, so I don't get hurt again, rerunning my old patterns.

Maybe it's not exactly healthy, the way I am already thinking of not having my T, but I am used to loss. Too many times I've reached out and been told, either directly or more subtly, that I'm asking too much. And my relationship with previous T was very painful. I wanted her to be my mom, and unfortunately, that's pretty much what she gave me I'm not ready to be without T yet, but I don't ever want to experience that kind of pain again, so I don't let myself forget who I am and who my Ts are.