[QUOTE=nottrustin;4053622]Does you therapist ever apologize for things that she has no control over? How do you handle it?

Sometimes my therapist will and I really don't know how to handle it.. . . QUOTE]

I do understand the confusion over this kind of statement from therapists and other people in our lives. It took me a while to figure it out for myself. This is what I came up with. I was raised in a family that wasn't very much in touch with emotions. The most important and valued thing in my family was that you were independent, strong and self-reliant. It was the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" kind of mentality. Crying, whining, sadness etc. was not condoned under any circumstance, not matter what age you were.

I think that when people (therapists included) make a statement like, "I'm sorry that happened to you?" or "I'm sorry you have to go through this again." etc. they are actually trying to convey empathy for the difficulties I'm experiencing. They are attempting to draw closer to me to let me know that they hear and are really trying to grasp/understand the emotional things I'm wrestling with in my inner life. For me, that is an unfamiliar, strange and uncomfortable statement for me to hear because my family of origin was adamant that I be independent, self-reliant and unemotional about difficult personal situations. I'm suppose to have a stiff upper lip and not try to pull others into my circle of emotional pain or discomfort. (Which is rather an amusing self-script to be dealing with considering I'm in therapy to purposefully include someone else in my emotional life )

In any case, what I'm trying to say is that if we are unfamiliar with empathy and a willingness of someone else to enter our circle of emotional pain or we've been trained to push someone away when they attempt to reach out to us emotionally because we believe we have to deal with it ourselves, then such statements and actions are going to confuse us and in my case, cause me a great deal of anxiety. Like you, I constantly say, "It is what it is." And that's because in my world, it is, what it is because I alone feel that I have to deal with it. At the moment, I'm trying to learn that life and life's problems don't have to be a solo journey, that it's okay to open up to another person and allow them to share it with me or at least, help me deal with it more effectively. Not sure if that's what's going on for you, but I wanted to share how I've begun to see things.