Quote:
Originally Posted by missbella
IG, the game of therapy is set up as an uneven field. The client has all the problems and questions, has most of the exposure. The therapist (often) plays the role of expert, makes the rules, holds the answers, decrees the interpretations, defines the narrative. What is represented as like intimacy is extremely time limited and very engineered.
No wonder therapists can be intimidating.
In truth, with some exceptions like the classroom, the workplace and the legal system, no adult has any authority or supremacy over another adult. No one is a Life Expert. No one has the answers or determines the narrative in an interpersonal scenario.
I know some very strong competent adults who relate to their therapists like whimpering puppies.
From everything you've told this board, getting what you want from this woman, getting her to admit her errors is an impossible mission. You tried and tried. As many have told you, that only leaves you taking care of yourself and cutting the cord.
My therapists were extremely arrogant, righteous characters. Even when the psychologist saw my complaint, in writing, several years later, he insisted on his blamelessness.
That kind of relationship certainly is "unfair." It leaves the client to unravel the knot on atop of the original issues that prompted getting treatment.
The good news: I learned more from disengaging from bad therapy than from ethical therapy. You talk about your strength and surviving, and which gives me the clear sense you'll emerge here.
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Much as I hate to admit it - I am starting to feel very subhuman. Ashamed. Old flawed thinking creeping back in the edges of my mind.
She knows in my history I have a parent who threatened to take love away because I was too vile.
Everyone has limits. Everyone.
It's certainly turning into what you have describe above now, where all the problems are mine.
I definitely didn't ever see her as a life expert, at all. She was way too frank about her own crazy life for me to think her some kind of deity.
I don't feel upset as such, just so badly confused and terrified of cutting off my nose to spite my face.
As I've just said in a text to a friend, apart from my late mother, nobody else ever seemed to love me with such fierce passion - and I managed to ruin that! The feelings of guilt and regret! Jeez, they are powerful.
If I elicit this reaction in my parent, and then in a therapist who I do honestly feel loved me at one stage?...this is going round and round in my head.
I know perfectly well it's not remotely love now, as friend has pointed out very wisely. However, unconditional love is for your children, not for any adult to another. That's always been my belief. So I polluted it, and now I'm suffering.
Other friend says the key problem is it wasn't her place to love me that way (a personal way, like unconsummated lovers, or my archetypal sister, or plain old friendship, depending on day/ mood/ moon phase) in the first place.