How do you know when things really aren't right? or if it’s coming from somewhere inside.

I really have a tough time with trust, I know that’s a theme with a lot of us, but I really struggle to have any sort of adult relationship. I have lots of friends but I never actually tell them anything if that makes any sense. I also have major issues with abandonment, this all comes from lots of history of childhood abuse and being abandoned by my mother as a small child and various other people along the way.

Anyway, I’ve been seeing my T for around a year. She has been repeatedly going on about how I need to learn to trust her etc etc and how some people are worthy of trust and others not so much. And, I am doing better, I have been slowly starting to trust that she is going to be there and isn’t going to dump me, but then suddenly last week the wheels just came off and I’m left feeling really unsure about her and this therapy relationship.

She is very CBT which for various reasons hasn’t really worked out in my therapy, we didn’t even really do any of it, so last week we had a session where we sort of went over what I had achieved so far. This amounts to nothing really if I’m honest, I really have sucked at therapy. I felt like I’d failed the class and I wasn’t getting the chance to re-take. I totally got the feeling that she was irritated by my lack of progress and I get that, I must be frustrating, I don’t mean to be but she was talking about other services which she absolutely knows I don’t want at all, we talked about all of this months ago, but she kept saying things like she can’t believe I haven’t been forced into a higher level of care by now by other people in my life (I’m an adult). This all set my alarm bells ringing, she is going to terminate me unless I start improving and fast. The problem is that I’m not being like this on purpose, I do the things i do because I don’t know what else to do. I said that once, I asked what am I supposed to do instead of all of these things everyone keeps telling me are bad behaviours and she said ‘do you want people to tell you what to do?’ but the trouble is I really don’t know what people do do that isn’t rubbish behaviour because if I exercise that’s bad, but other people it seems to be a good thing to do, if I clean the house, that’s bad but for everyone else that’s ok, so I’m left with all of this stuff which is wrong but nothing which is seemingly ok. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all.

So, we go on to discuss the trauma stuff relating to my childhood. This sucks. I hate it. I can’t even tell you how hard it is for me to even start to talk about this but I do throw some words out there, probably really clumsily and all wrong. But I do get some stuff out, no emotion of any sort, just words, because I really don’t do emotions, especially in public. So I described very briefly some of the sorts of things that happened physically to me as a child. It was pretty extreme and I suppose it may sound completely exaggerated, seriously, that was barely even scratching the surface. But, she asked me some questions like, why didn’t anyone do anything? you must have been covered in bruises. Is that a normal T question under the circumstances? because I don’t really know why no one stopped it or why no one helped me. There were other questions that just seemed challenging, like, how was it that these people allowed you to spend so much time out of the house at clubs when you were so young if they were neglectful. My reply was that they honestly couldn’t care less where I was. It made me feel as if she didn’t believe a word of what I was telling her and this was barely the headline so it’s hardly making me want to get to the deeper stuff, I don’t know what I was hoping for really, she knows I hate it when people show any sort of care towards me so maybe it was that but I suppose I hoped for something that didn’t leave me feeling like a complete idiot.

There was other things in the session which weren’t so bad, she said some nice stuff too. She has been really ok up to now, I’ve been feeling more and more able to be open and feel secure in this relationship over the last few weeks and even a couple of weeks ago I would have said she was ok. But I feel completely different now and almost as if I have been so desperate to believe that it is possible to have that sort of a relationship and that I can do what normal people do that I let my guard down and I am about to feel the pain for doing it.

I really see a ‘thanks but no thanks, please go and find someone else to dump your crap on’ session this week, and that sucks, I don’t want to. I thought she was ok, she told me I could trust her, is this me being over sensitive? am I looking for a reason to run from some scary stuff which is coming up and finding reasons not to trust someone who really hasn’t done anything wrong? or are there really red flags here?