Quote:
Originally Posted by BudFox
MP, as you noted in another thread, we seem to have had a similar experience. For me it was like a glimpse of everything I ever wanted, the classic "golden fantasy" thing where a single relationship fulfills all needs, heals all wounds, and you are understood as never before. Was seductive and addictive at the time, a total disaster in hindsight. Unconscious collusion between two people desperately chasing needs, textbook co-dependency, nobody minding the shop.
I not only feel indifference to life, I have been more or less paralyzed for a year and a half now. I also have debilitating chronic illness, but the therapy thing has broken something. Was as if the universe played the cruelest ever practical joke. And I cannot make sense of it, along the lines of "everything happens for a reason". Seems like a senseless torment. A "humiliating kick in the crotch" when I was already down for the count.
Hope you can find your way through. Do you have some sense of the core issues that were driving you?
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Hi budfox, I understand what you mean by "as if therapy has broken something." It's like it revealed a new level of emotional pain underneath what I had always thought was the worst. I had never been as detached from "most people" as I was after a while in therapy, I got so sucked up into this secret narrative, and piece by piece, I forced almost all of myself into it. so I had never experienced such an extensive loss and rejection.
In my case I don't really feel like it was a practical joke.....It was the mutual grasping for certainty, this fantasy of total comfort that created the pain. However, i do recognize that my T had a responsibility to be the better and more together one in this situation. I know she had supervisors, she consulted, etc. but the problem was it was all on the surface. All the conscious beliefs were just alibis plastered over the real feelings. Once I pointed at the real stuff, that was when everything rapidly imploded and suddenly we were two wounded animals locked in a little room together, trembling, licking wounds and baring fangs, recriminating each other with the shame of their own hypocrisy in turn, while paradoxically trying to salvage the illusions that had allowed the therapy to exist at all. Suddenly this consciousness that had felt so close to my own was far away, foreign and immensely fragile.
I've definitely learned a lot about my core issues in the process. Well, in the aftermath I saw that I was a lot more like T than I realized in a lot of ways that I had never put a voice to. I guess I was vicariously living through her instead of authentically for myself. But she was doing the exact same thing through me.
So at least it has gotten somewhat easier as I took back a lot of myself from my image of her. It did leave me in a very volatile/vulnerable place though because now I really only have myself atm and I'm very hesitant to trust and open up to someone again. It's taking all my energy just to stay together and I can't tolerate much more yet. Trying to rememeber it won't be this bad forever.