Quote:
Originally Posted by BudFox
This is almost verbatim my experience. I got a begrudging and coerced apology, and a shaky acknowledgment that possibly significant harm was done. But she was interspersing these things with assertions that therapy had helped me, that she had put me back together sufficiently before abandoning me, that it was because she cared. She had to control the narrative and the endings. The endings were always like a gun to the head -- say what you need to say, when the conversation is over that is it, no more contact ever. Even if it was traumatic to end that way, tough s**t because she is in charge and because she wanted to make sure the narrative/fantasy was in tact. Infantilizing and humiliating.
Same here. Sorry you are in this position. It is a terrible feeling.
She basically haunts my consciousness 24/7. I even dreamed about her last nite.
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I had dreams for a while too. It seems to have mostly stopped, and at least my emotional stability is much better once I mostly took back my locus of control. It all seemed to get intensified the more I would spar with the shadow T in my head. Now I tell myself, I was only vulnerable because I was longing for more of something that isn't intended to exist in therapy. I was making up reasons and excuses why it could, because I saw that it did exist. Well, the point is
not that it couldn't or didn't exist, the point is that I was wasting so much energy on proving to myself that it didn't
not exist, that there was no point of being in therapy anyway. T was naive for temporarily giving in and providing that something (to the extent that she really clearly acted on it and brushed off my concerns about her acting on it) and I am in real pain, but don't get me wrong, I don't feel like a victim either. <---- I make that distinction primarily to empower myself. A while back, in the aftermath, I genuinely felt that my life was pretty much over. But, I most certainly can do something about it. I can survive this. And thinking about it differently makes me much more able to try.
There was a very real insecurity I was covering up with my longing for T: the fundamental knowledge that even if we ~love each other, even IF we met outside of therapy, this relationship is not realistic. I think this is where "transference" becomes about something more than just what exists between two people in a room. I'm saying, "I know it's not realistic, BUT...." and the transference part is what I say after that but. That's the part that was weighing me down in therapy, this need I felt to make extra allowance for how to act
in case our feelings are real. The excessiveness of the need to make therapy not just therapy. even despite the fact that the feelings definitely were real. I did a pretty good thing ultimately by really insisting to talk about it. And T reflected the truth at me--it was all just too much and too personal to survive the limits of the therapy room. It had genuinely become too real because I voluntarily treated it like it was real all that time. I had a LOT of pain, and though I wish it could have gone more smoothly, still, the extent of my pain, and my reactions to escape my pain were what created this situation.
It hurts a lot and yes it was clearly imperfect but I'm just trying to hold onto the silver lining that now I know for sure what it feels like to be losing myself and looking for the right things in the wrong places for the wrong reasons. Now I know genuine, sustainable love and affection when I see it--something that exists without me having to feel these cycles of dissonance and doubt and desperation. Not right away but, eventually that knowledge will be really valuable.... so, that's just my thinking lately, don't know if it would be useful to anyone else though.
dreams though, those are the worst... they're so cruel....