Quote:
Originally Posted by Petra5ed
I've wondered all this time if therapy is inherently flawed for people with childhood trauma... i.e. people whose core issue is feeling unloved. Therapy has helped me realize that is my core issue, I feel unloved, unwanted, unworthy, and I'm sure it goes back to feelings I had as a child. Therapy has helped me realize this, but it doesn't solve anything, in fact it's like salt in a wound because you're primed to fall in love with a therapist who often won't even give you a hug let alone ever say I love you back. It is yet one more one-way relationship of you loving a person who doesn't really care all that much about you, with the only difference being your therapist is hopefully a lot less abusive.
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Funny, I just sent an email to my therapist that contained basically what you are saying...here is part of it. He hasn't responded yet, I'm assuming we will discuss it tomorrow.
"Essentially, I'm walking down this road and looking at the loss except this time, I'm feeling it rather than pretending things are okay. Those things that carried over. When my mom would clean the house, or make dinner, go shopping...the times that those things happened I've carried with me...essentially replacing lost love with a clean house, or shopping or cooking. I have been hard on myself for feeling sad, way to hard. If I'm walking through those memories without the protection of denial, but basically naked.. then sadness is appropriate. The absence of pain would really be abnormal.
And I still want a mom to walk down that path with me, I shouldn't have to do it alone. I want a mom to tell me I'm great or to hug me when I'm overwhelmed to drink coffee with, to help ease life when it becomes too much. When people write tributes to their parents, I ache with jealousy.
When I was a little girl, I'd often fall asleep praying that I'd wake up and my mom would magically be ok. I didn't care that we were poor and lived on welfare or that I had crappy clothes, I just wanted her to be okay. I still sometimes wish there was a drug that would do that for her. But not for her, for me.
Things get narrow here for me because it's hard for me to imagine that I won't always want that and that it always will be painful for me not to have that with someone. There isn't a place where I can go and pick out a mother and say, love me, want me, make me your pride and joy, let me tell you the awful things I've done and still love me even if you're disappointed.
I feel broken because that is a void that can't be filled. It's impossible to imagine that even the best therapy can ever heal that sadness. I don't know how a person becomes whole without something so basic.
When we do the exposure therapy, you become that replacement and then I become needy, angry, frustrated, and sad. It's weird. I know you are not her, you can't replace what was lost, you can't fix it....and that intense emotion overwhelms me. I'm in an emotional state of being alone again but this time I'm acutely aware of it and the rest of my world falls apart. What is your role? To bear witness to the destruction? Why wouldn't I want to harm myslf? When I'm alone and in pain and I can't see the present world, what reason would I have to live? "
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