Hi Mona, I haven't been posting much lately, but I have read the things you have written lately about your T. It sounds to me that your therapy is going badly wrong. Therapy should be something where you experience acceptance and which somehow helps you to blossom. I think that you know that your therapy is not right? But you just can't quite believe it, you don't quite trust your own perceptions because it is hard to reject someone who you have placed trust in, and who we are attached to. I think we place a lot of belief in therapists that they know what they are doing, therapy needs us to do this, so it is really hard when we are confronted with a therapist who doesn't know what they are doing. Especially as the therapy relationship brings out our insecurities and makes us question ourselves.


In your posts you have said that you blame yourself, and that this has been a pattern with other therapists. It sounds like you are feeling that therapy can't help you? This resonates with me because it is similar to how I felt after my bad therapy experience. I doubted that I could ever have a successful therapy experience and suspected that I was too damaged. I manage pretty well in life though, so it was kind of surprising that I couldn't manage therapy. Now I have a good therapist, I find that I can manage therapy and I am getting a lot out of it, and my life is going well too.


I think that you manage pretty well in life too? You are embarking on a great career that should give you a lot of life satisfaction. I think you need to choose to believe in yourself and in therapy.

Therapy is about process and it can be a long one. There are days one doesn't want to get out of bed, go to school, go to work, do the chores but it is all necessary and part of the process. I was thinking about the difference between books and reality (or online relationships and real ones) and how with books and movies and Facebook, etc. we condense things and don't get the whole "fattened" picture of what makes up a True story; we only get the headlines/punchlines and not the underpinnings. My T once pointed out how reality is not like a book, in books "you don't go to the bathroom" for one thing :-)


Put in the time, go to the session whether you feel like it or not; I always found when I wasn't wanting to go and did, that the session turned out differently than I had felt it would. We can't really know/anticipate the future, all the feelings and thoughts, etc. beforehand are just our imagination, not "real". You have to go and see what is in the moment, what is real and how to work with that. Not going to a session, you "skip" that and don't get any practice/instruction on how to be real (which presumably is why you are in therapy?).

This really struck me as something a person in an abusive relationship might say in order to justify staying in that relationship (or to justify the other person's behavior).


ETA: This is not meant to judge you. I think that if it is, in fact, true that you "bring out the worst in her", then she's letting her countertransference interfere with your therapy. I don't know you or her, but the relationship sounds really unhealthy for you and I can feel how painful it is.