T's reply. Not sure how I feel about it.

Dear mouse

Sorry I couldn't reply yesterday.

It's important that this stuff is coming out, and I think it is definitely part of the work that we need to be doing. It's useful for me too when you write it down because it makes it much easier for me to see what's happening, and to talk about it in a way that hopefully will be useful for you. I'm sorry that I can't always do that in the session.

There is something quite fundamental here about how attuned you experience me as being to you at any given moment. You often experience a mismatch, and this is your early experience with your mother: that she wasn't attuned, and wasn't able to properly attend to or validate your needs and feelings. When it goes wrong between us, you feel devastated and lost. You feel that I've abandoned you and that I don't care and don't understand you.

Something else happens too. You have a lot of bad experiences in your life, but you do have some good ones - even sometimes in relation to your mother. It's hard for you to hold onto both at the same time. Maybe that's because as soon as you have any positive feelings towards your mother, it's as if you lose yourself. So when I refer to the good stuff, it's not because that's what I want to hear from you, but because I want to help you to remember both and to hold onto both, without having to lose yourself - or lose me as a helpful presence. Sometimes I do that the other way round - when you are talking about the good things, I might remind you of the bad experiences. I think that because there were more bad experiences than good ones, it's easier for you when it's that way round, although it may still be that then you feel I'm ignoring the good.

These are different emotional states. It goes wrong when I assume that you are able to hear the contradictions, when in fact they are unbearable. It is difficult for me to know sometimes which state you are in. I'm sorry that I can't always tell. I could try to protect you from these moments by never holding up the opposite experience for you, but I think that would be possibly more destructive in the long term. You do need to hold both in order to have a more secure sense of yourself and sometimes you can.

When it "goes wrong" between us, I think I become your mother for you. It's as if I become persecutory, whatever I say. It becomes difficult for you to hold onto anything positive between us. But it does seem that even though you really struggle with it all, you are more able (than you used to be) to hold onto the possibility of there being another way of thinking about what's going on. When you say, "it's making me feel wrong to be in these states with you", I think perhaps that's what you mean, that you are aware of the two things. I know how difficult it is to hold onto that, and to be in that, but that does also seem hopeful, that you might be able to have both good and bad together, and make connections between them that can help you.

Love,
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