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Old Jul 14, 2017, 08:31 AM
feileacan feileacan is offline
Poohbah
 
Member Since: Sep 2016
Location: Europa
Posts: 1,169
It seems to me that you are expecting progress to be simpler and quicker than it is possible. Or you expect that you can heal your wounds without looking at them and cleaning them thoroughly, which, according to the severity of the wound, can take years.

I don't see any signs of your therapist abusing you emotionally. You got hurt by what she was saying but the fact that you got hurt by these statements is that you stumbled upon something valuable to work with. If your therapist would try to sugarcoat things and make sure that nothing she says will ever trigger you in any way then you just wouldn't be doing therapy. These things that trigger you are the material that therapy work can be done on. If she would deliberately avoid touching these things so you wouldn't feel any discomfort then yeah, it would feel nice but it wouldn't contain any potential for healing.

You can read about professionals how to theoretically work with trauma but in reality it boils down to the relationship. I don't believe you can apply any techniques without the relationship and thus focusing on the relationship is the most important and the particular techniques are secondary. However, each relationship is different and thus it has to be invented between very therapist-client couple again. This is your joint work, you can't expect her to do it alone, based on books, skills and techniques.

Sure, you say that you don't feel comfortable and you don't trust. I think that's ok. I've been in very intensive treatment for 4 years and I still many times don't feel comfortable and don't trust. I think that considering my background and trauma this is inevitable, there's nothing to speed up this process. I just have to accept that things are slow and take a lot of time. There is really nothing my therapist can do to suddenly magically make me feel comfortable when I in general don't have this experience of feeling comfortable with people.

It seems to me that you might mix up two things - your feelings and your T's actions. Your T told you something, this made you feel judged, guilty and ashamed and you conclude that your T is judging, guilting and shaming. I'm saying that it isn't necessarily so. It could be (and most probably is) that many things she says that you perceive is judging and shaming but someone else would perceive completely differently. For some reason you perceive her words in this particular colour and the useful question to ask and explore is why do you perceive her word in that specific colour. Where do these feelings of guilt and shame come from? But this is a long process, it can take many sessions - many months or even years before something crystallises enough so that things start making sense to you and something changes. The difficult part is that during this whole time you have to be able to tolerate these feelings at least to some extent and I think this tolerance also increases over time.

So, if you bring it up today and she tells you that you want her to fail then you might tell her it could be true but you see no value right now discussing it but rather want to talk about how her saying all these things makes you feel. When you stick to talking about your feelings, whatever they are, then her reaction to that is what helps to determine whether she can be useful to you or you need someone else. If she is open to exploring to your negative feelings to her then I would say that stick with her. If she would rather want to change the topic then you probably need someone else.
Thanks for this!
atisketatasket, Out There, unaluna