This week I was able to keep talking again and didn't get too triggered. A couple weeks ago I was very shut down because of people talking loudly in the hall way for most of my session and the last two times nobody has been there. Given that there have been other people around every other time I have seen her (and each time triggers me in to shut down mode) I wonder if she has asked her colleagues to keep to the other end of the building during my time slot. I hope so.
After talking a little bit about how the mother abandoned us to abusers a denial part switched out and was adamant there was no abuse. A younger part pushed through and pulled out the ACE and resilience questionnaires and went through each of the questions with the T. She said she had wanted to talk about those questionnaires with T and it was a good time to do it, to show that denial part that it really was bad. The child part doesn't feel any of the trauma, she only knows about it. I suppose the feelings about it all must be in here somewhere though.
We are still getting to know our T and she is still getting to know us. We are not going into anything too deep yet but we have touched on some hard stuff without the emotional parts of it there. I just hope T is able to keep other people away from the therapy room when it is our session time so we can keep feeling safe and not go into protective shut down.
It felt productive in that we were able to share more of our history with her and I suppose because her responses and reactions are always consistent I was able to trust her a little more. I do feel a lot better about continuing to see this T than I did a month ago. That's a good thing. I don't feel attached to her but I feel I can keep working with her. That too is a good thing. I suspect that next week I won't dread going.