Quote:
Originally Posted by growlycat
I’m struggling right now because the holidays and being with my family of origin makes me mentally unwell. I really wonder why I do this to myself.
I’ll be returning to the state I live in soon but that means seeing my therapist again. I went into the holidays kind of fragile because of a jealousy situation on my part.
My last session before the holidays I saw my t. But, he ran a bit late with his patient before me and I heard them laughing. When they walked out it was clear that my t and this patient have a really warm relationship. Kashi even said his parting catchphrase to this guy. I don’t know why i thought it was something he only said to me. I feel stupid. During session I didn’t bring it up. After all t didn’t do anything wrong.
Leaving session I stopped in the ladies room. So when I was exiting the building t was letting in the next patient again they were clearly fond of each other.
I feel stupid for ever feeling special in therapy. I am one of many. Not sure where I am going with this post. Not sure how much I am confusing therapy pain with family of origin issues. Just in pain and so very tired of hurting my whole life.
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I so relate to these feelings you have about Kashi, and his other patients. It is so painful, and I think the pain originates through a glitch in therapy and not a glitch in you( us). The problem is that it plays pretend of a very exclusive relationship that rings buttons socialized into us for what love partly is.
Like going to a movie or reading a book, we suspend our disbelief, take a leap of faith, and enter into a world of imagination aided and abetted by the more knowing T. This is really good, until a reality check happens like you experienced, and then the pain can be epic.
I think in session a lie both is and is not told. We "know"there are other patients but be dont know. It is rare in any other life experience to have that level of intimacy with someone that isnt reciprocal and we have no social experiences and training for therapy outside of its own little world.
Your relationship with Kashi would look the same way to a different patient, if they were coming out of the bathroom, and saw Kashi fondly saying his farewell catch phrase to you.
I have soaked in love from my T and his horror at the trauma I experienced one minute, and got the boot to cry in his stairwell while he saw other patients and forgot about me the next, and deeply questioned the ethics of therapy, the humanity of it. It has helped me though. It is aways about our relationships with ourselves, and never about the T. The hope is we take what we feel about T into the real world and recreate the good parts with our new skills?
Anyway, I am sorry and I get it. Kashi seems less sincere if he does it with everyone, and that is a healthy socially appropriate reaction to a socially unique, artificial situation.
My last thought is a bit eccentric and weird. . . but I feel for my T's wife. He gives such love and almost seductive insight during my session, and presumably everyone else's. It would freak me out if my husband did that all day.