I told him trauma is too hard and I don't want to do it anymore, and I sat with my arms folded for 10 minutes.
T said he's not sure where to go because he doesn't want to talk about something I don't want to.
I said I'm not sure if it's true that I don't want to work on it any more. I said I think I wanted to express anger at him because I didn't leave last session feeling grounded and then I had a panic attack the next day. I wanted to say "why didn't you make me safe?".
I told him I wanted to ghost him or cancel and worry him. He asked why I wanted to worry him. I said because I want to know he cares. He said that could link to a number of things - he had agreed with me that we shouldn't hug last week (because my kids had just had a sickness bug) and he hasn't 'made me safe'. I said Yes, both of those and also you didn't answer my last email. I said I also wanted to punish him for not showing he cared. Like I did to my Dad when I ran away from home.
T said what are you trying to communicate with your absence that you can't say with your presence? I said "when you see me I always seem so together, I seem okay. So maybe I want to communicate that I'm not okay". T said that made sense and reminded me I had put that in my email - that I don't even cry in therapy.
T said he sees this as like a whirlpool with lots of things going round - my childhood trauma is in there, my first therapist is in there and my mum's exes which I mentioned in the email but haven't really talked about before. We talked about that a little but need to explore that more.
We talked about grounding techniques for when I'm triggered again and we talked about dark thoughts I have when the equilibrium is knocked off kilter.
At the end we had a warm hug. T said "you have lost a lot of hair!" Because I had like 5 inches off my hair and obviously he's used to a face full of hair when we hug.
It was a good session.