Quote:
Originally Posted by Mully
I totally get your struggles with attachment. I’m there. I have a therapist with pretty tight boundaries- she is only available during office hours, and I am allowed to call her vm anytime, but she doesn’t reply or answer messages until she’s back in the office, which is only three days a week. That’s it. No email, no texts. That said, she does tell me some details about trips, and time away, but she says that’s because of the length of time I’ve been seeing her and my struggles.
Anyway, the point of me saying that is to hopefully show that I understand how hard it is. It can be devastating to never get a reply to my desperate vms, or have no way of contact. Yet on some level, it actually is healthier for me. I’ve had to learn to cope, and struggle. It’s not a lack of caring or concern on her part, it’s just boundaries. And the nice part about them is that it is consistent, even if I think they suck sometimes.
In moving from mc/ex-t you’ve learned and grown a great deal- or at least it seems so from your posts. But one thing I’ve seen come up as a theme is that you seem to want specific responses from people. If they don’t answer with the wording you like, you understandably get upset (as I would too) but then you will email/text/ask for a session until you get what you want. I don’t mean that in a harsh or uncaring way at all. It seems like language is really important for you and you are asking to get your needs met, which is great, but at the same time- life and people aren’t like that. I don’t think your T was trying to be uncaring or insensitive by his email. In his own way, in a style that he feels comfortable with, he was trying to reassure you. So for him, he really didn’t understand why you were so upset. Not because he lacks thoughtfulness or awareness, but because he acknowledged your concerns. It just wasn’t the exact answer you wanted. Maybe it’s something to think about?
Again, wishing you the best and not meaning to criticize at all.
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Thanks, Mully. I'm not seeing this as a criticism. It helps to have people point out patterns like that. I think it's just hard because MC was (is? we did have an exchange earlier this week) often so good at saying what I felt I wanted/needed to hear that it's hard switching to someone who either doesn't know what I want or isn't willing to give it. At the same time...I know that MC's frequent reassurance, while feeling good at the time, wasn't ultimately helping me in the long run. So, as much as I want to have those feelings, I also know that just looking for a T who tells me what I want to hear won't help me make progress.
You make a good point in saying that maybe T was trying to reassure me, but just in a less obvious way than MC. Like, it was nice to hear MC say he'd never abandon or reject me...but I also knew someone can't realistically make those sorts of promises in a professional relationship (different for, say, actual parent and child). So when T won't make promises like that to me, in some ways it hurts, but in other ways, it feels safer because he's not making promises he can't keep.
And if I say, for example, that if he's seeing me multiple times a week, I worry he'll get sick of me, I want him to say, "Of course I'm not sick of you. I like working with you." But instead, he'll say something like, "You're my job." In the sense of, it doesn't matter if he's sick of me or not, I'm paying him for his time, he's going to work with me. When I talked to my H about it, he referred to the furnace repair guy, and said that guy isn't going to be like, "Ugh, I'm so sick of these broken furnaces! And I had to go back to one a second time this week!" If he does, he needs to change jobs (same as a T).
But I think this is a good topic to bring up with T--I'll add it to the my insanely long list. Because learning to deal with not getting the exact response I want from him should also help me with that in real life.