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sunrise said:I think there are many ways of doing therapy, not one "correct" way. Your T can give you guidance if you could be doing something in therapy differently that would faciliate progress--e.g. giving him more feedback, etc. Similarly, you can tell him what would help you. Pachy, RE what you wrote about the psychiatric interview, I think most therapists would be the first to agree that there are two people involved in therapy. It's a relationship.

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I think I am seeing more clearly now that the deeper the wound the more skilled the therapist must be. Your suggestion about asking the T for guidance is probably a good one. I react to that sort of thing with the instinct that it would be completely stupid to ask. It would be asking for abuse. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." I seem to be so immersed in reactions to my own childhood that I don't realize how extensive it is. I have written here before about not being able to distinguish between my mother and my therapist == or more accurately, between what he might do and what my mother did do. I am so soaked in my past experience that it is nearly impossible to get beyond it. And maybe most therapists, not having a similar experience, simply do not understand how someone with that experience reacts. They do not see the need to take extra care, cannot believe that someone is not faking.

My mother would take any indication of neediness on our part as an attack on her, so that we learned never to make any expression of that need . This may not be relevant to the present discussion, but I remember something she used to do: if she ever caught one of us with our thumb in our mouth (this was before pacifiers) she would angrily jerk it out. This accompanied, of course, by words of hate and condemnation. This stuff soaks into one and is forgotten as a specific cause of anxiety...