Sitting with pain and grief are important and good approaches.

For me it has also been important to get out with friends. Some of that is a distraction effect, I won’t be feeling the loss of one thing if I’m out enjoying another. But some of it is actually addressing the underlying problem which is loneliness and feeling “not known.” It is as thought somehow my pain sets me apart, makes me not friend material and that therefore only this one person (my T) can ever give me a sense of connection? (It took until around year 5 of therapy to get to the regular going out with friends stage, so I didn’t, you know, “just do it.”)

To be sure, while I do talk about lots of painful stuff and real stuff with my friends, I definitely don’t do it in the same way that I would in therapy and there are things I only talk about in therapy. Still, it has made a big difference in the “ache of transference” times, the sense of unmet longing for connection.

In my life, that transference probably came about because my T is this huge magnet for unmet needs from a long way back. The ache isn’t actually about HER as such anyway. I mean, that’s the nature of transference, right? She has met some of those unmet needs for me and has helped me understand what they are, and now... I kind of have to start to displace those needs that were displaced onto her and try to meet them elsewhere.

(And, yeah, continue to feel the pain and grieve that I don’t and won’t have a mom and stuff.)