Quote:
Originally Posted by fille_folle
My T is not blank slate, but she is relatively hard to read. I think it is a combination of her personality, boundaries, and perhaps the type of therapy she practices (psychodynamic).
I've experienced negative transference towards her due to this, though only occasionally and not as an ongoing thing. The issue is that when I was abused as a child, the abusers often had a callous disregard for my feelings. When I cried during abuse, or as the result of abuse, there was often no reaction. One of my parents, who was one of the abusers, also suffers from mental illness and as a result, frequently failed to be emotionally responsive to me in general. This was pretty devastating as the parent was my primary caregiver.
I find myself in what feels like an impossible, no-win situation in therapy. I tell my T about my traumas, and she responds with appropriate commentary about how the experiences have shaped my life and where to go from here. However, her unemotional affect when delivering her lines sometimes feels very bad. It's like I'm reliving not only the traumas, but the non-reaction by abusers as well as caregivers to my pain. Intellectually, I know that the way I feel about her response is being heavily influenced by my abuse experiences. But I can't seem to prevent the feelings of worthlessness that get dragged up.
I don't really know how to deal with this. I like my T, and while there's a part of me that wishes she would be different about this, I also respect that she interacts with me as she is able and thinks is therapeutic. I can't imagine any of my T's clients being damaged due to thinking she cared deeply or in a special way for them, only for her to turn around and prove otherwise (that seems to happen a lot).
I won't ever discuss this with her. I feel very ashamed of my reaction to her demeanor. I'm not exactly sure what is causing such intense shame, but it's definitely very powerful. And the thought of discussing this with her makes me want to disappear. I have been in therapy for close to 14 years now. I have never brought up anything interpersonal with a T before, and I can't imagine starting now.
I don't really know what I'm looking for with this post. I guess I'm just wallowing in shame and hurt feelings over imaginary crap, and thought sharing might relieve some of my angst.
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I have had this exact same thing with my previous T. My experience of my female parental unit is of her as being "nothing". She wasn't any good for anything at all, certainly not for stopping abuse or emotionally supporting me with anything at all. When my ex-T was impassive and blank about difficult things shared, I experienced her as "nothing" and it was awful. It triggered up all the old responses to my mother, which I was unable to separate from T (intellectually I could, emotionally and reactively I couldn't).
There is absolutely no need for you to feel shame about your reaction to your therapist. These feelings are not in any way shameful. Your response is woven into your neural networks. Your brain is protecting you the only way it knows how, using the template it made in childhood. "In x situation respond with y". You are responding the way human beings have adapted to respond to childhood traumas. You are just being a perfectly imperfect human. There is nothing bad or wrong or shameful about your normal-for abnormal-environments neurological responses at all. They are just doing their rightful job. (Yay, neurons!)
Is your T a trauma T? My ex T was a trauma T who was very up to date with the latest in neurological understandings etc. Here's what I did when I was in the situation you are facing: I told my T. I said (something along the lines of) "Last week when you didn't respond to my pain it felt like the same way my mother responded to me, and it triggered me into that nothing space. It was really hard."
I had shared many times about the nothing space, so she instantly knew what I meant. She responded with "[deep breath] Oooookay, that makes sense, I understand what happened more now. We need to think of some ways to ensure that doesn't happen again."
So we did, and it never happened again.
Fillefolle, I know this will be hard for you to address with your T but is so very, very important that you find a way to do that. It really will impede your progress if you don't - those parts of you (we all have parts!) that are stuck in those trauma responses will stay stuck there because they will not feel at all safe.
It's a neurological thing, not a cognitive thing. When it happens again you will get triggered again and respond in the same way, because that kind of trauma response comes from the amygdala rather than the temporal lobes, and the amygdala overrides cognition when it gets activated.
Again, this is nothing to be shameful about at all, on the contrary it is entirely predictable behavior given the circumstances! Shame be gone. Your brain did an awesome kob of keeping you safe when your parent was unresponsive. Just needs to download a bit of an update for current day life, tis all!