Quote:
Originally Posted by Lrad123
Yes, I agree that a T that does both types would be good, but I really am ultimately interested in the exploratory type. The fact that I fall apart between sessions and get negative likely shows that I’d benefit from more frequent sessions which is logistically not possible right now. I’m also high functioning outside of therapy (perhaps my T would disagree as it depends how you measure this) but have found that therapy has created a dimension of my life where I’m not high functioning, probably because I’m opening up to feelings, etc in a way that’s completely new to me.
I’m interested in your comment about how your T thought your emailing was not good. I can’t remember if you’ve elaborated on that before, but do you mind saying more? Obviously that’s something I’m really stuck on, so I’m curious about others with the same predicament.
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I just checked my email history. We started in Nov. Until end of May it was scheduling only. I'm not sure now what the trigger was to change.
I had thought it was the summer break which was 7 weeks in July/Aug. She said I could email during that cause it was so long (a combination of her and my holidays and we did do some skype).
I've just scanned some and it basically seems I was in crises (SUI) and emailed her for support. So basically I just reached out. And she responded. This was only very intermittent. It was genuine crises by anyones standard.
We knew the summer break would be difficult so she offered email contact in extremis to help me. I did keep to this except of course the definition of in extremis kept expanding. So I got use to contacting her when distressed.
She would always reply with an acknowledgment, a sentence relating to the email and a comment redirecting to the next session.
After the summer break she went back to the no emails. But she didn't tell me. For her we had an exception to no contact over the break and were just going back to normal. This was Sep. For me the two periods had elided and we had been in email contact since end of May. So I was like ??????? Big rupture.
She owned up to the process mistake but tried to row back to no contact. It triggered all sorts of abandonment bells. Plus I was seriously deregulated and had at least 2 more crises so I was like email demon. She generally responded in the same way. But we had many sessions about why I emailed, what got out of it, etc etc, the guilt I felt in still doing it and not being able to stop.
She tolerates it, said something like 'but you still do it' which I interpreted to her prefering I did not but she said she is not going to 'make' me stop. One of my reasons for sending was to have someone to bear witness to pain which didn't have before.
She's moved to only acknowledging the ones I am in distress I think. She doesn't think so so I could be wrong. Says she may have missed some cause she gets them together. Also she responds in hrs mainly. Unless she's away when she will tell me what the delay might be.
Forgot to add her reasoning was that I needed to bring these things to the sessions, to learn how to contain myself, that we'd up to 3x a week, to learn how to express myself in session, to feel in session.
Hope this helps. Happy to answer any questions.