I am beginning to wonder, after three years of working with this therapist, whether we are fundamentally actually a right fit with each other. I feel that she may be an intellectual and not naturally an empath who will be effective in doing the therapeutic work that I am looking for and need. I'll share a few recent scenarios with you guys.

I had a dream about a therapist and I shared it with her. In the dream, we were having a session. I was depressed in that session. I asked if she was upset with me because I'm depressed. In the dream, she said yes she is unhappy with me because I'm depressed. So the dream itself explicitly stated why she was unhappy with me. The reason is that I came into the session feeling depressed and she was finding it annoying. I shared this dream with the therapist in session.

Her immediate response? Her immediate response was along the lines, "Are you worried that I'm mad at you because of the recent texting incident?" I said, "What? No. That's irrelevant. In the dream, you were upset and not happy with me because I came in depressed and you found it a burden." Her response was like, "Oh." And that was it. No acknowledgement. No empathy or mirroring. No further prompting.

I had been holding back some of my depressive feelings for a few months because I didn't want to bring it to therapy. I was afraid she'd get all paranoid and make me see a therapist in-person, which would only overstimulate me and make me withdraw further. I had also been troubled by a statement that she made last March when I was suicidal. I won't iterate it here, but it's basically a big reason why I have been holding back my depressive feelings, too.

Anyway, I felt shot down in this interaction because the therapist jumped from "A" to "Z" in her immediate response. What I was sharing was rich of information that we could explore, but she didn't attempt to prompt. She jumped right in to proposing another possible interpretation of the dream.

The next session, I told her that I need to be able to take one step and one thing at a time in our work and cited this dream sharing incident with her. She said, "I was inviting you for further self-reflection." I said, "Yeah; and I totally welcome that invitation. I'm okay and appreciate your invitation and I value your being able to bring up other possible interpretations for us to consider. But the invitation is premature often times. I need to for us to be able to work with the interpretation that I'm sharing with you first before we jump into considering other possible interpretations that you're suggesting." While I was conveying that to the therapist, she said, "Yeah, yeah. Right, right." When I finished the sentence, she said, "I'm always going to invite you to consider other interpretations as part of our work." I reiterated, "Yeah, I totally invite that. But I don't want for you to jump from "A" - what I am saying to "Z" - what you're proposing right off the bat. I need to be able to sit with "A" and explore "A" interpretation first. No further response from her.

There's no indication if she understands what I'm getting at. And it was almost as if I was more mature than her in this interaction because as the patient, I was acknowledging and validating the importance of her invitation to consider other possible interpretations. But she, on the other hand, did not express any acknowledgment for the importance of taking one step and one thing at a time to sit with and explore the interpretation that I am presenting to her before jumping to "Z" interpretation immediately in her response. Her "Yeah, yeah. Right, right" - is that an indication that I can feel safe about continuing to share with her because moving forward, she would take it one step and one thing at a time? It's not explicitly clear to me because she didn't acknowledge it like I acknowledged the importance of her invitation.

And in this dream sharing interaction, I started wondering if she may be an intellectual - more so than an empath. Because more and more, it seems that her intellect has a faster reflex than her empathic side based on the responses that she gives. Her responses tend to be questions or analysis; she doesn't seem to give room for the emotional side of things to sink in.

I'll give another example.

I said to the therapist, "I've been abusing Advil to help me fall asleep every night the past week." She responded, "Advil isn't supposed to make you sleepy unless it's Advil PM." I said, "I don't know that Ibuprofen isn't supposed to do that. But it does make me sleepy and knocks me out. Do you remember how I shared with you about my night time fear of lying in bed not able to fall asleep?" She said, "Yeah." I can't remember how the conversation continued, but there wasn't much further exploration at this point.

In the next session, I brought this up and said to her that that interaction was odd. I said, "Does it matter whether Advil is supposed to make a person sleepy or not? For all that matter, I could tell you that I have a candy bar or break dance every night to help me fall asleep. It doesn't matter whether something is supposed to make me feel sleepy or not; the point is that I am abusing Advil every night. Imagine a patient telling the therapist, 'I take xyz alcohol to help me fall asleep every night,' and the therapist responds, 'But xyz alcohol only has 0.001 percent of alcohol content and isn't supposed to make you sleepy.' Uh, we're not lab partners in a chemistry class. That's not the point. Why don't you say something therapeutic along the lines, 'Aw, sounds like you've been having trouble falling asleep?' or 'Have you been having trouble falling asleep?'"

She responded, "Yeah. I asked that question because I didn't know that you were not aware that Advil isn't supposed to make you sleepy."

Umm, okay. But why does it matter whether I know or do not know that Ibuprofen isn't supposed to make me sleepy? It's like a therapist responding, "Break dancing isn't supposed to make you sleepy unless you're dancing to a a soothing instrumental music." Wtf??

Talking and sharing with this therapist has been feeling so... exhausting and rigorous. I often find myself having to justify myself to her, which is very stressful and untherapeutic. I confided in a friend and a coworker who is a clinical social worker. And they said that a therapeutic response should be to find out whether I'm having trouble falling asleep. "Are you having trouble falling asleep?" "Sounds like you're having a difficult time going to bed?" They said that the therapist sounds like an intellectual and not an empath. They also said that she may not actually be a right fit for me because the therapist was trained and worked as a physician - MD, general internist all her life. She only started practicing therapy in 2008 and she didn't have a formal education at a counseling or clinical school. She was trained at a psychoanalytic institute.

I don't want to question the therapist's skills. She is a highly educated woman who has written tons of research papers and is well-respected in academia. But the few people who I've confided in said that it doesn't mean she makes a good therapist or is a natural empath. And that worries me a great deal.

I value the therapist's insight and ability to consider other possibilities. But she feels overly analytical and intellectual to me at times. And I would really like for there to be more balance with the emotional, right brain side of things. We're doing psychodynamic therapy, not strictly psychoanalysis. I wonder if maybe she is more suited to be a psychoanalyst rather than a psychodynamic therapist?? I wonder if maybe her intellect has a quicker reflex than her right brain??

I said to her that I need for there to be more empathy, mirroring, paraphrasing, emotional feedback, acknowledgement, and validation in our work. She wanted to analyze my need for that. I said, "I don't think that the degree of my need for it is pathological. It's basic communication and therapeutic skills. If you want someone to engage in analysis or think about interpretations that you are inviting them to consider, you have to first show them they you're on the same page as them - that you understand what they just said and where they're coming from. It's basic." She didn't seem to appreciate this. She didn't acknowledge the importance of this in therapy and communication in general.

I feel like I am at wits end. Because even while trying to fix all this with her, we can't even seem to communicate effectively with each other.

The first year into our working together, I gave the therapist a feedback, "You tend to give these textbooky psychoanalytic explanations, but I don't get it because you don't connect it back to me." She said, "Yeah, you have a point. I do have that tendency." Back then, she was mindful of it and actually connected her explanations to me in future interactions. I have a feeling that if I gave her that feedback now that we're three years into our working together, she would probably respond, "Some of those explanations are hard to hear. Maybe that's why you've trouble understanding them."

I say this because I feel that when I give her feedback on what works best for me and what doesn't, she puts it back on me and analyzes it or questions it. Look, I know that I am the patient in the relationship, so technically, I am the defective one. But it doesn't mean that anything and everything that I share is pathological and comes from within me and that there isn't actually anything concretely going on in the way therapy is conducted.

Whew. Thoughts?