Things have gone pear-shaped with my long-term T (Liz) over the last few months, so I am now seeing a former colleague of hers (Amy) who does DBT and EMDR and has a psychodynamic orientation. I have been considering EMDR for a year or so, but I wasn't sure if it would be helpful since I don't really have any big-T trauma in my past. Liz and Amy both suspect it will be, though, and I am ready to try pretty much whatever. My goal is to get to where I can go back to Liz, but it is still an open question about when/whether that will be possible. I keep getting triggered by Liz and having these spikes of suicidal ideation, and nothing I do seems to stop it from happening. Several people in my life seem to think that I need to cut ties with Liz because they believe she is hurting me. I don't want to stop seeing Liz permanently, but I also don't think it is wise to just ignore advice from several other people who care about me and are familiar with the situation.

It helps that Amy knows Liz and has worked with her before because Amy seems to agree with me that Liz is not a bad therapist. But we also talked today about how Liz isn't omniscient, and Liz may be doing things that are hurting me without meaning to or realizing it. I am annoyed that Liz doesn't seem to have been listening to me when I tried to tell her why some of the things that she has been doing are upsetting. I think Liz and I fell right into re-enacting relational traumas from my childhood, but she can't see it. I have the sense that Liz thinks the best thing to do is to have firm boundaries and stick to them, and try as I might, I can't get on board with that. It is reassuring that I am not crazy or self-destructive for wanting to go back to Liz, and Amy clearly seems to understand how well my relationship with Liz was working before. I have always thought that it was okay if Liz sometimes makes mistakes (because she is not perfect), and maybe I can expand my understanding of the scale of her mistakes and their forgivability. There is something tantalizing about going through hell with Liz but still having the possibility for a solid resolution at the end. I have never had that in this kind of relationship; it has always ended either poorly or abruptly (through death).

Amy and I talked a little about which memories or thoughts we will use for EMDR. Amy used a clogged pipe analogy, saying that trauma memories tend to get stuck, and you have to go back to the root source of the clog or else things will just keep getting stuck. She said Liz and I were probably functioning post-rupture by pulling little pieces of hair out (gross analogy, I know) but the source of the clog deeper in the pipe hadn't moved yet, so it will keep getting backed up. The part of me that has always wanted nurturing had been coaxed out of exile by Liz, but now Liz doesn't feel safe to me anymore and I feel trapped and a little tricked for having ever started down this path with her. I feel incredibly reassured that Amy seems to have an intuitive understanding of how this is all happening.

Before I left, I was telling Amy about how I am both fascinated and irritated that my wife can read Feeling Good by David Burns when she is feeling down and improve her mood almost immediately. I said that I hate CBT because it feels so invalidating, and she snorted and said that that's exactly why CBT doesn't work for people with borderline traits, because it is so invalidating. (I don't have borderline personality disorder, but I do have a few borderline traits.) My face probably immediately turned into the heart-eyes emoji because I get so tired of hearing how CBT can fix literally anything. Nothing makes me happier than realizing I will never, ever have to talk about cognitive distortions with her.