Thanks for the responses and encouragement!
The good news is, we talked about where this anxiety/fear might come from, how paralysing it is, and what might help to keep it from interfering with my everyday life (not much success on the latter, though). The bad news is, we focused on this general fear of 'badness', and childhood memories, not on her stance on the specific issues that I'm afraid of discussing, so now I'm starting to worry that this means she prefers to avoid those issues. Funnily enough, even when she asked what might help to make it safer between the two of us, it didn't occur to me to bring this up, so I guess if anyone was avoiding discussing those issues then it was me, and this worry is a 'transference' from ex-T. Will have to email her about it, though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by here today
What I found, with my bad ex-T experience, was that it triggered a very deep, hidden, apparently dissociated section of feelings that I had from my family of origin. It took 6 months of feeling horrible, plus being abandoned by the ex-T and not trusting any others, for the feelings from my family to be "released". So I could have said the experience with the T "released" the old feelings, but it was far from that easy and it was also intolerable and dysfunctional-making. 5 years later and I'm still dealing with it, and the original stuff, without any help and not very successfully.
So, I wonder -- is there anything that could be like that for you? Any trauma or family dysfunction at all, that perhaps you don't/can't really feel or know? If so -- getting that stuff "released" without all the re-traumatization (again) might relieve some of what you are trying to do now with new T?
Or, is there a way to talk around the subject of bad/harmful T's so that you could lay some ground work and/or get some clues about new T's feelings about things like that?
I know, for me, I still don't trust any of those people. But, given that you've started with this new T, I hope things work out for you. It doesn't seem like it ought to be THAT hard for them to catch on -- except there may still be a lot of them with the same kind of unresolved trauma, and how to tell? Please keep us posted.
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So far she seems good with the xT stuff. She confirmed some of my suspicions / validated some of my feelings on the stuff I shared, but she can also can provide therapist perspective on some of the difficulties xT might have had, all without 'taking sides'. The main issue is my feeling stupid for being so hung up on xT in the first place, because who's this woman to have this sort of effect on me, and also xT acting like I should just 'get over' this stuff, because transference blah-blah. This new T seems to grasp that it's possible to have transference but also have a legitimate issue in the here-and-now at the same time, and also that emotions generated by a transference won't miraculously disappear just because I'm reminded that it's transference..
Re: possibly dissociated feelings - I'll get back to this later.