I confronted my therapist, I thought it was the thing to do. I could have kept my feelings turned off and unexpressed, so it's not like polite behavior was impossible for me. It was therapy, after all, I thought. But eventually she terminated me saying she did "not have the emotional resources" to continue.

The termination triggered enormous feelings of rejection and abandonment, deeper than anything I knew I had at the time. More than 50 years of therapy on and off and I hadn't gotten to those deep feelings. Six months after the termination I had some recollection of the same feelings from my childhood connected with my family members.

I got along for 5 years without therapy but was having an extremely difficult time a couple of months ago, decided to try to find a therapist again, and lucked out a little perhaps -- one picked up the phone directly and did not send it to voice mail. Otherwise I very well might not have left a message.

I told her I was not looking for any more therapy or help with my internal states but did want feedback and some help with my adaptation. especially my social interactions with other people. However, several weeks ago, when I was describing the distress I had at the termination with the previous therapist, some dots or threads seemed to connect -- back to an abandonment trauma and terror when I was being given anesthesia in the operating room when I was 3. It was back in 1950 and medical people weren't sensitive to little children's emotional needs back then.

So, now, I have the specific event that I can look back to when I experience social anxiety, terror, and anger. When I experience feelings like that now, it helps me to remember that event (now in the past, and I DID survive), step back, and take the real current social situation into account somewhat, more than my previous, lifelong response of mostly numbing out, or else expressing what may have seemed to other people overly intense emotions that were likely triggered from that original, unprocessed event and the then similar feelings which went unprocessed, too, throughout my childhood from dysfunctional aspects of my family life. So when I experienced disappointment and anger toward the previous therapist(s), it was probably a repeat of that old, unprocessed anger. And I thought that we were supposed to resolve that -- but the old anger was, of course, long ago and unresolvable -- although it may be processable, if opened up -- MAYBE and SOMETIMES. I don't think therapists know how to tell how and why and for whom, though.

It may be that the therapist triggering what had been so well defended that I could not access it was something that was needed? Except that -- I am 73 and how am I going to make a new life for myself now? Well, I have to try, my physical health is good and what else is there to do?

I don't know if my experience can help you at all. I think it has helped me to have that specific event that was like a flashbulb memory, only the feelings were unprocessed and dissociated, I guess, when the anesthesia took effect. Before that came together with some other experiences from my childhood, the feelings were like this whole amorphous thing, although it had been getting somewhat less intense in the last year. I can well imagine that with infant neglect there are no specific cognitive memories -- but perhaps you can imagine one anyway? A time when you were hopeful about the world and your caregiver, and then just gave up? SO PAINFUL. I get that. Still processing that one, too.

I'm also still angry -- legitimately I believe -- that it took so long for therapy to be "helpful", if it turns out that it is, and the "it may get worse before it gets better" lasted DECADES. Lives are limited in real time, if not in theoretical therapy time.

That's my perspective and experience, anyway.