So I just gave more context to what happened in my reply to LT. I think the surprise for me was that until those terrible few sessions, I truly believed that all that was keeping us from fully healing this issue was my lack of courage in bringing it up. (Because I have a lot of shame for feeling so deeply upset about this and feel that a better version of me would have just been able to let it go.)

I was fully confident that once I brought it up, she’d handle it just great. But instead it was horrible. She wasn’t vulnerable or real at all, she hid behind some stiff, bizarre clinical persona that I’d never before seen. She seemed incredibly irritated by my intense feelings and was quite reactive in a way I’d never known her to be. It was actually quite scary, she was unrecognizable.

So of course I eventually went into frightened kid mode and apologized for everything, trying to get her back.

It’s messed up.

I want to pivot to a warm summative few last sessions. But I’m kind of wary of her now. Which, again, is devastating because this is so different from what I’ve known all along.