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Originally Posted by Favorite Jeans
She really just didn’t get it. She just didn’t seem able to wrap her head around the idea that something like that could hurt me so much. And I felt that her inability to understand that meant that she had no idea of the power she held in my life, even though I’d really tried to tell her.
I think what I really wanted from her was some version, of “wow, I really messed up there.” I got apologies and “if I’d realized it would hurt you I’d have done it differently” but all that mixed in with a lot of stubbornness and flashes of anger and making me take apart what meaning I assigned to it. Eventually I just let it rest. As I saw it, she’d made a huge mistake and I was shocked that she couldn’t just see that and own it.
So that’s the long version. That’s why things feel so raw and difficult.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Favorite Jeans
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.
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I had a similar thing going on with my ex-T, except it was more pronounced in our relationship: we had a number of ruptures that never quite healed, the last one (or rather, attempts to somehow fix or at least understand it) taking up the last 3-4 months of my therapy with her (after which I gave up and terminated) plus another 2-3 months of trying to look back and understand a little later. Yes I was stupidly desperate to fix, if not the relationship then at least how I can think of it. It was ultimately a failure, and even now, almost a year later, I'm still not 'over' it.
And it was mainly the 'not getting it' part that made it worse and worse and worse. And that stiff clinical persona you mention elsewhere. She did get vulnerable every now and then, and that helped when it happened, but I feel kind of guilty and ashamed of saying that because, in hindsight, it was probably not a controlled thing but something I wasn't really supposed to see. And she never got
curious about why I was so hurt
Oh, and the 'frightened kid' mode trying to get her back. And failing, of course, because the 'angry kid' was always nearby, ready to jump at every perceived threat, and the therapist tended to get into fights with that one rather than trying to help (or notice at all) the 'frightened' part. Utter rejection.
Anyhow, another thing that seems likely in hindsight, that it wasn't really 'not getting it', but kind of getting it on a cognitive level, but for whatever reason she couldn't cope with the realisation. Like, as my new T pointed out, using words that she 'retraumatised' me, but apparently failing to acknowledge the weight of that, and her responsibility in it. And she revealed stuff that lets me have some guesses as to why it might have been difficult for her, but all very vague and sometimes contradictory, so ultimately unsatisfying, and it seems pointless to even try to get a confirmation.
So your situation might be a milder version of this? Maybe your T is more aware that she ****ed up than she lets on? Or disappointed in herself that maybe she didn't do as well as she hoped? Or just can't figure out how to retire properly, lol.
Seeing how badly I handled my thing, I probably shouldn't give advice, but what did work for me in terms of last sessions (two singular ones) was to
1. write out any frustration / anger (that was likely to get out of hand if trying to repress it in session) in email (while also explaining what I'm trying to achieve), and with that (somewhat) out of the way
2. imagine what I'd do in a few weeks (after getting through the despair) in order to salvage as much of the wreck as possible, and try to focus on doing a bit of that in the last session.
If that makes sense. Obviously, your situation and your needs are different. But if your T responds well to emails, that might be an easier way to get your point across. Even if she doesn't, for me it was worth saying / writing down some things even when they obviously went unheard, just for the experience of having done it and the world still standing.
Of course, it helped that she probably also tried to make the most of these last sessions and maybe made extra effort to not get defensive? There was one thing I said in the very last session that only hit me afterwards just how badly that could have gone. It's always up to both parties, I guess, the good and the bad.
BTW, semi-random oddity: no experience with xT's family showing up, but I had a nightmare in which
someone showed up in my session, my best guess being that it was her daughter (but she denied, then somehow turned into a monster)