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Old Feb 16, 2021, 12:35 PM
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ScarletPimpernel ScarletPimpernel is offline
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Member Since: Nov 2013
Location: US
Posts: 9,036
Quote:
Originally Posted by ElectricManatee View Post
You know, I feel like I learned how to handle this the hard way. My first/main therapist does deep relational work, and it was very helpful and emotionally satisfying until it became a nightmare (her enforcing new boundaries that didn't seem fair or collaborative to me, mostly). I left therapy with her for a while to do some of the newer trauma things with somebody else (EMDR, DBT, and a little IFS thrown in there). I think it is helping reduce the reactivity in my brain so I can do the "deep" work again. My first therapist became a trigger for me, which is pretty awful, and I needed EMDR to help put out all the fires in my brain that were being reignited. (Not my fault or your fault that the fires exist -- they are a consequence of trauma.) So if this feels intolerable with L right now, maybe you need something like that? With trauma, the body keeps the score, and when you bump into things that feel like the original relational trauma (which is bound to happen in the therapeutic relationship), you often can't talk yourself out of being upset. That's just not how trauma gets encoded.
Thanks. L does a little DBT and I think IFS (well she at least works with parts). I don't want to quit with her because she has helped so much the first year and a half. Since December, I feel like I've been beaten up emotionally in our relationship. Almost every time it's been worked through. This month, however, I feel like we've had so many ruptures that I can't even remember the ones besides the last two. So emotionally I'm holding all the pain, but logically I can't even remember why!

I have a session with L tomorrow. She wants to tell me her perspective. I hope she doesn't invalidate my experience. I know I was in the middle of a crisis so some things are blurry, but other things I remember really well.

Depending on how tomorrow goes, I'm thinking of giving her another chance. This was the first breakdown/crisis I've had with her in-person. I'm willing to chalk it up to not knowing how to navigate it since it was the first time. But if things go down similarly in the next breakdown, I'm afraid either she or I am not ready for it.
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