I’m really struggling with the emotions and feelings that are being caused by being in therapy and I’m beginning to wonder whether just the process of being is therapy is actually retraumatising me.
I have a very disorganised attachment style all stemming from childhood abuse and neglect.
I have struggled all of my life to build healthy attachment and relationships with people. I can be avoidant, anxious or a complete mix of the two. I often exhibit a push-pull dynamic which obviously always ends up in disaster.
However therapy has allowed me to start building a deep but insecure attachment to my therapist and this relationship in itself has become extremely painful. The deeper the attachment the more painful it feels. Even without ruptures, just the act of just having an attachment to my T is distressing and painful. The stronger and deeper that attachment with my T, the more my child parts desperately feel overwhelming parental transference and scream for him to meet my unmet needs. And when he doesn’t do that it feels like a repeat of my childhood and I am being retraumatised all over again. Realistically I know he can’t meet those needs but my child parts don’t understand that and the whole therapeutic relationship becomes unbelievably painful.
The thought that I have to learn to meet those needs myself is not something I can accept, it is not enough for me. I need someone else to tend to those needs. I am also so ashamed of all of this that talking about it is not something that is possible. Therefore is therapy just a retraumatisation exercise for me and something that I am never going to benefit from? If so, then what the hell to I do as nothing else works either.