Oh holy hell. I haven’t posted an IST in a while, but today was too crazy not to catalogue. The system is that I call when I arrive at the office, then L will come and unlock the door and walk me back to the office. Today right as my phone began to rang he opened the door. As we were walking back to his office, he asked how I was doing. I kind of just laughed wryly.
He does the billing stuff (takes him like 20 seconds), then he sits down. I told him that I’d been struggling. I had a fight with a friend last night, and during me telling L about the fight, I told him something that happened between my husband and I that is highly correlated with what I’ve been working on in therapy the last couple of months. So after I recounted the fight, L takes a beat and says, “what else is going on?” I ended up getting really emotional last night, which is really odd for me, and I had told him that. Yet he didn’t say anything to acknowledge the 3-4 minute story I told him. I took a few deep breaths, paused for maybe about 30 seconds, and said “well I could either answer the question the way you intended or I could answer based on my current experience.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well frankly I’m kind of pissed off at you.”
“Why?”
“Well I just got finished telling you this whole thing and you have nothing to say?”
He then asked me if the flow of our sessions since we began working together. Typically I tell him what’s been going on since I saw him last, he asks a few questions about symptomatology, then we’ll do some EMDR processing. Has that changed at any point? I said no. “Okay so then you know that I’m trying to get a full picture of what’s going on. That’s why I asked the question I did. You mentioned something else really important during what you just recounted.”
“I know, and I was getting to that. I wanted to talk about the setting event first.”
“Okay. But have I ever not validated what you were saying?” And at this point I don’t remember exactly what he said but I got a bit of a feeling of being scolded by a parent. It was a mix of how he asked that question and his tone.
“I literally just told you that I felt invalidated.”
He said that was never his intention, and started to launch into something else. He cut himself off mid sentence and said “okay, and now you’re shutting me out.” I definitely was.
I believe it was at this point that I began to cry. I don’t typically cry in session anymore, though the last month or so there were some sessions where some tears may stream down my face. Today I was sobbing.
He commented that he still wanted to know what else had happened yesterday, because he didn’t understand where all of this was coming from. I told him about what happened with my husband in more detail and talked about how dysregulating it was.
We talked about how my reaction to things at the moment is my right brain trying to protect me from the magnitude and reality of the trauma I’ve been processing in EMDR. For reference what we’re processing is most likely the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I acknowledged that I was definitely in emotional mind, that I’m hijacked at the moment.
“I could tell from the moment you walked through the door. Today is different, daisy. You’re not yourself.” Then he was talking about how it makes sense that I’m upset. The things we’ve been working on are difficult for any person. “And so you’re angry. I get it. And you’re projecting that anger onto me.”
That upset me even more because it felt that it was him not claiming agency for what he did. I very quickly said “okay my dude, we’re not going to go there today.”
We pivoted instead to the event with my husband. This isn’t the first time recently that something like this happened. I said that I think about this trauma at some point every day. He seemed caught off guard by that. I said that perhaps I hadn’t been doing a good job of expressing how difficult things have been recently. I also talked a bit about how I can’t stand silence right now. How every time it’s silent, my mind goes to the trauma. He decided in that moment to use intentional silence, which I appreciated the irony. I wasn’t upset.
trigger warning, sui:
He said that he could see that I was truly struggling and asked if maybe I needed a break. I didn’t know if he meant in that minute or what, so I asked him to clarify. Currently I’m seeing him twice a week, so he said that maybe going to once a week for a while may be beneficial.
“I logically heard you saying that once a week would be for my benefit, but the only thing I heard you say is ‘oh I don’t want to deal with daisy anymore’.” I did make a comment that sitting here talking to him was growth for me. I have stormed out of sessions and terminated with therapists for less grievous incidents.
He jotted something down on his clipboard, which he’d been doing sporadically throughout the session. He normally only takes notes when he’s asking about symptoms. I said how I wondered what he was writing, and how my brain just assumed it was something deprecating toward me. He didn’t comment. I didn’t really want to know what he was writing.
It was toward the end of session, so we called my husband to solidify a safety plan for tonight. L and I decided that it probably wasn’t safe enough for me to drive home in my emotional state, so H got a Lyft to come pick up the car and me. I ended up waiting in the waiting room for my husband to arrive. L had asked my husband to reach out when we got home.
H and I decided to make a couple of quick stops on the way home, so L ended up reaching out to me for an update. I told him I was with H and running errands. This was his reply (errors have been corrected):
“Okay good. Thank you very much for letting me know!
I want you to know that you are an extremely important person. You may not believe that, but you are. This stuff is hard, and you have been working extremely hard. We have breached the dam but we have so much more to go. This will continue to be hard at the moment, but it is going to get better.
Whatever your decision about therapy going forward, I completely respect it and I will help you in any way that I can. I sincerely care about your success and as long as you continue to give it one hundred percent, I am completely committed as well.
I hope you have a good night and are able to rest this weekend.”
I’m just exhausted. I’ve been dissociating off and on all night. Both H and L said it was obvious. I’m just going to be gentle with myself tonight. I’m hopeful that tomorrow will be a better day. If anyone chooses to comment or reach out, at this time I’d prefer support rather than an analysis of either my therapist or myself.