Quote:
Originally Posted by ArtieTheSequal
Hi everybody. I decided today that I'm ready to come around here again. I miss y'all! I never stay away long. 
LT, I just read this and the first thing that came into my head was that I really respect both your willingness and your ability to do this relationship-related work with Dr T.
Because I couldn't do it anymore. For such a long time, the therapy relationship with L was my work, and when I had the realization back in November that I had begun insisting on only seeing her monthly it was because I was just trying to hold onto my fantasy version of her - but that I wasn't really doing any work anymore and didn't want to be (I pretended pretty well though ha) - that was when I knew it was time to go. Well there was other stuff too but that was the crux of it I now think.
Incidentally, it's funny to me now, that she was right even though I didn't believe it - that in the past every time I'd asked her "how will I know when it's time to stop?" and her answer was always "You'll just know." Yep, she was right, I knew. It's been 5 months now (as of yesterday) since my last session, and I no longer have any desire to go back, even briefly. It helped a lot that I finally processed my feelings about leaving through writing poems during the month of April.
Oops I didn't mean to type that much.  |
All good, Artie! It's nice to see you on here. It's good that you knew when it was time to stop with L and that you can see you made the right decision
I know you're not suggesting I end with him, just sharing your own experience and saying you'd struggle to work with him. The thing is, he's very helpful in a few key areas for me, the biggest one right now being with my daughter. And that to me is most important.
It's just particularly difficult for me right now because it had felt like we were in a really good place, and he even *said* recently "we're doing amazing with the rupture piece" (like with avoiding ruptures. I don't know that this is actually a rupture at this point--in his email reply, he emphasized that he was just "mildly irritated" by my texted and repeated "mildly." And that it's not an issue for him anymore.
The problem for me is, I had checked in with him about it, and he said it wasn't a problem at all. Apparently, he expected me to be psychic and know at what point it would become "mildly irritating" to him. And now it feels difficult to trust when he says things are fine. But he said that if things aren't, he'd bring up something early on, as he did here, and "f people can just say something early and kindly, we can move on." It just triggers something in me (coming from him or people in my outside life) that I clearly need to work on more.
Anyway, now I'm the one who said more than I'd intended to say....I do appreciate your insight!