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Originally Posted by comrademoomoo
LT, I think the most important factors in your expressing concern and anxiety about your therapist's well-being are being lost. I don't think the useful consideration is about the nature of human caring or where the focus of the therapy is flowing or whether he is annoyed or whether clients can comment on a therapist's life, etc. These sound like distractions to me and in that sense they do take the work away from being about you.
For me, the therapeutic work here would be about the interpersonal interactions in the relationship e.g. what are my projections here? Is my concern for his well-being actually an expression of concern for my own well-being? If I think he is struggling, am I actually the one who is struggling?
Similarly, the intrapersonal dynamic is potentially being highlighted for you. Are there aspects of your self who are worried that you are going to let yourself down? Is your inner critic questioning your mother self? These are guesses of course, but the conflict and concern which is showing itself in the relationship could be a reflection of your inner conflict and concern.
It doesn't sound like he treats your anxieties and concerns as information which both of you can use to help you understand your internal world. He sounds stuck in an anxiety-reassurance loop with you which isn't working for you - mostly because he can't even reassure you sufficiently. I think identifying patterns or being aware of replays (such as the ex-MC stuff or parental relationships) goes some way to explaining the familiarity of your anxieties, but it doesn't sound like it is deep enough to really help you get inside those feelings and find a new course for yourself.
This is a very long winded way for me to say that I get the impression that he repeatedly misses important information and opportunities.
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I would agree with this. He said at one point today how he wondered if my email was a test of sorts. Well, OK, so what if it was? Isn't that something we could explore? Like, what is going on with me there?
I tried to explain some of it, but not sure he got it? As in how if I feel disconnected from someone important to me, I try to find a way to make the connection again, even if it means pushing the other person and risking rejection. Which apparently he finds to be annoying. But it seems an important pattern to examine. His annoyance (sorry, "irritation" comes first though, it seems).
I had this thought just now after reading your post. I doubt he'd go for this. But I wonder what might happen if for, say, a month (some set span of time), he would be OK with me just emailing whenever I had the desire to do so, no comment on it being irritating (he's only said that recently), maybe no charge, or perhaps a set charge for the month? And he'd agree to respond to them, as long as they weren't too excessive. And we could sort of see how things play out?
I find when he is responsive in a supportive way to my emails (and in session, I guess), I suddenly feel less of a need to send them. It's like if I know I send something, he'll say something kind and supportive back (how he's generally been during the pandemic), then I can almost tell myself what he'll say. And I don't need to reach out.
I don't know if that makes any logical sense at all, but I think it has to do with feeling secure in a relationship. And I felt pretty secure with him for a long stretch there, and now that security feels very threatened. So I'm trying to get back to that safe place, but it's irritating him, and he's not responding in a safe way, so then I try even harder to get to that place, and he's even more distant.
You make some other good points, too, but this is just what my brain went to in reading your comments. Hm, maybe I feel like he has changed in some ways since resuming in person? In certain ways, I feel more connected, but in other ways, he seems more distant.
I'm even thinking of ways he replied to emails a few months ago, where he seemed fine with him. Even "non-urgent" ones, like when I was at my parent's place at the beach, and he encouraged me to go out and do something despite Covid risk. And I emailed to tell him I went out to a taproom for a couple hours. And he replied enthusiastically about it the next morning. That's a random example, I don't tend to send him those kinds of emails. They tend to be brief requests for support, like finding out D's assessment scores, stuff like that.
Is there some reason my emails have become irritating now? I would say he was putting up with it and not saying anything, but he has always said he'd let me know as soon as something became irritating, and he prides himself on being honest. So what changed? Does he think that because he sees me in person usually (except Wednesday...which is a big part of why I emailed), I shouldn't get any extra support? Or am I just bothering him in some other way right now, so anything I do is irritating? Maybe he's really not OK with my wishing him a happy birthday? This really started around that time, it seems.
I would ask him, but I don't know if he's self-aware enough to realize. He'd likely claim he hasn't changed, but he *always* replied to my emails in the past, and he needed a request to confirm over the weekend (like 30 hours later) to respond to one--then it was just "confirming receipt"--and this most recent one he took >24 hours to reply to and just said "confirming receipt." Usually he'd at least say something like "Thanks for sharing. We can discuss more in session," but generally more than that, like "I'm sorry you're struggling with this. I know it's very difficult to hear news like that." and then something.
I worry he's just sick of me. But maybe, in the words of singer Matthew Sweet, I'm just "Sick of Myself," and he's picking up on and projecting that?