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LonesomeTonight · Jul 04, 2022, 05:22 AM

I do appreciate the feedback. I'm aware that he's not the right fit for me in certain ways. After he's back from vacation (don't want to get into it this week), I need to have a discussion with him about the direction of my therapy, whether what he sees as my goals align with what mine are and if he has other thoughts on how he could help me get there. While in the meantime, perhaps I research other T's. I do have a few bookmarked that do EMDR (which I could also do while seeing him, so perhaps could be a way to, I don't know, ease out of the relationship?).

I was talking to a friend (who's very knowledgeable about therapy) about his comment on how he decided that his being completely honest with me on his feelings (and more so than with other clients) is what is best for me. And she said he really shouldn't have decided to use that method without my consent. Which made me think. Should it have been something that I agreed to in the beginning? What if *I* don't think it's right for me?

I get the idea behind the method. He thinks if he's completely honest with me, then I'll know where I stand at all times. All his cards are on the table, as he put it. So I should be able to trust in the relationship more. And...I suppose the idea is then that trust would spread to my outside relationships? However, if they're not all being completely honest with me in the same way, I'm not sure how this helps? I'm also unsure I would *want* others to be completely honest with me all the time anyway. I feel like in marriages/partnerships, friendships, and with family, it's better for the relationship to just let some more minor stuff go.

Anyway, I think Dr. T being honest with me all the time has backfired in some ways. I'm not sure that it *has* made me more secure with him, for one. Or with others--honestly, it's made me wonder all the ways in which I'm irritating people in my outside life that they aren't telling me about and wondering if at some point they'll just explode about it. Back to Dr. T specifically--I don't know how helpful repeatedly hearing "this thing you did irritated me" is (unless it's, say, the same thing that I keep doing). And then we have to spend part of the session on that instead of talking about my other stuff. Plus then I maybe feel distressed or anxious over it, adding to any distress/anxiety I have in my outside life.

Trigger for SH:

Possible trigger:

I'm fully aware that this was my own decision, and nothing he *made* me do. And that it in large part was because I was sort of overwhelmed by my life responsibilities at that point, right after H had his surgery and I was essentially fully responsible for D, plus the stress going on with D's school stuff. So it's like my coping reserves were tapped out. But I feel like the fact that I engaged in SH for the first time in a long time in large part as a result of what Dr. T said to me--shouldn't that be a sort of red flag for him that this technique is maybe not working as he'd intended? The only comment he made about it was "I'm sorry that happened." Plus how my coping mechanisms were likely tapped out. And no, I don't know specifically what I wanted him to say, but it seems like it should have been examined more maybe? (It's a topic that's come up before, how he seems to underreact to things like that with me.)

And please note that I didn't tell him about it in the sense of "Here's what you made me do." I was reluctant to tell him, but felt I had to, as it illustrated how intensely bad I had been feeling that evening.

So, I don't know. I clearly need to talk to him about all this. And, yeah, look for other T's, I suppose. I hate attachment sometimes....