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Originally Posted by comrademoomoo
Is he helping you to understand what happens for you which leads you to push him on his feelings? And in contrast, who cares about how he feels about you pushing him?! It is his issue which he should take elsewhere to explore. The point of working with counter transference, or the therapist showing you their response, is that it needs to be in service of you - not to make you more emotionally compliant and acceptable.
He seems to repeatedly side step the therapeutic material in favour of considering his own feelings. The fact that you apologised for trying to analyse him (and that he accepted your apology) is a really good example of this. If he is allowing that kind of table-turning to occur in the therapy, he has poor awareness of his own boundary. It is his job to unpick the re-enactments between the two of you and hopefully avoid them. Instead, he seems to be upholding the re-enactment with the aim of teaching you about his reactions (because he is only teaching you what his reactions are, they are not universal reactions - lots of relationally based therapists would welcome your intense feelings about them).
I say re-enactment because I am assuming something similar has happened for you with others in terms of needing to understand them to feel safe, or working out the relationship to ensure your emotional survival. Essentially looking after the other - another dimension which is being played out here as the other therapist encourages you to consider Dr T's differences and make adjustments accordingly.
It all seems topsy-turvy and like stuff is being missed all over the place. I am waffling on really, but something about this reminds me of my ex-therapist. Beware of a therapist who heralds the relationship as the core of the onion when they are not capable of processing their own material (and don't even have the mechanisms in place to do so).
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Thanks for the comments, Comrade. I've been thinking more about my apologizing to him. In the moment, it felt really good hearing him say "I really appreciate that. It means a lot to me" (and seeming to genuinely mean it). And I felt good about it for a while afterward. I felt annoyed when a friend told me I had no need to apologize to him. Like, "No, this is a good thing!"
But as I'm thinking about it more, I'm feeling less good about it. Isn't this basically just people pleasing? I felt that I needed to apologize to him about this to keep the relationship safe. I mean, there's nothing wrong with apologizing when you genuinely feel you were in the wrong or if you inadvertently do/say something to hurt someone. But I'm just wondering whether I did so for the right reasons.
Like you said, a good therapist would want to unpack what happened more. Maybe say, "Why did you feel the need to apologize to me?" But I get the sense he's thinking more, "Oh good, she apologized. She really needed to for pushing me so much." And like you said, to try to figure out *why* I was pushing him so much.
We did talk about that a little, in the sense of how I try to "figure him out." He said he especially noticed that in my first year of seeing him, the questions I asked about him and his personal life. Where I don't ask as much now. I said he's shared a lot with me on his own (he disclosed a lot more during the pandemic).
I said how I think in trying to figure people out, it's like if I can understand them more, it makes me feel like I can better avoid rejection/abandonment. Like what you said. To feel safer. He seemed to get that. But I'm sure we need to explore that more. And the pushing is a bit different from asking something like, "What kind of music are you into?" Especially pushing regarding his emotions.
And this comment made me think, too: "another dimension which is being played out here as the other therapist encourages you to consider Dr T's differences and make adjustments accordingly." I mean, not that it would have overly been helpful if R had simply been like, "Yeah, he's an idiot, he just should have accepted your love and not gotten all weird about it." But it seemed that she was painting me as the one who'd been in the wrong and needed to make amends. Rather than addressing what all might have really been going on there (we did talk about how I may have been talking to Dr. T as if he were my father, like what I might have wanted from him as a kid but didn't get, but I also don't think I should have to apologize for that).
So, I don't know...lots to think about particularly in terms of whether I can go forward with him. As opposed to when I left Friday thinking, "Oh, good, everything is safe in the relationship now." It may be safe, but is it good or helpful?