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comrademoomoo
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Default Sep 01, 2024 at 04:33 AM
 
I don't think she is working therapeutically with you and I think she is enabling a borderline process which ultimately isn't going to serve you. So much of what you describe in the work is about how she soothes you, connects with you, tells you that you are important, and so on, but I don't believe that is the developmental work which someone with relational trauma needs.

Of course, when she able to meet you in these "loving" ways, it feels stabilising, but it is all externalised - it relies on her relationship with you rather than your relationship with yourself. You make it all about her because parts of you need to know what is going on with her (is she sorry, does she love me, where is she?) in order that you can feel safe, but then you are angry that it is all about her. She is facilitating this process of you looking to her to feel something about yourself and I think that is a very frightening because I suspect it recalls something from your childhood relationships.

I don't think it's mean that you felt reassured that she cried, I think it indicates that you are both locked in re-enactment which centres around connection-disruption-penance-catharsis. But what happens after the cathartic period for you? She isn't wrong for getting pregnant a second time and I think her apologies only hold up some right/wrong win/lose binary which isn't adult or healthy for you.

I have said similar things over the years to you about her way of working with you so none of this is new. I feel for you because it would be Herculean to end the work with her and start with someone new. I know that from my own experience. However, you are not so uniquely or severely traumatised that you can't begin therapy with someone else - choosing not to is another matter of course.

I think she's out of her depth in multiple ways and this doesn't sound like therapy, it sounds like a protracted attempt to prove that you are important to her. You are smart Scarlet and you could make real progress.
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Thanks for this!
ArtleyWilkins, ScarletPimpernel, unaluna