</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
chaotic13 said:
I've also learned yet again that the people on PC can be very supportive as I work through my mental ramblings.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">True for me too. It can be so helpful to participate in discussions here, compare experiences, get support, and have a place to ramble.

I want to add also, chaotic, that I do understand your reluctance to call your T. I am a fine one to say just call your T and ask for support, because I can't do that. I really feel unable to reach out to him beyond the frame of the once a week therapy session, whether by email or phone (emails I might send are strictly logistical). However, I really took my first therapist's message to heart, that a T who only sees you once a week cannot be your entire support system, and I shouldn't expect that to be sufficient. As she told me to do, I built up more of an outside-therapy support system (I had none) of friends and family. I was so scared and resistant to doing this. We actually had to work on this in therapy, what my resistances were to this. One was that I felt my reaching out would be rejected and that they wouldn't want to give me help or a supportive ear and would think ill of me for it or laugh at me or whatever. One of the things she said to me was that when people came to me for help or support, did I feel like that? And the answer was no, of course not. I was glad to be able to help. This helped give me courage to reach out to others. And in general, reaching out was a good experience, I was not rejected and I found some support (of course, I chose who I reached out to VERY carefully!). These successes gave me more confidence and helped me see that reaching out was normal, not a flaw or character deficiency. Somehow, I had not known that before. Probably like dalila said, because of my dysfunctional childhood and lack of love, warmth, attunement, needs being met, etc.

As for reaching out to my therapist, I do that in session. That is my time with him. I like to think maybe in dire circumstances, I could contact him outside of session. Once I was really in a bad way and I emailed my lawyer. Well, who should respond to that email but my T. Lawyer called him immediately, told him what was going on, and he emailed me. Then later we talked on the phone, and he said, "why didn't you call me?" And I just wanted to bang him over the head and say because you never check your f**king voicemail and when I have called you, you don't f**king respond. In many ways, they sure don't make this easy for us. Maybe someday I will have healed enough that I can casually call my therapist for help and easily take it in stride when he doesn't respond.