JOURNALING - UNSENT LETTER

Dear ***,

I am feeling so sad today. Our therapy doesn't feel like it is working. I have learned alot but am stuck with other problems that will not go away. At times, I feel such a strong urge to talk to you about my childhood traumas, abuse, and pain. I seem to feel at those times that if you would just hug me when I am in so much pain, and tell me how much you care about me, I would feel so much better. It feels like if I could be close to you in the way I've never been close with my mom, then I could heal. But you don't do that.

It is true that you sit with me and try to validate my feelings. But it doesn't help very much. It is nice to hear nice words. But they don't make the pain inside me hurt any less. Even though I know that you believe it is best for me if you withhold touch, because of things that happened to me in my childhood, it feels like you are leaving me to suffer with all that pain alone. It makes me feel hurt and angry because therapy causes me to remember and relive all of my old pain again and again, yet you do not reach out to comfort me in the way I need you to. I need you to be more than an observer of my pain. I need you to comfort me and help make it more bearable. When this does not happen, I end up feeling retraumatized again, just like when I was a child and was hurting and in need and my parents did nothing to stop it or comfort me.

We have talked about this many times before. When I get overwhelmed with pain and start decompensating, your solution is always to back off and return to working with me again to build up my own coping skills, so that I can tolerate my own pain better. But no amount of coping skills is great enough to offset the pain of looking at my past. If I am going to just sit and suffer the pain, while you look on, why even bring the painful experiences to mind? You keep telling me that peace will come as I let the pain out. But peace is not coming. The only thing talking about my childhood traumas does is make me feel very upset and depressed. I get a depressed feeling in my head that sometimes lasts for several days afterward and makes it hard for me to cope at work and home. Also, every time we talk about the nurturing I didn't get from my parents -- and the fact that we can't have an emotionally close relationship today -- it just revives all the unmet needs and longings. This makes me want very badly for you to nurture and care about me the way my parents could not. But it always ends in disappointment, hurt, and frustration because you can't be like a mother for me.

We have only 1 hour each week to take in your words of encouragement. I know you care about me, and you show that. You do acknowledge the part of me that feels like a hurting little girl. And I assume that for most people, this intermittent boost is enough to help them get over whatever humps have brought them to therapy, and to get on with their lives. But it falls so short of what I need to soothe and heal my pain inside. I have talked to you so very many times and have told you that I need you to sit next to me and hug or hold me while I cry, but you do not give me the type of comfort I did not receive as a child and feel desperate for now.

I am giving up now on the idea that you can help fill the empty hole inside me emotionally. You cannot be a mother or a friend. I cannot even count on you to be my therapist for much longer. Soon you will retire, and I will not have you in my life at all, except for perhaps an email once or twice a year to say hello. Pinning my hopes on our relationship so much is bound to lead to more pain and suffering when our relationship ends. It is crazy for me to think that you could love me like a mother would. I want so much to think that you deeply care about me and want to be in my life, when I know that you only care about me professionally. You want to help make my life better, but you do not want to remain a part of it.

I so much appreciate everything you have done, and are doing, to help me. But I realize that I need more than you can give me. This is deeply painful for me. Maybe it would be better if you refrained from saying or doing anything that might stir up my childish longings for nurturing. Maybe you should act less caring, so as not to let me entertain false hopes about the closeness of our relationship. I am thinking about forcing myself to avoid contacting you at all between sessions, by either phone or email, and not sharing any more poetry I've written that expresses my attachment needs. I am considering keeping to myself from now on the whole part of me that feels like a needy, wounded child. Perhaps no one can heal my brokenness except for God, and perhaps not until the New World to come.

I am aware of the aching pain inside me, and the unmet needs. I know why they are there. I can seek to understand them. Hopefully, some day I will be able to tolerate feeling them and accept them. But I am still a long way from that. Despite self-soothing skills you've taught me, and DBT skills, I still do not have inside me what I need to heal my own pain.

I am taking a break from therapy. I have cancelled my appointment for this week. Perhaps I will cancel next week also. I do not know how long I will wait until I come back to see you. The truth is that I already miss the sessions I will not be having. But maybe that is the best reason to take a therapy break. I need to rely upon you less and upon myself more. I need to prove to myself that I can function with less support from you, even if it hurts to go without. When it comes to having time with you -- when it comes to having your caring -- I need to learn to be satisfied with a little bit. I must give up the need I have for the type of emotional closeness and nurturing you cannot offer me. I am hoping this break will help me put aside the intense longing I have for you to be more involved in my life emotionally, and stop the need I feel for you to physically comfort me when I am crying and in deep pain. I do not know how I will do this. But I must try.