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The patient’s greatest fear is that when the therapist will see the real them, she'll be horrified and disgusted, and run away in terror, disbelief, disgust, fear, and dislike. They'll be abandoned when the real self is observed. As always feared.
I had a weird therapist-initiated abrupt termination 4 years ago that I've been posting about like crazy. In getting "can no longer remain objective" as explanation when multiple simple and relevant reasons could have been given--boundaries/trust violated, no longer beneficial to work together, etc.--I've started to wonder if the real reason wasn't something very serious and disturbing that T discovered/realized about me. I realized that when I was asking "why termination?" I really meant “what did my T think of me after that all happened?” That that's the crucial part to me. So, I started to think she must have been horrified when she saw the real me, and not just horrified/disgusted/etc. but afraid of me. That I didn't just do bad, but was bad, and in a way particular to her a threat.
So I tell my new T that I realized that the real question for me was “What does she think about me post-junk?” not “Why terminate?” I spun my thesis and he seemed to disagree and we talked and talked and then he seemed to latch onto it: He said, yes, the kind of termination I received, therapist-initiated, abrupt, no substantive explanation, and references to her lawyer such as "my lawyer advised me that we couldn't continue, then couldn't talk again, then we can't write again" are when the T has developed a fear of the patient. And that the reason they want to terminate is so difficult for the patient and they themselves don't want to talk about it, that they speak in the broadest of generalities. He was emphatic about that pattern. He's seen it all, supervised hordes of T's, at 81 has been a leader locally for 40 years...........
So Mr. 81 y.o. senior of the community T adviser to all told me that, almost certainly, my T became afraid of me for some serious reason that is so bad that she doesn't even want to say anything specific about it at all. In other words, the patient’s greatest fear was true in this case.
Considering that I came to him 2 weeks ago being a day away from killing myself (close to true), you’d think he wouldn’t go into overdrive to convince me that my worst-case scenario was almost certainly true.
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