T Said She Didn't Have Time

It seems like there are just a couple of ways for her to respond that would have satisfied you, peaches. Yet there are hundreds of ways she could have responded and I think the way she did respond was not negative or unsupportive, just neutral and honest--she didn't have time right then. Are you setting yourself up for disappointment when you so narrowly define the response from your T that is acceptable? She is an individual and different from you and may respond with individuality to emails, rather than the way you would have most liked her to. But that doesn't necessarily mean her response was a bad one or a misstep. It was just not what you most wanted to hear. I know that some Ts, aware of their own inability to read minds, ask their clients to tell them in the email (or phone message) what they want back, so they can provide it (within reason). I think what others have suggested--to discuss this with your T--is really important, since what your T may have thought was a minor email exchange, has taken on a lot of importance for you. My T looks for these little rough spots (triggers) as we talk in therapy. I may not even be aware of them. He says these rough spots are places that need healing. So be sure and tell your T, because this is an opportunity to heal, if only a little bit. But every little bit counts, and one day, all the little bits of healing will add up to something big.

Peaches, I can very much relate to what you're feeling. I always feel embarrassed when I write something very long and get a 3 sentence response. And then of course my mind starts running wild with bad thoughts. I think it is helpful sometimes to stop, take a breath, and look at the situation objectively. Perhaps she would like to devote more time to the discussion and doesn't want her thoughts to be misread. Or maybe even she just had a bad day. I'm sure that happens to Ts too and that it doesn't have to mean anything personal about you. I hope you keep your appointment so you can put your mind at ease with this.

Well, I waited all day yesterday for a response and still did not get one. So i sent her a 2-line email, telling her that she must still be too busy, and that it's understandable, but that it brings up bad feelings for me, and i am thinking to quit email.

She replied that she is working on a letter of medical necessity for me (she forgot to get authorizations for this year and didn't realize it until July. My insurance doesn't want to pay, so she has to submit an appeal and letter of medical necessity).

At first, i felt like a complete jerk for even saying anything about it. Total guilt. And i still do. But behind the guilt, I question what she's saying a little bit. She has known that she needed to do the letter of medical necessity for at least a couple of weeks now, and as far as i know, there is no real deadline for it (although it does have to do with her agency getting backpay). If she is being truthful that she couldn't respond because she'd been working on the letter of medical necessity, then why didn't she say so initially when she replied that she didn't have time to respond to my concerns? It would have made me feel a lot better to know that she hadn't just blown me off. I don't understand what reason she would have for not telling me this initially. A small part of me wonders if she's trying to make me feel guilty.

I know i'm probably totally over-reacting. But my t knows that email has always been super important to me in keeping a connection with her. We've talked about it many times, and she knows how badly i feel when she can't or doesn't reply. So i just don't understand why she handled things this way. It just feels like she could have easily provided the reassurance i needed but chose not to.

And, yes, this is a HUGE trigger for me. The not feeling important. Not feeling worthwhile. It cuts right to my core and goes back as far as my birth. This brings up alot of pain for me that i know is not about her, but is about me and how i feel about myself. It's just that my t knows this kind of thing is a huge trigger for me, so i can't believe she didn't take the time to write a couple of sentences to provide reassurance and let me know why she was not responding. I mean, yes, she let me know now. But not until after I'd stressed and felt hurt, and said something about it. So knowing now makes me feel guilty for having said anything. Had she told me what was going on, i would not have felt hurt OR said anything.

I don't know. Maybe i'm just wrong about all of this. This is a huge trigger for me. i can't think.

I'm a bad patient and i suck.

((((((Peaches))))) Try to be gentle with yourself. I hope you feel better. Are you going to t today?

I still say punch the lady in the nose. Or keep that thought in your mind, but don't actually do it. Tell her you want to punch her.

Isn't that better than punching yourself?

Or am I bad ?

I think you should maybe talk to her about it next time you see her.

Don't be hard on yourself though

You are honest about your feelings and this is very important for healing (actually punching her in the nose probably wouldn't be a good idea.........)

..........

That's so interesting, Sannah, your thoughts of the power being taken out of our lives by depending on other's actions toward us. I'd never thought about it quite that way before. Pretty much the same thing happened with me with my former T a few weeks back and I felt kind of badly when it happened as well. My interpretation after some time was that I was giving myself too much power in the situation. My therapist's responses...or anyones therapist's responses..don't have everything to do with the client. There are a lot of factors involved in someone's actions besides just us. That's the human element here. But maybe it's a paradox like that. We give ourselves too much power and thus end up taking our power away. My head hurts...

Anyway, for me, sometimes when things like this happen I find myself in a bad place for a while but it doesn't last. I can get myself out of this pattern of thinking now. I think, Peaches, that everything we do and feel always has something to do with something that has happened in our past. That doesn't mean it isn't happening now. It doesn't mean that your feelings aren't related to the present either...but I think the responses we have to certain situations now may be like an old tape playing over and over again...and maybe now we can learn to respond differently.

Probably not!

But giving yourself the permission to think about something like that can be helpful, at least for me at times.

(((((Peaches))))) I am sorry for joining your thread late. I read all the posts and I agree with all of the wise words here.

What Rainbow said really hit home with me, too. My t doesnt allow email (no surprise there) but if she did Id be disapppointed and reading into every word. And watching to see if her reply was timely enough. And then read something into that. But it can be an oppritunity for healing and understanding. As Rainbow said, this is the present, it is not my past, I have a present filled with evidence that t cares a great deal about me and therefore would not deliberately hurt me. The pain is pain from my past. If you do discuss this with your t, it may be another small step towards healing. What it triggers for you. I know everything you said would be a major trigger for me.

I also liked what Brightheart said about our responses are like old tapes playing over and over again. The situations change but our hurt and disappointment plays over and over again. I posted that my new interview t never showed up to the appt and left a msg late. I was real hurt and disappointed, playing that tape over and over, but I could have seenit for what it really was- she cancelled, something big or small came up, I may never know, and it had NOTHING to do with me. Be disappointed but try to keep my emotions within some kind of normal limits and not to overshoot the mark (in terms of my feelings).

pachy you are funny sometimes it sound like a good idea to punch. imagine all the trouble you would get in.

(((((((sweet peach)))))))

i don't think i have anything to add that hasn't already been said, but i did want you to know that i care. be gentle with yourself, okay?

Hi Brightheart, do you mean, when you say that you are giving yourself too much power, that you are thinking that everything that happens has to do with you (when it doesn't)?

I can see how that would be helpful..........

Exactly what I meant. That his response was some kind of reflection on how he feels about me, which I'm sure wasn't true at all. Or that he was trying to push me away, which again was probably not true. There could have been many other reasons why his response was so brief that had to do with him as well. Maybe he had a client waiting? Or his hand was cramped? He was tired and not in the mood to give lengthier answers? Everything is not all about me...It was probably something he did without painstaking thought about trying to send me some deeper message. I'm guessing that he answered me in a way he felt it would be best to according to the situation. And likely it was as simple as that. So in that instance I needed to turn the drama down. His email response to me is not attached to who I am as a person.

So I think it's both. Giving myself too much power in the matter of how he replied. And taking away the power in my life by attaching my self-worth to how he responds to me. That has to come from within and is not dependent on him.

Just a quick update, before i get to making individual replies. . .

I went to my session yesterday, and was determined to act like my reasonable adult self. My t and i usually do a mindfulness exercise first, and she asks me if it's OK to move up closer. This time, she asked me and i said yes, and she said "Are you sure?" and I said "Yes," and she told me i looked skeptical. I told her "No, it really is OK" (and it was). We did the mindfulness exercise.

I had pretty much decided i didn't want to even talk about my disappointment over her not having time to reply to my email. I felt ashamed and was just going to gloss over it. In fact, i'd made a list of questions to ask her, none of them even related to the t-patient relationship. I was going to keep the focus on me and my insecurities, since i knew that was where my immature reactions were coming from.

But t brought it up anyway. She said she had a new boss who expected them to do more paperwork, and that lately, she's had to work later to get it done. She also told me that she had not ignored my email on purpose, and that even the best mother cannot always be responsive at every single moment the child needs them. They need to learn to wait sometimes, and then their need would be attended to.

I told her that i understood that she was just busy, but it still hurt. ALOT. In fact, i told her that it hurts so much to need something, and not get it, that i would rather not need it at all in the first place. I talked about how in my day to day life, when i'm in my normal adult mode, i don't feel needy, don't feel a need for connection, don't feel any hurt emotions about my childhood, etc. I act normal. But when i allow the hurt part of me to come forward, then i am needy, hurting, empty, in pain, etc.

I talked to her about how hard it is for me to believe that she, or anyone, could care about those messed up child parts of me. And that, whenever i start to believe it, then something happens that seems to prove that i am **once again, as i have always been** an unimportant nobody. I said it's really hard to believe i'm important and worthwhile when i've had experiences all my life that prove otherwise. I told her I'm afraid that i am *incapable* of believing that she or anybody cares -- and how can a few acts of kindness ever counteract a lifetime of feeling invisible? By thta time i was really crying.

At some point, she asked if she could come sit next to me, which she has only done once before. I said Yes. She kept asking me what else was going on -- was there something else that happened this week -- besides the email thing -- to make me feel this way? I told her No. But i said it had been building. It started about 3 weeks ago when i brought my husband in, and because he was feeling so bad, they talked the whole time and i was left out. Then, after she made a comment a week or so later about how i make grammatical and spelling mistakes when i email her in my child state, I felt nervous and ashamed, like there was something really wrong with me and i shouldn't allow that part of me to communicate with t anymore. In fact, that's what i'd emailed her about. So when she replied that she didn't have time to address my concerns, it just triggered that hurt part of me, and i fell apart.

I told my t i don't want to have these hurting needy parts of me. I'm fine as long as I'm not aware of them. But they keep wanting to bring all the old pain from childhood into me. It's like all the painful crap from my childhood that i'd stashed away, and forgotten about, keeps trying to come forward, and i can't deal with it. By then, i was really crying hard. I told my t that i know she wants me to listen to those parts of myself, to let them have voice, and learn to acknowledge their pain and heal. But i said it's too hard. i don't want to have parts of myself like that. i don't want to listen to them, don't want to hear what they have to say. It hurts too much, i just want to be rid of them, i want them to die.

Well, I was just a mess. I had cried all my makeup off. And i had red blotches all over my neck and chest (which always happens when i get "worked up.")

Then my t told me that she thinks we need to take a break from doing "parts work." She said that i was clearly communicating to her that i was overwhelmed and it was getting to be "too much" again. She thought we should go back to working together in my DBT book (which is usually what happens when i crash too hard). I agreed.

But after having thought about it overnight -- I feel that we should keep going forward. There have been several times in therapy where i've gotten to the point where i can't handle the pain, and then we slow down or even change what we're doing. And it feels like a repetition. I'm starting to feel that I'll never going to get where i need to go if we keep stopping because i can't handle the pain. We keep thinking that if i could just develop better coping skills, then i will be able to handle trauma work better. But we've already covered coping skills again and again. It doesn't make things any easier, not when i get triggered about my past or the pain of it breaks through my awareness. I'm starting to think that maybe it is just not going to get any easier. Maybe the pain is just going to be that bad -- and the only way through it is to keep going.

So today, i emailed t and told her i want to continue working with the parts of me that hold my trauma. despite the pain. if she agrees. i feel like we've come to far now to keep stopping. i told her i don't need a reply and hope we can talk about it next week.

And now I'm just. . .worn out. Every time something happens to trigger my past and i have an "episode" like this, i am physically exhausted the next day.

i feel sorry for my t. i really do. I'm sure she feels like she can't do anything right for me. so often, what starts out as something she says or does that probably seems insignificant (commenting on mistakes i make while dissociated, or not responding to my email) triggers me and causes a cascade of traumatic and overwhelming feelings. . .just one more *problem* that we have to work through.

i don't know what else to do. i really don't. i'm doing my best. but this is so hard. and sometimes i worry that i might be too screwed up to ever heal.

Sorry my "quick update" wasn't quick.

(((Peaches)))
This all sounds so familiar to me. I've been there, I am there. It is so very difficult. The only thing that keeps me going is my t's insistance that things can be so much better, after healing takes place. Sometimes I don't think it will ever happen and then sometimes I can see places where I have "grown".

It IS exhausting work. In the hospital they talk about how much energy it takes to do trauma work, like actually doing physical workouts. So, it's ok that you need to rest, sometimes I come home from therapy and have to go lay down.

It's ok to take breaks from the hard trauma stuff, too. But I am like you, I just want to keep at it to get somewhere. Pacing yourself is important too. This does feel like it's going to take forever, "it takes as long as it takes" is what my t will say. (which usually frustrates me--grrr).

It's no fun having all these parts with their needs and feelings and issues. I would like them to go away too, but I guess that can't happen, they make up ME.

Hang in there, keep us updated, and pm if you want. I'm here for you.
Take extra special care!

((((((Peaches))))))

I agree that sometimes the only way to move through the pain is to face it fully.

I think you're being very courageous, Peaches, and am very glad to hear that you went to your session with your T. It sounds as if you were very open with her about what you were feeling. That's a very positive thing. I have little doubt that your T cares a great deal about your well-being. I wish that you could be more gentle with yourself. It seems ironic that we are often the hardest on ourselves. I do the very same thing sometimes. Maybe try nurturing yourself and accepting your emotions instead of viewing them as a burden to others. I know...easier said than done, but it sounds as if you are ready and willing to keep working hard. That says a lot.

People will live up to or down to your expectations. I think that your T is holding the bar too low for you. I think that you can work through this. You have to deal with what is inside so that you can work through it and leave it behind. Keeping it covered and letting it brew and simmer doesn't keep it from affecting you. It is being undealt with and it continues to affect you constantly. I think that you can gain a lot from continuing to move forward. You can gain a lot of confidence by showing yourself that you can withstand this and work through it. What kind of message are you getting that you can't do this just yet?????? You are very smart and capable and you can do this..............

And yes, I am very impressed how you handled this last appt. You went in there in an excellent frame of mind!

Sannah,

Well, as it turns out, i did sort of read in -- feeling that she didn't care about my concerns. Turns out she was busy doing something insurance related. I need to figure out how to stop "reading into" things. What happens is that intellectually, i figure she's probably just very busy, but emotionally, my heart sinks and i feel anxiety. Always that "fear" that i've done something to make her stop caring or that she is sick of me and doesn't want to work with me anymore. I know it's probably irrational. But the emotions that come up are so unpleasant!

Deli,

She probably did think it was better than nothing. It's just my insecurity i guess.