I am going to my appt on Thursday.

it's the only time the sneaky pete apologizes for being late, when he knows i've got the actual time right in front of my eyes. what he doesn't realize is that I am so enthralled by the continuing adventures of PC, it could be an hour later and i'd never notice!

You are not going to cancel.
You are not going to throw a giant hissy and quit therapy.
You are not going to sit around today trying to come up with reasons to hate T.

I have faith in you!

Right now I'm irritated with the last line of his email. He told me my progress is commendable.

Yeah, that rat bastard. They should revoke his license for conduct like that. He's obviously a giant menace to society. Lock him away.

Hi, pbutton: What did he do?!

Hugs, Nicole

using 4-syllable words?

edited: really BORING 4-syllable words! commendable! who says commendable? what the heck does THAT mean? we need cbox to translate into improper English, please!

Translation: You're doing great!

I don't want him telling me I'm doing great. I don't want any praise from him. It grosses me out in a big way. I just want him to help repair my faulty wiring and send me on my way. I don't need his encouragement. He's not my buddy, he's my therapist. I could go on with this for days. Ugh.

Holy trigger. I keep thinking about him telling me I am doing great and I want to either cry or throw up. Possibly both.

no not great, commendable. can't explain was just being nice, ignore him! commendable just means, um, hey lookit her, she's trying. poor slug...

is that better?

I understand.

After my session yesterday I would describe your experiences as a fantastic opportunity.

I shared with my T something that had made me very anxious over the last week - T immediately tried to re-create it in the session. I was like "What the heck are you doing, I just told you how unpleasant it was why are you trying to make me feel like that again" (apart from this was in my head and I didn't express it out loud )

Sure enough my anxiety started to come back. T got me to talk about it and then talked me through it and I was OK again.

I realised that T was probably wanting me to feel those feelings, so that I could learn to recognise them and use a technique to manage them under his guidance. Of course this was a more valuable lesson for having had the feelings in real time, rather than talking about them in the past.

So although it may feel really difficult to do what you are planning - I think having those feelings and being OK at the other side is a worthwhile experience and in my opinion progress.

Let us know how it goes - keep listening to that stubborn bit that will get you there - Soup

Great thread.

It can be tough to accept what people offer you. It means something, I don't know what exactly. But I can say that getting to the point where I can just say thank you for the kind words feels loads better than, well, this thing you are doing that I used to do.

Anne

Sometimes praise sounds patronizing to me if it is coming from someone who is in a role where I didn't expect they should care about me. In therapy, I think you have to care at least a little about what the therapist thinks about you for it to work.

I don't think that I have trouble accepting praise. To be brutally honest I think it's a CSA trigger. It makes me feel helpless and creeped out and ANGRY. I don't really have the words to describe the feeling.

I generally don't have trouble accepting compliments. I have pretty high self-esteem. I have more of a problem having high esteem for others. But I definitely don't want compliments from older men. Particularly those that have any type of authority. Nothing grosses me out more than getting hit on by an older guy. It is the grossest thing I can think of. I don't want T to do anything that seems friendly. I want him to be completely neutral when it comes to me. Otherwise it's yucky.

I do sometimes wonder if I'd be better off w/a female T. All of my other doctors are female. On the other hand I suppose this is a chance to work through it with someone safe.

this is what I am aiming for...being THAT comfortable with my t.

Given my high anxiety state,I'm normally jumping out of the chair!!!

The CSA trigger makes sense to me. Maybe the issue is whether you want to unhinge that trigger and react a different way or whether you prefer staying put.

The emotions make sense given the trigger, but these are hardly comfortable emotions to experience.

Sometimes what happens to CSA survivors is they SEEK out compliments from older men in authority and/or give off signals that they want to be hit on. Yours is the "better" problem.

Someone giving you an honest compliment -- and at least in the work I do, there are older men around at least some of the time-- is very far away from hitting on you. And older men, or anybody, can hit on you without given you a compliment. One thing does not logically lead to another.

I think that getting to a place-- if this is what you want-- where a compliment is neutral, neither something that you seek nor something that you must push away and/or have unnecessary associations with, would be much more comfortable.

T's can no more be neutral than any other human. Humans have reactions, and so do T's. Part of their job is to react MORE neutrally than the average person, especially around negative emotions. But at least I feel that the times that have been particularly healing for me have been when my T is at his most authentic-- a flash of tenderness, a bright smile, disgust at something my perpetrator said to me, etc. Emotions are information, and his have helped me make sense of my own reactions and my convoluted thoughts. However, you could tell your T you don't want him acting friendly at all, no compliments, etc etc. I just think it's a really bad idea.

And-- I'm not in any way trying to demean your experience, but do you really want to walk around in the world where you can't take any "friendly" interactions with a significant sector of the world's population? It seems to me it would be much better, rather than wanting your T to have an artificial emotional response to you, to want to disconnect the unhealthy association you have between "friendly older guy" and "gross".

I can't say whether you'd be better off with a female T. I think that you can work through the issues, if you want to see and/or feel and/or relate differently to older men, with any kind of T. But I think that the work begins when you can moves towards wanting it to be different.

Best, Anne

pbutton, I will be keeping close to you tomorrow. Hope it goes very well for you.