i feel like i can't go back....

this may sound harsh AT FIRST, but is this cold distant T again? in which case major kudos to you for going back and trying to work things out.

All I can say is, I felt like a pile of pathology when I left the office.
I did need to be supported by my therapist this week. I'm going through some really funky stuff at work (while also bringing in a lot of new revenue!) and that was why hearing that "you're just surviving" felt kind of awful really.

Yes, I'm kinda proud of myself, and was pretty revealing of myself in these last few sessions. I acknowledge that a lot of the crap I'm wading through right now is the result of a traumatic background but I try not to use that as an excuse. And so, to hear...."with a background like yours, I can understand...." or "It's not likely to change" makes me feel stigmatized, misunderstood and hopeless.

I did speak with my T about this. What I heard was, well, what's coming up in this now is probably there in your other relationships.

I do not feel that this is the case.

Right now, I have the choice to put my therapy on hold for a while due to some scheduling changes, and think about it. I think that's a good idea, but part of me doesn't really think this is fixable, and the reason for that is that I'm already feeling better with some distance from this, and the idea of going back gives me that pit in my stomach that says...this may not be in your best interests. The very different kind of stomach feeling that you get when you have to take that hard leap forward.
Hard leaps, I can do. And if that's what this turns out to be, I think I will know it.

I will keep asking myself for guidance but I really appreciate your sharing your experience. It resonates with me.

Good luck with your decision making. Sometimes not going really is the best choice. I hate the feeling in the pit of my stomach thing.

I'm afraid I'm understanding why my t thinks I have anger problems from reading this thread. agh.

Anyway, Hankster's and Sally_Brown's posts were hard for me to read. If they were saying the same thing to me, I'd have felt like they were saying I was a bad person because I wasn't being considerate of my t and because Sally said "insist that he adopt my understanding" as if I was being unfairly pushy when I was just trying to keep from getting myself squashed by misinterpretations t was forcing on me. I don't think they meant to say you're not a good person though and I definitely think you're a good person .

It sounded to me like t misunderstood what you needed to hear when he said "surviving." Then you felt hurt and thought you should express it. Everyone always told me i should express myself more, and once I figured out how to do it, I thought I was supposed to express my anger in situations like this. You wrote "sticking up for myself, in this relationship, too energetically feels like I'm crossing some kind of line." I think you're right. I think we're supposed to feel the anger for a minute but express ourselves in a more rational, less "energetic," less emotional way in this situation.

It doesn't mean your t is right about you only surviving. And it doesn't mean you aren't doing a good job of asserting yourself if he doesn't agree.

IRL, sometimes these things happen and you have no chance to communicate with the person who hurt you- it's either fight or leave to protect yourself.

But in some situations, if you have a lot of patience with the person who hurt you, you can find out they did it by mistake. If you get mad at them, they will think it's not fair since they never intended to hurt you, but if you talk to them in a more patient way, they might apologize for accidentally hurting you.

I think your t wants to give you a chance to practice the second situation.

mcl is so right. T is not meeting her where she is, and neither was I. that is not being supportive. i'm 60 years old and we play with therapy dolls, for pete's sake, and i'm telling mcl to be more mature??? major fail! I think I get what you're saying now. in my case, I was always pushed to grow up, grow up, grow up - partly because I was larger physically, but also because my mother just did not have the patience for children. So now, part of what I "do" in therapy is try to fill those blanks - I know we can't go back, but we can bump out the dents and Bondo and paint over them. My T is taking the time to do this - sounds like mcl's T just kicked the tires? And then I came along with a tire gauge, which I am notoriously bad with IRL, and in measuring the pressure, further deflated the subject. I am truly sorry for being so not understanding and unsupportive, esp when I have been (and still am) there and should know better.

Hey MCL,

I first of all wanted to say that you do put out positive energy, insight, and all kinds of other good stuff on this board. I'm sorry that you feel as if you're not being very well heard here. I think I have probably contributed to that feeling, and I'll apologize in advance if what I'm about to say does that again.

I have somewhat of the opposite strategy as you with respect to my traumatic background, in that I express frustration with still having periods of time where flashbacks can distress me (but never derail me from what I need to do) and I have part of a self concept where I see myself as unfixably broken. Even so, I still want the people around me to see my strengths and my positive ability to cope. I don't want people to pathologize me or reaffirm in any way that what I have been through is hard. I have only experienced this pathologized attitude from a friend, and trying to communicate about it with her was a disaster.

If my T had said pathologizing things, I would have been devastated. As the person that I would assume has had a much greater opportunity to really SEE me than a friend, that would have really hurt. Because the biggest change in my understanding of myself has been that while I can still easily trot out all my flaws and difficulties, I see myself as the accomplished and fundamentally good person that I am and the potential I have to carry my strengths forward and become better. Anybody who can't see me as a person of strengths doesn't belong in my life.

Here's the issue, I think. When misunderstandings happen, inside or outside of T, in any relationship (some people here call them ruptures), of course you talk about it, as you have. What if the talk is unsuccessful? Do you go back and try again? How many times? How much energy do you put towards it before you realize that this is one of those relationships that you have to let go?

At different points in my life, I've either been too quick to let go, or too stubborn to let go. This past summer, my H and I were able to work through a conflict about a misunderstanding that had been going on for about five years-- with a negative effect, off and on, in our marriage. For five years, we'd been trying to talk about it, trying to hear each other unsuccessfully, and being angry about the other's inability to hear and understand. It was probably among the most beautiful moments of my life when one evening something shifted and we were able to resolve it. It healed something inside me that was definitely linked to my past. It can be worth it to keep trying to work through it, to keep trying to explain to the other person what you need (and don't need from them).

But then sometimes it can't. Only you can decide whether you want to expend more energy to get past that place of what can feel like awfulness to see if you can break through to the other side. For me this can feel like those times when I do some long distance swimming: there's a point at which I feel like I have to stop, right here, right now, my heart and lungs can't take any more. But if I can keep going, I get that second wind and I feel like I can swim forever.

Best, Anne

That seems like the issue to me too. For me, hearing t say something like that and not getting the resolution I need once I've struggled to bring it up would make it feel pretty hopeless. But for most the people posting on this thread it seemed like they weren't even sure mcl had done what they would consider trying to discuss it yet. So if a lot of people understand it that way, maybe they don't attribute as much significance to mcl's effort to talk about it as she would or as I would, and maybe the t didn't get it either.

It seems to me like mcl is very aware that only she can decide. I want to suggest for her to give it some more times with her t.

My T told me once that "good enough" is 1/3 of the time not dealing with the misunderstanding/rupture--just letting it go, and 1/3 bringing it up with the person and mending the rupture, and 1/3 bringing it up, trying to mend, not being successful and then having to let it go. I guess this is what is thought to be "good enough" in the mother-child relationship and by extension, all of our important relationships. This comes from Winnicott, I think--the "good enough mother." That helped me understand that at least trying to deal with it with the person was a worthy goal (especially for conflict avoidant me), because then there was a good chance it might get resolved. But if it didn't get resolved, or I just let it slide and never brought it up, the relationship might still be OK and survive, if we had a history of at least being able to resolve a significant portion of our misunderstandings. It also helped me be OK with letting go of a certain fraction of misunderstandings. Everything didn't have to be 100% resolved and discussed in order for I and my T (and I and others) to have a super amazing relationship. If my T uses a word that makes me go "gulp" or "what?", sometimes I bring it up and we discuss that, but sometimes I just let it ride and reflect on it internally, confident that he didn't mean anything awful because I know we have such a strong relationship and he cares about me. I think this is harder to do before the relationship is well established, especially if one has a history of untrustworthy significant others in one's life.

I think everyone has a somewhat different tipping point for what is good enough and what isn't.

yabbut when the GOOD 1/3 was missing, and you got 1/3 benign and 2/3rd carp growing up, you don't have much tolerance for carp as an adult. That's why T had to be supersweet with me for a long long time before I could even begin to give it back. Not to "make up" for my past, but to begin to fill the very empty bucket where reciprocation comes from.

This really sums up how I see you, Anne.

Thank you.

Anne

I'll be going back in tomorrow. I'm so dreading it. I don't know how I'm going to get thru the next 24 hrs.

T just called to confirm whether I was coming in tomorrow. i honestly thought I had LONGER, like maybe all day today, to make a decision on this. Due to a horrible injury to my dog, it really was a challenge between that and my job to make the call, and T beat me to it. Ts voice sounded exasperated (yes, I'm reading into it here, but that's because I'm pretty UNDONE right now and you know what, that's what I do sometimes). I felt really placed in a corner: Are you coming in? I said, can I call you back in a few minutes? You won't get me (I understand)...and then I said....yes, I will be there.

I honestly do not know if this is the right thing to do. Nor do I know if I can actually get there.

I'm really not looking for analysis here just a little support.

I am really sorry about your dog. I would be devastated if anything happened to mine. I hope she is recuperating well.

On your T appointment, it's just one appointment. It will not make or break your life. Given that you're going, I hope it goes well.

Anne

(((((((mcl))))))

Sorry about your dog!!! I hope he/she is okay.

When I can't decide whether to go to therapy, I usually go. Once I'm there, I can either work through it with my therapist (I didn't feel like coming, here's why) and we come to a resolution, OR I find out that yeah, this really WAS a bad idea...and then I just have to get through the 50 minutes and it's over.

I think ESPECIALLY when we're considering quitting therapy it's important to go. We can come up with all kinds of scenarios in our heads that may or may not be real. Can you go and be honest with T about what you're thinking/feeling and get her take on it? It might help you decide how to proceed from here.

Thinking of you

Keep in mind that in my post i said, I can't go into a lot of detail here.....internet feels really risky today. So why not give me the benefit of the doubt?

thank you so much.

My dog: It's hard seeing my little pal in pain and the accident was so shocking...no details needed but ugh.

Appointment: I just kind of want to get it over with. I would have really felt better had T not called to confirm. that really messed with my head. I was hoping to be able to call and just leave a message, and I had actually decided to GO, and now, hearing T's voice...I think....why am I even doing this to myself? The call has made things much worse in terms of my anxiety. I'm having a hard time being here at work. Trying to minimize it by saying...hey I can just "muscle through things" that is a very big part of my problem. I think I can tough everything out, and you know what? I can't. always. do.that.

I am really worried about myself, actually. Scared. Which says a lot actually. I see a lot of people on this forum who can email their t or reach out, and this is definitely not that kinda deal. Not when the relationship is the problem.

thanks for your note. I feel like your description of your talk with your friend was really useful to me. That's how I feel today...like I objected to being pathologized (and put into a theoretical framework that I wasn't privvy to) and when I objected, things went to ....well, you know where.

Right now, I'm hoping to go to my appointment. But I could still cancel if this just feels so awfullly horrible. And I'm leaving myself that option, even if it's a bit of a "trap door" because given what happened this weekend, I'm just not interested in making myself walk the plank. That's just where I am today.

but thanks for writing.