Possible 'rupture'...

Man, I'm sorry, Just. That must feel so awful to have things just continue to be unresolved and to have the misunderstanding continue. I don't know what to say other than it sounds like your T is not putting the time in to really consider your point of view, and/or is a bit defensive about the entire thing. I'm so sorry.

Hi JustSomeGirl - wow this sounds similar to my week - not with any verbal communication, but with me having to sit feeling really confused about T. I have had all those thoughts, quitting, feeling disliked, abandoned, etc etc etc. I have felt like I was going to explode with my head soooo tangled up with everything. But I have been trying to tell myself that sometimes life is just like that, sometimes people really get us, sometimes they appear to be on a different planet - then I remember the mindfulness (after I have managed to deaden the "XXXX the mindfulness" thoughts ) and remember that it is here and now that is important:
breathing?
feet in place?
weather outside?
noises?
house needing tidying?

I know it is not easy, I have e-mails and texts written ready to send to T, saying I am never going to go to those sessions ever again, but I am trying to sit with them and wait.

I really feel for you right now - Soup

I agree w mkac. i've like really yelled at my T and told him not to use his stupid tactics on me cos he wasn't very good at it and i've had TACTICS used on me all my life by my mother and brother and that's not what I come to T for. more of a quiet whining crying yelling, but really f-u mad. where I don't even want an apology, that would be meaningless. I want a demonstration of a change in attitude towards me. they need to "up" their game if they want to play with me. you are not her little sister that she can pull this crap on.

It is horrible to have something like this hanging over your head. I usually write out my side of things and edit several drafts as it helps me communicate with clarity to have distilled my reaction down to the core problem for me.

I have had numerous ruptures (I hate that word as a description of conflicts) with the therapist and have never had the transformative repair that some describe. I have had them become more tolerable, but not experienced them as events that strengthen the therapy experience.

Thanks for all your replies and support, I'll be giving them more thought as I no doubt prepare to draft yet another email - but if she doesn't get it this time, I swear I give up because I don't know how to make myself clearer. I just feel like my entire faith in it all - and her - has been shaken. It feels like she's messing with me - pushing buttons so I can better get to know myself - which she actually said - but I feel like the button pushing should have happened in session, where she could deal with the aftermath, not via email and then leave me hanging for days. And the thing is, I'm not seeing myself any clearer, I know I get this upset over 'small' things, she knows I have abandonment issues, and I've told her this, just like I told her I believe I have BPD - so why the **** is she so surprised that this blew up? And what, like, it's okay that I'm this upset because it's part of the process?! I have stuff to do, you know?! But now I don't even want to get out of bed.

I feel like I've seen a fair number of people on here have "ruptures" that occurred because of email and then find that trying to discuss them via email is basically a disaster. IRL, I don't know anyone who emails their therapist. I had no desire to email my therapist ever, and observing the experiences on this board makes me think everytime, that emailing as a regular course of therapy is not such a good idea. Do T's get training on how to do therapy by email? Or how to resolve conflicts, how to validate people's experiences, how to show that you've heard them via email? Personally, I think you're asking too much from a T, whose training is in real time, to ask her to give you what you need to resolve this via email. Some T's may be able to do it via writing, but that's not their training and probably not their strength, or they'd be writers, not T's.

One thing that sometimes helps in all miscommunications for me is for me to start at the beginning and try to track the flow from the other person's perspective, given everything I know now. Can you take a look at your first email before the rupture, and see her response from her perspective as the "challenge" she says it was? Can you try to see the point of what she's saying, or how her interpretation was reasonable, despite her getting it wrong?

I'm really not trying to come across as scolding people for trying to get something therapeutic via email, but I do not think that emailing with a T over substantive matters is what therapy is supposed to be all about. I think that T's that are fine with people writing to them so that email is more like a one way journal but who refuse to respond are incredibly wise.

It just hurts so bad to have a supportive relationship be so painful. I have been at odds with my t for a while, so I totally get it.

If I write and send to therapist, I have done email but prefer regular mail as it takes the whole idea of a quickly written response out of the picture. The one I see is a terrible writer on the email side of things(i mean actual writing sentence structure, punctuation etc) (i hope and assume -more for my sake than hers-she is better when paying attention to writing rather than dashing off responses). For me I understand how therapy could be done by writing, but it takes more effort on the part of the therapist.

I don't expect my T to do 'therapy' via email. We've been emailing for months without a problem - usually it is a way for me to update her on what's going on, link her to articles or copy/paste stuff I feel is relevant for me, send her journal style entries, dreams... and sometimes it's easier for me to reveal things via email rather than face to face, or to articulate them more clearly, then we talk about them later. My T doesn't send lengthy replies to everything - she reads all of my messages but doesn't reply to them all. If she does it's nothing too heavy - in some cases she has called me rather than email back over something more serious. Email has been very valuable to me in my therapy, I don't think I'd have got half as far in therapy without it. And since I only go to therapy once a week, and have struggled to cope with the time in between, it's been a way to stay 'connected' and feel like she's 'there'. So no, email is not the devil.

I wish I'd more carefully worded the email I sent to her, yes, but apparently it's not even my email she was reacting to with the 'challenge' - it was what happened in the session itself, so it didn't really matter what I wrote, I think the question would have been asked anyway. And no, I did not want to discuss a rupture with her via email - but she was otherwise unavailable, so I sent her an email to clarify some things from my side. The clarifying of the things has not made the rupture worse, we're still hung up on the original misunderstanding - which it turns out actually happened in session, not via email. What's unfortunate, the way I see it, is that she didn't 'challenge' me in session. But that wouldn't have been roses either. But, again, she didn't 'discuss' the rupture by email (nor did I expect her to), we spoke on the phone, and no doubt we will talk in session.

But if she was 'pushing buttons', like she at one point during our conversation today seemed to suggest (I'm not sure, some things she said seemed contadictory to me, and unfortunately we didn't have enough time to talk properly), then the buttons she was pressing were my 'abandonment issues' etc, and what better way to make someone feel abandoned than by leaving them hanging?

If it WERE a simple e-mail miscommunication, which I was hoping it was, I wouldn't be so upset about it. No, she stands by what she said in the email. It means what she meant. She just doesn't appear to see why I've got so upset over it.

But yeah, thanks for making me feel crappier about expecting too much from my T, who must be an idiot to reply to me in the first place?!

See what you're saying, stopdog... my T actually has a pretty flawless written style, spelling, and grammer ... but it's not really 'therapy by writing', it's more 'staying connected' from one week to the next. Usually.

On the phone today she actually encouraged to email her again this weekend, so for us I really don't think the medium is a problem. It's not like I'm sending her hate mail - it's an exploration of my feelings so she can see what's going on - which she says is important.

For what this may be worth, I agree email and or writing is not the devil part of things for everyone. And I believe the therapists could contain a lot of the problems not by restricting email, but by stopping and thinking before they respond. The connection by writing is important and useful to a lot of us.
I got that you were not trying to do therapy by email - I was just being a bit more universal because I don't think it is a bad or impossible way to do therapy in general.
I am sorry you are going through this. It is a painful thing.

I am really sorry that this hasn't resolved for you and if anything is feeling worse. I've never managed to sort something like this out outside of my sessions. Wednesday is a long time away when you're feeling like this but I really hope that in person she really sees you and hears you and tries to understand. I think that's partly what feels awful during those times. I think often many of us work so hard, do our best, really care about our therapists, and then suddenly they seem to have some sort of moment and don't understand where we're coming from at all. Like they stop understanding us altogether, and the importance of our relationship with them. The one person who has always understood.

I tend to feel like those initial mistakes can be a simple misunderstanding, but what's really important is the way they help us to deal with it and they way they respond to it afterwards. It doesn't sound like it was appropriate for your therapist to say in an email. I can sort of relate it to a couple (or more actually) times when I was really struggling, or maybe just not doing really well, and right at the end of my appointment my therapist would say something like "maybe it would be best for you to see someone else". Coming from the only person in the world that I've ever felt strongly attached to...and she's said it a few times! I didn't mean for a suggestion like that to destroy my week, but it always did. I think it might have been last year, she said it just before my birthday and I thought what a nice birthday present.

Thanks Nightlight, yes, this. It just really shook me up. I've been feeling rather unloved and unwanted in life, generally, and she's the one person I can go to with it all, seems to be on my wavelength... yeah.

I've calmed down a bit. I took some time tonight to write out some more thoughts, get my head together, try to convey how it felt - but take full responsibility for my part and my catastophising etc...

I agree, I still don't think she should have wrote what she did in email - the 'challenging' thing - she hasn't discussed anything further by email, she rang me... but from speaking to her (which did help a little, once it sunk in!) and from how I know her to be after all these months, I really don't think she intended for me to be so upset by it - I think she inadvertantly pushed more buttons than she meant to... but... yeah. These things can happen. Just unfortunate that she's not really been available since - which is unusual, on the few occasions I've needed to speak to her she's called me back pretty much straight away, so I guess she spoiled me! Suddenly she doesn't call back right away and I read all sorts into it - if I could have spoke with her soon after I think a lot of my distorted thinking/catastophising/paranoia/general insanity could have been nipped in the bud. From her P.O.V, though she's probably still going to say it's a learning experience and that I need to learn to tolerate these things happening in reletionships... which is fair enough.. just, not you, T, not you! I'm just way too vulnerable right now, and therapy is way too important to me at what is kind of a transitional time for me, and what with the depression and anxiety being pretty full-on...

I'm still worried that there'll be negative fallout from this and that it's not going to be the healing experience ruptures can apparently be, but...! I guess I'll just have to see. Perhaps we'll both go forward with more understanding of each other, and, maybe some of 'the fear' may subside if I know we can survive things like this...?

I have enquired about whether we can have session any earlier in the week, but... On one hand I just want to get to it, on the other hand it's probably going to be awkwaaard. Oh well, whatever will be will be... either she'll fit me in or she won't, or whatever she thinks is best, she's probably dealt with this stuff before, right?

Thanks again, really appreciated. And hugs for the 'maybe it would be best to see someone else' comments, I'm sure they would ruin my entire week, too! Well done for getting through those times and coming out the other side (hopefully relatively unscathed!)

i've been holding my breath for you. sometimes it feels like that's all you can do, just hold on?

I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread and been supportive through what have been a rough few days for me, I appreciate your kindness, means a lot

I hope you will be able to talk to your T when you see her. My T does not use email with her clients so I have never had that type of experience, although I think I understood you when you said that it was really about the fact that she did not understand why you were upset. I am not sure how I would handle the emailing thing so I will be thinking about you. As far as the negative posts - I think they say more about the person saying them than they do about you. I think it is possible to express your feelings but the tone used to do this is important.

My first therapist was like that.. and it was a toxic, toxic therapy that nearly did me in. I spent sooo much time and energy coping with the extraordinarily painful process of attempting to repair that relationship while the ruptures grew and deepened with his every refusal to talk honestly with me about the possibility that he may have 'slipped'. I would have been so okay if he'd have just acknowledged it. It was awful. It was so retraumatizing. It took me a year and a half with my current therapist to get to a point that I was not in constant pain over that. He undid me. I'm not kidding. So... only you can know.. but if I were you I'd really pay attention to the red flags popping up.. and really *really* pay attention to how this therapy is making you feel. If she can't own her contribution to relationship ruptures (it's not about 'fault' - it's about both people contributing), then I don't know how it can work in a way that's therapeutic to you. My current therapist has the stance that any ruptures in the therapeutic relationship are HER responsibility to notice and initiate repair. The only thing she asks of me.. is that I tell her any time there is anything that happens that is troublesome to me. It has worked beautifully, and her passionate dedication to that stance is what facilitated my healing from that previous ripping asunder of my constitution.

Please pay attention to how this is feeling to you. If she is not attentive to that (you don't have to be right - but she Does have to be willing to help you overcome any misperceptions you might have).. anyway, if she's not willing to do that, then I don't see how it can get better.

Thanks for sharing so honestly, Crescent Moon. Sorry you had such a bad experience. I will bear your comments in mind...

I was very emotional when I wrote that post, though, and whilst that is truly how I felt, I'm not sure it reflects the most... erm... balanced view of the situation! I want to believe my T had good intentions, and that we can work it out... A big part of the reason I got so upset is because I'm so attached to her, and up to now (15 months) we've not had a problem... so I do want to give her the benefit of the doubt with this... However, I guess a lot will depend on how she responds when we have time to talk about it properly...

I'm willing to accept where I went wrong and contributed to this, but I hope she is too, and that she can address my concerns..

And yes, at this point I'm a little peeved that I feel like I'm the one putting so much effort into trying to initiate a repair... But then, it's the weekend, she's been busy... and although this started on Thursday morning, I honestly don't think she realised there was such a problem until Saturday, when, to her credit, she did call.

I'll see what this week brings!

Oh dear. I think I might have broke my therapy. My T has responded.. via email.. and, as well as seeming kinda defensive, she again states that she doesn't understand how I could feel upset. And, she can't see me until my scheduled appointment - which is totally understandable, but really sucks.

I feel a little hurt by her response, but more than that, I worry that if she can't understand things I'm trying so hard to spell out to her, maybe she can't help me any further. I know I need to go to my session on Wednesday and discuss things with her in person, but right now, I feel it will be with a heavy heart.

I hope you can work through this in session; it seemed thongs had been going well until this point

I know, things had been going well! So well, I thought. But a teensy misunderstanding seems it might have revealed bigger problems...

It still could be worth working through if you can ... and seeing if it can be resolved

It is NOT you breaking the therapy. Let me say it again real clear: It is NOT YOU!

You have made repeated attempts to talk honestly about something she said that hurt you - and she's reacting by minimizing the effect her words had on you, being defensive about it, and even using a technique that I HATE and I think is a really bad sign - when she told you she was just "challenging" you. Therapist's say that when they KNOW they screwed up but they are too small minded and egotistical to acknowledge it and sincerely apologize.


Maybe it doesn't suck. Maybe it will give you time to catch your breath and gather your thoughts.. and hopefully realize that she is demonstrating that she is not able to model relationship negotiation in a healthy way. You don't need that - for sure.

That is brilliant insight! You are right on it. You should not have to try so hard to spell it out for her. If she hasn't gotten it by now, then I fear it's hopeless.

You will be okay. I admire your insight and your courage. You are the healthier one in this situation, and I think you should be proud of that!

This is not something you can fix or explain or discuss via email which is what you have been trying to do. Until you can sit down face to face with your T and really do the face to face work, just try to give it a rest for a few days. I suspect once you can really have a true conversation about this, things will be fine. In the meantine, the continual replay and analysis of her written words is really only making things worse in your mind. Can you set it aside until you meet with her rather than continue to play it over and over again in your head?

Setting it aside is what I'm intending to do now, farmergirl, thanks. It wasn't my intention to 'discuss' via email, I just wanted to explain/present my feelings, and it was the only way of relaying the information at the time. We spoke on the phone at the weekend and she said to send more email if I had any more thoughts. I asked if I could speak to her again or if we could fit in an earlier session, but that hasn't been possible. I wasn't expecting her to reply via email, I'm pretty surprised she did - I would have preferred to discuss the content in person, and thought we would be. I did feel it was important I send the email, though, and I don't regret that, because I wanted to clarify some things and also to apologise for overreacting in the first place. (I feel I've been able to be more articulate and clear in writing than I could have been days later in session - when I would probably find I'd struggle trying to remember what I wanted to say)I also didn't want to leave things on a 'bad note'... and waiting these things out is so uncomfortable for me. But yes, I totally agree, no more discussion should be done about this in writing. The information is all out there now, and I do feel face to face is absolutely the only way forward from here... (hard as that is going to be!)