Awful email response from T

Learning you needn't have been so sensitive to my sensibilities after all as of my session yesterday I am now once again without a T .

What can I say, I'm feeling totally devastated and reeling from the about face she made on her second email response. The first email from her that I originally posted here really did reflect more accurately what was going on in her mind.

You know I could have put up with all her interruptions and incessant irrelevant talking, I could have put up with her clinical coldness, her detachment, her total lack of compassion, the absence of all empathy, her superficial CBT approach - all for the sake of having my anger heard and validated, that was and is always my chief need that I seek to get met in therapy. And a clinical detached po faced 'professional' seemed the perfect candidate for not taking personally anger from a client. Appearances and protestations of professionalism deceive, as ever...

She pulled the rug on that completely yesterday. She set conditions and expectations on me that made it impossible for me to continue in therapy with her - it ceased to be 'therapy' in the moment she set out her demands of me.

For a big part of the session (in amongst really negative stuff related to other issues) she judged and criticized my 2 emails to her this week as extremely critical and highly destructive and therefore unacceptable . Ironically she later said the first email (which in my eyes was a very reasonable and reasoned and not at all angry email) was very critical, but the second one which I thought was critical because I didn't censor my anger in it, was not critical . This after spending half the session repeating ad infinitum how critical they both were .

And to really put a few more knives in she labelled the very first email I'd sent her several weeks ago outlining what I'd thought had gone wrong in a particular session - at her request I might add, she's the one who was adamant that I send her an email to warn her of any bad feelings or issues I had with a session - as equally highly critical and highly destructive . WTF? Talk about holding grudges and being dishonest and inconsistent - I felt really betrayed at that bit, if she'd found it so 'highly critical and destructive' weeks ago why didn't she talk to me about it at the time?????? Trust stopped even thinking about peeking into this therapy after that undermining backstab. And I might add, not once did she take responsibility for this being about HER feelings vis a vis my emails, she just continually repeated that they and I were extremely critical and highly destructive .

For what it's worth, and I know there will be many here who will automatically assume that because the T has judged my emails as critical then they must be, they were not. SHE experienced them as critical, though they were predominantly about ME and MY FEELINGS - she took them personally, and that was very evident from what she said and read out to me from her written but unsent response to my first email this week. Therapy was becoming more about her all the time and less about me

The bottom line was that she said that I must from now on express my feelings to her 'constructively'. Which totally destroys the foundation of my being in therapy in the first place - I'm actually very good at behaving like a good little girl in the real world and have done so all my life, it's the pattern I'm trying to break - and completely destroyed all faith and trust and respect I might have been nurturing for her. She demanded that I behave in a manner more acceptable to her and that if I didn't she wouldn't work with me. All the time telling me that I would be making a mistake if I 'quit'. So covering her own back actually, a sneaky ploy indeed, saying on the one hand, but I'm not quitting on you (this to maintain her ego image of being a therapist who 'never gives up' to quote her own oft repeated words to me from early in the therapy) but on the other hand setting out personal demands that make it impossible for me to continue...

I tell you what, I don't pay someone seventy quid an hour to kowtow to their emotional expectations or to make them feel good or to accede to their demands and expectations of how I should behave, feel and think in order to make life easy and comfortable for them. I am torn between absolute rage at how this woman has screwed me over emotionally, and profound desolation at having been made to experience myself once again as unhuman, unacceptable and fit only for rejection because of my angry feelings.

Talk about repetition compulsion - I keep bringing my anger to therapists like a pathetic puppy growling over a huge bone pleading with them to accept it and me and not take it personally, and it feels like they promise the earth and then they turn around and say that bone is ugly and offensive and too big, you are not allowed to bring it in anymore...

Well actually, thank god for my anger because it allows me now to say to them go **** yourselves.

Sorry PC I won't be around very much for a bit - firstly it just upsets me unbearably to be around people with a therapist when I'm out in the wilderness again, and secondly because I just feel so completely overwhelmed with despair right now at being the agent of my own rejection and pain because of who I am, that I need time to try and deal with all of the horribly conflicting stuff coming out of this last therapy, and I'm going to be hard pushed to be supportive of anyone right now...

The one thing I haven't been 'allowed' to do up to now, is express my anger at them (been terminated for less!)

She’s not big on taking responsibility for her part in ruptures in therapy, there’s always a defence or an explanation or at best an I’m sorry IF…

One thing that kind of strikes me here is that you seem to be working yourself up a bit. I call it "kitchen sinking". It's when one thing happens - a poorly worded email for instance - and then this one thing calls in to question the entire relationship. Everything but the kitchen sink gets added on.

Learning you needn't have been so sensitive to my sensibilities after all as of my session yesterday I am now once again without a T .