How much do ts need to know?

******* talk of rape**********


T knows the I have been raped.. He knows the details as I remember them. We focus on the that trauma on and off since I told him. So, my question is.. If there are more incidents, not rape, but other things. Do you think my t would need to know? Regardless- we are still doing work on trauma.

Therapy, is about sharing what you feel you want to discuss, in my opinion. If you need to work through something, else, then why not?

I don't think there are any absolutes -in the sense that you have to share everything in order to heal, grow. I suppose it depends on what you feel will help you and when is the right time for you.

My first impulse is to ask, what is the conversation you are having in your head? Are you thinking to yourself, "well t you wouldn't say THAT if you knew this about me". In that case, you are just putting more frosting on a broken gingerbread house and expecting it to hold up, but ultimately it will crack and break down? Instead of letting t get in there and help support you and try to fix stuff?

I don't think of it so much as what the therapist needs to know about me as much as what I might need to tell the therapist.

I had this same type question awhile back. I don't think that you MUST tell T everything, if you don't want to. In my case though I found that T came to wrong conclusions about things because I hadn't given him the full picture. I ultimately decided he had to have all the pieces in order to understand me better. I wrote him a letter about it and handed it to him in session. He was glad to have the information.

I asked my T something similar when I left therapy first time around.

Me: 'I still haven't told you everything' (about csa)
T: 'we can't always say everything but instead speak about the things that are important enough to be mentioned'

Are you really wondering if your T needs to know - or if it's okay to want to tell him?

I know that Its ok want to tell him. I have been t long enough to know that. The problem is I am not sure I want to talk about it. I trust him, just not sure I am really ready to go into just a couple of other things.

Hmm good thoughts hankster... Since what I am talking about is more trauma stuff, I wonder if anything about out session would change.
But now typing this, I think t would question why I would want to keep it to myself. He would want to know how that would help me? We already established that keeping the rape to myself for so long was a major source of my anxiety over the years...

From my own experience, I would encourage you to be as open with your T about other traumas as you feel able to, when you're ready to. I suspect that you might actually be there now, because you're thinking about it in the way that you are. The reason why I say this is because I have found that multiple traumas all relate to one another in sometimes odd and subtle ways, and that they can be a sort of integrated whole at some level. I think that the way we experience and make sense of and process trauma is very much affected by prior traumas, one defines the other. It has just been useful to me to look at things side by side, both intentionally and not.

What your question also trips for me is that sense of "what's there really to be sorry about" with respect to being open about things in therapy. Do people really feel bad that they shared "too much" in therapy-- outside of all the pretzel twisting that naturally comes with it, such as now my T will hate me, think I am a terrible person, yadda yadda? At the end of my life, I can't imagine saying "I shouldn't have said so much in therapy." That would be like saying, "I shouldn't have spent so much time with my child." In the bigger picture of things, not just about one decision, I suppose I would rather err on the side of being open than closed.

Yes - I regret sharing so much in therapy in the past with xT. I feel that I have to stay on guard now because I don't want to be hurt/violated again. I wish it wasn't that way for me but it is.

Freewilled, I am sorry that you had an abusive experience in therapy. I don't see, however, that being guarded is really going to protect you against someone who is abusive. People who abuse can use any speck of information against you in order to hurt you, and you likely still would have been hurt if you had said less. You didn't get hurt because you shared too much, you got hurt because of the person you shared it with.

It can be healing to allow yourself to drop your defenses, although it is always a balancing act to have them where you need them. But I think the healthy trick is learning when to lower your defenses and when to raise them, and to not walk through life thinking that everyone is going to hurt you.