Wounded by therapist I trust(ed).

She sounds like she handled that very well. It can be hard to be that vulnerable, but it sounds like it paid off.

From my perspective, that is fairly young and inexperienced! Plus, as someone else said here, a t cant take you someplace they've never been. I held onto my first longterm t far longer than i should have, for the same reasons you give. I feel like all my life ive been choosing ts with lesser intellectual capabilities. That was also my role in my family of origin, so that makes it complicated to deal with in therapy. Where you live you should have your choice of ts. Find someone who appreciates you.

I think it's nice that she's responding to your concerns.

Hi grimtopaz, I know this is probably not what you want to hear, but I'm going to say in anyways. I know that you really like your T and have developed a strong connection with her, so it makes sense that leaving her would be really hard. I also understand how you feel about the whole abandonment thing, I have the same kind of issues big time. But it really might be for the best. I had really strong erotic transference with a humanist CBT therapist recently. She basically refused to deal with it and ended up yelling at me for my transference issues. This was really horrible because this was the first therapist I was able to trust. Anyway the relationship was badly damaged by her outburst that I ended up having to terminate.

In hind sight I really wish that she had just referred me to someone better suited to deal with my issues. This would have been less damaging. Although that's not to say that it wouldn't hurt. I'm sure I would have felt abandon too. But this would have been far better than the alternative. I think your therapist is just really trying to be responsible. I think its a lot better to go through a termination process than to just have things end abruptly. Maybe you can spend some more time with your therapist talking about why she thinks another approach might be better, and what it will help you with specifically. Maybe she knows about the transference and wants you to be able to talk about it with someone who is trained to do that?

You can always just go try the new person and see if it works. If you don't like it you can find a CBT person again. Who you want to see for therapy is really up to you. At any rate I really hope that she can help you work through your feelings of abandonment until you see someone new. The new person should help you with those feelings too. If they don't find someone else.