Falling into old patterns with T

I feel like maybe my big issue over the past few weeks that I've had with past Ts but not with current T until recently is that I want to tell her super traumatic things and then have her reassure me. I only really realized this on Wednesday when I started crying and then wanted her to comfort me; it was never really a dynamic we had before then, and I don't know if it's good for me or not.

With past ED T, that pattern got so pronounced that I would actually do the opposite of what she wanted me to do just so I could still be her poor pathetic client who needs her to take care of me, so she would have sympathy for me and be like, "Oh, I know it's hard; I get it," and hug me and make me promise to try again next week, which I wouldn't, just so we could have the same conversation (and hugs) next week. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The same thing happened with past CBT T where I would actually make stuff up just to elicit comfort and reassurance from her, and the same old pattern has happened with past teachers in particular, where I tell them super traumatic stuff, they comfort me, and I feed on that comfort, and it becomes like an addiction, where I want to tell them more and more so I can feel that safety.

It is a very bad habit to get into, and I know I need to discuss it with T...she thinks I haven't talked to her about past stuff because it's hard for me, but the real situation isn't that it's hard for me; it's just that it would be so easy for me to fall into it. Like last week, I told her about the situation with my Minnie Mouse when I was six and I told her the specifics of my mom kicking me out(?) and I told her in particular about the incident where my stepdad took off my pants to stop me from running out of the house, and she was so empathetic to all of that that I felt like I was sort of feeding off it. It gave me some sort of gratification to see that she was upset by the stuff I was telling her, and it made me want to tell her more. Yikes...

Yearning, I think it is good that you realize that this is a pattern with you. That would probably be something that would be good to talk to your T about. I think you would be surprised to have your T validate what you are saying as something that is understandable and extremely common.

I think it takes a great deal of courage to talk about it here. I can totally relate to what you are saying.

I know I need to tell it to her, but part of me is scared that if I do, she will stop responding empathetically to the things I say...and I feel like even if it might not be good for me in the long run, I need it. I don't think I would be brave enough to tell her traumatic stuff if I didn't think she was going to be super supportive and caring and validating...

♥

I can only speak about my experience with working in the field and being a client, but I think that she would tell you that you don't have to tell her horrible things (although that is good too) in order to get her to feel that you are valid or care about you.

I think if you told her that you were feeling the need for some caring support then she would give it just as much. I think she would also feel that it was a good step to ask for what you need without feeling that you have to to elicit those things with anything more than asking for what you need.

She's the one who wants me to keep talking about traumatic stuff...I'm just scared that I've opened Pandora's Box. With past Ts and with teachers, I definitely did feel like telling them traumatic things was the only way to get them to care about me, but in this case, I don't know if that's it.

I know that telling her traumatic things won't make her care any more about me than she already does, and even me crying hysterically last session was not going to get her to break her "the session's over when the session's over" rule...it's just that when I say, "This terrible thing happened when I was a kid," and she says, "Oh, wow, I feel so sad for you that you went through that," or "I'm sorry that happened to you," or "That sounds like it must have been very difficult and I know you're doing the best you can with it," or even something less therapeutic but more real like, "Oh, Yearning, you got blamed for everything, didn't you?" (This last one I think she didn't mean to say but it just sort of slipped out.)

Those are pretty normal things a therapist would say to a client making those kinds of disclosures, but I feed off it, so much. That's definitely not the only time I feel her validation or caring (in fact, I feel her caring much more often when I talk about other things), and she definitely doesn't "give in" to the amount of caring I would like in those moments (she doesn't do hugs like past ED T did and she doesn't do platitudes like, "Everything's going to be okay," and she doesn't tell me stuff like, "I care about you and I'm here for you," in those moments, even though sometimes I wish she would).

I really want those kinds of reassurances, which is probably why I worry about whether it's okay or good for me to have them, since when I want something that much, there's usually something wrong with it. But maybe if I had that kind of safe, caring validation, that would be enough and it would fill that hole...I don't know. And I never really felt the need to go over traumatic incidents with her until now, a) because she wants me to and b) because it actually feels good to. It makes me trust her more when she responds well to stuff.

Yearning, I hear what you are saying. I think that sometimes "knowing is half the battle". The fact that you know that you want to take care to not fall into some old habits, you will be more able to combat those things.

I really hope you know that you deserve all of the caring that you crave.

I don't know how to determine whether the "caring I crave" is a normal thing that I should give in to or whether it's pathological (T hates it when I use that word) and something I need to suppress.

Oh Yearnings, I have similar patterns. I never got the care that I needed. They seem to have no idea about emotions period. After I experienced a SA they left on vacation for 10 days even though I asked them not to. So I wrote to one of my professors and told her what happened. I was secretly thinking how great it was that this terrible situation was happening because she would really feel sorry for me now. I've only ever brought this pattern once with last T. I can't really remember if we ever addressed it directly after that. But she did eventually help me understand how much my own self worth was deeply damaged by family's continual suppression of emotions, and my mother's flat out abandonment of me. Nobody in my family ever really appreciated the person that I am, and they were some of the least likely people to validate my feelings.

Eventually I wrote a list of all my qualities (good and bad) and took them to therapy and talked about them. This made me feel like I had a lot more to offer in relationships.

So you do absolutely deserve to have your emotions validated--I guess nobody ever did enough of that for you--but you have a lot of other things to offer in relationships too I'm sure. Even in therapy! I know just from talking to you on here a bit that you are a very smart and perceptive person.

Thanks for this, Depletion. T asked me a couple weeks ago to make a list of all my good qualities. She didn't like that I was having difficulty defining the word "good" because to me "good" = "contextually beneficial" rather than "objectively positive". But I came up with some things.

And I can totally, totally relate to being secretly glad terrible things are happening so I can get my "sympathy fix". When I was thirteen, during the first Christmas after my mom had kicked me out, my dad was away in Cuba and I was home by myself for a week, and I was secretly glad because this meant I could go tell my teacher whom I had intense maternal transference with that my dad had left me all alone and I was lonely and sad and poor little me...she let me stay with her until 5:30 on the last day of school and hugged me. It was totally worth being home alone on Christmas.

Your mom kicked you out when you were thirteen? Me too. Well, I had to go and live with my dad because she was in so much debt (she has a shopping addiction). After that she just started caring less and less about me, until she move away one day, and didn't tell anyone where she was going.

Anyway, don't mean to hijack your thread, but I just can't believe some of the similarities in out stories.

Maybe you could talk with your therapist about what you have to offer in therapy--what kind of agency you have.

I'm rooting for you.

Thanks, Depletion. But what do you mean by what kind of agency I have?

It's a theory term I thought you might know. Basically it means your ability to affect change--usually political change--but I think it can be personal too. I'll send you a PM about it more in a bit.

Okay, obviously I know what the word agency means. I just meant in this context. Because I'm usually pretty confident about my ability to effect change. I am an incredibly autonomous person. Something about being a Millennial, I believe.

Oh cool. I guess I was think of it more as your individual capacity to effect change in your own life, or what kind of power you bring to the therapy relationship. With my last therapist we were going to start talking about feeling strong. We never quite got to it before therapy ended, but I think it was important. I guess I thought about that strong feeling as getting in touch with my own agency, and responding to the things that have hurt me, as best I can.

Of course agency is always something that is limited by social factors, or by other harms done to us, like abuse, and its critical that these harms are acknowledged. So I think that's probably what you want Yearnings--for the harm to be acknowledged. I know that's what I want. I want for someone to acknowledge that what was done to me was wrong, and to do something to make up for it, like hold me. I think I want this so badly because no one in my family ever seemed to acknowledge that what was going on was wrong. My mom, especially, was always finding ways to justify her neglect of me. So I think its ok to want some one to say all that stuff was F***ed.

But I think the trick is you have to find away to get these things acknowledged in away that doesn't cripple your own agency too much. One thing I did that was kind of a medium between hoping for endless amounts of pity, and feeling like I had to be strong all the time and tell no one my problems, was to find ways to Incorporated some of my traumatic experiences in to my school work (gender studies is a great venue for this). Doing this was really healing. I don't know if that is something that feels like an option for you, or something you have ever explored, but I just thought I'd suggest it. It kind of helped me get some of the personal attention I wanted, but it also helped me feel a bit stronger, and like my story had a purpose beyond getting someone to give over endless amounts of sympathy (nice as that is).

How did you manage to do this?

Well that's a very complicated short question, and I'm not sure which part you want answers to, so I'll try to answer a few parts. First, I'll answer the logistics, although I'm not sure if that's what you want help with or not.

How to get your professor to let you do this:
One way to do this is to just do it. Sometimes my courses had things like short reading responses, this is a good venue to test this kind of stuff out. So if you find yourself doing a short piece of writing and see some way that the piece relates to your own experience you might try slipping in a paragraph about personal experience, be sure to make it clear how it relates to the article or thing your talking about (keep it academic). You could if you're more caviler try something like introducing a paper with a personal experience (but I wouldn't suggest this without knowing the professor well). Finally, you can always set up a meeting if you have an idea. I suggest going to the meeting as prepared as possible. Think about how the experience might fit with the topic, or if you're brave suggest a topic related to the course (I did this mostly with a professor who always had a forth paper option to get another topic approved, that way I knew she was open). At any rate go to the meeting as prepared as possible, I suggest taking a Thesis statement and some explanation of how your personal experience relates. FYI you don't have to disclose everything about what happened in the meeting. You might just go and say I was thinking about doing paper on ABC thing; I wanted to talk about such and such personal experience; I was planing on connecting it thesis in such in such way, or using it as an anecdote in intro.

For me it worked best to do this with professor I knew well (had taken more than one course from), and I most often did this in theoretical course (although depending on the kind of department your in you might choose something else; I'm not sure what the course structure is like, so really whatever feels right)

Keep your guard up:
This by all means should never be your normal paper method. It should be the exception, not the rule, and it should feel more inspired than forced. You need to want to do this, or there is no point. Forcing yourself to disclose is not a good idea. You should include these kinds of personal experiences for you. The paper, and most specifically and analysis of the experience, should help you process the experience. Be clear with yourself that you are writing about this experience because you want to understand it better; because you want to want to claim some kind of pain, or understand yourself in relation to a larger group. Your goal should be to know yourself better by the end. You have to be ok with no response to the experience, or a small amount of sympathy in the comments. I most frequently got responses to my experiences regarding how I had utilized the experience as a piece of evidence to support a larger claim.

Also only, only, only ever write about this in places where you feel safe. I only ever did this in gender studies class with professors I trusted knew well, and that I knew respected me.

Last be clear with yourself, these are your experiences, you choose what to disclose how much to disclose, and the manner in which you will do it. You own your experiences, do not ever forget this.

Keeping a balance:
Ok so I'm not totally sure if the above novel was really the answer you were looking for to your question (I thought you may have just wanted to know about getting a bit more balanced, I wasn't sure so I just answered it all) Anyways, I can't say that I'm perfect or totally healed from doing this, in fact I just suffered a terrible preoccupation with my last T, which did not end well, so I'm not some kind of walking miracle story (but I don't really want to be). But I can tell you that this did help me to gain some since of ownership over my own stories. I think that writing about them in a way that fits with who I am personally was helped me to understand that using my story in a deliberate and careful way gave the story a kind of purpose, which in turn returned some of the power that had been taken from me.

I can not say that I will ever regain the things that were lost. Mothers can not be returned, or made new, the scars from SA will never disappear, the longing for the care and tenderness which I did not receive persist. But I do think I found a more productive way to process and share my story.

This kind of method isn't for everyone, but I do think its critical that you find a way to tell your story in way that has some kind of productive meaning and purpose. For me what I think was most important was gaining some since of control over what had happened to me. But this by no means the only method. If you do try this be careful, academics are not always the most emotionally aware people.

Finally, a reading suggestion: bell hooks. She often uses her personal experiences to make larger points. Maybe something to look at, if you haven't.

Also don't do this until you are ready. This really has to be for you, so take your time. It's really not an all at once kind of thing.

Yearning my heart breaks when I read your posts. I think canon is right, your t will support you and give you empathy no matter how you are, she sounds brilliant. I know the feeling of wanting to get that empathy and care from them and it can be addictive, very much so!

But it can also keep you stuck in a victim role and unable to move forward and maybe right now you can't and are not able to move forward.
It sounds as though your inner child is acting out and screaming for the love and attention she never got as a child. She is yearning to be cared for and rescued. How would it be if you were to ask her what she needs from you?

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Inner child needs a mother. But even she knows that that's never going to happen.

(I know, I know; I can be the mother to inner child myself. Maybe someday. But even that is a pretty shallow comfort.)

Yearning I can relate to you to the dot.

I fell into this at school with my teacher and it was a vicious cycle .. leaving school was scary, horrible etc.. but it got better in time.. unfortunately PSTD kicked in and I needed help with 'thoughts' but i was petrified to start a therapy 'relationship' because: 1. I was scared of maternal transference like i had with my teacher and 2. slipping back to old habits - exactly the same as yours!

If it helps I have kind of told T - maybe indirectly but I think she gets it.

T has told me that I think I need to deserve attention and therefore bringing up traumatic experiences/making them up etc is a way of feeling like i deserve it. Like my subconscious thinks I will only be/feel cared for or loved if something dramatic is said/happens.. because my mother/family didn't provided me with love/care for the normal things like crying or just being upset. So I had to make something big just to get a little attention.

Also, we have identified what I need...or what my inner child needs.. and that is a mother.. but as you so rightly said we are never going to get that

I can't help because i've slipped a bit with T myself..but..I hope this helps in terms of being able to relate to you!

Keep Strong