[Yearning0723]

She did get my email and we went straight into talking about big stuff, like emotions and attachment. Mostly we talked about my former T and how I felt really rejected by her once I actually started to trust her and how she wasn’t able to handle how attached I started feeling to her and how that stuff might be impacting how I feel in therapy now. Also the fact that it feels really gratifying for me to get an empathetic response and care from someone, and that usually derails me from my “proper” goal (healing from trauma) because instead I just want to talk and talk about bad things so I can feel loved by the other person, and I can be very manipulative about this and I really doubt this T would notice me manipulating her because she takes most things I say at face value and doesn’t always look for a hidden motive.

Former T DID always look for a hidden motive and assume I was manipulating her, so that relationship didn’t work out, but with this T, right now I have no desire to manipulate her, but I’m scared I might have that desire and the future and it would feel so gratifying to get attention from her that I wouldn’t even tell her what I was doing. It feels like there’s no end point for me…it’s not like if someone gives me a good enough reaction, okay, done, the need is met, now it’s gone. It’s like there’s a black hole inside me and no one can ever fill it; their care can just never be enough for me, and I don’t want to get into that sort of pattern.

Also, therapy is very destabilizing, to bring up all these really powerful emotions, and then the session is over and you just have to deal with the aftermath all week. That was a problem with my former T, and I had lots of coping mechanisms, but the problem was whenever there was all this inner turmoil inside me and I was using coping mechanisms to get through my life between sessions, it just felt like I was “faking it,” and it was just really inauthentic. And I realized that I just don’t have anyone in my life who can support me, and T is the only person who really would be able to in that situation, and I don’t want to be dependent on her. And either way, I don’t know if “processing” childhood stuff is even possible, or if it will even help, or what it would do to me and my personality, and whether I would even recognize myself minus all the anxiety.

The real thing is that I’m scared of becoming attached to her and then being rejected because she can’t handle my emotions or because of “boundaries.” She thinks she can handle it. I asked her why she thinks that, and she said she just does, and I told her that wasn’t an acceptable answer, so finally she said she’s not 100% sure because she just doesn’t have enough information yet to know whether she can help me work through this, but she thinks she probably can, and she isn’t like the other people in my life who hurt me, and she’s willing to try and she thinks that even if there are roadbumps she will be open to discussing them with me and she thinks we will be able to work through them. And she said I know that she cares about me, and she doesn’t know if that would be enough, but she would like to try.

I found that quite an honest and satisfactory answer. And her saying she cared about me was very gratifying. So, I am willing to try with her, if she’s willing to stick it out with me. I guess what I need to do for next week is ask her two things that are worrying me: a) what she would do if she found we weren’t working well together and b) what things would indicate to her we weren’t working well together. Maybe I will send her an email tomorrow or the next day and ask her to bring that stuff at the beginning of our next session, because I think I will be too nervous to ask out loud…

[NowhereUSA]

I don't think it can hurt.

Different Ts are going to be equipped to handle different things. I like that my T is DBT trained because he doesn't see manipulation as necessarily a bad thing but as a thing we do to get what we need and that when we haven't gotten what we need, we have mechanisms we do to get them (wow that was a long rambly sentence).

I've worried I'm too much for my T but he's stuck it out

[Yearning0723]

Originally Posted by NowhereUSA

I don't think it can hurt.

Different Ts are going to be equipped to handle different things. I like that my T is DBT trained because he doesn't see manipulation as necessarily a bad thing but as a thing we do to get what we need and that when we haven't gotten what we need, we have mechanisms we do to get them (wow that was a long rambly sentence).

I've worried I'm too much for my T but he's stuck it out

My T also doesn't see manipulation as a bad thing but just as a way of getting my needs met...but part of me worries that that's because she hasn't been on the receiving end of it (and perhaps I lack confidence in her ability to even realize she's being manipulated). I don't know if I actually will ever manipulate her, but I worry that someday if she is too nice to me, then I will try to manipulate her in order to get her to keep giving me super empathetic responses to things...

I'm glad you were able to talk about your relationship with the previous therapist. I like this one's response, too. It's honest. Could you consider that if you do find yourself repeating old patterns, that you can both work through it and get to the other side--scary, yes, but maybe worth it? She seems much more capable of doing that than the last one, who pretty much just shut you down.

[NowhereUSA]

Originally Posted by Yearning0723

My T also doesn't see manipulation as a bad thing but just as a way of getting my needs met...but part of me worries that that's because she hasn't been on the receiving end of it (and perhaps I lack confidence in her ability to even realize she's being manipulated). I don't know if I actually will ever manipulate her, but I worry that someday if she is too nice to me, then I will try to manipulate her in order to get her to keep giving me super empathetic responses to things...

I try to remind myself that I'm not my T's first rodeo. He's dealt with lots of clients with lots of diagnoses. It is a level of trust. Maybe it's something you can say if it happens. "I really liked the response you gave me here and now I really want that response again and I feel like I'm trying to get you to give it to me."

In DBT we learn that calling a feeling a feeling or a thought a thought can often times give us some level of power over it. If I say "I feel the feeling of anger." It's no longer an identifier. I am not the anger. I feel the anger and it is not my identity.

I think you can do the same thing with where you are. Worth trying maybe? Or just keep talking about it with your T, give her a chance to reassure you multiple times because I still need lots of reassurance.

[Yearning0723]

Originally Posted by NowhereUSA

I try to remind myself that I'm not my T's first rodeo. He's dealt with lots of clients with lots of diagnoses. It is a level of trust. Maybe it's something you can say if it happens. "I really liked the response you gave me here and now I really want that response again and I feel like I'm trying to get you to give it to me."

In DBT we learn that calling a feeling a feeling or a thought a thought can often times give us some level of power over it. If I say "I feel the feeling of anger." It's no longer an identifier. I am not the anger. I feel the anger and it is not my identity.

I think you can do the same thing with where you are. Worth trying maybe? Or just keep talking about it with your T, give her a chance to reassure you multiple times because I still need lots of reassurance.

Maybe the thing is that I know my T doesn't have like 30 years of experience dealing with difficult clients, so it's conceivable that my issues might be too much for her...maybe I underestimate her (or overestimate myself). I've manipulated much older and more experienced Ts in the past...and it's really easy for me to say now that if I was manipulating her I would tell her, but when I'm in that moment and feeling very gratified by attention/care/something, I know I probably wouldn't...perhaps this is just an irrational fear though...