My T Left Me...Part 2

Trying to get my life back. I still have hopes to be a mother and that's more important than a person. I still struggle with the loss of my T. But I also know that there's not much more I can do with the situation. I know she won't change her mind no matter what I do, and even if she did, I wouldn't trust her. She destroyed the relationship. But I still miss her and still love her

Weight... So annoying. I have to lose 40lbs now in order to get the doctors to help me become pregnant. But I also know it's doable since I was close to my goal before. Same with the A1C levels. I like the minion quote though: "Don't be afraid of a few extra pounds. Fat people are harder to kidnap."

Oh! I don't know if it was the medication or what, but I didn't cry last night!

That is my new motto!!

Having a horrible night. Another full on crying fest. I miss my T so bad! I know it's night, and by morning thing will be better. But it's so freaking painful tonight.

I was rereading her response to my email after the termination. How can she say she cares about me, but that I can't contact her?

My fiance told me to call the new T. I can't. It feels wrong. Why would this person who is practically a stranger want me calling her at 4am? Why would anyone want someone to call them at 4am? And what could she possibly say to me anyways? We haven't processed anything together yet, and this os something major. What if she says/does something that hurts me and makes things worse? We should start out with small issues and not jump into a major issue at 4am, right?

It sucks. The only person who can help take this pain away is the person who caused it and she wants nothing to do with me!

((((Scarlet)))) It's day again. I hope you're feeling better.

I've just been reading more on here and I see your posts supporting other people. You're sure not wallowing. You strike me as moving into the mainstream of life as fast as your feelings let you.

One post of yours struck me particularly. You advised someone to "do the opposite of how you feel". I thought of this when reading about you rereading old T's email and about how much that intensified your pain. Right now you're too fragile to revisit that. It would be enormously better if you printed out all of her emails, put them all in a sealed envelope, and deleted them from your computer/phone. When you're ready, if you still want to revisit that, open them up and read them with your DBT T. But definitely, never when you're alone and never at night. That triggers you too much. That's not keeping you safe.

I hope today is peaceful and more.

What you said about not wanting to contact your T out of session reminded me of what someone said in a feminist consciousness raising group I attended briefly in the 70's. One of the women had been in therapy and talked about her process. She said that at the beginning she was always contacting her T between session, saying "Get me out of my life!" but later, when T started working, she felt less of a need to. I know I wouldn't call a T at night unless I were actively suicidal or something similar, but I also suspect T's expect more upset phone calls at the beginning before T and skills have started to work.

((((((Scarlet))))))

i'm sorry you're having a horrible night. it's completely understandable to still be grieving for your T, it hasn't been that long at all. take care of yourself.

(((Scarlet))) Hope today is better.

After 10 months in therapy, I am just learning this.... it's awesome!

I'm not doing to great this morning. But I survived the night. My whole face is swollen, I have a headache, and I can barely keep my eyes open. I had plans to go to the mall with my mom and step-dad. I wanted to help them design my mom's wedding ring (they're getting married in Sept). I have no energy to go, but I'm going to go anyways. An hour at the mall with family will do more good than harm. I'm trying to do the opposite of what I feel

There are some replies I really want to respond to, but I'll have to wait for later.

good luck, i hope it goes okay.

I'm sorry you're feeling so bad.

As far as my message goes, they're only ideas for you to use or not. Period. Whether or not you use, respond to, or ignore them, I know that you are the one who knows what you need.

(((Scarlet)))

I think it's really admirable that you're working so hard to "do the opposite". I'm sorry you woke up feeling so awful, but hopefully getting up and being around people will help you feel a little bit better....

(((Scarlet))) hope you feel better soon...

Yay for opposite to emotion. That one is a seriously tough one to do. Our feelings, emotions, and vulnerabilities are all often conspiring against us. To push forward, great job.

What you said makes logical sense. I want to keep my emails, but I really shouldn't be accessing them right now. Part of my issue is that there are over 300 emails total that we have written. That's going to take a lot of printing. Second issue is that I prefer to have all my documents backed up on the computer/cloud. Idk. I'll have to think over that one. What would be cool is if I could make it into a book for when I'm past all this pain.

Thank you for writing this. This makes so much sense! It's like a revelation. I still need to talk to new T about boundaries before I feel comfortable calling. I need that reassurance. I'm already overly conscious of other's boundaries, but now I feel more panicked because I don't know if boundaries had anything to do with why my T left me. I just don't trust what people say anymore.

I'm exhausted. That's a good thing. I helped my mom and step-dad pick out their wedding rings And the jewelers offered me a job That's the second time a store at the mall has offered me a job. We spent like 3 hrs at the mall and then went out to lunch. Then my step-dad fixed a few minor things on my car.

Being out with my family did help. It was difficult and tiring, but I got a break from my emotions.

I have to be awake at 4am today to talk to the crisis house counselor which I feel is important to do. Then tomorrow I get to see my counselor from the board and care I stayed at 13 years ago. Plus I have a whole slew of errands to do including getting my pillow from the post office.

I think a nap is well deserved now.

The nap is definitely well-deserved! I'm glad you were able to get out with your family, and get away from all this stuff for a little while at least! That's good news... and that you'll be able to talk to woman from the crisis house tonight.... 4am would be rough for me, but it sounds like it might actually work really well for you, since you've been having trouble sleeping?

Good night, hope you got your nap in!

I didn't get to take my nap

I haven't written about it, but I'm having issues with my fiance again. He's been lying, breaking promises, being lazy, neglectful, and his anger is starting to come up again. Not things I need right now. Today when he came home, he sat out in his car talking to a coworker for 20mins. Our dogs know the sound of his car, so they were barking for 20mins and I couldn't quiet them. This was when I was trying to take my nap. He didn't care. Talking to this guy, working (on a Sunday) was more important. And when he did have a T, his T told him to stop working on the weekends and at night. He's not even getting paid for it! He's supposed to work 5hrs a week; he's working ~60. The job is only paying him for the 5hrs, so he's getting paid a whole $200 a week. Yep, that's all. It's bs! He's been doing this for 13 months now... His boss keeps promising him a salary, but nope. There's always an excuse.

So I've been trying to distract myself with cleaning. I've done 3 loads of laundry and put it away, gave all 3 dogs a bath, cleaned my bathroom.... I'm going to be hand cleaning the tile in the dining room tonight and maybe grooming my dogs.

I'm just feeling so alone. I'm worried I might have hit another depression cycle. I hope not. But my body hurts, my head is throbbing, my face is still swollen from last night , my energy is low but I'm pushing through it, and I'm feeling hopeless again.

I hate chronic mental illness! You have a physical aliment, you have so many options for treatment. But with mental illness, you are already being treated before a crisis, and then what can you do during the crisis? There's not many resources nor treatments. You just have to "hold on", "fake it till you make it", "sit with the feelings", "think positive". Tell that to someone in chronic physical pain! And here we are fighting, trying so hard to not just survive but hope to thrive. But it's so difficult!

Hmm...if I compare what happened with my T to a doctor treating someone for physical issues.... that would be like a doctor treating a burn victim and then setting their house on fire with them in it. Or curing a cancer patient of stage 2 cancer, and then implanting stage 3 cancer cell. Oh! A dentist restoring all your teeth and then smashing them during a cleaning. Yeah, the anger is present tonight.

How do people survive this? Please someone tell me how? I think one of the reasons nights are so bad is because I distract myself all day from the pain, and when the distractions end, all the pain comes rushing back. It's like opening a flood gate. You have to grieve losses right? But you also can't have a pity party. How do you balance them?

Well, I'm going back to my cleaning. Hope all of you had a good weekend and have a peaceful nights sleep.

Hey Scarlet,

Just an idea for the emails: could you "lock them away" virtually? Like packing them into a zip folder that you put password protection on? You could create a password that is a message to yourself in the moments when you feel you need to access the emails. You could write out an encouraging sentence and use the first letter of every word as a password.

That's a clever idea. My fiance wants me to get them out of my email so I can keep them safe. I could do that and put them in my dropbox.

I was also thinking, might be a dumb idea, but actually going through all the emails, organizing them, and printing them into a book. I'll highlight all the really special things, so that when I read them, I'll immediately find the best parts.

My problem is one: figuring out how to download them, two: being stable enough to read them, and three: somehow being able to accept all the positives.

She's still split for me. I cannot see her as a whole. In my mind, I cannot believe that the person I loved and how I thought loved me, be the same person who caused me all this pain. I did split her once before, but she was there for me to help me see her as a whole.

Can someone who read my previous threads that I posted about my T, please tell me their honest opinion (nicely )? Was I idealizing my T? Do you think I saw the good and the bad, or was it all just a fantasy made up in my mind? I know I'm still looking for answers. I still am trying to figure out why. I don't think I idealized her, but if I didn't, then why can't I accept that she was capable of abandoning me like this?

God! I want so much to see her and speak to her, or write her or call her. I want to know why. My fiance keeps telling that's what the advocate is trying to do. But she's not going to find out why. My T could lie to her. Only my T knows why. But she broke all her promises so I could I trust anything anymore?

In your opinion, do you think my T ever cared for me? She said she did in her last 2 emails to me. But how does someone do this to someone they care about? Someone who is supposed to be stable and trained. Can you imagine how much worse things could be if a therapist has unresolved issues of their own? And I know a few. O e is still practicing!

I really hope someone can answer these questions. I know they are simply opinions, but that's all I've got too. The only facts are: I loved my T, she said she cared (and loved in so many words), she's gone, and I'm hurting. So wth happened?

I've written everything here, all my experiences. It's all been truth. Of course, I can't be 100% open about all the details for privacy sake, but I have been very open still. Everyone says I didn't do anything wrong. Why? How do you know? It takes 2 to be in a relationship. I had to have had an effect somehow, someway.

* It wasn't money because I would have paid her.
* It wasn't boundaries because I would have respected a change.
* It wasn't a crisis for her because I've already been through a crisis of hers.
* She said she loves this city and has no plans to move.
* She said her schedule is booked.
* It shouldn't have been my depression ir cutting, we've been through that plenty of times. Plus she took me on in the first place because she knew how much I needed a T because I had a 51/50 called out on me before I met her.
* It wasn't that she didn't know about the BPD because she did...she officially diagnosed me after a month!
* I was in DBT group, and I did have the workbook, and she said she would have been my individual DBT T if I could afford this other group.
* I don't think it was lack of progress. The week before she told me she was proud of me for meeting all my short-termgoals. And I did make a lot of progress...for me at least.

So what happened? Any guesses? Any ideas? I have none. Could it have been my "secret". Was she always there only for guilt? Was I an experiment? Why all the promises? Why the support? Why did she email me everyday I was in the crisis house? Why was she part of my crisis plan?

I apologize. I know there's no answers. But even that! Omg! She said that she didn't like how my Pdoc left things with me. She did worse! She encouraged me to try to get clarity from my Pdoc. Why won't my T give me clarity?

It's one thing to terminate me, but why did she abandon me?!?! Why????

I hurt so much. I'm tired of this. I want to be happy again. This sucks so much. I hate life right now. I hate myself.

And am I stuck because of my mental illness? Or am I stuck because most people with or w/o mental illness would struggle with this? Am I messed up that bad?

Wow. Sorry Kraken. I didn't mean to go off ao far from your reply. None of that was directed towards you. I apologize! It was just a train of thought.

No worries! I didn't think it was directed at me directly. This is just how our thought processes work .

I, personally, think that the problem was entirely on your t's end. I haven't read what you wrote about her previously, but the way I see it, as a professional she should be capable of dealing with whatever a client says and does. It doesn't mean that she cannot decide to terminate the client, but there are professional ways of doing this. What she chose to do was not a professional reaction. Which makes me think that something was fundamentally wrong on her end. It could have to do with counter transference, but we can only speculate on that.

Being in the middle of a psychological crisis is hard to explain to people. Even with my own T I've described it as feeling like my whole body is on fire and everyone is telling me to "sleep it off" or "wait" in some other way. People don't understand the pain.

It seems like your T had a problem of her own. It's awful to not know the reason why. It may be 100% her mess and nothing to do with you.

Sometimes there just isn't any answers as badly as we want them. At the very least, we can assure you that it was her issue and not yours.

I hate chronic mental illness as well. I wish I had an answer as to how to survive it.

i hate mental illness too... it needs to be treated the same as physical illness.

I agree with the last 2 posters who responded to your question, regardless of whatever you have or have not done in that relationship, there are ways to terminate that are ethical & professional & there are ways that are not. She betrayed you in doing things the way she did, she was very unprofessional in what she chose to do & that's why I've said to you that it's HER problem, not yours.

It's hard not knowing why, I get that. You're left hanging with no closure, all you can do is speculate & it sucks, it really does. But countertransference is a good point, this can be something therapists find hard to face & admit to directly when dealing with clients (some do but from what I understand the majority keep it to themselves) & maybe that was her way out of having to do so with you? No one knows, the only person who TRULY knows why is your T & I agree that she may not be completely honest about it if other people were to ask her, particularly other professionals.

I wouldn't necessarily look at it as you've done something wrong but rather she was unskillful in how she handled you as a client. Regardless of what you've done, she should be able to handle things way better than she did. She is the professional & she is the one with responsibility to act ethically in such situations & she failed you by not doing so. Keep the responsibility where it should lie, with her, NOT with you.

I'm encouraged reading about how you're doing, kudos to you for doing all that you can for yourself & pushing through this adversity, you're doing very well & I look forward to hearing more about your journey as you go forward! What you describe happening to you with the going back to rethinking things with your T is completely normal & is a part of the grief & acceptance of a loss process. You may not be able to accept everything right now & that's okay, it will happen over time & eventually you will be in a better place about all of this. Best of luck & I wish you happiness & peace in whatever you do!