Dependency in trauma survivors

http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/steele-2001.php

Quiet Mind posted this link in "Interesting Articles" and I found it quite interesting. The authors make a case for ts providing a safe person to attach to during treatment. There were several points that I thought they made well.

That people in treatment for trauma related MI (BPD, PTSD, DID) almost always have missed out on secure attachment as babies, and that treatment must address this.

That Ts need to be flexible yet firm with boundaries. Boundaries must be clearly explained and open for re-nogotiation. They should never be summarily tightened.


Ts should allow some between session contact but need to be attentive to not fostering damaging enmeshment or dependence.

Clients need to be gently encouraged to develop support outside the therapeutic relationship with t understanding how difficult this is and being patient about it.

That ts need to truly care for clients.

There's more, its a long article. But it really illuminated much of my journey. Especially the fact that for whatever reason I am having an anxiety relapse. It normalizes that by saying that while there are phases of treatment, recovery is not linear and will include cycling back to earlier phases.

thanks for posting this. going thurusomething similar

This is really how my t has been with me since the disclosure of my trauma and subsequent dx of ptsd and bpd... And aside from a few minutes or ruptures therapy has really worked well on this method. Sure there were times that we had frequent out of session contact, but it is tempered with my periods of time of stability and minimal contact with t.

I have never been made to feel bad for depending on him. We've never had issues with boundaries, because of the way we operate I have never felt bad about asking him if he though a particular behavior was to close his boundaries or now.. Ana we have had those convos a lot because of our kind of duel relationship.

It can work like this!

Janina Fisher explains this really well too, I went to a work shop of hers and it was pretty much about trauma and how these particular clients fear intimacy but also crave it so working with a therapist can provoke lots of anxiety.
She also says that our memories are stored in our bodies so if we have insecure attachment we will be very sensitive to any form of abandonment by the therapist. We are constantly looking fr signs or signals from them, we have learned that people aren't safe and we cant trust them.

I would agree that I am hypervigilant and that I read people very carefully. And I am quick to bail out if I sense abandonment is coming.

One thing I can say after reading that article is thank God for t1 who is relentlessly consistent. He has an amazing ability to stay present and to be there when I am freaking out.

My T acted similar to this. However, I have a tendency to see that if I'm an issue then I run in the other direction. I do have dependency issues but I have the control to terminate it and be realistic about things. When I saw how dependent I was and how she reacted to me I felt like a bother and canceled a few sessions. I'm not sure how my T was to handle that. I'm not sure how she took it or even if it was something that she thought about. I felt like I was annoying her and that she lost her interest and so I disappeared. So was it better to take a different approach than the one she took. I'm not sure how my dependency case is different than others and if the same method works. I'm used to abandonment and that's how I feel. I ended up freeing her and now I deal with the issues on my own the way I used to 4-5 years ago.