If your therapist says something hurtful and unprofessional, would you return?

Hope your session goes well today...

@wheeler: That's a good question. If she didn't disclose that much information, I might have pressed to know more. But whether or not I let it go would depend on how she helps me to work through any unsettling feelings of not knowing to reach a point where I feel settled and not anxious.

Yeah, i kinda agree with this - you cant have your cake and eat it too. I think the client should take some responsibility for encroaching upon boundaries beforehand.

Its who you are - you were sensitive to her nuances - thats okay. She made the decision not to stonewall you early on. Thats okay too. But i dont think its fair NOW to say, "well a REAL t with PROFESSIONAL boundaries wouldnt have blah blah blah." Thats not the t i presume you wanted, because you poked at the boundaries. You make them leaky. Again, i think thats okay.

My boundaries with my t are a bit leaky. The good news is, i think you can repair them with a t easier than you can a regular human.

I do want to say to the OP, youve done an excellent job of describing all the nuances (sorry to repeat the word, but i think it applies) of what happened and what you felt.

What i see happening now is, can you apologize and feel that the t really thinks its okay? And that is more about you than her. Can YOU feel forgiven? My family would hold a grudge FOREVER. For my t to forgive me was a whole new thing. And its not that THIS incident is so important. Its that, can you forgive - or be forgiven by - anyone in your life? Cuz having always to be right can be a lonely life. I. E., whats the big picture here?

I don't think you can blame the client for the consequences when the client pokes at the boundaries and the therapist then allows the boundaries to be breached. I should be free to poke at all sorts of boundaries (including taboo things and things that are completely off-limits in a therapist/client relationship or in any relationship, for that matter) without my T giving in. I trust her to know how to keep us both safe, which is why I'm free to explore wherever my mind goes. The mess that results from the leaky boundaries is on the therapist's hands, not the client's. If the leak doesn't bother either of them, then it isn't a problem, but that isn't what's happening here.

Im not blaming the client, im saying, she made the bed, now lie in it. Blame doesnt enter in.

Eta - i love this bed metaphor. The client is saying the t messed up the bed, but they both contributed.

I also like the bed metaphor because i think a major question many of us face is, what do we do if our partner cheats on us? Do we stay and work it out or just immediately cut it off?

@unaluna: I don't think that it's all about me moving forward. I am honestly sensing some micro hostility from her like I wrote about the incident above in response to 1413 and the child's room. Back up a few posts that I made.

I saw that before i posted. I dont think you can be cute with each other like you were before until this is straightened out. I really do feel like she is waiting for you to feel forgiven. That you see it as a micro-hostility - its like when people say "too soon" to make a joke after a tragedy? Its just too soon.

Please let us know how things go, mindmechanic.

@unaluna: I don't think that either one of us was being cute with each other. It literally was a child therapy room in the past before it became her office a few months ago. I never went back to that room even though it became her office. The therapist and I have always referred to it as the child's room. But she's acting hostile and saying yes; 1413 is what you call the child's room. It seemed like she was trying to nitpick out of hostility and get all technical about who calls it what even though it was clear what I meant and we have always used that term to refer to the room. She could have just said yes when I clarified which room that number 1413 was.

Hope your session goes okay, mindmechanic.

@mm - i meant cute in the sense of like having private jokes - oh, i didnt even see where i was going with this until i wrote that!

I meant cute in a positive sense, like "meet-cute", not "sarcastic-cute". But having a private joke with someone IS stretching a boundary. You are saying that you are not okay with her being unprofessional, so for her to acknowledge that the two of you have a special name for this room - yeah, she is now saying, or asking, is this a slippery slope?

She could just as well see it as a micro-aggression from you. You are trying to entice her away from strict boundaries - then she is damned if she holds them and damned if she doesnt.

I think she gets it that you just kinda freaked. Can you let your guard down and be together with her in the forgiving space? Sorry to sound all woo-woo, but thats what its about for me - be wrong together or be right alone. Nobody's perfect.

You havent answered if perfection is what your family demanded. My t is the perfect t because he is imperfect.

Eta - i hope im not sounding argumentative. I hear what you are saying, but i dont think you hear what i am saying. But i want to repeat, i really do think you came out with all the nuances of this so far. I just think there are more to come.

Whether or not the T was professional, I think it may be worth looking at all this in depth, given your own reactions and sensitivity to it (including what you perceive as "subtle hostility" now). I am saying this because my last T shared a lot of personal things with me, including health problems, and how he anticipated those health potentially interfering with our interactions once. I did think that he sometimes overdid the self-disclosures (and brought this up once in a general way) but never felt the specific, strong reaction to them, or one of them, in the way you seem to. I cannot imagine any therapist being perfect and never making mistakes - what I do think is that it's interesting what sorts or errors we clients react to specifically strongly in such a way that we can't let go of it and we relate other things to them. In my experience, looking at these things (with the T or alone) can reveal interesting things about our own values and specific sensitivities.

Anyhow, I also hope your session goes well.

I don't see what perfection has to do with anything. The OP never said they expected the therapist to be perfect. Perfection is a whole obfuscation of the actual problem here - that of the therapist. And I do think the therapist is continuing to mess with the client. Not even all that subtly - but certainly hostily.

I ask if perfection was demanded of the OP by her FOO. Not really anything to do with therapy, except inasmuch everything FOO has to do with therapy! For us freudians, anyway!

@unaluna: I would have to disagree. I don't think that having a private joke with someone crosses a boundary. That was simply how we communicated with that room. But we can agree to disagree on that.

Anyway, it went well. I'm relieved but also weirded out at the same time. She was smiling quite some bit which was different from last week. That aside, we were able to talk things through. I think she recognized how it was completely irrelevant of her to self-disclose certain things about the incident. She also acknowledge losing her professional composure when she got angry, and that when someone is angry, it is difficult for them to be empathic. That was why she couldn't empathize with me at the moment and said that hurtful and unprofessional thing about whether I had considered that they wanted a premature baby. She also reaffirmed that I can say anything I want in our sessions - although I'm careful about that now given this recent incident.

And I did go on to tell her one of the reasons why I lashed out and couldn't calm down despite having had a few days to think it through before we met. Having been raised neglected by the parents, this incident triggered something in the little one in me. I saw the grandchild as a threat. I would say competition, but I was very passive growing up and didn't fight to get my needs met or for attention. So it was something very young in me that led me to lash out and just couldn't calm down. The therapist understood that for whatever reason - we have yet to discover it - I needed to say what I did when I lashed out. She also said that I didn't need to be forgiven for anything that I said. So it seems like I mah be able to carry om with this therapist.

She also mentioned boundaries which we were not able to get much into. We talked about it last week, but I didn't understand her distinction and she was empathic about how boundaries can be difficult for me to understand. So I guess she is open to taking it slow and patiently with me.

I'm relieved that today's meeting was better. But I'm very weirded out. I expected to be rejected.

I also did ask her about her response about the room and that I felt that there was micro hostility from her. She explained that it was her office now and not only a room where she sees child patients. I maintained that we didn't have to get all technical about it because there was a longstanding mutual understanding about what we called the room. We had enough to work through. She nodded. And I moved on to talking about the other stuff above.

@mind - 1. i feel heard 2. It sounds like you and your t are hearing each other. 3. Thank you for sharing this journey with us. 4. Yes i really talk like this 5. Yes i know thats why i dont have any friends

Thanks for the update! I'm glad, too, that things went better than expected. I can understand a weirded out feeling after all of that. I'm glad she validated your lashing out as something you needed to do even if you all don't know why yet. And it seems very good to me that you could pick up on her micro hostility and still go forward. Hopefully it has evaporated with time and all the processing you all have done together. Please keep us posted, if you feel like it.