Ghosting/ Break Up

I would not deal with the guy any more. A client does not owe a therapist anything more than the fee for the appointment time used. Walk away and don't look back. This one sounds like he is on a giant power trip.

I'm going to chime in here with an outside possibility that you're not being "taken for granted" so much as not being treated as "special."

I may be way off base here, but an important part of my therapy has been to understand that I'm not a special case in as many ways as I'd previously thought. I believe that therapists can sometimes enroll in our dramas to the extent that they collude with us around our "specialness." When that eventually, inevitably fades, it's jarring and deflating to the extent that the alliance is seriously threatened. Then the therapy changes and other work can emerge.

I think this dynamic is present in most human relationships, because we are all indeed special, but it can also be a stumbling block.

The other issue that I want to raise is that I think you are more interested in your therapist than you are in yourself, to a certain extent. Why are you so focused on what he thinks of you, rather than what you think of yourself?

I don't mean these comments to be hurtful. You are such a nuanced, intelligent poster...your writing and observations are exquisite. Is it possible that you think too much?

except i hate that expression "think too much"! (I almost had a heart attack the first time i heard it, like 15 years ago, from my bff's son to my bff.) I dont want to discourage anybody from thinking! But maybe theyre going down the wrong rabbit hole?

Hey, that is great point that that I might think so much about my T to evade thinking about myself.

I dont think I am looking for him to treat me specially, so much as to trust judgement about what is too much, and if prolonged exposure therapy stuff is something I can manage while still functioning highly in my real life.

It is like he teaches me how to take out trauma formats Pandora's box, talk about it (things I didnt know how to do before therapy), but he doesnt teach me how to put it back away so I can do my job, focus on BF and my friends, etc. It would be consoling to feel like he was watching over the overall process so it doesnt contaminate my present life like it did the distant past.

I will give the idea thought - maybe I do want some special attention, having always concentrated on blending into my peer group and keeping secret anything "bad" . Maybe I do feel, having finally told someone, that he has to care ,when he is really seeing himself as a doctor doing a job in the office ( a very good job ) and it is BF I should be telling if I want that really deep connectedness longer than the session.

Thanks for the really good post to think about .

The session was confusing- we didnt break up but there was an edge - whereas there used to be a really easy affection. I hope therein be peace .

I had this uncanny feeling he read this thread ( lol if you are my T ,and you are reading this,then you lose all credibility about boundaries! )

I found the fake and arbitrary boundares only gave the illusion of safety for the client, while providing a measure of safety for the therapist, which in the end was the point.

I reject the selling point of therapy as a "safe space". If it were safe, why the fixation on boundaries? Sounds more like something that is fundamentally problematic.

He talks about modeling good boundaries, yet is selling caring by the hour, and pushes you out the door in a distressed state after behaving ambiguously.

All of my therapists routinely violated normal interpersonal boundaries, while implying they were upholding them.

Ive mentioned this before, idk if to you, but at one point in the early years with current t i asked him, when or how exactly am i supposed to change from somber depressed ruminating luna, to cheerful sunny happy face the world luna? While im waiting for the elevator? Riding down the 20 floors? Leaving the building? Before i get to the corner? I suppose i SHOULD be more present in my own mind but im not.

Then hes like, "oh do you have problems with transitions?" Im like, "idk, wtf are transitions? Oh wait, yes work bosses have complained about that." But basically i was like, if i am supposed to leave here smiling, then HE has to make that happen.

Now i feel pathetic about that - its NOT like i need the restaurant hostess to wave to me, bye! Have a good day! But geez you leave t in a state of mind, actually more than that - a state of being. Why shouldnt that be part of the session? He does NOT get to roll over and fall asleep until the WHOLE job is finished!

Just some thoughts.

This! It is the ambiguity that drives me insane . Having no idea where I stand makes me dwell on him, whereas if I was clear, I wouldnt. I don't do that dwelliing real life, but I also dont discuss taboo private topics nor have one-way relationships either.

Love this- That indefinitely what I think he does the instant the door closes. Snore. . .

Yea i had same issues. To this day i cant get over their nerve (or delusion)... selling something so obviously unnatural as a "model". And if you respond to it in odd or extreme fashion, they say aha you got issues. It's wildly manipulative in my opinion. It's like giving you a powerful drug, observing that you act differently, then suggesting it has little or nothing to do with the drug. I think many therapists are not right in the head and it only gets worse the more they play this game.

Maybe I'm confused about the problem, but if containment is the issue, and your desire is to be more put together at the end of session, why not ask for that? It seems like what you want is to be allowed to stay over. Instead, would it be helpful to you to ask for him to keep an eye on the time and when it is 5 or 10 minutes from the end of session, for him to let you know. Tell him you want to spend those last minutes figuring out how you can put this away until you see him again.

Were you safe in your family home? Or is this ambiguity part of the transference that needs to be worked through? I mean, why dont you know? Who holds the definition?

Eta - as anne says, i dont quite understand exactly what the problem is either. You cant get an answer if you dont know the question!

Yes, I want to rejoin normal life without unremitting fear and having the therapy session intrude into daily life negatively. I cant sleep, and my BF is worried about that which outdone pressure to sleep - snowball.

No,not safe in FOO home. Maybe transference , but I am newish to therapy terms.

I also don't resonate with the whole I am a doctore & therapy is a medical procedure paradigm. It isnt that it is wrong in any way, but it might not be a good fit as the material becomes more and more personal .

I don't feel that trust and bond as much any more , and I am trying to figure out why not and what to do about it, if anything . I miss it. I really loved the discovery process of therapy for a long time, and I still hold my T in high regard as someone of the highest ethics and intellect, but it doesnt feel as safe/right any more . I'm not sure if that is bc the materials more difficult, or because as some posters have picked up over the months, my T can be full of himself ( a quality I find charming too )and very goal oriented.

Today he said he will watch the pacing and pushing too hard . He did listen, and we did talk about the problem. We both like meeting goals and making tangible progress, but if we go too fast, it is me who has to go to work trying to seem normal, and he gets to feel fine. Even that is okay if I can blend in, but what isnt okay is to have tears in the streets or not be able engage m clients and the world. This isnt something I have ever experienced before, and it scares me to feel so exposed . He is the first one to celebrate that he is one of the strictest T's with the firmest boundaries you could choose ,and that might be good for me, but it isnt at this very moment easy, warm,or fuzzy . It might not be easy for him either or he might just be keep it in professional perspective and be unaffected one way or the other- that's the ambiguity BF mentioned.

Susan Shapiro wrote a novel about her couch trip. I loooooove her and took a writing class from her. Her t "prescribed" an hour long hug from her h after sessions as a regular thing.

I didnt mean to be using jargon in my previous post. I meant, why DIDNT you know if you were safe at home? For example, my dad gave me a creepy feeling, but i also knew he should not be telling me stories like certain details about his dating life. But until i nailed all that stuff down, it was always the other person who decided if i was safe with them or not, including t. The other person "held the definition" - i have no idea where that expression came from!

I basically had no values - it was what the other person wanted. My true self (winnicott) was buried far far away. I think your t is stressing stating his boundaries because he sees you are vulnerable just as i was, so he is telling you that you are safe. Mostly he is trying to get the message across to your inner child or whoever, who wasnt safe the first time around. Then it's the job of adult you to take her in hand until she can get home for a hug session with bf.

I mean, thats how i would do it. I had a neighbor who would see me returning from t and say hey come on over, and i eventually had to "recuse" myself. So, what kind of decompression period do you need after t, or what?

My opinion is that ambiguity is the cornerstone of therapist role playing and it's the reason for most of the problems.

As for therapists who act and talk like doctors... i think it's a red flag and suggests they are using clients to live out some wannabe-doctor fantasy. There is nothing medical about therapy, and it's nuts when they pretend otherwise.

Your story reminds me... therapists are at the center of everything. It's their boundaries, their narrative, their special world. Clients are almost incidental. I could be wrong, but seems he is less concerned with your well being than with his posturing and feelings of self-importance. If you quit on him, presumably he'd look for another client to make him feel important and doctor-ish. Frankly, i now see some of my therapists as predator-like, sitting in their lair, waiting for the vulnerable and the broken to show up.

I don't see it as ambiguity at it, it's irrelevancy. It's you that are putting him at the center, as if somehow knowing your effect on him will somehow make it better for you. It's a variation of the classic client desire to know how they affect the therapist. If something in your therapy isn't working (like what you call pacing and what I would call a need to stop earlier and specifically put things away before the end of session), it's about how you feel about it, not him. He might be losing his ***** in his office after your sessions or calling someone for supervision, you don't know and I think you shouldn't care. The story you tell about his consistency and how he explains it is not ambiguous at all from my reading of it.

An earlier poster hypothesized that you may make therapy about your T as a way of distracting yourself from the real issues for you. I don't give a red rat's booty if you leave this T or therapy altogether but it sounds like it's been working for you because you have come to the point where it is hard and progress has been made. And it sounds like he was recently willing to try to change what happens in session to improve that for you. So what difference does his lofty speeches about therapy or his kind of snobby description of the work of therapy make? It's easy to get lost in the intellectualization of the process and criticize the hell out of the T and the process and even the institution. But none of this helps you deal with what's up with you, although I do think that quitting therapy or changing T's can be right for people.

For me I am a master avoider at dealing with the hard stuff and my T is pretty much the opposite of yours in the sense that he would let me forever linger and avoid and I had to tell him that he had to push me more. For me therapy worked better and better when I grabbed onto my own agency in therapy rather than waiting for him to figure it out. There definitely was a good landing after the hardest stuff, but it required me to step up in communication with him in ways that I hadn't before, to shoulder more responsibility for what happened in session and understanding how it affected me.

This articulates a real fear inside method is juxtaposed against a leap off faith in this person to be . deeply professional , sincere provider . I will work it through and out in the fullness of time. Thank you for giving words tony fears that dont always have words.

I appreciate the varying viewpoints on the forum, and think about them all.

Thanks for this:

I didn't want to interject my own view and maybe detract from your situation but the following seemed really apt to me, too.

There's this idea going around currently that vulnerability, and the ability to express it, is good. I kinda think not. Vulnerability is dangerous. And I, like perhaps other clients, went into therapy not knowing how vulnerable I was, nor that therapy was not necessarily a safe place. I couldn't protect myself and the therapist didn't care. As things turned out, for me, in the end there was no ambiguity about that. Hope things work out better for you.

My therapist was sincere and wanted to help. But her own needs were mixed up in the process, and it was inevitable that once a conflict arose we'd be competing, like two addicts. So in that way it was incomprehensibly dishonest.

The client pays and so ostensibly the therapist works for the client, but in my observation the client usually ends up a subordinate of the therapist, in terms of both power and need gratification.

Anyway just my annoying viewpoint, your situation is not mine.

I've struggled with that a lot and I have accused my T countless time about not caring about how I leave. But recently I understood that this is precisely what therapy is about. No one will change unless they are forced and this is precisely a situation that forces for change because otherwise things are very unpleasant. It forces you to find ways to regulate yourself better, to cope better, to switch better. The T doesn't have any magic means to make you suddenly do those things better. He can only help to create situations where you are forced to learn those things for your own good. This is how change happens and I assume that you are in therapy because you want to change. Therapy isn't supposed to be pleasant, I believe the best work occurs at the very boundary of being barely tolerable. I have learned it from my own experience.

My Ts have done their very best to not send me out distressed. Their methods have varied. T2 would offer to do "safe place" with EMDR, T3 talks me through grounding stuff, ex T would work with the presenting part, T1 talks to the little kids or whole group and will do check-ins or extra sessions.

That doesn't mean that I have never left distressed, but they have all been willing to take extra time and to try really hard to help me. I am now at the point where if I am running over time with T1, I can often muster up enough enough of a sense of trust/security/non-abandonment that I can tell him thanks for trying and leave. And sometime the fact that he tried can sustain my connection/non=abandonment until the next session. Not always-but it has improved. Right now T1 is out of town and I don't like it, but I am not freaked out by it. He took extra time with me before he left to help me settle and I know that he did that, and that he will do the same when he returns.

My most recent session with T3 went long because I switched; she started with telling me that I needed to leave in an adult space, but I wasn't leaving until I got an answer. We went 15 minutes over. I left ok.

I know that is not how all Ts operate, but mine all have/do. I would not continue therapy if they didn't. In January things were not going well with T3 and despite her efforts, I was almost always leaving upset and being all discombobulated between sessions. I took a break to see if that was better than seeing her. As it turned out, she called me and I have gone back and am glad I did. But for me, taking a break with no drama was a tool for me to decide if I wanted to continue or not.

Wow. My experience was that the manufactured drama of therapy was not a vehicle for healthy change. It was a path to regression and dependency. It added a new and absurd layer of dysfunction onto existing difficulties. The situations created were fictional. They grew out of a simulated relationship with someone who was there to collect a fee, feed off the worship of the client-base, then go home to her real life. God help me if i had viewed this as compulsory. Breaking-up, to use SE's words, was a mess but ultimately the best thing.

I am aware that this is your viewpoint and experience. My experience is different and I view this whole therapy endeavour differently.

For me it is not manufactured drama because who and how could manufacture it this way? This is the drama of my childhood and my T has given me the room and space to explore it. I can't say that I would be extremely grateful to him for that all the time because as I've said many times, it isn't pleasant. But this is my drama and my T does not manufacture it but rather accompanies me in it.

Also, my relationship with my T is not simulated but very real. I don't even see how someone could simulate a relationship. Even "simulated" relationship is some kind of real relationship. If due to the "simulation" it is not honest then it just isn't very good relationship and therapy in that relationship might not be possible.

In a way what I bolded may be true and in a way not.

But it's not at all obvious to me that the only way I will "change" is if I am forced. In things that are unconscious, well, maybe. Since I don't have conscious access to those things I can't say for sure.

I don't see why the T can't explain some of that up-front. Say that it's going to be a role-playing exercise to see what comes up. The feelings, etc., of the client will be real enough. Mine certainly were. The ways it got messy was when it got real for the T, too. Their own issues, their own drama, maybe.

The last T rejected and abandoned me. Triggering, eventually, the memory of that kind of emotional experience from childhood. Complete devastation of any sense of having value. Complete rejectabilty by all human beings. It's been horrible. Even posting on these forums is sometimes a push, expecting to be rejected again. I'm doing it anyway. Maybe I will grow a psychological skin and/or toughen up.

Still think I could/should have been warned. "Trained" even in some way. I don't think they've found that throwing people into water so they will "sink or swim" is the best way to learn to swim. Some people sink. Or stay swamped for years.
That needs to be on the informed consent disclosure. At the very least.

I think that a T rejecting and abandoning her patient is not what I am talking about. A rejecting and abandoning T is a completely another story. I can only speak of my own experience because this is something I have first hand access to but my T has never rejected or abandoned me even if sometimes it has felt to me like that.

I firmly believe it is the T's responsibility to make sure that the patient is not sinking. I have had this discussion using the same metaphor with my T because for a long time I thought that he should help me to keep myself above the water while it felt to me that he let me sink. He told me that he can't make me swim magically but he will make sure that I won't sink, which may mean that I might be just slightly above the water, sometimes struggling to breath, for short periods perhaps not being able to breath, but still floating and not sinking. He said that he does not do more (hold me confidently above the water) for several reasons: 1) he just couldn't do it and 2) even if he could, it wouldn't help me. And because he is dedicated to my healing and my getting better and not necessarily feeling good in the moment then he will do those things that help me get better in the long run, even if they feel very bad in the moment.

I don't have much faith into warnings though because to my mind it essentially doesn't change anything. I don't think anyone can really prepare themselves for what is coming anyway and because what happens is a process that unfolds and not something that T consciously and technically fabricates then the T can't possibly know what warnings would be appropriate for which person because the T can't know in advance which process unfolds, when and how.

I'm not trying to impose my views as objective truth. This is my experience and my truth. As a consequence of that, I have been able to gain immensely from therapy. Other people can have other experiences and other views. If therapy is not beneficial for them, that's ok too.

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