Reached a painful point

I'm not trying to tell you what's painful and why, but the most painful parts of therapy for me have been when the relationship "dynamics" (for lack of a better work, but what you mean by your need v. his need or a lack of "human relationship") in fact turn out to model painful relationship dynamics in previous relationships.

Therapy has often been very symbolic to me, and what pings for me in what you are saying is something that runs deeper. That it is the boundaries of relationships outside the therapy room that are painful to confront; the nature of the T relationship represents how many relationships, past and present, have limits on what others can be to us or what we can be fore them. That my marriage had boundaries and my spouse had limits that didn't entirely work for me, and the 4 corners of the T relationship allowed me to recognize how painful restrictions on relationships, whether chosen (such as encouraging my teen to be more independent from me) or enforced by circumstances (such as being attracted to someone while married or who is married) or because the person can't really give me what I need as a friend or lover or spouse, as their emotional or ways of connecting aren't intense or otherwise enough for me.

Echos, maybe the shame is more about being seen by your T with those needs and feelings? For me, up until recently my subconscious demanded that I fly under the radar (even my own) emotionally. Which meant that no-one, not even myself should notice my feelings. It took me years to become more aware of my emotions, I got better at this "feeling-thing", noticing what is going on on my inside. But showing those emotions unfiltered?? Or even - showing those emotions directly, uncut and unfiltered to someone who matters to me? That would send my in downward spirals of shame and guilt. Because ultimately my subconscious rule for survival was "I must extinct myself - so I won't experience extinction." So acting against this rule and allowing myself to be seen would result in self-punishment.

The painful thing is, at the same time I was deeply longing to be seen. As I really am. Yet I was constantly boycotting myself. Because of the "flying under the radar" rule.

This survival rule thing really helped me to emotionally grasp what I was constantly doing to myself. And absurdly I was constantly submitting myself to the exact thing that was my greatest fear....

For me, shame and the other dark stuff like self-punishment turns up, whenever I have done something against those 'important' rules. It is like my personal alarm system that is supposed to tell me that I stepped outside the boundarys. Unfortunately, the system didn't get the memo that the war is over. And is still acting in high alert.

So ultimately, experiencing this (negative) emotional activation might be a sign that you were expanding (which you were). So maybe this perspective might help you 'holding' those emotions a little bit better?

There's a book (L. Heller/A. Lapierre: Healing Developmental Trauma). which has helped me tremendously in learning to handle my feelings of shame and guilt. In this book they talk about expanding our emotional terrain. And that quite often, after expansion follows some form of contraction. Because the expansion feels 'new', uncomfortable or even threatening. So we react (automatically) by activation of our fight/flight/freeze-responses.... The good news is, it gets better. The more often we expand, the more our inner system re-learns and realizes that there is no need to fight back any more. The not so good news is, it takes time. A lot of time. And allowing ourselves, again and again, plenty of new experiences, so that the inner system can learn new responses. And it hurts so so much being in the middle of it. It sucks. Full stop.

Try to be kind and gentle to yourself, especially to those vulnerable parts who are in turmoil. Maybe there's something that would feel soothing to this smaller side of you?

Sending you a warm, big hug,

cinnamon_roll

Echos,

My heart went out to you as I read your post. So much of what you said was how I felt in the last couple of months in my own therapy; it was like listening to me from three months ago.

I didn't really get the sense from your therapist's email that they understood the depth of how you feel -- and if that's true, I'm truly sorry. I'm not sure what the answer is when these types of feelings come up -- a lot of therapists don't seem to understand them or know how to deal with them.

I don't have much advice, but I wanted to let you know there's someone out there who has experienced something similar and come out the other side, and I'm sure I'm not the only one on this forum. ((hugs if you want them))

Sending lots of empathy, Echoes. I could have written your post too. Down to the seeing my current therapist to deal with painful feelings towards my previous therapist, feeling intense shame about wanting love and care from my T, and my young self not feeling satisfied with the outward success, confidence, and competence my adult self enjoys.

Being a therapist also can make it ten times harder. Like I know too much for my own good sometimes and struggle to settle in to fully being the patient. And like the stakes are higher. I don't know if this is true for you, but right now it feels like I need to resolve this with my T to continue trusting that the entire profession isn't f*****. I know that's too much to put on her (and on me), but **** if I can bring reason to bear when I'm awash in feeling.

I agree that it's good that your T was able to witness the feelings. It puts it all out there for exploration, understanding, and hopefully healing (I'm hoping this for you and for myself). From what I've read about your relationship with your T, it seems very much within his capacity to work through this with you, even if it takes him awhile to get there. Wishing you continued courage and hope.

Echos, hugs to you.

My experience is that it will go better over time. The child part felt safe enough to come out and express her true feelings. Sure, the painful thing is that those feelings just can't be soothed away because they obviously come from somewhere much earlier and deeper than this particular relationship with this particular T. The good part is that these feelings are allowed and welcome in this relationship.

While in your current situation you might rightly ask why that would be useful because that means just more and prolonged pain. I don't know how it works on a technical level but I have the experience that over time the child calms down. Although this relationship has its boundaries, it still can satisfy some of those needs - you are allowed and welcomed to come out and express yourself whatever you feel in that moment, your T fully focuses your attention to you during this time, thinks with you, feels with you. It's impossible that when he's doing those things for you that you wouldn't be important to him. As for love, I strongly believe that the love is there and it speaks in actions. Words can lie and they can be misinterpreted but it's much harder to lie with actions.

Speaking of actions, I know that my T would have never given me extra 15 minutes - this is just not the way he operates. On the other hand my sessions are every day from Mon to Thu and so the whole setting is different. As I understood that much of the shame stemmed from begging and getting this 15 minutes, maybe it would be worth to explore a bit more the meanings behind this sequence of actions. Just in case: I'm not passing judgement, just that it could hide relevant meanings.

Ah so many good points. Thank you everyone.

Cinnamon - as is so often the case, your insightful post has been really helpful. Yes. Being seen. That's what was new about this situation and that's where the shame spiral began. It makes me wonder about early messages that if my pain and my needs are seen, I will be thought less of. I know my biggest fear here is that he will think less of me somehow. That he won't like me anymore. For some reason it feels of paramount importance to protect his positive feelings towards me. I suspect this relates to my mother, whose unstable mental health became such a source of frustration for my father that my mother left the family home when I was 5. I think I rejected her on some level too. I saw her mental health issues as something that made her lesser. Although my father never said anything like that to me, I think that is how I interpreted the divorce. That she should be rejected.
Of course, as an adult I don't feel that way at all but somehow I expect the same rejection from others. I think I am left with what I must have felt when I saw my mother rejected by my father - "I must never show such weakness or neediness or my father will reject me too".
Damn. There's a realisation.

This is so interesting... something I relate to very much with my own history and how I tend to present myself as an adult. My parents never divorced but my mom had so many psychological issues, severe trauma history, an inability to be independent, lack of ambition, and I think life-long depression. She was a loving and caring mom for my infant-type needs but also very anxious, and once I'd turned 4-5 years old, I felt she had very little to offer to me. But was sometimes quite intrusive and demanding of love, which I mostly rejected already at that age and continued to largely reject for the rest of her life. (This is something I would certainly do differently if I could go back with my current knowledge and awareness.) On the other side, my dad kinda represented a lot of the traits and acts I grew to value very much: high level of independence and self-sufficiency, ambition, curiosity, an innovative spirit and inspiring presentation, and a lot of emotional toughness to overcome adversities and to self-actualize. We became very close when I was around 4 and it remained that way until he died, with a lower period during my teens but that's normal. He looked down on my mom quite clearly and even talked to me rather negatively about her, mostly for what he thought as my mom's lack of ambition and not achieving much professionally, not having friends, not showing own independent interests etc.

My dad always challenged me to improve myself in seemingly supportive ways, not demanding or critical ways. He was never an emotionally very conscious and supportive father though, and I think he played a role in my generally prioritizing cognition, strategy, rational planning and interpretations over the life of emotions (there were other influences as well but I won't get into those now). Of course one cannot just deny or eliminate emotions (especially if someone wants to be highly self-aware, as I do). And emotional issues will surface whether we want them or not. Basically, that's exactly what happened to me in my 30's: my emotional issues and the consequences of denial/bad coping got seriously in the way of my otherwise high motivation and ambition to be creative, to make things happen, and to live a good life. But I would still hold onto that "together, tough, competent" image and presentation with teeth, hid everything else from most people - until it was no longer possible to hide it and the effects in my life were everywhere, very visibly.

Yet I would still want to be associated with the kind of men I started to like in my childhood and impress them with my intellect, competency, independence and ability to solve problems. I think this was, in large part, why my therapy with the two older males did not work for me. I just could not let go, was not honest, basically did not use therapy for a therapeutic purpose. I think it would have been more effective for me to work with a female T, no matter how aversive that might have sounded in the beginning. I rarely have the drive to impress females the way I tend to do with males. In part, this is also why I like this forum (with a high female bias in membership) and can express my challenges more openly. I now do the same (or much more) with select women in my everyday reality, and I often don't like it, but it's more helpful for my personal growth than my usual pattern of relating to men. It can be very rewarding and, of course, sometimes also humiliating and shame-inducing, to be truly vulnerable with some male friends as well, which I have been doing for several years now. But could not pull it off in therapy - I think mostly because I chose Ts based on a perceived professional competency level, not based on how emotionally supportive they would be (even if they were, I just did not use it). And dumped one of them quite soon when he had proven incompetent and insecure.

It's really not easy to let go of this darn life-long thing about wanting to present and image of what I like and value and hiding the rest. I think I'm doing quite well with it now in my everyday life but it can be a struggle and generates shame every now and then. Okay, this is a long post about me but things that this thread reminded me of and I thought to share.

Yes there are definitely similarities there Xyn, and this resonates particularly:

This is why I often found myself drawn to older men who would be impressed with my intelligence and wit, from a very young age. I am still drawn to teachers, and, of course, therapists, who are older men and who might also express approval for my intellect and ability. For some reason I have been able to break through that to some extent with this therapist.

I was talking to someone the other day who I have known for a while and whom I just found out is a supervisee of my T's. She said "the thing I get most from supervision with him is that I can be totally authentic with him, I can be totally honest". Made me realise that he just creates that space in his professional relationships. Had I not met him, I suspect I would have kept looking for, and kept failing to find and older man I can work through this with.

Thanks for sharing your story, I appreciate it.

Echos, I think it might go back even further: Not being seen with your needs when you were really needy and dependent as an infant and/or todler is more than enough to deeply ingrain this pattern of shame and self-loathing inside of us. To establish a pattern of not wanting to be seen and/or not being able to endure being seen. And I guess, chances are that your mother wasn't really able to attune to your needs as a baby in a way that would have been good enough, to get those basic needs that all of us have met.

This is painful stuff, incredibly painful stuff. Kudos to you for not shying away but being willing to explore this further (with your T, who will be there - I'm more than sure of that).

This book I mentioned further up has been really helpful to me with those issues, a lot of things that haven't made sense before suddenly added up a bit more. It helped me to establish a frame of reference for my "neediness", to know where it comes from, and what it stands for, and to find ways to look after myself whenever I get to that point, when the neediness (and subsequent shame and guilt) might take over...

Love and a big hug,
c_r

Thanks cr, I feel pretty sure I have pre-verbal trauma. I'm sure that's a part of it even though I also think what went on between my parents is relevant too.

Yes my mother wasn't at all attentive to me as a baby. The only picture I have of us together when I was a baby I was sitting in a chair facing away from her. My father was my primary carer. I think that is all relevant.

My T said that the way I gaze at him is indicative of pre-verbal stuff.

I downloaded the free sample of the book you mentioned and I liked it. I think I will buy it. Thanks for recommending it.

I think you are right that my T and I can work with this. I emailed him today and told him about being 'seen'. He said well done for working through this. I'm looking forward to seeing him now.

Echos, my face lit up reading this bit. That's wonderful, considering where you were coming from a few days ago. Hope this feeling stays with you until you meet your T.


xxx

My T seems afraid of eliciting this, as if he has been through it with many clients and dreads it in a worldweary way. He has a 3 foot rule ( no touching, no hugging, no hand shakes), a gaudy wedding photo out of place with the diplomas , etc.

The ironic thing is how intimate his speech can be- Tell me, trust me, stay with me, stay the course with me, I am right by your side, how do you feel about me?, how do you feel toward me now in this room? .

He seems hurt by the social cues he gives- bc of course I am going to "stay back(stop dog to her T)", scramble backwards to the distance of three feet emotionally. He doesn't want the distance there metaphorically- he says we have an exquisite connection . I don't feel that way. I struggle. The moments of meeting are real and profound, but they nourish the T and confuse the client. If I am able to have the moment of meeting, the blast of mutual connection and let it go, then that is my T's ideal. If I carry the moment out of the room and make real love out it, then my T will set boundaries- no more Christmas gifts, right out the door in 45 to 48 minutes. If I lean out, he will chase me. The real thing that some T's want, it intense intimacy in the hour, with no consequences outside the bracketed time.

Feeling dirty and wrong for wanting an extra 15 minutes and offering to buy it on the spot reflects that. The moments of meeting are only in the room. Once you leave the room? It seems the patient carries in with her, and the T changes gears?

I think in some ways, some T's are intimacy junkies. They call it moments of meeting . They need it. However, like all the little prince quotations, they are not responsible to the moments.

I wonder what this means? What is the gaze and how can he tell?

I do a lot of looking into his eyes without words. It's similar to the eye to eye contact that a primary carer has with an infant. The way I do that and the way I get lost in that suggests that something to do with my experiences as an infant, either that I didn't experience that connection enough, or something else, is being triggered in therapy. It makes sense to me.

well said. this is the part of my therapy that i've always struggled coming to terms with and the only way i have been able to make some tiny tangible sense out of it has been to write my ex-T and other Ts off as pretty much nothing more than 'intimacy junkies'. i guess it's better then calling them hypocrites.