How does it feel to not get what you want?

At least who tried? The client? The therapist(s)? The therapist didn't know what they were doing and they hurt me, while taking my money, but "at least they tried". I don't buy that.

To me there is a distinction between "faulty" and "blame", even though frequently somebody gets "blamed" because something is their "fault". I'm not blaming therapists, or therapy, because of therapy or therapists' faults, their imperfections. But I do blame therapy for the failure to warn clients (including me) adequately about the limitations of their methods and practices.

Investing, for instance, is risky. "Everybody knows that." But, even so, professionals and financial documents are required these days, in the USA at least, to provide clear disclaminers. Financial advisors are supposed to exercise care in recommending investments, appropriate for the client's life situation and risk tolerance. Does that mean I won't lose money? Of course not. Does that mean that sometimes there isn't a Bernie Madoff around who will defraud people anyway? Of course not. And. . .he went to jail for it. How many unethical therapists suffer any consequence other than, perhaps, losing their licenses?

Given the time and energy, as well as money, that clients put into therapy financial advisors may be a more appropriate and fruitful analogy than plumbers, who usually do all the work themselves.

I very rarely get what I want. If it is an extra session- no. Too full the schedule. If it is a longer session, no. The ceremony of endings is part of the healing. No hugs, no handshakes, no late, no early, no missing or skipping. Within all the no, is a gentleness of someone who doesn't actually like saying no but who is entrusted to keep at bay interpersonal chaos in the longterm by protecting the space in the short term so it is still there ready next time.

After reading more than 200 psychology and psychoanalysis books, textbooks etc during my 3 year stint in therapy, I definitely think that not all working therapists have even close to the theoretical underpinnings needed to treat trauma and dissociation. The most kindred school/ movement for me is Relational Psychoanalytic. I went to meet the writer of a book I loved on that topic, and he was profound in his belief that therapy should be marked by increasing fittedness between therapist and patient , that is attained through moments of meeting but also struggle through enactment. The key is the T sees these as co created and takes responsibility for being more than a neutral figure, a mirror etc. His idea is the T and the client make a world between them, and both live in it. He has no use for CBT for relational trauma or behavioral interventions like exposure therapy or the Blank Slate.

My own T is not relational, but he is very reflective and imaginative. Overtime our relationship has changed, with each of us more fluent in the way the other organizes the experience of the session. We still run into very painful skirmishes usually me wanting something and him saying no, but there's more goodwill on both sides. He trusts me that I am usually levelheaded and give more credence to something upsetting me; I get it better that the strict boundaries are for me as well as him, and that he gives me a gift of attention with no strings or agenda bc of them. I have changed gradually in terms of being more consolidated and less fragmented , and made progress telling the difference between states of dissociation and being for sturdy in staying present.

Next week, there could be an impasse or a catastrophe between us, I know. I am not so much better that I don't cycle through the anguish created by letting someone so close to wounds. However, when I look back at my posts I see progress. When I look at my life, I see progress. So many times, I almost quit and I once started a thread about ghosting my T. I probably will again too. but I notice progress happens after bowing down in some way to not getting what I want and the urge to walk away from the relationship, like I have many times in my real life, like the song by Ben Harper is my theme song. Somehow, I have stayed and not gotten what I want even 1/10th of the time. I guess the 1/10th is enough?

I agree with everything you said here, but at the same time, if childhood deprivation was too severe, I think it can be damaging to experience those feelings over and over in therapy which may not result in any positive long term effect.

Lrad-I'm sorry the schedule didn't work out. This therapy has a way of eroding defenses against feelings which has both pros and cons.

Any favorite articles, books or authors? I’m always looking for suggestions.

You don't have to buy anything what anyone else says. I'm writing based on my own understanding which has developed based on the things I've experienced in my own therapy and what I've read in books that made sense to me etc.

I also suppose that the sample of therapists we've had the luck to try is very different. I've only experienced working with two therapist (I've seen more but their style or the way they worked did not make sense to me and so I never saw them longer than once) and my understanding what therapy is is based on these two examples. I absolutely wouldn't hesitate to recommend these two men to anyone with severe trauma or neglect.

Sure, it is all context dependent. Also my own T did not start telling me these things right away but started doing it only after several years after he had probably sensed somehow that I had become at least somewhat receptive to these ideas and had become able to manage hearing them.

Before that he did many things that standard psychoanalytic textbooks don't recommend but what he felt were necessary for me to tolerate the treatment and keep coming back.

Steven Stern Needed Relationships And Psychoanalyic Healing

Sandra Beuchler - Still Practicing

Relational Psychotherapy A Primer - Patricia DeYoung

I can relate to that.
I think it's feelings of humiliation and shame for me. I'd rather preemptively deny myself things. I don't want someone else to tell me no, because then I feel ashamed for asking and like I "should have known better."
Even if I can admit to myself that I want it, denying myself the thing is far less painful than expressing it and being told no.
My T often encourages me to express my wants and needs and ask questions (like allowing myself to ask whether he cares about me), but that feels "dangerous" and makes me vulnerable. It's easy for him to tell me to ask because he's not the one who'll end up feeling humiliated if it's not the response I wanted.

Maybe it depends on what you're looking for in therapy, or what your goals are for therapy or what changes you're seeking to make. Could be that the goal is to ask for what you want and be okay when the answer is no. This seems like a healthy skill to develop, especially if growth in relationships is desired, or greater risk taking is needed to move forward in whatever way one wants.

I don't have a therapy goal related to my therapist giving me what I want. I have asked for things over the years and I can't recall he refused with the exception of switching a session time during a week when he was full. Maybe once or twice during answering one of my crises calls, he could only give me a few minutes. I do think it was helpful for me to reach out and ask for what I needed, it cracked through the fierceness of my independence so when I later needed to ask people in my life for help, I could do it. And there was a lingering trace of belief from childhood that people won't help you even if you ask, so why bother, and some of the fierceness of my independence was more cynical than fierce.

But it seems like being will to ask for what I wanted from the people in my life gradually opened up more closeness and intimacy with them and I became more comfortable with the kind of vulnerability this generated. But I think asking comes with it the willingness to hear no for an answer; if you ask and you're not willing to accept a no, then that's not really asking for what you need. When I first started asking my spouse for things, I'd get pissed off when he said no, and I'd be all like (inside my head) I hardly ever ask for anything and he says no, like that should have anything to do with it. So I would engage again and negotiate for something else that was in the neighborhood of the original want, a decent substitute for me, it might take me days or even weeks to reengage. Maybe this is automatic for a lot of people but I had to see asking as more of a process or long term approach rather than a one time event. But it definitely improved my ability to communicate what I wanted and he became more of an asker too. I think both of us became more open minded and were more satisfied with the increased closeness that brought.

The original question posed in this thread, how does it feel to not get what you want, is an easy question to answer. For me, it can feel awful but is survivable. I don't think the answer is the end of something, but the beginning. In my own therapy it's been hard for me to admit that I wanted certain things (that didn't have to do with the therapist). Because to have that open desire out there for me to see-- well, if I were a guy I'd say something about something swinging in the wind-- that feels vulnerable. I'm trying to tame my instinct to beat up the thing I want or demean it or pretend it doesn't really matter if I get it and I want to see the desire as the beautiful human thing that it is, but I'm not quite there yet.

For me, apparently, wanting something (love, acceptance ?) and not getting it felt not survivable in my childhood and so was shut down, until triggered by the rejection by my last therapist.

But I have survived -- with pain and difficulty. Though in recent years the survival had been painful in other ways, as well as pretty meaningless.

The longing and the disappointment and reactions to that, certainly, are NOT very tame. But so far as I know there's not an easy path, not a "trick" to taming them. . .Becoming aware, if you can tolerate that, may be a first step?

Maybe this is why self help books to "change your life" fly off the bookshelves, because we want to believe that it's easy to tame emotional reactions or some magic to translating them into something more cognitively tolerable.

I can look back and see that awareness is at least one of the first steps for me, and I can see that the taming is easier and faster than it used to be, that I am able to tolerate more than I used to. And that somewhat paradoxically, being able to tolerate more reduces the intensity of the thing. The keys for me begin with a desire to see something differently, maybe imaginative in terms of believing it can be different than the emotional place I'm in now. At some point I began to believe that I could act differently than my emotional state was driving me towards, I could get off that train or out that trap door. Some Buddhists refer to this as intentionality or in the terminology of Pema Chodron, "letting go of the storyline." Doing it differently, even if it didn't produce an automatic positive result (i.e. get me the thing that I wanted), seemed to help me break free of whatever negative emotional control was grasping at me.

I think only in retrospect can I begin to articulate what's different than it used to be. What therapy has done for me is to develop a place where I can describe what clutches at me and how I respond to it, and a place to keep track of what I did differently or to become a better observer of what I'm doing and where it leads me. I have a long way to go but it's critical for my well-being that I keep reaching towards what I want.

Does he literally ask, "How does it feel to not get what you want?" Because I would find that really provoking personally - probably more so than not getting whatever it was that I wanted. Or does he say, "How does it feel to not get [x]?" That would be a less provocative question.