Are you "allowed" to need your therapist?

This is a unique kind of pain, isn’t it? I like the way you describe it although I hadn’t thought of it as a “need.” I have certainly felt this too, although the origins of my “psychic pain” are likely different and have lessened a bit with time. Feeling this sort of anguish and not having it taken care of is a special kind of torture. Certainly my husband would never understand and frankly, it’s too embarrassing (and complicated) to tell my T about although I’ve definitely let it slip out in emails.

I relate so much to what you’ve said here. Thanks for expressing it so well. I guess I hadn’t thought of any of these things as needs.

Sometimes I experience needs as pain too, in a sense that the “need” is so visceral it feels sort of physical, kind of deep inside my stomach. Sometimes the knowledge that these “needs” can’t be fulfilled (like the “need” for T to “never” leave me) makes me feel so anxious, my body wakes itself up in the middle of the night in a state of absolute panic. Often, the yearning for him is like the yearning of an infant for its mother and I’m so ashamed of it and of the fact that I can’t switch it off. I “need”to be able to express this to him without fear of rejection/abandonment but I can’t. My “need” for survival (revealing less for the sake of self preservation/keeping him in my life) is sometimes greater than my “need” to voice my vulnerability.

Merope, I totally get this. It sounds like you’re a few steps ahead of me in terms of being able to accept and describe it. It’s so unpleasant to me sometimes that I think I just push it all away any way I can.

I don’t know about that...the more I think about this, the more tangled up I feel. I’m also guilty of overthinking which ultimately leads to me feeling like I’ve done something wrong by having “needs” and that he will abandon me.

I do the same thing. My T has said that he thinks that I think I’m “too much” for him. He may be right and the reason may be that if I feel like I want (need?) something from him, he’ll be overwhelmed or frustrated. My solution is to contemplate not showing up just about every week so that that doesn’t happen. I rarely skip, but I do agonize about it on a regular basis. And I sometimes play out a scene in my head where he agrees that we’re not a good fit and that we should stop working together.

I've told my T before that I worry I'm too much or too needy for him, and he says that I'm not. In this case, it's kind of a pattern in my life, that I worry I'm too much for people, so it's something useful to explore. And I also feel safer asking T something like that than, say, a friend (though I have sort of done that before, just not in those exact words--but it's been more recently, since my work with this T, so I think he helped me learn it can be OK to ask that).

Sort out a list of things and seek out a term that best fit it. As I seen on a movie , help me understand, transference, reparenting. Highly effective people certain books might be easier then a discussion.

But from what i've seen, expression of certain needs is in fact not allowed in many cases. Step out of line, get fired. One of the running themes of this forum is fear of termination or other punishment. I see many people calibrating their behavior around what the therapist wants or needs or finds acceptable.. Whose therapy is it?