STUCK

Hey everyone,

Have been seeing a new T since 4 months.
She has 25+ years of experience and I also like her and the way she works.

However, I am running into a problem that I also had with a former therapist.

My current therapist is trying to establish a safe relationship between us two, where I feel safe to show my emotions, especially anger. My problems include detaching and focusing on the needs of the other instead of my own.

Each and every session, she asks me various times: What is your feeling towards me? She does this especially when I feel blank, because she supposes that the blankness is my way to suppress negative feelings towards others that I expect will lead to trouble, in this case my feelings towards her. This makes sense to me, I hope I've explained it clearly for anyone who's reading this, too.

However, every time, I have such tremendous difficulty feeling what I feel. I am almost incessantly unsure of my own emotions, because they often seem non-existent or very slight. It also gives me anxiety when she asks this question, because I am afraid that I will, again, not know what I feel. I am scared that she will at some point say that I am not working hard, or that I am blocking the process.

I also have the feeling that I am misunderstanding something, because sometimes I find I have assumptions about 'assignments/questions' (in whatever context) that lead me to think the 'answer' has to be between certain parameters that I later find I made up myself, whereas to others it appears much more logical that the 'answer' lies in a different direction, or within much wider parameters, for instance. The problem is that right now, I don't know which parameters I made up. I hope this sounds familiar to anyone, but I find it difficult to explain.

The difficulty for me is: I don't know what I feel, and I want to get help to find out how I can actually feel my emotions at such a moment. But another problem is learned helplessness - that I lean on others for lots of decisions. Do you understand my problem? On the one hand, I have to find out myself how to feel things, but I don't know how to feel them because I usually feel nothing; and on the other, I can't really ask for more guidance, because then I'm perpetuating learned helplessness.
She tries to help me by telling me to pay attention to my body: I have found, after my initial scepticism, that anxiety and anger actually are related to certain feelings in my throat, chest, etc. So I try to pay attention to my body when she asks 'what is your feeling towards me?', but that still often leads nowhere.

Long post, my main concern is: have others had such difficulty 'accessing' their own emotions, and does anybody have help for me as to how I can feel my emotions when she asks me that question?

I'm worried that I'm blocking my own process, but not sure how that's happening exactly. I feel like I'm running into a wall. I'd really appreciate any of your insights.