Too sensitive to progress any further with therapy?

I have been seeing my therapist for over 4 years, doing trauma work, and I think overall we have a good relationship and I trust him, and I have made a lot of progress.

However, I can be incredibly sensitive and the lightest of challenges from him on certain topics and I shut down, becoming a hateful, angry, sarcastic totally uncooperative version of myself. Who I hate. This means we keep having almost identical sessions where I am unreachable. Afterwards, I feel terrible. It’s making me want to quit.

Even though I understand why I do this, that it’s a defence mechanism I needed to survive as a child blah blah, none of that feels empowering or helps me get out of that dark place once i have fallen down there.

But I don’t know what I can do differently or ask my T to do differently. Other than never challenge my thoughts at all. To be honest, I usually know that the things he challenges are just projections of my trauma, but when he points that out before I even have a chance to get stuck into a rant, I feel invalidated.

I don’t really know what I am looking for - maybe to feel less hopeless and hear that others have got through their strongest defence mechanisms? How did your therapist help you?
Thanks.

If you haven't already, maybe you could try exploring this "stuck" feeling with him. Describing how it happens and how it makes you withdraw... then go from there?

I haven’t quite been with my T two years yet but trust him a lot, we have great rapport and we are doing trauma work. I have two BIG trigger buttons with him where I totally shut down or get really nasty with him.
Thought one... trusting your T and feeling safe enough for certain topics are two totally different things. I may trust my T but not trust my ability to cope until the next session. I may trust my T but not trust something else... doesn’t negate my trust in T it just means other things need done first.
Thought two... safety is a hard one. My T has a lot of experience and tons of training in different types of therapy. We tried a lot of things before getting to what helped me feel safe. Once we figured it out processing MOST trauma came easy... some things need a different feeling of safe (aka my two big triggers)... and we are working on that. The pandemic has taken away what we were able to do that made me feel safe. Some of it, thankfully, was internalized so we can keep going on some things but other things have to wait until we can go back or find a new safe. Safe has ebbs and flows and even catches to it sometimes.
My T will ask me if it is OK for us to talk about X, or can he talk about X in general not expecting anything from me. My T will also ask if it is OK to talk about other people’s experiences with X.

I can be unpleasant towards my therapist. I target her weak spots and can say very challenging things to her. She has got better at identifying when I am doing this and pointing it out to me, although I still take her by surprise sometimes and we become locked in a rupture. If I am able to say to her "I want to say something $hitty to you" or "I am feeling like I want to attack you" this takes the heat out of the interaction and we can work on my intra-process rather than what I am trying to act out with her. It's very hard for me to identify this destructive impulse and articulate it, but when I can, it feels much more productive. Sometimes I also say, "I need to think" when I feel like being cruel in order to buy myself some time and really focus on what is happening for me.

And also, for me, I don't consider this behaviour of mine to be an indication that I am too sensitive. Quite the opposite: for me, it arises out of an inability to be vulnerable and from a struggle to be open to my sensitive self.

Thanks Mopey. We have explored it....but maybe because I hate everything about this feeling, I haven’t been as curious as I could be.

Thanks Omers. Sharing your experience has got me thinking about the idea of safety. Maybe I need to try and pin down what it is exactly that makes me feel so unsafe, what it is he’s doing that triggers that powerless feeling that seems to set me off.

Thanks Comrademoomoo. I somehow seem unable to extricate myself from the acting out. Once it starts, it’s like quicksand. But I surely must be able to do something like this. I hate the ruptures so much.

I think being curious has a lot to do with it... instead of just hating those sarcastic, hateful parts, you could ask why you hate them and get to know them.

It's interesting to hear quite a few people are horrible to their therapists. I don't feel like I have been, maybe once that stands out, and he just ignored it. But it was for a very good reason as he really hurt me.

Quicksand is a really good description of the experience. If you can't catch yourself at the start of the sinking feeling, maybe you could catch something further down the line and say something intuitive like "This feels like quicksand". I am speaking to myself as well, being able to say that would help me. The important thing is to say something which draws attention to what is happening rather than behaving from habit or without curiousity. Our therapists can't always articulate that because they don't have access to our internal worlds, but with practice and some hard work we can go some way towards doing that for ourselves.

I have used some of comrademoomoo's techniques of naming what I want to do rather than doing it. It helps me from getting stuck and shutting down. I don't usually become sarcastic or mean. I just shut down and don't talk. I close off and push her out. I think the times that I am able to name it, she's been able to help me talk about it and work through whatever. I'm not able to do that all the time or even half the time.
It has taken practice and seeing that my T is helpful and doesn't take it personal.

Maybe even in that sarcastic way, you could say that you are feeling the need to be sarcastic, uncooperative or whatever.

I've even used the phrasing that anger has joined us or something similar.

My T has helped by accepting whatever I am feeling, welcoming those feelings, not taking it personal, helping me to continue to stay connected to her and talking. Sometimes that even includes me saying that 'I don't want to be here' meaning that I don't want to be in the emotional place/with this topic and her picking it up and moving the discussion to something completely off the wall.

Does she specialize in trauma or is that something he works with? I have come to realize those are two totally different things. I worked with a T for 10 years and we had a wonderful and trusting relationship. She helped people with trauma for about 40 years. However she didnt have experience with trauma a complex and extensive as mine. When I started to get upset we would totally change the subject because I couldnt handle it.

I have worked with current T for three years who specializes trauma. sometimes she pushes too hard and I disassociate or freeze, sometimes Infer angry and push her away and put up a wall. She recognizes that it is all a defense mechanism. We have discussed this multiple times. We have discussed how we can deal with it. It can be very difficult because what I can handle one day is very different than what I can handle the next. We call it our dance. She will push a little and see how I respond. Also she has been able to recognize a look on my face when she is going to far. She will tell me that she sees it, checks to see if we nee drop change the subject and do whatever she can to being me back to the present because we know that it ain't really her I am upset with but a reaction to what is being said.

Thanks Lost. I really don’t like being horrible to him, although I guess a part of me actually does feel less small and powerless if I am ‘fighting’ him, even though I think I am really just fighting myself, if I think about it.
I’m sorry your T hurt you.

I am now thinking a giant DANGER QUICKSAND!!!!!! tattoo somewhere obvious should be the way forward for me.... This whole thread has made me realise how little curiosity I have mustered so far for this part of me as I dislike it so much.

Thanks for sharing this, Elio. My T is very accepting too, but I think he is generally keen to hang around that place of rage and coldness, when I want him to back off. I think I need to discuss him trying something like your T does - moving the discussion somewhere completely off the wall would be a good jolt to the system.

This is so typically me, but I’m not actually sure how he would describe his trauma knowledge....until I started with him, I had never framed my experiences as trauma, so I wasn’t looking for a specialist at the time.

Thanks for describing your dance. I think my T could be more gentle. I feel like he stands on my feet a bit in our dance....

I can totally understand not thinking about trauma when you start out. I never intended to tell my T about my trauma. I went to therapy totally intending to just deal with parenting issues and the grief of losing my mother. It wasnt until later that I disclosed my abuse.

I talked about my childhood (and other) trauma very early in my therapy. Almost right away, in fact. I was able to do that because I didn't realize the depth of it, and so what I "told" was just a little bit of the larger, awful picture.

Is there a chance he is standing in for anyone from real life or childhood? Are there other times you can remember feeling this? The repetition and the stuckness seem like an enactment. Sometimes the unconscious of the therapist is co creating the issue when it becomes entrenched like that.

Maybe you can brainstorm together how you each are feeling in the moment that it happens, what leads up to it and what resolves it.

There's a notion therapists learn that you can only take a patient as far as you've gone yourself. Is there a possibility you've outgrown your therapist and are frustrated?

At year four, my T and I used to flat out argue/ fight- something I rarely do in real life. It bothered me and his conduct bothered him too. We actually used two sets of yellow and red cards from soccer refing to warn each other. ( yeah , if you are shaking your head- agreed. PC clued me in to end this therapy about three years before I gathered the strength. )

In trauma theory, there's an idea that T and client trade around three roles if they are not very careful: bystander, victim, and perpetrator . There's a feeling in the room that neither one of you know what to do nor want the interaction that is happening. It's an unconscious trying on of roles.

When I read your first post my immediate thought was: does your T take any responsibility for having a part in triggering you? My impression (which might be wrong), is that you are having to take on the role in the relationship of ‘being at fault’ (which maybe you always were as a child?). I’m wondering if he could assume some responsibility for making clumsy mistakes that trigger you by responding to you in a way that’s not helpful. You say he challenges you - would it be more helpful if he tried to understand you in those moments instead of challenging you? I think that we benefit most from seeing things ourselves rather than have our T’s cleverly point things out to us.

This is some great food for thought, thank you.

I actually had a session today, tried to talk about things. I asked him how he felt about these sessions where I retreat into an angry cold place. He asked why I was asking (predictably) because I don’t normally ask. I said I wanted to know if he had a plan, because it was very distressing to me that it keeps happening.

He assured me he does have a plan, this is happening because it needs to, the pain I’m feeling is childhood stuff that I have never been able to express before , coming out in aggression and rage and he feels it’s important that I can and do go to this place and it’s going to keep hurting before it gets better. Hmmmm.

All of this might be true, but I feel like I’m clinging on by my fingernails. I have always felt like I had a decent sense of self despite everything, but the hopelessness and total collapse I am starting to feel after session is making me doubt myself.

Hey Ocean breeze, thank you. I definitely do feel I am at fault when I end up in this unhelpful place. Lately, he does keep saying that even though what happened to me was not my fault, it is my responsibility to fix my behaviour. And although I can’t argue with that, it does leave me feeling a bit like this is my mess to sort out.