The adult part taking care of the child part

Yes Repetition compulsion it is called. I think you are right so how does that revelation get used to resolve the issue?

Right. So your t wants you to make a RATIONAL decision based on that realization.

This is not a math class! Its about feelings! Where does he get off asking you to do algebra in therapy? If you wanted that, you could go to community college.

You know how they say, its like explaining color to a blind person? We are the blind person, and they are NOT doing a very good job of explaining color. They have no concept of our world. ALL of our decisions are ALREADY rational - THATS THE PROBLEM. They are flat black. He is saying, leave it flat black. You are saying you want more. He is saying, there ISNT any more. Hes a liar. Eta - okay thats kinda harsh! But to me it felt like a box.

Eta - your parent was your only choice. Your t is NOT your only choice.

Well, I'm not entirely sure. For me, it was about building relationships with people who maybe didn't feel so familiar and "right" right away but who I could see rationally were good people. (I remember my first reaction to my now-wife is that she seemed really boring.) So in terms of therapy, maybe that would mean finding a therapist who seems well-trained and dedicated and experienced with developmental trauma but who doesn't inspire the intense transference right away. My experience is that those feelings will likely come around eventually with the new person and then you might have a better shot at resolving them. So you'll have the urge to repeat the attachment experience but the target of your feelings might be different this time and thus better able to help you through them. But unfortunately there are no guarantees with this kind of thing.

No, I got that, which is why I wondered what your current T does when you talk IFS like lingo to describe your inner world.

Who is he to put it into the box he likes? It's your inner world. Shouldn't you get to enjoy it however it feels. You might get to where you feel only those 3 parts/states. You might never get there, and (this is my opinion) both of you have to be ok with how your inner world feels organized to you at any given time. The simple fact that it doesn't feel that it is simply Adult, Parent, Child now, is important to explore and not with the agenda of pushing your inner world into that definition of a mind/psyche but because it is your inner world that needs to be explored and expressed as it is now and as it changes and grows. (again, my opinion)

I don't think you are asking the impossible. However, the possible might not look exactly the way you thought it should when you ask for it. Makes me think of little caesars pizza - the square pizza with square slices - that I really loved.

My T doesn't subscribe to this statement and I am glad for it. She believes she can be 'as if' in her responses to me. Or maybe it's that she believes that her responses have the ability to touch the parts of me that needed that stuff as if she was my parent; thereby providing me with an experience of receiving something. There's still boundaries and I've been told no. I don't get every fantasy that I want and I've had to learn to ... or try to deal with that. Still learning.

Well my appointment is tomorrow. I have managed not to email him between session because I have BetterHelp T I message twice a day and and we agree he responds in the morning and evening so that helps with venting, being heard and getting attention.

Well we did not do much of anything except discuss the transference more and him explaining what he thinks is going on and he still feels that once I can transfer the transference back on to myself by my adult part taking care of the child part then it will resolve. We are to do this by taking me back in to trauma memories and in that moment have my adult part rush in and save and nurture the abused child part.

Oh barf......all so hokey.

I hope he is able to be of guidance on how to have the adult part help and be patient enough to go at your pace.

I completely agree with his concept of once your adult part can take care of the child part then this type of transference will start to resolve. I have my concerns about his method. And with comments of barf and hokey, I feel you have your own reservations of this method.

Are you going to keep your better health person for a while?

Yes I am with betterhelp T. He is helping me process sessions and help me through the week between sessions not to seek attention from EMDR T. BetterHelp T said T’s approach was, “This makes sense to me as it is likely the etiology of the attachment issues. Whether or not it will be effective remains to be seen though. I suppose we can only trust in his judgement and hope for the best.”

Well I have to wait another week and sit here and try to manage this awful transference.

I guess I feel it's kind of heartless that he expects your adult self to do this alone? My T and I do imagery rescripting of abuse memories except she also steps in as an ally to my adult self. Initially it was all her since my adult part had no idea what to do!

Having your T not even willing to be there in the scene to help protect your child part feels really cold to me.

I talked to BetterHelp T about how I would like a transitional object from my T. He said:

"As far as the helpfulness of a transitional object, I suppose it could prove to be useful in order to bridge the gap between his presence and your life outside of session. I could also see it serving to just perpetuate your attachment to him though. It could serve as yet another reminder of him that strengthens the attachment."

He is probably right.

Reference: I feed lots of Raccoons and their cubs on my porch. Don't judge me.

In session yesterday T tried to make analogies to help me see that I know how to take care of my child part.

He was using the Raccoons as symbolism's or references to show me I do know how to take care of my child part. He ask. "If you saw one of the large males beating up one of your cubs what would you do?". "When you stepped onto the deck to clean up and one of the cubs was still on the railing and it was crying like a puppy because it was scared what did you do?". "Is it the cubs fault it is getting beat up? Is it the cubs fault that it could not climb down fast enough to follow its mother? If the cubs make a mess of the deck do you wait until they return and yell at them viciously and beat the up or do you just clean it up because that is what cubs do?" It was ways for him to show me that I already know how to nurture a child and I can do it for myself when in the memory. It is to show me I was a just a child and not to blame for doing normal annoying things that children do and should not have been abused for it. Apparently I blame my child parts for the abuse and for the trouble it causes me in adult life and I want nothing to do with it. In other words I lack compassion for myself. I understand what he is saying but I do not feel what he is saying.

What is your transference feeling like when you say you have to manage it? You say awful which sound more a result of the transference feelings. For example, at many times my transference felt like a longing or a deep ache which left me feeling miserable and anxious. I never really have been able to say what I longed for or ached for; there didn't/doesn't seem words for it. Sometimes there would be images of wanted actions and so on.

How does it change from moment to moment?

How does it move through the week? When if ever do you get angry about it, get angry at your T because of ... something specific or something unnameable?

Dealing with and working with transference of any kind is hard. It is courageous of you to want to work through yours, to understand it, and to grow through it. You've been here long enough to know that if not handled well can create more problems. I'm glad you are keeping the better help T around for a bit.

Is your ego state T... an EMDR T? If yes, did you start to see him as an EMDR T and developed the transference or ?? Does he plan on using EMDR with you at all? If not, have you brought up the idea of using EMDR to deal with the trauma rather than visualization?

Girlfriend that is a lot fo questions!

So I described it as feeling like my self worth was tied to him. Feeling of being nothing, empty, worthless along with the longing to be loved by him and taken care of by him like a child. When not with him I feel like I have been kicked out of my home and not wanted until the next session. Like I just do not want to exist if he is not in my life.

All day I think of ways I can make him proud of me. I am modeling what he did with his business. He had professional pictures done and a brand new website. So I am having a photo shoot in two weeks for pictures for my website and hired someone to update my website. It will be good for my business and it will show him my best adult self did something mature.

I never really felt any anger. Fleeting it was when I wanted him to fail at his practice and die. He does EMDR and Ego state. Combination of both. I can not pin point exactly when the transference became a problem. Yes he wants to go back to doing EMDR going back into the same memory we worked on for months and I felt we never got anywhere with it.

I think this all kind of depends on one's take on attachment and transference. The way I see it, the transitional object is best when one struggles with object consistency and/or self-soothing. By the end of your week, is your T a bit of a stranger to you again? Do you fear he'll be someone else or feel he is someone else?

For what it is worth, I don't believe it is wrong to perpetuate an attachment. I think this may fall back under the psychoanalytical stuff as a big part of that seems to be in working with transference and attachment as a primary intervention. I see nothing wrong with a T fostering an attachment as long as boundaries are firm enough to minimize if not completely keep from fostering dependency at the same time.

Why do you want a transitional object? Have you had one in the past? How has it helped or what do you think it will do for you? Can you find something yourself? I don't know what your financially situation is; one of the things my T encouraged was me acquiring items that spoke to the younger parts. We would sort out later why that item spoke to me and what it was giving me. Her encouragement and acceptance of these objects actually created stronger transitional objects than the actual things she gave me. They feel like there is more of her with them, more things/emotions I can associate to her with them.

Yup he has in the past given be a glow in the dark silicone bracelet with the elements of Water, wind fire..... on it. It spoke to my child part for sure. It was to help ground the child part and remind her of him and be comforted by it. OMG I cherished that thing! That was last year. I still have it but it does not give me the same feeling because our relationship was in a different place.

Yes purple means something to my child part and I surround myself with purple. My phone case, watch band, purse, whatever I can get in purple.

I feel like he is leaving out one key piece here... when you are cleaning up after a raccoon, pet, another child, another person... your child part has not been activated, you are not experiencing the world through those elements. Instead, you still are connected to your adult or to maybe all of you parts. When you are experiencing the world through your child parts, you might not have access to your adult parts to know how to respond. If they ... your adult and child parts are not talking to each other, not working together... how is the child supposed to believe the adult will be there to take care of and all that jazz... and if the adult blames or despises (whatever) the child part why would they step in.... and a bigger question... is if the "adult" blames, despises, or whatever the child part... is it really the "adult" part? Is it really the 'I' of your system or is it another part that has stepped in and is aligned with or identifies with the perpetrator of your abuse, and is perpetuating the bullying or abuse?

For me, I found that it was that part that was trying to keep me safe by modeling the parenting I grew up with, that it was not the adult me or the 'I'. I had thought of it as my adult part because that is what the adult in my life did as my parent. That is what I thought an adult did. I still have a long way to go, so again this may shift as I grow. It's how I understand it at this point.

Does it feel like it isn't connected to your T anymore or your T isn't the same person that gave you it? Or does it somehow feel tarnished by the rupture you had with your T?

If it simply doesn't feel like it has the energy(for lack of a better word) of your T, then having him hold it for a while might recharge it. Him taking it back and keeping it for a week or even just a session then giving it back to you might be a very valuable symbolic action of repairing the rupture. Hard to say what your psyche would do with it. For me, as I typed that up, I imagined/felt a sense of forgiveness and welcoming of my return in that kind of action. If my T did something like that, I would feel as if she was saying that I wasn't bad, she still loves me, and I am (still) welcome/wanted. And maybe it just had that feeling for me because of where I am at the moment. Who knows.

If it feels tarnished, shoot I don't know. I've yet to figure out how to unblend something from that feeling. Instead it usually continues to hold the emotion and memory of the painful experience.

I am trying to understand this. So what you are trying to say is that the part that is cleaning up after the Raccoons in not the adult and perhaps another part. In my T's world there are 3 part. only. Child, Parent and adult. So who is it then?

I'm trying to say that maybe the part that struggles with your child part, isn't the adult part. It might be the parent part (if I was to have to limit myself to those 3 parts) since from how I read your posts, it more closely mirrors what you felt your parents might have felt towards the child you.

And maybe when you are feeling the child part, you are in a state of needing support and soothing; and the adult/parent parts are not reachable.

It's hard for me to narrow myself down to just those 3 parts as my inner world doesn't feel like only those 3. I might be able to divide them into 3 committees consisting of those types of parts. So, anyway, in the 3 part ego state, I struggle with separating out the parent and the adult when talking about soothing and taking care of. I always think of the adult being the one that gets things done (the manager so to say) and the parent as the one that soothes, comforts, and protects. But if we didn't have that as a kid, how are we going to be able to do that with our own child part. Our child part doesn't trust "parents" and while our parent part can be compassionate towards others, it has internalized the narrative about ourselves from what we experienced as a kid. In my opinion, one has to first get those 2 parts to be willing to be "wrong" about the other before they can even start to see the real them. I don't know if I'm making sense at all.

Hope that helps.

Adult, parent, child are the key positions in transactional analysis. Has he explained the fundamentals of how these states work and interact with each other - as well as how they interact with the states of others?

I do not understand what you are trying to say here. Tread lightly.

So I put the question to Betterhelp T how he would handle this if he had a client like me and he responded.

"That's a really good question and one I have asked myself as I am sure you can imagine. Personally, I equate attachment with love, and not necessarily romantic love (though that as well). I see them pretty much as one in the same thing. If I were in Michael's shoes, the way I would conceptualize it is that I have a client who loves me. I'm not sure if this is how you conceptualize it, but this is what helps me to do so. And how do you go about falling out of love with someone? What makes someone fall out of love? Perhaps a wrench could be thrown in the idealized version of me; we could work on viewing me as a person who has flaws just like any other human. Perhaps sessions could be tapered to eventual termination with the intention of allowing the attachment to dissolve. Perhaps we could work on finding a substitute for the attachment --- an activity or another person. In any case, it would be incredibly difficult. I can only imagine being in either your shoes or Micheal's. It would take an immense amount of effort for both myself and the client. And it would be quite scary for both myself and client too."

I kind of hate to suggest this because I certainly have no qualifications, just a lot of reading I did trying to figure myself out. But for what it is worth, this sounds to me like a (normal/natural) idealization of your parent by a child, and like it got stymied. For very young children their (idealized) parent is experienced as a part of the self, according to some theories. Is that what it seems like to you? Does that memory have anything to do with anything like that? Is it possible there is some deeply unconscious feeling that you haven't been able to get to with EMDR (yet) because it's so well defended against? Nevertheless, could that be part of what's still keeping you stuck?