How much contact do you have with T out of session?

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Riptide said:
2) "Most therapy professionals agree that the standard and best approach for working with trauma survivors should follow these three stages:
stabilizing and managing responses
processing and grieving traumatic memories
reconnecting with the world

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Very interesting. It made me realize that after a rupture, my T has backed off and I think gone back to stage 1. I don't think I'm ready for stage 2 yet.

I ran into my therapist at the Home Depot shortly after I started therapy.....she was in the paint aisle....I was in hardware......we exchanged glances across the ceiling fan display....I blew her a kiss and she gave me the finger...I wrote about it in my diary and think about it often.......we connected on another level that day.....and to think I drove the extra 3 miles to the Home Depot when I could have shopped at Lowe's...

it was destiny...............

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Brian37 said:
I blew her a kiss and she gave me the finger.

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NO WAY! This did not actually happen, did it?

OMG Brian! She flirted back with you...didn't she? Well we are all human. I hope you both worked through that though.

How crazy is this....I seem to have shut down a bit with T. Didn't contact him at all between our Thursday and Monday appointments, and suddenly just felt this "disconnect" about 2/3 of the way through our session today. AND have reverted back to some seriously unhealthy coping behaviors.

I am totally not blaming this thread for it....but I think some part of me heard "slow down" and I responded with "shut down". Blah. Therapy is so hard. It's this constant cycle of learn to trust, open up, get afraid, shut down, repeat, repeat, repeat, endlessly.

Glad my T is patient

Earthmama,

I don't think it's crazy at all. I shut down periodically and shut him down periodically. LOL

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constant cycle of learn to trust, open up, get afraid, shut down

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Yes, but eventually you will get afraid and open up anyway instead of shutting down. I think I was there today. Keep trying and magic doors will open!

Peace

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earthmama said:
but I think some part of me heard "slow down" and I responded with "shut down".

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Maybe this thread could have triggered this slow down or maybe deep down inside your mind was telling you this, which then lead to you starting this thread. The key here is that you've learned that you control the pace at which you explore and deal with your issues.

My pdoc asked me if I felt like I needed to do "homework" to try to sort things out on my own...this is what I was doing because I had a need to control how the sessions went...check mate!
He told me I was not required to think about therapy stuff outside of the seesion and asked, frankly, how much good had it done me doing that for the past 20 years.
Sure, since I've abandoned by "homeword" as much as I can, we have ten minutes of silence and panic on my part at the start of each session.
I go four days a week now which seems to be enough to discuss and process during session.
Maybe you could increase the frequency of your sessions so that you don't need so much out of session time? Just a thought...