Posted by mair on February 14, 2007, at 16:55:09
My T called me today to cancel our next appointment and left a message on my voice mail at my office asking that I call her back (at home) so she could be sure i got her message. I can't seem to bring myself to call her.
Some of you know she has breast cancer and following a mastectomy, is going through chemo now. She's seeing patients every other week. It's been pretty difficult to maintain any sense of continuity, and tough for me, when we do meet, to get beyond the distraction of just thinking about how awful all of this is for her. She's lost so much weight and all of her hair, and I know she's finding it more and more difficult to bounce back from each chemo treatment. She seems so less engaged although it's possible that I'm looking for this. It may be more perception than reality.
An additional complication for me is that I very recently found out that my older sister has breast cancer too and is undergoing a mastectomy next week, with major reconstructive surgery. I'm taking a week off so I can fly down to Atlanta and be there to help when she gets out of the hospital. Because of her situation, my T and I have been doing more talking about cancer (just the factual stuff) than we might have otherwise. Things with my T and my sister seem so intertwined.
Therapy has seemed so pointless to me lately, and last week, without really planning to, I actually broached the subject with my T of terminating. I've seen this T for around 10 years, much of that time on a 2x per week basis. But I've been mostly doing ok with a scaled back schedule and the thought of ramping it back up after she's better isn't very appealing. Maybe the stuff with my sister is making me feel like I need to hurry up and move on to the next stage of my life. The problem I have with therapy these days is that my most important therapeutic goals can only be achieved with more intensive therapy. If I don't want to see her at least twice a week, we can't work on the more intensive stuff. Now, all of these goals seem unreachable anyway and actually irrelevant too. As long as I'm pretty stable, once a week seems pointless.
As soon as I left my T's office last week, I felt like a heel for bringing up the subject of termination, particularly since I'm not really interested in doing anything precipitously. I also felt like I had this huge need to see her again soon. It's almost like the subject of termination created an immediate need for therapy, which wasn't there before. I also felt a little like a deserter. I know her practice has been seriously disrupted. She told me that when she can start back on a fuller schedule, she'll only have about a third of the caseload she had before.
I seem to fly all over the place between feeling like I don't really need to be in therapy, and feeling so needy. Sometimes I feel that this disruption has demonstrated to me that therapy is simply an expensive luxury. The next moment I feel panicked at the thought of trying to maintain some mental stability without her help. It's occurred to me that maybe I'm making myself feel depressed and needy just so I can justify continuing. Is that being manipulative?
All of which gets me back to where I started. I think I'm so conflicted that I'm incapable of really doing anything - I can't seem to just quit - I can't invest enough of myself into therapy right now to make it seem worthwhile - and I can't even seem to respond to a very simple request that I call her.
Any ideas?
mair
poster:mair
thread:732804
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070203/msgs/732804.html