Posted by Tamar on August 12, 2007, at 21:52:23
I’ve not been around babble much in the last few months, but I’ve been in therapy for over a year now. And I’m still going through the same frustrations I was posting about a year ago.
My therapist has been quite unreliable and has sometimes forgotten to show up for our sessions, and sometimes been very late, and sometimes forgotten to tell me important things (like when he was changing jobs and thus moving office!). It has caused me huge problems with trust. His efforts to repair the relationship involve trying to keep the frame as stable as possible, and to keep the boundaries very firm. I can’t help feeling I need something from him to compensate for his actions: I’ve felt neglected and desperate for care and attention. So obviously his insistence on firm boundaries has felt awful and counterproductive.
He may, of course, be right. I think he believes that firm boundaries will help to repair the relationship, given enough time. And I’d be willing to go along with it if I thought the problems were going to be resolved. But it’s been a year and he’s still not reliable enough. And it’s all very well his saying he needs to keep the frame secure, but we both know that his unreliability compromises the frame very seriously. Something happens to interfere with our therapy about once a month. I am trying to learn to deal with it instead of wishing it would go away.
He has admitted that something is going on in his personal life. He didn’t say what it was. I suspect it may be health problems: either his own health, or someone in his family, but I’m just guessing. Obviously I feel a profound desire to comfort him, to take care of him, to do whatever could be helpful to him; though I know he wouldn‘t let me.
Anyway, I want to keep working with him because when he’s there he’s brilliant. But when he’s not there, I feel humiliated and rejected. Certainly his absences reinforce all my negative thoughts about myself. And at times I think trying to do therapy in this way is damaging me.
I know that his unreliability is unprofessional. I can forgive him because I value him highly. But it also leaves me wanting more from him than he can give me. I found it hard enough to handle the professional limits of the relationship *before* the unreliability started, but now it’s much worse. I feel as if he’s abandoned me repeatedly. I find it almost impossible to believe he cares about me. I miss him terribly between sessions: I spend hours in bed crying, wishing I could be near him, wishing he cared about me or at least wishing I had his permission to love him. And I haven’t been able to talk to him about it because his boundaries terrify me. I’ve never had a conversation about the relationship in which I felt he accepted my feelings. Every relationship discussion we’ve had has ended with me closing down because I can’t bear the rejection.
I’m so afraid… The work I most need to do is centred on gender, sexuality, and body stuff. My transferential material is increasingly intense and scary. I can’t talk to him about it because he wards me off at the first sign of discomfort and I can’t cope with it. I dissociate and then cry later. I’m terrified. I’m so desperate to talk but if he keeps hurting me I’m afraid I will kill myself.
I’ve always believed love is a gift. I’m so ashamed of feeling love for someone who doesn’t want my love. It’s like… making an effort to choose something really nice for him, something I think he’d really like, and giving it to him, and then it turns out he thinks my gift is cheap and nasty; he thanks me insincerely and later, after I’ve left, he throws it in the trash. Why do I want to give him something he has no use for and that isn’t to his taste?
Sometimes I think suicide is simply inevitable: I’ll just keep living as long as I can, and every week alive is one more week with my children. It doesn’t always frighten me; sometimes it feels like a simple fact. I hate myself for thinking these things because it seems so overdramatic and irrational, but it won’t go away. I’m certain I’ll eventually talk to my therapist about loving him, and he’ll respond by reminding me of the professional nature of our relationship, and he’ll say nothing about what my feelings of love mean to him, and that will be that.
poster:Tamar
thread:775888
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070807/msgs/775888.html