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Re: When you first started therapy? - HELP » Looney Tunes

Posted by raisinb on July 28, 2008, at 15:39:10

In reply to When you first started therapy? - HELP, posted by Looney Tunes on July 28, 2008, at 15:24:21

Before I started with my current therapist, I'd seen six or eight others--most for only a couple sessions, one for four months, another for six. I enjoyed the opportunity to vent, but it didn't affect me much one way or the other.

When I started with this one, I talked freely for several weeks, as I usually do. Kind of jokey, funny, light. One day she confronted me on this. I'd been talking about my childhood. She asked, wasn't it a struggle to tell her this? Because she felt that my emotions weren't going with what I was saying. That she didn't feel that I was attached to her or trusted her at all, and that she could lose me as a client at any moment. That I didn't really engage or care one way or the other.

Well, that did it. All at once all my transference feelings rushed in and it's been a pretty intense ride ever since. I've thought a lot about what that comment--and her forthright, open manner of saying it--meant unconsciously to me. It might have been the implication that it was okay--even expected--to care. Or her willingness to confront me directly, which showed caring and engagement on her part. Or maybe even that she thought about whether I'd stay or not. In retrospect it seems like all this stuff was just inside me waiting to be triggered, but it was a shock to me at the time.

I doubt that now, three years later, it would have much effect on me, since we've gone so much deeper since then. But it was striking then.

It did not make me think she was right for me. As a matter of fact it made me want to run a hundred miles in the other direction. It made me feel helpless, resentful, and trapped. But it also made me feel inexplicably attached to her and there was something that made me keep coming back because I couldn't leave these issues alone--they'd become too real to me.


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