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Re: Testing - trigger » antigua3

Posted by DAisym on February 6, 2009, at 20:02:00

In reply to Testing our relationships with our Ts (long), posted by antigua3 on February 5, 2009, at 9:34:50

I think you experienced (and still are) the "after." After the abuse there is this a period of time of intense hurt, shock, and pain. It is devasting - what just happened is devasting. You needed someone to help hold that pain, to comfort you and soothe you. But no one ever did - no matter what the signs and symptoms, and no matter how you communicated it. Aren't moms supposed to be magic and just know this stuff?

So then the shame and humiliation takes over. And we work hard to hide it all - to make it OK for everyone else around us. We reach for the false part of ourself - to mask all the ugliness inside. And I think pride comes in too - A kind of "fine, nobody cares? I'll handle it myself." But it such an awful, black, LONELY place. It is utterly unbearable to know what happened and have to pretend you are OK. Worse - the person we love and who would be our comfort, is the person who hurt us. We hate him; we love him. What does that say about us that we love him? How can we hate him? We must protect him, mom and everyone else from this ugliness.

The "after" is a horrible, painful place to revisit. It is a place in which you feel shattered into a million pieces. And touching it again, bringing those feelings to the surface makes you feel shattered again.

For me, it also brings me face to face with the reality of my theraputic relationship - how much that I, as an adult, must now do for myself. I feel angry at myself for needing my therapist and angry at him for allowing me to need him and really, really angry because while I'm allowed to need him, it is so limited and so restricted. I'm alone at 2am. It sometimes feels like a cruel joke - to feel and want and need this connection but to also know that it isn't enough to fill up the "after." It never will be.

I hate knowing that. But it is a stark truth. And it tortures me - wanting something to take up enough space inside myself so that it crowds out all the emptiness, knowing that it is too late - I'm an adult and I need to figure out how to be enough for myself.

I'm glad you can think more forgivingly of your therapist - she hasn't been herself for awhile now. That would make me anxious and it certainly does not undo leaving you alone with all this pain.

I don't know what to say about your pdoc - I think it is his style to not call unless you call and ask him to call back. Reading what you wrote I'm sure conveyed your pain but he likely did not see the "I need help with this right now" parts - he most likely thought it could (and should) wait until the next session. It may very well be that his message is that you need to handle it on your own in between sessions. I don't think you can leap to his not caring about you - although that is where I would go with it too, if it were me. He is probably thinking that his withholding contact is in your long-term best interest, however painful that is. I disagree with his methods of therapy but his consistency makes me want to say he cares, he just isn't warm and fuzzy.

I've been struggling in this amazingly painful place for nearly three weeks about wanting to be special to my therapist. It hurts tremendously to want this and not get it. It is humiliating to recognize the largeness of this need. And it brings to the surface for me all the reasons I'm not allowed to be special. Top of this list is that I'm tainted - and he knows it better than anyone. It strikes me that perhaps being special "enough" to get a call back, to receive comfort for your pain -- to still feel like you are in existance between sessions for your pdoc - may be in play here too.

Because being special is dangerous - and not being special is on par with anniliation. Both of which you've experience with your dad and mom. The war these feelings ignite is indescribably painful.

I guess I've written all of this as a way to say that you are not alone and you are special - a special friend and mom and babbler. That sad little girl should have been made to feel special in all the right ways from her dad and mom - and she shouldn't have been made to feel so rejected and abandoned now. But no matter what, she isn't alone anymore.

Take care,
Daisy

 

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poster:DAisym thread:878199
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090129/msgs/878599.html