Posted by DaisyM on May 27, 2004, at 20:27:10
In reply to I really and truly give up, posted by Aphrodite on May 27, 2004, at 15:20:19
Aphrodite,
I agree with everyone else...please wait out your feelings a little bit before quitting. Maybe quitting is what you need but you should talk to your Therapist about it first. Dinah is probably right, the feelings that are old get mixed up with the here and now.
I have another theory too. It goes like this:
"I just pored out my heart to you. I cried. I told you I'm suicidal at times. And YOU'RE GOING TO JUST LET ME LEAVE??!!!" We all want someone waiting for us at home who can wrap their arms around us and rock us and tell us it will all be OK. Most of us leave therapy and go back to work or go home and be the mom, wife, girlfriend, whoever. The child part of us that is really, really out and in pain, does not go home to her mommy. And we don't get to take our Therapist with us.
The first few times I experienced this whammy, I was incredibly crushed. I did call him, I remember specifically one Thursday saying, "what did you do to me that I feel so alone and so hurt!" He said the work of therapy often makes us feel lonely, because NO ONE listens like our Therapist. And once we start to talk, it is hard to stop and only do it in 50 minutes increments. That one of the tasks of therapy is to internalize your Therapist so you can take him with you and not feel so alone.
It took me a really long time to do this. I felt so psychically intrusive. I finally have though the younger parts of me will "disappear" with him and leave me out here hanging sometimes. But when I feel the connection between us weaken at all, I freak out. I need him to keep me together.
The other thing is that once we started on the really hard stuff, he had to learn how to put me back together so I could leave without invalidating the work we had just done. I think of the analogy of "In Session" about taking your clothes off and putting them back on. Once (and only once!) we had this emotional conversation and at the end he had an "Oh by the way," insurance question. I felt like he was doing what everyone else did, asking me to solve his problem. He got that this upset me, we talked about it and now we do "business" at the beginning of the session or over the phone, not in session time. We now usually end with him stopping 5 minutes early and asking how I'm doing. Then we make a plan for coping. We all have leaving rituals I think, that help.
You are not alone in this. You will get there. You did an amazingly hard thing today. You were so brave. You aren't alone, you have us. But, please, call him and leave a message. You don't want to spend a week like this. And you don't want to start over if you don't have to.
Please let me know how you are doing. I'm worried about you.
(((Aphrodite)))
poster:DaisyM
thread:351182
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040522/msgs/351255.html