Posted by cricket on April 27, 2005, at 8:26:44
For those of you who have been listening to me whine about my struggles with my T. He's fed up, he wants to get rid of me, he has nothing but contempt for me, etc.
Well, I went in there and confronted him. I can't believe it. It's so unlike me. Everything inside me was telling me to flee and not go and then once I finally got there all of these voices were just saying shut up, shut up, shut up.
It started out with me just sort of narrowing my eyes at him.
He said, "You're looking serious today."
I got scared then of what I needed to say and tried to shrug it off.
"Any thoughts from our last session?"
"Umm. Yeah." Then I thought oh no. Why did I say that? Now I have to say something. What am I going to say? I can't do this.
I had my jean jacket on my lap and just kept buttoning and unbuttoning the top button and that distracted me enough to say "I think that you are fed up with me."
"Me? Fed up? No, not at all. Why do you say that?" Typical therapist rote response.
More panic on my part. Frantic buttoning and unbuttoning of jean jacket. "Because of some of the things you say."
"Like?"
Inner voices screaming in my ear at this point. "Shut up, shut up, shut up. Say never mind. Get out of there." But somehow through sheer effort of will, in what I am sure was this robot voice, I gave him the list of things he's said for the last few weeks that have made me miserable.
He said, "yeah you're right. I have been very hard on you lately. No doubt about that." I wished I could have seen his face when he said that but I couldn't bear to look up yet.
Then he went on about us being at a transition stage and he really wants to move us forward, etc. and that's why he's being hard. "What I can't forget though, what I have to honor, is the heroic effort it takes for you just to be here every week."
Then I did it. No whining, no pleading, no crying. Just a straight out. "So, don't be hard on me anymore. It doesn't work for sh**."
Then he laughed, but it wasn't a mean laugh. It was a "you're an okay kid," kind of laugh even though I am far from a kid. But that's how it made me feel.
Then the tension that has been dragging on for months eased. I think it was the first time we've laughed in months.
Later in the session, he even came up with some reasons why he thought I was right that being hard on me wasn't going to work.
At the end, he said that the other thing he had to watch out for, what his countertransference feelings were telling him was that I would be very happy just to let him babble away the whole session. "I could just ask and answer my own questions without a peep from you and you would go away very happy," he said. Then I laughed because that is very true.
So still not sure whether this is going to work or not, and I know that there are a lot more struggles if it does. But for today, I feel proud of myself.
poster:cricket
thread:490263
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050420/msgs/490263.html