Posted by Tamar on June 6, 2006, at 17:08:47
I’m too depressed to think about it. I know I need to think about it because we need to talk some more about his forgetting my ‘anniversary’, and how that affects our work together, but I don’t feel as if there’s any point. It won’t change anything. He’ll always be very distant, and I’ll always feel too uncomfortable with his distance to open up.
Yeah yeah, I know my post on Relationships doesn’t sound like someone in the grip of depression. But after that moment of light relief it all got heavy again.
I’m submerged in a sea of father stuff. And it’s making things very hard for me because the stuff I want to talk about is stuff I can’t talk about when I’m feeling all that father stuff. My therapist’s distance and forgetting and boundary-making is so very reminiscent of my father when I was a teenager. But it’s not the stuff I want to deal with now, for two reasons: 1) I’m more concerned about my self-harming which is only tangentially related to the father stuff; and 2) getting into the father stuff will take far too long; I don’t have the opportunity to see my therapist for years on end.
I don’t have enough of a handle on the father stuff yet. But I have a reasonably good understanding of the self harm, and I really want to work on it. I don’t think I’m entirely avoiding the father stuff, because I have been spending some time working on it, but I’m still a long way from having any significant insights.
I want Mr Safety back. I want to sit opposite my therapist and be able to imagine talking to him openly, and hearing him respond with all the right things. In my imagination he can say things that would be too risky to say in real life therapy, but imagining it used to help. And now it’s impossible because he’s so distant.
He has said to me over and over again, “You don’t know anything about me,” and “Perhaps you think I don’t care.” And those aren’t the things that distress me. I don’t expect to chat about politics and art with him; that wouldn’t be therapy and I really *do* want therapy. And it feels to me as if he cares. But I can’t help thinking I’m giving him the ‘wrong’ responses and that’s why he keeps returning to those things. I feel as if I’m not getting it right and I keep thinking he can’t possibly want to work with me.
Meanwhile I want reassurance and I want to be understood and it feels to me as if reassurance isn’t something I can legitimately expect from him. I don’t even know how to talk about it with him. I don’t know how to talk about anything with him. It’s all about the despair at the moment.
And after having written all this I’m quite sure I’m wrong about all of it. What’s the point?
poster:Tamar
thread:653736
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060604/msgs/653736.html