Posted by Tamar on June 30, 2006, at 13:49:28
Sorry I haven’t been very communicative recently. I’m having a really hard time at the moment: I’m feeling horribly depressed and my diabetes is spiralling out of control for no obvious reason.
Therapy is still hard. We had a session a couple of days ago and it went pretty well until the very end, when he said he thought perhaps I might want something from him. And of course I wants lots of things from him, but he never seems to want to discuss that. So I said, “What can you give me?” And he looked away for a long time (well, it seemed long, and I was trying to figure out whether he was annoyed at me). Then he looked up and he said that I don’t have to feel this way. That was OK with me because I understood what he meant, by my inner 18 year-old wanted to smack him. She said, “You know, what I *really* want is to be able to remember what you look like between sessions.” (We had been talking about that earlier.) And he told me that he thought what I really wanted was to be able to hang onto my internal representation of him, and that my internal representation of him didn’t need to have a face. And I gave up. If he can’t understand that I want to know what he looks like, I don’t see the point of continuing.
I have never felt so sh*t leaving therapy, even when we’ve been talking about very difficult things.
I accept that he may be right. Perhaps I don’t need to know what he looks like. But I *want* to know what he looks like. Why the f*ck can we not talk about that? And in fact, he may also be wrong. I might actually *need* to know what he looks like. How can he know what I need? How can he make that decision without exploring it and discussing it with me?
I want to phone and cancel my next appointment. I don’t think I will. But I’m desperate now. I can’t go on like this. My 18 year-old wants to misbehave. She wants to email him, phone him at home, drive past his house, send him books, sit in her car outside his office and watch him coming and going… I think she hopes that behaving badly will get his attention. I’m very sure she’s wrong. But it frightens me. I haven’t felt like this before. I haven’t wanted to misbehave purely to get attention since I was a small child.
I’m scared…
poster:Tamar
thread:662944
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060623/msgs/662944.html