Posted by Honore on February 18, 2007, at 22:25:32
In reply to Re: At the beginning » DisTraught, posted by Dinah on February 18, 2007, at 12:13:24
Hi, Dinah.
Maybe your T meant that he thought you had some trouble establishing relationships initially-- and he still thought you had some trouble with that. That doesn't mean that he thinks you don't do it after the initial time of testing or self-protection.
Since he was wrong about looking for another T, and I suspect wrong about whether you'd get anything out of it-- from everything here-- he may not fully appreciate how connected and involved you are, or even perhaps how much you felt that connection, even in the early time.
Sometimes Ts just don't know what's going on inside our heads; they make inferences, some of them based on their own partial ability to know intuitively what someone else really feels.
My T, for example, has for a long time, greatly underestimated my suppressed, or hard to express, optimitism-- he overreads signs of pessimism, which often are my fears of expressing the hopes I have-- of protecting them from possible injuries from the outside. Which I have found in the past.
He mistakes my resistance to embracing or announcing how "proud" I am of various things, or how much I "want" to continue to be able to do certain things-- for an actual lack of desire, or valuing the things I do accomplish. But it's often that I'm not comfortable admitting to some things I do feel, even if I feel that, at one level, so strongly.
Maybe there's something like this, if you T underestimates your ability or depth, or continuity of attachment.
I don't believe that you've been a bad or hurtful mother-- don't read books that prescribe "eye contact" or whatever. They're trying to translate a warmth and caring and nurturing into overt and concrete signs. Some of the signs are valid insofar as they go-- which is for some people, at some times. But look at your son and see if he seems happy, curious, engaged in his life-- if he loves you and knows you love him, and also knows that he can to out into the world in a good way. (Don't be self-denying or worried about being too hopeful-- or that you're deluded--if possible)
Please don't read some book and then apply its absurdly limited formulations to anything so complex or impossible to characterize esp completely, as your life and your love.
Honore
poster:Honore
thread:733798
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070215/msgs/734023.html