Posted by wittgensteinz on October 4, 2009, at 10:15:54
It's been a long while since I've posted here.
I don't often weep in session - in life in general I try to keep my emotions hidden - but lately the sessions have been very intense and painful. I go home feeling exhausted with red eyes.
One of my long-standing problems is distrust and suspicion. It's as if I am on the look-out for a sufficient reason to distrust a person. I'm always doubting peoples' intentions, fantasizing what 'they are really thinking' in a given moment, spinning a perfectly normal situation into a threatening and negative one where I feel rejected and I run away into myself. I know where the roots of this problem lie - I understand the factors in my past - but I don't seem able to change the way I react to the world.
The week before last I got myself into a very bad place. I was suicidal and very very nearly did something terrible. More by chance than anything I didn't and managed to keep myself together. At the time I didn't feel I could reach out to my therapist - I didn't feel I could reach out to anyone - and that made it a particularly dangerous situation. I posted just over a year ago about a serious attempt I made on my life. The irony is that I felt that was in the past, that I was doing so much better but the same vulnerabilities and tendencies remain and bubble up every now and again.
When I saw my T for the next session, I told him about the week and how close I'd come to doing something that would have been terrible. I had to admit that, although I am clearly very attached to him, I didn't feel able to reach out to him. I didn't feel he would have wanted me bothering him - I couldn't trust that he would be glad or relieved to hear from me. This constant distrust is something he finds difficult to bear. He began to weep, so I looked away and soon I was weeping too. I felt so ashamed that I'd made him so sad. What a helplessness he must have felt and it made me feel helpless too. I really want to be able to trust and let go of my defences but there's just something so deep and fixed inside me that at the slightest sign of abandonment or rejection I retreat and hide and then things start to go wrong.
I saw him again last Friday and toward the end of the session his voice started to crack up. I'd used the word 'probation' - that it was like I kept him on probation (in retrospect I feel like it was a stupid word to have used) - if he made a 'mistake' then I would quickly retract the trust I had in him - I think he feels he deserves or has earned more than that from me. He said "but how long are you going to keep me on probation? 2.5 years? (that's how long I've been seeing him).. 5 years? 10 years? Forever?" And now that comment and his shaky voice are ringing through my head and I feel awful. Things can go wrong very quickly and that terrifies me. I can go for weeks and months feeling reasonable - coping with life more or less - then the floor will drop away and I will be in unbearable emotional pain and all I can think is to get away from it - as if someone is holding a burning object against my skin - that's the urgency I feel in those moments. I asked him once if he'd ever lost a patient and he said 'no' - I guess I'd assumed that all therapists had 'lost' patients, somehow (perhaps as selfish as this may sound) it wouldn't have felt as bad if he'd lost patients.
Lately, life and therapy have just been too hard.
Witti
poster:wittgensteinz
thread:919657
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090907/msgs/919657.html