TN thank you so much for replying - I felt quite guilty posting about this when I knew you are going through a horrendous time because of the way your T has badly mishandled things. I don’t at all blame you for deciding at the moment to never allow yourself to become attached to anyone again - but I do hope that you will one day be able to see truly that it was his failing, not yours and that maybe it’s not a question of your having to shut down on loving someone but more a question of the ability of the other to receive that love. (((( TN ))))
Kashley I think I’m probably at the stage where you were soon after you started with your T - it’s all about trust for me at the moment and what you say makes perfect sense,
quote:I'm talking about that ultimate level of trust that takes a while to develop.
I kind of just assumed that I automatically trusted a T simply because they were a T - but in fact it’s always only ever been on an intellectual level, as you describe
quote:mainly because I know it's her job to listen to me and focus an hour on me each week.
I finally had a taste today of what it’s like to genuinely trust a T (that is, what it WOULD be like lol, just because I had a sense of it doesn’t mean I’m now totally trusting) - I have to say he earned it - there’s no way I could have had that sense of beginning to trust unless the T had in some way ‘made’ me trust him/her, and it finally dawned on me that this is something that will (or not, as the case may be) develop over time.
I’m just really not sure that I could make the leap to attachment, especially as what made me start to trust this T today, was the recognition (thanks to the way he was) that he wasn’t in the business of providing me with all my unmet needs. But then I don’t know s*** from clay about emotional reality anyway lol, so who knows where I’ll end up as far as attachment goes.
STRM I loved the analogy with a horse race - it must be so much harder for you with different parts who have different levels of fear and defensiveness! So you’ve got a whole lot more work to do (many times over really) than most. I’ve been really interested by the body work that you do with your T - it’s something that some Ts I’ve seen recently incorporate into their approach, but only as an aside, rather than the focus of the therapy. The new T I now have is strictly ‘old school’ so I don’t see him going in for body awareness - I have a feeling that the deeper feelings like shame are probably better dealt with via body focus so don’t know what will happen on that front. That’s actually going to be a BIG issue for me, seeing as how he’s a man
oh all sorts of fears and defences coming up there already. Attachment equals needy equals physical awareness of feelings equals shame. Uggh.Songbird it just occurred to me, reading your reply and putting it in context of your other posts, that your T doesn’t actually know how much it matters to you that he care? Maybe he thinks he’s done such a good job with you because you’re not letting on how much he means to you? Sorry I don’t know anymore about you and your T apart from what you’ve written recently so I could be totally off the wall here - it was just a sudden thought that came to me as I was reading your reply in the context of what others have been saying about attachment.
Whatever the situation is, I hope you at least can talk to him about how you’re feeling before deciding that you might be mistaken in your perceptions of him. (((( Songbird ))))
Ok yet again this post is getting too long, so will split it.