I've been reading a bit more on here since I posted earlier and am amazed to find so much of what I experience to be common. It's nice to hear from other people who are baffled by this sense of neediness toward their Ts. I am really blessed that mine is so patient with me. At one moment, I'm practically begging him to respond (he encourages/allows me check in via text to monitor) and the next I'm instructing him to ignore me out of the shame of "needing" him, sending me into a self-abuse cycle. I have admitted horrible projections, which can border on paranoia, of how he might hate/judge me, how I feel like I can hear a far off sigh when he receives my texts or even that is going behind my back to the few others I am close to. I'll feel completely liberated by being able to trust him so well to admit these things, then panic about his inevitable disappearance and close off or ask about quitting.

He is so patient and reassuring about my irrationality and always encouraging me to expose the lies I believe about dependence/needing I use to never need anyone enough to be betrayed or hurt. The best I have been able to explain it to him so far is to tell him that he makes me feel very safe...and to me that safety itself feels UNsafe and makes me panic. My biggest fear right now is that I will bring the transference issue to his attention and it will either disgust him or he will realize he's done it unintentionally and have to "fix" it. It's probably ridiculous to worry that a T who has been practicing for over 20 years and who is privy to my past, and my current fears of losing counseling has NOT figured out the transference connection that is occurring (and how I act out to fight it).

I am fine with him utilizing my transference to get at the issues beneath if he consciously intended to allow this parental dynamic. However, if unintended, I worry I am draining, manipulating or otherwise taking advantage of him (yes, boundary issues are common in my family). I feel personally responsible for his choice to interact with me--does anyone else feel they must have mind control powers or else no one would give them the time of day? Basically, I feel like I need his explicit permission to be OK with my feelings of wanting/needing to be nurtured and cared for by other people, and specifically him. It just seems so counter-intuitive that someone would allow me to burden them in that way (he says not a burden, but we all KNOW better, don't we?).

I go back and forth between being so afraid he'll reject me and almost willing him to do it, so I can at least see where he draws the line (and then safely avoid it thereafter). I keep asking T to give me rules or structure, because I have this insane idea that if I can just have enough information to accurately predict everyone's expectations and boundaries, I can somehow meet them all and never be abandoned or disappoint anyone. And I have been just successful enough at it in my life to believe such an equation for safety might actually exist.

Yet, knowing all this about myself and where it comes from, I still can't assimilate that knowledge and process it on a deep enough level to even begin to work through it. I think I'm starting to realize we're talking years of work ahead. Somehow I imagined that a conceptual understanding was enough to help me knock it out in a matter of months.