Posted by wittgenstein on August 15, 2007, at 19:56:58
Sorry, this is going to be a bit of a ramble...
Last Friday I saw my T again after 3 1/2 weeks. It was my first long break from therapy since starting a few months ago and it was harder than I thought it would be.
The weird thing is now I am seeing him again, I'm missing him even more - a feeling of neediness towards him - perhaps it's just the feeling that I want things to be how they were just before the vacation, which of course they're not straight away.
Anyway, last Friday he was asking for me to be more open to him - he said explicitly that I should stop trying to be the 'perfect patient' and just be myself. Perhaps I took this too much to heart as over the weekend I wrote him a piece about how I felt about him - how much I'd missed him, and how at times it had given me comfort to imagine embracing/hugging him as a daughter might her father.
Anyway, I had my last appointment with him on Tuesday and it was really awkward (for me at least). I would never have said these things to his face. I felt he trivialised and downplayed my feelings - he described my transference as a 'side effect' of the therapy and described himself as having joined the line of male authority figures to whom I had had fatherly transferences (which I felt wasn't fair at all - and humiliating to boot - there certainly isn't a 'line' of them - made me feel like he thinks I'm emotionally loose).
Then he gave me a talk about how we could hug and it would be nice but that it wouldn't help me and it would just be re-living an early desire. A few minutes later he asked me if I was 'disappointed'. I can see why he wanted to make this clear but at no point had I asked him for a hug - actually the reality of it would probably have made me very uncomfortable - I had simply shared a fantasy I had had rather than making a request of any kind.
I left the session feeling hurt and confused. He told me it was very good that I had shared how I felt but I got the feeling it wasn't good at all - almost as if he wanted to punish me for having those feelings or that I should have kept them to myself. I don't feel he understands me at all. Why encourage me to be open and then label my feelings as 'side effects'. Why couldn't he have just understood that my desire to be hugged was one of a need for closeness - instead of taking it as an opportunity to alienate and humiliate me?
What hurts the most is the more I care about him, the more he can hurt me.
He knew I was irritated/frustrated in the last session - I said as much - and he said something like 'how can we make the time go then?'. Sometimes it feels like he's more willing to chat about travel and art than he is about feelings.
I see him again on Friday but in the mean time it's that horrible 'killing time' feeling.
Witti
poster:wittgenstein
thread:776504
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070807/msgs/776504.html