Posted by onceupon on June 23, 2009, at 22:07:04
Ack. I've been in lurk mode for a long time now, and I've struggled with responding to others because I'm also in total avoidance mode.
But I'm feeling pretty lost at the moment, and would like to think aloud, as it were, for awhile. Hope that's okay.
I'm coming up on 2 years with my therapist (I also saw her for about 6 months maybe 5 years ago). In some ways, I can look at myself and say, "I'm doing a lot better than I was 2 years ago." I'm no longer suicidal, and my moods aren't so whacked out. That's progress, obviously.
But there's this whole other sea of stuff underneath that has felt stuck for a REALLY long time. I feel disconnected - from my husband, friends, son. After my son goes to bed, and sometimes during the day too, I'm content to check out for long periods of time - mindlessly surfing the web, just pissing away time, really. This isn't helping me write my dissertation, or get any other similarly pressing things done.
And then there's my relationship with my therapist, which is, by turns, painful and wonderful. The other bit of stuckness that feels like it's held me back for just about forever is all this unresolved mother stuff. It's morphed from angst about my mother to include angst about my own newish role as a mother. A lot of the time, this manifests as this super-intense longing directed toward my (female) therapist. We've talked about it ad infinitum, but it doesn't ever really shift for me.
I'm at the point now where, like yellowbird above, I'm not really certain that I NEED therapy. I still WANT it, but that feels like a different thing. I do want to move past this mother stuff, and I do want to feel more connected to my life. My husband and I have been teetering on the edge of divorce for several years. Disengagement has proved the most successful (in terms of reducing conflict) solution to this.
I know I'm rambling here, and I'm not even sure I'm saying what I want to say. Some days I feel like I want to quit therapy out of frustration - frustration that comes in part from knowing and bumping up against the limitations of the therapeutic relationship, and in part from wondering why I keep putting myself through this grief of setting myself up to want what I can't have (read: therapist as mother).
I don't think I'm making much sense anymore. Need to sort through this some more first.
poster:onceupon
thread:902851
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090614/msgs/902851.html