A Letter to T (not actually sent)

Dear T,

I am writing this for my benefit more than your’s, but perhaps it will help us both. Who knows.

Right now things aren’t feeling good for me. About you. You aren’t feeling safe to me at the moment. In fact, you feel dangerous to me. That probably sounds a bit dramatic but its the truth.

Right now I feel that when I see you I will have to put on an act that I am very strong, very sure of myself and of my feelings, opinions and thoughts and not weak. The reason I feel like that is that I feel if you sense my weakness, you will sense a “way in” and you will use it to your advantage to “win” somehow. Perhaps by making me doubt myself and think that you are right and I am wrong, perhaps by persuading me that I have been stupid, perhaps by filling me with guilt…. perhaps by removing the sense I have at the moment that I am not weak or stupid or guilty, but I am listening to my own mind, my body and to my gut, to my self for once. I don’t want you to take that away from me.

When I started to have doubts that perhaps you aren’t actually who I thought you were, I tried to brush them off. I tried to ignore myself and then I tried to listen to myself… listening to myself is what has got me here. I have spent my life ignoring or dismissing my own beliefs or ignoring my internal danger radar – I decided that has to stop. And here I am.

You don’t feel safe because I feel like perhaps the whole time that I have looked at you as the some great protector, the fantasy mother or whatever else I’ve seen you as, has all been wrong.  When you apportioned  your own angry feelings to me you were wrong. You weren’t only wrong, you did what SHE does. Don’t project your negative shit onto me. I won’t take it. I am NOT a scapegoat anymore for anyone, least of all you who should know better.  Why do people see me as such an easy target? Do I do something to make that possible? Is it because people look at me and think “she won’t do anything about it”? Is it that easy?

You don’t feel safe anymore because you ruined my good news. SHE does that too. Why have you started doing the things that she does?

You’ve admitted that when you got my email telling you I had a new job and telling you I would be dropping back to one session a week you felt anger. I could tell you felt something negative because of your reply. I admitted to you that your reply left me feeling disheartened and dissapointed. It felt “therapisty” and cold to me, but as usual, I doubted myself because obviously you are right all the time.. or so I thought. I should have trusted my gut at the time. I could feel something wasn’t right then but I chose to ignore it. There seems to be a pattern emerging there.

You experienced a negative reaction to my good news. I don’t know the reason for that, but what I do know is that, that isn’t right. It isn’t normal for my therapist to have a negative reaction to my good news.  Guess who else would feel a negative response to my good news?? HER AGAIN. I expected more from you T.  At least with her I can put it down to her being jealous of me somehow, but clearly that doesn’t apply to you and so the only way I can make sense of that is that you want to keep me down, small, weak…. dependant on you and that makes me so angry. Why do you both want to keep me needy?

I feel like you will blame all of this on me. I feel like you are currently sitting at home feeling totally un-phased by all of this. Perhaps it crosses your mind every now and again and you think to yourself “Ooh Twink has turned me bad – at last, this will be interesting” or something similar which feels painfully condescending and disrespectful to the pain and anguish I am left with in the meantime. It makes me feel like a fucking science experiment. You won’t admit that to me of course, that wouldn’t be ethical. My feelings mean shit, right?

Being angry at you or not trusting you feels like a no-win situation. You are more intelligent, more important, more authoritative and more wise. I am none of those things and so, naturally, I am wrong.

Every now and then this wave of guilt washes over me when I think of the times you have been kind and soft and it makes me cry. Like now as I type that… but I am fighting against that because I can’t lose my anger. Losing my anger makes me feel weak again and as I have already said, me being weak means you get to be stronger and overpower me and I can’t let that happen. I can’t be crushed. Guilt is a bastard little shit face. Guess who else uses guilt to win?

If it turns out that you are just like my mother I don’t know what I will do. The thought terrifies me. It isn’t impossible though is it? Look how many people like my mother I’ve already attracted in my life! There’s Sarah, then Tina and God only knows how many other people, not to mention the fact my Nan and sister clearly treat me with similar traits to my mother and her narcissism. Do what we say, do what we do, don’t disagree and don’t say no… or else…… that’s how you made me feel too.

If I have bared my heart and soul to you for the last 3 years and all the while you were just like her, then I give up. I won’t ever be able to trust anyone again because if even a qualified therapist is able to control and manipulate me and make me feel weak and use me as a scapegoat for her shit feelings, then what hope is there?

I think I will stop there because I am drained and I have a headache from crying.

Despite my anger, my fear and everything else, I can clearly see that a lot of this letter is probably transference after all…… but that doesn’t give you permission to make light of it. The feelings are real, the pain is real and the fear is real too.

Don’t laugh at it, please.

 

 

 

 

 

Busy thoughts and doubts

This whole situation with T is really playing on my mind. It has played on my mind all weekend but its been hard to pay much attention to it with the kids here until half an hour ago.

I still feel the same about everything but now I am having these doubts that I am wrong and that I’ve totally got it wrong.  I can see how easily this all looks like transference and if its transference, that basically means that its all me and none of it belongs to T, right? That doesn’t seem right to me.

I Googled rupture and repair earlier whilst watching a film with the kids and what I read seemed to suggest that T’s don’t take too seriously anything we may say at them in our disagreement with them because they should view it as handy tool to what our biggest struggle is with the world.  That made me angry. So, does that mean that my T, any T, won’t really care about what we are saying they have done to annoy or upset us, but they will just instantly take it away from themselves and apply it to others?? If that is the case then that seems rather fucked up, doesn’t it?

I wrote this:

What are my underlying fears with the concerns I have with T right now? 

• That I have trusted her when I shouldn’t have. That I have, yet again, fallen into a relationship with someone who doesn’t have my best interests at heart despite what I thought at the time.
• That I have to agree with her and do what she says otherwise I get punished somehow.
• That she is just like my mother – like Tina. I have been blind because I hadn’t yet “found my voice” to disagree with her on anything.
• What would have happened if I had of agreed with everything she said that session? How many other things have I done wrong/missed out on/gone against my true wishes on just because I wanted to please her – to be the good girl?

Now even I can clearly see that many if not all of those things could easily be about my mother and not T. So that makes me doubt myself, perhaps it really isn’t about T after all?

Yet that doesn’t sit well with me because the facts still remain that a therapist shouldn’t have acted the way T did in that session “Disaster” and the fact still remains that the anger SHE felt when she read my email about dropping a session did not belong to me.

It is still the case that she projected her feeling onto me. I am not accepting that.

It is still the case that she has responded entirely differently about my second session since the new job offer, so what has changed? AND it is still the case that even she admitted her response to my email was cold (she has admitted she thought about sending one to apologise but decided not to. Why?).

I’m not actually getting anywhere with this writing so I apologise for repeating things I’ve already said in my previous blogs. It is just going round and round in my head and I can’t make any real sense of it.

I feel horrible but I just feel like T is feeling rather smug and arrogant and doesn’t have a care in the world about all of this because she cant accept that any of it could belong to her. Possibly transference again, but still, how I feel regardless.

God how irritating.

Doubts about T (Part 2)

One of my lovely readers has just commented to suggest the following:

“With that anger comment, the plot really seems to thicken! Random thought came to my mind about her possibly projecting. And it’s a completely random and out there thought without knowing either of you. Can you imagine if she has a daughter/son who is going/has gone through a similar big life change without consulting her? And she feels completely powerless in that relationship. Or hurt about not being consulted in some relationship. And this is seeping into your work in some way. So a reenactment from her side, not yours. Or you both reenacting and getting into a toxic spiral without being able to clearly define what is going on… As I said, just a fun theory… 🙂”

This has REALLY given me something to think about and I am currently in agreement.

The reasons being that whilst T was away, I was offered an interview, attended the interview and was offered a job, which I then accepted all without consulting her.  I then emailed her to tell her that these events had happened, hoping she would be proud of me and that it would demonstrate my growth.  She replied very bluntly (in my opinion) and with a total lack of congratulations which left me feeling disheartened.

She has since admitted that when she received my email, she felt “a real surge of anger” that she decided belonged to me and not her. I strongly disagree with this and feel that perhaps she DID feel a surge of anger, but that her anger actually belonged to her and that she was projecting it on to me because she knew somewhere that it wasn’t the right way to feel about the decisions I had made on my own.

She has also since admitted that she thought her response to my email was a bit cold and that she spent a few days afterwards debating whether to text me to say “Sorry, my response wasn’t very pleasant” but that she decided to “leave me with my anger“.

Moving on, I then had my doubts about that job and was invited for another interview somewhere else, which she DID know about. I then went to the interview and was offered (and accepted the job) all with her alongside.  Her reaction this time was completely different. She was even excited for me and subsequently she has not tried to talk me out of dropping my second session at all. She even said yesterday that we will see how things go and that if I need a second session again, the universe will align to make that possible. That we should trust in that. – A total 360 on last week.

She said to me that when I heard from the new employer as to whether or not I had the job, I could text her to tell her if I wanted to – I thought that was a nice offer and despite feeling I could have easily held it until I saw her the following day, I did drop her a text and she replied MUCH warmer. She congratulated me and told me to “enjoy the feeling”. Perhaps she wanted me to text her so she could right a wrong so to speak. To repair the first reaction with a much better, more appropriate one.

Those two reactions to two very similar situations are extremely different aren’t they? The only difference between the situations is that she wasn’t involved in the decision-making process of one and she was with the other.

She then said that yesterday she was happy for me and that “perhaps she picked up on my uncertainty” over the first job. I disagree, but nodded along that it was a possibility.

I genuinely think this could be what’s happening here and I am debating telling her this too.. BUT I am a bit concerned about the repercussion’s of it because in my recent experience of her, she has not accepted any of her own “stuff” in this. She has projected feelings onto me and said that I trapped HER in a re-enactment……  so if I do tell her, would she be able to take this to her supervisor and take a real, genuine look at it? or will she tell me I am wrong, become defensive and insulted and then I potentially ruin things between us?

Having said that, if I do speak to her and it does ruin things between us – perhaps it would be just as well I found out now?

IF one of her two daughters made an important decision without her input or advice and it did leave her feeling left out or powerless or something, that would explain the strong reaction I received and would also explain why I felt like she was talking to me like a child (I told her that).  It is possible (as Jay rightly says in the comment above), that the “re-enactment” she speaks of, was a two-way thing. Transference AND also countertransference because her reacting from a triggered (and countertransference) perspective triggered my anger because I felt like she was trying to 1) ruin my good news (like my mum does) and 2) control me and make me doubt my own strength.