Therapy Trauma, Healing and Starting Over

PurpleMirrors,

What you have described is so similar to my own attachment issues. It is amazing how similar those of us with unmet needs in childhood can be!! I also desperately yearn for maternal figures and quickly attach to therapists who offer any kind of gentle kindness or nurturing. It is soooo painful but it is like a drug. I have worked through this in past therapeutic relationships but because I have had such negative experiences in therapy in the past 4 years - I am deterred from going there anymore in therapy.

I am currently experiencing maternal transference with my therapist (despite not having built trust yet). I have been upfront about it with her and luckily she has set major boundaries with me. It hurts a lot (because it can feel like rejection) but I recognize why she does it and have let her know that I am aware it is to protect me. The challenge is that I have extreme and repeated betrayal traumas in therapy - which further complicates the matter. I keep forgetting that attachment to a therapist does not equate to trust - it simply appears that way and makes us far more vulnerable to old abuse patterns if a therapist cannot carefully navigate the minefield for us and with us. (As well as navigate their own countertransference) My therapist has also identified my little part and how it wants to attach like a mother / son - and she (thankfully) has said she does not want to attach to the little part, but rather to the adult part. She said it is my job to learn to attach and look after my little part - which is sooo true!

I believe she may be the ethical one I have been looking for in this regard.

I am curious; when you begin to feel those attachment feelings towards someone - do you avoid it altogether now? Do you set boundaries so that you don't wind up attached and in pain? It is a new concept for me NOT to allow that yearning take hold of me - I have yet to set boundaries in therapy to avoid going there. In past therapy my therapists have welcomed it as a necessary part of treatment, but I wonder if maybe this time around (considering my past traumas in therapy and extreme potential for being harmed) that maybe the best course of action is to set boundaries for myself in order to protect myself.

Would you agree?

I love the way in which you speak about doing what is best for you. That is amazing and perhaps you can help me on this journey!

Have you felt better when you notice those attachment needs flare up and rather than being swallowed up by it - chose to disengage?

Thanks,
HD7970ghz

I’ll write more later but wanted to say that I absolutely disengage from the attachment patterns! Budfox described well the insanity of jumping from therapist to therapist to fix trauma layered upon trauma. I don’t see the point of opening old wounds when the person who is “helping” has very little hope of fixing the wound. Years of this dynamic felt a bit like being hungry and having to stare in a bakery window all day.

For me, I became tired of the powerlessness, longing, and vulnerability. I saw years of my life drifting away, consumed with therapy drama. I was tired of feeling pathetic, needy, ill, shamed, and degraded. Tired of the one sided relationship and tired of unreciprocated love.

One day I just snapped and said ENOUGH and decided I was never, ever going to allow myself to be in this position again. So I started my quest to self-heal and build myself up. It hasn’t been perfect but anything, ANYTHING was better than what I was getting out of. I had sold my self respect for the illusion of being loved. Never again.

Thanks for this!

The Bold is how I felt when my therapists betrayed me! I was ready to NEVER speak to another human being again - that is the potential damage that can occur when therapy becomes dangerous. I agree about the unreciprocated love and being sooo vulnerable, add to this the inherent power imbalance in therapy and the fact that THEY have all the power in the relationship.

thanks,
HD7970ghz

The thing to recognize is that it’s a choice to engage in these dynamics. We can’t help how we feel and respond to individuals that fit this criteria, but we can choose to remove ourselves from situations that are harmful and from people that don’t make us feel good about ourselves.

I hope your newest therapist can help! It sounds like she is better than the others you have dealt with. Please keep posting!

The power in this inspires me; you dug down deep and found agency within yourself ( locus of control?).

The unrequited everythings: unrequited secret-telling, unrequited high gamble on the other person, unrequited longing. It is a very humbling experience.

In reading the theories, like Jessica Benjamin, I totally get for the best of them, therapy is a sacred play-space where both client and therapist understand that this is all "as if". A laboratory, a sandbox, a play in a theater: we act as if we love each other, we act as if T is the dad and client is a child again.

A problem occurs when the T is playing the "as if" game and the client is all in for real, having not gotten the emotional memo.

That is me right now. My T says lovely things to me, so tender . I think he means them inside the hour and inside the office.

He simply understands the rules of the game, which I do not. I take his words away and live with them in my mind without the "as if", without the" he said that as a playful way of getting me to wonder - hmmm what would it be like to be loved in this way". It is really difficult to be the client, too difficult for me with already confusion about the basic nature of attachment created through csa.

This is where therapy gets dicey. I have a good social skills facade, but underneath I am anguished and maxed out by my T telling me our connection is exquisite or he will be right by my side through thick and thin or such things, and not meaning them yet meaning them, enjoying paradox, playing with this, and ultimately shutting off the game after 45 minutes like Lucy taking the football away from Charlie Brown, day after day , session after session.

It is amazing how everyone here can put pretty much what I am feeling and going through into intelligent words. When I am a ball of emotions I just can not describe them intelligibly.

Thank you! I am so sorry you are going through this too. I could have written much of this myself and identify with the heartbreak.

Where I find myself getting angry is in the fact that those of us who end up in this horrific situation already have histories of extremely painful childhoods. It’s like adding a secondary trauma on top of what is already there. The situation is also no-win to get out of - it’s traumatic to leave, but also excruciating to stay. It reminds me a bit of Tom Hanks in Cast Away - who had the choice of languishing alone on an island, or building a really good raft and challenging tsunami sized waves to take a chance that what’s out there is better.

I am very leery encouraging anyone to leave therapy, but what I can say from the other side is that the time you spend trapped in pain IS trauma. For me, the feelings didn’t just stop when I left. It’s been a slow process getting back to who I used to be. It’s manageable at this point - a year removed - but left an enormous mark on who I am as a person. I don’t know how long you’ve been in this situation but I’ve lost 8 years of my life to therapy pain.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that you can resolve this in therapy, or find the strength to leave. ❤️ I hold out hope that some of the excruciating therapy stories I read here end well, even though mine didn’t.

For me it was addiction disguised as a healing "journey" or as "treatment".

From what I've seen, it is that way for many people in long term therapy.

It's not uncommon for people to want to increase session frequency once they get hooked. Some people hire a second therapist. Plus the compulsive emailing and then waiting for a response. Anything to get that fix.

It's ironic, too, that so many people are plagued by obsessive and intrusive thoughts about their therapy, which is one of the hallmarks of a traumatic experience.

This is such an eye opener for me to the point I stopped myself from immediately emailing him about something that happened and waiting for a response. I need to get out of this.

I resemble all of this. So messed up.

yes! ^^^ this exactly (especially the bolded bits)

i feel very similar in retrospect to my own therapy and the 'relationship' with my ex-T. therapy was the centre point of my life for over six years. six years i will never get back. six years of missing out on time with my family and friends because of the state of despair or obsession that therapy sessions usually left me in. life for me during that period mainly revolve around therapy and the dramas of the relationship with my T. much of this i believe was because of my Ts own counter transference issues and him getting many of his own needs met from the relationship. it wasn't until my last year of therapy that i finally recognise and acknowledge just how unhealthy and retraumatising that the relationship with my T was. i spent that final year of therapy working towards detaching myself from the unhealthy attachment and enmeshment so i could get out of the relationship unscathed. fortunately, the things i did to prepare myself for that ending worked, and two years since ending, i feel nothing but happiness and contentment for not only getting out of that situation, but towards myself and for life in general. similar to you, i'm completely enjoying the freedom and having a life back that does not revolve endlessly around therapy and knowing that i can live a happy and content life without therapy or my ex-T involved in it.

all of this is so well said, especially this:

it was addiction disguised as a healing "journey" or as "treatment".


all of what you say in your post above resonates quite strong for me. at times, it did feel like a 'life or death' fixation. pretty pathetic when i reflect back upon it...and like an addiction, all the money i spent on it to be able to get my fix. i could have funded a first class trip around the world instead.

Exactly this!

I’m still processing through anger that my therapist was profiting from this and feeding her need to be needed through my addiction.

There are few words to describe the boundless exploitation and degradation this experience left me with, packaged as “treatment”. Sadly my horrific final therapy outcome was “unintentional” so there is no perpetrator/victim to make this more black and white in my mind. There was no malicious intent, no ill will, no ethics violation or gross misconduct to help frame my anger. In fact I had many, many sessions that felt truly sublime.

Along these lines, it has been exceptionally difficult to reconcile rage towards someone I still idealize, long for and love. It’s the perfect storm for a total mental cluster. It illustrates exactly how damaging “therapy gone wrong” is, and why it takes so incredibly long to get past trauma that occurs in what is described as a sacred space. The damage runs deep and leaves scars.

Your experience has always resonated strong with me. I am so happy you were able to get out relatively in tact as well!

Regaining my freedom and self-respect has been an awakening, and I have a new found appreciation for those virtues. One that I will not take for granted in the future. I suppose it’s one of the few good outcomes of “therapy failure”.

I also value my mental health now more than ever. I made a promise to myself to do whatever I can to keep from slipping back to a place where I am in the losing end of such awful relationship dynamics.

It was a long time before I could intellectualize what occurred. When I escaped I only felt shame, like I’d failed at some purification and now I’m destined to live life flawed and tainted. My group co-therapists had me convinced they were the sole path to salvation.

My biggest lesson from therapy was paradoxical : no one is omniscient; anyone pretending is a charlatan, there are no omnipotent wizards. Subordinating myself to another person is a sick relationship.

It’s liberating to learn I was chasing something that never existed, and I’m ok living with my traits and limitations. I now believe most things about us are both weaknesses and strengths.

The comments on this thread have been so insightful.

What's striking me is that now, almost 3 years post therapy, I'm hooked on my anger toward them. If that anger could fuel something that would help the situation then it might serve a purpose. But I've thought and written about my wishes and ideas and inclinations toward trying to do something like that and it seems pretty fruitless and amorphous at this point. The profession and the general public just aren't ready for that yet, quite, it seems.

So -- time to let that go, too, and move on? But to what. . .

Things are desolate here at my house. One of my cats was just diagnosed with cancer and there's likely not much to do about it -- I don't think putting him through surgery for just a few months would likely be in his interest. I may get more information from a specialty vet next week. I've been clearing out the accumulation of 30 years and more in my house so that I can move to an apartment closer to my son. Years and years of being a somewhat career woman, wife, mother, and over the last 20 years pretty much an emotional wreck and therapy addict. All that time, and identities, and stuff -- now gone.

There's a toxicity in the relationship with my daughter I've not found a way to overcome. We both participate these days in slightly disparaging, somewhat disguised and excuse-ridded discounting of each other. It got overtly too much for me on Friday, when I had just gotten the news about the cat.

So -- despite "doing my best" and "what I was supposed to do" in going to therapy, believing they would help me be OK -- they didn't.

The best thing I'm looking to right now for help is some Buddhist ideas on hindrances, especially ill will. I was able yesterday -- in part inspired by comments on this thread -- to see my last T and the consultant who referred me to her as members, as am I, of the human community. Messed up members, maybe, but then not that different from the rest of us. Well, maybe that's not too bad as a start. And trying to live in the moment. Just very, very hard at the moment.

For me, self-acceptance has been key too. With catastrophic therapy endings, it is so easy to accept all the blame and paint ourselves as bad people. Particularly since therapists are engrained as “helpers” and wonderful, caring and gentle entities.

For me, there was a point where I said to myself “Ok, I could be a bad person. I’m still going to try to live my life as best I can and be the best person I can.”

I’m so sorry here today.

Part of what I experienced post-therapy (and still do, to a lesser degree) was the enormous empty space that therapy used to occupy. The quiet bleakness and feeling totally alone was frightening and panic-inducing at first. It’s one of the big reasons I try not to influence others to quit therapy especially suddenly. One has to have enough internal resources to cope with the jarring change and also be able manage decently without dedicated support. It is NOT easy.

When the theatrics of therapy are over, we are certainly forced to face our issues alone. As I’ve heard worded quite eloquently, there’s no such thing as a pain free life. There are times I look at things going on in my life and think... REALLY?! Yet human suffering is life’s common denominator. All we can do is our best.

Sending good thoughts your way about your kitty and daughter.

this is very true. the post therapy period definitely took some adjusting to get use to and one has to be ready and willing to try and do new or different things to replace all the time and space that therapy once took up.

when i was in therapy and my husband was attending my sessions with me, we use to make it a ritual to visit one of the local breweries after my session. we called it 'beer therapy after therapy' and would use that time to decompress post session or to discuss my session. so when i ended therapy, fortunately we decided to continue the 'beer therapy' tradition and started going to the brewery at the same time that my therapy session would have been. with no therapy sessions, it allowed us more time together for the evening to connect as a couple. to this day, we still continue this tradition and since doing this for the past couple of years, we have made many new friends with the regulars and staff. don't reckon i would have gotten the same benefits of socialising and making new friends if i would have remained in therapy focussing all my energy and time on ex-T.