Therapy Trauma, Healing and Starting Over

so sorry HT to hear about your dear kitty

sending hugs your way

Thanks for the update PurpleMIrrors. I'm so glad to see you molding your experience in positive ways. You sound like you have a good head on your shoulders!!

I'm lucky my T doesn't get enmeshed. His countertransference can impact the therapy from time to time, but that's unavoidable as it is expected to happen on occasion.

Even aside from this forum, such as my experience with previous Ts and T shopping, enmeshment between therapist and client seems more common than not, which to me is an issue of competency. That's one reason why I stay with my T.

I am so impressed that your husband helped with your escape plan! It sounds like he was able to support you well! I can’t picture my husband attending my sessions. We are almost a generation apart - he, part of the generation that believes in pulling yourself up by the boot straps. His response to most of my therapy situations was, verbatim, “She’s incompetent, leave her already!” Of course I couldn’t because she was MY incompetent therapist. But I digress

Thank you for sharing how you were able to move on!

Thank you! I have always been envious of your solid therapist and wonder how my experience would have been different with someone so intellectually curious and flexible with whatever comes up.

my husband attended almost every session, twice a week for a while, for the last 2.5 years of my therapy. after the first year of therpay, i started opening up to my hubby more about me and my issues and started feeling safe enough to discuss some of the issues i was experiencing with my T. more than anything, hubby wanted to help, and this was one way that he could. he was like my 'consultant' or advisor, especially when ruptures occurred between my T and me. after a period of feeling stuck and at an impasse with my T, i asked both hubby and T if it would be ok if hubby could join my sessions for a while to offer a 'neutral ear' between T and me to help us get past the impasse. this worked quite well, and we decided to continue having hubby involved in my sessions.

having hubby there was great for both the physical and emotional support he could provide during and between sessions and it allowed him to understand me and the dynamics of my relationship with my T better. having hubby involved felt like we all (T, hubby and me) were a team working towards the common goal of helping me to get better. hubby learned a lot in my sessions and this in return helped to strengthen our relationship. in the end, it actually was hubby who i was able to form a 'secure' attachment with, and not my T. hubby was available and could support me in ways ex-T never realistically could, and it was that level of care that i truly was needing to help me move forward. similar to you, the relationship with my ex-T was more of an re-enactment of unmet childhood needs that were often triggered and replayed repeatedly. ex-Ts inconsistencies and counter transference did nothing but aggravate the triggers more. there was never a chance to move forward from the unmet needs or to grieve them properly. it never quite felt safe enough with ex-T to be able to achieve that.

my hubby was very supportive of me when he knew i was needing to get myself unattached to my T and out of that unhealthy relationship. i'm not sure if i would have been able to do it, move forward as much as i have, to be free or be alive today if it wasn't for hubbys solid dedication and on going support.

Wow. This is amazing and inspiring on the part of your husband (and of course for you in your willingness to see therapy through).

I am so glad you have him! I’m also glad your therapy came to a successful resolution almost in spite of your therapist. The transition of attachment to someone who can actually meet your needs is the optimal outcome of any therapy - at least how I’ve come to understand it. Love to read positive endings!

I agree with this. The first core trauma sets up the one in therapy, bc it rings a bell that was once rung in the past, mixing together the past and the present . It all hurts. My parents used to fight, and put us to sleep with sips of win and benadryl . I would wake up on the floor or wherever, and then be immediately dressed in Laura Ashley blah blah, told to put a smile on my face, and go to school to act out a facade. That was a good night. So now my relatively blank slate T presents me with a facade, and it scares me. i don't want to break his social rules, so I am often at sea with what I can and cant say. Like yesterday he did therapist yawn that I guess is supposed to fool me. I felt pressure to pretend I didn't see it, but also I started wondering oh did he sty up late with a sick kid, am I boring etc. I end up producing a facade again, often. My T once wrote intensively about my case on Reddit, and I was both devastated and relieved. Devastated by he is less an expert in CSA than he projects and he broke my confidentially in a way and then relieved bc he gave the post a very tender name, seemed committed to the case etc. He will not talk about this, except to say he is sorry if he makes mistakes, that he is only human, and that he never wants to fail me. He has lied a few times also, and those too just pile up unspoken of. In other situations, he comes through big with an unexpectedly tender and loyal comment. He is scary smart, and his insight and turn of phrase and beauty of expression are almost an aesthetic pleasure as well as intimate. All in all therapy is very messy for me. I am scared often, and don't know what is happening, yet I am oriented to my T is a very intense way in which I feel I cant live without him. This hasn't been part of my outside relationships- the close-to -obsessing. I think from his training he is trying to be internalized by me as a "good object", but to me he is a source of extreme ambivalence.

An update, for what it is worth. May seem self-absorbed and not related to the topic of this thread but I will try to relate it at the end.

Things are maybe better with my daughter than I thought. She hasn't cut me off again, I'm glad about that.

The cat died Friday. An in-home vet and I agreed he was going downhill and that more misery was likely not in his interest. I'm devastated about that -- AND I know that I loved him.

AND, so in a way, I know I was not loved in the environment I grew up in. That's (mostly?) what to me been so confusing and misleading and denial-provoking and producing living-in-fantasy, I think. The psychotherapy "experts" may have that right -- but the therapy "relationships" were not sufficient as a resolution. At least not in my case.

That environment. I didn't have an environment where real love existed. My late husband and I loved each other -- both of us were damaged personalities, probably, and the individual damage didn't get in the way of us loving each other. That CAN happen, despite what current experts say.

And then he died, and the core of me was not engaged with anybody much in the larger society, didn't/couldn't participate except on a surface level, and that was further desolating.

Except that 3 and 4 years after he died the cats came into my life. I had known the kittens since they were born. And vice versa. They were people to me and I am/was people to them I feel confident. They could exist OK without my love, but they also have the capability to respond to it, somehow, and so -- I loved. And feel that love. And so know I was not loved. No use blaming the parents and other folks -- they didn't have it, they were damaged, damage had been passed down for who knows how many generations. They did their best.

Pets -- cats especially -- are relatively safe to love. It likely won't mess them up too bad if you do it wrong, don't love them enough, etc. And yet they can respond when you do love them. So, the 16 years I have had with them have been somewhat healing.

Starting over -- that's a toughie. I don't feel a direction to go in with that. Three of 6 cats remain and I love them. And knowing how I feel about them helps to sort out the love I have for my children from other things I may feel about them from time to time, sometimes remnants of those old dynamics and patterns.

So, keeping on keeping on. . .Until it's my time to go, too. That's about all the starting over I have for the moment.

Hi All,

Thank you for sharing your stories. They resonate quite a lot with me. It is really useful to hear and great to hear the process you are making since ending your therapy.

I was just wondering, if anyone is ok to share A is there anyone from the U.K. on here or are most people US based?

I’m uk based- east anglia

How are you doing, PurpleMirrors? I noticed you posted a link to this thread and wondered if you might be interested in reviving some themes here, especially as regards healing. Or, it might be better for me to write "healing", as I seem to have no clue what that might mean.

A big empty space is something I think I experienced in my early life, then numbed out and defended over it. So, perhaps, the (reenacted?) rejection I experienced with my last T activated that long-buried, dissociated experience. However anybody conceptualizes it, the question remains -- how to 'heal' from that and what I now feel is betrayal by the institution of psychotherapy and the institutions of society which support it unquestioningly.

I think I've largely dealt with the trauma neurologically just by tolerating it over time. Cold turkey, so I'm not feeling a need for EMDR or neurofeedback. I could be wrong but that's how it seems to me at the moment.

To me, what's needed is a kind of social healing. There's an empty hole in me where the world of people I love might be and an empty hole in society, or a community, where the shell of me ever shows up because the essence of me isn't there. In other words, I guess I'm saying I AM that empty hole. Or else sometimes unrelatedly emotional -- which is what I learned how to do in therapy.

Perhaps at this point the issue may include social anxiety on my part, trying to learn through trial and error -- and the errors seem so endless and demoralizing. I'm old, I'm tired, some people never "heal". I've certainly seen that happen with others who have done their best.

What does healing mean, to you?

Hi here today -

I’m still on what I consider to be a positive track!

At the moment, healing work to me means letting go of the anger I feel towards both my therapist and therapy in general. I think it’s easy to stay ‘stuck’ in a cycle of replaying what hurt me and remaining in ‘victim limbo’. I’m trying to assume more self-agency, accept responsibility for my own feelings, and re-direct energy towards things that add to my life vs depleat it. I’m planning to take a break from the boards since it’s adding fuel to the fire.

In terms of the rest of my life, things are going well. I don’t consider myself depressed, nor I am seeking help from anyone including other therapists. That’s huge progress since I spent so long dependent on the system and wasting money and time on a destructive path to nowhere.

Self-care has been key to keeping sane. I eat well, exercise, sleep 8 hours a night, keep engaged in social activities and journal. I now have a deep understanding that the only person who will take care of me is me.

Hope all is well with you!

Thanks for that perspective and description. It's good to hear the path described that way. Before therapy, I was probably addicted to trying to do, and see, things "the right" way. Your perspective may not be considered, "right" by some but it certainly seems well-grounded in your experience.

And that sounds like a kind of "healing" to me.

Exactly!

I’ve abandoned the concept of right or wrong and focus now on what gives me the best quality of life. No sense in doing things the right way and being miserable.

I don’t consider myself cured or enlightened but I am certainly more ‘awake’ and realistic about my circumstances than before this gigantic therapy mess. Despite being an exceptionally painful experience, I don’t know that I would change anything based on the depth of where I was forced to go when things went wrong and what I gained by helping myself out of it.

thanks for the update PM. so eloquently stated and i agree with every word of it

glad to hear that you are not only seeing, but starting to experience the light on the other side as well

I learned far more from my bad therapy than my harmless therapy. I learned to disregard anyone who pretends to be a guru, who offers mystification over science, who poses as an undeserved "authority." I think that "progress" is what I accomplish, not the drama in my own mind. I learned that "knowing myself" is creating a future rather than obsessing on the past, and that I'm the owner of my own life.

Thanks for sharing and offering hope. Glad to hear you are on the other side of it. Keep going

[QUOTE=PurpleMirrors3;6500010]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.

This thought helps me know that I am not as vulnerable I was before my experience , but feeds into my " I know better, what was I thinking etc etc " - beating myself up for the past.

[QUOTE=Topiarysurvivor;6587387]There’s a lot I could beat myself up for too, and often do. Some lessons are harder to learn than others.

When I find myself going down this road, I tell myself - I did the best I could at the time with the resources I had available. What more can we do?

Lots of insightful comments here from OP and everyone else. OP's message is very uplifting.

The most difficult thing to let go of for me has been the therapist voice that I've introjected (if that's the right way to describe it). This voice of right and wrong. This voice that says I'm always overreacting and it's all my fault. I find myself constantly seeking permission from this voice especially when it comes to my dealings with authority figures. It's much like the inner critic that's a feature of childhood trauma. It's so frustrating and totally disempowering to feel like I have to go in front of a tribunal whenever I want to stand up for myself or protest unfair treatment especially at work. That's where it's most prevalent. It's like this condescending voice that's always undermining me. I'm trying to work through it.