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Default Apr 22, 2019 at 12:34 PM
  #21
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Originally Posted by susannahsays View Post
I don't think she would find it acceptable if I said I hated her.
Why not? Have you discussed it with her? Or is it so that you don't find it acceptable?
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Default Apr 22, 2019 at 05:01 PM
  #22
Well, she doesn't think everything I've ever done in relation to her was appropriate, and I think telling her I hate her is worse than some of those things. I don't think it's a particularly acceptable thing to do, either, though.

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Default Apr 22, 2019 at 07:27 PM
  #23
How would you feel about showing T a printout of your opening post?

If only just the bullets points if you so prefer (you can expand if need be).
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Default Apr 22, 2019 at 08:51 PM
  #24
My last T once told me that it was perfectly okay to say I hated her. By some of the things your T has said/done,I don't know if she'd read the same way. Does she have experience in dealing with alters and trauma?
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Default Apr 22, 2019 at 09:54 PM
  #25
She has a lot of experience with trauma.

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Default Apr 22, 2019 at 09:55 PM
  #26
I acted out and I'm feeling really gleeful and defiant.

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Default Apr 23, 2019 at 05:52 AM
  #27
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Originally Posted by susannahsays View Post
Well, she doesn't think everything I've ever done in relation to her was appropriate, and I think telling her I hate her is worse than some of those things. I don't think it's a particularly acceptable thing to do, either, though.
Right, but there is a difference between doing something and expressing a feeling. When you tell her that you hate her you are not really doing anything but rather expressing a feeling.

Or maybe you can give some examples what are the things you have done that were not appropriate? And did she tell you that it was not appropriate or is it your own judgement?
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Default Apr 25, 2019 at 10:02 AM
  #28
I've been thinking about it, and I think that words do count as doing something. If they didn't, there would be no such thing as verbal or emotional abuse. I think expressing a feeling is doing something. I would not find it acceptable for someone in my life to express hatred for me. If someone hates me, I do not have a relationship with them. While therapy is different than "real life," in that the focus is on me, it would not feel right to me to treat the therapist with less respect than I would literally anyone else on the planet. And whether or not she can be hurt by anything I do or say is immaterial. I guess that I don't even need to consider her attitude on the subject.

If she had done something that deserved my hate, it would be different. My angst has come from wanting to do something that goes completely against my personal code of conduct. I think there may be an element of self-sabatoge.

She has always been receptive to my anger when I have expressed it in session. What she has deemed inappropriate has been when I have given ultimatums/threats over text message.

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Default Apr 25, 2019 at 10:46 PM
  #29
I talked to the therapist a little bit about how I was feeling when I saw her on Tuesday. I told her right off the bat I was feeling really hostile towards her. Things stalled for a while after that, though. I refused to say anything else. It felt too vulnerable. She said she couldn't take responsibility for something if I didn't tell her what it was. I said it was her own fault I wouldn't tell her. I'm not really sure why I said that or if there was truth in it. She said she wasn't sure what to say since I wouldn't tell her what she had done or why I wouldn't tell her. At some point I told her I wanted her to sit there because she had to because it was my session. She said ok.

Eventually I told her I was angry that she had forgotten about the traumatic thing I had told her. She said she didn't forget, but then she screwed things up by mentioning a different traumatic thing that had happened to someone else (not a different client, I mean someone else in the same body). Granted, I had been the one who had explained about what had happened to her, so it wasn't completely out of left field that she would relate that event to me, but she still got it wrong. That thing didn't happen to me. And it wasn't the thing I had told her that did happen to me. So I was mad. She asked me to tell her which thing I was talking about, because she's been told many things. I refused, but I said I told her late last August. She looked in my chart and said it wasn't that she had forgotten the incident I had told her about, but she didn't remember that it had happened to me specifically. She said she was sorry.

I don't know if I believe that she remembered it. There's no way of knowing, and I very much doubt she would tell me if I was right and she had completely forgotten. I am also angry at the injustice that she didn't remember that it happened to me and not somebody else. She said something about it probably not feeling fair to me. That pissed me off because it's not just that it doesn't "feel" fair, it ISN'T fair.

She asked about other things I am feeling angry about. I said I am still angry at her for ignoring my text message. I said I understood she didn't know what I was referring to and maybe didn't know it was serious since we had been laughing in the previous session, and the question was if she had laughed at me. But I was still mad. And I said I hadn't felt I could wait until my next session because then I would have nightmares about her laughing at my traumas. She said maybe what I could do would be to call and leave a message if it's something like that instead of texting her, and she will give me a call. I don't really like that and it seems like it will take us both more time than is necessary when all I need is a yes or no, but it's better than nothing. I will take it.

She asked if there were other things I was angry about. I fibbed and said I couldn't remember at the moment. The other stuff was pretty petty in comparison to the items we had just covered and my heart wasn't in it. She suggested I write down anything I think of and bring it with me.

So... yeah. Not a bad session, I guess. Could have been worse. I'm a little bit disturbed by the detail that she apparently puts into her notes, but that's mostly my paranoia. I was faced completely away from her so I'm not sure if she does a separate formal therapy note for insurance purposes or not. Yikes.

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Default Apr 25, 2019 at 11:50 PM
  #30
Yikes, I can understand why you were so angry at her. Trauma sharing is really vulnerable, and you need to know you can trust her with that information. Anger protects vulnerability. No wonder you wanted to lash out at her.

Just as an aside... our therapist always brings things back to "anything that happens to one of us actually happens to all of us". Our therapist is quite experienced with dissociative disorders but still doesn't seem to get that the subjective experience is quite unequivocal about this - something that happened to a different alter did NOT subjectively happen to me (and vice versa). I get the theory that there really is only one body/one person, but... yeah. Not.
I totally understand your sense of invalidation about the therapist getting another's experiences mixed up with yours. It matters. I am glad you were able to somewhat repair the disconnect with her though.
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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 12:43 AM
  #31
Susannah, it seems that you had a fairly good session indeed!

I agree with you in that sense that saying things is doing as well and I also agree that in normal relationship situation it would be inappropriate to pour your angry feelings out to everybody.

However, I'm a firm believer that therapy is different, especially when the hate is transferential and symbolic as it seems to be in your case and probably in most cases. I don't generally hate anyone - I can't even imagine what someone has to do in order for me to hate them. Yes, I might be annoyed about stuff that people do and I may not necessarily like them very much but hatred? nah. But I have hated my therapist and not the real person of him because he has never done anything bad to me but I have hated someone that he stood for in those moments and in those moments I wasn't able to see clearly that he is just a substitute. Understanding that is also made more complex due to the fact that I don't ever remember myself hating anyone, so it's not totally clear who he was substituted with.

Anyway this means that there can be hatred hidden in person and it just doesn't go away in itself. You have dissociated personalities. The milder version is dissociated feelings. Hatred is a very strong and unacceptable feeling in many ways, so it has a larger tendency to get dissociated. But it's not gone, it's still there and is effecting you who know in what ways.

You have become in touch with the hate, that means it's not completely dissociated anymore, that means it's possible to work with that. How can you work with that if expressing it is unacceptable? You can't. And although you said that you find it unacceptable, it seems that you beautifully expressed it in session.

I don't think that saying "I hate you" in itself does anything. Without proper feelings backing it up in the moment it's just empty words. However, when the feeling is there, then you don't even have to say this particular phrase because the feeling will be conveyed anyway, regardless of the choice of words. I guess that's why I don't understand the common taboo with respect to this phrase.

Also, to me it makes totally sense that your T "prefers" not to receive angry texts and would like you to call instead. With text messages you are basically sending your hatred towards her but the possibility for real communication (receiving, understanding and responding appropriately) are very limited. So sending such text messages is really doing, while talking about it in session or even via phone call is still to my mind less doing, because then it is an act of interpersonal communication, which is what talk therapy is based on.

Last edited by feileacan; Apr 26, 2019 at 01:04 AM..
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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 07:28 AM
  #32
I would think it would be extremely difficult for a therapist to keep what happened to one of your alters separate from what happens to another. They do technically and physically happen to all of you whether you are in a place to understand and integrate those experiences or not, but I hear that from your experience each person's is quite different from the other. I would guess that is a constant challenge in therapy. I'm glad you are sounding better today. I was concerned about you.
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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 07:42 AM
  #33
Thank you.

Btw, a couple of you aren't familiar with my background, but I am actually considered an alter. C is the "main person." It has been very hard for me to accept this, but that is the reality.

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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 11:32 AM
  #34
To me, it would make a lot of sense to be angry about being chronically dismissed and not receiving individual recognition (except for bad things). I have no personal experience with significant dissociation but if these personas have their own sense of identity, it is probably just as frustrating not to be recognized and respected as an individual, regardless of the physical reality of it (one body). And since the therapist is expected to be the one rare person to actually know about all this, of course it is maddening when she is confused and dismisses things. To me, that alone could be enough, being angry with her, not even necessarily projected or transferred frustration, although I guess the latter is likely part of it, too. I agree with others that it may be a good idea to talk to the T more about all this, maybe that way she would learn how to recognize and acknowledge the different identities better. Anyhow, I just wanted to express that I easily understand the intense anger and don't actually think it is exaggerated or out of place given the situation. I easily get how that would lead to thinking therapy is not useful.

I had a T in the past who was very bad at recognizing and handling individual differences even just between different people, very very dogmatic and projecting things all the time. It was infuriating and useless "therapy" for me as the analyses and potential solutions offered were not relevant to me and my history at all.
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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 04:06 PM
  #35
@Xynesthesia2 To be fair, I did not intend to characterize her as not respecting my individuality in general. Like Amyjay's therapist, she does pig-headedly insist on seeing trauma that happens to one of us as happening to everybody, though. Maybe that makes it harder for her to remember which one of us actually identifies with different events. Not sure. But she's very big on talking about how I have my own unique strengths and C has hers, blah blah. She has listed what she sees these as, and I agree with her analysis. So it's not that she doesn't acknowledge or recognize that we're different. That would take some Olympics level mental gymnastics considering how different we are.

Thanks for validating that my anger isn't entirely transference. I do think it is reasonable to be angry that my single personal disclosure was not memorable enough that the therapist recalled I had been the one who made it. I had thought she had understood it was a big deal for me to have told her anything whatsoever. Knowing that she had at a minimum forgotten how difficult it had been for me made me feel like an idiot for falling for a therapy illusion - the illusion that anything I as a client say or do is especially memorable.

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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 04:26 PM
  #36
I am kind of upset right now because I was really late to my session today, so it was obviously much shorter. Almost feels like it would have been better to have had no session at all. Everything feels all stirred up. Really depressed.

Somehow, we got on the topic of me possibly telling the therapist more traumas. Now I'm angry about this idea. Why should I tell her anything? She'll just write it all down in my chart and forget about it. What good does that do me?

She also started talking about how she thinks I know who this certain perpetrator is because it's clear C's mom must have known him. That made me feel really fearful and threatened. I don't know what it is she thinks but it's scaring me. And I don't know anything about anything, anyway. So I told her it doesn't matter. But she said sometimes it does matter. She said why she thinks this, then asked me to think about it over the weekend. Then we were done.

I want to steal my file and destroy it. And brainwash the therapist.

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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 04:35 PM
  #37
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Somehow, we got on the topic of me possibly telling the therapist more traumas. Now I'm angry about this idea. Why should I tell her anything? She'll just write it all down in my chart and forget about it. What good does that do me?
I get this. Former T always wanted me to tell her things that happened to me, and I of course resisted. Like you, I have trouble seeing what good it will do me.


Despite that, there is something to be said about someone else being able to hold what is said to them. Sometimes just telling my T something, without wanting commentary about it, and just having her hold it for me did me good. It was like, something in me could relax because someone else knew.


I don't know if that is true for you or not. Just thought I would put it out there. HUGS Kit

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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 04:42 PM
  #38
Does it count as holding if it goes in one ear and out the other? I'm not sure. There's also my complex around her laughing at my traumas to consider. Giving her more material might make me more paranoid...

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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 09:17 PM
  #39
What has she said around the laughing at your traumas? Does she see it the same way you do?
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Default Apr 26, 2019 at 09:50 PM
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I'm not sure what you mean. My fear about her laughing isn't based on anything she's ever said or done. According to her, she would never do such a thing. She says only someone who is sadistic or who laughs when they are shocked would do that, and that's not something she sees happening with her. I asked her today to rate how funny she found what I had told her before was. I made the scale from 1 to 10 and said 1 was a little and 10 was a lot. She asked again what 1 was and then said it would have to be 0 because it wasn't funny at all. I asked if she was sure and she said she was positive. She asked me some stuff trying to understand why I would even think she would find it funny, but I can't explain it. So she just said it's tragic and abuse and there's nothing funny about it. And if there were people laughing about it she thought that was sadistic...

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