Unjustified Anger At T

Has anyone ever been really stuck in therapy, but made it through?

I'm so angry at my T, and he doesn't deserve that anger. I've rarely experienced real anger at people, nevermind someone who has helped me greatly to put together the jigsaw pieces of past csa, so that the present makes more sense.

I try to dial it back between sessions, but the resentment grows like weeds or cancer for the past month. I focus during session and don't feel this anger, but I am more tongue-tied than in years and feel over challenged. A few times, I've taken Ambien just to turn off consciousness bc I don't have the grounding/ coping skills to explore these topics, then go back to daily life put -together. He says that is bc I work too much, and bc the people involved I don't totally cut off.

This relationship has become important to me, but something seems to be going wrong or going sour in my mind.

I think it is from both sides, but my T denies that and says it is a mistake of attribution (like I am frustrated with him but misread it as he is frustrated with me).

I'm just more stuck than ever before, and afraid we're not going to make it through this.

R and I recently got unstuck after what felt like weeks of misattunement I guess . What actually helped was seeing someone else. But he admitted his part in it. The thing is like any other relationship- it's not all just you and your perception of things.

I'm sorry you've gone through the pain of losing your baby and your childhood.

M's pictures being a trigger makes sense for me. I found pictures of T with his family online on his wife's facebook- boy did some of those hurt. Just everyday normal ones like him with his daughter in his lap.

If you feel over challenged i think it's okay to scale it back and go at a pace that suits you. Even if that means dropping from two sessions to one. I have a workbook for DBT skills which might be helpful, but if the truth be told. If I need to cry. I'm going to cry. I spent a good few hours in bed with a soft blanket and the main overhead lights switched off.

The start of this video might be a bit woo- but some of her her tips are good.

YouTube

Also T taught me that it was okay to have negative emotions and to feel and express that anger somewhere safe.

Thank you, Lemon. That was a cool video. I read about Teal S, but never followed through and watched before today.

Part of it is just that delving into these wounds causes pain, and month after month the space gets associated with that maybe.

I don't like the feeling of the good part slipping away for unknown reasons. Misattument might be right.

Perhaps you can get through it if your T really is capable of it? Mine wasn't, as I have written about before on this forum.

What I learned in that disaster of a reenactment, though, is that I had horrible, unprocessed feelings from my early life about feeling rejected. I had good defenses around them, could pretty well tell when I was being unreasonable. Thing is, with the T, she was REALLY a snotty, judgmental b**h and so the cut off feelings that got triggered were, in that case, appropriate. Just primitive and I didn't know what to do with them.

Hence, my question-- is your anger really unreasonable? Or is it possible he is triggering some realistic stuff you just don't fully know what to do with yet?

That's a great question. He is safe and in no way predatory, but he is kind of a bystander in my mind , fair or unfair. He often says how much he cares about giving me a voice, but he doesn't listen to much of anything I ask. I think he is in a double bind in a way bc he thinks holding air tight boundaries proves his safeness, but he so regimented I feel like he is bean counting every minute. He isn't a snotty, judgmental guy, but he is authoritarian while being the same age as me. It's confusing.

I have intense anger for t3, I tell him constantly he's a jerk and I hate him. I get angry with him every session BUT I know that it's not actually him I'm angry at and he handles it so well, it's good for me to express myself

I think it can very well be a good thing for some

I wish I could do that, but my T says it makes him feel like I believe he fails me over and over when he is just staying with his training. I really feel guilty and also misread, bc I don't know why Im angry, but I know he hasn't failed me, and actually has helped teach me to resist dissociation as a defense- which is pretty amazing. I woke up in a fury with my T, maybe I dreamed about him and don't remember. I look at E still asleep and the two dogs snoring on the bed wonder why my mind skips over the real life good things t obsess over T. When I was a little kid and being hurt, I used to go to my mom in the middle of the night and try to tell her. She would send me back to my room meanly.I think this gets awoken at the end of sessions, bc I struggle and struggle to talk, then at minute 43.5 seconds, he sends me away. I mean I know the session ends, but it isn't how I experience it. I have struggled with this since day one of therapy. How to talk, and then how to handle the aftermath of talking about things that were forbidden topics all my life. My adult mind knows is fine and therapy; some other unconcious part fears punishment and that my T is. . . .immediately headed to a 4 day weekend at his summer house. He can go from an intense blue eyed empathy connection to vacation mode before my eyes when the clock strikes minute 44. I wish he would hold his demeanor until I left. His POV is that he has already heard everything in his job, and in some ways I appreciate that. In other ways , I am at a loss as to if he really is trained to help me or trained in prolonged exposure therapy only, and is learning on the job to treat me.

When he wrote about me on Reddit, it broke the spell that I was in completely capable hands, and introduced an element of doubt with which I struggle to put aside. There's no doubt he's helped though. Truthfully, he is not the person who inflicted pain, and he is the one trying to stop pain. And yet, my experience of the end of session is : "I listened, now get out ". It's weirdly humiliating , session after session, and I'v come to dread it.

I find this thread really interesting and although our circumstances may differ, I can relate. I am not an angry person, not even close. And my T is gentle and soft spoken and kind, but I frequently feel anger towards him. He’s a psychodynamic therapist and he’d say that this is something that should be talked about. I’m still figuring it out, but part of it for me is feeling left alone by him in between sessions. Things get stirred up during our sessions and I have a delayed response and then feel alone and he won’t respond to my emails even though I blame him at least in part for my feeling the way I do. I think I go into each session with the hope that I’ll get something from him, that I’ll leave feeling fulfilled in some way, and when I don’t, I’m stressed out and angry at the thought of having to wait another week for the possibility (or not) of getting something from him the next time. It feels like a crapshoot. I never know how I’ll feel until after I leave. I suppose it relates to my history in the sense that my father was absent. He was physically present (until he took his life when I was a teenager), but emotionally absent. I suppose I could find ways that it relates to my mother too.

In any case, it sounds like you can certainly think of of reasons from your past that may cause you to feel these intense emotions towards your T. Can you talk to him about it? In psychodynamic therapy at least, that would be the way to deal with it, and I do think it could be helpful to be allowed to express anger and have him be able to hold it without making it about himself. I understand that may not go over well with all types of therapy.

It sounds to me as if you have justifiable reasons to be angry with him here. If he feels that he has failed you when you get angry with him, that is his feeling, his reaction, and you are NOT responsible for that. His hangup, I would go so far as to say.

As for feeling humiliated -- that's a complicated one. Even if some of it is related to the experience with your mom, it sounds like some of it isn't, too. Have you been able to talk with him about that at all?

I think that hearing him believe he has failed you would be a strong barrier in the relationship for me. It would make me feel so badly for my T that I don't think I could explore my anger after that. Is there an element of that happening do you think? Maybe you need T to be strong and hold your anger, tell you it's okay to feel that way and you can explore it together. Instead, I wonder if he's taking your anger personally, creating painful feelings and a sense of stuckness in you.

The feeling of being left in between sessions is hard for me too, so I totally get it. It's one of the most painful things about therapy - the limits, the boundaries - but these feelings should be given space.

I don't know what happened re your T writing about you online, but I would be pretty devastated and find it hard to deal with. I hope he is able to sit with you as you explore your feelings around all this. I know it's hard and I hope you can find a way through this.

First, I'm so sorry for the loss of your father. He left you emotionally alone, and then literally alone. Being left alone by the T between sessions seems like it would be opening a wound.

Yes, I resonate with the similarity here. My T is psychodynamically trained too, and he doesnt budge much on boundariess either. I suppose it makes me angry that my boundaries were violated in th extreme by close male humans and he is treating me for that by constructing rigid boundaries. No one cares about how I experience them, neither the perpetrator nor healer.

Lonelyinmyheart Yes, he words it that I think he fails me over and over- not quite saying he thinks he does. But yes, it was so powerful. I was stricken with regret and guilt, and now I dont know how to express myself and keep trying to show he has done good job by mentioning what is going well.

I am dreading the session tomorrow because of being so angry, yet feeling told he is deeply hurt by negative feedback - transferential or for real. He also doesn't like to be romanticized. So. Balancing act.

I don't want to hurt anyone, especially my T for whom I normally hold a good deal of affection.

All this anger and fear is gathering, and I worry there's no way of communicating any more.

I would react exactly the same and indeed have in similar instances in the past with other Ts. It's easy to fall into a caretaker role especially for those of us who weren't parented properly and/or ended up being the parent to our parent(s).

The only way through is to try to address all this and tell him how his reactions have made you feel. After all, therapy is about YOU foremost. It's okay for T to say how something is affecting him if it serves the therapeutic purpose, but this is having a detrimental effect. If he is a good T, he will realise immediately that his feelings are making you feel you can't share your feelings with him. It should be an alarm bell for him. Unfortunately some Ts just haven't worked on themselves enough and get triggered too - it's okay as long as they can realise this and quickly re-attune with you.

Can you perhaps write it down if you can't speak about it? From my own experience, rather than write pages and pages (which have often led to increased misunderstandings rather than anything else) maybe keep it to the point, rather like you have in your post above: Your feelings are causing me to feel guilty and full of regret and now I don't feel able share how I really feel etc etc.

I know it's the hardest thing to do. I've been through agony with this kind of thing with a T who was wonderful and meant well but frequently brought her own feelings into the room in ways that didn't help me.

Thanks. I adore my T usually, but it's like he's tried so hard with me, he needs me to recognize his effort by being trustful. But I am a csa struggler, and I get quietly triggered by things he says or by what he doest do. There's no room to talk about this. He madethemetaphor about putting my bad memories and images in an album so they become 2 dimensional, and taking care of the child I once was by saying this isnt for you, you're not old enough- taking the book away and closing it. It was a powerful metaphor, tender in its way, but it also clearly showed his belief that patients must help themselves. He played no role in that curative scenario. I had conflicting reactions- like held and abandoned at once. We couldn't talk about it though, the part where he has no role, bc I don't want his metaphor to fail and I am tired of wanting more than he gives in 44 minutes and 3seconds.

I'm a little late to responding to this - in terms of unjustified anger. Yes, I've experienced it. I've also experienced the feeling of over-challenged or something akin to it. I took 6 wks off from therapizing myself. My relationship and therapy is much different with my T so I was able to continue to physically see her while we did very little in the sense of talk therapy. She was open and willing to let me take the space to find whatever I needed to find to continue, she encouraged me to continue to come even though we were mostly doing jigsaw puzzles. We watched a movie and parts of other movies and we played games. Even now, we rarely go all 3 sessions in a week of deep diving into therapy land. I still need/want the frequent contact with her in order to create the environment I need to feel safe and connected enough to share.

I do feel somewhat stuck in the sense that it seems that there's this never ending amount of sadness that I feel and there's no longer any stories I can associate to the sadness anymore. There's just a sense of sadness. I'm starting to think that this is where some of the change really occurs - in the stuckness of it all. I think there's an element of realizing that you are stuck here (at someplace) when enough of your defenses have been stripped away and all you are left with is an unexplainable feeling. I'm still not sure what I'm to do with my feeling.

For you, what would him giving you more look like (not in terms of the minutes/seconds)? What would it mean to you if he did give more? What if he artificially changed that 44 minutes and 3 seconds to being 40 mins and then give you between 40 and 44 minutes for you to decided when it is time to leave? Is there any element about this that is around the control on when you get to leave/or are sent away? Nothing really says that you have to wait until that 44 minute and 3 second mark to be sent sent away. You could somehow take charge of that time, so that it is you that is choosing when to leave, knowing that there is a moment at which you have to leave and anytime before then, you are choosing to leave. Would it make a difference if it was you that initiated the leaving/end of session process?

Elio, this is beautiful and maybe part of the problem " there's this never ending amount of sadness that I feel and there's no longer any stories I can associate to the sadness anymore".

My situation is I feel tongue-tied trying to describe the stories now, and they feel high risk and result in anguish aftersession. I want more support , I guess, for forcing myself to go there.

He just won't go one more second, or one more session or change anything - it isn't so much needing the time that flusters me so much as encountering the rigidity after being encouraged to have more a voice and use it.

I have tried leaving on my own, and he was anxious and troubled by that. He wouldn't agree to watching a movie- we've talked about "kithing" being together without talking, but he says that isn't therapy, it is something else. You're therapist seems very invested in you .

I so hear your pain, I really do.
There's no easy answers, I wish there were. I struggle with the whole 'we must save/help ourselves' too. I believe there is, and can be, a balance with that; it's okay to need T, it really is, but it sounds like your T and you aren't connecting fully right now so you don't feel heard or that your feelings are okay. I know it's hard to talk about all this, I honestly do. I've come a way in my work on myself, so all I can say is that is truly CAN get easier to be open, but it does take trust, obviously, and a very safe T who can also be honest with the process as mistakes and misattunements are unavoidable, sadly. Thinking of you.

More support in what way? Good for you to go there, but why force/push yourself to go faster/further than you are ready to go? Who is the one forcing you to go there at a pace that maybe too quick for you? If it is you, why do you feel you are pushing? What are you trying to accomplish by going at a faster pace? I know there's a lot that believe in the 'rip the band-aide off' mentality; however, if a wound is not healed enough, it just results in more scar tissue. Does it feel like you are pushing or being pushed with a 'rip the band-aide off' mentality? If you feel like your T is pushing, what is he doing/saying that is giving you that impression? Do you think you could talk to your T about this pressure? Can you ask him to slow it down, or help you slow yourself down?

I believe you have talked about this in the past and talked to him about it. If not, then do talk to him about it. To me, it's totally reasonable to be mad at him for being inflexible, it illustrates a level of power or type of power in the relationship and in my opinion, ultimately leaves you with only suffering within his boundaries or the nuclear option of leaving him (or firing him depending on how you look at it). At the end of the day, you have to decide if his inflexibility is still serving you. Are there places where you see flexibility - where are they and how are they, how can you use them to help feel supported within the areas that there are no flexibilities? This is a hard one and really only you can sort out if his method is the right for you. There are types of therapy modalities and times/situations in therapy where this level of rigidity is appropriate. Is it appropriate with who you are, what you need in therapy, the issues you are trying to address in therapy, and where you now are in therapy? Perhaps they were needed at one point but now they are a limiting factor and you need something different.

This concerns me some. I know it is taken out of context, so I am unsure what else might have been going on that might have left him anxious and troubled that you were leaving that might not have been about you leaving early. If his anxiety and distress was only because you were leaving early, then those are his feelings to manage. You do not have to stay until you are dismissed, you are free to leave at any time, even just after arriving (though if you use insurance to pay for your session, you might have to pay for this one out of pocket). You are even free to not show up, as long as you follow through with whatever his policies are for no shows. In fact, I'd almost challenge you to slow down your pace and "leave" when you have felt like you've gotten enough support from him on that topic. I quoted leaving because one could leave in many different ways. He can't force you to talk about a specific topic or talk at all. So simply put a boundary up yourself when you have gotten that support and leave the conversation; say something like switching gears, or done talking about that... or even 'that was helpful, I'd like to talk about <whatever> now'. I think it would be good for you to feel what it feels like to get the amount of support you need until you no longer feel you need it and are able to "leave" on your terms. Then again, I don't believe that therapist is so separate from the solution/healing process as the method your T seems to employ. **btw, it's thousands of times easier to say do x or y from over here, I recognize it's not that easy. if it was as easy as I make it sound, I probably wouldn't be in therapy myself.

My T believes there are many ways of communicating. In my case with the movies, why did I pick the movies I did pick? Why did I pick watching a movie over doing another puzzle. How I put together the puzzle gives her information on how my mind is working at the time. With the puzzle, it even provided situations where I'd have to ask her for stuff if I wanted pieces that were near her, so did I ask or did I simply move on (which sometimes I asked and sometimes I moved on). When I wanted to color but then ended up laying there with my head on my arms because coloring was too much work told her lots about what state I was in.

Why does he feel like "kithing" isn't therapy? What does he think it is? Is he talking about it from the perspective of purposefully setting up time of not talking? What if your silence is because you are processing/integrating something internally and need the space to sit with it or sort it out; or having an internal discussion with yourself about something? Shoot, what if you are simply feeling rebellious and don't want to talk to him because he'll kick you out in 44 mins and 3 seconds. Sometimes acting out is good for us, for some of us it shows we feel safe enough to act out.

Yes, I do believe she is. Even in our state of rupture, I knew she was still here. I knew she cares and loves me.

Elio, If you were a T, I would be setting up my appointment now.

My eyes were wide reading the mid section of your comment . ( You do not have to stay until you are dismissed, you are free to leave at any time, even just after arriving (though if you use insurance to pay for your session, you might have to pay for this one out of pocket). You are even free to not show up, as long as you follow through with whatever his policies are for no shows. In fact, I'd almost challenge you to slow down your pace and "leave" when you have felt like you've gotten enough support from him on that topic. I quoted leaving because one could leave in many different ways.)

My T has 3 strikes you're out kind of thinking. If I walked out or didn't use a session available to me a few times, I think he would say my space would have to go to someone engaged . What he does like about me is that I work hard. But also he cares about doing well himself, and he still talks about the day I walked out like no one ever had before ( which cant be true?). He was shaken up, and said he was sorry. He does ruefully admit he pushes hard , and can be a lot to handle.

Overall, we are a good fit in many ways. He is so, so funny, and the quick wit I appreciate and enjoy. He can be extremely loving and lyrical. He's very insightful, and he remembers thingsI forget. He has literally taught estep by step to resist the siren song of dissociation- that's crazy he could do that.

He just is very rigid. For example, he puts signs up with new rules in the waiting room, even though it is just him there in this epic space most psychologists couldntn afford rent wise. It is so. . . power-oriented. Just tell us. He describes himself as a win-win person, but I don't experience that. I do experience him as so not creepy and very well-meaning.

I cannot say I know he is there and he loves me. I have felt that from time to time.

What he would like is me to say I know he cares about his work, and doing excellent work on my case.

My T has written me some beautiful emails and says he works hard to earn my trust. I really have adored him , and been intensely engaged. I'm stuck now, and just feel like its going sour without understanding why. I'm consumed with anger him, but I am inexperienced with the feeling. He said that I think anger is a firehose I cant control if I feel it, so I chose not to have it in my repertoire . I don't want to traffic in anger, but suddenly the structure feels like my way or the highway to such a degree becomes a dare to take the highway .