I want to take a break from therapy

I need help writing a letter to my T about taking a break. I really think he needs a break from me.

Why would you think he needs a break from you?

It was probably my anxiety.

Now I think that I messed things up. I emailed the office earlier to cancel my next 5 appointments and sent an email to my T telling him that I was going to give him a break from me.

I never received a return email from the office so now my appointments are probably canceled and I’m not sure when I will go back next.

And worst of all, I’m really hurting and I don’t know what to do.

Can you call the office and ask for your appointments back?

I thought you had an appointment tomorrow night?

I thought you said you werent going to cancel appointments willy-nilly anymore.

Please call back and get your appointments back im sure they will understand. Hugs.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but it seems like you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s not up to you to decide whether your therapist needs “a break” from you. That’s their job and what they are paid to do.

Hopefully you get things worked out that will benefit you.

I used to think my therapist needed a break from me. I asked him that question, maybe not in those exact words, many times. He was never tired of dealing with me, he was never sick of me, he never needed a break from me. It took me a long time to believe him, and I may at some point again decide he's sick of dealing with me, but for now I believe him. I never tried to cancel on him though. Cancelling is just counterproductive. Can you just outright ask him if he needs a break from you at your next session or by a phone call or an email if he allows that and see what he says? I'm betting that's not how he's feeling. To paraphrase my therapist, I doubt he's experiencing you the way you think he's experiencing you.

If you need a break from T, by all means take a break. BUT saying you want to take a break because you think T needs a break from you??

Don't assume and try to read their mind - ask directly, rather than cancelling on a whim.

You say you are hurting and need help. How then, is depriving yourself of therapy going to be helpful?

Do you really think a therapist would actually admit to a patient that they needed a break from them? I would just tell him outright how I was feeling. Let him take it from there.

Hope, please don't take this the wrong way but this is a repeat pattern with you. Cancelling appointments then emailing back to set them up again. Quite frankly, the office staff is probably expecting you to ask for your appointments back again, or maybe they have not even cancelled them yet because of the pattern. You just said yesterday that you were upset about school and wanted to see your T on Friday night. If you felt so bad, why would you cancel weeks of appointments? It might help you to look through all of your old posts for patterns and writing them down. That way when you want to cancel read you list and see that you will change your mind in a day, so try to postpone cancelling for a few days to see how you feel. When you think your T doesn't care, look at the list of things you have written when you said you think he is great.

As for you T needing a break from you, not to be cold but you part of his income. Even if he was sick of you, it is his job to help you and provide you the best service for which he was hired. That bein said, therapy is a relationship like any other; not a friendship or a mere acquaintance but an intense relationship aimed to help you improve your life. As with any relationship, someone at one point will be annoyed, angry, tired, proud, happy, sad, or experience any number of other emotions toward the other. It doesn't mean that the relationship should end. You can only work through difficulties in any relationship by talking and working it out with the other person. Cancelling sessions is not going to accomplish anything but to keep you stuck in your misery.

I know I have said this before but please work on a treatment plan with your T. Create some goals together that will give you something to work towards. Personally I hate having to do a yearly treatment plan with my T but I do understand that there needs to be some sort of mutual goals so that you both have direction and are able to measure the progress you have made. Everyone needs to have some sort of goals in life or they are simple existing day by day. I have lots of goals. I fail to meet them most of the time but at least I keep trying. That is all any of us can do.

Send another email to the office and ask for your appointments back. It may help to apologize and tell them you are trying to break this habit for the future. We all want to see you succeed Hope but you also need to work on ending the self-sabotage. I hope you can get your appointments back again. Good luck to you.

I am working on treatment plans and goals with my T.

I think the problem is that I’m having a difficult time showing him the pain. I have so much trouble putting it into words and he asks me questions but I still can’t explain it.

Plus, the other day I saw some wonderful pictures of him and I’ve been ashamed to admit that I wish I had met him before he became my doctor.

Hope, I truly feel for you.
You're repeating your patterns. Please try to get your appointments back and work with your therapist on achieving your goals.
If you want to explain your pain, write a letter, a poem or paint a picture.

My T says that I haven’t been repeating my patterns. He has been patient and helpful with everything and I’m also working toward my goals.

From an outsider's point of view, there does seem to be a pattern of approach and avoidance that plays out in your thoughts and feelings around therapy. Lots of us, myself included, go through that. What helped me get over the overwhelming need to quit that surfaced from time to time was to make a rule with my T that I wasn't allowed to quit without having at least two sessions to discuss it first. It worked because that gave me plenty of time to emerge from the avoidance part of the cycle (feeling the overwhelming need to quit) and get back to the need to "approach" and attach. Also, my t at the time had an agreement that if I ever cancelled she was to keep my appointment open for me anyway. That was a good call, as I usually went to it!
Would something like that work for you and your T, to create that safety net that allows you to experience the need to avoid (it does serve a need for those who experience it!) but remove the danger of quitting when you really don't want to, you're just experiencing a strong emotion.

The quitting part is manipulation to get the therapist to chase you to show you that they really care for you. Sorry Hope but that is the BPD.

My T said right of the bat "I do NOT chase".

This used to resemble me not to long ago.

This high-conflict personality can become extremely volatile if their chosen "protector" appears to have forsaken them on purpose. After all, the therapist has been providing a steady supply of validation, reassurance, and emotional support in a safe holding environment. If the BPD's sense of identity is experienced as being dependent upon a stable relationship, the therapist who withholds by reinforcing boundaries has just abrogated the client's recognition of self (it's like denying refills on medication). The therapist has been serving as the BPD's missing internal part, and now that part is wearing out. In the end, BPDs will pull the rug of congeniality from underneath their caregivers whenever the gravy train of unsustainable support goes off the rails (cessation trauma). An overwhelming desire to feel safe again compels the BPD to bifurcate people, messages, and situations into simple categories. BPDs consistently puts their needs at the forefront, so any sudden reduction in attentiveness will always end badly. What was once an ideal caregiver for the clinging child has now become an untrustworthy demon who must be annihilated by the punitive parent. For the Borderline, the mistakes and limitations of others are intentionally designed to cause them pain. After all, it's what they've learned from childhood (no one cares; love is a cruel illusion; people cannot be trusted; and the world is a dangerous place).

You are describing how BPD manifests for you and in your behaviours. Your experience is not universal and Hope's struggles are her own. What drives Hope to follow her cancel-reinstate pattern is for Hope to work out, it does her a great disservice for people to tell her definitively what is causing her behaviour. If Hope herself is not yet clear about how this pattern serves her, how on earth can anyone else know?

Sorry to talk about you in the third person, Hope!

That quote is a Bit b/w in itself really.