Wording is everything.
I just got off the phone with my T who was returning my call. Of course, why else would she call right? Anyway, I answer. She says “Hi, this is ______. How are you doing?” I thought she said “WHAT are you doing?”

To which I asked, “WHAT am I doing?”

Then she said “No, I don’t care WHAT you are doing, I asked HOW you are doing.” (I must admit there may have been a tone of her sometimes barely detectable sense of sarcastic humor with that remark.)

So I went into the reason as to why I had called her all the while those words “I don’t care…” rang coldly in my ears like clashing symbols and reverberated down into my chest. By the end of our 2 minute conversation I could sense that she was rushed, but I could not ignore what I was feeling.

So here I go into a slight spiral of emotions. I took the time to reach out to her and call her for some insight. Believing that it is ok to do that and pushing aside my old fear that ‘I would be a nuisance if I call her, especially if it is not an earth shattering event.’ Then I am immediately met by those words and a sense of her being rushed into returning my (pesky) phone call. I feel the hurt start to agitate deep inside of me. I know I need to express this to her. Hoping she would rescue me from my impending doom of my darkest emotions I bravely tell her how her initial words “I don’t care” affected me.

She went into defensive mode. At least that is how I would describe it, although I am beginning to realize that she would deny that. She insisted that she “did not intend for those words to be cold, but the fact is (she) doesn’t care what I am doing. She would never ask what I am doing. She is only returning my call to see HOW I am doing.”

I bravely press on, “Yea, but the words you chose are cold and I need to inform you of that.”

“I didn’t say it coldly. I just said “I don’t care WHAT you are doing.”

“But those words hurt.” I admitted again as my voice began to shake.

“I don’t know what to say about that. I’ll never say them again.”

I see this conversation is getting nowhere. I now feel worse than I did when I called and she is not bending. She is obviously rushed because, as she admitted, she had a client waiting for her. I said “Ok. I can sense that you are rushed and I respect that you have another client waiting for you and that this is not a good time to carry this on. So I will let you go.”

“Ok,” she said. “We can talk about this later.”

Can anyone guess how I am feeling now?? It’s not even 10:00 in the morning here and I may as well throw today out the window!!! Oh and let me guess, I won’t here from her later today unless I am at my chiropractic/massage appt. and won’t be around to get her call. Most likely she will wait until our appt tomorrow while I suffer in the thoughtlessness of her words. I don’t even know what later means to her.

You see why I am afraid to reach out? Last week we talked about a similar reaction to her not calling me back because she thought the intensity of the moment had past and she assumed that I was ok by the time she got my message. Her response to my feelings were that ‘I am expecting to be disappointed and therefore nobody can do anything right.’ I still don’t agree with that by the way. I get some mixed reaction from her. Sometimes I feel her warmth and understanding; sometimes I feel that she is cold and detached from me. She wants me to believe that it is me projecting this. Am I holding back? Am I projecting this? I feel that she is unreasonable sometimes. Why would she do this to me?

Shrinklady-is this some twisted school of thought she is using to try to toughen me up and expose my feelings??