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She also said that all the methods, all the therapies agree that with attachment issues, you contain the client to the sessions, you keep it contained just within session and no time out of sessions.

Hi Sheychen,
I’d like your C to have a talk with my T as he has said many times that his contact policy is based on his understanding that when you are an attachment figure for your client, you can never know when those attachment needs will rise up and so it’s very important to allow the client access to you. Not that there aren’t boundaries to that connection, but the connection is available.

I am sorry for the pain you continue to be in, and I do think that it would be a good idea to just let go with your C as any further sessions seem to be just causing more pain.

Sheychen, I noticed something in your post that I want to point out to you, but I know it might be very difficult to hear right now. So I want to be very clear about a few things up front before I say it. I definitely think your C was out of her depth and did not have the abilities or capacities she needed to cope with your trauma history. Most egregriously, her consistent failure to hold her own internal boundaries and then insist on making your responsible for her failure was so wrong and the complete opposite of what I believe she should have been modeling for you. And those lacks on her part, led to her re-traumatizing you. I think it is clear that despite your strong feelings for her, she is not capable of giving you what you need to heal and you need to find someone else to work with. I am in no way blaming you for how this turned out. OK? I find your feelings very understandable because I have felt so many of them.

But knowing that you need to go on and work with another T to heal is what makes me want to point something out. That you spend a lot of time either deciding how your C feels despite what she says or not believing her when she tells you how she feels. I went through your post and clipped out the parts that I think support this view.

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I still feel that she got angry and reacted after that Friday. She denies this. She insists she is doing and has always done what is genuinely in my best interests. She cannot seem to admit that she is still annoyed and irritated.

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She is judging me for it, not hearing my pain around it. She cannot seem to help herself.

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That 10% is the bit that I feel she cannot bear. That to her, was wrong. It has violated some code that I did not know about. It made me beyond her ability to care and truly be there for me. Who has pushed her in her own life or 'upped the anti' that she then put those feelings of 'this is too much, this is beyond what I can accept' on to me?

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She protested that she did not feel I was manipulating her ...

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Anyway, now it does not matter because no matter how much I protest that I am not that bad, she sees me as 'that bad' and is sticking to it. And she truly has me in a “that bad” box, a very tight box, and no matter what I say or do, she is going to keep me in her tight box. She cannot do otherwise, otherwise she would have to question herself and other motives in her for what she did.

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And again I asked why she could not have fought for me. And she AGAIN went back to saying she thought I knew that we were terminating at Christmas anyway.( god – to me that is so untrue – so utterly untrue and I think she just dare not admit that we had never ever EVER said any such thing).

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I also asked her again whether she truly wanted to continue working with me and she protested again that she was committed to working with me and wanted to keep working with me until Christmas as she had said. I just don't believe her. I just don't. In a room full of anger and irritation and annoyance and frustration, not of acceptance or kindness or understanding, - how can I feel that she truly WANTS to keep working with me when she has such strong negative emotions towards me that she keeps denying.

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And she took offence at that, that I should say that I do not feel safe with her.

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I heard this as : you manipulate people to give you care and that is all that you do, want care and find ways to get care. I said that. And I said that I have not been in therapy for 15 years, there are vast chunks of my life where I am giving and working and not in this state. I felt deeply judged and deeply misjudged.

But she said she did not mean to judge me, she was just saying that I was very good at it, that I had learnt many ways to be very good at getting care.

One of the first things that my husband and I had to deal with in couples’ therapy was that we were both making huge assumptions about how the other person was feeling without checking in to see if we were correct and at other times, we would flat out NOT believe what the other person was saying about how they felt. It took a long time, but I had to learn to recognize that no matter how strong my feelings were, they might not be the TRUTH. That my husband really would know better than I how HE felt. I remember asking my T one time, well then how do I learn if my feelings are an accurate reflection of the truth? And he told me, you have to ask. So one of the things that became central to my therapy was going back time and again to my therapist and asking him, are you angry? are you frustrated? do you want me to go away? That part was terrifying but what was really difficult was believing his answers despite how I was feeling.

I made an emergency call to him one night, and he called back but was pretty short and got me off the phone as quickly as possible. I had a bit of a meltdown and ended up writing him a very LONG email. I went staight to him experiencing “compassion fatigue” and asking if maybe we needed to take a break so we wouldn’t destroy the relationship. But I also asked if my perception was correct, that I couldn’t always trust myself. I got a great answer. He told me that he WAS rushed and he understood how that could come across as irritated, but that he wasn’t irritated at all. And that it was always good to check my perceptions with him, especially if I thought something was wrong. He managed to tell me I was wrong, but could trust myself all at the same time. And he made it perfectly clear that he understood exactly where these strong fears were coming from.

This is one of the things that makes attachment injuries such a hell to heal from. Even when the T is doing everything they need to, providing consistent care and clear boundaries, we often perceive a lot of negative things coming from them. My Ts ability to remain non-defensive about my feelings and be open to discussing them was a big part of me healing. That is the part that I think is missing from your C. Non-defensive is not her strong suite, nor is she very good at holding boundaries. But when you find a T who does have those skills is when you then have to deal with your own stuff, and I know for me that meant that no matter how much my T cared, or how warm and available he was, there were times when I could not see it nor trust it. And what was worse, were the times I could feel it, but have to deal with the fact that it still wasn’t enough. And from what I saw in your post, I think this is an area that you also struggle in.

Please don’t lose hope, Sheychen, as your experience with Jenny proved, there are good, caring therapists out there who understand these injuries and know what to do to help you heal from them. That can see in you a worthwhile, strong, resilient person who managed to survive all that you did and is struggling to leave behind beliefs and behaviors that while allowing you to survive have outgrown their usefulness.

AG