From my own experience, when I have got to the core issues, my own volatile suppressed feelings come up in waves and strongly. These can really fly around the therapy room and are often aimed - at the poor therapist. My own therapist likes to see herself as a good kind stable person and I throw such anger at her and she gets defensive and then i feel unsafe and we have dissonance.

Core issues? For me they are usually not the presenting issue, the ones that bring us to therapy in the first place, but the ones that take some times, sometimes years, to uncover, the ones that are the foundation of why we respond or react the way that we do, why we have formed the way we have. for example, I have been through major traumas in my life, sexual assaults and rape in my 20's and physical abuse from my father as a kid, and sexual abuse and rape as an 8 yr old, and also sexual abuse in my 30's from a therapist, and all those issues fascinate therapists who see them as really meaty issues to get stuck into looking at, but ACTUALLY the major trauma in my life that created the way I responded/reacted to all those later ones, was that I was badly burnt at a small baby and was in hospital til I was about four having operations. The worst was when I was 3 3/4. I remember that one really clearly and how i reacted, i closed down emotionally and turned away from my care givers. So that is a core issue for me and that is what I did from then on, when vulnerable.

Does that make sense?

Yes, it is brutal for me that my C does not keep firm boundaries, she waives them a bit out of kindness and then she changes her mind and firms them up in an over the top way and none of this is negotiated, she just implements it, so I of course feel punished, like it was my fault and I am being punished for them being waivered or wobbled, when actually, SHE wobbled them and then panics. It leaves me angry with her and feeling uncared for - cos what was there is taken away.

It is very unprofessional. and it causes me grief to say the least. the worst is when she blames me outright for her own boundary issues.