TN,

Thanks for posting it. I'm not as computer savvy as the rest of you although UV did send me instructions on how to do it. I will have to force myself to learn one of these days.

TN, the article was so fascinating to me because my T had a distant stance from me and he and I were falling into all the traps that the article outlined re: when that happens. There's even a section towards the end re: the countertransference the T might be having towards dependency and that also describes "the dance" he and I were doing to a T.

He loves the article. He told me it helped him to grow. It expanded his thinking. He said that it's the way he was trained to view dependency.

I said to him yesterday, I'm just mad at a profession that picks you apart and then when that last pin c omes out and you fall apart, they say, okay you can only have "this" much support because too much dependency is bad. He had already gotten to that point on his own and totally agreed with me.
H
The article completely changed our relationship. I've also told people privately that the last 6 years of my life have baeen extremely stressful and at times traumatic and I reacted to the stress and trauma the same way I learned to react as a child, which was to totally shut off and eventually stop functioning (because no one was listening back then). And, so, in the scheme of things, it's not like I went to therapy to become dependent, the circumstances of my life now are such that I truly needed the extra support if I'm going to engage in the psychotherapeutic process.

Ironically, T's stance towards dependency triggered the "no one is listening" schemas, for lack of a better word, and I shut down with him as well and we entered into a total enactment.

Thankfully we are on the right road now. But the article helped me a lot and so hope it helps others out there as well struggling with dependency. My only wish is that my T would have addressed it directly instead of me having to "feel" those boundaries. It might not have created the enactment that it did. But then on the other hand, as hard as it was, he feels the whole enactment was very therapeutic for me or will be in the future.