TN,

You WERE in fact picking things up and you were right on target when you saw all those red flags. And thanks for giving me credit. Sometimes I feel sad that I stayed as long as I did against the advice of everyone here and even that consult who told me to try something and that if things didn't improve, I should find a new therapist.

He told me that it doesn't matter how many clients his approach has helped, it wasn't working for me and he needed to adjust to meet my needs. Of course, I would have preferred not to have been the one who promoted his growth but thankfully he is secure enough with himself to admit where he went wrong and apologize for it.

I see very clearly now that I go into hopelessness and despair when I don't get my emotional needs met. Learned from childhood. And, when T wasn't meeting my needs, I went to my automatic default setting, hopelessness and despair.

Of course, he probably never gave dependency a second thought after graduate school and might not really and truly have understood it and how it develops, that it is a conditioned response. Or maybe he thought he understood it. It's fortunate that the tide is turning re: dependency and that there are truly bright people out there rethinking all this stuff.

But I do see now that it's not the dependency per se, it's all the feelings it triggers that gets me so bogged down. My dependency needs need to be paired with a positive experience and within that framework I can grow and blossom. (Hopefully.)

It also seems as though it's probably a natural byproduct of therapy for people who have been traumatized and something not to be avoided but worked through as we work through everything else.


TN, thanks for looking out for me. I was sort of half listening to you. Only half because I really didn't want to leave him but also knew I wasn't doing well and what you were saying had many elements of truth. If it hadn't been for you and all the other knowledgeable and bright people here on this website, I'm not really sure what would have happened to me. I was headed to either the hospital or SU. It wasn't pretty.