(((Affinity))) I know this is really painful, confusing and overwhelming right now but I think you're doing really good work.

I think as you move closer to your T, I think it is triggering memories of what relationships felt like for you as a young child and wholly dependent. It truly was life and death then, our need to stay close and we are biologically wired to move closer to get our needs met. But when we do that and get hurt, it can truly warp our perceptions of relationships and how they should work. Our needs and instincts drive us closer, but our experience says we should flee.

I had really surpressed a sense of my own needs, so much so that I actually had a panic attack once when my T asked me what I wanted. I hated my needs because they were what keep driving me to go back to my father and be betrayed and hurt over and over again. So I decided my needs were the problems. But those needs weren't the problem. The problem was how my father exploited them.

I think that you are starting to trust your T enough that those unmet needs for care, attunement, acceptance and compassion are asserting themselves. They are SO intense because that's how it felt when we were kids.

All of that talk to yourself about the relationship not being real or its just going to end, and you not knowing him? These are attempts to devalue the relationship so you do not continue on the "dangerous" path of moving closer. I don't want to lie, it is painful because as we move closer, the feelings and losses emerge, but it's worth it I think.

And wow, I have also struggled with feeling like this is just constant humiliation. But I want to ask you something. I know the feelings of humiliation are very real, but has your T ever acted in any way to deliberately humiliate you?

I realized for the first time in a recent session that I was actually ashamed of the relationship with my father. I knew I felt ashamed of what happened and what I did, but had never quite thought of it that way. My T said I was ashamed of the relationship and it shot through me. And I finally realized that I had let that sense of shame spill over on to my relationship with him. I have always felt like my love and need for my T was something illicit, that I should be embarrassed to feel. I have been trying to take in the radical thought that my early relationships tainted all of my attachment behaviors with shame and that actually, my feelings for my T, having needs, reaching out to other people are all behaviors that are GOOD things and nothing to be ashamed of. Such a completely foreign concept.

Your T sounds like a very solid one and I think you are in good hands, which I know doesn't really help the terror. And don't be too scared of hearing "no." Some of my best work has been done around no. And you are talking about a pretty complicated dynamic around touch for you so I think its important for you to examine it.

Hang in there, it will get better.

AG