Hi CT,
I wish I had asked my T more about what he meant. But between my last T's comment that I wasn't ready for affirmations yet and current T saying I need to get rid of the negative stuff first all said to me that I needed to be at a specific point in my growth in order for anything positive to have any kind of positive effect on me. If you start with the positives before the negative stuff is gone, it will be as though you are building the positive stuff on top of the negative stuff and the negative stuff will still be there.
I didn't ask any questions in either case because I was absolutely intrigued by the idea that my T's do have some kind of map in a sense and know where I am at and where I have to go. As is typical of me, instead of taking control of my life, I was happy that someone else knew where I was and needed to go. It probably made me feel safe and secure and I stopped there and didn't question any further.
I love both Raven and Alpaca's mantras. And I love the way FMN describes the pitfalls of perhaps getting involved with affirmations too soon: "If you have an undercurrent of negative behaviour and you don't notice it, surge ahead with positive affirmations and stacks of books on spirituality, you move away from yourself rather than toward yourself." I can see how it would be difficult to believe something positive about myself when I still have a core belief that I am unworthy, eg., and the negative would always be interfering with the positive and basically cancelling the positive out and providing a lot of static.
Maybe you can talk to your current T more about why she gave you the affirmations, where she thinks you are at, does she think you are ready for them, that kind of thing, to get an idea of how she sees them fitting into your life. Maybe you can also tell her that you've tried them in the past with little success and you are not finding them very helpful now.
I wish I could give you concrete examples. I just assumed that my T meant that when all of the negative transference, all of my anger and all of my distortions were gone, then it would be possible to start building "new" positive feelings about myself and the world. I assumed that all of this would happen in the process of my therapy with my T and it was something that just has to unfold over the course of time. I have just arrived at a new place with my T that has given me a sense of peace that wasn't there before. And I do find that I am able now to deal with my negative emotions better and faster even though they still FEEL horribly violent.
I keep thinking that it's like as if I had been throwing a ball all my life. But no one caught the ball. Or maybe my parents caught it or at least my mother because it suited her. But as I grew, the ball just fell to the ground again and again and again. And I was sad and mad when the ball fell to the ground because I wanted to have a catch. I saw other people having catches. Why couldn't I have a catch? I tried to throw the ball to the people who were having a catch. But they were busy and they were engaged in what they were doing. And they were surprised that I was trying to throw the ball to them because maybe they didn't know me well enough to catch my ball.
I didn't know what it felt like to have someone catch the ball at the other end. I just kept throwing it because, well, that's what I was driven to do. And over the years, there was a lot of hurt. A lot of misunderstandings. A lot of loss and a lot of grief. Then finally hopelessness and despair.
Sometimes I would throw T the ball. He wouldn't catch it either. It fell to the ground and broke into a million pieces. I tried to move closer anyway because I didn't know that someone was supposed to catch the ball before I moved closer. But T finally caught the ball.
And because he did, it enabled me to get past my anger that no one had ever caught it before. And maybe it's not that anyone was bad or anyone was wrong before. Maybe the ball was me and I needed to learn that I could be loved even if I didn't throw someone the ball. I don't have to give me away in order to be loved. Am I sounding a little too much like Shel Silverstein here?
When I finally stopped blaming either myself or the other for not catching my ball, I was able to just sit with the emotions and then just let them go. And once I come out on the other side of my negative emotions, (which hurts like hell still every time) I am able to let them go and view the situation in a different way that now feels less threatening to my sense of self. Before this, I either suppressed those negative feelings (but we know they came out somewhere somehow anyway) or I got completely embroiled in them, couldn't let them go and couldn't get past them either.
What was it that finally allowed me to stop suppressing those feelings and get past them? It was probably just my T being (mostly) consistent over time, again and again, proving (mostly) to be a sensitive person and a nice guy who wasn't out to hurt me. And when his "insensitivity" does pop up, now I am able to see it as a part of who he is, part of how he sees life, part of his life's experiences, and that it doesn't have any relation to who I am or the validity of what I want in life.
Once I told T that I felt like a hamster on a wheel. And he told me that the door on the wheel was starting to open. I was trapped in an old way of thinking, a way that didn't get me what I needed and only served to reinforce past negative beliefs and patterns. All of those negative beliefs have reared their ugly heads in my relationship with him and my experience with him has challenged each and every one of them. It wasn't necessarily that he challeneged them on a cognitive level. It was experiencing the negative feeling in the first place and then T behaving in a way that was different than what I would have expected in the past. We did this over and over again until that door started to open and I could feel and taste freedom for the first time in my life.
The stuff in our environment triggers thoughts, beliefs and emotions in us that will then cause us to behave a certain way, which will then cause our environment to react to us again. It's a vicious cycle and it happens very fast and very automatically. The only way to get past it is to become aware of it. And only then can you change it. And also just having a different experience with another human being in a caring and trusting relationship.
It took a long time, Ct, (for me) and a lot of patience. I have absolutely no idea if that helped you to understand anything any better. But I've been looking for a way to describe my experience to my T so thank you for giving me the opportunity to try to verbalize it here. It all comes down to how you feel about yourself in your core. And if your core is negative, the positive stuff isn't going to help much.
HUGS,
Liese
