Tas I have this exact issue.
The only way I have ever had relief is to mourn the fact that I didn't have parents who were there for me. But now as an adult I can know those losses, feel the pain and be there to care for myself. That there's nothing inherently Wrong with me just because my parents weren't there for me

Thank you Green Eyes...I want so much for someone to be that for me and it is so difficult to reconcile that part of me with the fact that it will never happen.

I try to push it away...It is like a weight that I can not get out from under...I think that is partially why I quit therapy...I wanted the Therapist to be that to me...and he can never be...

Thank you for replying

Oh tas
The yearning and pain of unrequited love is horrendous.
When I was going through this with my T he made a really helpful comment. And that is the knowledge that you can't have what you want stops you receiving what IS there. When I let this in, I could really feel the love and care my T has for my chid and adult parts and could feel love from hubby, family and friends in a way i never had before. That has been really healing for me.

Hi TAS,

I don't think we've met. I hope you don't mind me jumping in here and sharing. I've experienced this same issue, and it is incredibly painful. But before I go on, I'd like to warn you, some of my answers may not be what you want to hear, and I hope you aren't offended by that. I just want to share with you about what has helped me get through this pain. I absolutely agree with what GreenEyes said. For me, the first part of dealing with this kind of longing is grieving what I didn't have, and grieving the fact that I will never fully get it from any external source.
But the other part is what I'm afraid you don't want to hear... the other part of healing for me is allowing myself to tell a safe person EXACTLY what it is that I want, even though I know I cannot get it from them. That is one of the hardest parts of therapy for me... letting myself be vulnerable enough to express the things I want while knowing that there is very little that can be done to make me feel better right now. But when, as you so accurately described, feeling like I was being smashed under a heavy weight for the entirety of my life was the only alternative, I felt I had no choice but to persist in therapy.
Ever since the first session in therapy I, too, wanted (and still want) my therapist to parent me... to be the awesome mother to me that she is to her daughter. But it is through my therapy (almost 6 years), and her boundaries, that I have made the progress in this area. To be honest, it used to eat me up... literally keep me awake at night, and haunt my dreams. Why wasn't I lovable? Why wasn't I worth parenting? What was so awful about me that I couldn't convince my own parents to care for me? This type of self-blame and hatred saturated every part of my soul. I defined myself by the fact that I was motherless.
But it was in the thick of these feelings when I realized that my T was right there with me, accepting my feelings as normal, showing empathy for me, hurting some with me, and trying her best to be there for me now in a way that she could not go back and be there for me as a child. Unfortunately for my inner child, this doesn't mean treating me like a child (which is what I feel like I want). But it does mean respecting my feelings, hearing me, engaging with me on a level that I can understand and at a pace that I can tolerate, and problem solving with me. That's what a true parent does after all. What I truly missed out on was having a caregiver in my life that gave me exactly what I needed, not necessarily what I wanted (or only what they wanted).
From the beginning- and despite my dismay- my T has emphasized that she doesn't wish she could re-write history and go back and parent me, ONLY because then I wouldn't be me. That changing the past would mean changing me, and she doesn't want anything about who I am to change. I have fought her and fought her on this... negotiated, tried to convince her that I would completely give up being me in order to get her to parent me. My desire for a loving parent greatly out weighs my desire to continue being me. But at the same time, as I've run into her lovely opinion of me over and over and over again, I've started to wonder if maybe there is something about me that's worth keeping. I'm not sure what it is yet, but I can feel my perspective beginning to change some.
The other thing that has plagued me about this process is the fact that only I can re-parent and appropriately nurture myself. For the first 5 years of therapy, I would just blankly stare at my T when she brought this up, thinking to myself "F*** you lady." Why in the world should I have to parent myself if I've never had a parent? I already raised myself as best as I knew how... clearly I don't know how to parent me!? If no one was willing to parent me the first time around, then maybe I don't deserve to be parented! After all, if I was supposed to be loved and cared for, then it would have happened when I was a kid, right?!
But the fact of the matter is, if anyone else truly tried to re-parent me now... and treat me like a child, they would be neglecting the parts of me that have matured, that are capable of adult thoughts and feelings. And it flat out wouldn't work for me. I can't take things in now the way a baby would have, they way a toddler would have, the way a young child would have. Sure, I can operate on those emotional levels at times (and do frequently ), but I can't view the world, and the people in the world, as if I were completely a child. I have opinions and thoughts and wounds that have to be paid attention to now. Neglecting adult me doesn't aid in nurturing child me.
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope you don't mind that I shared this with you, even though it's not what you were wanting to hear. I guess, if anything, I want you to know that wanting someone to fill this void for you is completely normal, and I totally understand it. I guess I'm just saying that you don't have to try to supress these feelings. It's okay to express them to a safe, boundaried person, and eventually, the weight of it all can lessen. But I know it feels never ending, and like your wants/desires are capable of running people off or suffocating them. But suffocating yourself in this type of darkness isn't a place you deserve to stay, either. You deserved to be cared for then, and you deserve to be cared for now.

-CT

You have all made such really thoughtful and insightful responses to TAS that I don't have much to add here that has not been said. I just want to emphasize that to do this you need to have a therapist and be in therapy TAS because, as AG points out, this type of healing needs to focus totally on you and that is difficult for someone in our personal lives to manage to do with us because their own needs will at some point enter into the relationship. This is the unique part of therapy. That and also the way you can disect and discuss all aspects of the relationship LIVE while it happening so that you learn how to do healthy relationships.

CT... I just want to second what AG said. That was an amazing piece you wrote and I want you to know how much it helped me to read that. In fact, I need to go back and read it again because it is this exact thing that I am struggling with now and it's helpful to read of someone who is further down the path than I am right now. I am glad to see you around again.

GreenEyes, thank you for sharing what your T told you. My T said something very similar to me but I'm in that stage now which CT mentions above... the F--- You T I want YOU to be my parent and I refuse to do this myself...eewww.

Cat...I'm glad you are forming your own supportive family and have found some balance in your life and relationships. You are doing very good work.

TN

CT what an awesome pece of writing, thank you so much for sharing your experience so vividly and poetically. You managed to reach right inside and speak to my hurting abandoned child self and helped me pin point why I'd been feeling off kilter today. I'm back in the "wanting T to be my dad and everyone stop hurting me and give me what I want" mode.

I too have laid in bed at night searching for impossible answers about why nobody loved me and what was so wrong and bad about me that those I loved hurt and abandoned me repeatedly. I wondered whether i was a dumb baby who couldnt cue properly. I wondered if my mother just knew the moment I was born that I was evil and worthless. I imagined my T's wife and teenage daughter and how murderously jealous of them I was and how i had nothing and nobody because i was not even human. The pain those little ones have endured is beyond words.

TN and Tas It is very hard to move past the "f($@ you be my parent" mode because there's a lot of grief and pain waiting in the other side along with the difficulty of letting go of a lifelong hope and dream and facing deep seated shame and self hatred.

(((TAS)))

Great question. It seems like a lot of us here struggle with it. I know you don't want to hear this but I agree with AG that the work has to be done within a therapeutic relationship. The job that needs to be done has to be done by an expert. You wouldn't want a teacher to build a building, right? This is turning out to be long. Sorry. There is so much good information out there.

quote:

how do you not put that desire onto others...that you want them to be that for you and yet, you KNOW that they can't be.

So, how does you reconcile the fact that you know no one can ever be that to you...and yet you feel those deep longings within you to have a mother or father...what do you do with that?

I've asked myself that question many times and I've asked my therapist. We ARE missing something in our lives that causes us to keep looking for that. We were never able to depend upon our caregivers. From Kathy Steele's article:

quote:

Intense dependency wishes seem to emerge from the chronically unmet need for secure attachment, and serve as an "internal guide" to direct the individual toward secure attachment. However, such wishes are often replete with cognitive errors and overwhelming affects, and thus often direct the individual to behaviors (and people) that actually decrease the possibility of secure attachment.

TAS, we NEED the secure attachment. All of us. It's just the second part of the quote, the cognitive errors and overwhelming affect that gets in the way. If you can learn to tolerate the intensity of the feelings, they will lessen over time.

Here's more from Steele:

quote:

We must therefore consider the impact of trauma and neglect on basic psychological and physical needs. Laub and Auerhahn (1989) make a strong case for the presence of need in the psychotherapy of severely traumatized individuals and the therapist as a need-mediating object:

When the world of people proves malignant on a massive scale, the internal representation of the need-mediating context is destroyed, the individual loses the capacity for wish-organized symbolic functioning (Cohen, 1985), and wishes regress to being dangerous biological needs. (p. 387)... The traumatic state operates like a black hole in the personis mind becauseOein the absence of representation of need-satisfying interactions, there is no basis for symbolic, goal-directed behavior and interaction. (p. 391).

Cohen (1985) was emphatic that "the traumatic state cannot be represented (sensorimotor affective state) therefore cannot be interpretedOe.[It] can only be modified by interactions with need-mediating objects" (p. 180). Patients may thus experience dependency as directly related to survival needs, therefore may sometimes act as though their very lives depend on urgently having needs met by the therapist. These clinicians thus support the idea of a need for secure attachment and dependency in therapy for severely traumatized patients. Mitchell (1991) concurred, stating that dependency desires expressed in therapy can represent ego needs, not symbolic wishes or fantasies. These needs must be met and gratified before anything else can happen in therapy, and the therapist should engage in active participation with the patient in discovering and meeting these needs within appropriate therapeutic boundaries (Connors, 1997).

If dependency represents need in the traumatized patient, we would again assume those needs are related to emotional systems, as needs are biologically derived, even though they may (also) have psychological manifestations. As Laub and Auerhahn (1989) stated above, the symbolic wish to depend upon another for care is replaced by basic survival needs in the face of overwhelming trauma.

Recovery from such trauma would require that therapy meet essential needs. The primary need would be the attainment of emotional and physical safety, i.e., absence of threat to bodily integrity. Although many survivors enter therapy at a time when they are no longer being traumatized, they experience oscillations in sense of safety due to re-experiences of the trauma, phobic responses to internal states related to trauma, self-destructive impulses, and, for some, a general inability to cope with the vicissitudes of normal daily life. The secondary need would be the attainment of secure attachment with the eventual achievement of felt security in relationship with a consistently responsive and caring individual, i.e., the therapist. The secure base developed in the therapeutic attachment provides a catalyst to develop other satisfying and consistent attachment relationships with others in daily life, and to function adaptively in normal life.

My T isn't psychoanalytically oriented and he doesn't talk about grieving anything and so I am a bit fuzzy on the grieving part of things. I know I've grieved. I know I've let go of hurts, wants, desires, etc. but I struggle with understanding why the therapist can't give us those things. I'm not sure that they don't already because it seems that if they didn't, we wouldn't be able to feel them as our secure base.

The difference is that now, as adults, we know the limitations of every relationship. For me, the scariest thing in the world is being alone. Knowing that I don't have anyone else to rely on. No one is going to set up a social support network for me or feed me or find me a job. No one is guaranteeing that they will take care of me if I become disabled or lose my mind.

This is all true when we are little as well. We have your parents there for a time to provide some of these things but, eventually, it's a truth we all have to face.

The thing is, if we get all the emotional goodies we needed when we were young, we'd be strong enough to face that truth as we get older. But learning to feel secure inside while intellectually know that there isn't any security in life is a bit tricky. When you're young, you get to feel (if you're lucky) that sense of safety in trust in the world even though it's not true. We can't understand that then and that gives us the confidence to go out there and face the world. Think of all the crazy things kids do not fully grasping the risks and how people tend to get more fearful as we get older because we know too much. If we knew, as children, that we would love and lose and hurt over and over again, would we choose to love and trust to begin with?

I do think there are certain essentials our therapists can give us that WILL fill that hole. Security, safety, unconditional love or positive regard, consistency, etc. Honestly, what my therapist gives me is better than what my parents gave me. I see my parents now for who they are: people with issues who had children. They too wanted to be loved. They wanted security.

This quote is from Kathy Steele's article. It is speaking to what therapists SHOULD do:

quote:

Separate[s] dependency on therapist in therapy versus dependency on therapist for daily life

This is where I see the distinction coming into play as far as what the therapists can do and be for us vs. what they can't. They can give us many things on an emotional level.

The following is from The Therapeutic Relationship As The Foundation for Treatment with Adult Survivors of Sexual Abuse Karen A. Olio & William F. Cornell

quote:

The therapist, therefore, must abandon traditional reserve and shift to a stance of "active engagement" (Olio, 1989). This stance offers explicit, repeated invitations for contact between the therapist and client, followed by observation and inquiry regarding the meaning to and impact on the client. Active engagement reflects the balance of sufficient initiation by the therapist, to create a responsive environment without reaching a level or intensity of intervention which becomes intrusive or controlling. If the therapist holds back, out of fear of intrusion, he or she may fail to provide the level of contact and emotional involvement necessary to encourage disclosure and access to the traumatic memories and accompanying affect.

.....

This shift can often be difficult for clinicians who have been trained to view neutrality and therapeutic distance as a valuable asset and who may fear creating an overly involved or overly intrusive environment. While a significant level of emotional involvement is an essential ingredient in the therapeutic relationship with victims of childhood abuse, over-involvement on the part of the therapist must be monitored as well. Active engagement requires the therapist's willingness to initiate interaction with, and attune, to each survivor. The therapist must engage in an active process to develop a relationship that fits the particular individual's needs, rather than one which simply reflects the therapist's assumptions of the "correct way to proceed." This stance includes the therapist's responsibility to inquire about the client's internal experience as well as monitoring the quality of his or her everyday life.

(((Cat)))) and ((((TAS))))

quote:

having a T who tries (offers) to re-parent can't ever work. I had a T like that (I have written and length about him).

I know you had a terrible experience with that male T and I know that you are still coming to grips with it and with your feelings towards your current T. I wonder if the problem was with him, though, and not with reparenting per se. He was getting his needs met and it wasn't at all about what you needed?

These T's form their theories and structure their treatment around their own emotional issues. They take the stuff they learned in school and from books and they add their own emotional spin to things. Perhaps what modality they chose to study and where they ended up applying to grad school is influenced by their attachment style and/or their emotional style of dealing with their own past. Sometimes they try to give us what they wished they'd had as children.

It sounds like your T didn't discuss the symbolic meaning of things for you, the relational part, how things affected you. He was in his own little world acting in a play, so to speak.

I had an experience like that with my T although it wasn't in terms of reparenting. It was almost at the opposite extreme of reparenting. My T didn't like dependency and was always on the lookout for it. I felt the same way you did, that he infantalized me and took my voice away. But because it was around fear of dependency, I was more like a top spinning out of control on a very long strong with T attached to the other end.

It seems like the problems come about when the T is either enmeshed (yours) or too distanced (mine), when they don't communicate well and they are just acting something out, without any regard for what is happening for us, how things are affecting us. That's when our voices get taken away. They are the authority after all. They have the training and the degrees. Why would we trust ourselves?

I guess I feel like my T is reparenting me a bit now but maybe the difference is how we define it. I'm not his daughter but that doesn't mean that I never wanted him to be my father. I envied his daughter intensely for a long period of time. I envied anyone who was close to him.

It's so hard to describe how exactly he and I found the right mix. In the literature, they refer to it as finding an exquisite balance between being enmeshed and being distanced. It really does seem to take a lot of skill on the part of the therapist in order to get that balance right and maybe it's different for everyone. For instance, I do have 24/7 access to him but it's not a problem for me. I haven't called him out of session now for quite a while. It WAS a problem for me when I didn't have 24/7 access to him. I felt like he was inaccessible and that was intolerable.

He gives me a lot more on an emotional level than my parents ever did. He listens a lot more. He takes more of an interest in my life. He doesn't tell me what to do. He doesn't criticize me. He supports me. He doesn't get frustrated (or at least he doesn't show it) when I make the same mistakes or if I suddenly get scared again. He cares about my feelings.

The envy that I talked about above lessened as our communication increased and he made himself emotionally available to me. He had been a bit walled off. Yes, I have to do some things by myself. I have to go out and apply for jobs and go on the job interviews. I have to deal with my mother. I have to make friends. I have to make dinner. But, I know that I can talk to him about whatever it is I'm feeling and he's not going to reject me. And that's so much more than my parents ever did. I don't ever really have to be afraid of his reaction to me. I might be afraid anyway. But he's been so consistent (as of the last 1 1/2 years) that I've learned to take comfort in knowing he's there for me in the way that I really need him to be - even if I can't talk to him this second because he's in session with someone else.

I struggle with the grieving part because it seems to me that those of you with the psychoanalytic T's are always in so much pain over the grieving. My T isn't psychoanalytic and we never talk about grieving. He always talks about what we have as opposed to what we can't have. Sometimes it seems like the psychoanalytics focuses too much on what we didn't have instead of focusing more on looking forward towards the things we can and do have. Yes, I've cried about my hurts to my T but he never tells me I have to reparent myself. That would bother me as much as it bothers all of you. It would make me feel very alone and rejected. Life hurts enough. Reparenting is the end goal but not the means to the end.

Davies and Frawley said this in a very poignant way. I especially love the 2nd and 4th paragraphs. I also love the way they describe the things we can't have in the 3rd parapgrah, like we can't spend Christmas with them in a concrete way. To me, that leaves a lot of room for creativity within the therapy relationship. And those types of boundaries are part of EVERY relationship. We CAN'T go to the office with our husbands or to school with our children.

quote:

Here, the clinician once again is challenged to proceed with delicate balance. In part, the emergence of entitled demands for compensation for a lost childhod represents the reawakening of long-buried relational strivings and yearnings to play, an activity often alien to sexual abuse survivors.

For those healthy strivings to continue to unfold, it is crucial that the therapist allow the creation of that illusion within the therapeutic space in which clinician and patient can play, and fight, and love, and hate with the shameless passion and vitality known only to children.

At the same time, the patient must be allowed to rail against and grieve the original losses as well as the limitations to reparation available within the therapeutic relationshipo (e.g., sessions do end, clinicians take vacations, therapist and patient will not spend Christmas together in a concrete way).

If the work of this pase goes well, however, the internalized presence of the therapist will accompany the patient on vacations and at holidays in a way that encourages passion, play and continued relationship unfolding. ....

I wrote another novella. Don't mean to offend anyone with a psychoanalytically oriented T. It's hard to hear you all talk about this stuff, especially how much pain it causes you all.

I am not saying that I don't believe we don't have to let go of things in order to heal. I do believe that I've grieved a lot and let go of things from the past that had to be let go of. But now I look back and ask myself, why was I holding onto that so tightly? It doesn't seem to fit anymore or make sense.

Hey Liese... I liked what you quoted. It resonated with me. Where is it from? Is it an article or a book? It sounds very interesting.

thanks
TN

(((TN)))

I've gotten so much out of this book. It's written for therapists but in a very compassionate way.

Treating The Adult Survivor Of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,
Jody Messler Davies (Author), Mary Gail Frawley (Author)

TAS, i just wanted to poke my head in here and let you know that i'm pretty much in the same place. lots of great advice and thoughts here. i'm reading all this and it's becoming clearer and clearer to me, who has not seen her T in 3 months, that the only way to heal from this stuff IS through having a "relationship" (yuck) with an experienced professional. it's 3 months and i still think about T every day and just today the feelings came to a head. EXTREME yearning for the connection of another ... not just for anybody but for T. i fought that connection for two years, and now i'm starting to think that it's a losing battle. for me, anyway. anyway, my mind is not that cohesive at the moment so i'm going to stop here.

i'll be watching this thread and thinking about you, TAS. good luck on your journey. i hope you find the answer you're looking for. sincerest of s

Cat
It is so painful. To know what you've lost, to know what you've missed out on and to feel there is a deep flaw in the self.
Remember you deserve to be loved and cared for as you did when you were a child xx

(((Cat))) I've recently started to come face to face with this realization, and somehow, for me, it seems to shine a spotlight on that huge, empty hole in me. I'm sorry you're going through this pain.

Liese.... I just wanted to get back here and thank you for the name of the book. I'm going to look into it. It sounds really interesting and helpful.

Hugs
TN

(((TN)))(((AG)))

Glad you guys found it helpful. AG, I've only been able to read parts also. I wanted to order too it but it's a bit pricey. Let me know if it's worth it when you get it. Wish I could get it from my library.