My T terminated me abruptly and unexpectedly by email back in January, after years of promises that she loved me and would never abandon me. Her reasons were bizarre, but I was very attached to her and utterly devastated. I was used to doing therapy twice per week, and suddenly I was left with no support at all. I am not going to revisit all those details again here, but if anyone is interested in that background you can read the thread “This can’t really be happening to me!”.
I tried going to a few new T’s that didn’t pan out. After a few months of that, and against the advice of the forum, I convinced my old T to resume sessions with me via Facetime video chat (because she would not agree to see me in person). Two and a half months and 9 sessions later, she terminated me by email again, this time for supposedly different reasons. When I could not change her mind by email or text, I drove to her house an hour away, showing up on her doorstep at 9:30 at night, and insisted on talking in person. She was not happy I was there, but she let me come in. We argued for over an hour, with me begging her in tears to reconsider. When it became increasingly clear that she was not going to relent this time, I collapsed on her floor in sobs. Eventually, I subdued myself as my mind was overtaken with suicidal planning, as I had no desire to go on in my grief. Then the police showed up at T’s door because my H had called them to check on me. T talked to them and had them escort me to the ER for a psych evaluation. That was the last time my T spoke to me. It has been four months since that day.
After a lot of insurance-wrangling, I was finally able to find another female T in my general area who is covered under my plan, at least until the end of this year. Who knows after that. Today was my 6th visit with her. While I am still angry that she is not old T, today I was partially grateful that she is not.
New T recently returned from vacation, resulting in a span of about 20 days since my last appointment. I told myself it should not be any big deal for her to be unavailable because I have not become emotionally close to new T (and I don’t think I will, at least not in the same way I did with old T). However, at some point I became angry about her long absence. Probably the anger was more about old T than new T, but since she sort of represents old T, she got the brunt of it. I sent her a message that said:
quote:Hello. I am feeling an overwhelming weight of negative emotions right now, some directed at you and some at myself. Maybe they are not justified or based in reality; I am not objective when feelings are intense. Maybe I can’t be objective ever, even when calm. I am not asking you to write back for 2 reasons: first, you are on vacation, and second, I know I will not handle it well if I expect you to respond and you don’t. So although I feel like venting, I cannot allow myself to need you and risk being ignored or rejected. Therefore, I do NOT need you to respond and you can’t hurt me with your non-response. I do hope you read this, however, like you said you would. My old T did not like it when I expressed anger or mistrust directed towards her. I don’t know yet how you react. I am trying to tell myself I am being unreasonable to be angry but the tears keep coming anyway. I am mad because I don’t want to comfort myself and there is no one to mother me! I don’t deal well with vacations.
So today when I finally went back in for a session, I was surprised for new T to tell me how honored she felt that I showed her my authentic self and that she could tell my feelings were genuine, and that I had done a good job of stepping back far enough to see the emotions for what they were so we could talk about them.
Inside, I was saying to myself, “Wow. If this was old T, she would probably be giving me a lecture on not projecting my stuff onto her, and being annoyed that I did not trust her.” It was a breath of fresh air to not feel condemned for my anger.
