I'm reposting this from my blog. I've been thinking of publicizing it here because I've been writing more there recently and I'm getting braver because others have been sharing their blogs. Getting Closer

My session yesterday sucked. I struggled with talking about anything because I knew I was going to be away for another week and a half. I told M (my T) about that fear and he basically reworded it and echoed it back. I’m not sure if he was normalizing my fears or trying to show me that they were irrational. He certainly didn’t suggest any way to work with those fears. In one of the early silences we booked a phone session for next Wednesday morning but as the session progressed with me getting more and more frustrated I wished we hadn’t because I will face the same fears next week and the silences will be worse over the phone. I realized that part of me is angry that he left on vacation and that I am leaving (how crazy is that?). If it wouldn’t upset my whole family I would skip the vacation. Which is another crazy behaviour. Imagine giving up a week of vacation at a cottage on a lake in order to see a therapist for one or two hours. I hate myself for being so needy and I guess I get angry at M when I hate myself. Near the end of the session I told him I was angry for wasting the session just like the one before his vacation started crying. At this point the session represented a fairly typical failure of me communicating and connecting with M. The epic part occurred after.

First I left a message telling him I would like to talk to him either later that night (he usually works late on Wednesday nights) or this morning. Then I sent an email asking if he had time to talk before I went back up north today to his office account. When he didn’t answer I sent it to his mobile account because I was hoping he would have time for a session and I thought if he didn’t read the email until tomorrow morning then it might be too late. He responded fairly quickly telling me he could talk briefly before his first session and asking if it worked for me. I figured that meant he didn’t have time for a session and agonized over my response which was to say yes I was available shortly before 10am but I didn’t know if I could say anything briefly. Then this morning while I ran around doing errands I made sure I was out of the house and alone in my car from 9:45am and waited for him to call. He didn’t. At 9:55am I called him and he picked up right away so I said were you waiting for me to call because I’ve been waiting for you to call. He said “yes I was waiting, how do you feel today?” I burst into tears. This has happened once before about 2 months ago where he left me a message saying he might have time to speak before 11am and I waited for him to call while he waited for me to call. I was overwhelmed with frustration. M and I can’t even communicate clearly about who is going to call and I told him how stupid it was that we wasted time before we even spoke to each other. He said something about there being a lot of anger and frustration around and it would attach to whatever occurs which sounds to me like he doesn’t think it is a problem that he isn’t communicating clearly. Of course almost immediately his client arrived and he said I’ll speak to you next Wednesday and I said no I don’t want to do a phone session. He responded by saying I will keep it open and let you decide later whether you want to keep it. Which is another thing that we have struggled with in the past because I hate making the decision again about whether or not to keep an appointment. Several times over the four years I’ve worked with M, he has said I will leave it open and I have gone to the session but usually I’ve said things like I’m not sure I want to come to the session or I’m afraid to. In May before my vacation I cancelled and he said I will leave it up to you to decide and I tore myself into knots about whether he expected me to go, expected me to pay for the session, would waste time waiting, etc. So this morning I said “are you really going to do this to me again and leave it up in the air?”. He said I really have to go and started to explain why he wasn’t making a decision and I hung up while he was still talking. That has never happened before.

So then I went home to pack the car and drive three teenage girls up north. I just kept feeling more and more angry and the situation. When we stopped for lunch I tried calling M but he didn’t answer. I left him a long message telling him I thought it was stupid that he expected me to call him. That I had left a voicemail and two emails to find out if we could speak this morning. That I was willing to change my plans and it was clearly important to me. He was the one with the difficult to predict schedule. He said he could speak briefly. I didn’t know how early he got to the office, how many other people he had to call or email, it wouldn’t be possible for me to predict his availability accurately. I told him I thought he didn’t call me because he didn’t care how I felt and that I understood that therapy and my relationship with him were much more important to me but I thought my feelings and pain should mean something. I then told him that I had wanted to ask him for something from him over the break but I had been afraid because I once asked him if he could write an appointment card reminder for the session after his vacation and he had laughed and asked me if I was going to forget it. Now I wonder if he didn’t call me this morning because he was hoping to avoid me. That is when it reached epic fail. I think the kind of failure we won’t be able to come back from.