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I love this place and all the advice. You people are wonderful.

Wow, 2 months ago I would never have been able to do that. Compliment anyone or even go out on a limb and say somethng like that.

This brings me to my question.

As we progress and make changes within ourselves, can we fall backwards. I mean the 3 steps forward 1 step back sydrome. I would really like to know as I feel progress and am scared to fall back.

Thanks
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Katskill,

I did this just this week - the stepping back thing, and it felt like a full 3 steps back, and it freaked me out. After I'd been home with my 'rents, I got all anxious and not-wanting-to-go-outside again, a real return to how I was over this summer.

I talked to Tfella about it, and it helped - we went over what I did right to deal with the issues, and what probably set me off about it all.

So maybe I get a few steps forward from that. But yeah. 3 forward, 4 back, 2 forward, 2 forward, 1 back, 3 forward...

s'like Chutes and Ladders, I think.
quote:
As we progress and make changes within ourselves, can we fall backwards. I mean the 3 steps forward 1 step back sydrome.

Hi Katskill,

It sure feels that way sometimes. But falling back sounds like regression and that does not usually happen. It feels like a step backwards I think because there are so many different levels we are working on at the same time and most of it is being done neurologically where we can’t see it. So while we make all this progress I notice that it feels like I am working on the same stuff and will remark “I thought I already worked through this!” My T always reminds me that we did, its just a new layer. –That’s my experience anyway. I believe that we reach a point of no return in our therapy. Once we've come to know that there is something different, something better, we will never go back. Not that we can never have upsets or set backs, but I believe those become more temporary. You know what I mean?

I am glad that you are able to reach out like this. It is a pleasure to have you aboard with us.

JM
One more thing: I also think in the beginning we sort of wobble back and forth like an unsteady toddler learning to walk as we explore our new found sense of ourselves and others. So that can feel like stepping forward and stepping back. But just like a toddler learning to walk they fall down some, but they learn to get right back up until they master it.

Therapy becomes a centrifugal force in our lives where we learn to move forward. I hope this sounds reassuring.
quote:
s'like Chutes and Ladders, I think.


To me it feels more like a combo of Chutes and Ladders and Twister.

My T says that progress in therapy is anything but linear, in fact it is all over the map. It is a very messy organic process. Hearing her say that made me feel better since it was exactly how it feels to me.
I believe ShrinkLady has an interesting post/page on this: Tracking Progress in Therapy. Personally, the only way I've managed it is by keeping a journal - an honest-to-goodness, mostly-only-about-therapy-stuff daily journal. It's been going for four months now, and wow! It's terribly useful for gauging progress.

'Cause like the page says, once you get better at something, you kinda forget that you were bad at it. Smiler
I just want to add one more thing to alot of good responses. When we are dealing with issues from our childhood, often the emotions are primitive and intense and remembering them can make us feel very young and like we don't have access to some or all of our adult resources. And that can make it feel like you've lost ground when you really haven't. I think of therapy like peeling an onion, you keep circling around but going to a deeper level each time. And by the time you get to the center you're pretty smelly. Big Grin (Sorry, couldn't resist the last line.)
*rant alert*

We seem to go round and round on how hard therapy is. One of us (sometimes all of us!??!) have a bad session, we come back here, we barely sound like human adults, we're reduced to gibbering masses of affect and barely comprehensible words.

And then we get ready and hype ourselves up into an anxious state and get all bothered and go back for some more.

And most of us _pay_ for this.

Sometimes I don't worry about making progress; I worry about having been crazy enough to sign up for this business in the first place.

*endrant*
Dr. LaCombe's quote regarding change in therapy that "the processing has been non-conscious...almost as if you were the last to know" makes a lot of sense. I've read this elsewhere, too.

I've always hoped for some sudden, dramatic epiphany about myself that would melt away all my suffering and make me well beyond my wildest dreams, but it just doesn't work that way. It happens, but it kind of sneaks up on you.

"Maybe it no longer bothers you to ask a stranger for directions." This is a perfect example of a subtle but profound change. You just do it without thinking about it. Then, you might think, "wait, did I just do that? Whoa."

That's change. Smiler
There's a book by Nick Hornsby called "A Long Way Down" about four people who meet because they all went to the same rooftop in London on New Year's Eve to commit suicide. The rest of the book is a subtle, funny, really insightful look at how we change each other sometimes in very unexpected ways. There are no grand resolutions or thunderous revelations, it happens like it does in real life. They each gradually shift infintesimal bit by bit until they're somewhere else, a place where they want to live without knowing how they got there.

It's beautfully summed up by a scene at the end of the book. They all go back to the rooftop and from there you can see the London Eye, the giant ferris wheel on the bank of the Thames. One of the characters looks at it and says, "that's funny, you can't see it moving from here, but you know it's moving." I thought it was the most perfect analogy for therapy I ever heard.

AG
AG,

That sounds like another 'must read.' I looked it up real briefly on AMazon.com and it gives me the sense of what coming here is like. All of us having some sort of agony and triumph to share. Touching each others lives and changing each other for the better just for being there when you thought you were the only one who was desperate and in need of help. I think I willhave to order that one. Thanks. Smiler
Just Me,
It was an awesome read, I read it cover to cover in like three days. He's a really good writer with what I consider to be highly keen insight into the human condition. His characters are all three-dimensional and have both good and bad about them. And he is so funny! I actually found myself laughing out loud while reading it, I really think you would like it. Let me know when you read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

AG
The kind of falling-back that I'm worried about is when it seems that suddenly I'm feeling all down and horrible about myself when it sure didn't seem like I was that way before. Like, now I have periodic bouts of feeling worthless. I don't remember having those before. That kind of thing doesn't seem like a positive bit at all. And I know that things and feelings can get worse before they get better (I mean, I read that, and ya'll have said it), but ... Grr.

And I can't use the techniques that ShrinkLady's page advocates, 'cause when I read back over my journal I didn't use to talk about myself that way, and now I do. So...I can haz progress, plz? kkthxbai.
We had a discussion in therapy today about progress...specifically, about what you can change and what you can't.

It started when somebody asked if we were ever worried about falling back into the worst of it. Lots of folks talked about new ways they have of noticing when they're falling into bad patterns, and how they hope to keep themselves out of the kinds of situations and worst-case-scenarios where they feel like they'd go back to the worst of their feared patterns.

We went into really hard-to-deal-with-patterns. Then we slid into talking about what you can change and what you can't.

The idea of not being able to change things & patterns was scary. It sounds like some of what I worry about the most: that I'm broken or sullied or scarred forever or whatnot.
Wynne,

I deeply believe that it is possible to change your patterns of behavior, it's just difficult work because you have to in effect "re-wire" your brain. And because so many of these patterns play out on a non-verbal level and are unconscious, it takes being in a relationship with someone who can help you see what you're doing and not aware of. I'm reading a really good book on Attachment right now called, appropriately enough Smiler, "Attachment in Psychotherapy" by David Wallin which talks about what we've learned about attachment and applies it to healing someone in a clincial setting. The brain never loses its plasticity. What you learned as a child is NOT a life sentence. Do not despair, your past is not the definition of either who you are, or what you will become.

There's some quotes from the book I'll post later when I have the time about this subject, but I didn't want to let it go to long without answering.

You are not broken, or sullied. There may possibly be some scars, but scars are a sign of healing. That which does not kill us, only makes us stronger. And postpones the inevitable. Big Grin

AG
Hi Wynne,
Sorry it's taken so long to post this stuff; crazy week, volleyball season has started. Smiler

The following excerpts are from the hardback edition of Attachment in Psychotherapy by David J Wallin. This is written by a professional for professionals and I will confess that it can be pretty heavy going at times, but there's also been an incredible wealth of information. It has described a lot of what I have seen play out in my work with my T. I just wanted to post a few quotes about our ability to change.

quote:
In the world according to Bowlby, our lives, from the cradle to the grave, revolve around intimate attachments. Although our stance toward such attachments is shaped most influentially by our first relationships, we are also mallable. If our early involvements have been problematic, then subsequent relationships can offer second chances, perhaps affording us the potential to love, feel, and reflect with the freedom that flows from secure attachment. Psychotherapy, at its best, provides just such a healing relationship. Pg. 1


quote:
Pg 2 - 3. The same three themes organize the model of therapy as transformation though relationship. In this model, the patient's attachment relationship to the therapist is foundational and primary. It supplies the secure base that is the sine qua non for exploration, development, and change. This sense of a secure base arises from the attuned therapist's effectiveness in helping the patient to tolerate, modulate, and communicate difficult feelings. By virtue of the felt security generated through such affect-regulating interactions, the therapeutic relationship can provide a context for accessing disavowed or dissocaited experiences within the patient that have not--and perhaps cannot--be put into words. the relationship is also a context within which the therapist and patient, havingmade room for these experiences, can attempt to make sense of them. Acessing, articulating, and reflecting ypon dissociated and unverbalized feelings, thoughts, and impulses strengthen the patient's "narrative competence" (Holmes, 1996) and help to shift in a more reflective direction the patients' stance toward experience. Overall, the relational/emotional/reflective process at the heart of an attachment-focused therapy facilitates the integration of disowned experience, thus fostering in the patient a more coherent and secure sense of self.

Very much as the original attachment relationsip(s) allowed the child to develop, it it ultimately the new relationship of attachment with the therapist that allows the patient to change [Emphasis mine]. To paraphrase Bowlby (1988), such a relationship provides a secure base that enables the patient both to deconstruct the attachment patterns of the past and to construct new ones in the present. As we have seen, the patterns played out in our first attachments are reflected subsequently not only in the ways we relate to others, but also in your habits of feeling and thinking. Correspondingly, the patient's relationship with the therapist has the potential to generate fresh patterns of affect regulation and thought, as well as attachment. Put differently, the theraputic relationship is a developmental crucible within which the patient's relation to his own experience of internal and external reality can be fundamentally transformed.


And last, but not least:

quote:
Secure attachment relationships in childhood and psychotherapy help develop this reassuring internal presence by presence by providing us with experiences of being recognized, understood, and cared for that can subsequently be internalized.


So, bottom line, who we are and how we behave is set down at a very young age and deeply influences our behaviors and relationships. But if we didn't receive what we needed then to develop a healthy, secure, internal sense of security, its not too late. We can, through forming a new secure attachment, accomplish the development now. And internalizing a secure base actually changes who we are and our ability to react to our experiences. It's never too late; your brain structure, your sense of yourself are NOT cast in concrete. I'm not saying its not difficult, painful and a lot of hard work; but knowing that its possible is more than half the battle. We do not strive in vain.

AG
quote:
Secure attachment relationships in childhood and psychotherapy help develop this reassuring internal presence by presence by providing us with experiences of being recognized, understood, and cared for that can subsequently be internalized.


This statement scares me as I never did develope secure relationships in my child. For 3 years I was away from home every winter living in other peoples homes. During that time I was on my own. No family, no friends.
I pretty much internalized everything, even my feelings of loneliness. I never did show emotions, as I felt I was not allowed.

Makes the uphill battle seem awfully tough

Kats
Kats...don't let this statement scare you. What you will internalize through psychotherapy is your T's reassurances and the experience of being heard and cared for. This is all good. The psychotherapy seeks to replace the things like the lonliness and feelings of isolation and fear of being dependent that we have internalized instead of the good stuff. I'm not saying it's not an uphill battle ... because I've been struggling up the hill myself, but I think the end result (if we stick with it) will make it worthwhile.

TN
AG,

Many thanks for the excerpts. I've been thinking about them and the topic of the role of individual therapy in my life for a bit now, 'cause the sessions with Tfella are up and it's time for me to probably be transitioning to seeing someone in the community - or not. And since I'm in group therapy as it is, I had to figure out what individual therapy gave that group didn't - or, if it didn't give anything different, if I even needed to try to find another T.

I have decided to start looking, and asked Tfella for referrals, in large part because of this whole phenomenon that you're talking about. Group just doesn't have that kind of attachment, not with the Ts or the other members. I _do_ get things in group that I would never get in individual therapy - advice, support about making good choices, feedback about how other people really see me - that I don't get in individual therapy.

Lots to think about.

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