TN,

Thanks for posting it. I'm not as computer savvy as the rest of you although UV did send me instructions on how to do it. I will have to force myself to learn one of these days.

TN, the article was so fascinating to me because my T had a distant stance from me and he and I were falling into all the traps that the article outlined re: when that happens. There's even a section towards the end re: the countertransference the T might be having towards dependency and that also describes "the dance" he and I were doing to a T.

He loves the article. He told me it helped him to grow. It expanded his thinking. He said that it's the way he was trained to view dependency.

I said to him yesterday, I'm just mad at a profession that picks you apart and then when that last pin c omes out and you fall apart, they say, okay you can only have "this" much support because too much dependency is bad. He had already gotten to that point on his own and totally agreed with me.
H
The article completely changed our relationship. I've also told people privately that the last 6 years of my life have baeen extremely stressful and at times traumatic and I reacted to the stress and trauma the same way I learned to react as a child, which was to totally shut off and eventually stop functioning (because no one was listening back then). And, so, in the scheme of things, it's not like I went to therapy to become dependent, the circumstances of my life now are such that I truly needed the extra support if I'm going to engage in the psychotherapeutic process.

Ironically, T's stance towards dependency triggered the "no one is listening" schemas, for lack of a better word, and I shut down with him as well and we entered into a total enactment.

Thankfully we are on the right road now. But the article helped me a lot and so hope it helps others out there as well struggling with dependency. My only wish is that my T would have addressed it directly instead of me having to "feel" those boundaries. It might not have created the enactment that it did. But then on the other hand, as hard as it was, he feels the whole enactment was very therapeutic for me or will be in the future.

quote:

He loves the article. He told me it helped him to grow. It expanded his thinking. He said that it's the way he was trained to view dependency.

Hi Liese... I am glad that you shared the article with your T as I have really noticed a change in him over the past half year. He has really stepped up and both educated himself and adjusted his approach to you to make you feel safer, more cared for and as a result you are doing much better. As you know, I was very suspicious of him in the beginning... just was seeing a lot of red flags.

Ideally, this was what I was trying to accomplish with oldT. But he had competence and self-worth issues and was not interested in learning or changing and preferred to abandon me instead. I know it was him and not me but that took a long agonizing time to acknowledge. I know I'm in much better hands now.

I did want to say that you should give yourself a lot of credit for giving him the feedback and the information that he would need to help you. You also worked hard at asking for what you need (example, the two sessions/week) and I'm glad to see that is working out as well.

Oh and... yes many T's were trained to avoid the client becoming dependent on them. It was seen as unhealthy to allow this when in reality it was the opposite, particularly with attachment injured, traumatized patients. They NEED to depend for awhile while they go through the appropriate developmental stages they missed out on in childhood. Eventually, over time they will depend less and less as they grow and get stronger. If a T denies the dependency or makes the patient feel "bad" about needing it, it just stalls the therapeutic process and may cause a breakdown in the relationship. Your T definitely got it right.

Much to my delight, my T is absolutely okay with me being dependent and it's a topic I can easily discuss with him.

Take care,
TN

TN,

You WERE in fact picking things up and you were right on target when you saw all those red flags. And thanks for giving me credit. Sometimes I feel sad that I stayed as long as I did against the advice of everyone here and even that consult who told me to try something and that if things didn't improve, I should find a new therapist.

He told me that it doesn't matter how many clients his approach has helped, it wasn't working for me and he needed to adjust to meet my needs. Of course, I would have preferred not to have been the one who promoted his growth but thankfully he is secure enough with himself to admit where he went wrong and apologize for it.

I see very clearly now that I go into hopelessness and despair when I don't get my emotional needs met. Learned from childhood. And, when T wasn't meeting my needs, I went to my automatic default setting, hopelessness and despair.

Of course, he probably never gave dependency a second thought after graduate school and might not really and truly have understood it and how it develops, that it is a conditioned response. Or maybe he thought he understood it. It's fortunate that the tide is turning re: dependency and that there are truly bright people out there rethinking all this stuff.

But I do see now that it's not the dependency per se, it's all the feelings it triggers that gets me so bogged down. My dependency needs need to be paired with a positive experience and within that framework I can grow and blossom. (Hopefully.)

It also seems as though it's probably a natural byproduct of therapy for people who have been traumatized and something not to be avoided but worked through as we work through everything else.


TN, thanks for looking out for me. I was sort of half listening to you. Only half because I really didn't want to leave him but also knew I wasn't doing well and what you were saying had many elements of truth. If it hadn't been for you and all the other knowledgeable and bright people here on this website, I'm not really sure what would have happened to me. I was headed to either the hospital or SU. It wasn't pretty.

Thanks for sharing. I may share this with T, just because dependency, attachment and dissociation obviously come up in our work both as unconscious behaviors and explicit discussions.

While it is technical, I actually found it a lot easier to understand than other articles I've recently read (which this one seems to be referencing in the discussion of structural dissociation). I found the synthesized description of primary, secondary and tertiary dissociation much easier to decipher than Van der Hart's actual article on that topic. I am just about half-way through this one, but finding I can follow (though maybe having read that past article kind of laid the groundwork).

Anyway, I really appreciate the sharing. I especially relate to:

quote:

This attachment style involves simultaneous or proximate alternation of defense and attachment emotional systems (EPs involved with both systems and ANPs with the attachment system), manifesting in intense insecure dependency with a phobia of detachment, and intense disavowal of dependency and phobia of attachment.

I don't think there could be a more perfect way of describing the work with my T in our first year together. In fact, I'm fairly certain my early journals including this concept of phobia of these "parts" and the attachment and dependency needs, before I had read anything about dissociation or had more than a cursory (ECE) knowledge of attachment theory. This is just what I experience. Beginning to read about the phase oriented treatment is also interesting, as I can see how we moved through a period of being in phase one and now we are doing a lot of phase two work, but feel like we'll probably have to be cycling back to phase one soon, as I am not tolerating the particular work that has come up with a part that experiences the "intolerable aloneness" I have read about in this and other articles, which I have also described to T as hopeless aloneness and desperate aloneness. Working with that seems like such a trap. Reading about it in this way helps get me out of experiencing it for a bit, though, and back to conceptualizing it, which provide some much-needed temporary relief. Whew, back to reading!

TN,

It was so great to read the words you wrote when you said: I know it's him and not me although it took me a long time to recognize that. I know I am in safe hands.

Yaku, Isn't it a great article? I really related to it.