incognito.
Trust me that I understand exactly where you're coming from, I've been there. And I understand how real and strong the fear is. Its legitimate because when you've trusted in the past, and been honest about how you felt, it probably didn't work out too well. So in that sense it's a rational fear.
However, in the relationship with your therapist its about your needs. And therapy is not linear. If all it took was discussing it once so that you understood it, they could just hand you a book and therapists would be out of business. but it's not. Its about reparative emotional experiences. Which is part of why your therapist is concentrating on your emotions. And if you've noticed in other posts, people with our kinds of backgrounds tend to be a teensy bit cut off from our emotions because they were too painful, too dangerous, or we learned we had no one to help us make sense of them.
So we have to go back again and again. Each time we act on something that's improved, we wear a deeper groove in our brain until finally it becomes strong enough that it becomes a consistent choice. But that takes going over the same ground again and again. And your therapist understands that. He's totally committed to your needs and understands the need for repitition. And he's not letting you continue to come based on your performance. You're valuable because your you, not because of what you do. This is a safe relationship where's it safe to be open, about your feelings and about your struggles, even about the fears you're discussing now. That's one of the wonderful things about therapy, since its about you, you get to do it your way, in your time. This isn't a contest or a race, its a healing journey and your healing journey is unique to who you are.
And just to make you feel better about struggling with things again, during a couples session my T was explaining to my husband the whole moving toward intimacy, getting scared by closeness and pulling away. My husband was having a hard time understanding it and basically turned to me like do you get it? I answered that I did kind of get it but that's because our T has explained it to me at least 8 times. My T's response? "And that's probably 8 out of 8,008." At the time I didn't know he was serious.
I do mean that though, he's basically been holding still and repeating the same thing to me over and over and over again going on a year and a half now. Because what I need to do is experience the safety, and taking a risk and having it turn out well enough times that I can trust that it will turn out well and stop being scared of moving closer. I'll let you know when I get there, its a work in progress. A messy, meandering, rollercoaster of a work in progress. All these feelings and struggles you're having are normal.
Although that doesn't mean it's not frustrating. I threaten to quit at least once a month.
AG
