I haven't written for a while because I've been struggling with my T and our relationship. I feel like I just keep doing the same thing and complaining about the same thing here and it must be at least as boring and frustrating for people to read as it is for me.

Since the christmas break I've spent time in my sessions talking about how I feel when my T doesn't call me back or respond to my emails the way I would like. I think he is angry at me and passive aggressively ignoring me and I feel guilty for bothering him and stupid for trusting him in the first place. I've told him that I think he doesn't like or care for me and how hard it is to open up to someone who doesn't care. I think he pretends to care and then the one time he doesn't call me back is the time he is showing his real feelings. He's talked about how he doesn't always understand what I want from my emails or voice mails in part because his attention is divided when he listens to them. He's told me in the past that it is best to do therapy during sessions because that is when I have his undivided attention but he is okay with emails and phone calls but he doesn't always have the time to address them fully (he always ends with a "we'll talk about this further in session" T line).

This led (over several sessions) to me admitting that I didn't feel his care when I was in session and that I usually felt it most when I wasn't with him, either when I was reflecting and processing the session, or when I spoke to him on the phone briefly or read and reread his emails. I'm afraid I've created the relationship and the feeling he cares because I want it so badlyl. We had an interesting discussion on how rarely I looked at him during sessions and how fear can block feeling connected and cared for. He told me that he liked and cared for me as a person and he cared for my happiness but he wasn't dependent on it (which is good because I'm rarely happy in his presence). I asked him how he showed his care for me. His response emphasized how he tried to stay present to me and what I brought to a session and how he accepted all parts of me particularly the ones I think of as negative, the anger and frustration and sadness. He reminded me that my family couldn't accept anything "negative" and either told me to take those feelings away from them or told me I was wrong for having them and so I don't recognize care that involves caring for the "negative" parts of me as much as the "positive parts (negative and positive are my judgements).

Last week (as I was beating this to death) I asked him how he could work with someone who was always sad and complaining and blaming him for things. He gave me an answer describing his process and then asked me how I felt about his answer and I said it bothered me because I thought it was abstract and distancing. He was surprised. I only realized later when talking to my husband about the session that I really wanted him to answer the question "do you want to keep working with me?" and so his answer didn't satisfy me. I sent him an email admitting that my real question was implied and he responded by telling me Yes.

During my first session this week I asked him if he knew what I was really asking with my "how do you work..." question and he said no that he took it at face value and explained how he worked. I asked if he could see it later and said yes when I emailed him he realized what had happened. It was an incredible relief for me because I realized that generally I'm very straight forward in my life (at work, with friends, even with my husband after a long time of working on our relationship) but with T I'm not. I've always thought he knew when I was asking for reassurance and was avoiding giving it to me which made me angry and then I thought he didn't care etc. It was an odd feeling to consider the possibility that I wasn't communicating clearly and that he wasn't purposely hurting me. It even gave me a couple of days of peace until my next session.

I went into my second session this week thinking this new outlook was going to free me up to talk about some things that I just touched on during my first session. I had written him an email telling him what I wanted to talk about but then in session I told him I changed my mind and it felt wrong to talk about it. The topic was about right brain/right brain connection. I couldn't express my fear that we weren't able to make that connection (or more likely I can't connect that way so I was never going to be able to heal). I froze, couldn't talk at all. It was awful, I couldn't even give an intellectual description of things like limbic resonance. Every thing T said made things worse. At one point I told him to just get to the point and he said he had but I felt he was leading up to telling me why therapy wasn't working. He kept trying to find a route into the subject and I felt worse and worse. The session was so frustrating and near the end my T told me he was trying to figure out how things could have gone differently and I told him they couldn't have because I didn't want to talk and he insisted and so I assumed he had something he wanted to tell me (something bad I left unsaid). He apologized for wanting to get to the subject so much that he had pushed me instead of waiting for me to be ready to talk. He apologized for me being so frustrated.

I left the session furious and sad, stopped on the way home and called him and he surprised me by answering. Then after I had thought a bit more I sent him an email explaining how I felt but now I feel somewhat different about things. I keep thinking that therapy is going to get easier. I'll reach some threshold and be able to trust and then talk but really even when I trust I can't talk easily. It's painful but it is how I am. I think I'm accepting myself a little more and feeling a little more compassion for the child whose family convinced her that she shouldn't ever talk about how she felt and what she struggled with. That's my long and typically splitting good/bad update on therapy.