Hi motivated and welcome to the Board. I think five months is a REALLY short time to be in therapy and to expect to be able to trust your T with difficult and painful emotions. It sounds to me like you still need to work on the foundation of the relationship with your T. The relationship has to be steady and solid before you will feel you can trust your T with such powerful stuff.

Your fears and anxiety make sense to me. You were hurt in the worst ways interpersonally or relationally... meaning your hurt and abuse was caused by people so why would you trust people? Over the years you developed lots of coping mechanisms and defenses that are no longer useful and are probably going to hamper your therapy and healing. But just getting rid of them proves VERY difficult because they were the things that helped you to survive horrible pain and fear.

I know you are in a rush to get through your trauma therapy but that is probably not possible from my experience. Actually, as many T's say.... the slower you go the faster you will get there! So I say give yourself a break and take your time in building and establishing your T relationship and then you can work on the actual trauma. If you go too fast you risk retraumatizing yourself or overwhelming yourself and then you will have to address that before moving forward.

I think it would be helpful if you could just tell your T how you are feeling when you are unable to talk. That is a good starting point and I think your T will be happy to help you work through that.

Let us know what happens.
TN

Time to settle in for a few more years of therapy, in my opinion! You just can't rush this stuff.

Motivated,

Just wanted to say hi. I'm in a bad spot right now myself but wanted to welcome you to the boards.

((Motivated)) Welcome to the boards. Not much I can offer right now, but I will tell you that it's taken me more than 2 years to get to place where I can really sense my trust in my T, and even then it's not total, implicit trust yet. I'm not saying it will take that long for you - but it's just a way for me to emphasize that 5 months is a very short time. Go easy on yourself, as much as possible. If you try to rush too much, it might make things worse and that definitely wouldn't be good.

Thank you all for your in put...

Dang, I guess I have a lot to learn about this therapy business... I honestly thought I would be done in say 3 or 4 more sessions? I know my T says it's a process but I didn't know it could be that long of a process.

So, when does the anxiety go away of feeling like you need a michael jackson disguise just to walk through the door in case someone sees you? I have yet to see other client (thank God).

Hi Motivated, welcome.

When I first started therapy I could have written what you wrote here. People open up after time.. you have to build a relationship. I thought I would be done in 3 or 4 sessions too. It took 2 years to get even sorta open and now finally I can occasionally be emotional. Opening up will be more of an implicit thing - learning trust deep, deep down after a pattern of trust. It's not something you can think yourself in to unfortunately. I have an amazing T, too and it took a very long time of her consistency to get where I am. I hated her and it took us a very long time, but it was/is worth the time.

Again, welcome!!

I didn't know it was going to be this hard