Hi Magpie! Welcome to the board! I love your name. We don't have magpies where I live, but I got to spend a summer in Colorado when I was going to college, and they have lots of them. I thought their coloring was really pretty.

It sounds like you've spent lots of time looking around this site, so you know you're not alone in any of your thoughts and feelings regarding transference or therapy. For me, knowing I'm not alone is at least half the battle.

Your statement about feeling like you had cheated and jumped to the end of the transference "book" made me smile I had that feeling, too! In fact, I thought by reading about it, I had ruined my therapy and wouldn't be able to "do" transference. I was actually worried about telling my T that I'd been reading about transference because I thought he'd be mad at me. But the good news is, it doesn't "ruin" anything, it will only (hopefully) bring some clarity to the therapy. The T I have now loves that I've done all the reading I have. And your T should welcome the initiative you are taking to make sense of your own feelings. It shows that you are wanting to do the work of therapy, that you are striving to make sense of what is happening.

See you around the forums!
SG

Thanks for the welcome SG. Looks like I should find a photo of a magpie to add to my name.

Yes, it all seems pretty usual from what I've read but I've not broached this subject with my T yet; we're still finding our feet. I don't do trust too well, so frank disclosure isn't easy for me. Hence why I'm arguing with myself as to why I'm going, yet I'm enticed by the idea of someone being there just for me. Hope that makes sense.

Magpie,

I would like to share something with you. The following statement:

quote:

I have a fear of not being worthy of therapy...

Well, it has just, recently, been brought to my attention that there is a possibility that I, too, feel unworthy of therapy. As it was put to me...

"It is really about her worthiness to be able to receive good attuned care from her therapist."

I have been in therapy with my current T for about 20 months and she always knows what to do or say before I even know what is going on. It is amazing! But, I am still asking myself if I am worthy...! That is a very hard one for me to let go of. I spent my growing up years not being 'good enough'. Every session I have, allows me to feel a bit more worthy... What a slow process (but I am also extremely stubborn)!

I just wanted to share that with you.

KS

Thanks KS. I appreciate where you're coming from. It's just going to take some time to get there.

Magpie, welcome
Well, myabe you got a chance to look up the end of the book, but it somebody else's book. Yours is still unread and you don't know how the story will go for yourself.
As for mine, I find it adventurous, a bit scary, difficult, exciting and I still don't know what to expect. (I'm past some 31 chapters/sessions so far).
Good luck!

quote:

Reading on here , you all seem to think it's normal to discuss this with your T but that scares the hell out of me. I don't like the thought of anyone having that kind of knowledge and power over me. I hate feeling needy.

Hi Magpie, welcome to the forums! I really understand how you're feeling. I HATED that it felt like my T had all the power in the relationship when I first admitted my feelings for him. Because in my past, and especially in my childhood relationship with my dad, that power was abused and used to harm me. So why would I possibly enjoy someone having power over me. And I hated my needs because I had come to believe that my needs were the problem. That if I didn't have them then I could stop trying to get them met and getting hurt and disappointed. I don't know anything about your background but from the feelings your describing about therapy I'm going to guess you had a less than happy childhood. Just know that all of your feelings sound really normal, although I know they can feel crazy. You've found a good place to come with them, I hope you'll continue to post here so you can talk about them knowing you'll be understood.

AG

Amazon - that's a fascinating way of viewing it. You could be right!! Thank you.

AG - Thanks. I don't know if I'll be able to tell my T about this yet. I suspect I may try to raise the matter on a hypothetical basis at some point and see how she takes it. Probably she'll see right through me. We'll see.
A less than happy childhood? There's some truth in that but forgive me if I'm reticent to expand further. It's hard to explain or give it a score out of 10 (10 being normal) when I'm not entirely clear on what's normal and I'm questioning my judgement.
As for my needs, just now I'm seeing my 'need' for therapy as my being weak, pathetic, self-indulgent and attention-seeking. It's something I know I have to work on since I don't think that of others in therapy so I hope no-one takes offence at that statement.

Ho hum, I guess what I thought were my issues are not going to be sorted in a handful of CBT sessions as I naively thought. I'd better strap on my seatbelt for a bumpy ride.

Hi Magpie,
Please feel comfortable saying as little or as much as you want about you're childhood. Its your information and you have every right to decide when and where you talk about it. An important part of feeling safe is that you know you can speak only when you feel ready to. So I was in no way pushing for more information, just offering up a possibility.

And please, I beg you, do NOT assign a score. If you've read other threads, you'll find out that a MAJOR pet peeve of mine is that pain is NOT a competition. There are always going to be people who have had it worse then us and people who have had it better than us. That does not change by one iota the pain that we've experienced and we're entitled to our feelings, whatever they are, about whatever has happened in our life. You might want to look at the Define trauma, please thread and also follow the link in my first post.

quote:

As for my needs, just now I'm seeing my 'need' for therapy as my being weak, pathetic, self-indulgent and attention-seeking.

Been there, done all those. The truth is that when our needs are neglected as children, we learn to regard any seeking out of what we need, no matter how legitimate it is, as somehow over the top. My experience of people who go to therapy is that they are very courageous. Therapy is a messy, painful, chaotic process and is not for wusses. It takes fortitude and bravery to look your fears in the face.

And one of my favorite questions (True North will back me up totally on this) is why is it that you don't assign these negative qualities to others seeking out therapy? What makes you so different? When we think about others, we tend to see more clearly because our own emotions don't cloud the issue so much. So I would ask you to consider that you are NO different and that you are not weak, pathetic, self-indulgent or attention seeking for getting help.

AG

Point taken AG. Though I've always thought different rules apply to me, and not in a good way.

Echo - Oh great, lol. What I have to look forward to.

Folks, thanks for your thoughts and kind welcome but I'm feeling a bit in at the deep end here. So I'll probably paddle back to the shallow end of lurkdom for a few days. God, I can't wait for the next session. I'll be back though. You all take care.

Just had to pipe in on your last question, Deja Vu - it's 5 am where I am, and yes, I should be asleep! I tend to pop awake for a while around now. This time with disgusting nightmare so it's nice to come and see new posts, thoughtful conversation.

AG I just have to tell you that I've now been around you & Wynne's "Really, really mad" conversation a few times and it's just hugely helpful. I still want permission for my trauma, though! (I fight with the urge to put scare quotes around that word every time I use it in relation to myself.)

At some really deep level I want god to come down from on high and say "it's not your fault things are like this! This was *done* to you." I guess this is part of what's scary about claiming trauma - the sense that a part of me really does just want to beg off responsibility for my life and go to sleep. I struggle to remember that therapy is about taking responsibility, not about begging off. Despite knowing without a doubt that my t wouldn't let me treat it that way if I tried! (And yeah, sometimes I try.)

But I've started to notice a couple of things about the dark side of minimising my experiences and their effect on me. That voice that says "stop whining, get on with it" sets me up to see pain competitively. The harder I invalidate, the harder I have to look for my 'place'. I notice I read this board and find myself relentlessly looking for my permission, which means slotting everything into some kind of crazy ranking system. And now I notice that actually I do this in my life too, with my husband ("who is hurting the worst? Who has permission to feel?") and my family of origin too, which I guess is where it started.

Of course, as soon as these thoughts hit the light of day they make no sense and I can disown them. But they are there operating, I have no doubt now. Those thoughts feel like poison and I just want to let them go. The only way I can see to do that is to just let myself feel what I feel. And to uncouple denial and responsibility - I'm *starting* to get glimmers of the notion that stiff-upper-lippedness - where it's actually denial - makes responsibility less likely, not more likely. Altering my thinking on all this is easier said than done (I'm still trying to figure out if I'm on the right track even), but the status quo is not easy anyway.

Time for another try at sleep!

Hi Jones,
I'm really glad you found the discussion helpful. I have very rarely met a victim of trauma who has not struggled with their "legitimacy" so I think it's an important topic. I know I struggled with it for years. But it makes me so angry because the very damage that you need to heal is also preventing you from feeling like you deserve healing so I'm glad that you're thinking about it.

I love what you're saying about responsibilty. I have found in my own life that I have had to learn to both take more responsibility and less responsibility. I have needed to take less responsbility for what happened to me. I struggled on many different levels with feeling responsible for my abuse. It has taken a long time and a lot of deep work to realize that my abuse had NOTHING to do with me, I did not ask for it nor did I deserve it. It was something horrible that was done to me and by the very persons I should most have expected protection from. Another fundamental shift for me was in recognizing that I wasn't "crazy" so much of my intense, seemingly absurb reactions actually make a lot of sense when viewed in the correct context as my reactions to long endured abuse (I was sexually abused by my dad from about the age of four to nine as best I can figure). But this is where the more responsibility comes in and again on two levels.

My relationship template, while making sense and even being necessary when it was formed, has now become maladapative and needs to be changed. And although the events and relationships which formed it were not my fault, I am the only one who can change those templates now. It has to be my choice to face my fears, and open myself to the difficult task of learning to relate differently and make different choices. I sometimes think of it (admittedly in my more bitter moments) as cleaning up someone else's mess. But its a mess I'm living in and the only way out if for me to clean it up.

The other aspect for me was that my sense of self and worth was so shakey and/or negative that it was difficult for me to admit when I did something wrong or to be able to hear someone else's upset feelings about me (which let me tell you is hard to avoid in 23 years of marriage ) so part of learning to regulate my feelings has been to learn to handle my triggers and bad messages so that I can stay and be able to recognize or hear when I've done something wrong, to take responsibility for the things that I do, knowing that I can handle hearing about it if I've messed up and not letting that become the totality of who I am in my own mind.

In many ways, responsibility has been an intricately interwoven topic throughout my healing. So fwiw, I definitely think you're on the right track.

AG

Hi Magpie, it is nice to meet you. I am pretty new here myself. Sorry I'm a bit late to the discussion. I have been thinking about your post but didn't respond earlier because what you wrote evoked strong feelings inside. I've been going to therapy for about 5 months and still have some of the issues you've described.

quote:

Originally posted by Magpie:
I think what's spooking me the most is the idea of transference.

A lot of people who post here understand transference better than I do. I, like you, have been trying to learn more, perhaps in an effort to protect myself from the inevitable. Can someone tell me, is it ALWAYS transference when you develop a strong connection and need for your T? Does transference by definition mean "not real"? If it isn't real, isn't it dishonest for a T to encourage it?

quote:

Originally posted by Magpie:
Reading on here, you all seem to think it's normal to discuss this with your T but that scares the hell out of me. I don't like the thought of anyone having that kind of knowledge and power over me. I hate feeling needy. Yet I've been thinking constantly about my therapy sessions every day for well over a week and can't wait for the next one. It's distracting and it's driving me nuts (if I can use that term here, lol).

Yesterday I took the plunge and pretty much admitted to my T that when I am not furious with her then...yeah, I really like her, I really need her, and I just want her to know that I HATE IT!!! What is happening to me?!!! I used to pride myself on my independence, but those walls are being breached.

quote:

Originally posted by Magpie:
Oh and add to it all I have a fear of not being worthy of therapy, and fear of being thought to be making mountains out of molehills etc. Having 'rented' a friend etc.

I have had all those fears too. I'm starting to wonder if this is universal to everyone who embarks on the therapy journey? The "rent-a-friend" is what I am struggling with this week. This may sound a bit harsh, but I could draw some comparisons to prostitution here: it just isn't the real thing when you're getting paid for it. Not that a T can't enjoy helping people while they work, but in the end the support only lasts as long as the money does. T's deserve compensation for all their training, skills, and time, I totally can't argue with that. It just seems to interfere with my private little fantasy that my T would genuinely care for me even without the money -- you know, like a parent should naturally care for their child without reciprocation.

Hello MH, good to meet you too. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I'm just back from my session and I'm feeling much less stressed about it all. Thank God. Not that the issues have disappeared but we discussed some of my concerns about being 'in therapy' so they're 'out there'. We stuffy Brits excel at torturing ourselves over this apparently . I'm pretty sure we'll go over this again on any number of occasions, especially the 'rent a friend' issue. MH, I totally get your analogy with prostitution. My T's aware of my trust/rejection issues and now knows I'm wary of transference and why. In return, she's going to look out for it and we'll discuss it as and if it occurs. She said that extreme transference isn't always a guarantee and the degree to which it occurs can vary depending on the amount of input a T has with a client. I'd welcome Shrinklady's or anybody else's view on this. In return, I'm trying to be as open and trusting as I can. After all, I can't do this without trusting her, can I? So I like to think of it as if we're two professional people doing business which, in many ways, I guess we are. But it won't be easy and she knows that to gain access to some stuff she may need a crowbar, pit helmet, large torch and a fair amount of time proving to me that I can rely on her. Our relationship is getting better though with each session, with lots of checks and double checks on what each other is meaning when we say things. We even laughed at some stuff today (makes a change from me fighting back tears), though at one point I panicked when I thought I'd said something that had really upset her personally. I was terrified when she said "oh, that's really hard for me" whilst balling her fists. Turned out she was sympathising with my confusion. Phew! I hate that 'OMG what I have done' feeling.

So, anyway, I'm hopeful today that we can make headway with fixing my skewed view of the world. I even said she could be a little tougher on me, providing she doesn't ever leave me in pieces with only 5 mins to the end of the session. I may live to regret saying that, hehe .

I do hope everyone else is having a positive day.

quote:

Can someone tell me, is it ALWAYS transference when you develop a strong connection and need for your T? Does transference by definition mean "not real"? If it isn't real, isn't it dishonest for a T to encourage it?

Hi MH,
From the research I've done (and trust me I was obsessive for a long time, ok, honestly, I still can be) there are really two definitions fo transference floating out there (actually there are way too many to count but they fall in two broad categories). The first is based on psychoanalysis and was first defined by Freud. His theory was that these feelings could in no way be actually grounded in reality or based on the person of the therapist because the therapist was supposed to be a "blank screen" so how could the patient fall in love? Therefore these feelings MUST be about a figure in the past and were being "transferred" into the present. This is where the belief, that is still prevalent in many circles today, came from that transference feelings aren't real.

Interestingly enough, after examining Freud's life, a lot of people theorize that part of the reason he came up with the theory was because of his discomfort about patients having sexual feelings for him. He came from culture that was fairly repressed about sex and he himself seemed to be fairly uncomfortable about it in his personal life and marriage.

The second sense of transference and the one that I believe to be more accurate in my case, is that we form relationship schemas, or templates, based on our early relationship experiences (this definition ties nicely into attachment theory). We learn both how to relate and what to expect in relationships from what we experience as infants and small children. This becomes in effect, a filter through which we filter all later experiences. Therefore, what occurs in therapy is very real (I know my T believes that the feelings are real because we've discussed it), as a matter of fact, the whole point is that we react in therapy to our therapist in the same way we react in our relationships out in the "real" world. But in therapy, there is an environment and a person which makes it possible for us to examine how we relate, get feedback from the person we're relating to and explore how it connects to our past. This allows us to bring our unconscious relating patterns into the light where we can examine and change them thus correcting the maladaptive behaviors from our pasts.

So the feelings are real but as we examine them, we often find that the intensity of them is because they are evoking or resonating with emotions and experiences from our past, often ones we were not able to deal with. For instance, I was terrified (and I don't use the work lightly) for a very long time that my T would either abuse or abandon although there was no evidence to support that belief. But he was a male father figure with power over me so my expectation was that either or both of those things would happen. Which, frankly, based on my life experience, was a perfectly rational expectation but viewed only in the here and now didn't make a lot of sense. So in my experience some of it is from the past, but there are real emotions in the present. I do love my T and really do have a deeply intimate trusting relationship with him. There is even a real sexual attraction. But the intensity of the "real" feelings isn't beyond what I can handle. The really intense "I'm gonna die" stuff is usually connected to my past. My T tends to avoid the term transference because he doesn't like the connotation it brings of the feelings being "unreal." And he has acknowledged to me that some of my attraction may be that I really do find him attractive. But he's also made it clear that we talk about our feelings not act on them in therapy, that he has the boundaries, that I am safe and nothing will happen. That safety has made it possible for me to explore all my feelings even in areas I normally wouldn't acknowledge to a man not my husband.

My experience with people who form a really intense relationship with their T (the "I can't stop thinking about them, I terrified they're going to send me away, betray me, not like me etc etc ad nauseum ad infinitum) is that they have some form of attachment injury so that their early childhood needs were not met. When we are small, our needs are literally a life and death matter, we die without an adult to take care of us. So when we form a relationship with an attuned T who is finally meeting some of those needs (the ones that can still be met), the life and death intensity comes roaring back and all our ambivalance of "I want to move closer, but that is SO dangerous" gets played out. I hope that helps.

Hi Magpie,
I'm glad to hear you had a session that went so well. You're doing absolutely the right thing to talk to your T about all these feelings, I really believe that's how the healing takes place.

AG

Hi AG,

A belated thank you for your response on the responsibility question above.

quote:

The other aspect for me was that my sense of self and worth was so shakey and/or negative that it was difficult for me to admit when I did something wrong or to be able to hear someone else's upset feelings about me (which let me tell you is hard to avoid in 23 years of marriage ) so part of learning to regulate my feelings has been to learn to handle my triggers and bad messages so that I can stay and be able to recognize or hear when I've done something wrong, to take responsibility for the things that I do, knowing that I can handle hearing about it if I've messed up and not letting that become the totality of who I am in my own mind.

Oh boy, yes... ugh... so much of my relationship disharmony is related to this point - the black & white thinking (I didn't do anything wrong!... I did EVERYTHING wrong!).

Thanks for understanding.

HIII MAGPIE!!! Welcome! I don't think I really have much to add here, just wanted to say hello.

AG- Is it okay if, everytime you post, I come behind you and just write "DITTO"?? That's usually what comes to mind after I read your WONDERFUL posts but I just thought I'd ask!

-CT

(((((((((CT))))))))))

Thank you so much, I am deeply honored to know you feel that way.

I'm only as good as the company I keep!

Hi Jones,
Glad it helped! One of the best things about this forum is just the realization that you're not alone and you're not the only one to feel this way.

AG

quote:

Originally posted by Attachment Girl:
So the feelings are real but as we examine them, we often find that the intensity of them is because they are evoking or resonating with emotions and experiences from our past, often ones we were not able to deal with....

My experience with people who form a really intense relationship with their T (the "I can't stop thinking about them, I terrified they're going to send me away, betray me, not like me etc etc ad nauseum ad infinitum) is that they have some form of attachment injury so that their early childhood needs were not met. When we are small, our needs are literally a life and death matter, we die without an adult to take care of us. So when we form a relationship with an attuned T who is finally meeting some of those needs (the ones that can still be met), the life and death intensity comes roaring back and all our ambivalance of "I want to move closer, but that is SO dangerous" gets played out. I hope that helps.

AG, actually that helps a lot. This transference topic has been really fuzzy in my mind. Right now I can relate to the ambivalence that you talked about of wanting to move closer, yet being afraid, and just feeling crazy out-of-control in not understanding why I am obsessing over it. I am so glad you take the time to share what you have learned over the years. I wish I could get to where I need to be by osmosis of your posts and not have to learn it all the hard way!