So to catch everyone up on my situation...
I'm still working out the seating situation with my T. I have sat in the new leather chair a few times. Monday of this week I sat there and it was somewhat better than the week before. The week before I sat there both sessions and I was SO anxious and SO distracted (even when I covered the chair with my new soft throw)by the chair itself it was interferring with my therapy. So, yesterday I decided to sit on the floor again. My T never misses a beat and just drops to the floor across from me.
I have found this change to be really helpful for a few reasons. One is that he is sitting closer to me and I feel more connected to him. Eye contact seems to be easier and there are less distractions in my line of vision. It also seems less formal and it also shifts the power differential a bit. My T just seems less "imposing" when he's sitting on the floor with his legs in "pretzel" position. But he is no less effective! He is simply amazing.
Last week he noticed how anxious I was sitting in the chair and he spent a lot of time talking to me about how it was fine if I needed to sit on the floor and there was no time limit or number of times we could do that. I tend to self-impose limits about certain things. Like no more than one email per week or one phone call per week and I will check how long I was able to go without that outside contact and now I'm telling myself that even though I want to sit on the floor he is probably dreading it or thinking I'm being a pain in the rear and so I'm afraid to do it again. He wants me to recognize that these are my own arbitary rules that have nothing to do with him.
I had a two hour session on Monday. My T does not normally do longer sessions and we discussed that if I gave him advanced notice that we could arrange a few of them when I need them. I told my T I could foresee needing probably 3 double sessions over our time together to discuss more complicated issues/events in my life. And so I decided to take the least scary of those events and ask for the double session to have enough time to get through it. Ha... little did I know!
By the time I got to the longer session I was struggling with the thought that I asked him for too much, that I really had nothing important to tell him anyway, and that by the end of the session he would be pissed that I wasted his time! Thankfully, that did not happen. Nor did it happen that I could finish my "story". I was very anxious and nervous and I think I babbled for the first 20 minutes. My T is VERY obserant and he steered the discussion to calm and settle me. He also worked hard on getting me to understand that HE was attaching to me and helping me to open up to accept that. He knows it's frightening to me. We talked about what that meant... that he had an attachment to me. He said allowing this 2-way attachment is a true gift for him. How wonderful that we can have this kind of relationship!! The way he said it really touched my heart. That it really did mean something to him that I allow him to attach to me and was able to take it in and accept it. It was a gift!
Anyway... The topic was a previous "attachment" relationship that I developed with someone that ended badly (not oldT) and how this impacted me, the loss it left in my life, and how even though oldT knew all about what happened and my terror at getting close to someone again, he abandoned me anyway and treated me with such cruelty.
The reason I didn't get to everything I had planned to...was that T kept stopping me and asking me a lot of tough questions about what I was experiencing then and now. He slowed me down and took the time to really understand me, the circumstances and tried to analyze the type of person I was attached to (checking for patterns I would guess). And so I left on Monday in a sort of limbo place... yet anxious to get back to him and continue.
Yesterday I continued yet STILL did not finish working on this story of the former attachment person. When I questioned my T he said while the story was important and he wanted to hear it ... it was also important that we PROCESS what happened to me as well and he wanted me to experience what I was FEELING at that time. This made sense to me and it was a new experience. With oldT he would just let me rattle on and on and then seesion over! No processing. I didn't even know what processing WAS!
Anyway, he was very kind to me and very understanding. I was shaking and shivering at the end of session and he gave me some additional time (yesterday was a regular session) to calm down and compose myself. We made some small talk and then he told me that he was going on vacation week after next!!
He usually goes first week of March and now he's gong earlier and it was unexpected to me. So now I'm feeling really scared that we are working on this issue and he is going to leave for a week (I miss 2 sessions). I know it's not that long in the scheme of things but I feel a real loss. Especially now that things are moving ahead and I'm feeling closer to him. I'm afraid the separation will distance us again. He did tell me that on Monday we will finish the story and then on Thursday we will get me in a good place for his vacation.The thing is that I am really missing him right now and I only have to wait until Monday to see him. The good thing is that the really bumpy, up and down, angry uspet relationship that we had last fall has now settled down again and we are doing good work. I just hope that having him away for that week does not thow us backwards again.
Thanks for reading.
TN
I don't know what you said today to T to make you feel like you lost him but I think your T will remain beside you, he has been so consistent so far... I know it's hard to see that in the dark. Be gentle with yourself.
). He seemed so shocked that I felt like running out of there and back to the safety of my car. It took me some time to pull out my throw and he had my blanket on the other chair which he went and got for me which made me want to hide because he had to do that for me and I was such a pain today. Then I had to fix the pillow behind me and he turned his chair around to face me and by then.... I could not talk. I was breathless from anxiety. I told him I just wanted to sit there and cry. That I didn't want to talk just cry. So he moved closer to me and told me it was okay I could cry if I wanted to. Then he asked me... no actually he asked if "she" was afraid of him (meaning the inner kid that is always scared of something). He reassured me that he would never want to hurt her. I took a breath and told him that I knew that. We were not scared of him, just of all the stuff that had to be told.