I'm not thinking about leaving any more, but I'm thinking strongly about switching to scheduling sessions as I need them, instead of going at the same time every week.
I recently had two weeks off from therapy because of a trip I took. I didn't miss T during that time because I was so busy. Now I have another two weeks off because T is on HER vacation, but I don't feel worried about it.
Feeling fine managing on my own (not really on my own, just using support structures besides T) is one milestone. The bigger milestone in my mind is how far my relationship with T as come.
In the beginning I convinced myself T had no feelings about me aside from professional concern, because I couldn't deal with thinking about anything else. Around 8 months in I sent her a list of all the reasons she wasn't allowed to care about me. Caring was threatening to me for different reasons. It's been a loooong process of sorting through all kinds of relationship baggage...from my family, from past mentors, etc. Only to finally conclude that T and I both feel care and affection for each other which is genuine and not transference.
The other day we were talking about what happens when we end, and T started saying "well sometimes it does happen that you 'click' with a client somehow and you end up wondering about what if we had met in a different way...although that isn't always the case, by far." I knew she was talking about me. After I went home I realized I felt resigned about expressing my feelings about her, because part of me was stuck back in relationships with teachers that I was fond of, when I was still a kid. At the time I thought my feelings towards my teachers wouldn't be taken seriously because of my age. When I realized that, I told myself that feelings are always important regardless of age, but I am also not a kid any more, and I know my T does take my feelings seriously. I was so excited and liberated by this realization that I wrote T an email with a list of things I love about her, just for the pleasure of telling her.
She replied that she appreciated it and she was going to try to take it in, but that even as a T she still sometimes has trouble receiving such things. In the moment of reading that I knew that we had become equals and felt I had come to the end of some kind of journey.
In the rest of my life I feel like I am starting to make good connections in this city that I moved to a couple years ago. When emailed the leader of a group I am in to say I would be at the next meeting, she wrote back "can't want to see you again!" A member of another group invited me to dinner tonight with friends of hers. When I go to church, people greet me and look happy to see me again. I still have a ways to go with applying to school and finding work, but I know I have come a long way in the last two years.
to everyone.
