I saw T today after a break for the holidays. In a happy reversal from last year, when I came back from a 9-day break from oldT and she thought it had only been 5 days, this time T thought we had missed two weeks when it was only one

In the course of our session, we started talking about "what now." I said that I don't seem to have any glaring problems or issues in my life that need to be worked on at this point, yet don't seem ready to totally ditch therapy yet. T said she was comfortable doing whatever I felt like doing, whether that was coming less often or taking a break. Which was all par for the course. But then out of nowhere she started to say that there are some situations where she WOULD have a strong opinion that a client should come every week. As I was trying to take in that information, she went ON to say "and there was a time in the past when I felt that way about you but it's no longer the case."

I'm not really why hearing that came as such a shock to me. I said, "but you never TOLD me that!" and she said "well, you didn't need to know it back then, and you can handle it now." After I had sort of picked my jaw off the ground, I asked her why she had thought I needed to come every week earlier on. She said something about whatever happened with oldT having been very "disorganizing" for me, and she thought that I needed to have consistency and frequency for a while to establish trust and I guess to have support through that.

I was literally sitting there with my head spinning, telling her I didn't know why this information was hitting me so hard. She asked me if I was feeling sad...I said it was more that it was bringing up how things were back then, early last year, and how hard it was. I guess there was a little anger about how confused I was at the time about what I needed and what it was OK to have, and that if she had just said to me, "I think you need XYZ to recover from this" it could have made things a lot less conflicted for me. She said "but you CAME every week" and I said "but I barely felt the right to!" So she apologized for having missed my need to hear that back then. But I think I wasn't really mad at her specifically for any kind of negligence, just appalled that my perception of things back then was so different from the reality in ways that made it hard for me.

So we had a little more discussion about the confusion between whether I had a legitimate "need" for therapy at all, or whether I was so messed up that oldT couldn't handle me, and how oldT referred me because she thought I needed more consistency and contact, and how I turned out to have LESS of that with T instead of more, and how it all worked out in the end.

But it all made me think about how our T's sometimes have thoughts about what we need that they don't necessarily share with us, and whether or not that's a good thing.

So I'm still scratching my head a little over all of this. It almost feels like I'm negotiating some kind of awkward adolescent phase of therapy where I'm trying to stay in contact with T without "needing" her as much as I did in the past, at the same time as trying to process some more "adult" realities about the nature of the relationship. It's not a bad thing, and I'm sure it hasn't hurt things between us. It's just...different.

Just felt like sharing that. Anyone else had revelations from their T that changed their perception of how things were in earlier phases of therapy?