Right now, I am sitting bundled up in sweats with a candle lit and calming music playing in the background. I haven’t spoken a word since I left L’s office almost an hour ago. I don’t know what I’d particularly say, as I live alone, but usually I’ll greet the cat or mumble to myself about one thing or another as I move from space to space in my house.
Today, none of that. I don’t want to hear the sound of my own voice. I don’t want to take up space. I don’t want to exist at all for the moment and I feel myself wanting to burrow in my bed with the covers over my head and not come out for awhile. I don’t want to be confronted with the hard truths, because they hurt. Being me and feeling all my many feelings hurts.
I probably sound quite dramatic. I suppose in actuality it really isn’t all that bad. Nobody’s hurt. Nobody’s dying. I simply have left my past two sessions feeling like I don’t ever want to go back to therapy again.
Which, for me, really feels like the end of the world. And that’s the problem.
We’ve come up against some heavy stuff in our past two meetings. The big trigger was that L told me she going away for 10 days at the end of the month. Or at least it’s 10 days between seeing her with me missing two sessions. Before all that came up though, I’d been carrying a lot of sadness in and out of session with me related to our relationship (or maybe just my attachment to L) that I hadn’t been directly addressing.
It looks like this. I spend the time in between our meetings wishing that I could talk to her or at least feel 1/10 of the safety and connection that I experience when I’m with her in that room. I also box up my feelings and try to keep them as small as possible, for feeling them is the same as being sucker punched right in the gut again and again. I spend so much time suppressing the words that want to come out, because there’s no one I feel I can bring that to, it’s up to me to handle. So I do. I handle it.
Then, when I finally get to her, it’s almost like I go into overload with all of that emotion crashing down on me. Often she’ll start by simply asking me how I am and I never know where to begin, because how does a person accurately sum up a few days worth of intense emotion? It doesn’t seem possible. And often, it seems redundant, because we’ve talked about so much of it the session before that and the one before that and so on.
Because I know there’s no way to shed myself all of that stuff I’ve been holding, to really lay it all out and actually have it stay outside my mind, I just start somewhere. Usually wherever she goes I’ll follow, because I’m not picky about which hole gets unplugged first when I know enough of the crap will eventually come flowing out regardless. So a lot of time I let L lead our little dance. She’ll drift from topic to topic and I’ll just tag along behind her, letting it slowly seep out as we hit on this and that. Drip, drip, drip.
L’s care for me is clearly evident. I know she wants the best for me and wants me to heal. She wants to explore my feelings, to help, to fix. But lately connecting with her is so, so painful. Each time I let out the vulnerable part of me and allow her to see it, it’s almost as if it grows in size, which makes it so challenging to stuff back in the box an hour later.
And when time is up, I tear myself away. I force myself to my feet and trudge back out into the world, where it’s just me and those big feelings again. All the time. So then I’m back in the stage of thinking about being with her, where it’s safe, and wishing I could share that pain with the person who does her absolute best to hold it with me, when no one else will.
I wasn’t particularly hiding these feelings before, we’ve touched on it here and there. It’s just when she’ll ask me if there’s anything else I want to say or what else is on my mind that I’ll stare at her and think well how do I even bring this up? Why should I even bring it up? It’s always there.
At this point, I just expect her to know it’s there. I think she does. She recognizes that the big feelings don’t go away just because we aren’t talking about them. I just don’t know how to acknowledge them briefly without them taking over. How to say well, that attachment is still pretty strong and it’s still stirring up intense feelings of need for comfort and safety. I feel it from the second I walk in the door. Which I do. I’m trying to be more mindful when I’m in the moment, but I always fixate on the time slipping by. Too many glances at the clock.
L has said that she doesn’t want to focus too hard on the relationship for that makes it implode. So why would I bring this up again and again? There’s no point. It would probably make things worse.
So there’s all that. And then there’s her impending vacation, which I’m certainly not looking forward to. I know I’ll be fine without her. I know I can handle myself. I know our relationship doesn’t cease to exist just because she isn’t around for a little while. I know she still cares. I know she deserves a break. I know I’ll get to see D in the interim, which is a generous gift, but I also know that the goal is emotional independence.
Which, ultimately, is a huge trigger for me.
L and I talked recently about my resentment that I have to handle my shit by myself sometimes when what I really want is to be taken care of.
Growing up, I never had that kind of relationship with my parents where I could talk to them about my problems, for I never felt they understood and often the conversation would take a turn in a direction that wasn’t helpful and maybe even escalated me. My big emotions weren’t understood, even though both of my parents suffered from their own. Maybe that’s why; there was no room for mine when their own anger suffocated them. Either way, I was largely left to fend for myself emotionally.
I remember once, when I really let out how hard things were, my mom yelling well, maybe you should see a therapist! But it wasn’t the kind, considerate offering it sounded. It was more a suggestion of how ridiculously she felt I was acting in the moment. And surprise, surprise, there was no follow up and no therapy.
This led to me confiding in friends who didn’t have the capacity to handle the intensity of my feelings, which pushed them away. I felt totally and utterly alone most of the time. I’m still working on not completely blaming my parents for this, as I know the good intentions were there.
So you see, when J entered my life, and then L, I’d never felt so much unconditional acceptance. I’d never been validated in that way. What was given to me through therapy was a level of support I hadn’t imagined. In a way, that is addicting to someone who has been starving for emotional connection her entire life. Once I’d experienced it, I no longer wanted to exist without it. That’s why therapy is so important to me.
When it isn’t there, when there is no L, I can do it of course. However, it’s so reminiscent of a time where I struggled so immensely, stumbling around on my own in the dark that I end up in tears even at the thought of it. Because I remember how much that young girl hurt all the time and I don’t want to keep living with those feelings. L’s words immediately meet the needs of that hurting child. Her encouragement and her belief in us restores me, restores that girl.
We’ve talked about me being the one who needs to be there for my inner child, how important that is. I know it’s true. I need to be the emotional support for myself. There’s no one else that can do it, but that just feels so so unfair sometimes.
I think I would feel more willing if there was someone outside of the therapy room that I could count on to have some real emotional intimacy with. But with my parents and current friends not being an option, and there being no romantic relationship to speak of, that leaves me quite alone. I can carry the pain for awhile, but I need to be able to unload it sometimes. I deserve to have someone who is willing to listen.
Hard truth time.
L has a life outside of work, one that doesn’t involve me. As such, I cannot have unlimited access to her. It is not her job to be there for me or take care of me. In fact, she needs that break from me, the time away, to live her own life, especially because I can be a lot for anyone to handle, her included. Her job is to model a healthy relationship, to provide strategies, to offer in-the-room support, but our relationship doesn’t exist beyond that. We are not friends. We are not family. She has other people she does this for. I am a client, part of a job. I am not special in any way. I need her, but she doesn’t need me.
And one day, our relationship will end. That will be that.
In the process of writing this post, I’ve taken pauses. At this point, I’m a few days removed now from that session and the pain I was feeling on Monday night. Now we’re on to Wednesday and I’m contemplating my session tomorrow.
We landed on this topic the other day purely by accident, because I wasn’t planning on rehashing it. We talked again about the delicate balance of her knowing I need support but trying to encourage emotional independence. As I stated some of these hard truths, she affirmed them, which heightened how I was feeling.
By the end of session, we were both frustrated. In a moment of pure angst, I wondered aloud why I was even going to therapy. I guess in my mind, I was thinking that if emotional independence is the goal, why am I fostering this relationship that’s all about vulnerability and reliance on another person? For me to be successful in therapy, as L even said, there has to be some level of that. Yet that’s so confusing for me. Because how does one get to emotional independence through so much leaning on someone else?
Things are so black and white to me. I want it to be all one way or all the other. This idea that there is going to be grey area, times where it’s okay to lean on her a little bit more and times where I need to work on making my own decisions or nurturing myself, is scary and puzzling. How will I know which time is which? I will simply spend every time obsessing over whether it is okay to reach out to her for support and then shaming myself for doing it.
So I guess really the biggest area that we’re talking about here is the outside contact because that’s where this issue arises. I miss when the texting seemed more straightforward to me. Ever since our rupture, I’ve been so nervous to reach out in between sessions, whether for reassurance or extra support. L says that the door is still open to do this, but when I think too much about it I end up telling myself that I’ve asked for too much even by just asking if we’re still okay.
I can hear her, as I write this, telling me to let her set her own boundaries.
I’ve also found that her responses to my pleas for support, where they used to help, now often sound recycled and trite. It makes me wonder whether she truly is annoyed or just feels obligated. Or whether I’ve just wrung her dry of things to say. Then I feel bad again, and I begin to question our relationship again.
I don’t want her to take the option for text away, but I feel like there needs to be a conversation about it. Maybe.
But then, I don’t know, because I don’t think I can handle it when she throws those hard truths back at me again. I said before we were both frustrated by the end of session. It really came to a head as she was restating some of those truths as if she was trying to justify her position. I kept telling her “I know” as my voice rose and eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t even let her speak. I knew whatever she wanted to say was just going to hurt.
So she paused. And I felt it, that irritation. I felt immediately guilty. When she did speak again, she said she didn’t know what I expected from her and she wasn’t sure she could meet my expectations.
Every thing in me went on high alert. She’s leaving, she’s leaving, she’s going to leave you. You’ve screwed up and ruined everything. But I tried to play that down, because I was afraid if I showed I was upset then that would worsen the situation.
Looking back, I don’t know what it was she thought I expected from her that was too much. I never said that I expected her to take care of me or be there beyond the therapist role; I just said that part of me wishes for it deeply. I think I got so frustrated because I felt misunderstood and like I was somehow being scolded about all the reasons these hard truths are necessary when really I just needed her to sit in that with me. She validated, but overall she was trying to fix it, and it’s just something that can’t be fixed.
I don’t want to talk about the hard truths anymore in therapy. All they do is cause pain. I think it’s time that I really do stand on my own two feet and deal with all the pain I have surrounding the reality of a therapy relationship by myself. Maybe that’s really just for the best.