I’m really tempted to text L right now and ask if we’re okay and if she’s mad at me. Not for anything that she said or did. In fact, we laughed a lot through my session today. No, this is all about me. I’m projecting, because I know she’s not mad at me, but I think I want to be mad at her.
I wish I could understand where this feeling is coming from because it’s not entirely clear to me. I’m not even totally sure I’m angry, but that’s what seems to make the most sense. When I have trouble identifying a feeling, it’s usually anger driving it.
I’ve scoured my mind for different things she might have said or did that would upset me. I came up with a few, but none of them are particularly striking. Still, I suppose they’re worth exploring.
I feel angry, and perhaps a little scolded, by the way she responded when I admitted to her that I was feeling jealous of her little family. That wasn’t an easy truth to share because it feels shameful to have such feelings. I don’t want to have them. She told me that jealousy isn’t an emotion she can get behind, and that it’s better just to be happy for the other person or something like that. So quickly it shut the door on the topic and I was left feeling like I’d said something wrong. It made me feel like I couldn’t talk about those feelings anymore.
I’m angry, and confused, because I feel pressure not to send her texts outside of session. Granted, there has always been a boundary, which I have always been careful, I thought, not to overwhelm her. The Sunday before she left, I asked for and received a phone call because I was uncontrollably crying thinking I was about to lose my whole support system for insurance reasons. The next day, she made a comment about how that was the level of distressed she thought I should be to reach out like that. She briefly glossed over the idea of me becoming less reliant on her. It was the first inkling she’d given that maybe I was asking too much and then I didn’t get to talk to her for three months. It made me feel like, upon her return, I had to stop completely because otherwise I would be too bothersome.
I’m angry that when I told her how I was missing J after emailing her, she suggested cutting off that contact in the future, closing the door for good. I don’t think I even need to explain why that sent me spiraling. Imagining a life that doesn’t include J in a small way is not a thought I can tolerate.
I’m angry that I don’t have access to her instagram anymore. It’s honestly probably for the better, because it was fueling the jealousy, but I still feel like I’ve been rejected even though I’m not the reason for the change in settings.
Part of me knows that if I brought these topics to her, she’d happily dissect them with me. Part of me knows that that’s the right thing to do.
Yet whenever I’m in session, I can’t bring this up to her. It’s just blocked. Even when she provides me the perfect segue, I stall, I tangent, I try like hell to control my face not to tip her off that something’s wrong. Because I don’t feel like these are real reasons to feel anger.
Let’s be real. I’m really, above all else, angry that she left me. Though I’m over the moon that she’s back, though I feel tons of positive feelings towards her, it’s hard not to hold on to the latent anger.
It’s like I feel she shouldn’t get off so easy. Like she shouldn’t be allowed to just slip back into her role easy when those three months were as difficult as they were for me.
Oh, there’s that. I’m still angry that when she left me, she left me without stable help from a compatible therapist.
Whether it’s anger or not, something else I’ve noticed is that I’m holding back from allowing a connection with her. There is one on the surface, but it’s fairly shallow. I’m so in my own head, oversensitive to every little thing she says and does, that I can’t relax into a session.
I’m spending so much of my energy concealing what I feel like are inappropriate feelings. L would probably disagree, she’d probably find some way to excuse them, but since that isn’t for sure I just continue to stuff them. I guess I feel like the parameters of our relationship changed with the instagram freeze out and the no-text-boundary and like I was censored for the first time ever with the jealousy comment.
Maybe (probably) I’m reading way too much into this. I mean, let’s think about this further. She never said a lot of the things that I’m inferring from more ambiguous statements. Maybe none of her statements meant what I perceived them to mean. It’s not like I don’t have a habit of assigning myself the most negative messages possible.
Do I talk about this? Do I see what time does?
It’s that situation where the holding on to the poison is killing me, and it will degrade our relationship if I’m not careful, but I refuse to let it go and just focus on healing.