Posted by crushedout on February 26, 2005, at 15:41:24
I haven't talked about therapy in here in awhile. I've been seeing my T twice a week and finding that it's one off, one on most of the time. I.e., every other session is a good one and ever other is basically disappointing. I'm not sure what that's about, but anyway, last session was one of the goodies.
I came in just feeling kind of depressed in an undramatic way. Like just really sick of never feeling good. Feeling like my new meds aren't working, none of them work, and it's hopeless. She said something about calling my new pdoc and I said, "why bother." I explained how useless I thought pdocs were especially since all the meds were worthless too.
She asked me if I was angry. That kind of shocked me because I didn't think I was sounding angry. But then I realized I was. I asked her why she said that. She said because it sounds like I think no one can help me at all. That made me start to cry because it felt true. Several times that session I started to cry, but I always tried to fight it off. I'm sick of crying in therapy. (That's another issue I guess we need to talk about.)
Anyway, we talked about a bunch of other really useful, and painful, stuff. And at the end, I admitted to her that a few sessions ago when we were talking about what I should do with my life, and she expressed a sort of optimism that we could figure it out, I ended up getting angry at her about it. Not during the session, but later on, when I was mulling it over. I thought to myself, "Who the h*ll does she think she is? If I haven't been able to figure this out in 10-some-odd years (and not for lack of trying), how does she think she has the power to help me figure it out? It's hopeless. Doesn't she realize that?"
I told her this and she thought it was really helpful and interesting. She said, "So basically you come here and spend your hard-earned money trying to work on a situation that you think is utterly hopeless and you believe that your therapist is a fool if she thinks she can help you with any of it?" I was like, "Yeah, that's it in a nutshell." I laughed uncomfortably. She said that was important for us to know about and try to understand.
As painful as the session was (p.s. I lost the battle not to cry), I thought it was really helpful and I loved the way she reflected my anger without taking any of it personally. It made me feel really safe. And, it made me think about ways my old therapist was really bad at such stuff, and how glad I am to have gotten this new one.
poster:crushedout
thread:463811
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050225/msgs/463811.html