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Confused about my T feelings - please advise

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Ales2:
Biddy - one more thing - what your therapist did - dismissing your feelings and assuming you are a malingering baby was awful!  So sorry you went through that. 

It was also unprofessional and cruel to stop taking calls without BOTH explanation and referral. If he cant help you, he should HELP by referring you to someone who can.

I can totally relate to not be able to trust another therapist. Your experience sounds worse than mine. With me, I sometimes think if I were to go back and try to "work it out with him" I would only be lining his pockets and getting nothing more than frustration in return. Not wise in my book.

Anyway ((((((Biddy)))))))

sKePTiKal:
Sorry I'm late here... but I see another possibility. You touched on it briefly, Ales... but didn't quite get to absorbing the whole enchilada.

When we have feelings, what changes those?
How do we learn to let things go -- and what on earth DOES this mean, "let it go", existentially?

When we have the same crappy feeling, over & over, and over & over until it seems like dogma, reality, and the doomed fate of our lives... what is that trying to tell us?

There are different approaches to T. And within those disciplines, there's sort of a personal style to each T.

My T would let me tell my story -- until I got to one of those painful brick walls, and then simply let me FEEL the feelings and be there for me. Self-pity, in my case, was an avoidance technique for grieving my very real emotional losses. :shrug:  In a way, it was functionally dysfunctional... my logic, if you can call it that, was because NO ONE ELSE cared, by indulging in self-pity I could at least acknowledge the existence of the fact that caring SHOULD exist in the world and that I was a candidate to be cared about.

We spent a couple years doing this. It felt like years, anyway. I had to get to know this from the inside, be able to see it from the outside like it was someone else's problem, puzzle over the alternatives... try some things on for size, see if they fit... and then one day - the bubble just popped. And the world was vibrant, fascinating, and charming... colors were brighter... birds were happy... and I was walking about 6 inches above the ground giddy-happy. (That wears off; life happens...)

The "work" that we did was NOT her guiding me to "do this", "feel that", "think this"... the work was simply her giving me her time and attention - and CARING - while I continued to suffer through really feeling my grief, my aloneness in my experiences of the past, until I'd REALLY let myself feel it - and realize, nope; I didn't "fall apart" into a blathering idiot or go crazy from it. It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

It was really hard work, for me. It must've been frustrating for her because my creative streak meant I was never at a loss for some evasive avoidance scheme. She had to repeat the above quite a few times, before I couldn't avoid the obvious anymore. The obvious is:

Life isn't always fair.
Some of us have more shit to walk through than others; but we all got our own shit.

Shit washes off.
--------------------------------------------------------------

One of the reasons, I think, that there are different kinds of therapy is because people are all so different. This (above) worked for me. Sounds like this T you described, and I would've hit it off. But it didn't work for YOU. That time, anyway. Maybe another time, and you'd be ready to face the worst of the feeling - feel it - and get to the point, where you'd know what to do on your own and be able to do it, without getting "stuck" on "repeat" of it. I took breaks; went back and then kept going. I must've learned SOMETHING, because even this horrible thing with my D and grandsons, as much as it triggers my old stuff - and feeling bad for them, too - is "do-able"... and every once in awhile, I can even find good, legitimate ways to help. Oh - and I still have my old quirks and my old avoidance techniques are still hard-wired into my brain.

But I can "see" it better now... and shift gears or change direction.

Meh:
There was a grief group that I went to a couple of winters ago.

The therapist who organized it was big on people having their experiences and ALSO he did stop people and cut people off with certain things because he said there were certain cycles that people get caught in that just keep people stuck.

Not sure if that has any relation to what you have stated.

It sounds mainly like you really need to have somebody understand your experiences.

Maybe the therapist is not the best match for you...

Ales2:
Okay, so I called another therapist today. Published author. Met her once at a book signing and lecture. Very well known had a radio/tv show.  The session rate is too expensive for me.

I said that I was stuck, even though I know what to do (look for job, date) but can't seem to do it on my own. I have an inertia and procrastination problem I hope to solve. I need a kick in the pants essentially. I have lost my confidence and even though I know I am worthy in ways I did not before, Ive lost my mojo and drive. I need to get it back. In the book, she has done work with people with similar problems.

My concerns are the following:

 1) too expensive, money better spent on other things (i.e i have no income)

 2) my default N wound - is that there is a "mental block" (my N mother told this to my friends mother at lunch when I was 8 years old, if you can believe that), something wrong with me that needs to be solved/fixed/ changed/eliminated - this is what I believed all my life, its not true, I have a self esteem and worthiness/assertiveness problem that is the result of this N wound. Basically, my N wound is a LIE. All of them are. Focusing on that LIE kept me from living my life productively and kept me as a people pleaser.

 3) Ill be a wounded child, a malingering baby - when I need to grow up and be more emotionally self sufficient, ie support myself emotionally, the therapist can tell me that, but of course, I'll be in therapy continuiing to be a baby, if that makes sense.

 4) My fears are that the job search is more "loaded" there are more issues attached to it this time - from 23-40, when I was financially indepdent, I attracted N bosses and bullies, not knowing why. When I got laid off the last time, thats when my life unraveled, I went through a year on unemployment and used another 20k in savings. At some point, I asked my N mother for $$$ and then several months later discovered she's a N. So, I needed her money before I knew what a huge mistake I was making. So, this tiem aroudn, getting a job, is also severing ties with her and will have to be for me to move on enough.

So, here I am. Not sure I want to start up therapy again. A little afraid of the expense, and not hearing anything I dont know already. I wish I could morph back into the old me, the hard working independent one, I was like that once before and was very successful in some way, just not now. And, I want to maintain the depth of what I have learned and before I was little more aloof and insecure that was hidden behind the hard work.

Ales2:
My pet peeve with therapists is this:

Quote
Blaming people, life or your family is like wearing cement boots swimming & wondering why your drowning?? Own your life no-one else can!

Written by my former therapist on his twitter page. He doesn't seem to understand the negative conditioning and coping patterns that come from NMothers...except, guess what, he wrote a book about it.  Hard to believe that he can be this insensitive.  As a therapist, his job is to help his patients understand their maladaptive coping patterns from NMoms that interfere with them taking full responsibility for their life.  No wonder therapy with him did not work out.

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