25 thoughts on “Another No-Send Email to My Old T”

1. Hi Harriet,
   I also picture my T with a great family life, and me by myself….even though I know I don’t really know his life at all, but it still seems a lot better than mine. It’s a tough feeling to deal with.

   I’ve also gone to therapy that didn’t help me in the past. It’s exactly true – how do we know? I knew nothing about therapy, didn’t even know that a connection was key to the whole thing. Going for therapy with ron has been a whole different experience. So I understand where you’re coming from. Trying to work through it by writing is a great idea. Did you send the email?

   I think a really good T will refer a client on if they don’t think the fit is good, but then, a lot are not that great unfortunately. I know you’ll tell me J was great and it was your fault, but I just think it takes a really really good T to refer someone on, especially if they’re not causing trouble.

   Wishing you a good holiday. Sounds a little mixed, with some good things though. Take care.

2. I’ve been thinking about this, too. Seems like if a therapist feels they have some connection with you they’ll try to work with it. How can they know whether you’ll have a BETTER connection with someone else? Or, if they refer you on, that you’ll actually continue to search for a good connection, instead of dropping the idea of therapy altogether?
   I spent 5 years with a therapist who I felt intimidated by – and now I have one who I’m less intimidated by, but who’s to say there isn’t one out there who would be even less intimidating? Isn’t it part of the problem that I’m intimidated by others to the extent that I don’t express myself?
   What if Art T is less intimidating, but she’s not as skilled a therapist? It seemed like J was very skilled, but that intimidation factor seems important too. The more you can express, the more work you can do.

3. Ellen – I know my t has a wife and two kids and he spends a lot of time with them, so I am sure he is with them having a wonderful Christmas day.

   I’ve written 5 or 6 of these emails to J, but I don’t send them. I told Art T about it and she says maybe it makes it easier to write if I am actually writing with someone in mind. Maybe that is true. I would not say J was great and it is my fault, but J had his strengths and I was difficult, and perhaps he had strengths in areas that I didn’t need help with. If he had suggested that I see someone else I think I would have been devastated. So he was in a no win situation.

4. Laura – I thought that it would help me to stay with a therapist that intimidated me because I thought it would help me to overcome my feeling of inferiority with people like him. But that never happened. My current t does not intimidate me, which makes me much less anxious, but does it take away from what I need to change about myself? I don’t know. J was skilled in certain things, and Art T is skilled in other things. And I think what I need, and what I have needed all along, are the things that Art T is skilled in. Not to say that J didn’t help me, he definitely did, but it was a struggle for me. Do you talk to your t about the intimidation?

5. Hi Harriet, I think it is very worth reflecting on why you kept going back. My guess is that this will relate to a big pattern in your relationships esp. early authority figures and carers (parents, teachers, rabbis and such).

   Why didn’t J tell you? In my view he was pretty clueless – which is probably utterly unfair seeing I’ve never met him.

   Merry Hanukkah!

6. As to therapy. If a therapist doesn’t know when to refer someone they obviously don’t know much. I think there are huge numbers of excellent therapists, and lots who don’t know much.

   In my view change comes from acceptance. Happy to explain this more if you like. For the theoretical base see Perls, Hefferline and Goodman’s Gestalt Therapy (the theory section. It is not a light read but in this bloggers opinion is a work of genius.).

7. Evan – I have had trouble leaving some bad relationships in my life, but not really with authority figures. I think I kept going back to J because I got to have someone pay attention to me for 45 minutes. And not just anyone, but someone who normally would never pay attention to me in real life, the type of person who I longed to have attention from when I was young. And he was always telling me how great I am, and despite the fact that I didn’t believe him and it frustrated me at times, I guess I liked hearing it. That isn’t really therapy though, is it? And it makes me feel incredibly ashamed.

   I was just reading about Gestalt Therapy on Wikipedia and this jumped out at me: “To create the conditions under which a dialogic moment might occur, the therapist attends to his or her own presence, creates the space for the client to enter in and become present as well (called inclusion), and commits him or herself to the dialogic process, surrendering to what takes place, as opposed to attempting to control it.”

   J did a lot of attempting to control what took place, whereas Art T surrends to what takes place, with me and with her, and with me and her.

   I’d like to read more about Gestalt therapy, the only thing I have heard about it is the empty chair technique which sounds very scary to me. Thank you for the recommendation.

8. Hi Harriet, yes; the empty chair technique became famous and is not a bit of a liability. It does work incredibly well for the right stuff. What wasn’t often emphasised (and still isn’t emphasised enough in gestalt in general imho) is that good support is essential.

9. i fall in the “there’s no wrong way to do therapy” camp… but i bet you already knew that… sorry.

   :-)

   sure, sometimes there’s not a good match, but you have to be willing to talk about it with your therapist, and i don’t think you made that explicit with your previous T, am i right? i had a T tell me that suicide was an “abomination” (yes, those were his words) and i knew right then and there that we couldn’t work together. took me a couple of weeks, but i told him that i disagreed with his phrasing, even if he hadn’t meant it that way, and that i felt we weren’t a good match. he agreed… and off i went.

   took me 6 months to work up the nerve to find another therapist…

10. Catherine – my t said there is no right or wrong way to do therapy, but when he told me, 9 months after I started therapy with him, that we finally had a “normal” session, I knew that he wasn’t telling the truth about that. I tried to talk to J about therapy, but I didn’t understand it or how it was supposed to work. We had many conversations, and yes, maybe I didn’t make it explicit, but since I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like how could I know how to explain what I wanted? I blame myself, really, that is what I do, I take responsibility for everything so yes, you are right in that regard. He told me that he used a psychodynamic approach, and I guess I thought that meant something other than what it means. I was willing to talk about it, but he didn’t like to talk about therapy in therapy. I don’t know, now I’m even more confused.

11. hi Harriet, I’m talking to him about intimidation, thanks to you. I think we learn alot from how we respond to different therapists (I now have a group therapist, too), and I feel that I learn from your experience and Ellen’s. I can see that I feel intimidated to the degree that I feel ashamed of my own life. I was asking him about his daughter who is just now moving out into the world, and it brought up my own shame for a life unlived.

    for some reason, you tended to see J as Perfect, you put him on a pedestal. Partly it’s the situation – we’re coming to them to be healed. He’s the doctor, you’re the sick person – it’s a natural one-down situation. But you go farther – it’s you who connects the dots, YOU fill in the blanks (as Ellen says, you don’t know much – but you assume – no, INSIST – that he’s 100 times better, happier, than you.) anyone insecure about their own life would feel intimidated by someone Perfect. How could you let them see what is so shameful to you? I guess that’s a common obstacle in therapy, we’re so ashamed that we can’t allow ourselves to be seen.
    So if it comes from you, what good would it do to change therapists?
    and yet…

    It’s so interesting that you don’t feel intimidated by Art T. I wonder why you don’t make her Perfect as well. Is she a spinster? homeless? homely? fat? childless? a college dropout? Perhaps she’s warmer, less intellectual. Do you have an idea?

12. Laura – I’m glad I was able to put the idea in your head to talk to your t about the intimidation. Can I ask how he responds? I tried to talk to J about it and he would always make a joke about it. He was obviously uncomfortable with the discussion or even the idea that he intimidates me, and he claimed I am the only client who ever told him that.

    What is funny is that he is not perfect at all. He has a criminal record! He was addicted to pain meds, and he was a pharmacist. He stole pain medication right off the shelf at wherever he was working and I guess someone turned him in, I don’t know the actual details. He plead guilty, got fined and had a suspended jail sentence, had probation, had court appointed substance abuse therapy, regular drug testing, lost his pharmacist license and then decided to go back to school for 7 more years to become a psychologist. I always said that didn’t take away from his perfection – it was just a mistake. It sounds crazy when I say it out loud.

    The whole thing with J is that he brought back very strong memories of my peers when I was in middle school and high school. There were guys like him, the popular ones – smart, funny, highly attractive, athletic, and I was invisible to them at best, and a target at worst. My experiences with men like him continue to this day – probably because I perpetuate them! I am terrified of talking to people like him in real life, and I am convinced that the only reason he would talk to me is because I paid him. Frankly I never knew how he could stand to sit in the same room with me for 45 minutes a week.

    I was looking through my blog this week and came upon an entry I wrote about a dream I had. I was in the hospital and the doctor said to me, “I would rather treat a dead animal than treat you.” That about sums up how I think J feels about me. But he never did anything to give me that impression! He always tried to convince me how great I was.

    I spent a good amount of time trying to convince him how bad I was, and no matter what I told him, he didn’t think it was bad. I asked him if there was anything I could say that would make him think I was bad, and he said perhaps if I clubbed baby seals. Therefore I didn’t trust him, because how could not think there was bad stuff about me?

    Art T is young, therefore not in my demographic (J is 11 years younger than me, but I felt he was somewhat in my demographic.) I believe she is married based on the rings on her left hand, but I have not asked. I do not know if she has children. I don’t want to know a lot about her, I think knowing too much about J was not a good thing. She is a bit overweight, but she is pretty. She doesn’t wear makeup and isn’t glamorous like J is. She wears nice but nondescript clothing, unlike J who always dressed up. She is approachable. She takes off her shoes and curls up on her chair like I do. I bet she would sit on the floor with me if I asked, I think I did ask J once and he said the floor hadn’t been vacuumed in a few days. She is smart, but yes, not intellectual in our sessions unless she is explaining a theory or something. She is much more feelings oriented.

    The one thing that does intimidate me about her is that she is an artist in addition to being a therapist. So it is hard for me to do art, although I am working on it!

    And the really hard things, the things that I did ultimately tell J, I don’t think I could tell her. I’ll make that another blog post.

    I wonder if therapists are ever interested in the things we clients talk and write about regarding our therapy. I wonder if they would be surprised by any of this.

13. thanks for the thoughtful reply, Harriet. I’ll be chewing it over today.

14. sorry for my earlier post, i was tired and sometimes i post without thinking. i re-read and it totally sounds like i’m blaming you, which wasn’t my intent. i hear how frustrated you were. apology extended…

    i have had the benefit of lots of therapy over the years, some of the therapists made their theoretical orientation explicit and others didn’t. i’ve seen social workers, psychiatrists, done mindfulness, CBT, and DBT. the one that is working best for me is relational psychotherapy, the kind that ellen does, too. it’s an approach that says the relationship between the T and client is the most important to healing as, very simplistically, you have the opportunity to process and heal all of your important relationships via your interaction with them. i also had sharon on a pedestal for a long time, and whenever i tried to say i saw her up there, we would then spend lots of time taking her down from that pedestal… she tells me that i am the one in control, the one with the answers, the one is most important, that she is the guide.

    i am glad he said there was nothing bad about you, because there isn’t. that feeling, which i know intimately, is a direct result of abuse and/or neglect. we cannot fathom that our parents do not care for us in the ways that they should, teach us how to regulate our emotions, express boundaries and support and careful discipline that we come to hate ourselves, believing that there is something essentially bad or wrong about us.

    repeating: i see nothing bad in you, and i bet if you asked Art T she would say the same thing. he wasn’t lying.

    i have made many poor choices, and am still making them, but they are ways of coping… of keeping me alive… they are not expressions of something bad within. so no matter what you are doing, i refuse to see you as bad.

15. Hi Harriet,

    +1 to Catherine’s last comment.

    It would be interesting to reflect on what seeing J as perfect did for you.

    Provocative thoughts from me:
    The dream in the hospital was partly about your attitude to you too, as well as J (being convinced you are bad and so on).
    There isn’t much that you could reveal that would lead me to thinking you are bad either. We all do bad things – stuff we are ashamed of and guilty about – usually they are our best way of getting legitimate needs met. Usually the way to get ‘good’ is the ‘self indulgent’ path of being kind to ourselves and getting our needs met. (You can see that my morality is a bit different to the conventional – very happy to discuss this.)

    After saying which I hope we are still friends.

16. did you see this article “The Myth of the Good Client” recently posted (by a therapist):
    http://whatashrinkthinks.com/

17. Thanks for the link Catherine, that was superb

18. Catherine – no need to apologize, my reaction was actually very interesting to me. Thank you for your kind words, maybe one day I’ll believe them. J didn’t really like to talk about the relationship between him and me, and it hasn’t come up with Art T yet, but due to my previous therapy I am able to tell her the kinds of things that bother me in therapy (for example I am afraid to tell her the names of any family members because I would be hurt if she forgot them).

19. Evan – seeing J as perfect didn’t do anything positive for me, it definitely hindered my therapy with him. I don’t usually “do” bad things, the opposite really, I am always trying to good things, it is more like bad thoughts, which is supposedly OCD and out of my control, but makes me feel evil. Of course we are still friends!

20. catherine – I did see that, and I thought it was amazing! I like everything that she writes and I wish she could be my therapist. I believe she is in the NY area and recently has written about going outside for walks with her clients. A long time ago I asked J if he ever does that and he said the two times he did it, he locked his keys in the office. Then he asked me if I wanted to go outside, well, how could I say yes after that? So we never did.

21. yeah, she seems pretty cool, i enjoy reading her blog.

    this is another site, also written by a therapist, that helped me understand more about how trauma/neglect has influenced my behaviours and coping, and how the kind of therapy i am doing works:

    http://www.pete-walker.com/index.htm

    loads of good articles

22. I wanted to thank you for stopping into my blog, and for leaving a comment. I’m glad that you did because I have enjoyed reading your blog, and am glad that I came to check it out.

    Although I’m likely repeating so much of what others have said – I truly believe that when we are completely ready for therapy, it works out in the way that we need it to. Often, it takes time to fit with someone else, and it is not always easy, and then of course, sometimes we simply will never fit.

    I have spent time wishing and hoping that things would’ve been different with my prior therapist, and yet always come to the conclusion that although she was lovely {and good at what she does}, I didn’t fit well with her. Both she and I know that. She is what led me to working so hard this time around.

    I’m not entirely familiar with your story {yet}, but it sounds like you’ve found a good fit since that time … and I’m glad for that. Have a good rest of your weekend.

23. Amanda – I’m glad I found your blog, I know you know how it is to have changed therapists. I’m still finding it difficult even though Art T is a better fit for me, therapeutically. She says that my 4 years with J served a purpose and was important. Thanks!

24. I’ve been thinking about your response, above… Do you remember Bill Zeller? That he killed himself because he felt hopelessly bad and soiled? Do you think he was right – that he WAS hopelessly bad, or was this a FALSE belief – that made his life unlivable? I think most of us feel defective and unlovable or bad to a greater or lesser degree, and we hold tight to this belief. Perhaps it’s like wanting to be RIGHT, more than we want to be LOVED.

    The impulse to fight back against and QUESTION this belief can only come from us.

    The belief that you’re bad and unlovable prevents you from having fulfilling relationships, from opening yourself to intimacy and a genuine connection. If you think people actually hate you, or hate spending time with you, how can you ever let your guard down? It prevents you from enjoyment of your life.
    Yet, we emphatically insist that it’s true. We can’t let ourselves off the hook. We can’t see that all around us are other equally imperfect, perfectly human fellow travelers.
    I think that’s the work of therapy: to find the unconditional love for ourselves that wasn’t part of our upbringing. We need to learn to see and appreciate who we are, as well as learning to see others accurately. Learning to distinguish J (your good-looking therapist, confidante and advocate) from the (good-looking) Mean Boys in High School was part of your work together.

    It seems like we don’t see ourselves OR others accurately – rather, through a distorted filter created from painful past experience. The Mean Boys are PAST. J was something completely NEW in your life – someone who saw your goodness and worth, who cared about you and didn’t try to control you. He was someone who could be with your painful feelings, and your secret truths.
    I hope you’ll be able to share everything with Art T and I hope you’ll push back against your belief that you’re not good enough!

25. Laura – I do remember Bill Zeller, and no, I do not think he was right. He was a person with value and he was deserving of love and kindness. I don’t have particularly fulfilling relationships, although I know that people care about me. It’s not that I think people hate me, I just worry that if they knew the real me they wouldn’t like me anymore. It’s so hard to believe that the experiences I had in my childhood don’t exist for me anymore as an adult. How do they get so ingrained into my psyche? Why do bad things stick to my memory more than good things? Thank you for your comment, it is very wise and insightful. I hope I’ll be able to share more with Art T too.