Posted by Dinah on November 22, 2003, at 13:22:06
In reply to Re: Therapists who terminate - a question » Dinah, posted by judy1 on November 22, 2003, at 12:59:19
Partly it's got to do with him, because it is very important to him not to give a promise of forever therapy and it took him a long time to find the right way of balancing his needs with mine.
But obviously if it took five years to trust him to begin with, and given the remaining issues I do have, I have some serious abandonment issues from childhood.
Let's see. My parents split for a while when I was two? and my mom and I moved across the country to live with my grandparents. My mom worked full time a couple of hours away so I was mainly in my beloved grandmother's somewhat distracted (busy farmwife) care, and with the grandpa who didn't like me too much. We left them to go back to live with my dad when I was four.
None of that stricly abandonment issues I guess. Or maybe they were. They weren't identified by me as such at the time.
There was other stuff in the middle too. My main actual memory of abandonment, which wasn't really I suppose, is that my mom had a job that had her picking me up late from kindergarten. If she left on time, she'd pick me up 30 minutes late. But if she worked late, I could be left wandering around that big K-12 school for hours in the days before after school care. Never knowing whether or not the next car would be hers. Not knowing whether I should bother waiting in front. Wondering at some level if she was going to pick me up at all, and knowing on every level that I must not be as important as those kids (every other kindergartner) whose parents picked them up as soon as school was over. And this was within months of coming back from my grandparents too, so it may have been all tied together in my mind.
Or maybe it's just a genetic susceptibility to rejection sensitivity.
Who knows.
I'd never ever get over being abandoned by someone I spent five years learning to trust. And I do enough borderline behaviors to know that I am sometimes stressful to him, though I try to keep it to a level that won't cause him to abandon me.
I'm so sorry for your experience, Judy. I can't even imagine, except in my worst nightmares. I'm glad your current treatment team is caring enough to be understanding of your fears.
poster:Dinah
thread:282173
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20031114/msgs/282534.html