Posted by Dinah on March 26, 2011, at 8:26:05
In reply to Re: I withdraw my previous post » Dinah, posted by Tabitha on March 26, 2011, at 2:10:02
I wasn't really thinking of it that way so much as I was thinking about it as love. When you have strong negative feelings about the formerly beloved, the attachment is just as strong as it ever was. And perhaps the temptation to stoke negative feelings to break a long attachment. As well as black and white thinking. Which may be a borderline trait, but certainly not one where borderlines have a monopoly. :)
And I supposed my everpresent pull to the middle and avoidance of extremes. I have a feeling it makes me contrary, because if anyone were to talk about the unmitigated joys of therapy I'd have a similar kneejerk response to pull to the middle.
But...
I will say I'm suddenly pleased that my many years were with my therapist, fall asleep as he may have done. He may have rooted around in my past a bit, and challenged my distorted thinking a bit. But most of what he did was simply to help me modulate my emotions. Apart from his own life, he really is calm to the point of phlegmatic.
I'd bring all these emotional storms to him and they'd beat against his solidness. Then he'd reflect back to me, or discuss them with me, and they'd looked subtly changed. The events were the same. He might even agree with me that they were very bad. But they'd be presented back to me and incorporated in me in a slightly modified version. My therapist operates on the basis of eastern philosophy a lot, so he might have some wisdom story or parable. So I'd go in overwrought and come out less wrought.
Sometimes he wouldn't even have to be wise so much as just be his large solid self to absorb all that extra emotional energy and help me moderate it.
So it's true that I didn't learn to find causes for my feelings in the sense that those with more psychodynamically oriented therapists do. Sometimes I envied those brilliant interpretations other therapists seem to do. The discussion about dreams, etc. But neither do I really regard them as the weather. Or at least not the weather as it appears on the surface. Maybe the weather reported as fronts and atmospheric pressure and convection and currents. So that my therapist wouldn't be as likely to speak of my reaction in terms of it reminding me of something my mother used to do or some deep seated emotional conflict or of an areas where I need to change something inside. So much as of doing a study of prevailing climate conditions. For example: I didn't get enough sleep, there's been a constant pressure of stress lately, I tend to avoid when anxious, or I have a oversensitivity to rejection or criticism. Then we'd discuss how all those atmospheric variables are coming together to create the perfect storm. Or a minor turbulence, depending on the occasion. So that they might not be such a surprise to me, I might even be able to identify conditions beforehand that might lead to a problem, and (just) possibly take steps to avert the disaster.
(Chuckle) If my therapist had framed things in terms of areas where I needed to change, therapy would have been an epic fail with me. It's because he accepted my failings as facts as impersonal as convection and pressure, and strove to help me find ways to work around those givens, and possibly subtly pointed out the ways they were hurting me, that I was able to change at all.
And of course, my personality is such that he couldn't just give me homework assignments to learn these things. I did and do reject emotional lessons presented didactically. It was more of a molding as in river on rock. A constant wearing down of my own ways of viewing the world.
To my therapist's credit, he did learn these things about me and modify his approach to me. I think in general he does more of a hands on, homework assignment, egg of shame sort of therapy. In fact, I heard him giving one of his clients the egg of shame as he was walking them out in a different direction than usual. :)
Your therapist didn't serve these functions for you? I know they aren't things everyone would find helpful, but I suppose I regret if you didn't get these things from your therapist. Or if she constantly framed your distress in terms of opportunities for improvement in you.
(I love cost/benefit analysis and sunk cost theory. My therapist had the good sense not to pursue the "and what benefits do you get out of feeling this way - what are the secondary gains" after my reaction the first time or two. But I suppose it's vaguely conceivable that those thoughts may have influenced him even if he bent over backwards never to speak the words.)
poster:Dinah
thread:980953
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20110324/msgs/981178.html