Published on 12, July, 2020
I want to be loved. I want my feelings to be validated. I want to understand the world. I want to read people's minds.
I have left my therapy recently. Well, I felt misunderstood at times. In one occasion, after a stressful session where I was really distressed, my therapist was whistling happily in the kitchen before I leave the place. I thought it was very insensitive of her. I have been anxious and frozen in few sessions and we couldn't change or improve the situation very much. She seemed confused about what was going on with me. I left those sessions blaming myself for not improving a bit in breaking the anxiety cycle or learning how to deal with it. I couldn't talk about how I felt about my self-diagnousis because I was afraid of being unbelieved. There were some questions she asked that I didn't understand. Her questions made me doubt myself. I can't tell if she did that intentionally.
I can't get the situation out of my mind. It feels like a breakup with all the feelings of anger, sadness and relief. I can't stop rethinking her intentions and my decision. There are some other things about her that I found "cool" and the fact that she's older=wiser and more knowledgeable made me ignore how I felt. I still think to myself "is it me or was really happening?". For some silly reason, I think that a cool person (progressive ideology) can't be wrong, it must be me who was wrong!.. also, the isolation that I live in makes therapists almost the only person to know the real feelings that I have. This makes them more special to me while I'm just one more client to them.. I have an experience of falling in love with one therapist before. I tend to fall in love with people who can't love me back. Thank you guys for reading.. I don't think that I could have shared this anywhere else..
I had a moment with my therapist where I hadn’t yet driven off after the session (I was connecting my phone to the cigarette lighter or something before getting going) and glanced in the rear view mirror for a second only to see her stepping towards what must have been her own car some spaces back. She was on her mobile phone, to a partner, a friend, a family member, a takeaway.. who knows? Nothing wrong with that, and I drove off seconds later after completing my technical jiggers pokery. But I realised it had made me feel oddly alarmed to see her outside of the inner sanctum of her office. Taking the nonsense I’d shared out into the world with her. I brought it up with her the following week, saying ‘I’m a bit weird to have had that thought/feeling’ (after all she’s not a hologramatic Doctor who exists in one structure or something) but she said that not only was it normal but she’d had it with her own therapist not long before, when his car ended up behind hers some of the way home and she couldn’t relax despite the irrationality of that and her own professional wisdom that ‘should’ have grounded her.
Just shows that we’re all flawed and that somehow helped to hear that she could relate. Also, I fully realised that once she’d left the building my stuff I’ve said was no more interesting for her to think about or disclose (against the rules anyway) than a blocked pipe would be to a plumber. ‘You want to have seen this sink I had to fix today…’ Doesn’t happen does it?!
Thank you for answering this. I don't expect therapists to keep thinking about what we tell them. I find it insensitive to sing or whistle happily knowing that a very distressed person who has been pouring their heart out to you can hear it. I was 2 minutes from leaving the place and I wouldn't mind if she did so afterwards.
Sorry Ree, I didn’t mean to be insensitive. I went down my own avenue there and hadn’t meant it to sound like a counterpoint but I can see how it did. And I’ve had that kind of thing too, causing me invisible distress. A colleague who whistles cheerfully after casually relaying something he knows will discomfort or upset me. So I get it. Oddly enough, I do remember my therapist starting to sing as I was putting in my coat one time. But I think there was some mutual sense that it had been a cathartic or ‘breakthrough’ session and she let her pleasure in that feeling show a little despite knowing I was not in a markedly better place, just…unburdened. But it could have hit me differently on another day. We are often sensitive people as autistics. Not ‘unduly’ so in my opinion, it’s the rest of the world that seems a bit lacking there. But that’s how the world keeps turning.
That’s how I feel all the time, I understand.