Solstice

Hi Jade. No, you're not the only one. While I now find that I'm most anxious in the mornings (likely the result of the fact that, like you, I have a job that causes me no end of stress and tension), nights really used to get to me. Something about the quiet and the stillness let my mind run wild. It's not nearly so bad now, but if I'm alone in the house at night, I need to make sure there's plenty of bright light, and I need to find things that fully occupy my mind. I am sorry you are having such a tough time, both with your anxiety and your work. I hope things get better for you very soon.

Hi KitKat. Yes, I can relate to the anger you're describing. I've never been physically violent to anyone, ever, but when I'm angry, I feel like I want to harm everyone around me, including myself. What I'm slowly coming to realize is that the anger is a defense mechanism. It "protects" me -- thinking about tearing everyone else, or myself, apart, so that I don't have to cope with the emotional pain I feel. It's scary, I know. When I'm angry, I hear myself say things I can't ever imagine I would say. I hurt people I can't ever imagine I'd want to hurt. Afterwards, I hate myself more than ever. I'm not sure I have any advice, except to reach out and get some support. Friends, family, professional -- preferably, all of the above. I know how hard that is, believe me, but I really think it's the only answer. Please take care of yourself.

Hi Jenna. I can't give you the sort of response you're asking for -- a parent's perspective -- because I never had children. In large part, that's because my experience with my parents was similar to what you describe. One of my earliest memories is my mother telling me, in a very matter-of-fact way, that she and my dad never wanted me. I heard that message many times during my childhood, and into my adulthood. Like you, it left me asking "what did I do?" It left me feeling defective. After much therapy, I think I am coming to understand what I hope you can understand as well: it's not about you, or me, or any other child, being "not good enough," or "defective," or unworthy of love. We're all worthy of love. The "defect," or, as my therapist puts it, the "deficiency," is in the parent who is not able to give a child the love that child deserves. My parents have that deficiency, and it sounds like yours do too. I suspect plenty of parents do, probably because of something they experienced when they were children themselves. The bottom line is that their treatment of you says nothing about you and everything about them, and even though this isn't the response you were looking for, I wanted to share that thought with you. Please take care.

OK, I guess, LaLa. Still trying to make it work with my current therapist. I'm finding some of the work I'm doing with her helpful. But I'm fairly down today, so I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm. How are you doing?

I'm not ignoring anyone...I've just been very down the past couple of days and not up to much of anything. LaLa, as to what my former therapist saw as so dangerous in my current relationship is that it is toxic -- we are both verbally abusive and unkind to each other. Part (most) of the reason I am in therapy is the fact that, even though I learned growing up that lashing out verbally at people is the answer to feeling bad, I don't want to be that way. So, I sought help. Unfortunately, my former therapist didn't see my part in the negative dynamic of my relationship. She expressed that she believed that I was wrongly blaming myself and that I was justified for lashing out. She basically made my husband the "bad guy." I don't know why she did that...maybe something in her history, or maybe she was deceived by the "mask of okay" that I wear. Either way, it didn't help me, so I moved on. I know that what's important is the connection with my therapist, more than any particular modality of treatment. But I have such a hard time making a connection with anyone, and the worse things get for me, the harder that gets. So maybe the lack of connection really is me, and not her. Anyway, I agree with both you and IJ -- I need to continue being as honest as possible with her, and try to work through this and find a way that she can help me. I don't really want to go find another therapist, again. But I also agree it's worth setting a deadline, of perhaps a few weeks...if I can't feel safe with her by then, or at least safer, it may well be time to move on.

DD, you're right, I am going to have to try to resolve it with her next week -- and if I can't, then I need to really start thinking about my options...they are rather limited where I live, but there must be some. The thing that I find most frustrating is that her "brand" of therapy is supposed to be really, really good for my particular issues, and there is no one else in town who does it...sigh. LaLa: The reasons I left past therapists were (mostly) different from what I am experiencing now. I left one because her answer was to pile on medications that made me feel worse, and not better. I left the next one because she insisted that I could only be healthy if I leave my current relationship, which I am not willing to do right now. I did not feel the distance with them that I am experiencing now, and, especially with the second one, I did feel like I could safely open up to her. I just wasn't OK with her insistence (and it really was insistence) that my problems were caused by somone else. I have tried group therapy. As a matter of fact, my current therapist has a weekly group in which I participate. At first, I found it helpful -- at least I could look around and see that there were other people who fight the same battles I fight. But, more and more, I find that group consists of my therapist reading to us out of a binder of materials she has. Interesting, but not overly helpful.

So I had therapy on Wednesday...Yet again, I tried to open up, explain how I was feeling about therapy and everything else, and -- I just left feeling like there was a disconnect. Like what she thinks will help me and what I think I need are in two different universes. LaLa, you asked if my therapist reminds me of my mother. Thankfully, no. But she just seems so distant. Given that I have trouble opening up in th best of times, opening up to someone who just doesn't seem to care or understand me is even harder. No matter how hard I try to just express what is inside me, I know I am keeping a wall up, and I don't know how to tear it down. And I had an experience in this most recent session that made it even harder. We were talking about being mindful of difficult emotions, and she had me do an exercise: sit quietly, focus on my breathing (the standrd mindfulness stuff) and then focus on a difficult problem I am dealing with, something that causes an unpleasant emotion. So I turned my focus to a problem in my life that is making me angry. At that point in the exercise, I was supposed to simply experience my anger and watch for it to subside. But instead, as I kept working through the exercise, I was getting more and more angry, and the exercise was making me angry, and it just wasn't subsiding. So, when the exercise was over, I told her that -- wanting to be honest. She got really upset, and made some comment about how now she had screwed up and "ruined my day" or something like that. She was so distressed that I was sorry I'd been honest about how the exercise impacted me. Which makes me not want to be honest in other situations...It's very frustrating. I don't know what to do. I don't want to quit therapy, but I think I need to feel I can at least be honest there...

LaLa, thank you for sharing your thoughts. I could certainly relate to a lot of what you wrote -- particularly your experience of being unable to express/feel real feelings when with your therapist. I feel very much the same way. I think the bottom line is I don't feel "safe" with her. For me, it's a combination of being afraid that she won't "accept" me and the things that you wrote about...the fact that I don't accept myself, and I'm scared of letting this pain out. I just feel I can't/shouldn't/don't want to open up to her, to show her the lonely little girl that no one ever wanted or accepted that's hiding behind my mask of "OK." Because that little girl is angry and frightened and hateful and resentful. I don't like her, so I don't want to show her to anyone else...I will try talking to her about this today. See where that takes us. As to how I am doing -- I'm just down right now. A combination of lack of sleep, too much work, so much stuff in my personal life that seems to be falling apart. I have a strong urge to just curl up and cry, but I'm here at work and have to keep going. Anyway, I hope all is well with you.

I get my sense of being competent from my job, where I know I am smart and tough and good at what I do. Outside of my job, though, I see myself as not competent -- just scared and weak and confused, because that's how I act. And I have no sense of being loveable...because the people in my life don't love me, and I don't love myself, and I look at how I act and I don't see a loveable person there. Clearly, my therapist is trying to teach me to "love" myself through the self-compassion work she has me doing, but I would have little compassion for someone who acts like I do, so it's a tough sell. (As to being kind, fair enough. I'll take courage and self-esteem and working to make the world a better place over kindness any day of the week.)

I don't know...it almost seems like I'm dwelling too much in the past and the bad things that happened to me when I was much younger. It took me years to recognize that my mother was, in addition to being physically abusive on a minor scale, also emotionally abusive on a major scale. Took me even more years to recognize that by letting it all happen and being an absentee dad, my father was in his own way abusive. But it seems as though, since I've recognized those things, I've only gotten "worse." Now that I've allowed myself to recognize those things, I can't deal with them, or anything much else, at all. Maybe working through it here, with the support of kind people like you, will help. But there's an awfully big part of me that just thinks I need to quit crying about it already, buck up, and move on.

LaLa: That sounds like an interesting book -- I may have to take a look at it (books are almost like a drug for me. Or at least a passion). The type of therapy I'm in now is a combination of dialectical behavior therapy and CBT. Supposedly the best type of therapy for someone like me, with some of the borderline personality disorder traits and self-harm issues. I've tried a number of other types of therapy -- from plain old CBT and old-fashioned psychoanalysis on the "vanilla" end of the spectrum to inner child work and dream analysis on the "stranger" end. And I've spent some time taking anti-depressants and anxiety meds. All to little or no effect... Mark: Truth be told, I think I am still looking for that "a ha" moment -- so that I can still believe maybe I don't have a choice in all this, and maybe I can blame someone. Rationally, though, I know better. I also know my feelings are telling me something. They are telling me I've gone too long without an effective, healthy way of coping, and that I need to choose a new path. The problem is that despite that realization, I do not choose that new path. I just keep plodding down the same old path that I know can result in everything I don't want.

DD: You bring up some good points. Maybe my therapist is just trying to push past my defenses by making me angry -- that would explain a lot of our interactions, and perhaps why I feel that she just doesn't "care." And maybe my dissatisfaction is that I am looking for the social support you mention to come from her. That's not really her job. However, my problem is that I don't have much (any) social support elsewhere. Just people who I've hurt so often that they don't care to support me anymore. LaLa: I do plan to tell my therapist next week that I feel like she's just not "getting it." As to how I'd imagine her reaction if she did "get it?" Well, I picture something like the couple of times I had to go to the emergency room, with a real emergency. The doctors were calm, but there was obvious urgency in their behavior, because they understood that they needed to move fast or I'd be in real trouble. I just don't see that from her, but I feel as though this is no less an emergency. You ask about what we discuss in therapy. I've brought up my relationships, my history, and the traumas that set my issues in motion, and we've talked about them to some degree, but she mostly focuses on my current state, or the recent past -- times when my emotions got the best of me. She doesn't seem interested in uncovering "everyting" in the depths of my mind, but that's how I imagine the help I'd like to receive. I imagine her delving into the reasons I can't cope, like my past trauma and bad relationships and poor self-image, and helping me to come to terms with those things so I can cope better. Crying used to work as a coping method. I'd start to cry when I was hurting and eventually wear myself out. But it stopped working. I still cry when I'm hurt, but now it's not enough to soothe the pain. IJ: Maybe it is just a matter of time, as you suggest. I've always been a goal-oriented, impatient person, so that's a bit challenging for me to accept.

Your first response didn't hurt me -- all it did was remind me of what I am afraid will happen, and I would have reminded myself soon enough. Anyway, please don't hold back, and please don't feel either responsible or guilty for my feelings. I'm posting here in hopes of learning and moving forward through sharing with others. And I do appreciate you sharing.

It took me a while to respond to your post, DD, because it tapped into some of my deepest fears these days -- that I will have to fall apart completely before I get any real help, and that I won't be able to get myself or a life together again after that happens. I'm so glad to hear that you are putting the pieces back together. But I worry: what if I can't?? And as to finding the right therapist...I've been to several over the past few years. All highly recommended, all highly trained. This most recent one is supposed to be the best in this city for my issues...maybe it's not her. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I want something I simply can't have.

Thanks, all, for your responses and questions. I'll try to take them in order... Mark: What I'm referring to losing are my relationships (the few I have), my job, and my health. And I know (or at least I believe I know) the root causes of my actions -- extreme fear, anger, and massive self-loathing. I've got tons of insight into myself. But that doesn't seem to hep me to stop. Lana: Thanks...your support means a lot to me. IJ: At the suggestion of my therapist, I regularly practice relaxation techniques throughout each day. The hope is that I could use them when I'm triggered and want to SI...but the problem is that the time from trigger to blow up is too quick. I don't even think to try to relax, let alone manage to do it. LaLa: Yesterday's session was...not satisfying. I tried, really tried, to drop the mask, to really show my therapist what's going on with me and to honestly disclose my feelings and the ways I harm myself. I was again left with the feeling that she just didn't "get it," but I don't know. She asked me to do self-compassion mediations each day. Which I will do, diligently -- but I'm scared that's not enough. You asked about the reasons I self harm. It's really both things that you mentioned. Sometimes the pain inside me gets so big that the only way I can find to control it is to hurt the outside of me. It can be calming, or at least numbing. And sometimes I do it because I feel like such a horrible person that I just want to damage myself.