So I mentioned before that there’s this box in my brain that has a default setting of “I’m something the cat dragged in,” and will skew all the regard data I get from people to basically say that. I have long resisted this verdict of me as a piece of garbage but I fear everyone else knows the truth about me and thinks of me and relates to me accordingly.
The only time in a relationship when I feel some relief from this dynamic is in that “honeymoon” stage before there is any real conflict or rupture. During that time I haven’t done anything wrong and the other person hasn’t been bothered by me in any way. As long as 100% of the data points coming from this relationship are positive regard then there’s no way there can be any other reality about me. It feels wonderful and amazing. It’s like finally, there’s someone in my life who sees me the way I long to be seen.
But it’s a very tenuous thing because as I mentioned earlier, all it takes is one negative regard data point… and the whole positive house of cards comes crashing down in my mind. It’s like the moment this person speaks of something negative about me, even if done in the kindest way possible and with the intent to help me, it’s like in my mind that person has finally learned the “truth” about me, has finally figured out what “those in the know” knew all along. I’d managed to dupe them for a short while, but eventually, the truth always comes out, right?
The degree to which this takes place is correlated with the degree to which I’m attached to this person. It’s not like this plays out with every single person in my life.
And there’s also the cognitive awareness that this is all based on some seriously distorted beliefs.
This dynamic in my mind is currently going on with my therapist. Around the middle of the summer I had an emotional breakdown during a session. It was provoked by him telling me some of the feelings that were coming up for him as a result of some of the ways I was approaching him and our work. He thought it would be helpful to share some countertransference (and he used that word), and I think in the long run it will turn out to be therapeutic. I’ve already gone back to that moment several times in processing through various dynamics that have played out in my life, and I’m about to do it again as I’m now exploring this particular one. We certainly can’t fault that experience for therapeutic mileage!
What’s playing out for me now is this sense of loss concerning how my therapist views me. Really, my perception of how he views me. We’ve been working together for going on four years now, and for the first three years and eight months he never had one negative thing to say about me. It didn’t matter what I brought to him, he always found a way to express it as a positive thing. A lot of times the positive was the simple fact that I’d shared this difficult thing, but often it went further than that. I have received a lot of very deep affirmation in therapy.
And then this summer it seemed like all of a sudden my therapist was saying negative things about me and how those things made him feel (his feelings seemed negative to me). And he said something my mother had said to me more than once, which in retrospect was probably the phrase that triggered the actual breakdown, the moment when my mind just couldn’t anymore. It’s a common expression, though, so not something a therapist should just automatically know is a trigger phrase.
Ever since then there’s a part of me (Crusader) that has been trying to vindicate myself in his eyes, prove to him that I’m really not all those things I think he just accused me of.
There were a few sessions where I saw an opportunity to point out ways in which I’m not those things and did, and so now it’s like I have an axe to grind with him.
We talked about that, and I told him about Crusader in the last session. He knows what’s going on and understands. I know that he still holds positive regard for me and that I have nothing to prove to him. I also know that as a therapist he has probably encountered far worse from clients, possibly even had clients cuss him out and stuff like that which I’d never do (so far anyway).
So part of this has been processed.
Today what I’m feeling is this sense of loss, though. Up until recently my therapist was the one person in my life who did not harbor a single negative thought about me, who did not regard me in even the slightest way as something the cat dragged in. But then it all came crumbling down that one session during the summer.
Objectively I know that truly nothing has changed in his mind. He’s told me this in all sincerity (and totally nondefensively). Emotionally I’m not convinced. Because now there’s a negative data point, and that data point carries more weight than three years and eight months worth of prior data points! All those other data points were outliers, a kind of unintentional lie. My therapist was just being polite, it turns out. And the emotional part of my mind is feeling devastated. He showed his hand. He revealed that he knows the “truth” about me and from here on out it’s just going to be a polite charade.
That’s the dark place my mind goes to and it makes me feel sad and heartbroken.
The fact that I know cognitively none of this is true is no comfort to me right now. I mean, what if I’m wrong? I’m likely wrong. That’s what my emotions tell me. The box part has analyzed and… who can argue?
So I feel sad, sad, sad.
Sad because of what I feel I’ve lost in my therapeutic relationship. But also sad over whatever happened to me to cause me to be so convinced of all this malarkey in the first place. And sad because I’m not sure this can be easily fixed. Will the rest of my life be a matter of forcing myself to listen to my cognitive brain telling me this isn’t true while my emotions are telling me it’s all over yet again?