It's bizarre. The minute she walked in the room, I disliked her. I don't know what it was, I just disliked her. And things went downhill from there.
The contrast between her and the first one couldn't have been stronger. She was so structured, disturbingly so. Yesterday's woman looked quite hippy-ish, and she took a much more relaxed approach.
Today was all 'what 3 words describe the space between you and your father', 'what phrase describes your mother'. And everything I said was met with 'can you give me an example of that', even when I'd just given her an example.
She also filled up those annoying 'therapy silences' - where they pause to give you time to think of something to add - by saying 'Mmm', 'Mmm,, 'Mmm', over and over, like she was slowly digesting what I'd said. Like it got more interesting with every passing second. It was so annoying. It was like the osteopath I saw in Liverpool who got round the problem of needing to see patients stripped down to their underwear by squinting his eyes so hard his lashes fluttered manically, like he was having af fit.
Yesterday, when I couldn't remember how old I was when the abuse started, that woman said 'how old do you feel when you think of that time'. The answer came instantly, I got tearful and we moved on.
Today, this one stopped me halfway through the session and said she was getting the facts, but no sense of 'me', and why did I think that was? But when I told her that I was very uncomfortable and was finding her questioning proscribed and confrontational; that she was phrasing for facts and getting facts, she had a go at me. She basically told me - without actually saying do - that I was a bad patient. Then she went on to accuse me of being like my father.
At one point, she even seemed to be suggesting that I'd be better off without therapy; she kept going in about if it was worth the awful unstable times when it feels like you're drowning in memories, like last night, when everything came flooding back at me just like when I tried working through the book on pain-as-childhood-trauma. Just from one appointment. But she seemed to think the healing that follows isn't worth that cost.
Or maybe it's just they she's such a shit therapist that she can't get you there.
She said she had experience working with people with chronic pain, but it didn't seem like she had any knowledge of somatic illness, or that she even recognised its existence. She'd never even heard of the book.
I think her therapy would've been very superficial. It would've been as close to the CBT-coping-strategies as a psychodynamic approach could get. She certainly shared the psychologist's inability to listen and unwillingness to accept I might have any insights to offer. Whereas the first one said I clearly had a lot of insight already, and was very keen to come at this from the somatic perspective - exactly as I am.
Today was a truly horrible experience, the absolute opposite to the day before, and I will never, ever go near that place again.
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