So, I first started seeing her a few weeks after my childhood best friend and first love died suddenly and unexpectedly. I ended up talking a lot about my parents because OMG they behaved so atrociously when I went home for Michelle's funeral. So very very badly. So that's when the 'abuse' word came up, because a lot of conversations went "And then my parents did X" "And did they do things like X when you were growing up?" "Yes, they did X, Y and Z." *eyes bug out of head* "And no one called child services? Really? Where were your teachers during all this?" And I really was not ready to hear that or deal with it yet.
So yeah. For a while she tried to promote the idea that Michelle wasn't really dead because her "spirit lived on" and I could still talk to her, which um. No. I'm too much a materialist for that to have had even a tiny chance of working for me.
Then there was the "You can re-experience your childhood, and be a parent to your child self. You can replace your bad childhood memories with these experiences of parenting yourself" which again. No. Time moves linearly and I cannot re-experience childhood. Even if I could simulate particular events, I still carry adult knowledge and experiences into the simulation and nothing can make me forget the way they played out originally. And while there's a lot to be said for self-talk and speaking to your inner child (and actually, the second therapist, the gender conformist one, was really good at that aspect of my treatment), that's not where the first therapist was going with it. And she didn't even try to help me understand that much of what I was feeling was grieving for the idea of a family, for what I should have had. It was all "You can make your bad childhood not matter anymore!"
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-11-15 09:18 pm (UTC)So, I first started seeing her a few weeks after my childhood best friend and first love died suddenly and unexpectedly. I ended up talking a lot about my parents because OMG they behaved so atrociously when I went home for Michelle's funeral. So very very badly. So that's when the 'abuse' word came up, because a lot of conversations went "And then my parents did X" "And did they do things like X when you were growing up?" "Yes, they did X, Y and Z." *eyes bug out of head* "And no one called child services? Really? Where were your teachers during all this?" And I really was not ready to hear that or deal with it yet.
So yeah. For a while she tried to promote the idea that Michelle wasn't really dead because her "spirit lived on" and I could still talk to her, which um. No. I'm too much a materialist for that to have had even a tiny chance of working for me.
Then there was the "You can re-experience your childhood, and be a parent to your child self. You can replace your bad childhood memories with these experiences of parenting yourself" which again. No. Time moves linearly and I cannot re-experience childhood. Even if I could simulate particular events, I still carry adult knowledge and experiences into the simulation and nothing can make me forget the way they played out originally. And while there's a lot to be said for self-talk and speaking to your inner child (and actually, the second therapist, the gender conformist one, was really good at that aspect of my treatment), that's not where the first therapist was going with it. And she didn't even try to help me understand that much of what I was feeling was grieving for the idea of a family, for what I should have had. It was all "You can make your bad childhood not matter anymore!"