Posted by pinkeye on June 24, 2005, at 15:11:16
And of course not sending it..
Hi Doctor,
I am going to write this last email to you.. I am going to give you some feedbacks which you may not like. I have given you only positive feedback so far, and this is the first time I am going to give you not so positive one. But I feel I need to tell you this for two reasons - one, to give me some peace of mind, two - to help you become better so atleast future patients (if you ever return to practice) would be treated better.
For what it is worth, the way you terminated me was really very wrong. You just sent me an email one day and vanished. It put me through extreme mental torture and I have beating myself up for the past 5 months over it. I have been tortuing myself about what I did so wrong that you ended up having to terminate me the way you did.
I have been suffering so much almost everyday for the past 5 months.. And it is such a torture..and I keep going through the same thing again and again in my mind.. You don't know how much of a suffering this abrupt termination and cutting off contact put me through. It is really cruel and horrible.
I can understand your stance partly - you had retired from beign a psychiatrist, email communication was getting too much for both of us and possibly introducing lot of miscommunication, and I was being too clingy and needy, and you possibly couldn't have continued supporting me. And I had started going to someone here, and you were also very busy. I perfectly understand that we needed to terminate.
But still with all that, you could have given me atleast 3 - 4 months prior notice and let me knew before hand that this was coming up, and given me some form of contact after termination - maybe write a brief mail once in 3 months for a year. I don't know if that is asking for too much. Any long term patients develop intense bond with their therapist, and cutting it off abruptly is not the right way to terminate. I would never ever have done it to any of my clients, if I were a therapist. I wouldn't have done it to my worst patient. It is an absolutely horrible and cruel thing to do. I don't know why you did it. Maybe you thought time would heal me - but it never really does for me. At best it dulls the pain, but it never realy heals. I always find it extremely hard to move on after bad relationships.. it takes several years for me.
This kind of abrupt termination is extremely hard for anybody to take - I know I am projecting a lot on you, and I am possibly replaying abuses that happened in my mind or possibly somehow thinking of you as my father and that is probably why I find it so very hard to move on. But many other patients do it, and their therapists seem to be able to navigate them well and heal them. I have seen many many therapists who handle termination very very gracefully and make sure that the patient doesn't suffer. And they have done it to patients like me - women patients, who were extremely clingy and had huge transference. And I have really tried my best to understand where I went wrong, and what I am projecting on to you. You don't know how much of effort I have put into understanding myself in these past few months.
I know you really wanted to help me, and you really tried to do your part well.. And I am glad I came to you. I know therapy in India is not anything like we did..I have read articles by many psychiatrists, and I don't like any of them - not even a single one.. I must have read atleast 30 - 40 articles in various magazines.. You are one of the most sensible persons I feel and you went beyond the Indian model of short term goal oriented therapy focussed only on actions and you tried to help me through my transference. I am grateful for all that.
But I think you really need to develop more emotional understanding and depth. You are very good in logical quickness and smart, but you lack a lot in understanding emotions.. You really need to learn more about it if you are ever thinking of returning back to therapy and being in psychiatry. Plus read about transference.. Especially if you are going to treat women clients long time, it is a must. You cannot treat without learning more about transference and how powerful it is and what kind of mental torture the patients go through. Otherwise, you will end up doing more harm in the name of helping. In fact, a huge part of treating long term patients is the focus on the relationship with the therapist. I don't know if you know all these, or even were taught about all these in your school. And maybe in your previous place you didn't have access to internet that much and good bookstores. But now you are in a bigger city, use this chance to learn about it. You should read some of the client discussion boards. They are really really helpful and they have a wealth of information especially about transference. If you are ever going to become a psychiatrist again and treat women patients, all of them are going to develop huge transference towards you. They are going to possibly think they are in love with you etc etc.. And I with so much of knowledge and access to internet, found it extremely hard to break away from that and understand where I am projecting on to you.. For lesser informed patients, it is going to be even more impossible. They are going to completely break down.
The therapy that gets done in India is not enough for healing. At best it is of logical help, and helps you control your actions and to certain extent your thinking. But for people like me who are already quite logically capable, but struggle with emotions, and find it difficult to be happy, that model is insufficient. IT works well for short term control. But if a person really wants to evolve into an emotionally healed and happy person, it is really insufficient. Intensive regressive therapy is what helps.
Even after all this, if you still prefer not to write to me even once, I also shall not write again. I still really think very highly of you, and I have very high regards for you and that will not change ever and I am grateful to you for the help you did for me. I think you had very little experience in treating patients like me and understanding transference, and I think in spite of your best interests, you went wrong. That is why I am even bothering to write this email because I know you are genuinely interested and cared to do a good job - atleast when I knew you in the beginning. You possibly have lost interest subsequently, and maybe you don't really bother or care anymore about therapy or all these things. But even then, you can just realize what it did to me, and maybe just acknowledge it to yourself.
poster:pinkeye
thread:518168
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050622/msgs/518168.html