Posted by Willful on August 24, 2010, at 22:43:21
In reply to Re: Deja Vu with therapist, posted by emmanuel98 on August 24, 2010, at 20:12:44
Many patients initially feel the need for a therapist to provide the love that they lost out on from their parents. But even if your therapist loved you in the way you wanted, it wouldn't provide or replace that love. It really isn't something that can be gotten later in life, no matter who or how much you're loved as a adult. It's something you get or don't get when you're a child--
What therapy or a therapist can give I think is a kind of love that helps you to give yourself the things that you lacked from your parents-- and I think often this isn't really love, but more things parents would have provided with love. I have a feeling that self-soothing, self-acceptance, equanimity, the ability to trust or to believe in others' good will-- and various other things like that-- are what's missing. And these things you can learn-- or come through experience and risk-taking to have a more belief in.
It's not a therapist's romantic love that really does it-- it's their caring and careful and wise attention to how you can develop these capacities in yourself. Patients come to therapy with this illusion about being loved enough by their T. But it's when you accept that you can't get the love you didn't feel in childhood-- and that, replacing it isn't what you do need--- and also recognizing that the right therapist can give you enough to help--without giving you romantic love-- that you get beyond this loss and not be permanently trapped with it.-- That is an important part of the work.
It sounds as if you can't give up this belief that being special enough will be healing-- and that without it, there's no hope for you. I wish you could see that this isn't true-- that you have a lot more capacities for growth and healing from within than you realize.
Willful
poster:Willful
thread:959593
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20100706/msgs/959723.html