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https://www.psychforums.com/blog/Johnny-Jack/ups_and_downs_of_working_with_a_specific_t_b-4410_sid-9d37eb03889bc1214e2b2f97e4ac7365.html

Author:  Johnny-Jack [ Sat Mar 23, 2013 2:07 pm ]
Blog Subject:  Ups and downs of working with a specific T

My life can't go on without outside help. Work has been such an incredible challenge the past year as I've been given a different job that requires new organizational skills that I'm still developing. I've hung in there and somehow been able to avoid enough of the sporadic (triggered) procrastinations that otherwise might have gotten me fired. But we need help from three angles. The first angle is therapy.

I've gone back to a psychiatrist I worked with in order for him to help me find another T. This is our third go with this man and it was a compromise with Jonathan that we are back at all. Being a shrink, he can prescribe a couple meds we ran out of and really need. Plus I continue to have weird internal blocks that prevent me from researching a new T on my own. I just can't do it.

About 18 years ago, when I had been on social security disability for a couple years, I requested a gay T because I assumed I was gay. But since the gay sexuality never felt nor worked right, I knew there was something about it that I needed to work through. Plus the periodic debilitating depressions. Maybe I was just uncomfortable with being gay? It never seemed that simple. I was very out of shape when I started going to this shrink but then I went through maybe my 10th life period of working out constantly and I was quite buff. I went to a session one day with this T in something like a tank top and quickly got the impression that the shrink was, well, checking me out. We were still talking about stuff but I caught him looking me over several times.

The man is gay, so I can't say this was a surprise. But inside, alarms went off. What I didn't understand was that the body had been abused as a child, so this older man looking at us, as the father and others did before abuse, was not safe, it was terrifying. It was maybe the next session I just didn't show up. Then I wrote him I couldn't continue going any more, just like that. I now think he knew why. I had been talking with him about years back meeting parts of myself, Jonathan and a child (Little John), and so the therapy was making real progress. The "checking me out" turned out to be extremely damaging for my therapy, my discovering the DID, and so my life. I stopped trusting therapists and went it alone, for years. I've only hinted to him that he did things my alters didn't like or trust. Saying anything more feels too scary.

Jonathan, who is 100% straight, does not like this T and always refused to come out and speak with him. He is the leader of the alters so we can't make progress without him. Over a year ago he insisted we transition to someone new who the others could feel comfortable with, ideally an older woman, but I still drug my feet a bit. Even though I knew he wasn't the right match for all of us, I felt comfortable with him and I still like him as a person, despite the rest. He is a moral man and I trusted him enough to allow myself to begin dissociating in front of him and becoming other parts of myself. As anyone with DID who has been in therapy knows, this requires some deep trust. We know he would not try anything with us. Little John, who had been around though not out, had remembered him as a kindly older man from decades ago and is or was a bit emotionally attached to him. Jack, who had never met him until a couple years ago, got the distinct impression the T didn't like him. Jack is straight and his accent makes him sound like a redneck. The T didn't engage with alters as themselves as well as a female T eventually would. Still Jack would have spoken with him anyway were there not new triggers from the T looking at photos of us. He smiled at one of us about age 5-6, discussed the meaning of my father's Johnny-Jack painting which is our psychforums avatar, and looked and smiled "too long" at a photo of the body around age 25 where I was looking good. Thank god the T was just gay with no pedophile tendencies. So he'll help us find a new T.

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