keep on keeping on

I'm a little confused. I think partly because I don't know what it would look like to do light processing IRRT-style, and also why you would expect her to be different when she's doing trauma work compared to not. Would you expect her to be warmer and more supportive when doing trauma work?

And did she eventually adjust after the pushing? That's still something.

Obviously, it could be that it isn't a good fit. This is the same issue I've been struggling with for so long with my T.

I wonder also (and I think you've brought this up before as something to consider) if she (or any T) can be a good fit for some parts and not for others. And is anyone a good fit for all the parts? I guess the T would have to be a good fit for predominant parts--that makes sense to me. So even if she isn't a good fit just for you, Asti, that would be enough.

Are you going to stop seeing her? What does she say if you bring up the issue about not being a good fit? I'm curious, because I think our T has managed to strike a very tricky balance of allowing the possibility that someone else might be able to help me in ways he can't, while maintaining that he's willing to try to adjust and change as much as he can and he believes it's possible for us to work it out.

I call it light processing because its a gentle technique that is focused on rescripting the memory and not on confrontation with all the pain, feelings and memories. it is far from the explosive stress and emotions that would happen in tf-cbt or emdr.
I have reports from other people that she is supposed to be excellent when talking with Littles and doing delicate work. The best there is, far and near. So I did have the expectation that she would be a bit less brain-heavy and more empathetic. but if she shows empathy, its in a way we don't understand. I listened back to the recording and she did everything right. The only thing missing was the emotional presence we have with the clinic T. and my best guess is that we just don't get her.

for me it is very different if we do cognitive restructuring, where it is supposed to be brain-heavy and logical, or if we touch an emotionally sensitive things. When it comes to the CBT she is really good and we work together pretty well. When we don't agree she at least inspires a solution and thats the most important thing. but she is holding back emotionally. probably because we do and she is just mirroring us to not scare us? she just waits for us to do the first step every single time. We need to be open from the beginning to get a topic started. but we have a deep pattern of not sharing unless we are asked about it. and she will never ask. she just sits silently and waits for us to say something. even when we wrote her that we urgently need to tackle a topic. nothing. we have to start it and in this case make a convincing point to get her to engage. she will do all the right things then. but it makes everything so much harder for us. I get it, there is zero suggestion in her approach. nothing that could be taken as pressure to please. I get it that she needs to hear a direct mandate for certain work. she is forever getting consent from us, even after we told her what we want. it just feels like all of this is making us work uphill and waste a lot of energy.
And she is very strict about needs meeting as something we have to figure out within the system. or maybe that is just how we perceive it. we end up withdrawing for it and taking care of ourselves. she has addressed it but we still feel zero readiness in her to engage on that level. like she is saying 'let me be there for you' while she is standing there, arms crossed with a neutral face. what we see feels like our own disconnection between words and emotions. maybe it is our own and its a transference thing. maybe we just can't sense her the way we can sense other people. we have the recordings. she says all the right things. we feel none of it.

we need to triple check if the other DID therapist is really retired or just erased her online presence. they do that sometimes because the waiting lists are full. for now, we will have to do with this one. maybe we can figure it out. maybe we stick to CBT for now. the next goal is to get us into a job program. DID-informed CBT should be enough for that. we need to plan clinic stays for the more painful trauma work. probably ones where we do little else but processing and recovering from it.
she has mentioned the issues we have, pointed out that maybe we should see a male T or someone else. it felt like a horrible rejection. like someone else is telling us that we are impossible to treat. it is when she allowed us to write and things got a bit better. The last topic that came up for me, which was about emotional and relational needs, might actually improve the situation. it looked like a key element. then other stuff came up and I had to push it down again... maybe cognitive restructuring is actually the right tool for this and we can still solve it. she is not giving up on us as long as we say we want to work with her.

There are a lot of parallels in what you describe to what goes on with us and our T. The details are different, but there's a similarity in the lack of attunement and crossing of signals.

birdsong87 wrote:like she is saying 'let me be there for you' while she is standing there, arms crossed with a neutral face. what we see feels like our own disconnection between words and emotions. maybe it is our own and its a transference thing. maybe we just can't sense her the way we can sense other people. we have the recordings. she says all the right things. we feel none of it.

Maybe there are nonverbal cues that you interpret as holding back (or that really are her holding back).

It's so important that she is letting you figure out what you want to do, and that she'll keep working with you if you want. I think it's still possible to make progress with someone when they're not the right fit, but I think it also creates a lot of obstacles. There are still things to be learned from how you deal with those extra obstacles, but it means less time spent on the obstacles that you walked in asking for help with.

last session felt more attuned. It feels similar to your problems @TheGang since there are these ups and downs and moments that feel better. Maya was engaging a bit, and I think for the first time with her, telling about the new plushee Fireheart sent us. When she noticed she attuned rapidly and did well.
we had a pretty extreme flare of stress-related pain issues. and of course that triggers certain parts and the way they cope is problematic. Age is still feeling very vulnerable from processing. today we faced one of the big triggers in that scene. I thought maybe we should wait but forgot that we would be confronted with it on the way to our grocery store. We worked on orientation with her and she was able to see that the surroundings are different from the trauma scene and that the source of the trigger is completely different. no big stress response. just fast breathing for a moment. if this worked we might have eliminated one of our worst winter triggers. I struggled not to cry right there on the street.

we are working hard to understand needs a bit more. it is such a difficult topic and we have always avoided it. we found something in a (german) book where they list certain patterns of needs/strategies that are over-used and needs/strategies that are under-used. the best fit was the set that equals OCD. Asti is angry when someone points in that direction. we were once misdiagnosed with OCPD when we actually don't match a single criteria fully. yes, over-control, but actually no OCD. but the set of needs that play a role was an almost perfect match. it helps because it shows us where to invest and what to practice.
there was also a bigger realization that the way we use self-control is only like the flipside of 'fawn'. both appeasement behavior. We don't do this for independence. We do it to avoid getting on someones nerves. just the polar opposite. where 'fawn' has no boundaries, allows everyone to do whatever they like with you and you approach to please we hide everything that could bother someone behind a wall, avoid interactions and we withdraw to please. in both cases personal needs are denied for the benefit of the abuser. one is more of an exploitation pattern, the other a neglect pattern. but really is does come down to appeasement in the end. anyway, it helps us to explore these things, create a framework for ourselves.

Wow--good news about the winter trigger.

birdsong87 wrote:there was also a bigger realization that the way we use self-control is only like the flipside of 'fawn'. both appeasement behavior. We don't do this for independence. We do it to avoid getting on someones nerves. just the polar opposite. where 'fawn' has no boundaries, allows everyone to do whatever they like with you and you approach to please we hide everything that could bother someone behind a wall,

I think this is true for us as well.

I'm glad you had a better session with your therapist. The process with mine is beyond repair at this point, I think. I'll update my journey thread sometime, but he doesn't attune to us--he keeps talking *at* us when we're clearly overwhelmed, trying to make his point as to what's going on, while we have to resort to putting our fingers in our ears to block out the words.

I'm happy for you too that the session went better with your T.

The book you found sounds interesting. Does it have an english or french edition? Or at least, a bibliography including ressources in english or french? If yes, would you please send me the name and author/s of the book via PM? (or here on the forum, depending on what you think would be best). Thanks in advance!

Moreover, it is not because your strategies match the OCD structure that it means you have OCD. But it means that, looking up OCD related ressources might be a good start towards finding the names of the ressources you need. Which is, from what I understand, what you are starting doing with the help of your book. Congrats on this It is not easy to use the name of something that is NOT what you have, to find ressources that you need.

@TheGang that doesn't sound good. beyond repair and fingers in your ears... I am so sorry. I know you have done everything in your ability to make it work somehow. Sending you good thoughts

@ArbreMonde The book was not translated, sorry. it is just a small overview of emotions and how they are connected to needs. looking into OCD treatment is pretty much useless for us. we neither have obsessive thoughts nor compulsive actions. our over-control is trauma-related without an actualy OC dynmamic happening. working on trauma beliefs and conditioning is more helpful. the treatment program for over-control we looked into was absolutely useless too, even though it said it used polyvagal theory. they all ignore the trauma. makes no sense at all. 'its triggering? do it anyway' is not a therapeutic approach. neither is 'just don't think about it so much'

We had 2 good weekends in a row. they are usually so lonely and difficult that we end up working to numb the feelings. I so want to keep this up. we got an air filter, one that catches corona from the air. doing our best to reduce the risk while also allowing us to entertain more this winter. the past 2 winters just sucked. not sure if this is an ideal way to invest the little money we have but I am hoping to make the rest of the year nice for us.

I'm sorry the ressources you looked into were useless. It is so frustrating!

Too bad for the book. Well I guess I might find similar ressources in other languages. Thanks anyway.

Sending moral support!

IMO the air filter is a nice idea in order to reduce loneliness and being able to see more people. I hope it will help!

Last T session we talked about I-messages. How we didn't get them in past harmful treatment. She had us try them from the T perspective, which was an exceptionally smart move and I hope it was intentional So the task was to imagine what the Ts should have said in the form of an I message. It shows that I am well aware of the impact our weird relational pattern of avoidance has on other people. it also guides us to give ourselves the kind of message that we should have gotten. And on top of that we practice I messages without even having to be open about our own thoughts and feelings for now. That is a bigger problem for us. I really really hope this was intentional and she is brilliant like that.
What stuck with me is that you really really have to express your own thoughts and feelings when using that technique. Its not like I messages are new. I have known the technique for 20 years. but it took me this long to realize that it means being open with my thoughts. saying what I think, feel and mean. it feels like such a stupid thing to realize. but its the exact thing that was never safely possible as a child or teen and what we didn't do as a young adult but by then it started to cause real problems in relationships. So I guess I am now trying to learn to say what I think. not just in writing. Writing is easy. but actually telling someone...

What exactly is an I message? Is it like “I statements” where you express how you feel instead of being accusatory? What would be an example of what a T should have said as opposed to what they did say?

It all sounds like a positive development; I just don’t know exactly what you mean.