Mission impossible – a new therapist
As a follow up to the emails we sent our therapist, we sent this to try and get her to understand that why we thought it would be helpful to get an email answer to some important questions…
Hi Bob,
Sorry, I probably haven’t made myself clear. I’m not trying to conduct therapy through email. All I want is answers to some very important questions. It’s not realistic to expect me to be able to control the dissociation while these questions are being addressed during a session. I’m not sure how aware you are of the dissociation during the sessions, but on a good day about half of the session is remembered, the rest is lost in the dissociation.
Which would you prefer?
1. Answering the questions via email, resulting in me getting the answers in a format that is less intimidating and which can be followed up in a therapy session.
2. Answering the questions in a session when the dissociation will occur freely, half of the information will be missed and the chances of mis-understanding something are high.
Regards
Kate
Having still received no response from her, we’re assuming that she’d prefer that we talk about it in therapy and for us to only get half the information. Just brilliant. The woman is intelligent, but we’re wondering if she’s so rule and boundary driven that she can’t see beyond those rules and boundaries.
We know that people need boundaries – boundaries are good. We’re the first to admit that our ideas around boundaries are messed up. But all we wanted is some really important questions answered in a safe way for us. Is that too much to ask? Well apparently the answer is “Yes”.
So now we have to try and find a new therapist… during the Christmas holidays. We know that last Christmas was a bad one for us. We know this, but have a total memory blank as to why it was bad. We know that we attempted suicide over the New Year holidays – Aimee did the post attempt assessment and told the rather nice young resident that she was too young to drink :) This all means that we’re potentially going to need outside help to keep safe during this time. The mother is coming up to stay with us over the holidays, but that brings all sorts of other tensions…
The need to find a decent therapist is high… The reality of finding one is going to be very hard. We contacted the only therapist in NZ who is listed on ISST-D. She got back to us yesterday to say that she didn’t know of anyone in our city with experience in treating the dissociative disorders. But she did recommend someone who lived closer to our city to see if they knew of someone who lives here… So just waiting to hear back from them. We’re hoping to find someone this way so that we don’t have to go through the painful process of interviewing the different people. It’s just too stressful to have to met these people and ask all sorts of questions.
It’s becoming very much like Vague commented on in our previous post – the therapy itself is becoming more stressful than the trauma work. What’s odd is that the current clinical psychologist hasn’t even touched on the trauma. She asks general questions about whether we’ve had a good or rough week, but nothing that can’t be deflected easily.
