Post by ted on Oct 15, 2016 10:52:18 GMT -5
I left my counseling appointment this week feeling violated. I’ve disagreed with him before, even often, but this time I felt preyed upon. I should leave him, right? But I stay for some of the same reasons I can’t seem to leave my SM.
His mantras are: damage from your family of origin explains how you feel and react today, and everything you say is a projection. I’ve indulged him for more than a year, dredging my brain for bad memories from my childhood. Like anyone, I’ve found several. Unlike some, there’s no smoking gun history of abuse or neglect. I have two normal, loving parents who just celebrated forty years together. My dad controlled his anger poorly, and yes, I see how that makes me extra sensitive to displays of anger. My mom overcorrected my firstborn, smart-kid tendencies, which has led me to a struggle with self-worth, confidence, and people-pleasing. These insights have been valuable.
But I’m never allowed to talk about the present or the future. If I mention having difficulty with the way my wife treats me, he immediately asks “And how’s that about you?” I used to answer “it’s not, I’m talking about her,” but that was quickly disciplined. “Talk about you. It’s all about you, my man. How’s what you’re saying really about you?” And now I know I’m supposed to make the connection to not getting the love I needed as a little boy, the remedy for which is for the adult I am now to “hold that little boy” and give him the love he didn’t get from mom and dad, and to share my pain over my childhood experience with my wife as a means of healing myself and creating intimacy with her. He’s gone so far as to say if I could have had a perfect childhood, there’d be nothing for my wife’s refusal to trigger, and I’d be having a completely different reaction, perhaps no reaction.
So I’m not supposed to say “Honey, I feel unloved, unworthy, and rejected when you angerly refuse sexual contact.” I’m suppose to say, “Honey, I’m sad right now because this experience is triggering my hurts of being unloved by my dad when I was a little boy. And that’s all about me, but I’m sharing it with you so that you can know me better and therefore I will feel loved.”
I’ve maintained an open mind. I came to him for answers I didn’t have on my own, after all. I see value in including this as part of understanding why I have some of the feelings and reactions I do, and sharing childhood stories with my wife does indeed create intimacy in that I’m not alone with those experiences and feelings. But this is *all he ever says.* Absolutely every time I try to talk about the hurt of my 15-year marriage, and the prospects for its future, he interrupts me and takes me straight back to mom and dad.
This week I’d had enough. I told him it was “fucking bullshit” that every feeling and thought I have today needs to be linked to some injury from my not-so-bad childhood. Why isn’t my marriage a significant enough relationship to have some primary injuries of its own? My childhood can’t be the answer to every question.
He responded “And what value do you get out of telling yourself that story?” trolling me to say it allows me to dismiss and avoid the pain of my childhood. “I understand if you want to give up; I understand its hard work to make this progress in your life and become a better man. You can give up now if this is too hard, plenty of people do.” And when I said we’d been going around this circle for more than a year, he interrupted “and it’s changed your life.” He said these same things in many different ways. I felt he was being dismissive, condescending, and covert-agressive.
Queue the projection theory. You see, my ability to assert my feelings and make judgments like that has been completely destroyed. He’s taught me that when I make conclusions about what and why other people do things, those are also “all about me.” What I’m attributing to them are actually my own thoughts about myself. So if I disagree with what someone says or does, the opposite is really true. It’s not them saying or doing, it’s me perceiving it that way because I’m really saying or doing that myself, even if subconsciously. My conscious thoughts are just my fight against the opposite thoughts in my subconscious, which represent what I truly think.
So now every time I try to draw a conclusion, I immediately included to think the opposite is actually true. Of course, that’s a feedback loop. Every thought sends you to the opposite thought, which sends you back to the original thought, which sends you back to the opposite thought, and so on ad nauseam. There’s no escape. This feels just like the gas-lighting I got from my refuser, the minimization-of-self I got from my mother, or the see-we-told-you-so I got from religion. Every disconfirming thought actually confirms you must be wrong and “they” must be right.
I’m well and truly fucked now. I have no mechanism left for making solid thoughts and decisions without entering a tailspin. And I feel abused by my counselor into seeing him for yet another week of healing. (See, I said abused. And I’ve used that word about my SM too. There I go again, creating boogymen everywhere. The common denominator is me. I must be creating this everywhere I go.)
Friends, please throw me a lifeline. Does anyone recognize this school of counseling? What can I read to get a better understanding of it? I either need to break my fight against it, go with its flow, and be healed—or figure out how to refute it, grow a backbone, trust my conclusions, and make decisions.
His mantras are: damage from your family of origin explains how you feel and react today, and everything you say is a projection. I’ve indulged him for more than a year, dredging my brain for bad memories from my childhood. Like anyone, I’ve found several. Unlike some, there’s no smoking gun history of abuse or neglect. I have two normal, loving parents who just celebrated forty years together. My dad controlled his anger poorly, and yes, I see how that makes me extra sensitive to displays of anger. My mom overcorrected my firstborn, smart-kid tendencies, which has led me to a struggle with self-worth, confidence, and people-pleasing. These insights have been valuable.
But I’m never allowed to talk about the present or the future. If I mention having difficulty with the way my wife treats me, he immediately asks “And how’s that about you?” I used to answer “it’s not, I’m talking about her,” but that was quickly disciplined. “Talk about you. It’s all about you, my man. How’s what you’re saying really about you?” And now I know I’m supposed to make the connection to not getting the love I needed as a little boy, the remedy for which is for the adult I am now to “hold that little boy” and give him the love he didn’t get from mom and dad, and to share my pain over my childhood experience with my wife as a means of healing myself and creating intimacy with her. He’s gone so far as to say if I could have had a perfect childhood, there’d be nothing for my wife’s refusal to trigger, and I’d be having a completely different reaction, perhaps no reaction.
So I’m not supposed to say “Honey, I feel unloved, unworthy, and rejected when you angerly refuse sexual contact.” I’m suppose to say, “Honey, I’m sad right now because this experience is triggering my hurts of being unloved by my dad when I was a little boy. And that’s all about me, but I’m sharing it with you so that you can know me better and therefore I will feel loved.”
I’ve maintained an open mind. I came to him for answers I didn’t have on my own, after all. I see value in including this as part of understanding why I have some of the feelings and reactions I do, and sharing childhood stories with my wife does indeed create intimacy in that I’m not alone with those experiences and feelings. But this is *all he ever says.* Absolutely every time I try to talk about the hurt of my 15-year marriage, and the prospects for its future, he interrupts me and takes me straight back to mom and dad.
This week I’d had enough. I told him it was “fucking bullshit” that every feeling and thought I have today needs to be linked to some injury from my not-so-bad childhood. Why isn’t my marriage a significant enough relationship to have some primary injuries of its own? My childhood can’t be the answer to every question.
He responded “And what value do you get out of telling yourself that story?” trolling me to say it allows me to dismiss and avoid the pain of my childhood. “I understand if you want to give up; I understand its hard work to make this progress in your life and become a better man. You can give up now if this is too hard, plenty of people do.” And when I said we’d been going around this circle for more than a year, he interrupted “and it’s changed your life.” He said these same things in many different ways. I felt he was being dismissive, condescending, and covert-agressive.
Queue the projection theory. You see, my ability to assert my feelings and make judgments like that has been completely destroyed. He’s taught me that when I make conclusions about what and why other people do things, those are also “all about me.” What I’m attributing to them are actually my own thoughts about myself. So if I disagree with what someone says or does, the opposite is really true. It’s not them saying or doing, it’s me perceiving it that way because I’m really saying or doing that myself, even if subconsciously. My conscious thoughts are just my fight against the opposite thoughts in my subconscious, which represent what I truly think.
So now every time I try to draw a conclusion, I immediately included to think the opposite is actually true. Of course, that’s a feedback loop. Every thought sends you to the opposite thought, which sends you back to the original thought, which sends you back to the opposite thought, and so on ad nauseam. There’s no escape. This feels just like the gas-lighting I got from my refuser, the minimization-of-self I got from my mother, or the see-we-told-you-so I got from religion. Every disconfirming thought actually confirms you must be wrong and “they” must be right.
I’m well and truly fucked now. I have no mechanism left for making solid thoughts and decisions without entering a tailspin. And I feel abused by my counselor into seeing him for yet another week of healing. (See, I said abused. And I’ve used that word about my SM too. There I go again, creating boogymen everywhere. The common denominator is me. I must be creating this everywhere I go.)
Friends, please throw me a lifeline. Does anyone recognize this school of counseling? What can I read to get a better understanding of it? I either need to break my fight against it, go with its flow, and be healed—or figure out how to refute it, grow a backbone, trust my conclusions, and make decisions.
