Unmet Needs

by Charity

[Posted this evening on PsychForums:]

For the past few weekends, things have been so bad for me/us that some of the others have tried to convince me that we need to call our T between sessions if we need to. Our T permits this, and we've done so several times. But the way things have been lately, I don't want to seem needy (even though I really am ).

Things have gotten worse inside between me and some of the others. Maybe I'm absorbing Deborah's and Rachel's pain again, but that's no excuse. Like it or not (and I definitely don't like it), I'm the "emotional center of our system," as our blog says.

So we're Skyping this evening, as soon as we get home.

[Later]

The Skype session turned out to be a phone session. Skype was acting strange and preventing us from connecting at either end. So we just talked instead, about the same formative and preverbal issues that have been plaguing us for so long on an emotional level.

We were surprised when some of her feedback caused us to consider things from a new angle. "Do you think that your mother never picking you up and holding you [as an infant] has anything to do with the fact that you've never liked being touched?"

We'd never thought of that before. We'd definitely been aware of our mother's rare attempts to show us affection when we were a teen or young adult....she was so awkward, as if her attempts to reach out were more from her own need rather than ours. And we would push her away.

The bond should have been established at the outset. "She failed Parenting 101," we told our T.

She failed in so many ways. Sometimes "I tried my best" isn't enough.