[NeuroBeautiful]

Hi,

I have not made a thread here in a while and was trying to hold off reaching out, trying to do it all on my own.

I am seeing an individual therapist one time a week. She is an intern and works under a supervisor. This is also teletherapy because you know, covid.

In the beginning, around mid October I was seeing her once every 2 weeks because I was feeling nervous about starting over and decided to take it slow. Then I realized I really do need 1x a week so I started doing that sometime in November. And Then the month of December, we did not meet the week of Christmas.

Last time we met was on Monday Dec 21st. We were talking about something that I guess I still have unhealed wounds and I was at first talking very fast and making random jokes and I was also really sniffly because I was starting to have covid symptoms that evening (and I had covid since then and just got out of quarantine on Friday and returned to work today) and then because of the overwhelming topic, I had shut down a bit and was feeling spacey for a few days. During that time I was also feeling very embarrassed and ashamed about shutting down and ashamed about the topic itself and I had told her there was more to it that I was too embarrassed to talk about, so I was feeling embarrassed about what came up in my head that we have not discussed out loud and been anxious about seeing her again leading up to this evening which is the first time since the previous session seeing her. She has not addressed the me shutting down thing and I am not sure if she really knew that that was happening and that is also really anxiety provoking because I don't like when I have to tell a therapist of my symptoms hoping they would agree with me. I have negative experiences with that.

Well, the session went by really fast with me filling her in on things and talking about my difficulty at work. I am a teacher and teacher assistant (sort of both because some subjects I teach and some I assist) We went through the session with me talking about work the whole time and then our time was over and I felt like I have wasted it. She asked me how all the stuff that was going on affected me and I feel like that might have been an imortant question but I tend to need extra think time when it comes to questions about my feelings and I sense that I just didnt give the question enough time and thought and she asked it when there was only one minute left.

I find that I am ranting on a lot of factual details and not speaking much about my feelings towards it or how it affects me. I am not sure it is enough to be asked these questions because I am struggling to go about answering them.

I have been told by therapists in the passed that I am 'insightful' and as hard as it is to take positive words about myself, I will take it. Except I feel like what is sometimes overlooked is that I may be perceptive about what is going on in a situation, factually and in terms of having a balanced view. But in terms of how it impacts me, or naming my feelings or even feeling the feelings, I have a hard time with those kinds of skills.

I would say I blog often enough, I am able to write stream of consciousness kind of writings. But I am getting to a point that I don't know how to do therapy. It is not a matter of simply writing down the things I want to talk about or journaling during the week because I do those things already and naturally incline towards writing things. It is about the topics I do end up bringing up and the topics that get the air time and when I bring up a more buried topic like my past rather than my current work stress, I have difficulty sustaining the conversation. My defenses go up and I either make jokes, find ways to distract and go off topic and/or shut down. Another thing is I dance around the conversations a lot. Like I would not call something abuse, I would say phrases like "did certain hurtful things"

I guess I would find it helpful if she maybe asked me questions in advance and then I would have few days to think about it and answer. It is a weird thing though because we talked about me emailing her out of session and she has certain guidelines including 1 email per a week and that she would not reply to the email, rather she should respond in the next session. Also she said make sure if it is an emergency or if I am in crisis to not use email and call a crisis line instead. And to remember what I put in an email that is not guaranteed confidentiality in terms of potential hacking which i guess is more of something to keep in mind and use my judgement for.

How can I utilize this new email opportunity agreement in the most optimal way? What can I do to talk about the real stuff instead of the work related stuff, which may be important but has a tendency to take up a lot of the talking time and this is not the first therapist this happened with. It is a pattern I noticed. And if I am asked any deeper questions about my work situation, it is not like I am able to carry those conversations because I get the same kind of antsy/silly/shut down as when I am talking about heavy topics. Because I know that my job is a helping profession and working with people and it definitely triggers things in me and that IS actually related to deeper things but we somehow never really get there whichever direction we go.

I know I have not been with this therapist that long but it is about that time that the getting to know you stage is wearing out and I noticed with previous therapists we danced around topics a lot or continued to talk about present day things in a surface-y way and I really want it to be different this time.