@Justmehere - I first want to say that you're doing good work IMO, looking at this challenge and confronting it.
Some things stuck out to me. Ok, a lot of things...I think they are in two categories -
(1) your own observations about how you use humor, and how they might help you move forward.
You say this:
For whatever reason, my pain is funny to people in the profession. I’ve never had anyone outside the profession who wasn’t actively abusing me chuckle away about trauma. It’s weird to me. It is what it is.
I don't think you can be certain that it's your pain that is funny to mental health professionals. I think it's more likely that they are picking up the cues you are giving them. if you look at these two quotes:
I crack jokes and story-tell. I say things like a good story. It’s been every therapist I have seen. Ever. No exceptions. It’s me and the profession.
I can humorously analyze it to death and tell it as an interesting story, no one sees the pain.
You can see that you've used humor and storytelling as a way to distance the listener and yourself. That's really not uncommon, at all. And I would say that it's also pretty common for the therapist (while listening) to mirror the client.
What it seems like you have not yet had is a therapist who doesn't mirror it (the distancing humor) back to you. Or, a therapist who confronts you about it, thereby challenging your distancing mechanism.
And it sounds like that's what you want, now. You've been doing a lot of new disclosure with this therapist, if I remember right. It makes sense to me, in that context, that you'd be realizing you want to be listened to differently, and that you need help making that shift.
I just don’t want my trauma to be laughed about anymore by people in the profession.
The rest of the therapy is super helpful. Just not this dynamic. It’s not unique to her. It will stop when I change. No sooner.
Yes - but I think it's very possible for her to be helping you with this change. You need to figure out how to catch yourself slipping into storyteller mode, and you need to re-direct. But she can also be a useful observer of when you're switching modes, and help you stay away from deflecting.
I asked a friend who is very humorous if he ever struggles switching from the humorous to the serious. He said no, not off the top of his head...How come I am not doing it well? I don’t know. How do people make the shift?
This really stood out to me. I have a hyper-awareness of exactly what this shift is, for myself. It's very important, first, that you simply slow down. Take your time when you are talking. Try and be aware of your own perspective on what you're relaying. When I'm talking about stuff that happened to me, I can either tell it as a narrative or I can tell it as it happened from my perspective. I only noticed very recently that I was almost always narrating what happened to me, instead of actually talking about my experience...urgh, I feel like I can't explain this properly. But does any of this ring a bell?
I do know that it's possible to learn to recognize when you're shifting into a storytelling mode, and when you're not. Slowing down with your own rate of speech and . even thought formation will help.
(2) OK, here's the stuff about the therapist's past behavior that I think needs to be addressed with her
I don’t want to end with this therapist, she’s good at one area that I can’t find anyone else in my state to touch with a 10 foot pole. I want to keep working on that with her. Problem: she laughs at me too much. Like full on belly laughs. I’m ending up saying, “please stop laughing, please stop I really mean, it please stop” at least once every other session for a few months now.
My therapist just says she can’t help it.
If that's really true, then she's a really shitty therapist. I doubt that's true, given everything else you've said about her. I think that it's 100% appropriate for her to modulate her own responses - that's part of her job. The fact that you've told her to stop and she hasn't, is weird to me - weird like, I wish I could see a videotape of an exchange that went that way, so I could see if she's really that callous and clueless, or if it's more complicated than that.
But I don't think you need to try and sort that on your own. I think this is the stuff to bring to the table, because it's what she's going to need to change.
(The rules around texting go into that discussion category, too).
In your time working with her, have you yet ever given her critical feedback? And/or done a sort of state of the union session where you very purposefully discuss communication, and what's causing you problems in the working exchange?
