Should feel something?

[CatInTree]

My brain decided that it was time to fetch memories of previous therapists. This one is the one I had before the one who would improve if she was an actual wall.

I was telling her about someone I was messaging with before he ended his life.

Her reaction was to expect me to join her in being angry at him.

I wasn't and I've never been.

I still remember the look she gave me. It was like she couldn't wrap her head around how I wasn't angry at him. She went on to tell me how angry she was. I was more angry at the situation and the people who had shut him down when he asked for help hours before, she treated that as a sidenote to how angry she was at him.

As I've been writing I've realized that this is a pattern. I'm often defending someone I was messaging with during that time. It's one of the reasons I don't tell people about my past.

At the same time my brain won't let go of the idea that there's something wrong with me for not having expected reactions. If even a therapist thinks I'm in the wrong for not feeling something surely I must be some sort of freak of nature.

This isn't why I stopped seeing her. I stopped when she told me not to tell her something. That "something" happens to be related to how I got started in suicide prevention, but she never found that out. I may have realized the connection years earlier if she hadn't stopped me.

And now my brain is in "I was in the wrong for walking away from someone who could tell my reactions weren't normal" mode. Was I? What's going on here?

 

[ILoveLife]

Hmm. You'll feel what you need to feel at the appropriate time. If she was angry, all good. No need to follow her lead. If you'll never get angry? Possible, but doubtful.

There's this thing in therapy about being healthy-angry and it's valid, but all in due time, not on cue.

 

[CatInTree]

It was the part that I was supposed to be angry at him that threw me for a loop.

It's over 4 years and that hasn't happened. I've been angry at the situation, at the worse than useless "care" he had gotten, at the people who shut him down when he asked for help, at myself...

But I understood where he was coming from. He couldn't see another way out after trying every way he could think of for I don't know how long. I wish it didn't end like this and that there was a better system (serious note to self: check use of word when rereading this evening) in place.

 

[ILoveLife]

I get that, I don't know if I would be able to be angry either.

But are you questioning if you should've quit this T, or the getting angry part?

System is an appropriate word, in my view :)

 

[digger]

I don't think you 'should' always feel what your therapist feels about a situation, or even that you should be aiming to feel the same things necessarily, and I think if she was expecting you to do so that would be problematic.

I think there are times though when it can be really useful to experience someone having a different reaction and set of feelings to something we are telling them than we have. It can help to look at things from different perspectives, or just to realise there can be different perspectives to be had.

My T has said things before like she feels angry on my behalf - I could read into that that anger is the thing I should be feeling too, but she doesn't phrase it that way - what it shows me though is that anger can be a reasonable response to the situation even if it's not something I'm personally feeling <<<that is only possible though because I have an established enough relationship with my T to trust that her responses are reasonable!

It sounds like you didn't feel this therapist was a good fit for you anyway though. I hope the new one works out better for you.

 

[EveHarrington]

My therapist thinks I should be angry at things that I’m just not angry about. I can have spurts of anger, but they are fleeting. My anger is dissociated. Im just like whatevs! I need to fix this so I’m angry like the Normies and then struggle to let anger go? No thank you. I’m fine as I am.

 

[Fadeaway]

We don't get to choose our emotions. They aren't right or wrong, only how we react to them. I think your therapist was wrong. Maybe she had lost a client in the past and was angry about it and projecting those emotions on to you.