I think I’m gonna email him and see if we can both work on coming up with some ideas for how to crack that door open. I feel like a balance of being funny and light and exposing some of my lesser strengths we’ll say would be good. But I gotta tell him I want to be more open and want help.
Yeah, I totally know it’s early and we are still getting to know each other. I guess I’m just getting a bit anxious as I recognize my same patterns emerging, you know? The making light of things joking and redirecting. I think I just want to make it clear that that’s an area I want to work on. Thank you for your comment.
There are others I’ve begun to open up to slowly, testing that out. So I’ve made strides in vulnerability and have had success. And I’m doing other things on my own (well, I mean with others) to open up and be seen but it’s just such an awesome opportunity (therapy). To just have someone actually KNOW you. I want that so much. I have only given people certain masks. And we’re all a collection of masks, I just want to show them all, or most of them, to someone.
In my experience, in order to work effectively with a therapist, vulnerability does come into play. For me, some trust has to be there first. It is a long process. The more I take a chance with being vulnerable, the more I find out I can trust this T. With my previous T, it took years for me to get to that point. But they were not a trauma T (and I did not originally go to them for that reason). With the current T, it seems to be happening a lot faster. They are a trauma T, which I think is helping. Also, though, I think I did some relational healing in the years with my previous T which have sped up my ability to work with the new T. And maybe it is just that the new T feels safe for some reason.
I feel this! Like my relationship with my last t was great and now with this new guy it went from shaking the first day thinking he was gonna kill me (lol so silly but it was a real fear) to just really wanting to see him again and tell him things.
