So I haven’t posted in a while about how much I love my therapist. There have been some reasons for this. A few months ago she had some personal medical stuff happen and she went on hiatus to deal with stuff. Fair enough. When she came back she started behaving… oddly. Our sessions started involving a lot of personal details about her life. It started feeling more like she wanted to bond than be my therapist. This was a gradual process and for a while I wasn’t sure if I was overreacting or if things were starting to get way too friendly.
A few weeks (months? my time sense is toast) ago I noticed that almost half of our session was spent with her telling me how much she and I are alike in great detail and telling me about how we have overcome the same things in our lives and how special we are. Riiiiiiiight. Then I had the prelabor issue and I canceled sessions for a while because I was afraid of driving to Oakland. During this period I talked to a few people and decided that no really, she was being completely inappropriate. After I was on bedrest for a bit she offered to drive down and do a session in my house. I figured that I needed to talk to her about the weird boundary stuff anyway so sure. Only she just couldn’t seem to get here. She called 30 minutes before the session was to begin and told me that she was getting a late start because she had been having anxiety issues and her current med cocktail makes it unsafe to drive when she is freaking out like that. I said that we should maybe cancel because I had another appointment after her with not a lot of wiggle room. She indicated that she was already on the road, but she had stopped on the way and she could make it in time. She was pretty aggressive about still wanting to come down. So I agreed hesitantly and sat and waited. At 15 minutes past the start time she sent me a text message saying she was lost but almost here. When we got to the point where I needed to leave in 15 minutes I sent her a text message saying that I needed to leave soon. She called me and said that she understood that I needed to leave and that being punctual is very important to me. She then said she was very sad because she had really wanted to at least see my house and touch base with me–she hadn’t been planning to charge me for the session anyway. *blink* ? What? This was odd. I told her to just turn around because I was going to head out.
Then she sent out an email to all her clients saying that she needed people to pay in cash for a while due to an issue in her personal life. Well that’s odd…
I agreed to one phone session after that, but there was a weird connection and she lost phone connectivity (battery?) and so she didn’t charge me for that. Then I got to the point where I was just not up for the continued weirdness and I told her that I was going to be opting out of therapy for a while because I didn’t really want to be driving to Oakland and I thought I was doing pretty well anyway. She reluctantly agreed to this.
Then tonight she called me. She has missed me and wanted to know what was going on with me and why I haven’t called her. I was very very clear on my boundaries and told her that I’m doing fine and if I want to see her again I will call. Noah couldn’t figure out who I was talking to–he thought it sounded like my conversations with Rebecca when I’m being extremely clear on what I am interested in talking about. 🙂 She wanted to be sure that I would let her know when the baby comes and that it will mean a lot to her. She stressed a few times that if I want to talk on the phone because I’m processing anything she is totally up for that and she won’t charge me at all. Or if I am able to come up and see her that she won’t mind me feeding the baby at all. I’m starting to feel pretty freaked out. I left the phone call by saying that I was feeling like maybe I wouldn’t need therapy anytime soon but if I decide I need to see her I’ll let her know. That was probably too ambiguous. I’ve been seeing her for years. The next time she calls I’m going to need to tell her to stop calling and that feels so very uncomfortable.
I wish she hadn’t freaked out on me. My therapist is not supposed to be a source of freakin conflict.