Abandonment

I emailed my counselor, the one I saw when Evan revealed his addiction and who helped me so much for more than a year. She helped me really work through all that stuff with my father. She really made a difference for me.

And in the spring we decided it was time for me to stop coming all the time, but that if I ever needed to come back I could.

And it was sort of weird because she said something in our last appointment that sort of rubbed me the wrong way and I wanted to go back and say "WTF"? Because for over a year she hadn't said anything that was hurtful and so I must have misunderstood, or something. Surely she wasn't really expressing disappointment in my progress fifteen minutes after agreeing I was ready to stop seeing her.

And she is really professional about that rule where you are not supposed to confuse the therapeutic relationship with friendship, and I was really awkward about how to talk to her afterwards, which was unfair and strange because I know that Evan emails her and keeps her up on his life and feels completely relaxed about it -- and she enjoys the emails. I on the other hand felt weird and avoided her (which would have been easy except that Andrew sees a counselor in the same practice.) But I had been thinking about going and seeing her again, to work out feeling weird about not seeing her, you know?

But that isn't why I emailed her. I emailed her to see if she thought she would be a good person to see Frankie or if she would refer me to one. I sort of hoped she would see him because then I would get to talk to her about him and it would be more relaxed.

And she emailed me back and said she was moving far, far away, back to the place she came from.

Typing this is making me feel a little better, really it has, but I feel so abandoned.

She said I could always come back and now she is going away. It really doesn't feel fair. She was supposed to be there. I could always go back. She was supposed to be this anchor line, and now she is going away.

And I know that she would tell me that if I am feeling this this strongly I should think about what I am re-feeling. What childhood abandonment feelings are coming back. And that is so easy to figure out I know I don't even have to talk to her about it to do it.

And I should use this space to talk sympathetically about the traumatized kids we take care of. I mean, if I have it pretty good and have been in a safe and loving relationship for more than 20 years and I can still be triggered into feeling like an abandoned little girl, then how much more difficult it must be for them? My counselor, whom I am not even seeing anymore, is moving across the country. It is not about me, it is an entirely reasonable action on her part, and I do not feel the least bit reasonable about it.

But writing this helps.