For A Good Time Call...

There are prescribed ways to break up romantic relationships. Culturally speaking, there are also rules for what friends do when a couple breaks up. But there aren't  really any norms for breaking up with one's therapist, or how to support someone in the middle of a breakup.

Dr. Therapist and I have been together for a really long time. Around 10 years or more, off and on, but mostly on. For a while, I've been wondering if I'm really getting what I want and need out of this relationship. The therapy relationship is unlike any other you'll ever be in. It's all about you (if you are the client/patient) but both people in the relationship are open to being changed by virtue of being in the relationship. For a while now, I've not felt like some of the basic must-haves in therapy have been happening for me. We often talk about the basic therapy triad: three things that are essential across therapy modalities for it to be successful. They are, basically:
1. Unconditional positive regard - the idea that no matter how awful I am or what nasty, horrible things I say or do, the therapist will find something about me to think positively about, and will see my ugliness within a framework that says I am ultimately loveable.
2. Genuineness - that the therapist is honest, real, and in the moment with me.
3. Respect - the therapist is a model for respecting others and myself. This touches on the first point but is a little different. Respect also means that the therapist honours that this is MY therapy as well as me as a person.
The sad truth is that I have never felt unconditional positive regard from Dr. Therapist. He takes an old-school psychoanalytic psychotherapy approach and adheres to the "blank slate upon which to project" thing waaaay more than is useful with a client like me. I've brought it up and attempted to discuss it. But Dr. Therapist insists that I have hit upon the "limits of what therapy can do" for me. I disagree. The more I learn about my profession, the more I learn that there are many different ways of doing therapy and that client/therapist relationship "fit" might be more important than any other aspect of therapy (including modality, but I'm not entirely sold on that near-dodo-bird argument yet). I think it is important to feel prized and honoured (read: special) in the therapy relationship and I don't think more blank slate is going to do it for me.

So I started therapy-dating. I went on line and found the profiles of a few people I thought I might connect with, and essentially dated them in the therapy context. Most people (as is the case with online dating) I saw only once. Most of the time, the therapist looked fine on paper, but we didn't really seem to connect in the therapy room. This is an expensive thing to do, since more psychologists charge in the $160-$210/hr range. And on these first dates, I'm always the one who is paying. I had a couple of first date disasters... One specialist in sleep and anxiety that I waited MONTHS to get a date with -- I arrived early, as she requested in an email, so that I could fill out some forms, but the receptionist had no idea who I was. I waited for an entire hour (asking the receptionist twice to confirm my appointment and ask where the Dr. was) before I left. I told the receptionist that this wasn't exactly a professional way to treat a first time client... When I arrived home, there was a call from the Dr. "reminding" me about our appointment the next day. When I sent the Dr a copy of the earlier email confirming TODAY as the date, she attempted to blame the mix up first on her new receptionist, and then on the fact that she had just returned from a medical leave. This is a huge no-no as the therapy hour is supposed to belong to that individual client and the FIRST appointment is all about getting to know each other and establishing trust.
I had another female therapist that I thought was going to be a good match as she said she felt comfortable addressing my sleep issues and anxiety, she worked with a lot of graduate students and atheletes, and practised from a feminist perspective. Only in the second session did she bring up the fact that she wanted to use EMDR (look it up and laaaaaaaaugh) on me. If it had been a real date, I would have left before ordering. As it was, learning this about Dr. Pseudoscience cost me 2 X $105(student rate).

So I played the therapy feild for a while.

And then I met Dr. Dick. [And yeah, I laughed too, when he invited me to call him by his first name. I mean, c'mon, if there is a name with more alternative variations, I don't know what it is. The English has come up with at least a dozen alternatives to names like this just to keep God's Frozen People from having to say a word that is a euphemism for genitalia in polite company!] Dr. Dick was friendly and patient on the phone. When he accidentally scheduled another client at the same time as my first appointment, he took full responsibility and completely unpacked the impact of the incident with me in a mature and caring way. It also doesn't hurt that he looks like he could be the twin of one of my favorite high-school English teachers (who also happened to look a lot like Raymond Burr when he was relaunched the Perry Mason franchise). I felt immediately respected, immediately well-thought of, immediately like he was being honest and straight-up with me.

My conditions were met. I've got a new therapist.

It's hard to make this decision for a lot of reasons. I have to "start over" with a new person. I have to talk about things that I haven't spoken about for a long time. I have to find a new common language with someone. I also have to find a way to pay for all of this whereas Dr. Therapist was an MD and billing my provincial health insurance over the past decade. I think the weirdest thing might be telling Dr. Therapist about my decision. My biggest fear, of course, is that he won't seem to care. But then again, that's why I needed a new therapist. After talking about this kind of fear for years now, nothing has changed. I think maybe that's why it wasn't working... some of these older (psychoanalytic) styles don't allow for the therapist to become changed in therapy themselves. Anyway, it feels so strange. And it reminds me of many other relationships I stayed in long past the point of them being good -- just because I was afraid of change, afraid of hurting the other person with my feelings, needs, and wants, afraid of asking for what I needed because I thought I didn't deserve it. There have been a lot of times in my life when I stayed because I made the relationship all about the other person when it should have been about both of us. I can't stay like that in a therapy relationship when it is SUPPOSED to be all about me and what I need.

I won't see Dr. Therapist for a few weeks yet becuase he is away (another complaint I had was his frequent absences and interruptions to therapy). I have some time to think about how to put it to him in a way that is:
1. Respectful
2. Genuine
3. Regards both of us positively

... but mostly me.