How do I tell my therapist I’m frustrated with her?
I’ve been seeing my therapist for several months (since like October I think). I was going through a really bad episode where I was dealing with intense grief and anxious attachment withdrawal from a breakup AND panic attacks/anxiety/OCD. She was very helpful with the anxiety and OCD which I think was more in line with the kind of stuff she prefers to do. When I was having bad grief I would just sit there and cry and she didn’t really do or say anything.
I have been still struggling a lot with the breakup stuff and have been in communication with my ex to varying degrees/purposes pretty much this whole time. The best I can summarize the dynamic is that I am anxious and I strongly suspect he’s fearful avoidant so we do that dance.
He has never been anything but honest with me about what he’s capable of, but it’s also a really messy situation obviously and I’m often feeling frustrated/sad. I want to work on my own healing/attachment wounds independently of that (and say that to her) but I feel like our sessions are just me venting and I feel pretty directionless. It’s also obvious to me that she doesn’t like that I’m talking with him or think I should be, which I don’t think should be so obvious to me in the way it is, if that makes sense? I often feel like I annoy her.
Our previous session she kind of made me mad. I’ve been trying to tell her that I’m trying to challenge my assumptions and see how my core wounds show up in situations and be better at self regulation, but she actively encourages and validates my anxious interpretations of things. I think she is trying to validate my feelings and get me to set boundaries that if things are hurting me I should remove myself from the situation. But I don’t want to have to always remove myself from a situation because my anxious attachment was triggered. I’m being triggered by things I knew going into it would be the case, and then things go well and I start to hope/want them to not be true anymore, and instead of pointing that out to me she’s basically telling me “you’re right, he shouldn’t be doing that”.
She seemed to get visibly frustrated with me during this particular session and I felt like she was literally arguing with me that he isn’t showing me any difference from the past to now which I genuinely think is not true. I’m the one experiencing the actual situations so I feel like I would know.
I don’t even think she’s necessarily wrong that this might not be a good idea but I don’t think she’s appropriately doing anything to lead me to that conclusion organically.
And she’ll say like “maybe you should focus on healing that part of yourself” or whatever and I’m like yes!! How??? You’re my therapist??????
I don’t know how to tell her this because I feel really uncomfortable and awkward because she’s like, my age and feels like a peer more than a professional I get a service from at this point.
Should I even tell her or should I just break up with her? I don’t know if these are things that could change, but I really don’t feel like explaining this whole saga/pattern to a new person either.