I need a therapist who can work with early attachment wounds in adults, which means the therapist has to allow herself to become attuned to the different parts of me and adapt accordingly. If your own insecurities wont allow you to adapt, I will end up walking through the darkness alone as I have done so many times before. If you cant work outside the box, you are not the right therapist for me.
I need strong yet flexible boundaries born out of warmth, I have enough coldness within me - I don't need your coldness. I also do not need still-born interactions that originated in your text book or supervisor's mind; should this be what the sessions are build upon, I will reject your thoughts and words every single time, we will come to an impasse and therapy will be aborted and I will be left bleeding.
You will not see the happy and joyous parts of me instead I will bring despairing, hopeless and devastating selves. I will not share anything precious and meaningful until I feel you have earned my trust. This can take years. If you are not (a) patient you will not be the right therapist for me.
If you fail to see the anguish in my 'meaningless' words or silences but instead believe my conscious and unconscious expressions of pain are ways to manipulate you, if you do not know about primitive, pre-verbal pain and/or have forgotten about your own pain, you are not the right therapist for me.
If you are grandiose and believe that you will be able to "fix me", you are too narcissistic for me and you will not be able to help me with my own narcissism. I am not prepared nor am I strong enough to perform for and look after you.
If you have rejected or abandoned patients in the middle of their analysis or therapy, if you are unable to admit fault (whether this be to yourself or others) you are not the right therapist for me.
Most of my healing will come from our relationship and working through transference and counter-transference feelings. Interpretations are very important to me but only if they come from a place of feeling. I am intelligent enough to fabricate my own thoughtful interpretations, my healing will come from the feelings attached to interpretations.
Most people are not able to withstand my projections. I am mostly quiet or silent in the sessions yet it is this silence, the utter hopelessness, despair and unconscious rage that most cannot tolerate. Previous therapists want me to speak, to answer their questions in order to still their own thirst. This is about my thirst and hunger, not yours. If you don't have people around you who feed you, you will be left starved by me and in order to save yourself, you will end our relationship. This is unacceptable.
My quiet mind will attack everything you say or give me. It will reject and dislike you from the start and think you worthless - even though I want and need to be with you. I am terrified of closeness, I am equally terrified of withdrawal. My terror originates in this dilemma and you will fall into it sooner or later. You have to fall into my projections, I need you to, so you get an idea of the horror that is within me. Your supervisor must be strong enough to hold you, your supervisor must also be able to hold onto the warmth and hope when you have identified with my projections and perceive our relationship as worthless and hopeless and want to retaliate. If you are too afraid to visit my internal world and are unable to contain your own as well as my anxieties, you are not the right therapist for me.
If your supervisor and you are at your core punitive people who have not worked through their own primitive envy, you will be dangerous to me. In the transference I will recreate what has happened to me as a child, which was that I was almost annihilated first by my parent's envy and then by my own. I am terrified of my envy and will try to put it into you to hold for me.. until I am able to take it back... slowly... gently.... with much compassion attached to it. If you are unable to hold my envy, there will come a time in my therapy when you will want to destroy me. This will first be unconscious and if you are saying to yourself as you read this "I don't want to destroy her" you have already fallen into the dynamics. If your supervisor is unable to help you become aware of your unconscious need to destroy me, my projections, I will be in danger.
You need to know that you will fail at any of the above points, no one is perfect, neither are you. Hopefully you already know this, but if you are unable to stay in the relationship to offer reparation, no matter how deep the pain within you, therapy will fail me again. It will be the reparation that will heal me, not you being perfect. It takes a very strong person to get up again and again, after years of rejection. Please don't take me on as a patient if you are not strong enough to withstand my total rejection (of you).
In case you want to work with me, which will, I assume, be highly unlikely at this point, I need you to know that I will not come for an assessment session/s. I have been rejected too many times in the first session due to my inability to talk and answer questions. I will not sit in a room with you for 50 minutes, expose my precious inner world only to be told to go away. This has damaged me beyond words in the past and if I should come and see you, it will be the first session of many unbearable ones to come, it will not be an assessment session. Of course I fully understand if your way of working is unable to adjust to my need, you might even experience it as manipulative. If this is the case, we are incompatible as you are failing to see the pain and terror behind my need for safety. This is about my need to stay safe, not your need to be satisfied.