Hi all, going to try to keep this concise but really struggling with how I feel.
Me (F30) and my partner (M31) have been seeing a therapist for just under a year to work on our communication with each other, big topics like marriage/kids, and learning how to resolve arguments that come up frequently. My partner has been seeing an individual therapist for about a decade, I just started seeing one a couple months ago.
In our sessions, most of the focus ends up being on me, why I feel the way I feel, what it might be related to, what “age” I feel when I feel these feelings, etc. It has been largely really helpful, but over the past few weeks I am starting to feel frustrated with how closely we seem to investigate my feelings while simply accepting my partner’s. For example, my partner wants to get married because it’s “the natural next step” and I have never felt a real interest in marriage and don’t feel ready for it. We did a lot of investigating into why I don’t feel ready, what I don’t like about marriage, why it has never been important to me. We didn’t spend any time on why my partner feels it’s needed for a relationship, why he is uncomfortable with not being married etc.
Today, our therapist told me that she feels a rift between her and I because I don’t hear her and don’t want focus on me but in her opinion that focus is needed. She said that many of my problems arise around how I perceive my partner to have felt (e.g. upset/uncomfortable/walled off at an event) when he says he felt fine. I don’t want to shy away from the work, but I’m starting to feel like I’m the root of all of our problems and my sense of reality and trust in my intuition is being eroded when we accept that he says he felt a certain way (even if body language/tone of voice say otherwise) and question my perception of him.
What do you do if you leave feeling a little uncomfortable and misunderstood? Keep pushing through or see a new therapist? My partner us supportive either way and I’m having a hard time distinguishing between normal discomfort/defensiveness that I need to learn to work through VS discomfort/defensiveness that means this therapist and I aren’t a good fit.