hi all, i need some clarity here on a session that went down.

so for context, i am in couples therapy with my partner thru zoom. we are now searching for a new one because the one we saw yesterday referred us out.

yesterday, i came in for a session with my partner. we were both sick that day, and let her know this. i was quiet when we were talking at first because my partner was speaking, and i’m still sick so i didn’t really have much energy to talk.

she asked if i had anything to bring up, i said i did. i said that i felt like i couldn’t talk about things with my partner because he would become defensive and start calling me names, like insecure or crazy or dramatic. she asked for his perspective on this and when she asked for mine, i said i was having a hard time opening up in sessions now because of a previous one that we had.

when i started to explain, i said that a couple sessions ago that my partner brought a list in of all of my feelings that i had and they both started to discuss it at length. i said i felt like a lab rat because i had no room to talk in this session, but my feelings were being examined. i said that i thought the list was unproductive.

she said right off the bat that that never happened because she didn’t recall it ever happening. i said that it did, we were all there, and then she asked why i didn’t bring it up sooner. i said i didn’t get a chance to in our last session, so i was doing it now.

it was then that she started saying she could refer us out. i said i wasn’t looking for that, it seemed like a really drastic measure, i just wanted to communicate this. then she said that we had little time left in our session and that she wanted to make sure we used our time adequately.

i started getting defensive at this point. i stopped engaging fully because i felt like i wasn’t being heard and this became another problem. she started attacking me for my video screen being off, saying that i was avoiding everything, but my screen was off so i could read from a note that i had on my phone specifically for that situation. when you leave an app on your phone with video call to look at another it automatically blacks out your screen. i didn’t realize it was still off but when she said this i realized it and went back to the video call.

then she ended the session saying that she didn’t agree with my perspective, and she would be referring us out.

i’m at a fucking loss 😭 i was opening up until that session happened, and my intention with bringing up that i felt unsafe was to rectify it so we could continue with therapy and i told her that. i have no idea what went wrong here.

after the session my partner started grilling me. he said that me feeling unsafe was what drove her away. he told me that i drove her away with my behavior. he said that my mental baggage was making therapy difficult and that i needed to fix it.

what did i do wrong here? i feel so confused by the whole situation