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Originally Posted by pachyderm
One of the comments at the bottom of the page starts with this:
"Individualized therapy in DBT has been the reason people get better NOT steadfastly following every exercise in her training books."
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As I understand it, originally the whole point of DBT was to make individual therapy possible for patients who otherwise would be too distracted by all the ongoing crises and triggering in their lives.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pachyderm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fool Zero
I participated in a workshop where the workshop leader announced up front that (a.) he didn't care about us, i.e., didn't have an investment in whether we got better from the workshop or not; and that (b.) whatever he might say, we shouldn't "believe" it but just get that he'd said it, sit with it, and see what came up for us in response.
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Why does a person feel the need to use that type of approach at all? |
To me it didn't (and doesn't) look like it was anything about "feeling a need". The workshop was an exercise (or series of exercises) and that was the format of the exercises. If you didn't want to play by those rules, you were encouraged not to stay for the workshop. As well ask, when you're playing baseball, why does the umpire
feel a need to make you run from first to second to third base instead of coming home directly from first? After all, it would be much shorter that way -- though it also wouldn't be baseball.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pachyderm
Offhand, I'd say that maybe the person has a certain amount of discomfort with the behavior a sufferer presents, and wants to make it go away.
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In the context of the workshop: Having been there myself, I'd say workshop leaders had a great deal of room for participants to experience whatever they experienced and move through it
as long as they did so in ways that supported the other participants in doing likewise. They seemed to have seen it all and to be well prepared to take anything in stride and steer it into somehow contributing to what we were there to do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pachy
I can see that this kind of approach might have value if done with exceeding care and self-awareness, but it could also slip very easily into abuse.
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I kept seeing workshop leaders exercising, yes, exceeding care and self-awareness, and
not slipping into anything I would've found abusive. Please remember that I'd been around the horn a few times myself when it came to abuse; was at least as trigger-happy as the next guy; and went into the workshop alert for the first hint of anything that might signal I wouldn't be entirely safe there.
Actually, being able to point to something (outside my own imagination, that is) that showed I
wasn't entirely safe, would've been just the excuse I was looking for to hunker down and protect myself instead of watching my own stuff come up and dealing with it. I'm quite certain that I wasn't alone in that, and that the workshop leader knew it at least as well as I did.
In the context of DBT: Linehan (whose job, again, is to support therapists in staying on track and doing effective therapy) addresses something along those lines in the passage I
quoted earlier:
Quote:
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Some therapists do not want to hear about dysfunctional behaviors of their patients. Such reports might threaten their sense of competence or control as therapists, or remind them of behavioral problems of their own or of people close to them. One therapist I supervised told me that she didn't like to hear about "weird" behaviors from anyone....
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It seems to me, at least, that she's coming from "How do we best get therapists
past this?" -- and back to doing good therapy with patients who can (figuratively speaking) sit still long enough to make use of it.