I'm not sure when you were in therapy but I do notice that therapy seems to have come a long way since
I last was.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheByzantine
When I started with therapy I was so unknowing of what I wanted from therapy. I was too ignorant to ask intelligent questions. I just knew I did not like what was going on and could not change it for the better alone.
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I think a major problem for me was that I assumed there was something wrong with me that my therapists would see (since they were the experts) that I couldn't (since I was the patient), and that for the same reasons, they'd be able to tell me what to do whereas I'd never find the right direction by myself.
Since I was already used to hearing that whatever difficulties I was having were my fault (although for a different reason each time
), I was wary of stumbling into a situation where my therapist could possibly tell me I wasn't trying, or I misunderstood, or I was doing it wrong. The result was that I'd try to anticipate what they expected and give it to them, even if it meant saying things that I wasn't quite sure were true or sometimes not saying things that might make me sound like (my idea of) a bad patient. I'd present with those problems in particular that I thought would be easiest and most rewarding to recover from and least likely to confuse or freak out my therapist. Then, once we'd established that their methods worked for me and I was a good enough patient for them, we could go on to the hard stuff if we had time.
I was in my early 20s at the time, and accustomed to unequal relationships with authority figures. I figured the therapists would be deciding how the therapy was going, whether to keep me as a patient, and what to try next. I didn't trust them to do the right thing or make the right decision every time, but I wasn't going to be in a position to argue or appeal. I needed to keep looking like the kind of patient they'd want to keep working with, and hope that whatever they decided to do did me some good.
I later came across several authors who did seem to show a good understanding both of therapy itself and of my experiences with it. The first few I think of are
Carl Rogers,
Irvin Yalom, and
Steven Hayes. I have to admit that they, and therapy, make a lot more sense to me in retrospect. I'm not sure how useful I'd have found them if I'd read them before starting therapy.
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edited to add: While looking for some of those other links, I also found
this collection.