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Originally Posted by eskielover
When you were a younger person (or even older), there are times when relating to others around us that we can end up with a crush on someone & have feelings for them that aren't the way they feel about us.
Growing up is about learning the skills to handle that kind of pain & those kinds of situations....unfortunately, many of us didn't learn those skills as we were growing up.....& need to learn them at the older age in Therapy. If you aren't willing to work with your T on learning the skills, & you come across with an attitude of not being willing to learn skills, then it doesn't surprise me that your T is referring you to another T who might be able to relate to you in way that can get through to you.
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The thing is, if I had never gone to therapy I never would have been put in a position where I need to learn these skills, since crushes on people are not part of my life experience.
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Law suits aren't the answer to every pain we feel in life. Learning the skills to be able to handle them is the answer....but you need to be willing to learn those skills rather than to go on attack when you are feeling pain & trying to point fingers at whose fault it is.
The pointing fingers would probably go way back to your childhood. There are just some things in life that we have to accept as being what they are & learn the skills to handle those things....which is our responsibility, not the courts responsibility to hold some innocent person responsible for your emotions.
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I hold them responsible for not warning me about the pain I was possibly going to endure while in therapy.
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I'm guessing that your T doesn't feel that you are open to learning those skills from her which is probably why she is referring you to another T.
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What was she going to tell me? "You have a crush on me but your emotions are just emotions so you shouldn't care?" That's why I wrote in my other thread that therapy turned me into a sociopath. Because if love and affection are emotions that need not be respected then perhaps I should follow my therapist's example and treat other people's emotions with the same disregard that she treated mine. Maybe the therapist is right. Maybe I am an idiot for thinking that those emotions matter.
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Maybe you would be better off getting a T who focuses on DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy). It's a lot of work but the best therapy I have encountered in my 17 years of therapy.
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I agree that if I ever receive more therapy it should be a different type of therapy. But you say that you have been in therapy for 17 years? 17 years is a long time. I would question the effectiveness of therapy if I still need it after 17 years.
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It teaches & gives practice in mindfulness which teaches the ability to identify our emotional thoughts & rational thoughts & come up with wise solutions to problems we come across in life. There is also a section of Distress Tolerance, learning how to handle distressful situations that come up in life. There are also sections on learning about Emotional Regulation & Interpersonal Effectiveness & learning the skills to be able to use them in our everyday life. Skills that would have been good for everyone to learn as we were growing up, but most of us weren't in a healthy enough family life or had parents who had not idea how to teach us these skills while we were growing up.
Therapy is all about learning & practicing skills to help us in life, not trying to point fingers & accuse others for how we are feeling or how we act, or how we respond to situations. When we can learn to handle the situations we find ourselves is, we don't dig ourselves deeper into continuing situations that have brought us to Therapy in the first place.
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The thing that brought me to therapy is a problem that I should have attempted to tackle with chemicals. But my fear of their side effects of was such that I ended up leaning toward therapy.
But if I had only been warned about the side effects of therapy I would have given chemicals a try. What's a headache or a stomachache next to the pain I endured in therapy?
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It helps us look at the past situations & also help understand where we have come from & how to handle the emotions that we are dealing with in relation to past issues we need to work through.
Therapy is our WORK, it's not finding a T who will magically FIX everything in our life, but help us put past situations in their appropriate perspective & learn skills to help us in the future. Finding a T who will work with you in this way rather than like my past T's who just sat there & listened to me talk, is critical to our healing & learning how to STAY HEALED in the future.
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Then I guess it was my fault for trusting the system and being too lazy to do my homework. If I had known what I was getting myself into I wouldn't have bothered with therapy.