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Originally Posted by velcro003
no one can make you feel anything. it is your "choice" to respond and react--
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That is not true. It is possible to elicit emotions in people. If I insult you and all your family, you might have an initial angry feeling. At that point you can choose to entertain that feeling or employ a coping mechanism to make it go away. But the initial feeling is still there.
You can say whatever you want.
I did not want to feel attracted to my therapist. I tried to not feel attracted to my therapist but I failed because ultimately we, human beings, don't have 100% control over our unconscious minds. I don't need to prove this to you. I know it is true.
I believe that asking me to not feeling attracted to the therapist is akin to asking a heterosexual man to not feel sexually aroused if he sees an attractive naked woman. You can close your eyes... You can run away... But you can't really successfully suppress the initial sexual arousal.
In my case my best bet would have been to quit therapy before the cancer grew bigger, but if I had done that then people would have said that I failed to solve my problems because I quit therapy.
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which is why people are saying that how you react is entirely because of your experiences in life. even if a T was 100% neutral (which is impossible since they are not robots), you'd still experience some sort of feelings. my T is more psychoanalytically inclined, and is more like a "blank slate." Yet, I have brought in my issues into what she says, or not says. I take that neutral stance, and color it with my own experiences.
For example: For a long time, I thought that her non-response towards some things I said equaled her anger with me. I was terrified. What I eventually figured out through talking about it with my T, and her consistent behavior--is that I thought that because of my relationship with my mom growing up. Silence = Anger. My T wasn't angry, she was allowing me the space to think/talk. But because I had experienced silence as anger growing up, I automatically thought it was the same with her.
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I still believe that it is unethical not to warn patients about transference.So why is it that it's so much trouble to warn patients about transference? Is it because then the therapy wouldn't work? (By the way, most people probably don't even read informed consent forms. But if they go to therapy and end up experiencing this unnecessary torture, at least they can't say they were not warned.)