Well presumably, she knows how to adjust her method for each individual client so I don't think you need to tell her that. Maybe you could tell her you'd like to have a rather left-brained session and discuss how her process of therapy has helped you, what else might have helped you even more, and share with her some insights from Mindsight that helped you understand better what was happening to your brain in therapy.

In general, I don't discuss books on therapy with my T or the process of therapy. And I don't even read them too much. I have a tendency to be very analytical and intellectual and I try to keep that from dominating therapy, although I don't ban it. What's going to be healing to me in therapy is all the right-brained feeling stuff. Others may have different challenges and so need to be more thinking and analytical in therapy. Skysblue, remember Stuart the analytical lawyer client from Mindsight? The T deliberately had to avoid getting sucked into fascinating discussions of the brain basis for psychotherapy with Stuart--the scientific evidence, the neurobiological basis for each exercise they would be doing together, etc. I'm not as left-brained as Stuart but it does help me to keep too much analysis out of my therapy.

But I think if you want to share the insights you've gained from reading Mindsight, there is nothing wrong with that. And telling her how therapy might have helped you even more is fine too. I just don't think you need to pitch it as I'm telling you this so you can help your other clients. Because your T may already be changing her approach depending on the client's needs (and brain).

My T is not a brain scientist so I am not sure how much he knows or follows from Siegel (Mindsight author). But he has mentioned to me the neurobiology of emotions and therapy several times. Therapists have been doing psychotherapy for generations and not known about its neurobiological basis, so not all will have that knowledge yet as a lot of the research is within the last 20 years. But it doesn't change that certain approaches are effective in therapy (the therapist knew that empirically)--we just didn't know why before, at a scientific level. (Of course we still don't know everything on this.) At my last session, a month ago, my T mentioned Siegel as someone he thought was doing really good work. So I read Mindsight. I want to tell T I read it but I'm afraid we will get distracted from therapy if I do. I see him infrequently, so I feel I can't squander a session on a book discussion... Not optimal, but if we had frequent sessions, maybe I would.

It was interesting that when my husband and I did couples sessions with my T, especially in the first few where my husband was brand new to T, T explained the process a lot more and was really left-brained with my husband. He took a really different approach than with me! So I could see right in front of my eyes that T acted differently with different clients. (I still remember sitting there watching T, thinking "who are you?" LOL)