Yes Yes Yes!!!!! He has been pushing me to live healthier and he has been a hard@$$ about it too. I think the T gauges if you are in a stable place and then chooses to strike!

I know I need to be pushed but I despise it.

My T admits he is pretty pushy. He is really supportive as well, and I was in a deep, dark hole when I started, so I needed someone who would keep pushing me to get me out of that hole. I'm not sure we have had a session since the first few where there was not some combination of supporting AND pushing.

Sally is dead on. There has to be a balance. Therapy, IMO, can't just be about supporting us in our decisions, but helping us understand why we make them. Sometimes that involves taking a very very hard look at ourselves.

It happens occasionally that we don't care much for what we see and some of our choices. It's okay. That's why we do it. To improve ourselves.

All in all, when I think of the people that have helped me the most, it's those that have the ability to push me to be better, AND, help me to love myself right where I am.

If it's all one or the other, believe me, I would run.

I think this is the perpetual balancing act for Ts: finding a place between validating and challenging. Constant validation might feel nice but we'd be in therapy forever licking our wounds. Too much challenge and we're out of there, never to return.

T and I used to argue about this quite a lot, and there were times when I'd tell her to slide back down the see saw (towards validation). Sometimes she listened, sometimes the impasse lasted for weeks. We already had a trusting relationship though. I think if you're seeing T's pushing as the opposite of building trust, that's more of a problem. I think that challenge/pushing can only be effective from within a trusting relationship, and that Ts should always prioritise building trust, since we know it's the therapeutic relationship which accounts for the bulk of therapy's effects.