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Old Apr 09, 2012, 01:24 PM
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Perna Perna is offline
Pandita-in-training
 
Member Since: Sep 2006
Location: Maryland
Posts: 27,289
Quote:
Originally Posted by stopdog View Post
I am wondering how much detail is necessary to give the therapist to have therapy work?
It's changes in yourself that matter and make therapy work and not admitting "those" details out loud, keeping them inside with, perhaps, incorrect assumptions/imaginings about them that are at the crux of what makes you unhappy/have a problem could be what will make or break therapy for you.

You can't know what detail it might be before you bring it out into the light of day with someone else looking at it who says, "Oh, no, sweetie! That's not how that works" and correcting your seven year old self's misunderstanding of what was going on? The whole of how you think/feel/are "put together" is a good idea because you never know how your mother spanking you with her left hand when she is right-handed might be related to your split feelings about your mother being good/bad until it's paired with her grandfather being Muslim so the left hand is "bad" and it is your mother who is split and you just learned it from what she was taught (meaning you can unlearn/change how you think/feel).

Our younger lives, especially, are very complicated, when we're just starting to get oriented for ourselves and speak, etc. as we've already learned so much (don't put paper clips in electrical sockets) and a lot of what we have learned is cultural or idiosyncratic to our parents and not necessarily what is helpful or useful to ourselves, now. But often it takes another person looking at the same information to let us know that the "default" we are use to is what might be getting in our way now.
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Thanks for this!
stopdog