Stopdog, I think that if your T is using empathy statements and you regularly perceive them as pointless or adversarial, then she should get a clue and try something else. It does not sound like she is learning from her experience with you but keeps reacting to you in one, stock way. Isn’t she paying attention?

As sconnie said, I think empathy statements can be a way for the T to check if he understood correctly what the client is feeling. The client has a chance to correct. I am OK with the T checking to see if we are on the same page, because I want us to be communicating accurately.

I have a hard time believing any client actually used those words. Sounds like a therapist’s fantasy of the words a client would use.

My T sometimes tells me what is “normal” and it makes me feel alien or disenfranchised when I realize I feel differently than what is “normal.” It also makes me feel like T is trying to put me in a box to try to understand me. Like if he says, “usually when people get divorced, they feel X” or “women tend to react in such and such a way”, it makes me feel like “huh? I am divorced. [or, I am female.] And I do not feel that way at all.” T is trying to put me in the “female box” he has constructed in his head, and I do not fit. On the other hand if my T tells me I am normal because I feel X and it is true, it can help. Like if I am still grieving my father’s death after X months, and he tells me this is not uncommon, I am reassured.

Stopdog, this is a really interesting book on communication in therapy: Making Contact: Uses of Language in Psychotherapy by Leston Havens. He talks about the use of language to draw closer or farther away from a client, because the therapeutic distance is not the same for all clients. He seems very sensitive to this distance and described clients that he had to work with at a far distance and others very close, and he may vary this as therapy with them changes. I was impressed at his perceptiveness. It sounds like the books you have been reading are assuming that the distance would be the same for all clients. Who is this mythical, typical client, anyway?

I have therapy today and I am going to watch if T makes any empathy statements and what my inner reaction to them is.