Quote:
Originally Posted by mixedup_emotions
....I saw T today, and he decided to take a "tough love" approach with me. Telling me that he always thought of me as someone who didn't back down to challenges and that he would have to change his view of me....that my life is better than a lot of people, many people have it rougher than I do, so don't start feeling sorry for myself...that my life is a lot better than it was...etc.
...I felt awful before my session....and even worse after my session.
I asked him if he was minimizing what I'm dealing with. He said no, but then started reciting horrors of people who survived 40 days in the water surrounded by sharks, and how what I'm dealing with is "cake" compared to that.......which felt minimizing to me. 
He told me it was "tough love"....Well, it's not working for me. Not at all. |
Add me to the list of people who thinks this is NOT an example of tough love.
Tough love has the word "love" in it, which means that while being tough, there is still empathy and the desire for understanding. Tough love is when you tell someone something they don't want to hear, but that you know they need to hear. He got the "don't want to hear" part right. But you didn't really need to hear that. Nobody does, really, except for people who actually seem to not be aware that others are worse off than they are. That's really not the situation here. Here, an example of tough love might be, "I know you're suffering MUE, and I know that this is a bad cycle of feeling bad, not taking action as a result, then feeling bad about not taking action, and then not taking action as a result of that... you need to find a way to break the cycle, though, and you need to do it fast."
Tough love works for me sometimes, not others. But the approach you described pretty much never works, in my experience. That's like the #1 thing not to say to somebody suffering from depression. What I hear from him isn't tough love, but rather, "I am burning out and frustrated with my own inability to help you, so I'm going to take the cheapest shot in the book, which any idiot on the street could give you for free."
So sorry MUE. I hope your e-mail is helpful and sets things back on track
