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Old Mar 04, 2013, 11:27 AM
Anne2.0 Anne2.0 is offline
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Member Since: Aug 2012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PAYNE1 View Post
Well, I don't think a patient needs to feel in love with a therapist exactly, but it is true that a patient who cares what his/her therapist thinks and maybe even wants to please the therapist is more likely to follow through on the therapist's suggestions, do homework, and cooperate more in general. So, I agree with your general observation from your own experience.
I don't know, but I think that T's should go out of their way to not encourage the situation where the client wants to please the T or cares about what the T thinks. I think that T's should encourage clients to please themselves, not the T or other people, and to otherwise follow their own internal compass, not the T's. That is why it is important that T's be non-judgmental as possible, so clients feel free to develop their own sense of what is right for them. Also, I think that it is fine to give homework to clients, but if it doesn't work for a client, a T should be fine with that and not communicate that the client has somehow failed. And I'm not sure how "cooperation" works in therapy-- I am not really looking for advice from my T, and on the rare occasions he has offered it, I've told him to stuff it (and he's fine with that). But if I felt that my T was trying to get me to cooperate with him in some way, as opposed to driving the bus of my own life, I'd be out of there without a look back. He has said that he sees himself as like an accompanist for a musician, it is his job to follow me, cooperate with me, not the other way around. So my experience of what kind of therapy I want is the complete opposite of some model where I somehow get to where the T is.