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Originally Posted by OneInBillions
I have some concerns about the therapy I'm receiving; maybe those of you who have been doing this longer can help. I'm seeing my T about once a week, I guess for CBT. So here are my concerns:
1. He's usually at least 5-6 minutes late, and has been as many as 15 minutes late before. He never mentions this, or apologizes at all. Recently he's been ending the sessions several minutes early, too. Now when I'm paying over $100 for a 1-hour session, that seems a bit... wrong. Am I just being obnoxiously punctual? Am I wrong to expect at least 50 minutes of actual "couch" time?
2. Every session, he asks me how I'm doing, I mumble that I'm fine (because "fine" is my go-to euphemism for "not that good, actually"), and then the silence ensues. There is a LOT of silence between us. Granted, I have a very hard time trusting anyone and I know I'm not opening up as much as I should. But shouldn't a therapist actually try to start a conversation or lesson or something, instead of sitting there in silence, deconstructing his pen or bending a paperclip until it breaks?
3. I've been to maybe 20 or so sessions, but at the latest one he just wanted to "review" everything we've been over. Okay, that's fine, but then he actually told me that he "doesn't know where to go next" with my therapy. And it's been like this from the beginning -- he's always seemed very disorganized. Like he's not following any actual process, just winging it from session to session. Is that normal?
4. He says that I'm ready to try these things we've been going over in real-world situations and insists that I need a job, even though I'm absolutely terrified of interviews, the first day, meeting new people, workplace bullying, etc. I guess he thinks the "talk therapy" part is over, even though I don't feel any better in social situations than when we started. We talked for one session about my past traumas, and I guess he thinks that's enough to "cure" me? I know I'm paranoid and depressed, but it really feels to me like he's just sick of me.
I don't know what to do at this point... I honestly feel like I'm "failing" at therapy, and that's plain pathetic. I'm considering quitting the whole thing cold turkey, but I know that I have a lot of unresolved issues and some mental illnesses that aren't getting any better. Maybe I really am just a hopeless case.
Any advice or help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
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Hi OneInBillions. You might get many different opinions from different people, but one important thing where I hope most people would agree is the fact that you cannot fail at therapy, as long as you go to your appointments and don't actively try to sabotage them.
1. There have been some discussions about therapists who start sessions late and end them early, and while I am all for cutting the T some slack if it happens occasionally, I absolutely think it is a problem if it becomes usual, and especially if your sessions are regularly cut short by as much as 8-10 minutes. And in any case, if you are bothered by it, then it is a problem - anything that frustrates you or becomes a roadblock of any kind in your therapy is worth mentioning.
2. My T almost never starts the conversation. I found this frustrating and embarrassing at first, but I have come to appreciate it. A therapy session isn't like any other kind of conversation, I've found - it's perfectly okay to sit in silence for ten minutes, and that creates a very restful and unhurried environment, where it becomes more possible for me to open up than I had ever thought possible. However, it is a little surprising to me that a CBT therapist works like that (my T is psychodynamic), but of course CBT Ts are different, just like everybody else.
Again, if it bothers you it's definitely something you can bring up. It might make for a good conversation opener if you don't know what to say! (That your T fidgets with pens and paper clips sounds rather annoying, I must say. That would bother me a bit.)
3 and 4. This sounds like your T might not be a very good fit for you, to be honest. Maybe you need to see a therapist who is prepared to work on your past. To me it doesn't sound very helpful at all to just insist that you need to do these real-world things - it's a bit like those people who tell you to just "snap out of" a depression as if it were a choice to be depressed. If he says that he doesn't know where to go next, maybe you could ask him about alternatives, such as a referral to a different T?
In any case, it is not your fault. I just think that you and your current T might not be a great match.