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pinksoil said:
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from alexandra_k
i read something once about how the moments in therapy that are striking to the therapist are often quite different from the moments in therapy that are striking to the client. the therapist tends to think the most significant moments are when they make some insight they are all proud of. the client tends to think the most significant moment is when they got some sense of emotional connection. sometimes therapists don't know precisely what they do that we get so much out of...

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from sunrise
alex, I wrote that here a couple of weeks ago. I find it fascinating.

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Was that Irvin Yalom? He wrote when he asked his clients to wrote down what they remembered about session, it was the little things. He was shocked-- he thought they would remember his 'brilliant' interpretations, his insight-- the things that matter to the client were so very different than that.

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pinksoil, the place I got that was a paper from the professional psychology literature. I don't know if Yalom was an author on it or not. This was a research study examining patient and therapist picks for the most significant moments in therapy sessions. They used the therapists who had conducted the sessions, as well as "neutral" therapists who listened to recordings of the sessions. The neutral therapists and therapists who had been part of the sessions were pretty much in sync with their significant moment picks. The moments that patients/clients identified were quite different from the T's, as alex described in her synopsis. I found it to be a fascinating study!

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I hide my SI-- I'm not putting out in the open, in hopes that someone will see it and comfort me-- but it's an unconscious attempt at keeping the pain, the suffering... because I don't know any other mechanism right now.

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pinksoil, that's interesting what you wrote about SI. thanks for the clarification. For me, it was pretty different. My SI was not a way of keeping the pain going, but a way to release and feel the intolerable pain that had built up inside of me. It actually was a way of letting the pain go, not keeping it. Back then, when I was doing it, as now, I needed to learn healthier ways of feeling and expressing my pain. Again, this is something I wish was written into a how-to manual they give each person at birth.