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sunrise said:
Could you work on exploring in therapy what you need and want from him? This is a great topic and it sounds like it is so on your mind right now.
Also, are you the only one feeling like there is something lacking in your therapeutic relationship?

Does he feel things are going along fine? Maybe he sees this slower style of bonding ...[/i][/b]

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we have been off and on.. exploring it i mean. That is why i felt i had that wonderful session. And he does think it's going ok.. and part of the slowness is my own doing. i told him explicitly that i wanted things to be slow or i would bolt... but i didn't mean the formation of the relationship, i meant the journey through crapville.

i also hadn't answered alexandra's question about overt signs.. he know i focus on the tone of his voice, and i get a lot from that. i am accutely tuned into to body language, for reasons i'll bring up in another thread later maybe, and it is direct recognition. Like Alexandra said, it's a mirroring in a way. i think he is trying, but we haven't hit the same wavlength yet.

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sunrise said:BTW, CBT also doesn't work for me. Therapy was not that helpful for me until I found a non-CBT therapist, someone with a bigger toolbox who could use the best techniques for me. It seems I often read here that CBT doesn't work for a number of people. I wonder why so many therapists gravitate to it, then? I remember pinksoil saying once that most of the students in her program wanted to do CBT. (Hope I got that right, pink!) Maybe it is just as simple as CBT is the therapy that insurance likes to reimburse for (because it is shorter and not deep work), and the therapists in training are very concerned with the bottom line. /i][/b]

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you're right about the insurance thing, and it's the same reason why T's move to it.. it can be a quick fix to immediate problems without opening up the whole person. So, it's treating the symptom, or immediate issue without addressing the whole picture.. or that's the idea. Many CBT T's do delve further in, and from what i understand they are supposed to superficially look at past history. My old T was a CBT purist and he said outright he didn't feel that PA style did any real good. i am somewhere in between, i have worked hard over several years to explore my own self, and i have had many insights, but have not had them help a lot, or not known what to do with them. i think my former T just didn't want long term relationships with clients, partially because he felt it was a dependency that was unhealthy. His views, not mine.

i tend to think it has to be what works for the client. My T felt the same way even though he does CBT with most clients. i told him how i felt about CBT, and why, and how i felt the many insights i had hadn't connected me with any solutions... many people can adjust once they have an insight but that didn't happen for me. i need something different and so he suggested schema, which i think will become very widely used eventually. It incorporates a lot of CBT ideas but with a dash of other things... and spnds more time working on past issues.

CBT became the grail in a lot of circles because it offered working solutions for people. More people are willing to go into therapy that will take a few months rather than a few years, for financial reasons. So for T's it can be a business decision if nothing else. MAny traditional PA T's are seeing their business dry up somewhat. Years of therapy is expensive.

which reminds me... i bought a card for my T which says "therapy is expensive, popping bubble wrap is cheap.. you choose"