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Originally Posted by emptyspace
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I agree with you. It is their job and they probably only care within the boundaries of that relationship.
I know I will get blasted for saying this, but we are a job to them. We pay them for their service and 30+ other people pay for their service too.
They can't seriously care about all their clients, otherwise they would end up with "compassion fatigue" or exhaustion.
They pretend so that the relationship works, because without a solid relationship, the client won't change.
If you were a fly on the wall, you would see your T act very differently with another client than she does with you.
They have to act sometimes, because clients need different things.
Think about how different a T would have to act for StopDog versus someone who wants the relationship badly.
I sometimes think that they purposely act how we need them to, so that we keep coming back and paying for more. But that is another discussion....
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Not going to blast you, but I will qualify what you are saying a bit.
My T has talked about what good therapists know how to do so they don't run into "compassion fatigue" as you call it. He said that good therapists are masters at compartmentalizing. He has trained himself to keep each session/client in their own space because he can't be thinking of client A's problems when client B steps into his office. That doesn't mean he doesn't care. That means he does care because he is committed to giving himself fully to each client. He also compartmentalizes his work life from his outside life. That doesn't mean he doesn't think about his clients when they aren't in his office. He does. He just has a very strong ability to keep those aspects of his life from bleeding onto each other. If he couldn't do that, yes, he would be an exhausted, emotional mess. It's basically a boundary.
But he does think about his clients and care about them outside session. I suspect most of them do to some degree. Not every client every day. Certainly not every client every hour of the day. But just like the rest of us, people come to his mind, sometimes in the strangest of times and places. I remember him telling me once after he returned from vacation that he had had an aha moment about me while standing in the middle of a river fly fishing in Arkansas. It was a pretty funny image -- him in his waders, probably his beard all scruffy, doing his fishing thing -- but it reminded me that he doesn't just turn off his brain concerning his clients when he walks out the door. We have a way of coming to him, even when he is far removed from his job.
And yes, of course a therapist's interactions with each client are going to be different and their feelings and thoughts about clients are going to be different. How could they not be? But is different necessarily unreal or artificial? I have many different people my life personal and professional, and each of those relationships has a uniqueness to it. Would you really want your therapist to be the same with every client? They don't behave differently necessarily as an "act" so much as differences are just completely normal.