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sunrise said:
Do you ever share unrealistic "I wish..." statements with your T? How does he/she react? I shared such a statement with my T last session. For the last day I've been thinking about his response compared to the response my former counselor made when I shared such a statement with her..
My former counselor
Sunny: "I wish he would just never come home." (Said in reference to my husband about a year and a half ago when he was away on business. Things often seemed so much better when he was gone, and I thought life would be great if he just never came home. Then I wouldn't have to go through the pain of breaking up the marriage, etc.)
My former counselor (as if she were breaking some bad news to me): But that's not going to happen. He
is coming home.
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I react to that as a needed and welcomed dose of reality-thinking. Not a judgement on you, but just reality.
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My current therapist
Sunny: I wish I could be divorced tomorrow! (Said last week in the heat of feeling I-am-so-effing-sick-of-this-divorce.)
Therapist (smiling): I bet you do. Or tonight!
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That would set off alarms for me -- that my therapist was saying something she thought would please me, so I would like
her more. Or something that was more playing to
her needs than to mine.
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I've been thinking about these 2 interchanges a lot. Is the difference in the responses because my former counselor was CBT and my current T is humanistic? Were they trained to respond the ways they did? Or was it just kind of instinctual, the ways they responded, having more to do with their personalities? And my therapist's personality and response just fit better my own personality and what I needed from a therapist at that moment?
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My reaction would be that your last statement is true. That your second therapist's reaction more closely fit your felt needs at the time than your first one's.