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Originally Posted by Favorite Jeans
LOL! I wouldn't let any crystal healer near my hoo-ha either. I'm not offended by the idea of being instructed, I love to learn new things and there's nothing cooler to me than a really skilled teacher, but I don't experience therapy that way.
The essential part of the analogy for me was that in each case unnecessary interference is kept to a minimum. A good midwife has all the skills to recognize and manage an emergency, can give you a ton of information and tell you what you can likely expect. But she's not there to show off her skills, she talks more about "attending a birth" than "delivering the baby."
The trick is that she actually does have all kinds of hard technical skills too, she's not relying on crystal woo when you're bleeding out.
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Jajaja—thanks for this! Your posts always make me laugh. You have a way of crystalizing (haha) and clarifying a point that makes me a little jealous. Yes, I think the essential difference is noninterference—pure, active instruction can involve interference (I’m thinking trying to teach little kids how to hold a pencil, and half of them grab it full-fist like they’re about to stake a vampire—you’d step in and correct their grip). This is different than imparting information, supporting, guiding, and all that “fluffier” instruction that happens in therapy, when it happens at all.
I like that you bring up the point about hard technical skills. I know this wasn’t something I appreciated in my T at first. They spend so much time reflecting and nodding and doing that therapist thing it can be easy to forget that this person (presumably—hopefully) actually does have a ton of specialist information and education on human behavior, psychology, mental illness, and the like.
Anyway, glad as always to talk to a fellow learning-lover. Though glad you don’t experience therapy this way—I don’t think it would be especially therapeutic to have session after session focused primarily on the subject (or, god forbid, the therapist) instead of you, the client.
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Originally Posted by BudFox
Well said. It is one thing to receive technical knowledge or expertise in a professional relationship, but quite another to be given advice on living and feeling and relating. I think that sort of instruction or advice nearly always says more about the giver than the receiver.
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I should have asked ATAT what types of things one DOES learn in the context of therapy and how they differ from things one learns outside of it. Because, again, it’s often not that different in my experience. Maybe that’s because I’ve never really felt instructed in any topic as vague and amorphous as “life.” I receive psychoeducation on living with a mental illness, which I may do with as I will. I have a different perspective expressed to me on a particular relational issue, which I find interesting and provocative if not always correct. I am recommended and taught particular strategies for coping with particular feelings, which I always at least
try before discounting.
I’ve often had the same “ah ha!” moment when information on my difficulties clicks as when I finally get the pattern to the verb conjugation. I experience the same sense of accomplishment when I successfully change a tire as when I successfully change a bad habit. I’ve never felt instruction in either case was inherently offensive.
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Originally Posted by BudFox
Every therapist I have met either gave instruction or advice, or had a manner that suggested it was coming at any moment, had I hung around long enough. I have also never met a T who didn't at least in some small way project an air of superiority, with the implication that I must be more broken than they.
I find general life advice to be almost always an insult.
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I’m sorry you’ve had such awful experiences. I’m sorry you’ve felt that nasty implication. I can see therapy being very painful and disappointing indeed for someone who doesn’t want instruction or advice.