Quote:
Originally Posted by stopdog
Actually - I did not call all of therapy malarky. If it helped you great. Any number of things can help people.
But what I was calling malarky was the idea that if they don't make it mysterious and unclear, if they actually were to be clear and forthcoming about what they are doing, that it would not work at all. The idea that clients are so incapable of understanding or being able to still use therapy appropriately if those guys would stop all of the smoke and mirrors and game playing and just explain to clients how what they are doing at the client works or at least is supposed to work - it would not. If you found the smoke and mirrors game useful - good - but malarky that it is the only way.
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I really agree with this. I was totally retraumautized by my first therapist, and one of the big reasons why was that my therapist's orientation did not allow him to suggest anything actually useful to me to help me cope on my own between sessions. It was like the relationship was meant to be some magical process, which I totally didn't understand, and giving me useful ways of helping myself would have been interfering with the magic somehow. It was frightening, and he didn't help me with these enormous feelings of trauma that came up and engulfed me.
My therapist now, in contrast, is totally transparent. I've read books he's written- one for clients and one for therapists, so I know exactly what he's trying to do. He started out as a CBT guy but has gone along with that whole "third-wave" of CBT which seems to differ radically from what I thought of as CBT. (More meditation, mindfulness, compassion, acceptance, values-based stuff. Not focused on that "challenging your thinking", which as a pretty rational person I found totally insulting and invalidating when I tried out a therapist who did that stuff.)
There's no game-playing, and he's upfront about how he's trying to help me, and we work together on figuring out ways I can help myself. We have an extremely strong relationship, which is super-helpful, but neither of us believe that the relationship is the end-all and be-all. I have so much more power than that to help myself.