Quote:
Originally Posted by stopdog
I think one is free to choose a therapist that has experience or skills or training in the sorts of things one wants a therapist to know about. I am not so certain that I, as a client, get to demand a therapist get training in areas I think they need to know about. I would see it more as I am free to choose a therapist who does rather than demand the therapist go get it. I am a lesbian but that has very little to do with why I pay a therapist. As long as the therapist was not all bent out about homosexuality, then that part did not really come into play with my choices of therapists. I know of other people who deliberately seek other lesbians or gay men as therapists because they have that as a requirement for the therapist they hire. I think one should have choices in therapists, but as for demanding a therapist go get training in some area just to deal with me - is, to me, something that is unlikely to happen. I don't see a therapist complying with such a thing and I don't really see that they should.
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Fair enough. And, I would in general agree given how things are in the US or Western Europe.
However, QM's situation is different -- she isn't in a country that appears to have a great deal of choice in terms of Ts who are cool with LGBT stuff unlike in the US where the default is that Ts (at least in most areas) are unlikely to be homophobic (in this day and age -- the past is another issue).
She has also been working with her T for a while now and this has become a sticking point. Whether one uses the word 'demand' or expects that a T would make some effort to meet the client under these circumstances is open to debate -- but, I don't necessarily think that what she's asking for is out of bounds of what one might expect from a T in her situation.
Especially since the reason given by her T is not that she doesn't have the time / resources etc to do it but that she doesn't 'need' to do it i.e., because she already has the expertise / skills -- that to me is an incredibly false assumption and smacks of the Ts blindness which I suspect mirrors the general status of the homophobic society at large (I can't imagine most Ts in the US making a statement like that -- they may well say that it's beyond what they'd be willing to do but there's a general understanding that these issues do require more thought / expertise than may be provided in the typical curriculum). And so, this isn't just a general empathic / therapeutic failure but a specific issue that can be remedied with specific steps that the T is choosing not to do.
Also, I think it makes little sense to directly transport our understanding of things from a US / Western European context to other countries. At the same time of course, I do understand and see that it is possible to go too far with the cultural uniqueness argument -- I don't think that's the case here though.
QM -- apologies if I've misunderstood your situation or said stuff that's not accurate.