Quote:
Originally Posted by mostlylurking
I don't disagree that self-parenting is the goal. But I suspect the client learns this partly by seeing the therapist model empathy, acceptance, and advocacy for damaged / younger parts of the client. At least, it was so in my case. Even while the goal was for me to learn to take care of all that myself, there was still a period of dependency when I was learning to do this because my T was doing it. He was modeling it. This worked for me, but I can recognize the danger involved if I'd had a lesser T or if the process had for some reason been cut short by termination. I would have had the regression piece, but not yet the self-parenting skills. Hope this makes sense.
|
I get what you're saying and previously I would have considered this a reasonable supposition or concept. But after unwittingly trying this in a way and having it go badly, and then investigating further, it now seems nuts.
If the goal is to re-parent myself (whatever that means), then I can't see how an engineered, paid relationship serves as an appropriate or healthy model. To me it matters whether I am purchasing a contrived form of empathy or acceptance and not the real thing. I've been in the position of thinking there was something genuine and healthy developing, only to find out later it was not what it seemed.