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Old Mar 25, 2017, 12:43 PM
BudFox BudFox is offline
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Member Since: Feb 2015
Location: US
Posts: 3,983
Quote:
Originally Posted by feileacan View Post
A blog post about the necessity and usefulness of emotional dependence in depth psychotherapy:

Emotional Dependency in Psychotherapy
Some of what he says is logically incoherent. Emotional dependency between child and parent is healthy. Some level of dependency between partners in a long term romantic relationship is healthy. Even between friends. But depending on a paid stranger in an artificial, clinical relationship should be considered risky and by default unhealthy, unless shown overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is not a cynical view informed by cultural bias, it's a reality-based view.

Also his suggestion that resistance to dependency on the part of client indicates some emotional-psychological complex has necessarily been triggered, and that the client must be too blind or feeble to recognize this without the therapist's help, is both illogical and patronizing. The "resistance" might be entirely justified. The client might be backing away because they don't know a damn thing about the person on whom they are forming dependency, nor about the methods being used, nor about the risks or possible outcomes. And the disparity in terms of exposure and disclosure and power is enormous. And the therapist is motivated by money. And so on. The client might be sensing visceral cues that the situation is legitimately unsafe.

It's important to remember that articles like this are sales tools. He is selling a product -- therapy relationships. Best to be skeptical when someone is selling something.
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