Quote:
Originally Posted by Blanche_
Budfox-
Your original point, how I understood it, was that blank slate demeanor correlated with relational fakeness, no?
I think blank slate crap does draw out more transferences, by far. But I also think it makes the therapy more one-sided rather than fake. The therapy becomes all about your stuff, your projections, your needs, your perceptions, your inner world. So that's one way to do therapy, which isn't the reparenting type. It's more safe in some or many ways...
If you and your T are in a more two-sided relationship, therapy will include the therapist's needs (which btw are just as ****ed up as many of ours as patients). It wouldn't really be therapy, and enmeshment would be most harmful.
I don't think of it as fake, but if that's how you view it, wouldn't fake be better given the above? If not, what would your ideal therapy relationship be like (or have been like)?
|
I think blank slate is only part of it. Real people are not so magically accepting and understanding and selfless. These are characteristics of a staged performance. I'm not suggesting therapists should NOT do these things. I don't have an opinion on the ideal therapy arrangement, because that kind of engineered relationship doesn't make sense to me now.
To me the point of the original quote is that client projections are of dubious value, because they are driven in part by something artificial. The sort of persona most therapists adopt does not exist in nature (between adults). It's an anomaly. I also think it is a huge manipulation. Therapists have a lot of nerve passing off the premise that from something contrived will emerge something genuine.
The one therapist I saw for a while was clearly acting, and I was responding to THAT. Later she behaved like just another wounded ego. She was defensive and hostile and erratic. That was more real than any of the previous BS role playing.