Quote:
Originally Posted by BudFox
You can't have transference and attachment without manipulation. These things happen precisely because the therapist is manipulating the client at the deepest level.
Unconditional positive regard, for example, is hugely manipulative and bizarre behavior. It's a fake stance, and deliberate fakery is by definition manipulation.
I dont see what skill has to do with it. If anything isn't their main skill manipulation?
Exacly what skills should a therapist possess in order to play "let's have an attachment relationship" with a real human being?
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I don't think unconditional positive regard is a manipulation necessarily. Maybe depending on the therapist. Just looking at myself and what I think I might be able to do as a therapist (NOT going to try it btw), it could be a cultivated attitude. Almost anybody can and could do it but it might take putting some attention to it and practice so in that sense it could be a "skill". Again not necessarily a manipulation though it could be if the therapist's real, more basic attitude was "Give me the money" and "I don't give a s**t about you." Which could happen -- and I, for one, would have had a hard time picking up on that, maybe, because "I don't pick up on social cues", one of the issues I went into therapy with.
Based on my experience, the UPR (unconditional positive regard) was like a safe social environment, maybe like a catalyst, that allowed my own deeper interpersonal stuff to start to emerge.
But then, when my own interpersonal stuff, in a primitive form, tried to emerge -- my therapists' UPR disappeared!!!!!!! Major setback, re-trauma, etc.
My therapist was "triggered" she said, so it's like her own needs and reactions took over and she had only NEGATIVE regard for me. Managing one's own stuff so it doesn't do that is what I would call a necessary skill in what I would call "managing the transference".
I don't think she was consciously manipulative. To the extent that she didn't know her own stuff well enough, or recognize how incompetent she was becoming (because of another case she told me about -- boundary violation there of course), I got very badly hurt. And maybe she manipulated herself, and me, into thinking that she was competent to deal with my situation when she wasn't.
I think it COULD be possible for a therapist to have a real relationship with a real human being and for it still to be "therapy". But far too often, based on what we see here in this forum, it doesn't work out that way. It seems like there are many therapists who are NOT capable of it. And clients can't know until they get into the depths and get betrayed and hurt.