Thanks, Rayne,
I was looking at some more articles about treatment failure and found this one, which I thought was very interesting:
http://www.apa.org/pubs/books/interv...5-lambert.aspx
Quote:
Transcript
Interviewer: In your recent book Prevention of Treatment Failure you talked about the fact that some patients do get worse in the course of psychotherapy. How common is the problem, what are the causes?
Michael Lambert: In adults who enter treatment, the rate is about 5–10 percent. In children and adolescents who seek treatment, the rate is about 15–25 percent. So it's relatively rare in adults but all too common in children. And the major causes are external events that set people back like a divorce or a death or loss of a job, so it's environmental. And then within the therapy itself, it's usually related to some kind of rejection that the person experiences while they are working with their therapist. It's usually not related to specific therapy techniques but to relationship factors where the patient feels misunderstood, uncared for, or neglected in some way.
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I felt rejected, and shamed, over and over
by therapists. And since it was similar to the kind of subtle ways that I had been rejected in my family, it didn't compute -- and I blamed myself.
This went on for years, and years, and years -- with different therapists, of course!
I tend to agree with you about the value of current social science research. And as for the basic "talk" therapy -- it could be interesting to look at the different social contexts between the late 1800's and now, for which I think statistics would be very little help.
But I still have the (basically) same problem I did as a "disordered", traumatized teen-ager -- how to make it in the world, both "being" myself AND adjusting and finding a place where I am welcome in society or some part of it.
With determination I think I have found and "fixed" the trauma that prevented me from "being" myself -- but the adjustment and finding a place where I am welcome is still an enormous challenge, with very little experience, skills, and habits to draw from.
There are methods now like you mentioned that there weren't there when I started therapy. Too late for me to go back and pick them up now. As you wrote on another thread, "accepting things as they" are is definitely what I need to focus on now.
But the outlook just looks so lousy!! Oh, well, there is always tomorrow. That's reality, too -- "this too shall pass".
