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Originally Posted by Xynesthesia
But what is really natural, what can be natural in therapy?
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What can be natural anywhere?
In my mind, "we're people, we're doing therapy." We never stop being people, we will stop doing therapy at some point. People should act like people. That sounds deceptively simple, doesn't it?
You know, if therapists didn't conceal themselves, clients wouldn't try so hard to reveal them. And this really isn't about what information is or isn't shared. This is about an attitude, it's about therapists going into therapy telling themselves "I am now entering a different mode where I behave differently than I do anywhere else in my life." When someone is behaving in a strange way, other people will naturally want to know WHY. Humans desire reciprocity in order to feel secure.
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I personally think using it as consultation, to discuss the problems we are experiencing, is natural. Supportive, positive feedback is natural. Conflicts are natural. Building and reinforcing the illusion of a relationship, within the constraints of therapy, that is meant to mimic or substitute a parent or friend can never really be natural. I personally don't mind using therapy as a bunch of experiments, with me being the subject, at all. The problem is that Ts rarely are very explicit about this, the true nature of it, and feed that illusion instead. I think that they should be very clear and open about the fact that it is a contrived "lab" investigation, from the beginning. I think that clients that are prone to getting hooked would likely still do, but at least they would not be encouraged to develop/cultivate severe distortions. That would enhance awareness. Making the client believe that they have a surrogate parent, caring friend or something, I think that generates and maintains denial, which is usually broken at some point and that can be very painful.
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You see that's the problem though, it's not the illusion of a relationship. It's a relationship. It's two people relating. When you call something that is a relationship an "illusion," people get weird about it. We have in therapy the
illusion of an illusion which recursively proliferates to create the downward spiral that therapy can become. Therapy is just a big fat decoy. It's two people sitting in a room. That's it. That's all it's ever been. It's not special. It's not separate from the rest of life. It is pure belief that creates the conditioning that occurs in that room, the therapist's beliefs, the client's beliefs, and their respective beliefs about each other's beliefs.
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Addiction is extremely painful and destructive. For me, my substance issue was hands down the hardest thing to deal with and to resolve, with dire consequences, some irreversible. No other psychological issue came even close to it. If a client goes to therapy for something like depression or anxiety, and they get an addiction from the "treatment", I think that is a very bad balance and high cost. This sounds perhaps overly dramatic, but there are many stories being told here that fit this pattern. There is also the element that it is hard to accept it for what it is when it goes downhill. For example, when a T withdraws their engagement or does not respond as desired by the client, it is often experienced as abandonment, a parallel is made between the therapy event and everyday relational dynamics. But is it an accurate analogy, really?
There were some discussions here on PC about how Ts should provide clearer and more realistic guidelines from beginning and an opportunity for the client for informed consent, regarding the true nature of therapy and how it works. Of course most don't because that could interfere with their job and income. Even worse, there are many very ignorant, old school Ts who truly believe in the old dogmas about it and are not familiar with modern research facts much. They cannot educate the client about how therapy really works because they are in the dark about it as well. But they do like a position of power and the gratification it provides them with - maybe that also a certain form of addiction on the Ts end, especially the ones with narcissistic traits.
I experienced some reactions/behaviors in therapy that were pretty extreme and unlike anything I had experienced before. The Ts interpretation of such a thing is often that it is something brought out of the depth of the client's unconscious and reflects old hurts or deprivations. Sometimes, yes, but not always. I do firmly believe that some of those scary reactions were responses to a new experience that happened right there, in therapy, elicited in part by the unnatural factors of therapy that are not typically experienced in everyday life. Then the T focuses on an artificial phenomenon that has little relevance to real life or sometimes dumps the client because they cannot deal with it. Then the client goes to a different T to "work it out" and the cycle continues. Plus the client is often left with the message or belief that there is something fundamentally, very deeply "wrong" with them, which may be beyond repair. It decreases self-esteem further when it is supposed to enhance it, but maintains the sense that it has to be sought and resolved somehow.
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I have experienced the addictive aspect myself. For me, I actually never believed that therapy was different than real life, but I had a T who did, and that messed with me a lot, trying to reconcile those two opposing factors. I was addicted to the notion that this T would eventually understand where I was coming from. What a mess that became.