Quote:
Originally Posted by BudFox
It showed me a profession afraid of its own pathology.
It's clear to me a core assumption is that the client is not a credible witness to their own experience.
So, yea, therapists as a group seem to have trouble dealing with being wrong.
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Agree with this.
In my case, my clinical psychologist T definitely has a relationship with a capital P Psychotherapy that looms larger than any particular patient, including me.
There is a mystique to it that he buys- well, he has spent his life studying it: thousands of hours and dollars making this a life's work( sometimes feels like a life's work in my tears lol). He went to a top Ivy League school and could have been in finance or whatever, but he definitely fits in the broad wounded healer category.
Given all that, when psychotherapy itself is questioned to him or the frame itself is said to cause pain or be stylized, that is when he can get defensive and not nice. He can get dismissive or even cruel.
By extension, patients who don't get better, are not thankful, challenge authority too much- like stop dog's In Treatment quotation: the customer is always wrong- must be discarded bc they challenge the paradigm of this time-honored special profession, that sort of began with Yoda and Tiresias. My T even loves Harry Potter which he is reading to his kids. I often wonder if he sees himself as some kind of guiding hand in a magic word. All of this makes him such an arresting and talented practitioner- he is so creative and disciplined.
However, does he care about me or does he care about Psychotherapy and me only insofar as I bring him my "extreme( his word" trauma, and then rise from the ashes. If I don't "stay the course", if I don't become an exception to the rule, the statistics on his watch, he is not going to care about me, bc his first love is the profession.
I could be wrong- maybe he is devoted to helping me and I am damaged and cynical. I don't think so though, and I am thankful for him most of the time- hs imagination and perception. When T's terminate clients because they are not being helped, I don't believe it is as much for the client's own good as the T's morale, the T's need to believe that what they do with their lives is transformative and a craft as ancient as soothsaying yet as new as 2018's science.
It has a charm, it has a narcissism, but where is the client/ patient in the landscape of the T's mind and emotions?