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Originally Posted by feileacan
That has been my general experience in therapy as well. We talk endlessly about our relationship and seemingly random stuff without heads on addressing anything in my external life. My T knows very little about my external life because I just don't tell him anything what's going on there. And yet I can see things changing in my external life without much conscious effort.
Somehow this process associates to me to a set of balloons. Like you blow one balloon and somehow another balloon somewhere else is almost like magically blown as well, without anyone really explicitly doing it.
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Thanks for sharing your experience! I think working through stuff with a T, where it seems a safer environment can definitely have ripple effects on outside relationships. I like your balloon analogy! I feel like it's practice in a way.
It's funny, when I was first talking about this with current T (months ago), I was saying how I was standing up more to ex-MC and that then translated to other relationships (like H and my mother). T seemed rather surprised by that. That playing stuff out in the relationship with a therapist could affect outside relationships. My reaction was, "Wait, this surprises you???" I know this isn't the best thing, but I feel I'm teaching him quite a bit about therapy. (And he's been in private practice for 15 years! Plus has some experience before that, like in psychiatric hospitals, student health services, etc.) Sometimes I feel he should be paying *me* for providing him with continuing education credits... Yet he seems open to learning and understanding, and I think that's the important thing. He's definitely been adapting to me and my needs in many ways.