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Originally Posted by here today
I think that if T's explained that up front, it could help a lot. People coming to therapy -- even people who have been in therapy before -- may just not understand that. It's also an upfront way to help educate the client, if they might need that, about what a healthy relationship is like, and what human beings are realistically like. A kind of pre-emptive action, too, rather than just waiting for transference issues and unrealistic expectations to come up if they do and then dealing with the overwhelming countertransference, if that occurs.
It would also help, I think, if the therapists had, or accepted, more information about the pain, retraumatization, and consequent harm that can occur to the client because of their own issues and actions. They aren't perfect, but they can hurt people a lot. It can be devastating, and that is not at all clear in any of the informed consent statements that I have seen.
I'm still not at all clear about how that all happens -- what the pain from the failure and/or termination of my last therapy is about, what to do about it, how to "heal", whatever that means, etc.
I've ordered "The Betrayal Bond". Maybe that will help.
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Sure. It'd help if consumers knew it upfront that therapists are very limited in how much they could help either due to their emotional limitations or their limited knowledge.
For starters it'd be important to let people know that psychotherapy is not based on solid science and that a large part of it is experiential, so do it at your own risk.
But that kind of a disclaimer should be done on a mass scale in order to have an effect, not through individual informed consents, because it is a MASSIVE paradigm shift.
By disclosing the reality of what psychotherapy is and what it is not, you are essentially telling the public that the professionals they are or about to see are not all-knowing experts, who are well-equipped to deal with any emotional and behavioral problem.
That isn't going to go well both with the public and the professional community. The public at large wants to have "experts" who tell them what to do to "fix" their problems and the professionals want to play the role of those "experts" because doing so feeds their egos. Works for both parties, so none of them is particularly interested in changing the status quo.