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Originally Posted by octoberful
I love this site, the way the concepts are explained. I was at first taken aback when I read this, but then thought I'd post it here since it fits with the discussion.
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ADDICTION TO PSYCHOTHERAPY
Patients who manage to organise non-stop psychotherapy for themselves, year after year replacing one therapist after the other without a break, who even have a number of concurrent therapies at various stages so that they are hardly ever without therapy, learn a lot about psychotherapy, but only to defeat its very purpose. They themselves have no intention whatsoever of changing. They are professional patients. Briefly, they use psychotherapy itself to defend against change. The more disturbed ones, may fantasise or even attempt to become psychotherapists themselves. If they are lucky, they will be rejected by the training institution. If not, they will join the ranks of those bad therapists, who are well-versed in theory, but who have distorted attitudes, a tendency to intellectualise, and who are unable to work in the here-and-now, or make therapeutic use of transference and their own countertransference.
ADDICTION TO PSYCHOTHERAPY
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Would you mind telling us how you happened to come across this quote? It comes off to me as client-blaming. Kind of like doctors blaming patients for getting addicted to the opiods they prescribe.
Here's another article that came up when I did a search on "addiction to therapy"
When Therapy Becomes an Addiction | Psychology Today
I think one could describe me as having been addicted to therapy. I didn't know it exactly -- I didn't have the sense of self to know that.
Having detoxed from therapy for 2 years, and with the help and support of this site and an in-person support group I lucked into, I'm able to read this part
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They themselves have no intention whatsoever of changing. They are professional patients. Briefly, they use psychotherapy itself to defend against change.
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and experience what seems to be contempt that the author has for the "other" whom the patient seems to be to him, and see that as
a feeling in the author and not necessarily me.
But how one can get to that point, other than luck -- I have not seen any good descriptions that a client could use or any suggestions for an "intention" they could set for themselves to help them get there -- other than "go to therapy", which then, as we are discussing, can become an addiction.