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Originally Posted by Xynesthesia2
I agree with the above. Part of the reason why therapy was not truly therapy-like with my second T was that the sessions were a lot like normal conversations, I would say >80% of the time. I certainly enjoyed them as the T was a very good conversation partner, but so are many other people in my life, and paying for that and calling it therapy?! That T managed it much better in email interactions. But even in normal conversations, some people are just more generous with information than others. For example, I tend to be on the minimalistic/frugal side with personal info when I talk with colleagues, clients, in most work-related interactions. My thinking is that a lot of that info is usually just not relevant there and it can easily divert the talk and turn it less productive when there are time constraints. I think it can be a form of art to find a good balance in this, not to appear too standoffish but keep the focus. As for therapists, what I know is that many do not answer questions because they want to use it to explore why the client is interested in that piece of info instead. For me personally, that can turn quite annoying if excessive but it can also be interesting, why do I want to know and why am I preoccupied with it, even with the fact that they are not so generous? I've learned interesting things about myself and good ways to draw people out that way, not so much in therapy but when interacting with people in everyday life (especially one who was my romantic partner for a while) that tend to be quite minimalistic (often also avoidant at least somewhat). One thing I've found is that people who tend to give one-liners as answers are often more than willing to reveal more but they do need follow-up questions and the other person to engage them more because they rarely do that by themselves. I've also learned that I am actually good at the engaging and it can be mutually quite stimulating, even just for the sake of figuring out how to do it effectively with a specific person. Of course therapists can remain quite resistant to this as they regulate their style on purpose, but I still think one can learn from these situations about own communication strengths and weaknesses.
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Lots of good stuff in here about how people have interesting variations in conversational engagements with other people. One of the things I've seen change over the course of my nearly 10 year therapy is examining how and what my T is engaged in. If I drone on for some time, I often get a response that translates to "I hear you." Which is normal when I don't leave the other person a lot of room to engage with me. He shares more deeply with me (though his self disclosure is not so much about facts but about the nature of his own experiences in whatever domain we are in) when I am more open and vulnerable with him. Observing how what I communicate gets what kind of response has been a useful but mostly un-talked about part of my therapy. Sometimes his responses seem more eager and sometimes they seem more reluctant, but there are many variations within those two categories. With friends or loved ones outside of therapy, reluctance has sometimes been about a kind of disbelief that I'd really want to know about their experience in the past, or they are unsure whether it's really okay with me to talk about this thing. My T's carefulness in his responding sometimes feels like reluctance to me, and I have to check my reactions to this.
I also think T's ask that question "why are you interested in knowing" not as a roadblock to disclosure, but because the motivation underlying the question reveals something about the asker. This probably is more complicated when there are transference/obsessional issues involved. There is a difference between asking a question because you are generally curious about your T as a human being as opposed to asking a question to feed a desire to know more about his life. I think T's will answer the first one but not the second.
My T has never asked me why I wanted to know, but maybe that's because over the years there has been an increasing natural and conversational flow between us, as opposed to the earlier years where I talked and he responded. But I don't think this is about the loosening of boundaries or a de-professionalization of the therapy itself, but reflects that the way I engage with him now is different than I did before. I notice a similar kind of change in my close relationships-- a more open kind of communication, with less conflict and greater intimacy.