> Do you feel like your therapist is overly directive?

My therapist continually interrupts my attempted train of thought with "suggestions," that indicate how I should be doing things better, or with comments or thoughts of his own. Of course, everything he does is "for my own good." This is a particular problem of mine, in that I am unable to cope effectively with this kind of thing. I find most, if not all, mental health "professionals" indulge in this kind of process -- they always know best, since they are the professionals, and, after all, you have come to them for help and should accept the "help" that they offer. It is unnecessary for them to listen to you, because they know best.

Actually, they cannot let you be in trouble at all. They have to "correct" it. Who is the "parent" here? I feel that I have to cope with everything, them as well as me. I no longer have that amount of strength.

This therapist also does the group that I am in, and he does a similar thing in the group with other people there. I am not able to effectively cope with this, and the other people in the group largely do not see that this process is taking place, it seems to me. They accept, or do not have problems with, his suggesting what they should do in order to improve their lives. The fact that none of them are succeeding in actually carrying out the suggestions seems not to have occurred to anyone. They do not expect anything else.

I just started to look at a book: Please Understand Me by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates. I am having a lot of problems trying to deal with the contents of the book itself, but the introductory material struck me extremely forcefully. In fact it made me almost cry with frustration and fear and panic, for NO ONE does this. I quote from the book:

If I do not want what you want, please do not try to tell me that my want is wrong.

If I believe other than you, please pause before you correct my view.

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.

Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right -- for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as being right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

Now many here will tell me to offer this to my therapist. To tell the truth, I have given up trying to get him to see me, or change him in any way (!). And I do not think anyone in the clinic would hear me if I try to explain what is happening. I no longer have the strength to cope with the objections they will bring up. People in our "mental health system" are not about the process of listening to people, but to changing them (all for their own good, of course). After all, they know best. Why otherwise would we be going to them for "help"?

I am about to quit the whole thing. I do not see any viable alternatives. Evidently I have been looking in the wrong places. But I do not know where to look for any safe place. That includes Psych Central.