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Originally Posted by LonesomeTonight
I want someone who is comfortable working with transference, who will explore what's going on with me without making it all about them. Which is what I feel like T is doing, focusing on his reactions instead of what's behind what I'm saying and why. Whereas ex-MC, who was psychodynamically trained, would tie things back into childhood and say things like testing him are natural. And not get all bent out of shape about it. I want a T who can handle me working through something with them. I don't feel like my current T can do that.
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LT—actually I think your therapist HAS kept his feelings out of it quite a lot even though, yeah, you’ve been testing him. But just because a therapist reacts to something you do or say doesn’t make it countertransference or them putting their feelings into it. You know, you want him to say he cares. Wouldn’t that be putting his feelings into it? Why is that okay and not “I felt manipulated”?
(ETA: none of the examples you gave in response to susannah strike me as him putting his emotions into it, making it all about him, or countertransference.)
As for the childhood stuff, you can talk the talk, but at some point you have to walk the walk. You have behaviors you want to change, yes. And you want to understand why you do them, okay. But it often seems for you the understanding is the end goal. And this understanding never goes very deep as far as I can tell, it’s like “here’s another incident from my childhood that might explain x.” A catalog like that stops helping after a certain point because you can only deal with the present.
This guy is a sports psychologist. He expects doing at some point—not necessarily succeeding, but doing. He wouldn’t have an athlete client with whom he’d talk about how their childhood makes them freeze up in front of a stadium, he’d work with them on strategies for dealing with it.
A lot of us here are not super fans of Dr. T. I think our concern is if you leave him it should be for the right reasons, not because he’s expressing some reactions to your behavior that are hard to hear. (That’s something to learn from him right there: why did he feel manipulated and is there anything you could change, because other people might react the same way?) Not just to start the same cycle over with another therapist. You may tell them you’re there for depression, but if you spend a lot of time going into details about Dr. T, so much so someone says what the hell?, what are you really there for?
Listen, it’s tough, and I feel for you, because obviously all this is terribly painful. I would just encourage you to really examine your role in your therapeutic relationship as well as his.