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Riptide said:
Are T's supposed to show their feelings?
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There is no one "right" answer to your question. It depends on your T's theoretical orientation and approach. Some T's are of the "blank slate" approach and keep all feelings and thoughts to themselves. Other T's reveal their feelings and/or moments from their personal lives, if they judge it to be therapeutic for the client. This is called self-disclosure. (My T, for example, reveals his feelings to me on many occasions, but he has never shown anger at me. The closest he has come has been once he was appalled at something I said. And another time I got a bit of a lecture on how I shouldn't do X again. But he always owns his feelings and we discuss them. He is particularly good at owning up to countertransference. It disempowers it to speak of it.)
It does not sound to me like your T's anger is therapeutic for you. (It wouldn't be for me either. I would curl up in a ball and withdraw.) And it doesn't sound like the two of you are either discussing her displays of anger so that you can understand in what way they are therapeutic for you or discussing the countertransference. Her anger sounds like a big gorilla in the room and it must be hard to proceed with therapy without addressing this. If it is just too hard to deal with and you feel you can't discuss it with her and get the clarity you need, then it may indeed be time to move on.
The situation I think of when I think of therapists being deliberately combative are ones where the client is harming others seriously through his/her actions, such as substance addiction. I have heard there is a particular therapeutic approach used in these situations that is confrontational and combative, designed as a "wake up call" to clients to take responsibility for their actions.
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"Therapists are experts at developing therapeutic relationships."
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