Quote:
Originally Posted by comrademoomoo
My experience of therapy is that it is an additional source of stress. It is stressful to reveal yourself and be vulnerable. It's horrible to acknowledge your needs and it's unbearable when those needs go unmet. It's painful and confusing when your therapist has responses which you don't like. When you are working within the relationship, I can't see how it's not stressful at least some of the time.
I think I have said this before LT, but he doesn't sound like he works relationally. My therapist can be pretty brutal about her responses to me, but it is within the context of how we are relating. So she might say she is irritated by me (she has said more hurtful things than that), but she would contextualise it by talking about what was happening for her. Ultimately, we would look at what was happening between us that caused her response and, more importantly, mine. Does he do anything like this or just tell you his response (good or bad) and leave it there? Does he attend to your part of the interaction?
It is very surprising to me that he doesn't appear to have a distinct modality. Maybe this is different in the US and maybe it's different with psychologists, but how are you supposed to know if his approach suits you if you don't what his approach is? Theoretically, at least.
(Also, I don't want to paint my therapist as a golden therapist because she most definitely isn't.)
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Agreed on therapy being an additional source of stress in general. Sometimes, it's a place to release stress, but other times, it adds on to it. Like you said about being vulnerable. And talking about painful topics.
And no, he's not really a relational therapist. He describes his modality as "eclectic," like a mix of a few of them (I wrote this before seeing Mobius' post!). I do think it's more common for T's in the US to not have a specific modality, at least from what I've heard. Where they say they tailor it to the specific client.
I wouldn't say he really works like your T does. He'll tell he his feelings. I'll talk about my feelings. But I feel like the "look at what was happening between us" piece isn't there so much. He'll say that he reacts to others in his life--both clients and outside of therapy--in similar ways. (In fact, he told me Friday that he's more patient with his clients than with people in his outside life.)
I don't think he examines his role in things as much as he probably should as a therapist. Like, no supervision, meets with a consulting group like 6 times a year or something. But also on his own, like I don't know that he was sitting there thinking, "What might have been going on there with LT, is she triggering something in me that I'm reacting to? And am I triggering something in her?" Well, the answer to that second question is "yes," but I don't know if he asks it of himself? Like I think he sees this, from what he said in the email, as "This is only 'mildly irritating' to me, why is she reacting so strongly?" That's not a direct quote. But he did say: "In truth, you seem far more annoyed by my annoyance than I was annoyed by the texts."
In my reply to him, I told him: "Perhaps my tone came across wrong, but what I was experiencing was not annoyance, but intense fear, sadness, and shame, with my abandonment/rejection fears being strongly triggered." I imagine we'll talk about that tomorrow (he didn't reply to that email, just confirmed he'd received it when I asked).
But anyway...you make some good points, and thanks for sharing how your T works.