[CantExplain]

I think I would be jealous:

"You give all your love and compassion and understanding to your patients and you never have anything left for me."

[skysblue]

Well, I have a 'friend' who is a T and her husband has a very difficult life with her. I know from firsthand experience that being a client is much much better than having a friendship with a T. My friend has 'all the answers' and although she tries to apply them in her own personal life, it feels so often like she's trying to stuff it down our throats. Unlike the infinite patience a T can afford to have, a friendship requires much more.

I'm sure people look at my friend and her husband as having an ideal marriage and ideal life but it's nothing but that. It's very volatile and very unhappy.

[BrokenNBeautiful]

years ago, I had a bf who was studying psychology.

I was his guinea pig.

Ugh.

I also have to laugh because I am usually on the other end.

When I see a female therapist, I wonder about her love life. Does her husband praise her every day for being such a "good person", helping psychos. lol

When I see a male therapist, I am usually envious of his wife. She gets to live in a "palace" with him.

When I have thoughts like this, I have to remember that their lives are not picture perfect.

Yes, I would love to have more financial security and more stable companionship, but I do imagine what "real life" must be like for them, too.

And I do not envy therapists anymore. How can they put up with people's problems 8 hours a day? I continually hope they know how to keep boundaries with their clients.

Billi

My husband is a T. It cracks me up when ppl say their T could be in their family-- cuz for the family it isnt easy! I get jealous of his clients sometimes. He is sooo good at therapy, so patient and kind and compassionate with his clients. He works from home so i can sometimes hear his tone or him laughing. He isnt like that at home very often. He gets angry and bossy and gruff a lot and its like i cant do anything right. He would never be like that with his clients.

Ps. His best friend is a T as well. He is the same at home as my husband.

[skysblue]

Originally Posted by SarahMichelle

My husband is a T. It cracks me up when ppl say their T could be in their family-- cuz for the family it isnt easy! I get jealous of his clients sometimes. He is sooo good at therapy, so patient and kind and compassionate with his clients. He works from home so i can sometimes hear his tone or him laughing. He isnt like that at home very often. He gets angry and bossy and gruff a lot and its like i cant do anything right. He would never be like that with his clients.

Exactly! I've been jealous of my friend's clients. She says that she gives them 110% of her attention. I also know how patient and understanding and empathic she is with them. But with me and her husband, she can blow her top at any time.

I'll ask her why she can't apply her attitude to me that she does with her clients and she'll say that she doesn't want to have a 'therapeutic' relationship with me but rather a real and open and authentic relationship with me.

This is the reason that clients and therapists can usually not become friends after therapy is done. The client has an unrealistic understanding of who their T's really are. And it must feel weird for the T to 'come out' with their clients about their own needs and vulnerabilities. I'm sure most clients would not be able to handle that very well.

A lot of them are probably more messed up than we are. At least that was my experience working with some of them as a social worker.

[BrokenNBeautiful]

Originally Posted by skysblue

she can blow her top at any time.

I'll ask her why she can't apply her attitude to me that she does with her clients and she'll say that she doesn't want to have a 'therapeutic' relationship with me but rather a real and open and authentic relationship with me.

There's open and authentic and there's abusive. That's a fair question! My former bf of 1985 was abusive to me and kind to his clients.

Billi

[skysblue]

My T thinks my friend shouldn't be practicing therapy but I disagree. I think my friend is an excellent therapist and I think she tries very hard to work on herself. The fact that her own issues have caused so much pain to others only demonstrates that she hasn't completed her own healing process. But that doesn't mean that she can't help lead others to healing.

[MASIMO]

My T is not married. Has a live in relationship with a woman for 9 years.
He is divorced. Think because he ignored his first wife while developing his career as a psychologist. He hasn't tied the knot with this second woman. He travels extensively without her. She works a lot too.
He often speaks about needing his time alone, and how crowded their little home is. He said he sometimes leaves and goes into the office just to get a little space for himself. He has built himself a "mancave" in the basement. Well, all could still be hunky dory between them. I dont know have a clue one way or the other. But I sure would like to be a fly on the wall to find out what they are like together. Especially since I am in an abusive relationship with my husband. Is he ever like him? I wont believe it could be so.

[venusss]

I have a friend who studies psychology. Once i told her I am feeling real depressed and she got excited!

[skysblue]

Originally Posted by VenusHalley

I have a friend who studies psychology. Once i told her I am feeling real depressed and she got excited!

That reminds me of an episode of Grey's Anatomy in which the surgical residents were hoping for an accident so that they could have the fun of treating the victims.

When I was in law school, one of my classmates was married to a clinical psych graduate student. Soon there was a fairly substantial group of us that included a few law students, but mostly people studying to get their PhD's in clinical psych.

These folks were just like everyday people. They were smart and interesting and fun (much of the time), but they also had trouble with intimacy and committing, cheated on their partners, and otherwise were no better at relationships than anybody else. I did prefer them as a general rule to most of the students at my law school, who tended to be soul-less @sshats.

Oh, and the faculty in the clinical psych department-- totally insane-- left their wives for graduate students (repeatedly), swapped wives with each other, were sexually inappropriate at department parties, and regularly had silly little spats with their colleagues. Not exactly models of mental health and stability.

I think just because you may be good at therapeutic relationships doesn't mean that you are good at intimate relationships. You might think that my lawyerly training would make me "good" at arguing with my spouse-- I should be logical, linear, avoid irrelevant arguments. I wish, I am just as much a dirty and disorganized fighter as the next person. My H is a distinguished professor in the child development field-- that doesn't make him a perfect father. He's a great father a lot of the time, but sometimes he engages in bonehead parenting moves where I want to say, "do you in fact KNOW anything about children?"

The list of the divide between the personal and the professional goes on and on. The law school dean who has written books about morality, charged with unethical behavior. A research expert on marriage who has been divorced 4 times. A cardiologist who smokes cigarettes. A physician who studies hostility and who rages at everyone in his path who displeases him.

Anne

[BonnieJean]

What an interesting post!

[Open Eyes]

Sigh, they certainly are just people and they don't always keep up with the current information either. They get in their own style treatment plans and form their own opinions and often get settled.

I find it very unsettling sometimes because I will do my own research. I expect to sit across from someone who is more educated and prepared to address me from a much higher level. I find it very disheartening when I present questions and information that the therapist truely doesn't know.

My therapist before the one I have now was a herion addict/ alcoholic admitted habitual lier with narcisistic tendencies and also openly admitted his maturity level was way behind because of his addictions. And he was my therapist? Whoa, that didn't help my PTSD at all. I tried to get him to write a letter to my GP so I could get refills without spending a lot of money to get refills. Well, he never wrote the letter and my GP looked at me like I was the crazy one. I remembered that he did admitt being a habitual lier so I will never know if the dipolomas on his wall were real or not.

Open Eyes

[pachyderm]

You guys are discouraging me!

[WePow]

I have a close friend who is a retired T. He actually came with me to a major session once when I flew him in because he knows some of the issues my T needed to know about from another T perspective. My friend was VERY different while he was in session with me and my T !!!! I have been to that friends home and know his wife and even been skinny dipping with the guy LOL. And he is just a very normal person who has some open ideas about things and has his needy momments. But on that day, I saw a very different side of him. Actually, it kinda freaked me out because I was like "hang on! who is this guy!!" I honestly would not want my retired T friend to be my T at all! It would not have worked!!!

I know my T has his own issues. I know his wife has stuck by him through his own intense healing. And even though he is now on the other side of things and has a wonderful relationship with his wife, I know she went through heck with him. ((Therapy related issues he has that I have so I know a little about stuff with him since he is honest and has to be.))

I think that a good T actually is doing a job. They may also love it. But it is still work. They have to put their best foot forward just the same way anyone else does at work. I adore my T and could see how it would be fun to know him as a friend. But seriously, I am glad he is my T because I get the very best of who he is. hee hee.

And when they go home, they can rest and be natural. Just like the rest of us. We carry inside us certain traits such as kindness. But we tend to bring out those good gems when we need to do work. Another consideration is "does anyone want to work all the time?" Even when we do something we enjoy doing, if we do it all the time, it can be a drag. For example, I work in IT. I am a nerd all the time. So I go to work and fix things and am great at my job (when my PTSD is not acting up). But when I come home, I don't want to fix a computer or do anything that is like my job! It isn't that I can't fix up a friend's laptop for them, it is that I don't WANT to fix it because that is my work.

I would think a healthy T would be the same way. They would not want to stay in T mode all the time. If they were to do that, I suspect they would burn out very quickly.

[skysblue]

Originally Posted by pachyderm

You guys are discouraging me!

I also believe there are T's who are very emotionally healthy - like my T.

I imagine... that it would be very difficult to win an argument!

[stopdog]

I dated a t for awhile and several of my friends are therapists (LCSWs). They have their problems and personality flaws like everyone else. They are no more patient, insightful, consistent, etc than anyone else in their real lives. I like my friends who are therapists - several are among my closest friends, but they are just like everyone else, and some have or at least started with huge personal challenges, they have insane families, ill mannered children, dread their mothers etc.

[learning1]

One of my parents is a t. I like to think they aren't particularly good at it because I want to believe other t's are more aware of people's feelings. My parents are divorced and don't seem particularly good at relationships, although they avoid extremes like physical abuse. But maybe my parent is an average t. In spite of that, I still believe good t's would be better at relationships. Maybe this thread will help get rid of my idealism a little. I need to believe a good t's ability to teach us about relationships is something genuine though-- not something you can only do in a fake therapy setting.

[beautiful.mess]

My SIL is a LCSW and is a nut. Really. Well, see....that's how *I* see her. LOL. But I knew her back in the day, long before she was a SW. I don't see her with her professional "hat" on (and it's hard for me to think of her with said hat on because I see her through a personal lens....not a professional one). I see her as someone who is real and flawed. She has marital issues like a lot of people; and she's a knucklehead sometimes when it comes to her kids to the point where I'm like !!! She has a difficult relationship with her brothers. She has money problems and is indecisive at times. She's also a kind person and is easy to carry on a conversation with. She has a good heart and good intentions. She doesn't have all the answers and she doesn't have it all together. She really is like "everyone else". She talks about clients once in a while.....not names or anything like that, and not in a gossip-y way (not that I've ever heard) but more in a "I'm worried about one of my clients", or, "one of my clients is having a hard time, made some bad choices and is in jail and I feel awful..." kind of thing. I know she thinks of them outside of their time together; but when she's not in her office she's running her kids off to soccer and doing normal people type stuff.

I try to envision my T as a regular person and I wonder sometimes what he must be like outside of that dang office. Is he as kind IRL as he is at work? Does he talk to his parents? Maybe he struggles with a mental illness/disorder and takes meds like me. Does he have a tumultuous past...or did he grow up with a charmed life? Maybe he's a masochistic freak. Who knows.....

I can literally make myself crazy wondering about all of this irrelevant information. What I've realized though, is that it doesn't matter. Our sessions are about ME; it's just that the thing that makes therapy work so well is the same thing that is driving me up a wall - my relationship with my T. It's a dichotomy that's incredibly confusing and difficult to separate into their own parts that stand on their own. I just have to find a way to be OK with the ambiguity and not knowing; kind of like not knowing what happens after we die or if God is real and if he gives a damn. I can literally make myself crazy thinking about it; it's like trying to nail Jello to the wall. What I *do* know is that there *is* a person there....I just don't see the full person, nor will I ever. Gotta find a way to get it outta my head and focus on what's really important.

*sigh*

[learning1]

Originally Posted by beautiful.mess

it's like trying to nail Jello to the wall.
*sigh*

more characters so I have enough to post

[likewater]

I just make up imaginary scenarios for my Ts. They always have very nice, fulfilled, ideal lives. I take little details i do know and fill in
the rest. My current one lives in a beautiful decorated ultra chic kinda asian decorated house with her daughter and husband. They
all get along and support each other very well. I've decided she also has an herb garden out back where she also grows organic
vegetables . One day she will write a best selling novel or autobiography.

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by beautiful.mess

My SIL is a LCSW and is a nut.

I found LCSW on Google but I don't know what SIL stands for.