therapist selfdisclosure

The initial question seemed to refer to personal problems like divorce, etc., so I answered with that in mind. Like I said, on occasion he has mentioned something like a death in the family, I have a pretty good feel for the angst between he and his brother, etc.

Now, everyday disclosure stuff he does a lot. He tells me about his recreational activites like biking and hunting, etc. Just yesterday he let me know he is going to be a grandpa again and he showed me a recent picture of himself with his two daughters. Stuff like that. It's just the chit chat we tend to either start with or end with.

Had one psychologist who was into dressage horse riding like I was & she had just moved into a newly built ranch house when then ended up getting divorced. I was in a very bad place at the time & had many calls to her outside of therapy working on trying to stay out of the hospital.......so there were times when she didn't have the ability to talk much to get me through some of those rough times.

Another psychologist talked about his trip back to his home & family visit to Israel & then right when I was dealing with the trauma that happened with the home care person when my mom was dying of cancer, he ended up having to go out because of back surgery & was only practicing out of his home for awhile which was way too far for me to travel to see him. He lived as far in the other direction as I did in the opposite direction to the office we met at (my pdoc's office).

My current psychologist has told a few personal things like visiting her husband's family in India (when I first started going to her), her illness when she got back from the trip, & then again when she was trying to take care of her own aging mother & had time away from her practice.

Get a lot more information from our DBT group leader.....as it comes up in group discussions to make different points......very interesting because she grew up in Italy.

My XT shared some things about himself but only ever when he thought it would help me with whatever I was going through (i.e. not like he was "dumping his **** on me"). I actually like that because it helped me identify and bond with and trust him.

I know nothing about my new T and I think that's a good thing for now. I'm very, very, very afraid I will get attached to him too much like I did with XT. Amazingly he seems to still be able to get me to trust him without it. Hmmm... that's something, now that I think about it. I may have to explore that further...

On one hand it could be good... on the other if he's too much of a blank slate, I could really project a lot onto him and fall in love with the projection... but I guess that's better than falling in love with the real person like I think I did with my XT.