Does anyone have that one thing...

Thanks autotelica . This gives me hope. I hadn't really considered that he may have already much worse. To me, in my head, my secrets always seem so much bigger and dirtier than everyone else's.

T shouldn't do that.

I don't get the should at all, or the automatic judgment that this particular thing is something that no T should do at any time. Are there really absolutes about things a T can or can't say to be therapeutic?

If I were going to come down on a side for what a T should or shouldn't say, I would come down on a more free or open communication with clients. Exceptions being requests for sexual favors or turning a session into being about them.

As to the specific content that was mentioned, it would seem important to me for a T to offer a perspective that doing X thing doesn't make someone a "monster." A client thinking she's a monster is probably engaging in some kind of distorted perception, and one of the things T's do for clients is to give them feedback about how they think about something, including themselves.

.........

I'm very open with my T but I also have some "one things" that cause me too much shame to talk about. I've skirted around them off and on but not enough to be helpful. These are not about her and me, but just about me. They're in addition to my not being able to tell her directly that I love her.

I think if I had to zero-in on the biggest flaw my therapist has, it is her quickness to dismiss concerns.

However, I do think being dismissive serve a purpose. I like that she can discern "real" worries from autotelica-being-a-big-baby ones. It reminds me that not every worry or concern is deserving of attention and that it is indeed possible to be overly sensitive. As long as she's not dismissive about everything, I'm fine with a little "come on now, that's no big deal."

I like my therapy to be kind of no nonsense.

I think there's a large difference between a T "dismissing" a real concern, like "don't worry about setting things on fire" versus "dismissing" a fact that the T sees differently, such as said client is a "monster." I think part of the T job is to reality-check and point out their perception of said fact. I don't think of that as dismissing, but as offering their opinion. And if client feels that is dismissing, they are always free to say, hey, I'd like to talk some more about what a monster I am.

My T does court-ordered therapy for abusive parents as part of her practice. Sometimes I go in and say something like "I told my daughter at 9:30pm that I was too tired to talk about the issue that was upsetting her any more, and we could continue the next day. I am a neglectful parent to put my need for sleep above her immediate happiness." T said something like, nonsense, I spend many hours in here with a father who let his three year old play in the street and refused to clean up the house to the point where his 10 year old couldn't sleep because of the sound of mice eating at night. If you want to be "neglectful" you're going to need to do a lot better than sending your kid away after you've already talked for 2 hours and she's still saying the same thing over and over. So I completely disagree that this wasn't therapeutic for me; it was, it gave me perspective and it gave me a sense that I was being too hard on myself as a parent.

I just don't agree that T's "shouldn't" do many things that people on this board sometimes decry as bad. I object to the absoluteness of these statements and I don't think that anyone can legitimately say, with those obvious exceptions of taking advantage of people sexually or emotionally, that T's "shouldn't" do x,y, z.

But if you don't want your T to do whatever you don't want them to do, that's everyone's right. But I don't think much good comes from telling people that their T's are being "bad."

I agree with you. All of our therapists are different and we all respond to different things. (I also think it's good for people to acknowledge their therapists may do less-than-ideal things, but that doesn't make them bad therapists who need to be ditched ASAP.)

I don't want to use my therapy to escape from the rules of the "real world". In the real world, there are valid concerns and whiny-crybaby "get a life" ones. I would get exasperated if someone were to weep and wail over a paper cut, and I think most people would too. If my paper cuts were given the same gravitas as my gunshot wounds, I wouldn't feel like my therapist was a real person with real emotions.

I don't like to be dismissed. What I consider to be a big deal is important to me whether others agree or not. That particularly is true with the therapist where I am encouraged to tell her what is on my mind. To be dismissed after telling her sets me off. It is not that there is a requirement for ultimate agreement, but there is a requirement to take the concern I have as serious to me. I rarely tell others anything that is really a concern or whatever to me, and so to engage in what I already consider risky behavior only to be dismissed is not something I would put myself at risk at more than once with a therapist.

I also think telling someone that their therapist may be not good or is doing something I would not put up with can be useful as therapy is already cloak and daggery enough with therapists always blaming clients (resistance, unwilling to change etc) for everything that goes wrong - it can be useful for someone to hear it is not them but indeed the therapist who is at fault.

Well, let me put it this way.

I get vey upset if I think my T dismisses my feelings.

I had a failure of the imagination in thinking that everyone else would feel the same.

For me it wasn't the "one last thing" but the "one big thing" and the only way I could tell her about it was to sort of "paint myself in a corner" where I had hinted all around it and it just made it impossible to NOT tell her about it. That came with a price, no I can't NOT tell her anything, if it comes into my head it comes out of my mouth.

yeah, still got that one thing i haven't been able to talk about. talk around it, over it, near it, but so far, never "it"
yeah, t knows there is an "it" part of me thinks deep down inside he actually know what the "it" is, but is waiting for me to bring it up????

I have a couple of things I haven't been able to bring up yet. One of my concerns is that he never dismisses anything. I'm always convinced he's going to dismiss what I've told him as trivial or not that bad. He never does. In fact, he almost always thinks that things are a bigger deal than I do. So, I'm a bit reluctant to tell him about something that I actually do think is a big deal.