Ts and voyeurism

Yes, that's exactly what I meant stop dog. I didn't mean for their sexual gratification but rather their own curiosity.

Don't worry your secret is safe with us
Thank you for sharing that it was interesting to see it from another perspective.
I suspect 99% of the caring profession are genuine and do it because they want to help. Sometimes it's hard for me to see this clearly, I think because of my bad experience with ex t, I tend to be paranoid and tar all ts with the same brush but having said that I know that my view is skewed and I need to stop looking for something to blame this t for and to stop looking for an excuse to run away.
Again thank you for your reply and I think what you do is wonderful
I would like to ask her why she needs to know but I think deep down I already know. She is nosy. We live in small town and she wants to know exactly who the people in my life are.

Monalisa. That's a very simplistic take on therapy. I think It comes from an immature mind. With time this will change if you continue on in good therapy.

Monalisasmile, I'm so sorry to sound like a stuck record but I can't help thinking this might still be part of your transference. It's always a clue that this could be happening when a person starts talking about what they believe or assume their T is thinking, and not what their T has actually said. My transference tells me my T isn't interested, thinks I'm pathetic and can't be trusted. Yours tells you your T is excessively nosy and voyeuristic.

My T says there is more than one experience of a given situation, and my experience isn't necessarily the same as his. So I might experience him saying one thing in one way when he's actually said something slightly different. Sometimes I've remembered, clung to and written down things my T has said, either because I find them helpful or because they've annoyed or upset me, and later it's transpired that I've actually changed some of the words. He says it's not about whether I'm lying or telling the truth, but about how things get changed through perception and transference, so he says one thing and I hear another.

The thing is, we do tar all Ts with the same brush, and it's a very deep, very unconscious brush that we can't just magically change at the drop of a hat. What we can do is start to question it. You say you think that, deep down, you know why your T is asking. But you don't know! That's just what Captain Transference is telling you! You might be right, but you might not. Personally, I think the first step to fighting with that brush (as it were) is to ask your T: do you think X, are you asking because of Y, and substitute a real answer for the imaginary one.

The issues we have with our Ts tell us about the issues we need to work on. For you, this is part of your therapy, just as learning that my T can be trusted is part of mine. I hope you can talk to your T about it.

Monlisasmile, aren't you training to be a t? You should be able to answer this question better than the rest of us, do you think this is your reason for going into the field? I suppose it is good to recognize that in yourself if it is true, but I agree with mouse that it is rather simplistic/immature. Hopefully as you move through your education you will find that there is more to the caring professions than schadenfreude or voyserism.

I think it is a bad sign when someone believes they want to "be in a caring profession" because of how caring they think they are - it can lead to all sorts of bad things. "Caring professions" and so called "caring professionals" wreak havoc upon others all the time - not from intended malice but because their own sense of how caring they believe they are leads them to act in paternalistic or worse ways that can devastate their intended client or victim.

"Captain Transference"! Good one, tinyrabbit. It does seem so powerful as to take on a life of its own. But it also may be how a parent acted around us. So humanizing it is helpful to understanding how it works.

I think that what we believe about other people and their motivations says more about us as people than those people we are supposedly judging. You are making judgments about her without all the information you need, and it seems like you don't think you even need to ask her-- because she is the authority on herself and her motivations-- because you "know" it or you know what she'll say.

I do not think this necessarily applies to you, but I think you are skirting close to some kind of distorted perception that can mess up your therapy and/or your relationships with other people. I think that anyone who believes that they know the motivations of another person or even an entire group of people is deluded with a sense of power and/or belief that they are imbued with special abilities that most of us just don't have. Usually these people are the least insightful about other people's motivations and the most disconnected to themselves, and they selectively use "information" as a way of confirming their skewed beliefs about other people's motivations.

Instead of thinking that you know what's inside your T's head, consider instead that it can be very useful to just be curious about it. Come up with some alternative hypotheses and see what might fit. Ask her about it-- although I wouldn't say that people are always honest-- nor can they always be, even if they wanted to-- but it is information that can be useful.

And, finally, I certainly don't think that my past experiences and my current life are so fascinating that my T would get very far in his work if he was motivated by "curiosity" about the deep, dark details in other people's lives. Maybe the rest of you are describing orgies with famous people and fabulous vacations around the world, but my weekly reveals are as dull as toast. I think his curiosity is less about the details of my experience and more about understanding how I make sense of my past and think about my future choices. He's much more curious about what's inside my head than anything I have experienced outside of it.

But, really, I think the point of this thread is about what you *think* about your T's motivation, why you think that, and what that means for you and your therapy. At least to me, those are the issues. In the push-pull of therapy, this sounds like a way to pull away from her.

If our parents lied about their motivations or attempted to hide them from us, then that might set up a lifetime of problems with how we understand other people. Those of us who *may* run towards the cynical side of human kind may be skeptical that people have good motivations. What has been true for me is that once I stopped being such a skeptic, I have found more "evidence" for goodness than I ever could have imagined. Don't get me wrong-- there are plenty of @sshats in the legal profession and I've met plenty of mental health professionals in my work as well who fit this description-- but the goods outweigh the bad and the greats may even outweigh the bad too.

I respectfully disagree, stopdog. I am a medical professional. I got into it for a lot of reasons- I liked science as an undergrad but didn't want to work in a lab; I had some good mentors who encouraged me; the military paid for me to go to school. But I wouldn't have done it if I didn't care about people. I certainly wouldn't have stuck with it through the education process if I didn't think I could make a difference in people's life. I care about all my patients. I care that the treatment I recommended for them is working- whether it's for blood pressure, a sinus infection or depression. I worry that their sprained ankle isn't getting better, or that their cancer treatment is not going well.

I treat a lot of patients with mental health concerns. I am fortunate to have a rather flexible schedule and I often sit in the exam room with them for a half hour or more. I care about them, I worry about them outside of the office, just like all my patients. But, I don't get any kind of pleasure from hearing their troubles. In fact, I usually forget the specifics by the time I hit the gym in the evening. What I am left with is a sense of compassion and respect for their struggles.

Personally, I'd rather have a person go into a "caring profession" because they care than because they want to get rich. Especially a therapist because they're going to learn real quick that they won't get rich doing therapy.

I see transference as something my parents created that I am now stuck with. I saw a post on Facebook once that said something like: "be careful how you talk to your children as that will become their inner voice one day". That's how I see transference as well.

This is such good advice. The thing is you just don't know how your T thinks. I'm a very nosy, curious person, and I'm surprised when other people aren't. I always want to know more details. Whereas my husband is the total opposite. I don't understand how he can be but... he is.

I think it's really helpful to differentiate between what you actually know, and what you think or believe you know.

I don't think the opposite of believing one chooses a profession because one cares is necessarily because one wants to get rich. Nor that believing one cares means one obsesses over another's details outside of work. Perhaps some do care, I don't think it matters plus I think it often makes the believing professional more dangerous because they get clouded by how "carey" they are and can because of that belief, act in dangerous ways. But because it comes from "caring" it is somehow okay.

Well that is your opinion and it is also very simplistic and judgemental considering the dept of the thread and you probably haven't read most posts and just one of mine and decided to reply to that but thank you for your reply. I will have to disagree with you of course as I know my t and you don't and I have been in therapy for last three years.
Yes lucydog I am nearly finished my first year of training but still have four years left. You may have your opinion that I am immature and simplistic but that says more about you than me. It is also very judgemental and non accepting coming from someone who doesn't know me and is in the caring field. I opened this thread with my opinion on my t whom only I know and asked about other people's ts and views.

I don't think they are listening for information; mine after nearly 20 years wrote me a check to a wrong name and called my husband by another name. They are listening for our expression (or lack thereof) of ourselves, what makes us feel (or deaden/dampens us), what themes we have going, our "story". We have problems in specific places and they're looking for the snag, not the gossip

I agree I don't think most details they hear about most people is the part that makes it a voyeur-like profession. I fully believe there is nothing interesting factually in the story I have.

But obviously if a t knows some of the people you are refering to they are going to be curious or maybe thats just my t

I don't know that anything is obvious when we're talking about people and therapy. If you want to check your belief out, ask her.

I know that my T said that in this small town that we live in, there are often interrelationships between clients. He feels that sometimes he needs to probe more specifically about relationships, because sometimes he's seen someone who used to date a current client, or their relative, or client's new girlfriend is another client's ex, etc. etc. Usually this isn't about conflicts of interests per se (although this could also be a reason why a T might probe for specifics), but that T might have to "adjust" his understanding if he knows the person that's the subject of his client's stuff in therapy.

Also, sometimes T's ask clients for specific information, much the same way that T sometimes asks me about what music I listen to or what I'm doing after therapy. Direct questions can be ways of building rapport or understanding more about a client.

To me, there are numerous reasons that are possible for probing into pretty much anything in T. Sometimes I ask T why he's asking about X. Sometimes I make fun of him for asking a direct question, because he doesn't do much of it, it's not really his style. But I am not in therapy to understand why T asks his questions, and I've learned that going that direction shuts of the relational flow of therapy. I think that getting too interested in why T does or says anything is just a diversion from oneself-- which I am pretty expert at, but I'm trying to change that. I think it would be better for me to understand my own motivations and curiosities rather than focus on T's.

Thats it exactly, Thank you for verifying this. I told t that I wanted to run away from her last time and she said it was because I wasn't ready and it was my bodies way of telling me I wasn't safe yet.

My T has said, on occasions when I've hesitated to tell him things that might sound as if I'm criticising other people, that he's actually not particularly interested in those other people, as such. What he wants to know is how the actions or words of other people affect me. (Or rather, how my perceptions of what other people say or do affect me.)

And that sounds as if my T is horribly aloof and not interested in people, which I don't think is the case at all. At least it's not how I perceive him.

In my profession, over the years, I have heard countless times from people saying they want to -and should be allowed to- be Spanish interpreters because they've studied some Spanish and they want to 'help people.' It makes my skin crawl, gives me the shivers, ugh.

'Wanting to help people' is nice, but providers need a heck of a lot more than that to be able to appropriately help people. They need skills, for one thing. And they need good boundaries, in every way (this is a huge thing in what I do and I think is important in most helping professions). In fact, I have found that some of the people most gung ho about medical interpreting without the proper skills to do so and who think the desire to help people is the principal qualification, are often the ones with the worst boundaries, and should remain light years away from patients.

I suspect there are therapists like that out there (and even if you have all of the education, doesn't mean you have the skills, or the boundaries). When I used to interview people for medical interpreter positions, I would get the, 'well, I want to help people' thing, and my first thought is, how nice, what else you got for me?

You might agree with me, stopdog, in saying that some people with 'good intentions' can wreak some serious havoc.

But, circling back to the topic at hand, (sorry for the rant ) determining whether our therapists fit this sort of description of lacking skills and/or boundaries (yet ready and willing to 'help') is something that can be skewed by all kinds of things --including past experience, transference of all types, etc. (skewed both ways, not recognizing when they're not good at what they do, and thinking they're not when they are). I suppose it's all part of the process.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with curiosity -I think you're giving it a nefarious connotation. You can be curious, but not nosey.

I think first and foremost, you need to check to make sure you're remembering what she said right and secondly, if accurate, ask her why she's asking those questions, and thirdly tell her how these questions make you feel.

You mentioned something along these lines (re the influence of your x-T on the relationship with this T) --so maybe it would be useful to think about if you're invested in some way in her being messed up as a therapist. Is it a way of getting back at the x-T, does it make you feel more in control, does it validate your pre-conceived beliefs about how therapists, in general, treat you, does it validate your beliefs about how people in general treat you...? I'm just throwing things out there, but maybe something to think about.

I think Ultramar asks some very good questions.

You've made me wonder if I'm invested in certain beliefs about my T, namely my conviction that surely he doesn't really care.