'The goal is to understand'

My T said to me that the only goal in my therapy was for me to understand (I told her that I did actually have other goals). I think this is why she gave me her insight and analysis constantly. I think that actually a better goal would be to be understood. By the end I thought that what I really wanted was to talk, talk, talk about my whole life and have her understand me, know me (and accept me).

I can see how your two different beliefs about therapy could be a crossed purposes.

For me, I was in therapy to understand myself, to understand where I had been and where that left me now, to understand how to move forward from this point. Yes, being understood was part of that process, but being understood was only one part of the whole process. For me, if I had stopped at being understood, I'd still be stuck right where I went in. I needed to understand where to go from where I was.

Yesyes, and it's a biggie!! To "understand"... that encompasses a lot. For me, I realized only in the last few months (3 years into therapy) that why I was there - I couldn't answer the question in the beginning - was that I needed someone who could and would LISTEN to ME, and understand/accept my real ME, because no one ever had before. And you know what happened? By her constantly doing that over time, I am learning to listen to/understand/accept my real me inside myself. That is kinda a huge thing, if you think about it. I'm still getting there, it's definitely a process, but oh so worth it.

Did she explain what you're supposed to understand? Yourself? Her? Your life? There are many ways of interpreting that I guess. I'm not sure understanding would be a goal or productive for me. I tend to ruminate about things and trying to figure out the whys of life and things that have happened is not helpful at all. Sometimes things just are and we have to accept them. But again, I am not really sure what she meant by that.

If she wasn't giving you or offering you what you needed in therapy then it might be best to find someone else or whatever.

It's funny how right now (new to therapy) I need to be understood I need to be heard. I do not recall T giving me her insights but allows me to come up with my own insights. Insight is greater than the knowledge - and the act of finding those insights on our own is so much more powerful than the T learning it about us.

Just recently I talked to T about intellectually knowing that I need to stop craving the need of being important to someone and figure out how to be that important someone to myself. She said her job was to help me find & discover that and then work out how to get there.

First, I don't really think it's appropriate for a therapist to tell their client what the client's only goal should be. I understand that therapists of course have their own thoughts and opinions about what their clients need, but saying "This is the only goal" sounds unnecessarily prescriptive to me.

My T recently said that it is his job to try to see the world the way I do, in other words, to understand me as fully as possible. That's not the same as saying that that is the goal of therapy, of course. Or rather, it is a goal for him, but not for me. (We don't talk in terms of goals, that would be very counterproductive for me and would make my therapy much less effective.) Understanding myself has never been an issue for me, though. I understand myself pretty well. I have only recently started to (to some extent) forgive myself for the way I am, but that's got nothing to do with understanding.

You said that your therapy helps you to come up with your own insights - that's exactly what I had expected, that by talking to my therapist I would see things for myself, but instead I was bombarded my T's knowledgable insights.

My exT was a bit like that. She did not take the time to understand where I was coming from (or else we were simply too different for her to be able to understand) but she gave me advice and "insights" based on her faulty perception. And she did not allow me the time to discover things for myself. My current T is the opposite of that, in both ways: he does understand me much better than she did, but he also stays back and allows me to reach my own insights at my own pace. (That means that my therapy involves a lot of long silences. It is awesome to have somebody be sufficiently interested in what I have to say to be prepared to wait for as long as it takes for me to say it!)

Mine is that way also. He certainly does give input and has insights, but he also hears me and helps me gain my own insights (which is what we have to learn to do really). It's a give and take; a conversation; a dialogue.

The woman has never had anything come out of her I would consider to be an insight and when she talks, all she does is confirm how she either does not listen or she has so little understanding of me that she might as well not be listening. It is a big reason I tell her not to talk. If she does not talk, I don't get upset at how very little she gets about me. One time, I said something about a topic I mentioned a lot at the beginning but then stopped because she was so useless about it, and the woman said she thought I had gotten past it. When I asked why, she said because I had stopprd talking about it. I asked her why she did not check with me before making such assumptions and she had no answer. I then said I kept a list of thing that she is useless over and if I stop talking about something, it is usually because I have realized she is not useful and move on to find an area where she is perhaps not completely crap. I do try and boost her up by telling her good she is at staying back and not caring. Toss her a bone of good job every so often over that part.
The second one I see is better at understanding what I am saying. Her attempts at insight are no more useful, but at least I think she tries to understand me.

Where are these ts with knowledgable insights?? My ts job is to help me refine what i am saying so it is correct. It takes us several tries on both our parts before we home in on the truth. Or could be im just dense.

I think I hope that in being understood by someone else, and in talking to someone else about things that I have never talked about before, and in being accepted and close to someone I will feel better. If it was just a question of understanding ourselves perhaps we could do online counselling? I do also feel that understanding helps, but for me I think the being understood seems to need to come first.

If you are being understood you will know it.

I get that. For me it all kind of was happening at the same time I guess. And sometimes it was more about being heard, and other times it was more about gaining understanding from what we were talking about in relation to those stories. It goes back and forth, and often happens simultaneously. I never could have reached that kind of understanding of myself simply online though. Far too complex and gaining those insights was highly personally interactive. Couldn't have done that to a computer screen.

When you talk about your T it sounds to me that he is a really good T. I wish my T had tried to understand how I see the world - I think only then could she have helped me to meaningful insight.

Perhaps I need to forgive myself too, or maybe love myself for the way I am?

You told her you have a list of things she is useless over? I have a picture of your T and in it I imagine that this T really loves you (despite the fact that you have no wish to be loved by her).

Ack. I really don't think so. More like she just pays no attention to what I say or, if she does hear me, simply does not believe it.
But I think we can get various images in our heads of the the therapists people describe on here.

Yeah.. a bunch of them have wings. Yours might have horns and tail?

What a great post you made, I wonder to what extent this is true for other people. I had not thought of it this way before and this gave me pause.

So your goal being to talk about past and present and have her understand you in a deep level and come to accept you, the whole of you, and yet she constantly analyzing you and giving you her insight in an effort to make you understand yourself.

Come to think of it, I experienced a similar thing in the beginning of work with a therapist with whom I had felt most comfortable. There was an urgency in my voice those days, almost a sense of begging to be understood but I felt the therapist did not want to make herself vulnerable and always stood far enough not to catch the fire of my pain, only holding a mirror so I can watch myself burn in fire of pain, and asking me how did I feel about it and how I planned to escape the fire if it was giving me so much pain.

There is something deeply satisfying, beyond words, of being understood, truly understood. I value that so highly, my best relationships have been based on that. There is a loneliness in our journeys in life, and you can be physically close to another and yet not feel understood, by even your flesh and blood, by your siblings, children, parents, and that causes great pain. How wonderful it would be if we can all find people in life who truly understand us, and we can reciprocate that for them.

He is a good one, but I should perhaps point out that when I am frustrated with him I don't talk about it on this board, so I mostly just share the positive bits. He has flaws and there are things I wish he would do a little differently.

But yes, I wish your T would have done that. It is something that has been immensely helpful for me.

You've shattered my illusion that you have a perfect T (which probay started when you mentioned he watches movies you tell him about and he spends 1-1/2 hours a week looking through his notes and thinking about you a week). I never expected a perfect T, just one that was flexible and open in terms of our relationship.

I've had deep transference, inner child problems from a lot of early child abuse, and I feel that my progress in therapy with my current therapist is as much from the healing relationship as from any intellectual learning. From what I've read, the healing is mainly via the working through of the patient/therapist interaction. But the good-enough therapist does guide this to happen in a balanced healthy way.

But a problem I'm having is from T being so undefensive, so un-hungup on childish dependencies that she has difficulty experiencing what I find so loathesome and scary about it. I have trouble saying any kind of mushy, clingy, babyish wishes and can't even speak them to let my T know they are hard to talk about. She can't imagine someone could have that fear, as she probably didn't have that to deal with when she was little. But I think many here have trouble with the dependency, mushy, transference talk. Yet all that is what got many of us in trouble when parents and care-givers were cruel, harsh, ridiculing, until we got a serious hang-up about trusting and sharing feelings. That all crosses over into marriage and friendships later. I'm struggling hard with it, and I believe it helps when the therapist is comfortable with it.

Hi restin, I think you put into words something I tried to - the relationship can be healing without there needing to be intellectual learning.

Are you really sure your T really can't comprehend your babyish wishes? It's easy to start believing something like that.