Does your T instruct you?

If you need to learn how to change a tire or write a properly grammatical French sentence, you're not broken and the teacher is not a savior. But in the context of therapy, those are not the things you're learning.

But learning how to work through my thinking, manage anxiety, etc. isn't about being broken either. It is simply about never having learned effective and healthy ways to work through those emotions and situations. I never felt what they were teaching me said anything about my "brokenness." In fact, I felt treated much more "broken" by those therapists who had absolutely no skills to offer and just sat there and seemed to feel sorry for me; that was MUCH more demeaning and useless. And I never felt being given skills in any way made the therapist the "savior." He just happened to have some knowledge of ways I could do things differently that might actually help me out and shared them with me, showed me how to practice those skills and use them regularly. That approach didn't say I was broken; that approach said "With a few skills you may find life a easier to manage when you run into these kinds of stressors." In other words, I was being treated as a person completely capable of managing my life with just some rather practical skills added to my toolbelt. I found that approach entirely validating and respectful of my strength and ability.

I don't know...therapy and verb conjugations have certainly both made me cry

I guess they're just not that different for me. I don't feel condescended to or "broken" when receiving instruction or information in therapy or anywhere else. Everyone's different. I'm glad you don't receive what you don't want in your own therapy. Thanks again for your POV!

ETA: If my T were a "savior" I'd be in a Beckett play...Waiting for Godot. Hahaha.

I would say that the premise of all therapy - whether or not the therapist expresses it or makes the client feel that way - is that the client is "broken" and that the therapist is there to "fix" it. There's all kinds of things you can learn in therapy, and many are useful - I am talking about the view of therapy.

The way the question is phrased in the OP reminds me of this view. Say one goes to therapy as an adult to learn how to manage anger, for instance. The implication is that "normal" adults have already done this. That one needs to see a therapist to learn this task that everyone else seems to have mastered just fine does, in fact, suggest that that there is something wrong with the client, who has not mastered this skill. I simply don't think the profession can escape that implication; it is at the heart of mental health care.

To me I don't feel like I am "broken" and a therapist is there to fix it, I feel that I am "broken" and T is there as one tool or aide to help me learn how to fix it. I want to learn to live a better life than I am now, if not then I wouldn't be in therapy, but there's no saving me or swooping in and fixing it. There is only me fixing myself.

I think this is one of my points - if the therapist decides at the outset that "ATAT needs to learn X, Y, Z" then it is a totally different relationship from the therapist sitting there listening until ATAT learns a few things on her own.

Hmm. Maybe. I always sort of thought the implication was that, for whatever reason (genetics, environment, mental illness, trauma, etc) the client's problems exceed the "normal" range of severity and have not responded to the "normal" skills "normal" adults learn.

I mean, it's not as though everybody but you, the therapy client, somehow magically learned how to recognize the onset of and cope with a hypomanic episode. "Normal" people never had to learn this skill because they don't have this problem.

But I don't see that as being told I am "broken" and have never gotten that message from my very competent therapists who DID teach me very specific skills. That seems to be your perspective and experience, and I do think some therapists have that approach, but I wouldn't say it applies across the board by any means. Perhaps different modalities tend more to the "client is broken and flawed and needs to be fixed" mentality, but I've very actively chosen not to see therapists with that approach and really had no problem finding therapists who completely believed in my strength and ability, and they saw clients as people who already have the ability and just could use assistance in finding it in themselves. That is about empowerment and autonomy, not brokenness and "saviors" imparting knowledge.

It's not my experience at all that I'm viewed as broken. But I think that view, whether therapists or clients acknowledge it, is at the heart of the profession. It started with Freud, after all.

That view may not be present in any given individual therapist-client relationship, but it is what has informed the whole history of psychotherapy.

That is not why everyone goes to see a therapist. It isn't even why all therapists say people should hire a therapist. It may be a reason to do so - but not everyone who hires a therapist will fall into this type of reason.
I don't see it as a mismatch between ordinary skill vs extraordinary difficulty for all people who see a therapist.

Of course! I think my point was more that the implication ATAT talked about--"That one needs to see a therapist to learn this task that everyone else seems to have mastered just fine"--can hardly be considered "the heart of mental health care" when we take into account all of the clients whose problems exceed the "normal" range of severity and could therefore benefit from specialist instruction/skills/information.

There is nothing "wrong" with you if you never learned how to deal with traumatic flashbacks on your own and could benefit from some instruction in this area. It's not as though everybody else learned this in Life 101 and you just weren't paying attention--traumatic flashbacks are an extraordinary challenge arising from an extraordinary event or situation. It makes sense you might need some "extra" instruction in addition to the "ordinary" skills you and everybody else already learned.

Again, I just don't buy that the implication is that something's "wrong" with the client. What's "wrong" is the environment, the traumatic history, the chemical make-up of the brain, whatever. The client is simply an ordinary person trying to use his/her ordinary skills and information to tackle extraordinary difficulties. It makes sense that there'd be a gap there. To me, that gap--that mismatch of ordinary skill vs extraordinary difficulty--is what therapy-as-instruction is trying to address, not the "wrongness" or "brokenness" of the client.

I don't see the "broken" view as at the heart of psychotherapy's history. I think Freud mostly discounted the notion of "person" almost entirely; the focus was on the mind, almost as a disembodied entity, with no respect for what we would now call the socio-cultural aspects of personhood. I believe that was part of what Rogers was reacting against.

I think this sense of therapy as a reflection of social dynamics, including power structures, came to light more as a by-product of the struggles of wresting political power within the profession from MD analysts post WW II when the government specifically invested huge resources into broadening the pool of providers to meet the growing needs of veterans (in the US). The pool drew extensively first from the large existing number of social workers, who used their orientation of social structures' impact on individuals as a basis for therapy modalities. That view morphed with the rise of behavioralist psych and the discovery of increasing numbers of psych drugs into the perspective of "fixing"--a rather mechanical viewpoint. Throw in a bunch of short-term interventionist modalities, and it's easy to see how clients could be seen as "broken" and in need of a pseudo-medicalized treatment.

The pervasiveness of those viewpoints also gave rise to a backlash of more humanist approaches. So today is a mixed bag of proliferating modalities, controversies at the heart of professional organizations, and most Ts describing themselves as "eclectic."

"If my T were a "savior" I'd be in a Beckett play...Waiting for Godot. Hahaha."

Lol! I used to tell people that all the time in describing myself...at other times, I would describe myself as "Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello. Two of my favorite plays.

How very instructive! Thanks for this.

I agree, no arguments here--not trying to make a point about all people who see therapists. Just providing a counter-proof to the idea that instruction implies brokenness.

I find medical history an interesting sub-field, along with social histories of epidemics. Not too peculiar, I know... Anyway, a good general read is American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States, by Jonathan Engel.

I don't know if I would use the word instruct. My T does share her advice and suggestions and knowledge. Sometimes what she says is not helpful but I always tell her that and she clarifies. Her suggestions have helped me a lot and her insights have changed my life.

I think "instruct" has a didactic vibe about it that doesn't capture what happens for me in therapy. She's more like a facilitator or something. She makes sure there's a time and place, she moderates to keep things safe and focussed, she points out details and asks (usually) good questions and occasionally imparts new information but mainly she bears witness to what might otherwise be too terrifying a process.

She is like a midwife: there's this thing that you're essentially doing by yourself but it sure is nice not be all alone while doing it. It's painful and sometimes scary. It's nice to have someone to guide and reassure you. The potential for things to go wrong exists and it's safer to be with someone who recognizes the signs and knows what to do. But you don't want them just jumping in and telling you what to do, you don't want them intervening when things are unfolding as they should be, you want them to recognize that every birth is a little different.

I've been known to read the book or two on the subject. Thanks for the recommendation!

"Instruct" is a deliberately provocative word--I used it because it's the word that's come up in other threads and I wanted to get a sense for what it is some find so offensive about the idea. I agree it's pretty didactic--that's a really good descriptor--and I like the midwifery comparison A LOT. When push comes to shove (so to speak hahah) I think the work (labor? haha) of therapy looks like childbirth in just the way you described. I can also see the place for instruction--honest to god didactic instruction--in the metaphor. I wouldn't want my midwife jumping in and telling me what to do right in the thick of things, but I sure wouldn't mind being told some things I didn't know beforehand if that's what I needed to prepare myself.

My example is lame because I don't know enough about childbirth to extend the metaphor, but I wouldn't think there's anything offensive in the midwife telling me to have some sterile water and fresh towels on hand if I didn't already know that. I think it would be her place to instruct, and not just let me figure out for myself that there's going to be lots of blood and potential for infection.

I don't think I'd use the word "didactic" to describe instruction in my therapy: it carries too strong a connotation of moral education, and although I would never consider therapy to be immune from values, I never got a moralist vibe from my T. But I'd say he did more than witness or serve as a mid-wife. Very hard to describe: a sense of steering, but "leading from behind."

Agreed. A moralist therapist would be icky in addition to alliterative. I'd be out the door pretty fast if I felt my T were trying to give me a moral education. Sometimes we'll talk ethics, if there's something that's bothering me, but I'd hardly consider those discussions moral instruction.

I do think, though, that 'didactic' is a pretty good way to describe what's potentially distasteful about the word "instruct."

You know, I had that thought about the midwifery comparison, too--That it didn't give my T enough credit-- that midwives don't actually do anything. But Favorite Jeans had a lovely description that won me over. And, anyway,I know nothing about midwifery except that I once met a doula who used the word "phallogocentrism" a lot and believed in crystal healing. She was cool, but I wouldn't have wanted her anywhere near my hoo-ha.

Not that I want my T close to my hoo-ha. Eww.

It is difficult to describe. Thanks for your response!

LOL! I wouldn't let any crystal healer near my hoo-ha either. I'm not offended by the idea of being instructed, I love to learn new things and there's nothing cooler to me than a really skilled teacher, but I don't experience therapy that way.

The essential part of the analogy for me was that in each case unnecessary interference is kept to a minimum. A good midwife has all the skills to recognize and manage an emergency, can give you a ton of information and tell you what you can likely expect. But she's not there to show off her skills, she talks more about "attending a birth" than "delivering the baby."

The trick is that she actually does have all kinds of hard technical skills too, she's not relying on crystal woo when you're bleeding out.

Well said. It is one thing to receive technical knowledge or expertise in a professional relationship, but quite another to be given advice on living and feeling and relating. I think that sort of instruction or advice nearly always says more about the giver than the receiver.

Every therapist I have met either gave instruction or advice, or had a manner that suggested it was coming at any moment, had I hung around long enough. I have also never met a T who didn't at least in some small way project an air of superiority, with the implication that I must be more broken than they.

I find general life advice to be almost always an insult.