The Couch 119: Come Join The Human Shelf!

Are we standing up for ourselves as much as we think we are? In session i mean? T and i did post mortems on the last schedule change, and it looked like when he said, "we need to talk about it" i took that as a NO and was afraid to bring it up again. I say thats on me. Yeah? No?

That's an actual failure to communicate. I'm not talking about such a failure; I'm talking about her doing something that made my situation worse, and then not helping me deal with that.

I agree, but is their job ever that concrete? What, is she doing your taxes?!

But i can see how that would apply in MY scheduling situation above - thru his misattunement, he didnt know i felt intimidated? But they are not mindreaders.

Then we need a private roadtrip...! She sleeps with the fish sticks!

Yes - their job is that concrete. And yes - they are just like accountants or anyone else. They don't get to be above others. And they certainly don't get to have it both ways.
Or nice work if you can get it. Therapists and weatherpeople - just guessing but we are going to call it a science.

You know, that's a good point. I didn't used to stand up for myself as much.

But, after a few months, I did start standing up for myself a lot -- or rather, the stuff that happened went well beyond my usual (rather high) level of tolerance.

I don't know if this helps in conveying what I mean but she DID acknowledge repeatedly that I was hurt / angry at her -- she acknowledged this pretty much right within the first couple of times that I mentioned it.

So, clearly she had no problem in reading that I had a problem. However, she just refused to own her part in it -- it became all about my issues / past etc.

It's only this past session then that totally unbidden -- I just said I was irritated that she said / did X etc but that's it -- she said that stuff she has said has been unhelpful / she reached erroneous conclusions etc. And, she made the connection to how I've expressed my irritation about it in the past as well -- multiple times. So, she has tracked my expression of irritation / frustration pretty decently but somehow has never thought there'd be a point to owning her part in it, until well, I said I might leave.

Okay, I'll seriously stop spamming the couch with my T-drama at this point.....thank you though for your question

Interesting article I thought:
Detach from your own guilt. Parents need permission to accept themselves as “good enough” parents, Boorn says....

“The best thing we can do for our (adult) children is to calm ourselves down and accept they have a journey to take and that we must trust them to take that journey on their own,” Boorn says.
Forbes Welcome

Hi, couch.

I have to leave in about 20 minutes to go babysit my doggie brother. Is it sad I find more enjoyment from the dog than my actual mother?

I still need to clean. Bad, squirrel.

I would call that "normal."

I picture us like . (Except when we're like , as you might remember from when we both had different monikers)

This reminds me of a lot of discourse I find in dealing with a therapist:

Oh.my.god. She wrote back and told me that she "knew what was really going on here" and she'd explain at our Skype session tomorrow.

So apparently a client cannot expression annoyance at a therapist's mistake.

It is a good thing we meet by Skype now. I could not handle in-person after that remark.

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I would be homicidal at that ********.

I've started and deleted several responses - they quickly devolve into profanity.

On the one hand this is infuriating but also fascinating. How far will she twist herself into a pretzel to avoid responsibility?

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It can really take one's breath away, can't it?

You just reminded me - early in my career i was friends with a married couple, he was a psychiatrist who taught statistics to nurses (he hated psychology, go figure! ) , she was a computer programmer. HE used to say that HERS was the only profession where one got paid to get it wrong, over and over again. WAIT A MINUTE!! Or rather forty years.

Lawyers dont get it "right" - they just win or lose. Who exactly gets it "right"? Engineers just get close enough for all practical purposes (joke about the beautiful object at the end of a hallway, mandate to mathematician and engineer to cover half the distance at a time. Math guy says, you will never reach the object. Math guy is not concrete.)

Esp underwater, as she sleeps with the fish sticks.

That - they - whatever - look uncannily like my dad.

Plus - yes. That describes exactly what i was looking for. In life and love.

Who has daddy issues, me??

Also:

From what I have read on here and from my own experience with a messed up T, I don't see them helping anyone. I don't need to pay an idiot to hurt me more than I have been hurt in this life. I don't need it!

I was at the lowest point in my life when a T took advantage and exploited me to make himself "look good" to other people. What kind of sick person does something like that?

I'm sorry you had that experience, 4R0ar1ng. Please remember that the people who post here are not a representative sample of all people who go to therapy. People who have had bad experiences are much more likely to talk about it online. In addition, a large number of people on here have positive experiences of therapy - some of us have had our lives saved by therapy.

What you describe has nothing to do with therapy. As you say, that's the action of a sick person, not of a professional whose job it is to help people through therapy. I'm really sorry to hear that you were exposed to a bad one.

Hi couch. Not feeling well physically. How is everyone else?

You and I will never agree about therapists or therapy.

And I actually do think this is representative of people who seek out therapists. I believe a lot are silent just because it did not work and they went on to do something else.

I enjoy watching the first one - but I also keep evidence for when she goes too far out so at least I can prove that I won't let her do it to me. She can twist all she wants - I have the ability to stop her from rewriting history to suit herself.

Ho can you possibly know that? It is well-known (through much research in the area) that people who are dissatisfied (with a service, with a product they have bought, with a meal, with a hotel, with a spouse) are more likely to express their opinion than people who are satisfied or those who have no opinion. It has furthermore been shown many times (through research in areas closely related to my own field) that on anonymous online forums, negative emotions are expressed much more candidly and frequently than positive or neutral emotions - hence trolling and various forms of online harassment. Thus it makes no sense to believe that this one forum, catering primarily to North Americans, populated overwhelmingly by people of one biological gender in terms of those who post, should be somehow representative for all clients of psychotherapy everywhere, including the majority who have never visited a psychotherapy forum in their lives.

And that's fine, there is no reason why it ought to be representative. Each individual person's experience is equally valid anyway, whether it is positive or negative (yes, I know that not everybody agrees with me about this) and each individual is going to be different from the general population in many ways, so what most people in a population do or think is never particularly relevant in terms of what you or I as individuals do or think.

Of course a lot of people shut up and go and do something different when they are dissatisfied. But none of us will ever know how many people do that, and so it is an irrelevant unknown variable in this equation.

I did not say I had hard facts - I said I think and I believe. No one has facts either way - my thinking and belief has no less or more basis on this than anyone else's