Male vs Female Therpist....

Sunny..I think I have gotten too close to my therapists??? Sounds like you thought that T was alright except for the lack of depth...and the unconscious work. I am a pushover or something as I stayed so long.. and would feel guilty for leaving or separating. Guess I need to work on that.

REBT is Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. It's a therapy developed by Albert Ellis. Like CBT, it explores the correlation between the Rational (thinking), Emotive (feeling) and Behavioral (self-explanatory) parts of us.

We worked with a book titled :SOS Help for the Emotions" Managing Anxiety, Anger, & Depression by Lynn Clark PhD.

I have always preferred a female therapist, I really don't think I could open up to a male....not quite sure why...

As far as my Pdoc goes, I have always had a male doctor until recently. Because I only use the pdoc for medication management I don't really have a preference.

I find I have a nice balance with a male pdoc and a female T. At the start I don't think I would have done well with a male T. I had too much fear of men. Now it would be a different story and might do me some good. I can't even imagine a female pdoc, but it would be interesting to reverse the two. Only I'm terribly attached to my pdoc. And I wouldn't know how to start over in therapy with someone new. I wouldn't know how to end the current relationship with T.

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SecretGarden said:
Sunny..I think I have gotten too close to my therapists??? Sounds like you thought that T was alright except for the lack of depth...and the unconscious work. I am a pushover or something as I stayed so long.. and would feel guilty for leaving or separating. Guess I need to work on that.

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Hmmm, I wouldn't conclude you have gotten too close to your therapists based on what I wrote. Absolutely not. I believe you should be close to your therapist. My counselor was OK for a while, and helped with some depression symptoms. But she didn't want to actually help me get at what was causing my depression, just put bandaids on it. And she wasn't very creative in therapy, and had a limited skill set. I was profoundly stuck, and that was a major source of my depression. We made no progress at all in therapy toward getting me "unstuck." Eventually I stopped seeing her because I had reached the limits of her skills and training. She gave me what she had; I needed something more. After I found my current T, I realized the power of the therapeutic relationship, and how the mutual attachment can be so healing. I had no attachment at all to my first counselor. She was much more distant from me than my current T. That is why I always call her a counselor, rather than a therapist. I don't even know that we really had a therapeutic relationship. I was a novice back then and didn't realize you were supposed to have a relationship. The stuff they never tell you!

And yes, some months later, I did feel a bit guilty for having left my counselor. I just never came back one day, never discussed it, or anything. Bad sunny. About 6 months later I did call her to ask for a referral for my daughter, and I thought when we spoke I might say a few words of thanks or closure or something, but she never called back. Guess she treated me the way I treated her.

Alot of that is part of the Dialetic Behavioural Therapy I am doing now. It makes sense... Now for it to sink in.