When the therapist/patient gets bored

Do therapists get bored with patients that they've been seeing for several years? If so, is it their responsibility to work through it or refer them out? What's the protocol? Do you think that it compromises the efficacy of the treatment?

Do you, as a long term psychotherapy patient of the same therapist, ever get bored of your therapy/therapist?

at 20 months, not bored. I've been frustrated, and there's been rupture (s). Not bored.

I'm not bored of therapy, but I'm looking forward to the day when I will be, because it will mean I'm not in need of help with any crisis, and I'm feeling so secure, to the point that a therapy session could be mundane and even boring. I've seen little glimmers of it, I think,in the huge improvements that have taken place. But at the moment it's more or less a comfortable security, but not yet anywhere near boredom.

My T says he is not bored, and this seems to be true. Sometimes I think he must be, because I have been needing to talk about the same thing over and over. But he says that he's not, and he doesn't act bored.

Therapy is supposed to be talking about feelings to understand more what's underlying them and not reacting on them with actions. Being bored is a feeling too and the same treatment should be applied.

Of course, the client can terminate any time they want but from the therapist's side I personally would expect that any decent therapist would try to understand why he's feeling bored and try to use this analysis to help the client. The most typical textbook example is that the therapist starts feeling bored in counter-transference when the client is hiding something important. Surely there are other reasons, including those that are stemming from therapist himself, like for instance having some problems in his life that he can't put out of his mind and thus everything else sounds boring etc etc.

Anyway, referring the patient out because of that doesn't sound a reasonable option for me at all. Rather, the therapist should work on themselves to understand why they are feeling that way and if this is something personal then solve it so that it wouldn't interfere their work and if this is something coming from the patient, use that understanding to further the therapy. But it all starts from the self-knowledge of the therapist.

I have been with my T for four years and although I think he has been often frustrated I don't think he has ever been bored. Same applies to me.

My new therapist seems bored if he doesn't get a certain amount of time too, nothing inappropriate, but things seem to go better if we're having a conversation, which is pleasant, but I think is kind of a waste of my own time with him.

I would also say that there are some people out there who are just plain old boring--that was certainly true of certain DBSA people (generally depressed) and was one reason I quit. I guess a therapist would find a way to just accept being bored, if he couldn't find a way of squirming out of the situation. Maybe he can manage to think of (therapeutic) ways of entertaining himself.

Not with individual one-on-one therapy, but I've been in partial hospitalization programs several times where this happened. At the beginning, I would find all the group therapy sessions very interesting and almost wished I was there for more hours of the day to get more out of it. There would always come a time though where I'd start to get really bored and impatient during groups. This was always how I knew I was progressing and closer to being ready to leave the program.

I would think frustration and boredom come hand in hand, or not necessarily?

I picked up on some frustration from my T re something I want talking about. I don't know if I myself was frustrated and therefore projecting my own feelings onto him. But then I imagined that he must be really bored with me and he other patients who are more interesting/exciting. Made me feel really dejected.

Yes, I think t's get bored. My current t cut her hours back to two days and stopped taking insurance, and she says she loves it bc her clients can't make weekly appointments anymore (too expensive without insurance and no appts available due to t cutting back) so she gets more variety. So yeah, I think she got bored with the same people, same issues, week after week. Personally, I don't know how t's do it!

I've not been bored in individual therapy, but I have been bored in group therapy. I've been inpatient in eating disorder treatment centers and get very bored in groups there. Mainly because it seems one or two people take over and talk the whole group about themselves, and partly because after doing the same type groups over and over it just gets boring.

In my therapist training courses we were taught that boredom in session = lack of depth/progress/not getting to root of the issue. On one hand you can say its natural to get bored with a therapist over time, but that could be due to them using same interventions over and over again. Or the therapist getting bored of the client saying the same stuff over again refusing to seek different perspectives.

Not saying this is always true but it makes a lot of sense!

I haven't been with one therapist long enough to get bored. In fact I seem to unerringly find zany therapists, so it's hard to get bored.

I think therapists get bored, though - I would if I saw a client who was really stuck and showed no interest in unsticking themselves, or who wasn't really doing therapy anymore, just chatting once a week. I think therapists should refer on in those cases, because it suggests the therapist might be part of the problem.

Really? Why would you think that? To me those things are quite separate. For me frustration usually comes when there is something that I just can't seem to make any sense of. Boredom for me is quite different, although I can't really imagine it right now - I guess I haven't been bored for ages. I guess boredom comes when I'm not really able to engage with whatever I'm dealing right now.

I guess I imagine that when a therapist is frustrated - the frustration is caused by the patients resistance which then leads to the therapist becoming bored(of the same old ****, etc).

In that scenario, frustration would indicate to me a continuing desire to engage and potentially effect change whereas boredom would be a sign of having moved past even helplessness and essentially, landed in a place where there's little or no remaining desire for engagement.

Yeah, I guess for me also in the frustration there is some energy that is stuck somewhere, while the boredom somehow signals the lack of energy put in.

That's true - never thought about it like that.

7 years in. I'm not bored. I don't know about him!!!

When I get bored - I take a break. I don't know what the woman does when she gets bored. I don't consider her boredom to be my problem.

Wow, that's a long time, kudos to you!

I've only been seeing my T for a couple of years and I get jealous of T's new patients as I imagine working with them is more exciting as there is a newness/mystery to them.

Do you ever experience those feelings?

I do feel like T is more lax with me at times and I brought that up with him once. I can't remember what he said.. But yeah I understand those feelings

Seems like you've got your relationship under control

Yes, I sense my T is more lax with me in certain ways, which a part of me does appreciate.

How do you work with those feelings? If you don't mind sharing?

Current T (who I've been seeing for less than a year) has a client she's seen for about 18 years -- that's just a couple of years short of how long she's been practicing.

I am jealous of such sustained intimacy (especially since I don't even have any really close friends I've known that long) -- I imagine the client has access to her (and is seen by her) in all sorts of ways that I don't and maybe never will.

But, I don't get too caught up in it because of course, I remind myself of reality i.e., I'm cooler / awesome-er than all her clients, past, present and future, put together and multiplied a few times over, of course.

Thank you for that perspective - that is true, too.

And I love your attitude- I need to learn to adopt some of that confidence