[SarahSweden]

This week when I met with my therapist and I spontaneously came to talk about what I want from her in therapy, we´ve met for five months already, she became hesitant about the part when I describe I need her to be understanding and validating.

I talked about when bringing different issues to her, like a disappointment, a sorrow or similar and that I need her to show she understands and that she can engage in such a conversation. I´ve never asked for a solution focused therapy and neither did I with her but more that I need support on different situations in life.

But she became hesitant as she suddenly realised I´m not so much into searching for solutions, at least not as a first goal in therapy. I´ve never talked about finding solutions, I on the contrary gave her several examples of me not wanting CBT and other short-term therapies as I find them focusing too much on what to do instead of getting understanding for how I feel.

I´ve never met with a T who said this before, I think understanding and validating the client in both his/her negative and positive feelings is the basis of every therapy unless you´re in some kind of coaching or similar.

She wants me to share things and to share my feelings but at the same time she seems to kind of wanting to neglect negative things and focus just on the positive and how to solve things. It then becomes pointless for me to share negative things at all.

What do you think about this?

[SalingerEsme]

She sounds like she misattunes to you, or yes works though in incompatible theory that doesn't fit?

[cool09]

How did she act the first 5 months? Was it productive or not really? Was she understanding at all? It's good that you can assert yourself like you have to get exactly what you want.

[Argonautomobile]

I think a lot of T's have agendas. They want to see change. In my case this was not a bad thing. I hope things go better with your t.

[mostlylurking]

I think the more a T understands and validates your emotions, the more emotions tend to come to the surface, and there's value in trying to explain them to your T (and in having them validated) because you start to understand them better yourself. Bringing suppressed emotions up to the surface and examining them also helps a person not be "hijacked" by sudden really strong feelings.

At the beginning of therapy I would be frustrated because my feelings didn't match what I rationally thought they "should" be, but I learned (like really learned, at a gut level) that feelings don't care about whatever my logic is. They do, however, have meaning, but that might come from the past moreso than the present.

There's also the fact that we don't choose to have our emotions, they are just there. So there's no reason we should feel guilty or ashamed for whatever they are (heh... easier said than done). We can still choose to express them or keep them private or try to redirect them or whatever -- but it's not like we asked for these emotions, so it's not sensible to blame ourselves or feel awful for having them. It's possible to notice unexpected or seemingly inappropriate emotions with curiosity rather than with self-judgment. As in "Oh hey, this is a really weird and really strong emotion... I wonder what this is from?" (Again -- easy to say, harder to have it sink in.)

I think there's a lot that can be learned, and there can be a great deal of self-acceptance acquired, from nothing but discussion of one's emotions and where their roots lie.

(And emotions we don't accept -- like the way your T seems to not want to acknowledge negative emotions as much -- tend to grow and get cranky until they are given attention, in my experience.)

[growlycat]

Your t wants a shortcut to change. A bad cbt therapist often looks this way. I have had a very good cbt therapist in the past but sometimes I had to remind him to remember the person not just the goal setting. He was usually good at balancing both.

Your t sounds inexperienced or just uncomfortable with emotions, oddly. She may not be right for you

[satsuma]

I think this can be a difficult balance in therapy. From the T's point of view, they want to help their client to bring about some change in the long run, in a way that will make their life better (easier to live, or more happy or more purposeful or fewer problematic things such as OCD, or whatever is the case for each person). That's the basic premise of why they have trained as a therapist and what they are doing there.

But then for many of us, we have never had someone in our lives who cares about us, who hears what we have to say, who is supportive towards us. And then we suddenly find it when we go to therapy and it can be a wonderful but also uncomfortable and scary but ultimately very healing thing. I'm sure that in my own therapy a lot of the healing that has happened for me has come from being seen and heard and cared for in this way - getting to experience a really important thing that was missing in my life - rather than from any particular insight or technique that I have worked on with T. But we do both - I mean T us caring and supportive, but also we do work on CBT-ish things such as flashcards of things to try to remember in upset moments, and also imagery work and other things.

I do hear what you're saying about needing to feel heard and validated when you're being open and explaining things that have hurt you. I have told my T before that he has been too quick and jumped into "problem-solving" when I was upset. It made me feel like he was blaming me because he was saying "you need to work on x y z so that this doesn't happen again". T apologised and said that he does tend to jump into problem-solving mode and that he had done it too soon. (I am lucky to have a T who will apologise if there is some miss-attunement like that.)

I'm just trying to imagine if I asked your question to my T (if I was saying the things in your post Sarah), I think he would apologise for hurting me or hurting my feelings, and try to show that he was listening to my hurt. But I don't think he would agree that we should not be working towards change in the long run. I think he would say "It would not be very ethical of me to sit here and keep on taking your money Week after week when I am not working towards helping you in the long run". (We had a similar conversation once on a slightly different topic about when to end therapy, he said it wouldn't be ethical for him to keep doing that if everything was going really well and I didn't have any problems or anything to work on and didn't really need his help any more. Ha ha, we have never encountered this situation in real life, but I know that hypothetically if it were to occur then he would want to start thinking about ending therapy.)

I'm imagining that if I raised those things with my T it would lead to a really helpful conversation about the goals of therapy. I do think it's important for the client and the therapist to be clear about the goals of therapy and what they are both doing there because then both can feel that they are working on the same team. I wonder if that's a discussion you would be able to have Sarah?

[satsuma]

Originally Posted by mostlylurking

I think the more a T understands and validates your emotions, the more emotions tend to come to the surface, and there's value in trying to explain them to your T (and in having them validated) because you start to understand them better yourself. Bringing suppressed emotions up to the surface and examining them also helps a person not be "hijacked" by sudden really strong feelings.

At the beginning of therapy I would be frustrated because my feelings didn't match what I rationally thought they "should" be, but I learned (like really learned, at a gut level) that feelings don't care about whatever my logic is. They do, however, have meaning, but that might come from the past moreso than the present.

There's also the fact that we don't choose to have our emotions, they are just there. So there's no reason we should feel guilty or ashamed for whatever they are (heh... easier said than done). We can still choose to express them or keep them private or try to redirect them or whatever -- but it's not like we asked for these emotions, so it's not sensible to blame ourselves or feel awful for having them. It's possible to notice unexpected or seemingly inappropriate emotions with curiosity rather than with self-judgment. As in "Oh hey, this is a really weird and really strong emotion... I wonder what this is from?" (Again -- easy to say, harder to have it sink in.)

I think there's a lot that can be learned, and there can be a great deal of self-acceptance acquired, from nothing but discussion of one's emotions and where their roots lie.

(And emotions we don't accept -- like the way your T seems to not want to acknowledge negative emotions as much -- tend to grow and get cranky until they are given attention, in my experience.)

This is such a wise thing, thank you! It really helps me to remember not to be judgmental to myself about emotions. IF I remember!