Twice a Week for Attachment?

My 2 x weekly was for containment.
Attachment was there whether twice or once or living with her because it's about me not her.

i started going twice a week initially because i was struggling with object permanence and trust issues. i would leave sessions and found it difficult to even remember what my T looked or sounded like and that would hinder my trust with him because when sessions were spaced a week away we would have to spend much of the next session just getting me comfortable and 're-antiquated ' with my T before i could start to delve into any of my issues. as i progressed in therapy, similar to what Lrad said, it made therapy more productive going twice a week because we could easily pick up from where we left off the session prior.

I have no experience with this kind of illness/therapy, but just coming from my personal and professional experience that seems like a lot, especially in the context of missing her and not having a true therapeutic crisis.

I know people who have met with their therapist 2-3x a well for a set period of time to get them through a rough patch, i.e. increased self harm, SI, etc. But it didn't go on indefinitely.

If it did, I would think that was the opposite of what you wanted.

Mines been 15yrs and its made me better not worse.

Speculation v experience. I'll take experience

I don't feel it's unethical if the client asks for it or if the T just offers it. If the T pushed for it, for example, saying, "You need to come twice (or more) a week for your attachment" or "You'll never improve only coming once a week," then that would probably be unethical. But as long as the client feels they're benefiting and can afford it, then I don't see why it's an issue. Of course, I'm biased, but my T checks in with me periodically to make sure I still find twice a week beneficial. I certainly don't feel pressured into it or like he's using my attachment to make money. I mean, if I switched to once a week, he'd just get another client to fill the other slot.

I've started off with twice a week sessions for the the first 9 months. Then one session a week which increased to two from may. But I've had three sessions when I've had exams and needed it.

Now I'm on one session a week. Personally I liked being on two, but it was my choice to cut back. You need as much help as you need. It meant that we could sort out ruptures quicker and we could go over the same topic sooner.

I became addicted to one therapist. I said I wanted to increase to 2x per week, and she eagerly agreed. That made two addicts. The extra fix did not decrease the cravings.

As for therapists profiting from attachment, this is true regardless of session frequency. And, really, 1 or 2 hours per week is about the same... either way the client is separated from the supposed attachment figure for 160+ hours per week. This is where it gets unethical... this lopsided and cruel arrangement drives the fixation and obsession.

Reading is fundamental. Also, retract your claws a little bit, huh. My comment came from experience, albeit only from therapy once a week, and was just sharing.

Also, great for you. I'm glad what works for you works for you. But I wonder how common your therapy frequency and length of time are.

My T wouldn't see me twice a week even when I was in crisis (hospitalized for suicide attempt). Part of me agrees with it, part of me was frustrated.

The whole point of therapy is for the therapist to become obsolete. Not for them to become a crutch. I can appreciate how some Ts won't do twice a week because it can breed dependence. I'm super attached to my T. I don't need twice a week (I'd love every day, but that would not be therapeutically beneficial). Thankfully I can text/email as much as I want (and I do haha).

How often you go to therapy should be all about your individual needs and what's most productive and healthy for you. Not some arbitrary general ideas that might not apply to you as an individual. It's kind of like medication dosages that way. One person with attachment issues might really benefit from going 2x a week, another might need 3x, another might really need to keep a firm limit at 1x per week.

I really strongly disagree with statements that needing more than 1x a week means someone needs a higher level of care. I really value the added productivity I get in therapy when I go 2x a week, which I've been doing for about the past year. There are times that I definitely think going twice a week has been really necessary to my well-being given the difficulty of the work we've been doing. But a "higher level of care" wouldn't benefit me at all--what works and helps me heal is therapy twice a week alongside the rest of my normal daily life.

Thank you for this. I was already seeing my therapist twice a week when my husband decided to set our house on fire. At that point I started 3x week and have stayed at that level for a little over a year now. I didn't need a higher level of care. I needed the to see the therapist that had seen me through the hellish last year of my marriage more frequently. And I still do. I know none of the comments here are aimed at me directly, but some feel incredibly judgmental. I need what I need and my therapist seems happy to provide it and it doesn't feel unhealthy. We are able to go a lot more deeply than I would be able to at once a week. At some point I will drop back to twice a week, but I'm not there yet.

Like NP, I also appreciate these comments. And the comparison with medication is a good one. Or to think of it as more of a physical medical condition--when my H hurt his shoulder badly earlier this year, he was having physical therapy 3 times a week for a bit. Would someone have said "You should only do that once, the PT is taking advantage of your pain to make money?"

And I agree that "higher level of care" likely wouldn't help me. I've been at twice a week for about 9 months now and feel I'm making progress. More progress than I made in 6 years once a week with ex-T, though that might be more about ex-T and how we worked together than the frequency of sessions.

Plus, for a long time there, I was having a form therapy twice a week--just once was with ex-T (or, later, current T) and once with ex-MC. Which is why current T mentioned the possibility of twice weekly once I stopped seeing ex-MC regularly (especially since ex-MC often helped me with individual issues, too). Current T was like "So you've basically cut your amount of therapy in half then..." And asked if I wanted to try twice weekly. And the rest is history, I guess...

I was feeling a bit judged, too. And like my T was being judged for being unethical in providing me with something that's helping me and that I don't feel at all pressured into. (Yeah, there may be other reasons for people to judge my T, but I don't feel this should be one of them.) I'm glad your T is able to provide you with the support you need and that it's helping.

Similar to my situation too. Although my attachment will soon make me obsolete (I'm leaving soon) but if I wasn't making this choice, I'd be there forever, soley to be with him.

If it works for you and you can afford it and your T is ok with it, do what you need.

I personally was giving my own views from my experience. Not trying to judge. I have thoughts on it but I don't say them here. I'm glad you have a T who does this. Not all of them would. So it's good you found what you needed

For the people who go multiple times a week: how do you embed the work you do in session if there are only ever a few days between sessions?

I work slowly. I need weekly gaps in order to reflect, apply, make connections, decide never to return to another session because it's so painful, and then change my mind in order to begin it all again the next week ...

There is a certain almost child-like joy in saying at the door, "See you TOMORROW!"

I also work slowly, extremely slowly, so that I have had to ask my even already very patient analyst to slow down. If I would go once a week I can't even imagine that I would ever get anywhere with my pace.

I suspect that psychoanalysis is quite different from regular psychotherapy (even if it is psychodynamic). In psychotherapy I suppose people work on more or less concrete things and problems and thus there is something to reflect on, apply, make connections etc.

Analysis is about rebuilding the base. I don't know how it works but it definitely does not work on cognitive level. I don't think it is related to the frequency though - probably it is possible to do analysis also with one weekly session but it would be just more difficult, precisely because it would be more difficult to maintain the continuity.

I think way too much in general--about myself, other people, other things. I've been told (by current and ex-T) that I have way more going on in my mind at a given time than most people, for better or worse. So I think that's how it works for me, I tend to process things fairly quickly. And given more time, I tend to overthink them, so a simple comment (by a T, my H, etc.) can kind of snowball into a huge thing in my head given too much time to think about it (thanks, OCD and anxiety!) It's something I'm working on. But it's also something that makes twice a week useful to me. Plus I don't feel a session necessarily neatly fits into 50 minutes--often we may have started on a really interesting line of discussion with 15 minutes to go, and then I don't have to wait a week to continue that conversation/line of thought (when over the course of a week other things are likely to come up to distract me away from it, so that topic could be dropped). So, that's how it is for me anyway...

Bit late to the party.

To answer OPs question: I used to be really attached to my T. I suffered under it, I was constantly missing him, thinking of him and so on. I got worse for unrelated reasons and my T suggested we see twice a week for a while. To my surprise, this actually helped a lot with the attachment. I still like my T a lot, but I don't think of him all the time, I don't usually miss him. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to just go twice a week because of attachment, since it might also make matters worse. But if there's a need for going twice a week, it might be worth a try and might help.

I have a session on Wednesday and a second one on Friday. How I process the work depends. Sometimes I leave on Wednesday and think about the session for the whole next day because memories keep coming back or something like that. In those cases it really helps to just be able to talk about it for two hours, one hour is not really enough for me to get anywhere.
Other weeks we discuss completely different things in the two sessions. I write everything I remember down after each session, so usually I go back over the things we've discussed a day or two after the second session if I need to remember something. I can separate the two sessions and process them each on their own in those cases.

I can so relate to this.... the only "perk" of having terrible memory after my grief is often times now I am literally "blank" and have no thoughts or emotions. However it's usually short lived and I'm flooded with thoughts galore again. Always assuming things are worse than they are.

This is the same for me and what I find hard about the whole thing. I used to go once a week and I found it very difficult to wait a week before I could bring something up. Often I'd leave the session and have 100 things I'd want to talk about that were simply in relation to the session I had just left..My mind would start to overthink the smallest of things and I'd ruminate on them...Waiting a whole week to discuss things and the feelings of intense longing for my T made it torturous. We switched to 2 times a week and it was so much better. Am I more attached? No, I was very attached going only once a week I don't think I could have been anymore attached. Twice a week just helped my attachment not made it worse. I can't say it made me feel secure as it didn't but it did make me feel slightly less insecure. It is still painful at times but there is far less longing and I find we work though far more stuff. Basically going twice a week has helped me in terms of attachment.

I guess I am more of a "see you later alligator!" kind of woman ...

I find that the biggest difference between once and twice weekly in terms of internalizing the work of therapy is that my therapist gets a bigger glimpse of how I process the material outside of sessions--I'm still doing all the same stuff with making connections, reflecting, rejecting the whole enterprise, deciding it would be easier to just abandon my life, move to another continent, and feign amnesia rather than ever have to to back to therapy, etc., but that material now feeds back into the therapy more fully and faster. I can definitely imagine a situation where the week gaps were necessary and once a week was the most productive option, but shorter gaps turned out to be fine (better, even) for me.

That to me implies more of a laverne and shirley relationship with one's t. Nice and cozy.