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Originally Posted by PurpleMirrors
I want to comment specifically to this part. Many of us have highly dysfunctional relationships with therapists because we had highly dysfunctional relationships with parents or no relationships with parents. Many of us carry that through to other relationships in our lives or have figured out how to navigate life despite. I was under the impression that replaying these dynamics with our therapist and having corrective experiences is what therapy was all about? Deep healing?
Particularly when therapists advertently or inadvertently try to provoke a parental or authoritative role, it seems to me that dysfunction resulting from a dysfunctional past is inevitable. Is there no help for those that keep forming dysfunctional relationships if such a thing is apparently not ‘normal’? Perhaps not through the therapy avenue, unless one is lucky enough to find a therapist who is truly exceptional.
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This is exactly the point of therapy. Working out the dysfunctions your life brings to therapy, with a competent therapist, is how therapy can work. A competent therapist doesn't provoke in most cases (there are modalities like Gestalt that are more confronting) . But that storminess isn't the same as dysfunctional therapy. When the therapy itself is causing more problems than it's solving, something is wrong. When the therapy itself is introducing new conflicts, something is wrong. It's not usually so obvious in a single session sort of way, but in an over time sort of way.