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LonesomeTonight
Always in This Twilight
 
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Default Feb 14, 2019 at 12:33 PM
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by scorpiosis37 View Post
This resonated with me too. I think you have a good T and a very strong relationship with him. I think it can sometimes be difficult to navigate how much emergency we are putting into using therapy to help improve our real lives and when therapy is taking over our real lives. That’s something I struggled with when I was in therapy. When I felt like I wasn’t getting “enough” from my T, sometimes it was because something wasn’t going right in the therapy and sometimes it was because I was trying to use the relationship with T to fill something that was missing IRL. I never did manage to figure out how to get therapy to improve my RL, but I have seen others do it. For me, I always kind of “obsessed” over therapy to the point it became a greater source of emotion than my RL relationships and simply ending therapy was the right choice for me. For others though who have Ts with good boundaries (like yours), I think there are ways to focus on how therapy can help you make improvements IRL without getting so wrapped up in the T relationship that you lose days a time. I just remember so vividly how this used to happen with me, so it stands out. I wish there were more resources that helped clients with this. Like, what should a client DO when this kind of preoccupation is happening? Maybe your T has some helpful suggestions for you.

Thanks, it helps to hear how you characterize your past experience with T (I read much of it at the time, but it's often different looking back). It's easy to get sucked in when a T can seem so caring and supportive. I agree that there should be more resources for this (aside from PC!) and that T's should be more aware that it's happening AND know what to do to help clients with it. I mean, ex-T would comment on how much I seemed to think about therapy in general and ex-MC in particular, but it didn't seem she had any suggestions for me in how to stop doing that. I mean, "Stop thinking about it so much" isn't particularly helpful! Ex-MC certainly didn't seem to do anything to shift it either...

Hm, this seems like a potential thread on PC...
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