What your Therapists want you to know about therapy

I read this interesting article about what your therapist may be secretly hoping you will find out about therapy. Here are a few excerpts. Link Here

This is wildly patronizing, even for a therapist. Condescending to people in this way indicates low self-awareness and insight, which completely contradicts the major selling points of therapy.

I find the whole article to be utter nonsense. Basically the whole subtext is "therapists don't do anything but we will blame you and convince you to blame yourself if therapy is not useful."

Why on earth don't those people just give clients this information instead of "secretly hoping" clients find out. What an odd way of conducting business.

At first I thought you were being sarcastic, but this a really good point. Why the need to 'wish' understanding rather than simply state the words and explain to promote understanding?

This reminds me of another post where recently it was noted that therapists seem to wrongly conclude the client wants to be friends with the T, but it is really the Ts fantasy or assumption that all these clients want a friendship while the client expects a professional service.

Come to think of it, I've seen a number of Ts, most just for 1 or a few sessions, but none have shared these 'secrets'. In this day and age, don't people expect more? That's a serious question.

Maybe the article is helpful to you or others. It led me to feel irritated.

I agree to think about discussing with your T.

The website is a site for online therapy I believe, so it seems somewhat logical that an online therapy site would dispense this information online to an audience of prospective online clients.

Seems right. And the audience determines what the content is, and the title click-baits people who would be interested in the information it promises to contain. I don't see any problem with the content, but I don't experience the article as some kind of "ah hah" moment that explains all the mysteries of therapy. Distilled down, it feels like what I either already know about therapy or something where it's so general that an application to my specific therapy would be needed.

Just because a therapist writes an article for a consumer audience, doesn't mean that other therapists don't raise these issues with their clients, if clients themselves ask to talk about it. If my therapist tried to broach the content with me, "let's talk about what I think about therapy and what I want you to know," my reaction would be, let's not. I'm not interested in what he wants me to know, and I'm not interested in having some global discussion about how therapy *might* work better or what I'm *supposed" to do in therapy. I prefer to set the agenda for my therapy and having my therapist respond to my issues.

My T, frequently talked about all of this. In our first appointment she talked about how often in therapy because we are digging up painful memories it frequently gets worse before it gets better, she is not a mind reader so talk to her about issues, what would happen if we ran onto each other in public, if I felt like not coming please reach out to her as often that is the most important time to attend, and if I just stopped coming she would be concerned and wonder if everything is okay but she won't chase people. She would likely call if I missed an appointment to check to make sure there wasnt a communication error but will call once.

At some point we talked about her degree didnt give her a magic wand to fix everything. She wished it did as she would gladly fix my past but couldnt.

What your T said, sounds a lot like what my former T said. Kit

I would find that part about a magic wand so condescending.

why would they secretly hope you find out
I mean wouldn't it be more beneficial to say these things to a client

She and I had a very similar sense of humor

It was a joke. The initial conversation was she said she wished she could take away my pain and erase the past abuse. I then said something like you mean you dont have a magic wand? We then dmade a few comments like that. After that day when I was really struggling one of us would comment about the magic wand and them not giving her one with her license. A fee times I asked if there were a magic wand class she could take. I told her I would gladly pay for her to take it.

i've joked with my T about a magic wand too.

I think I would not have found this irritating when I first started therapy and did not know too much about it, I probably would have just seen in as a set of instructions, like with a medical procedure. I find it very irritating now. It is making a lot of assumptions and has an authoritarian tone, which I despise about a therapist.

Here's what I wish people knew about therapy... it's all about the therapist.

Knowing this will save people a lot of grief, more so than learning to obey the precepts outlined by the above Super Mommy 2.0.

Hmm. My therapy was all about me.

I agree with the tone being highly obnoxious.