Posted by Dinah on September 5, 2003, at 16:18:51
In reply to Please help..feeling really confused.. , posted by Adia on September 5, 2003, at 13:56:20
Adia, as much as you care for your therapist, and as many fine qualities as I'm sure she has, I'm still forced to say that what she did stinks.
My therapist has from time to time, and in fact the most recent time was a few weeks ago, wondered if therapy was useful or harmful for me. Every time it throws me into a wild panic. But at least he did it in person. Maybe you two have gotten a bit to comfortable with email.
Since this has happened to me, I can say with absolute certainty that therapy can recover from this. The most recent time I wrote him a very long letter that was my attempt to help him reframe his thoughts of the usefulness of our therapy. I put forth as convincing an argument I could as to why it was good for me, despite the fact that it also caused some upset. He thanked me for the letter, and said it helped him understand things a whole lot better. And the process continues somewhat. I'm gaining a better understanding of what he's thinking is going on as opposed to what I'm thinking, and why he gets so frustrated when I think things are going along fine. I'm going to start a thread with part of what we discussed today.
There are a few possibilities. Your therapist may feel she's in over her head, and she may be. How long has she been in practice, and what sort of therapy is she comfortable with? That's a tough hurdle to overcome, but not insurmountable if you're both committed to the therapy process. My therapist has grown as a therapist quite a bit while I've been seeing him, and I've stayed with him while he grew.
The other possibility is that she might just be frustrated at what she doesn't understand. That's way more easily dealt with. If you marshall up all your rational explanations of the good therapy is doing you and what you think is going on, it might give her a new way to look at the process.
Since I just went through this, I'll try to look at the letter I wrote my therapist and see the sort of thing I wrote him. Obviously you have different issues, and your letter would be completely different from mine. But the fact is that we can convince them at least some of the time by explaining what it is that they don't understand.
I *completely* understand how upset you are. And I'm rather upset with your therapist for addressing this via email. But perhaps we could give her the benefit of the doubt for the time being and assume she was out of her mind in delirium from her illness at the moment.
poster:Dinah
thread:257321
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030905/msgs/257362.html