Posted by mair on January 16, 2004, at 9:34:32
In reply to Re: Ranting and Ranting and Ranting, Oh My!, posted by fallsfall on January 15, 2004, at 21:44:04
I only just picked up on this thread.
I went through something similar with my therapist a couple of years ago. One of her concerns about my PB participation was that I had a real tendency to want to fully process things before I'd talk about them. So by the time I got together with her, I'd have already gone through a filtering process. Either I had no reason anymore to talk to her about something upsetting, or I had fully distilled a complicated issue down to something far simpler.
This may have been true to an extent but I thought on balance the benefits far outweighed the detriments. For one thing, at least for me, talking about stuff here gave me the courage to talk to her about them. Also people here might have an entirely different perspective which would get me thinking about things more deeply. Also, I didn't (and still don't) feel comfortable talking about therapy issues with my non-cyber friends. If we need to feel less isolated, reaching out to other posters is an important source of support.
I think alot of it with my therapist was that she didn't use the internet herself. I think she just assumed that any exchanges were pretty shallow. I think I convinced her that internet relationships can be very real. We periodically revisit my participation here usually when I'm most upset about something happening with another poster. If I am raising an idea or observation that came from someone here, I usually tell her that - this is something I just do automatically, and not at all deliberately.
Stick to your guns. These people can't always be right about things with which they're not really familiar. Depression is isolating enough; you don't need therapy to isolate you further.
Mair
poster:mair
thread:300607
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040116/msgs/301554.html