Posted by pegasus on April 21, 2004, at 11:30:50
In reply to T's...false sense of security!, posted by Speaker on April 20, 2004, at 21:21:36
Oh, yeah, trust is a biggy. I think the therapy relationship is very confusing and frustrating that way. As tmp said, it's weird to be paying (a lot!) for someone to support you, when it seems like genuine caring and support would not have a price tag on it. But, I also think that just because we pay doesn't mean that they don't really care. I mean, they don't have to be doing that particular job, right? They do it because they care about people. Including you.
And, that said, it's not like other relationships in our lives. They're not our mothers, or our friends, or our lovers. But sometimes we have feelings about them like we do for those other people in our lives. I think that's because those roles are familiar to us, and the therapy relationship is not something we get to practice in any other role. So we try to make sense out of it by comparing it to these other roles. And, it isn't a direct comparison, so things get confusing.
My old T used to say that we had a friendship within our therapy relationship. Which mean that we can't be friends outside of that relationship, but we can inside of it. To me it meant that we had those warm feelings about each other that you have with friends, but that we needed to observe all of the limitations of a therapeutic relationship, because that was best for both of us.
It's hard to accept limits on close relationships, but we do it all the time in other ways. For example, we don't have sex with our platonic friends even if we're attracted. We don't ask our coworkers to hold us, we don't hire our spouses (usually). I *think* that the only reason therapy feels different is because we have no precedent in our lives for that type of intimacy with those types of limits on it.
Sorry, got a little long winded there. This is just something that I'm trying to work through lately.
pegasus
poster:pegasus
thread:338232
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040419/msgs/338372.html