Posted by Tamar on August 13, 2007, at 9:20:53
In reply to Re: ***** Long, tedious and triggery ***** » Tamar, posted by Squiggles on August 13, 2007, at 6:37:55
> I'm not sure about T-vocabulary; what are the
> boundaries and the framework for example?I’ve had no psychological training, but here’s how I understand it:
Boundaries are concerned with issues of contact between therapist and client: how much a therapist tells the client about himself/herself, whether there will be hugging, whether the client may call the therapist at the office, or outside of office hours, whether the therapist will accept gifts from the client, and things like that.
The frame is about the environment in which therapy takes place: how long the sessions last, where they happen, when they happen, and how often. I think the boundaries are part of the environment and so can be considered part of the frame.
> Also,
> if you would be happy having a loving relationship, is the therapist the best person to have that with? Maybe, a bodyfriend, or a husband?I have lots of loving relationships with partner, children, parents, friends… But I love my therapist too, because he cares (albeit professionally) for my emotional needs. It’s not the same as the care provided by a GP or a gynaecologist or whatever: it’s much more intimate because of the things I talk to him about.
> I'm not sure what your needs are, but i have noticed a dependence relationship or bond forming with many patients here and their therapist. What happens, when he's gone; it's one of the reasons i think a dr. and social worker team would be less personally intrusive.
Yes, many patients develop a bond with their therapist. Some become dependent. Do you see that as a bad thing? I need to be able to bond with and depend on my therapist because I need to work in transference. The work I need to do is inevitably personally intrusive because it involves my gender, sexuality and body. A doctor and social worker team wouldn’t be able to help me much on those issues, unless they were psychoanalytically trained perhaps.
What should happen (I believe) is that I should be able to work though all that stuff by bringing my transferential material to therapy, and working through that with the benefit of my therapist’s interpretations based partly on his clinical skill and experience and partly on his countertransference reactions. He would work with me to find ways of integrating the different parts of myself until I’m better able to live happily with who I am. And when I get to that point I will no longer feel so dependent on my therapist and I will be able to cope with leaving him.
That’s what I want. I make it sound easy, eh? His apparent resistance to my transference is my first problem, and one I haven’t yet been able to solve.
> It's just my perspective, i may be wrong altogether about the benefits as i have only been to a counsellor in my life, outside a therapist.
Well, I guess the benefits of therapy to me might be very different to the benefits to you because we wouldn’t be working on the same issues, and even if we had similar issues, we’d have different experiences of them. Each person has unique experiences of therapy, so it’s hard to generalize.
Thanks for your thoughts about all this.
Tamar
poster:Tamar
thread:775888
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070807/msgs/775963.html