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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 19 of 19. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Dinah on February 19, 2002, at 9:49:21
OK, here I draw the line, trouble. I may be able to freely debate the use of the term verbal abuse, but I cannot bring myself to debate whether there is inequality in a therapeutic relationship (except perhaps in short term cognitive therapy). And it doesn't depend on the gender of either participant.
Every week I stand before my therapist emotionally naked and vulnerable, while he is emotionally fully clothed. That alone puts him in a position of power over me.
To me, he is the person in whom I confide my most hidden secrets and impulses, ones I don't even want to acknowledge to myself. This inherently makes him very important to me. To him I am just one of many clients who do the same.
If you aren't keenly aware of the power differential in a therapeutic relationship, may I respectfully and with the intention of being helpful suggest that you look and see how many protective layers you have yet to shed.
Posted by IsoM on February 19, 2002, at 12:00:24
In reply to Inequality in therapeutic relationship - Trouble, posted by Dinah on February 19, 2002, at 9:49:21
> > "...Every week I stand before my therapist emotionally naked and vulnerable, while he is emotionally fully clothed."
It's exactly for the above reason (that you stated so eloquently) that my youngest son (almost 20) won't see a therapist though I'm sure he could benefit from having his strange mix of repulsion & duty towards his father resolved. It's the total vulnerability of one in front of a therapist who needs to reveal nothing. He refuses to give control for himself over to another that he knows nothing about & may even dislike if he did know them.
Posted by Mark H. on February 19, 2002, at 17:53:13
In reply to Inequality in therapeutic relationship - Trouble, posted by Dinah on February 19, 2002, at 9:49:21
Hear! Hear! Intimacy necessarily involves vulnerability and sharing that which is uncomfortable to share. If there is no potential for damage to one's sense of self in this willing self-exposure, there is also little potential for growth.
You see this playing out in therapy with those who recite the same painful story week after week, never bringing their core issues into the present moment in the presence of others. I think this is one of my areas of weakness; I can verbalize the past with precision, but I often have no idea how I'm doing right now.
Yet it is my craving for intimacy that prods me towards this precious moment and, thus, healing. We must enter the relationship with trust, even if it later proves to be undeserved. One of the things we need to learn is that we can survive a broken heart (and/or disillusionment with our therapists). We learn better when and how to risk; we learn that a large part of what makes a relationship special is not just the other person but the openness to loss that we are willing to bring to it. Over time, we increase our capacity for love and simultaneously our acceptance of certain types of pain.
Peer counseling is called listening.
Directed counseling always involves inequality. Our power resides in our choice to be there, not in how we stand once we find ourselves naked before a (hopefully) compassionate and skillful stranger.
Mark H.
Posted by trouble on February 20, 2002, at 4:04:12
In reply to Inequality in therapeutic relationship - Trouble, posted by Dinah on February 19, 2002, at 9:49:21
Dinah,
I thought we were talking about power, now you post a thread about inequality.
Meaningful discussions can sometimes start bumpy but once we all define our terms, it becomes easier, and radically reduces misunderstandings.Yeah, the relationship is totally unequal, as you so eloquently describe, you can give 100%, the clinician gives whatever s/he feels is therapeutic. It's a unique, almost bizarre set-up, a human relationship unlike any other. So we want to be informed, we want to be free agents, we feel vulnerable. But I don't equate feeling vulnerable w/ disempowerment, or being stripped of ones agency or any of that political jazz.
I don't hold w/ the conventional wisdom about the power differential. I'm not talking about the complexities of involuntary commitment, or sexual exploitation or any of the terrible things men have historically visited upon the truly vulnerable. I consider these extreme cases, and the draconian laws that enforce them have been vigorously challenged for 30 years, both inside and outside the profession. These activists have been ostracized, lobotomized, imprisoned and quite possibly murdered, so I can understand a little hysteria surrounding the issue. A little hysteria. By people who are affected by it, NOT by white, priveleged, upper-middle class feminist idealogues w/ an axe to grind. I hate these people, and their insidious social influence over the laws, customs, education and art that I OWN, that are meaningful to me.I am sickeningly well-schooled in Womens Studies, going back 20 years, b/c there was a time I thought it could prove illuminating in my understanding of the human condition. I've kept about 15% of my education, the other 85% I consider sheer perfidy. Perfidy! So I hit that abuse website and immediately recognized the rhetoric. The sex obsession. It's so pervasive, in that bodice-ripping repressed suburbanite sort of way-
This man is a brute, and you are vulnerable, this man is powerful, and you are quivering, you're in danger!!! (But you need him, oh cruel fate you so desperately need him.) If the only pdoc in town is a lech then sure, you're screwed, and then we gather resources and get his license revoked. This is not the norm. It's hugely damaging, but to imply that it's immanent creates a climate that starts the therapeutic relationship off on a bad footing, w/ a presumption of guilt.The words on that website! Therapists as corrupt. Therapists don't THINK about the client's personhood, don't ruminate, don't lay awake nights worrying about clients... this reminds me of so many things, including my stupid, ignorant colleagues who insist that Alzheimer's patients have no inner awareness that they're losing their minds. The real truth is that these individuals have never earned the trust of a single Alz. patient, and are thus clueless about their inner experience. They started w/an unarticulated fixed belief about dementia, and nothing in their experience challenged it, ergo it must be true. This is lazy. (Tangent, sorry.) My point though, is that if I was a therapist I wouldn't be giving my self-styled enemies the time of day, much less access to my professional torments.
Every idea on that webside is a feminist hatching, the rhetoric did not exist 50 years ago. And IMO neither did the "feelings" it engenders, which is why I can be fairly pitiless regarding them.
If the word feminism would have appeared once I'd be alot less intense about this, but they've come a long way, baby from the early second-wave feminist writings when you'd see the word therapist divided as such: the rapist.Personal vignette:
Seventeen years ago, just starting therapy, I'd been giving the silent treatment the first few sessions, and when I finally decide to break the ice I begin by saying:
There's nothing stopping me from picking up that lamp over there and smashing you over the head with it.
And the rapist goes:
Yes. And I could do the same to you, but I'm not going to.
You know those words turned my life around (and she was a STUDENT!)
Anyway, just felt like throwing that in I guess!
At the risk of sounding like a 1950s red-baiting McCarthyite I'll admit I do believe in conspiracies and I also believe that nice well-meaning collaborators often unknowingly support them. Maybe the individuals who put up the abuse website are genuinely good-hearted reform-minded idealists. Maybe they don't have anything to compare these ideas to, and they sure sound compelling and important, sounds like there's a real problem to warn the public about. So they tack up these excerpts from popular texts, not knowing anything about the dogmatism that gave rise to them. If "the rapist" showed up, in a book by abuse expert Susan Forward it might give these do-gooders pause. The rapist is long gone. Why? I'm serious. What happened to the rapist?
The rhetoricians have softened the stridency into a language of high moralism. I believe we are all moralists to some extent, and it's kind of a disease. Absolute Moralists are easy to spot-they speak as if their morality is so virtually assimilated that there's no need for any philosophical accountability, any more than we have to cite Copernicus when we marvel at the beauty of a setting sun. Only a Neanderthal would question the march of progress. Any backtalk means you're obviously in favor of abuse.
This is how bullshit creeps into our culture. I'm the monkey wrench. I throw my lot in with maladjusted historians, critics, writers and adolescents, give me somethinig to analyze, down to the ground, and I'll be happy. This is not to minimize or reshape anyone's terrible experiences. I'm just not looking at that. I'm looking at another piece of the puzzle. It's not as soft and womanly as I wish I was, things just didn't turn out that way, character-wise. But if we all had your sympathetic manner, you wouldn't be so special.
Ok, time to wrap.
I've never been scared of a therapist, but I am now and always have been afraid of psychiatrists. This seems reasonable to me. Every now and then I go in there and make my pdoc prove to my satisfaction that he's not plotting to commit me, I try to trick him into revealing secret plans and the whole nine yards, and we do that dance 'til I leave reassured that it's not going to happen. I hope I am always on guard concerning people who have coercive potential over me, and I recommend that attitude to anyone who has a major mental illness.BUT, when you find a pdoc you can trust, and you hammer out a long term relationship w/him, that paranoia had better lessen, if it doesn't then IMO there's a big problem w/the patient's head, a rigid belief that prevents her from perceiving accurately, and no doubt this is global functioning w/ everyone, not just her provider.
I have no idea if you're still w/me, and if I find that you bailed out I won't throw myself on the railroad tracks, I gotta big head swarming with railroad tracks.
love, trouble
Posted by trouble on February 20, 2002, at 4:08:51
In reply to Re: Inequality in therapy - » Dinah, posted by Mark H. on February 19, 2002, at 17:53:13
Posted by Dinah on February 20, 2002, at 8:06:49
In reply to the rapist, the monkey wrench, and the RR tracks, posted by trouble on February 20, 2002, at 4:04:12
Goodness trouble! I don't quite know where to start.
I WAS referring to power when I posted about inequality. The things I spoke of lead to a tremendous inequality of power. I just left off the "of power" and used "inequality" alone.
My only power is the ability to leave. And you know, it is true that in many cases people "need" their therapist too much to leave. Dependence on my therapist is one of my "issues". I couldn't leave him to save my life. I have nightmares of termination.
That doesn't mean I think my therapist or most therapists are evil and certainly not "rapists". After five years, I developed a large amount of trust in my therapist based on his consistent trustworthiness. It just means that there is an enormous potential for misuse of power. You know, "absolute power..." and all that.
Your student therapist was very wise in her response to you. She showed the calm reasonable trustworthiness that mine shows consistently, although I must confess that I have never threatened him with a lamp. :)
Nor was I suggesting that caring therapists don't ruminate about the quality of their work or lie awake at night sometimes worrying about their patients. I'm sure most professionals do that from time to time. Although I'm pretty sure that my therapist doesn't give me a thought between sessions.
Finally, as a white upper middle class woman moralist, I must say that I don't think I'm quite the demon you make me out to be. :)
Sorry if I didn't answer all your points or somehow missed the point of your points when answering. My poor head is spinning. I get rather easily overwhelmed sometimes.
Best wishes,
Dinah
Oh, I'm still reviewing the verbal abuse site. And I have to admit that I like the "rights" section less well than the other parts. But I think you might be reading them a bit too literally. And the italics don't mean anything in particular. Every other "right" is italicized as a way to let you know one has stopped and another has started.
Posted by trouble on February 20, 2002, at 9:26:24
In reply to Re: the rapist, the monkey wrench, and the RR tracks » trouble, posted by Dinah on February 20, 2002, at 8:06:49
Top of the mornin Dinah,
Just for the sake of clarity I wan't yelling at YOU for disparaging the inner lives of therapists, but referring to the Home page of What is Abuse..To wit:
"Discussion about the abuse of patients...is seldom found in the literature...and is rarely discussed by practitioners in the contexzt of self-scrutiny."Lies. I'm not even in the profession but I've managed to collect half a dozen garment-wrenching masterpieces by the hairless and senisitive, and, no, they don't generally title their books FALL DOWN TO YOUR KNEES AND KISS THE TIP OF MY BRANDISHED WHIP, SLATTERN! But a man has his pride.
According to the site, among practictioners issues of abuse are ill-defined (quite, as I expect they would be, outside the cyborg community), and that these issues are (love this qualifier) "more often than not"
OUTSIDE
THE
CONSCIOUSNESS
OF BOTH
PRACTITIONER
AND
PATIENT.Uh-oh. Crazy lady talkin.
The moon is made of green cheese and while we're at it think I'll do a little time travel today and check out that Harlem Rennaissance.For me, this kind of hyperbole completely destroys any credibility, when all I ask is doesn't my intelligence have the
*right*
not to be
*abused*
by a discourse on par w/ the average prepubescent slumber party, I mean if my computer was a book I'd throw it against the wall, why must our children be given access to keyboards, and so on and so forth ad naseum.I LOVE the smell of clarity in the morning.
Dennis Hopper, now there's a man.
YEE HAW!!!
Posted by Dinah on February 20, 2002, at 10:09:00
In reply to comic relief or too much coffee man, posted by trouble on February 20, 2002, at 9:26:24
You have me outmanned and outgunned in this battle of wits. And so I graciously yield.
My poor brain gets so easily confused. I'm afraid I'm just a DOS person in a Windows world. I just can't deal with multitasking, lots of input, etc.
Perhaps we can joust again another day on a subject I feel more passion for. This one just doesn't inspire me past my inherent limitations.
I raise my glass to you, trouble.
Dinah
Posted by Dinah on February 20, 2002, at 11:28:49
In reply to Re: I concede the field » trouble, posted by Dinah on February 20, 2002, at 10:09:00
I don't want to mix my metaphors
Posted by Anna Laura on February 21, 2002, at 1:41:37
In reply to Re: I meant I retire from the lists » Dinah, posted by Dinah on February 20, 2002, at 11:28:49
> I don't want to mix my metaphors
Dinah,
Did you mean you want to leave the board?
Sorry if i'm asking: sometimes speaking another language makes it difficult for me to understand properly what has been said.
I was just hoping i misunderstood your words...
Posted by Dinah on February 21, 2002, at 3:47:53
In reply to Re: I meant I retire from the lists, posted by Anna Laura on February 21, 2002, at 1:41:37
No, no Anna Laura. Sorry to cause any confusion. It's just a rather arcane jousting expression. I'm merely withdrawing from this particular debate with trouble, knowing myself to be outmatched. It's not that easy to be rid of me. :)
Thanks for asking though. Asking is always better than wondering.
Dinah
Posted by Mark H. on February 21, 2002, at 14:24:05
In reply to Re: I meant I retire from the lists » Anna Laura, posted by Dinah on February 21, 2002, at 3:47:53
Dinah,
I hope you know I intended my post to be entirely supportive of you! I did not (and still have not) read the background that led up to your initial posting in this thread.
With kind regards,
Mark H.
Posted by Dinah on February 21, 2002, at 18:47:04
In reply to Re: I meant I retire from the lists » Dinah, posted by Mark H. on February 21, 2002, at 14:24:05
Good heavens yes, Mark. I saw your remark as totally supportive.
All I meant by my reply is that I didn't feel that I could hold my own in a debate over the topic of verbal abuse with Trouble. She obviously feels far more strongly about the issue than I do and she is more verbally adept. She could talk circles around me.
I was just trying to gracefully concede defeat, and inject some humor into it.
I'm sorry my lack of clarity caused some confusion.
Dinah
Posted by Zo on February 22, 2002, at 1:30:09
In reply to comic relief or too much coffee man, posted by trouble on February 20, 2002, at 9:26:24
> For me, this kind of hyperbole completely destroys any credibilityHyperbole is as hyperbole does.
Zo
Posted by trouble on February 24, 2002, at 4:39:16
In reply to Re: comic relief or too much coffee man » trouble, posted by Zo on February 22, 2002, at 1:30:09
>
> > For me, this kind of hyperbole completely destroys any credibility
>
> Hyperbole is as hyperbole does.
>
> ZoReally. Show me the hyperbole in my post Zo and I'll eat a stack of Bibles
trouble
Posted by Dinah on February 24, 2002, at 7:14:13
In reply to Re: comic relief or too much coffee man, posted by trouble on February 24, 2002, at 4:39:16
Good to hear from you trouble.
I was afraid that what turned out to be a poorly worded post on my part might have offended you.
Dinah
Posted by trouble on February 24, 2002, at 9:00:11
In reply to Re: comic relief or too much coffee man » trouble, posted by Dinah on February 24, 2002, at 7:14:13
> Good to hear from you trouble.
>
> I was afraid that what turned out to be a poorly worded post on my part might have offended you.
>
> DinahYeah, it bugged me, but after looking it over a couple times I realized I'm just going to have to get used to your excruciatingly high-minded dignity.
'Cause I don't think you're a cold woman, I think you're serious, and I am an American brat.cheers! trouble
Posted by Dinah on February 24, 2002, at 9:34:52
In reply to Re: comic relief or too much coffee man, posted by trouble on February 24, 2002, at 9:00:11
> > Good to hear from you trouble.
> >
> > I was afraid that what turned out to be a poorly worded post on my part might have offended you.
> >
> > Dinah
>
> Yeah, it bugged me, but after looking it over a couple times I realized I'm just going to have to get used to your excruciatingly high-minded dignity.
> 'Cause I don't think you're a cold woman, I think you're serious, and I am an American brat.
>
> cheers! troubleThank you for your tolerance, trouble. I do tend to be overly serious and honest about things in a way that disconcerts people and causes them to misunderstand at times. I appreciate your calling it high minded dignity and I'm glad you've decided to accept that in me. And I wouldn't call you a brat at all. I see you as disconcertingly charming, for want of a better expression.
If you will forgive a mother's story. Whenever my son gets a new teacher, I have to warn them that he hasn't a sassy bone in his body but that he is remarkably literal. So if a teacher asks him "What do you think you're doing?", he'll answer "I'm kicking my legs." They'll think he's being smart mouthed when in reality he is just answering their questions honestly.
Sorry to have "bugged" you for even a moment. And I'm glad everything worked out.
Thanks,
Dinah
Posted by trouble on February 24, 2002, at 9:38:17
In reply to Sorry, Trouble. :(, posted by Dinah on February 24, 2002, at 9:34:52
This is the end of the thread.
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