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Latest issue:March 2010
Vol.21
Issue 2
Latest issue:
A selection of articles are freely available to aid your research, guide your practice or inform you about a broad range of therapy related subjects.
Search for articles by keyword or browse the archive.
Client column - Tricks of the trade |
| "I feel it is time for my therapist to let me in on the tricks of the trade. I rehearse what I am going to say over and over again" |
Client column - What are we doing? |
| "Often I leave the therapy room in tears. Last week I arrived in tears. I had had an emotional conversation with my lover on the hands-free as I drove to the appointment." |
Client column - The holiday season |
| "It is challenging to keep up the discipline and concentration needed for therapy" |
In the client's chair - Ringing the changes |
| "The turn of the year is about assessing past achievements and future challenges. At the end of November I said goodbye to my therapist. Do I feel a sense of loss? Not really." |
I’ve had a three-week break. My therapist has been away. Have I missed her? No, not really. It’s been a relief not to have to unpack all my emotional baggage for a bit
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I’ve had a three-week break. My therapist has been away. Have I missed her? No, not really. It’s been a relief not to have to unpack all my emotional baggage for a bit. I wonder sometimes, if you keep going over and over all the stuff that makes you unhappy, doesn’t that just keep you reliving it, keep you feeling crap? I don’t seem to get to the acceptance and forgiveness stage. I don’t know if that is her fault or mine. I have been trying.
I tell her that I want to leave therapy. She reminds me that I had warned her about my way of dealing with abandonment, ‘Don’t expect to find me where you left me when you come back.’ Yes, it does take me a while to re-engage with someone who has left me and before I was aware of this I could cut off from a person permanently. (She did break from the norm and give me a piece of advice on that one: re-engage with them in your head before you see them again.)
However, wanting to leave my therapist is not a knee jerk reaction to a short absence; I have been thinking about it for a couple of months. I don’t feel as though I am getting to where I want to be fast enough. I want something a bit more directed, rather than this woolly, meandering kind of therapy. I don’t get enough input from her. Yes, I feel supported and accepted. However, I still feel on my own, lost and wandering around in a mist. I want her to hand me a compass – and she refuses to do this. It feels as though she is just holding my hand as we both stumble around and she’s relying on me to find the way out.
A well-meaning friend has given me a book to read, aimed at people who have commitment problems. I’m not sure that I do, but I’m open-minded enough to accept I may not be seeing the blindingly obvious. I find that self-help books can be a bit like horoscopes: they are written in such wide, sweeping terms that almost anyone can see a bit of themselves in the theories and the case studies. The jury’s out on whether I have commitment problems, but while reading the book what I find myself thinking about is not my relationships with men, but my relationship with my therapist.
Do I have a commitment problem with her? Am I expecting too much from one person and looking for perfection? I have gone into therapy with a wish list of what I want to find in a therapist and what I want out of the therapeutic relationship. Of course, I have signed up for therapy with a real person with good and bad days, not the all-knowing guru of my fantasies.
I wonder whether the grass is greener and I could be getting more out of a different person or type of therapy. When I think about leaving I feel guilty about finishing the relationship. Am I impatient? If I stay longer and try harder, then maybe the relationship will be better. It is difficult to know when to call it a day.
She is reluctant to let me go after the next session. She thinks it’s bad to end therapy after a break. What I am doing is feeling cross at being abandoned, apparently. She says that she thinks there is a lot more work that can be done. If I do want to leave then I should give it another six weeks. She feels that it takes longer to process closure, whatever that means – she doesn’t explain.
I guess I’d like to go over what I think I’ve learnt, where I’ve moved to. I’d really like her to do that. I will ask, but I fear it’ll just be fired back at me to do the work. She does say that I can go after the next session and the door will always be open to come back. A parent can say that, but it doesn’t ring true for me when a therapist says it. I know she is just trying to make me feel supported. Coming back to her door means a professional relationship with its rules and regulations, not the emotional bond of a friendship or a parent.
It is very difficult to leave. I feel vulnerable, not knowing what is the right thing to do. I feel an incredible disloyalty and guilt at rejecting her. It’s hard to go against an expert who says it is in your best interests to stay. However my gut instinct is that this relationship has run its course.
I do not want to give up therapy for good. I am determined to try something new for the New Year: cognitive analytic therapy. It promises a more active, shared interaction, with diagrams and things written down. Ahh… lists, shopping lists, to-do lists, Christmas lists. But this time I will try not to arrive with a wish list of attributes for my therapist.
Some names have been changed to protect identities
