Seeking Therapy Stories

[rachelmanija]

For my own benefit, I am looking for stories of two types of therapy moments:

1. Things a therapist did right.

2. Things a therapist did wrong.

In both cases, I'm looking for things that weren't obvious.

For "wrong things," I'm not thinking of clearly, extremely terrible things that I would never do in a million years, like having sex with a client, telling a client their abuse was their own fault, telling a client not to be gay, etc. I'm looking for mistakes that were more subtle than that - things a well-meaning but inexperienced therapist might do. For example, it was not beneficial to me (as a client) to let me sit there and recount lengthy abuse stories, and then have the therapist immediately start delving deeper into the abuse. But that's not an obvious mistake on the level of "It was all your fault it happened."

For right things, also, I'm looking for moments that went beyond the obvious "She was very empathetic," "He told me it wasn't my fault," or "She helped me see the connections between my childhood and my adult relationships." I am particularly interested in any times in which a therapist managed to do a good job with identity issues (gender, culture, etc), whether or not the therapist had the same identity as the client.

I realize that everyone is different, and what's right for one person may be wrong for another. I'm not looking for a rule book, but rather for inspiration and food for thought.

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Comments

[ambyr]

On a purely mechanical level, my last therapist (who did not have a receptionist to handle this sort of thing for him) would leave the bill set out on the side table for me to pick up when I entered the room. He never mentioned it was there or touched it in my presence. I found this weird and awkward--it felt like he was trying to minimize the role of money in our relationship. But, well, money is an important part of the therapist/client relationship. He's not my friend. He's someone I'm paying for services. It would have been much less awkward to me if he'd just started or ended the session by saying "By the way, here is your bill for last month" and handing it to me.

I dunno. Maybe other people liked it.

He was also reluctant to explicitly say "Our time is going to be up soon" or anything like that as we neared the end of the session. For the first several sessions, I ran things straight through the hour, so I was leaving just as his next patient arrived. Talking to other friends with therapists made me realize that the sessions were probably meant to be only fifty minutes long, so I asked him if that was the case. He said it was. I asked him why he hadn't told me I was running over, and he said he thought he had been sending cues that we needed to start wrapping things up. When...part of why I was there was because my reading of social cues is really, really bad.

It wasn't awful, because we got to talk about what those cues were and I got some new things to add to my lexicon of what other people's body language means, but it was awkward. In both cases, I think he thought he was being delicate; I felt like he was being deceptive. I really treasure bluntness. It would have made the space feel safer to me.