My Life In Therapy - New York Times Article
In reading the above article, which I found through the Shrink Rap Post entitled My Life In Therapy, a few things struck me that I did NOT comment on at the Shrink Rap blog, mainly because I commented at the Shrink Rap blog before I had read the long, 8 page article.
The thing that stuck out the most in the article to me is illustrated by the following quote from it:
"I believed in the surpassing value of insight and the curative potential
of treatment — and that may have been the problem to begin with. I
failed to grasp that there was no magic to be had, that a therapist’s
insights weren't worth anything unless you made them your own and that
nothing that had happened to me already could be undone, no matter how
many times I went over it."
And then here:
Somewhere out there, sitting in a smaller or larger office on Central
Park West or the Upper East Side, tucked behind a waiting area furnished
with a suitably arty poster or two, a couple of chairs and old copies
of The New Yorker
and National Geographic Traveler, was a practitioner who would not only
understand my lifelong sorrow and anger in an empathic (but not unduly
soppy) fashion but also be able to relieve me of them. Just as some
people believe in the idea of soul mates, I held fast to the conviction
that my perfect therapeutic match was out there. If only I looked hard
enough I would find this person, and then the demons that haunted me —
my love/hate relationship with my difficult mother (who has been dead
now for four years), my self-torturing and intransigently avoidant
attitude toward my work, my abiding sense of aloneness and seeming
inability to sustain a romantic relationship and, above all, my lapses
into severe depression — would become, with my therapist’s help, easier
to manage.
It FEELS to me like she was waiting for some kind of "magic" to happen, at some point, for some kind of change to happen, external to herself, although she points out in the first quote that she believed in the value of insight, but that then she may have FAILED to have internalize any of the insights gained from the therapists.
This is important, because if you go to therapy and discover insights, and don't make any of them your own, then what good IS therapy, anyway? It's not going to change a THING, really. Now, if you find that not all of the insights there are useful, then don't make use of the ones you don't want, but take what IS useful and beneficial, and internalize THOSE!
Me, I am guilty myself of not taking every therapeutic opportunity in and from therapy to change. I am human, and I can admit that. In fact, in the therapy appointment I had near the end of July recently, that I thought would be my last one for awhile, I pointed this out to him, and he and I both noted that I was "focusing on the negative", and that I would be better off remembering all those times that I HAD taken the opportunity to grow, and change, and learn.
I think, though, on a personal level, perhaps apart from therapy, since he'll perhaps "insist" that I'm focusing on the negative should I bring it up again that I've missed perhaps too many opportunities for change, that it is beneficial to reflect sometimes on why it might be so that I've let some of these opportunities slip through my fingers, and either do some writing on the subject, or recommit to taking hold of these opportunities.
Such reflection on just this subject is something I did this past February, and write I did on the subject, identifying some areas I could improve in, and recommitting to certain types of therapeutic "homework" and other things that I could do to help make the most of therapy.
If I left it completely up to what my therapist would have to say on the subject, ie, "you are focusing on what you HAVEN'T done", when mentioning all the opportunities for change that I haven't taken, then I would have missed out on what I learned about myself in February and what I gained from that writing, and from the recommitment to certain things.
I believe I then went to my next therapy appointment and told him I had recommitted to certain things, like writing in the efficacy journal (efficacy is a huge issue for me, and the lack of a sense of it thereof), and it has fallen off some as the year has progressed, but I recommit here again to it.
I believe in writing this post that I've come up with some good material to talk about at my next therapy session, although it should only take a few minutes, as I have much bigger fish to fry. I am just rather curious as to what he'll think about how I've gained from further examination of something that he saw as focusing too much on the negative, don't you?
I am tickled with how I tied what I gleaned from the New York Times article, in with my own personal experiences, as well.
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