Posted by fallsfall on October 23, 2005, at 10:43:10
In reply to Babble and therapy, posted by daisym on October 23, 2005, at 0:35:52
> I've been thinking and thinking about this. I think what I've come up with is that I use babble to help me survive therapy and I use therapy to help me survive my life.
At one point, my therapist changed what he was doing because he didn't want me to need Babble in order to survive therapy. But I still do...
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> It took me a long time to figure out what was happening to me between sessions. I think my first post here was about feeling emotions after sessions instead of during. I needed babble to make sense of the theraputic process. But I don't typically (though I do sometimes) use babble for my "issues" -- like whether I should stay or go in my marriage, etc. I like support around the issues though, don't get me wrong. More, I like sorting out my interactions with my therapist and all these needs and reactions to him I'm having.But this is precisely what my therapist doesn't want me to do. He wouldn't mind if I talked about my "issues" so much. He wants me to keep the transference and interaction with him private.
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> I guess I'd consider babble both soul soothing and courage building. If I can figure out how to write it down, I can figure out how to say it during a session. Sometimes I need a push toward saying it during sessions. Sometimes I need reassurance that it was OK that I DID say it during a session.Maybe I should try journalling more. This post has been helpful in two ways. First, just getting it all down in words is helpful for me. Second, getting feedback is also helpful. But I COULD get it all down and not share it and still get the first benefit. Except that it seems like a waste to write something if noone will read it. My first therapist would read all of my journalling - so the information remained private between us. My current therapist wants to *hear* it, and won't read my reams of journalling.
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> Does it dilute the transference? I guess it is impossible for me to figure that out since I see my therapist so much. If it does, I need it to. What I know happens is that I will talk about a subject I've written about and his questions and interpretations typically take us down a road I haven't gone yet.Right, so do they not want us to have gone down the other road at all? Are these other roads we are travelling useless or hurtful?
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> Someone wrote that their therapist told them to stop visiting sites that were upsetting. Mine has done the same thing. But by bringing him my fears about what I read, we are able to talk about what I think will happen to me. I do talk about "the board" in therapy -- he sometimes asks if I'm ever given a hard time here about the frequency of my sessions or my dependency, because I struggle with those things -- but he also asks if hearing from others normalizes my experiences for me. Especially about being in parts and pieces. And about therapy taking years and years for some of us.I am starting to think that Babble, for me, is more about a pressure valve that helps me to tolerate the emotions between sessions. Maybe I need to try to accept the emotions more and try to process them and get rid of them less. But I am in such a hurry. Why take 3 days to do something if you can do it in 1? The answer is because the quality of the processing is different? Thinking out loud here...
>But then again, he has benefitted directly from my participation here, having been alerted to a potentially dangerous situation. So I think he may have a different understanding about what we do for each other.
But this is exactly what my therapist is complaining about. He does say that he would listen to a spouse or best friend - but a friend from the internet??? And he doesn't find my overinvolvement with IRL friends helpful for me, either. And THIS is the issue that we are trying to talk about (how involved is it healthy for me to be in my friends' lives and problems, how much action is it healthy for me to take, how much responsibility is it healthy for me to feel?). But it seems like we keep plowing into this issue of his - so he isn't willing to consider that SOME involvement IS OK. Either that or he *IS* right, and I'm just trying to find an excuse (i.e. counter-transference) to prove him wrong so I can keep doing what I "want" to do.
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> Lastly I will say this: a good deal of my therapy has focused on allowing myself to feel needy, to reach out for help and to not keep so many secrets. If I felt I couldn't talk about what was going on behind that door, if I felt it needed to be completely private, it would be another secret I was keeping. I still don't do these things much in my "real" life -- but the freedom of being so honest here has been truly healing.I'm glad we can help you with that, Daisy.
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> I have great faith you will sort all this out between you.Me, too. Both he and I do want to figure this out, and we'll keep bashing away at it until we do.
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> (((Fallsfall)))Thanks, Daisy,
Falls.
poster:fallsfall
thread:570043
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051018/msgs/570873.html