Posted by Daisym on November 25, 2007, at 23:47:02
I have an interesting situation. A friend who knows I've been in therapy for awhile asked me what I thought about her therapy and her therapist. Talk about delicate! That is kind of like someone asking you what you think of her husband when she is upset with him -- you never know which way to go! Instead of answering directly, I asked lots of questions.
It seems she is somewhat unhappy about the "strict" boundaries her therapist has. But to me, the way she described things, they are actually pretty typical boundaries of a therapist. She wants to be able to email and her therapist doesn't offer that. (Neither does mine.) Her therapist doesn't run over session times and has an answering service who will page her if there is an emergency. My friend talked about other people who have more "access" to their therapist or get what feels like more individualized attention.
She also asked me what I thought the perfect amount of sessions per week or month were. I thought about some of the threads here and kind of hedged. I think session frequency depends on so many things - including the client's ability to tolerate both the depth of frequent sessions or the length of time in-between them. Money comes into it too, as well as jobs and family and other time commitments. There just is no "one-size-fits-all" in therapy, is there? This was a particularly hard question for me because I see my therapist 4x a week - but I often feel guilty about that - mostly like I'm indulging myself somehow. She is currently going 1x a week but would like to go 3x over two weeks. I told her the standard Babble answer - "talk to your therapist about this. See what she says."
Overall, my friend said she is pretty happy with her therapy. She went in over a bad break up and feels like she has learned a lot about herself. I told her that this seemed the most important thing and that comparing her therapy to other people's might be making her unhappy when she didn't need to be. But I admitted my bias of not bailing on an existing therapy unless it was really not working or detrimental in some way. I think a lot of work gets done in "fighting to relationship" as Dinah would say.
I guess it just made me think that we can't really compare therapy or therapists very well. Each person has to find what works for them.
I wonder if you would have answered differently?
poster:Daisym
thread:797085
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20071120/msgs/797085.html