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Originally Posted by dead_battery
my therapist doesn't even speak when i enter the room, i have to start. he will occasionally interrupt or ask me to clarify a comment, but in such a way that it makes a certain point or insight obvious. he manages to make the insights and connection happen by saying very little. it's all already in the unconscious waiting to come out.
they way he works is extremely clever. it's hard to describe how he does it, but he can make you suddenly see a connection you didn't see before simply by saying something like "that happened after x happened" or "and you said this earlier". it is what i expected it to be like after doing my research beforehand. he has a tendency to force me to pin down exact dates about events in the past that i talk about, which was unexpected. he wouldn't let me get away with saying that "event x happened when i was around 15 or 16", he will push me until i get the year and my age right, until i link it to other events i keep bringing up.
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That's interesting. My clinical coursework was limited (research nerd, right here), but I had a *bit.* And of course I sell out a small theatre with the amount of therapists I've seen... and one thing I've noticed, pretty much across the board, is that the event intakes precedence over the time. A LOT of therapists are fine with general ideas of the timing of things (8-10 years ago, "when I was five or six," "in my late teens," "when I was little"). They usually want to know, roughly, what your age was to frame within a larger context for their initial "assessment" and for their case notes.
It's weird. But American therapists are also very wary about asking for specifics about things that happened a long time ago. Your brain forgets and rearranges and reinterprets events all the time, and nobody wants to be blamed for encouraging or eliciting false memories. That's why they tend to take your word for it and move on with a general idea of the incident in question.
Damn, now I wanna read about psychoanalytical theory, but I have this dumb job to do at this stupid newspaper. Fuck my life
