Comment upon Talking to a Therapist

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Matt Valdespino is—along with his twin, Greg—one of my oldest and best friends. When I first met the two of them, I honestly could not tell them …

Talking to a Therapist

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I started reading this post and I found out his friend is a clinical psychologist or PsyD and immediately my mind started naysaying. 😆.

You can search around my blog and find my opinions about psychology and psychiatry, if you want. 

I did read to the end, though, and ultimately, despite all the names, despite whether people really think that science is getting anywhere towards a better mental health, I like where the interview ended up.

I tell my clients and patients all the time that they should be curious about their situation, and curious about the therapist that they’re going to go see.

However, while I do tend to agree that people should be a little more proactive in their therapy, and tell Therapists what they want and need, I think they should be more curious in this regard into just asking questions about how their therapist views mental health, what they see or understand as the cause of suffering, how they view the idea of “mental illness”, questions like that. As an analogy, I dont goto my heart surgeon and tell them I need an Aortic Stent. I go in telling them that I think something is up with my heart and ask them about how they view the situation. (That analogy only goes so far, though.)

I agree that most people come into mental health kind of passively. Which is also good, Because part of the reason why many people are coming Is because they I have no idea what’s really going on. This is fine as well.

And, sure, a client can come in and say “this is what I need”. I’m not really sure if Therapist is doing anything beneficial for the client if that’s not one of the first things they find out from a client anyways.

Being Generally Educated can be a Problem in itself as to the question of help.

I think one of the problems about being a generally educated client, is that they feel that they can apply their advance grade education to their mental health as well, diagnose themselves, come in and tell her therapist exactly what they need from them.

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Ok.

This indeed can be all good and well, if for no other reason than even Therapists need to make money, and so if They can provide a simple service as just for filling an order from a client, then so be it. Who knows, something else beneficial could happen that the client never thought of. The filling of the mental health order could be evidence of the mental health issue that the client is coming in for, and hasn’t realized it yet.

The client who comes in with that attitude might have missed the significance of the reason why they would feel that they have to come to therapy already. Which is to say, yes, that probably most people that come to therapy will be just mental health’s bread and butter, but the ones who actually have issues that need true tending (which is probably everyone) those are the reasons why we become therapists in the first place.

Yes, we feel a call to help people. The true question for therapy could be just exaclty what this help is.

Thanks Lotz!!xxx