Short cut.

Back in the library at dinner time. VNV Nation on my headphones.

Short cut. 

Condense everything to a very short, easy to understand paragraph.

Go!

I believe that the therapist understood 'therapy' as  a process of separation; child strategies from adult knowledge. Child reality, written in the mind in response to less than perfect parents. In the therapist's understanding these feelings and beliefs are the problem. They created the filter through which the world appears - distorted. Remedy, again I stress that this is simply a model, comes through a dialogue that leads to understanding the filter. New understanding is the basis for separating the self from old beliefs to ways to see and feel.  Method? The nurturing parent in the therapist meets the Child in the client, and the Child feels understood and secure in that relationship. The security enables to therapist and client to speak Adult to Adult.

And?

And I don't agree.

I don't disagree either, but for goodness sake, drop the Child stuff! Therapy is a process of encountering deep feelings and memories in a compassionate way, and this alters the meanings, altering reality. But reality is constructed in the present via and through memory. Memory and experiences change, all the time! How we talk together really makes the difference. As a therapist I became part of your memory about memory. Your meanings are key, your words, your theories - not mine. But I will be aiming to alter catastrophic overwhelm - into empowerment - through contact with the truth of the emotions, feelings and thoughts, externalising them, putting you in a position of power and asking what the hurt feelings need. Alongside this, through questions to highlight agency and energy, comes a process of reconstructing one's identity in the light of this new knowledge. 

It might sound as if the therapist and I believe the same thing, and we do, except! His insistence on development ( childhood experiences) is limiting . But the absence of metaphors...is a massive error. Metaphors both describe and shape experience, they mediate change. The therapist certainly didn't pay any heed to my metaphors. And though I could point to the probably that this was a neurodivergence, as Wittgenstein would point out, therapy includes language games. And as all the other postmodern therapists would tell you, we don't need to understand your problem better than you! We simply need to use your language so that you can understand yourself!

I need another paragraph!

I believe that problems are something we have in our lives, they don't all come from the past, or from how we see things. They are wherever the client says that they are. We are hardwired to respond to threat. Without threat, there is a feeling of possibility and agency and the freedom to seek challenge (threat's fun sized sibling). 

Diagnosis is about pattern matching symptoms with a description of a disorder. 

Response is a recognition of emotion as what living things do! 

The therapist believed in disorder, I believe in response. So he saw Eros as disorder, whilst for me it was my response.

To him.

I spent two years speaking with someone apparently from a time of inquisition and witch burning. I encountered someone steeped in semi shamanic belief practices; 'Object relations', Transactional analysis and the psychodynamic mythos. Meanwhile, the person underneath all this i.e. the therapist, is a  rational, curious, intelligent person- he shone through the clouds of his protective fantasies like the sun when they cleared for an instant! Only to be dimmed again, with foolishness. In retrospect, it was as if he is a cult member! It is horrible to recognise that in his chosen mythos I was a daughter attempting to seduce her father (call me Salome!)  hence his outrage. 

Or perhaps he positioned me as possessed?

 Or more likely he thinks that I am ignorant. 

In truth we are both adults who told each other tales - new and intricately wrought - bringing delight and laughter. 

OK, fly in ointment after that sunny memory! I'm not forgetting the Kohuts, I will never forget or forgive the Kohuts! The only way out of all of this should have been taken! Honesty alone would have cured it. The absence of personal truth, the therapist's denial of simple facts resonated with the dislocation I'd suffered through gaslighting.

And I know it is difficult, this whole Eros in therapy thing, I do know, I really do! I know exactly how complicated therapy is, but I don't see any benefit in believing that I'm doing therapy when it's confluence. Confluence is staying small, staying safe, it happens when dialogue veers away from contact with the edge of new knowledge...

So?

So... therapy comes with theoretical underpinnings - and you wont see them. Not unless you take a deep dive. They are not directly visible, but they certainly warp reality!!! 

Solution?

My, university application got me an unconditional place - and I have accepted. I hope this will get me access to the professional bodies that gatekeep therapists, so I can find out exactly how complaints are managed. I want to know what causes the complaints...

Obviously! I have serious concerns about therapy itself - the mythos and habitus. I have serious concerns about the complaints process.

I don't have serious concerns about therapists though, we are not our theories. We were judged by our tutors (fellow therapists) on our ability to put someone else at ease, and to hear another person's thoughts as clearly as we hear our own. And certainly the therapist I saw could do that, he is a good and kind person (wrong, and twisted, defensive, stonewalling and critical, but he means well) nevertheless I was re-traumatized - so as people, yay! Good. Theory though...Or am I wrong? Are we co good?

My son says I should create a YouTube channel for this, perhaps he's right..is anyone else doing insider based, criticisms of therapy?