This sounds like good advice. Particular the need to click with the right helper - if you don’t feel like they are right for you, try someone else.
Also curious (ozy) if you’ve tried gestalt therapy. I am training in it currently and it’s very much about the relationship of therapist and client in the present, and with a strong use of what the body is ‘saying’ as a type of intel.
My experience with generic therapy has been that its effectiveness-per-therapist is follows an initially-rising-but-then-eventually-falling curve, and as such that there's a lot of value to be gained in periodically switching therapists. (On the order of once per half-year to year for me, although I imagine that, even among people with similarly-shaped therapist-effectiveness-curves to mine, that time constant is going to be pretty variable.)
Specifically: when I'm first getting to know a therapist, I don't get much effect from the therapy, because the therapist doesn't yet have enough idea of how I work to offer any particularly useful insights. Then eventually, once we've gotten to know one another sufficiently, the therapist tends to start being able to offer well-targeted advice and/or point my blind spots out to me, which are the main two things I tend to be pursuing therapy for. But *then*, after another while has passed, the therapist tends to... run out of novel ideas? They start repeating the same couple suggestions over and over again for every new problem I mention, become sufficiently familiar with me that they stop being able to point out new blind spots in how I think, et cetera. And at that point the therapist ends up replaceable with a rock with "have you tried doing mindfulness meditation about this?" or "have you tried noticing you're not acting in ways which lead effectively to the accomplishment of your goals?" or suchlike written on it.
(Or, well, with that rock plus a friend who I can confide in about my issues. Because there *is* some value in talking about things even if the person-I'm-talking-to won't have useful advice about said things, sometimes.)
So, once the effectiveness of a given therapist is diminished, it tends to be beneficial for me to switch to a new one. This is, I gather, not the conventional model of how therapeutic relationships work? But it's the one that I've found to best match my experiences with generic therapy, so I figure it's worth mentioning here just in case there exist others who resemble me in this regard.
I feel like I'm in a similar boat, except a lot of the time I don't get to the 'well-targeted advice' stage. I've seen about six therapists and with all of them the experience goes something like: they ask me about my problems, I tell them, they ask me why I'm having these problems, I say I don't know but I'd like them to help me find out. Next session, they ask me about my problems. Repeat until I feel like I have successfully Told Them My Problems, and I get more and more dissatisfied because they just keep asking me what my problems are instead of, you know, trying to help me solve them.
This sounds like good advice. Particular the need to click with the right helper - if you don’t feel like they are right for you, try someone else.
Also curious (ozy) if you’ve tried gestalt therapy. I am training in it currently and it’s very much about the relationship of therapist and client in the present, and with a strong use of what the body is ‘saying’ as a type of intel.
My experience with generic therapy has been that its effectiveness-per-therapist is follows an initially-rising-but-then-eventually-falling curve, and as such that there's a lot of value to be gained in periodically switching therapists. (On the order of once per half-year to year for me, although I imagine that, even among people with similarly-shaped therapist-effectiveness-curves to mine, that time constant is going to be pretty variable.)
Specifically: when I'm first getting to know a therapist, I don't get much effect from the therapy, because the therapist doesn't yet have enough idea of how I work to offer any particularly useful insights. Then eventually, once we've gotten to know one another sufficiently, the therapist tends to start being able to offer well-targeted advice and/or point my blind spots out to me, which are the main two things I tend to be pursuing therapy for. But *then*, after another while has passed, the therapist tends to... run out of novel ideas? They start repeating the same couple suggestions over and over again for every new problem I mention, become sufficiently familiar with me that they stop being able to point out new blind spots in how I think, et cetera. And at that point the therapist ends up replaceable with a rock with "have you tried doing mindfulness meditation about this?" or "have you tried noticing you're not acting in ways which lead effectively to the accomplishment of your goals?" or suchlike written on it.
(Or, well, with that rock plus a friend who I can confide in about my issues. Because there *is* some value in talking about things even if the person-I'm-talking-to won't have useful advice about said things, sometimes.)
So, once the effectiveness of a given therapist is diminished, it tends to be beneficial for me to switch to a new one. This is, I gather, not the conventional model of how therapeutic relationships work? But it's the one that I've found to best match my experiences with generic therapy, so I figure it's worth mentioning here just in case there exist others who resemble me in this regard.
In my limited experience with therapy, I found the same effectiveness curve but for different reasons.
After I've known my therapist for a while, I start caring what they think, and become too embarrassed to tell them about my problems!
I feel like I'm in a similar boat, except a lot of the time I don't get to the 'well-targeted advice' stage. I've seen about six therapists and with all of them the experience goes something like: they ask me about my problems, I tell them, they ask me why I'm having these problems, I say I don't know but I'd like them to help me find out. Next session, they ask me about my problems. Repeat until I feel like I have successfully Told Them My Problems, and I get more and more dissatisfied because they just keep asking me what my problems are instead of, you know, trying to help me solve them.
Isn’t most therapy a mix of the two? At least that’s what all my therapy for OCD has been.