Tell Me More...

The discussion topic is a postcard from the edge. Tell me more. The subject is psychotherapy. Tell me more. The featured article is about lessons learned by a late-term resident in a psychiatric hospital (Adventures Of Psychotherapy Resident), such as:

"Nobody likes an awkward silence. If a patient tells you something, and you are silent, then the patient will rush to fill the silence, probably with whatever they were holding back the first time they started talking. You won’t believe how well this works until you try it. Just stay silent long enough, and the other person will tell you everything."

Our session will be about how you – maybe therapist, patient, friend of patient, couple's counselor, student, or simply a curious participant -- react to the priceless revelations in this piece. If you don't laugh out loud, your dessert is on-the-house.

The humor arises out of a certain ironic detachment in those accounts, nothing mean-spirited, though the author does admit to often feeling cringeworthy, even a fraud, in his therapy sessions. He wonders whether he might be the worst person in the world to do psychotherapy –his real-world coping strategy is to not talk about or react to emotions and wait for them to go away.

To a patient worried about a cheating partner, for instance, his instinctual advice would be, “have you considered not worrying about it?” Or, to a different patient who’s sad because his friend is moving away, perhaps he really is sad because of his friend and not because of some transference involving the loss of the therapist. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

And so it goes as he addresses everything from cognitive behavioral therapy to psychoanalysis/psychodynamic therapy and is finally “getting good” with annoying supervisors, meandering patients, unreasonable requests, and silly bureaucracy. Meanwhile matters involving Actual Pathology remain scary, mysterious, and really hard to predict. He hopes that’s what the final year is for.

We’ll be sure to keep track of his progress even as we apply those lessons learned as a catalyst for our upcoming securus locus discussion. That’s interesting, tell me more.