An antidote to the prevailing moral masochism of the psychotherapy professions:
"Several months after our final sessions, I reread the story of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. The parable, well known, concerns a man set upon by thieves and left for dead:
2/ '[The Samaritan] bound up his wounds... and set him on his own beast & brought him to an inn & took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two coins and gave then to the innkeeper and said unto him, "Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more,
3/ when I come again, I will repay thee."'
'Take care of him," says the Samaritan. He delegates the caretaking of the victim to another! The story of the Good Samaritan is not, as I had vaguely recalled, one of selfless endless availability 'like the 24-hour store.' The biblical
4/ passage suggests the ethical possibility, even the ethical necessity of doing a finite amount, engaging others to help, and then moving on... [It] points to a balance between concern for self and a concern for others—a lesson for all times."
-Deborah Luepnitz
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1/ Therapy “outcome” is not a standardized scale a researcher, who's never met the patient, chooses in advance & superimposes on therapy process
Real outcome is a shared understanding of desired personal change that emerges organically from the therapy work—unique to each person
2/ Most therapy outcome researchers are not, in fact studying “outcome” in ways meaningful to patients or therapists. They’re making assumptions about what people they don't know want from psychotherapy, and the assumptions often have little to do with what patients actually want
3/ Then they distort the entire therapy process to orient it around their arbitrarily-imposed “outcomes”
Skilled therapists actually orient therapy around a shared understanding—developed with each individual patient—about 1) what is going on psychologically that's giving rise
1/ Rule of thumb, part 1
Most therapy patients will begin to feel somewhat better within first weeks. Expect 6-12 months to make headway with underlying psychological causes
part 2
Add 6 additional mos. for every prior treatment with manualized, "evidence-based" therapy
more⬇️
2/ what they have to unlearn:
-that there’s a quick fix
-that therapist has the answers / can tell them what to do
-that there's a bypass around the honest hard work of self-reflection and self-understanding
-that therapy isn't a procedure done to them, it’s a relationship &
3/ a collaboration
-that unpleasant thoughts & feelings can be disregarded or explained away
-that their difficulties are not encapsulated “illnesses” to address in isolation… they’re woven into the fabric of their lives & their relationships
1/ I’m not sure, but leaning toward the view that all the research showing that therapeutic alliance predicts therapy outcome may be leading us astray. Here me out
Just about any well-intentioned therapist can develop a decent working alliance with someone at the healthier end
2/ of the spectrum of personality functioning (reasonably securely attached, good object relations, mature defenses, no serious personality pathology)
But it’s incredibly difficult to develop a working alliance with people with more severe character pathology (impaired capacity
3/ for attachment, impoverished or malevolent object relations, more primitive defenses, etc)
What if “therapeutic alliance” is really a proxy for personality health vs. personality disturbance?
If so, “therapeutic alliance” research may tell us only that people with healthier
1/ I made a list a while ago, about therapy🚩 that should make you think long & hard about whether you’re seeing right therapist
Starting another, please add
-agrees with nearly everything you say
-diagnoses people in your life
-gives you advice
-mawkish displays of “empathy"
2/ -defaults to calming/soothing in response to everything
-acts like cheerleader/coach
-wants to play role of hero or savior
-wants to plays role of spiritual or religious guide
-validates & affirms whatever you say
-speaks in jargon or “therapy speak” instead of plain English
3/ -jumps in with worksheets or “exercises” instead of listening
-joins you in blaming other people in your life
-seeks to indoctrinate you in politics/ideology
-talks about themselves/discusses their own life
-does most of the talking
-promises a specific result or outcome
1/ Absolutely none of these conclusions are justified
1️⃣ Patients who exercised showed some minimal improvement—but not enough to matter
2️⃣ The patients were not severely depressed to begin with
3️⃣ We already know that antidepressants & brief therapy (8-12 sessions, which is
1/ “Therapists need to be oriented toward... patient’s degree of felt power to influence events.
Many people come to treatment feeling that things just ‘happen to’ them. The absence of a sense of agency is inferable when the therapist has asked a question such as, ‘Were you
2/ feeling sexual desire when you agreed to give oral sex to that guy?’ and meets a blank stare or a response like, ‘I don’t know. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.’ Patients who give such answers are often the same ones who wait passively for the therapist to tell
3/ them what to do, a stance that can flummox clinicians who know [therapy] is not a set of instructions but do not easily find their own sense of agency in the face of this non-participation.
Psychodynamic therapists want clients to feel increasing power to influence their