Psychotherapista Teuthida: Analytically cuddly Lovecraftian sith lord
squidious
Karma: 412
Active vs Passive Distraction
The Self: Momentary vs Lifetime
The Desired Response
Agreed, regarding CFAR stuff.
And Qiaochu, even if you haven’t experienced this yet, I believe you are or have gotten closer than most.
So glad you wrote this, and looking forward to where you take this thread of posts. There is a whole bunch of stuff here that doesn’t get touched upon enough for what we’re all trying to do, and I think writing about it needs to happen more.
Mapping Another’s Universe
In cases like this, it helps if the end condition is discussed early on in therapy. If this worry comes up, it becomes important to find out where this insecurity comes from. Many therapists will have an open door policy—if we decide your goals have been met and we terminate, you can at any time come back and decide to start therapy with me again. If termination is due to the therapist leaving, they can refer the client to someone new. In some cases (though this is easier in a clinic) the gap can be bridged by having a session dedicated to the old therapist introducing the client to the new therapist, and helping create that bond before detaching from the client.
Usually, therapist and client talk about goals early on in therapy. This depends a lot on what the therapist’s expertise is and what the client sees as being the major problem. A client could come in with PTSD and say their major goal is to not have flashbacks anymore, or with social anxiety and have the goal of being able to approach new people without having a panic attack. It may not necessarily mean the end of therapy (could continue with new goals or see someone new or just stop, depending on what the client wants).
50 Ways To Leave Your Therapist: Termination and why it’s important
The Four States: action, cognitive, emotional, relational
Translating CFAR to Therapy
When “I’m here” means nothing
New Relationship Energy as an Emotional Bias
Repersonalizing the High Status
The failure of “put yourself in their shoes” seems similar to the failure of “do to others as you’d have them do to you”. You have to be hyperaware of each way that the person you’re modeling is different from you, and be willing to use these details as tools that can be applied to other things you know about them. This is where I actually find the ideas of guess/ask/tell culture to be the most helpful. They honestly seem pretty useless when not combined with modeling, precisely because it turns into “this is the one I have picked and you just have to deal with it”.
I’m somewhat surprised at the notion of “just be trustworthy” being helpful for anyone, though maybe that’s because of an assumption that anyone who doesn’t already employ this tactic must have considered it and have solid reasons to not use it?
Our community does seem to have enough pull to Ravenclaw Together that CFAR workshops are a thing and everyone ends up moving the the Bay (or New York). Though that does seem like a pretty strong failure mode. And as Raemon mentioned below, there is the unconference in the works.
Also, if posts about how to change your thinking can sway the way so many of us conduct ourselves, posts about changing the ways we act and feel could surely make enough headway with a significant enough portion of the community.
Side note: your last few bits did shed light on why it may be important to emphasize Hufflepuff work ethic among Ravenclaws :P
This makes sense. Thanks for updating the end—the way these values are portrayed contributes a lot to how seriously they are or are not taken.
Emotional labor can go into the noticing and motivation of the work (ie “the host of the party is busy making food, so I will clean up this mess” or “this person does not like cleaning and I notice that their table is sticky, so I will wipe it down for them”). It’s easy for non-Hufflepuffs to ignore tasks like these or take them for granted unless they’re explicitly asked to do something.
I’m betting that this is what he plans on explaining in the next post, where this post is a precursor to explain why it’s difficult to convey.