Questions
and Answers
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Questions |
do therapist end services with hints or do they give you a clear ending to therapy? my husband and i are in therapy together and our therapist says i can call anytime but in my husbands last session he told him that he thinks i should see someone else because it was causing conflict in my husbands therapy. i think this [expletive deleted] because he said he could do this when i asked him and i asked him please dont let me talk if you cant because it would be very hard for me to do this. i was sexually abused and i dont like to talk about it. he knows this and now i feel like ive been used again.
Sometimes, when a husband and wife are being seen in marriage counseling, the counselor may occasionally arrange to see one or both individuals in individual sessions. Usually, to avoid clinical disaster, these individual sessions are conducted under the rule that there will be no secrets, and that anything spoken in the individual sessions must be brought into the joint counseling. If either person has the sort of psychological problems that would warrant individual psychotherapy under strictly confidential conditions, the individual(s) should be referred to a separate psychotherapist, someone who has no connection to the marriage counseling. Now, from what you say, it’s difficult to determine just what exactly is going on with you, your husband, and the “therapist.” Are you in marriage counseling “together” with your husband, and are you both seeing the same psychotherapist for individual sessions as well? Or are you simply two individuals who happen to be seeing the same psychotherapist for individual psychotherapy? Or perhaps your husband is the one in psychotherapy, and his psychotherapist has allowed you to come into one of your husband’s sessions once in a while to supplement your husband’s psychotherapy? Without knowing the actual circumstances here, it’s impossible to comment on why the “therapist” told your husband, instead of telling you directly, that you need to see “someone else.” All of the confusion within your question, however, does give some insight into your own psychological symptoms. Saying essentially that “I don’t understand what’s happening, and I don’t like it, and I’m angry about it” is the hallmark of being a victim. After all, if you knew what the problem was and were capable of doing something about it, you wouldn’t be feeling victimized. And you wouldn’t need psychotherapy. And so, in your case, your not being able to see things clearly is a symptom of your not talking about your inner experiences. Your feelings about the sexual abuse are “leaking out” through your behavior in everything you do whether you like it or not. Therefore, the very fact that you are so confused about your “therapy” tells you quite clearly that you might benefit from real psychotherapy with someone who can treat you with directness and honesty.
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Huh?
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