Posted by fallsfall on November 3, 2004, at 20:08:05
In reply to Re: CBT vs. PDT(will probably trigger, sorry) » fallsfall, posted by sunny10 on November 3, 2004, at 8:59:53
Sunny,
You have a difficult life. I wish I could snap my fingers and make it "all better", but I can't. I do, truly, believe that therapy can help you, though. The challenge is to find the right therapist.
There are some people who could be helped by just about any therapist. Their issues are such that many different approaches might work for them. I am not such a person, and it sounds like you aren't either.
Those of us who are "challenging" need to shop more carefully for a therapist - if it is at all possible, try to find someone who has 15 years experience (or at least 10). Therapists really do learn a lot from their patients - I (and you?) need a therapist who has already done a lot of learning and made a lot of their mistakes already.
I have mixed emotions about eclectic therapists (those are the ones who do a lot of different kinds of therapy - depending on what they think will help an individual client). On one hand, this would allow your therapist to change the approach as needed - either to find something that will help, or as your needs change. On the other hand, I worry that perhaps their expertise in any one type of therapy might be diluted by the fact that they haven't been focusing on that one type of therapy. I think that the decision to go with an eclectic vs. single-type therapist might well be influenced by how much you know (right now) about what you need.
I started with CBT. Nobody thought I was going to be a tough case. This was a logical place to start. My therapist was very competent, and I learned important things from her (like how to stay alive when I was suicidal, and how to be open and honest in therapy, and what emotions were). I did some DBT, as well (because I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder), and that helped add to my chest of skills. This therapist has just recently started branching into Interpersonal Therapy, but she is really quite focused on CBT.
I read a lot of Psychology books (from the University library in my town), so I have quite a bit of exposure to the different kinds of therapy. I like to read case studies, and see how the different kinds of therapists interact with their patients. When I would read Psychodyanmic case studies (or Psychoanalytic case studies, which in my mind are similar to Psychodynamic - except Psychodynamic therapy tends to be a little more focused on particular current issues, but it does go back into the childhood causes for feelings and behaviors - ??) I would feel comforted. Somehow I knew that was what I needed. I wasn't really aware just how much transference was going on with my CBT therapist (and I don't think she was aware of it either). As I interviewed different kinds of therapists (I was looking at therapies that weren't CBT), the transference factor became clearer. My understanding is that a CBT therapist would be more likely to discourage transference, and talking about and working through transference, whereas a Psychodynamic therapist would be interested in working with the transference.
I don't know what would have happened if I started with this Psychodynamic therapist instead of the CBT one. I really feel like I needed the skills that I learned from her to be able to deal with the issues that we are dealing with now.
This is a long-winded response that basically says that everyone is different. And that is one reason there are different kinds of therapists and different kinds of therapy. Psychodynamic might not be a good kind of therapy for you - it is good for me, but that doesn't mean that it will be good for you.
If you can have an honest discussion with your CBT therapist (do you have a current one? my memory is terrible...) about different types of therapy, s/he might be able to help direct you towards a type of therapy that can be most helpful to you. In most cases, a therapist will help you find a different therapist if their orientation isn't helping you. Alternatively, if you can find a very experienced eclectic therapist, you might be able to do a consultation with them and have them point you in the right direction (or you might decide to see them!).
Some people can pick a therapist (or a hair dresser, or a doctor, or a plumber) out of the yellow pages and get what they need. But for some of us finding the right professional can make all the difference.
It is really worth it to find the right therapist. I wish I had changed sooner than I did.
poster:fallsfall
thread:410838
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20041026/msgs/411313.html