I started afresh with a new therapist last week. I have been referred to a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist (CBT) and have an initial 6 sessions.
The first session didn’t go well. I felt like the therapist was simply trying to boil down what he considered to be my problems into something that he could define, describe, measure and cure. I will concede that this process and the therapist’s insistence that I needed to ‘buy in because it works’ made me check out mentally a little bit. As you may know if you have read earlier blogs, I have a problem with public transport. Stripped down, actually the problem isn’t the public transport but the people on it. The therapist was adamant that exposure was the way forward. He also wanted me to write down what was going on for me at the height of my anxiety. I told him that in the setting of a quiet and calm therapy room, I could see the merit and think rationally about it. However in the grip of anxiety and panic I couldn’t imagine reaching for the paper to write it down.
I have worked on graded exposure over the last 18 months and whilst I have pushed myself beyond what I though I could do, I didn’t truly feel like I’d made significant progress (particularly here the public transport – other areas of my anxious life have improved considerably).
I have also been through enough different treatments and therapies over the years where I feel like I know what I need. And so this clashed head on with what the therapist was saying to me.
I left the first appointment thinking ‘screw this guy’ and ‘I can’t work with him’ and ‘I’ll ask the service to assign me a different therapist’. A couple of things that had resonated with me from that session though. The first had been when the therapist suggested, gently, that I might have been being obstructive almost as a safety behaviour. As much as I didn’t like hearing that, it is true that therapy is a two-way street and I have found that anything less than bringing your full self to proceedings and being ready to challenge yourself means you won’t get what you want to achieve from therapy. OK fair point. Keep an open mind, Greg. The second thing he emphasised was that he appreciated honesty and if I felt something wasn’t right or working for me, I was to talk to him about it.
As this Thursday’s appointment approached I wasn’t feeling great about going back. I realised that I was going in without a plan or any suggestions to change. In that moment I resolved to prepare to be honest and give the therapist a chance to hear me and reassess.
Honesty felt like a difficult one in this context. I thought back to other times I felt like I wasn’t happy with how things were going in therapy and found a theme. I hadn’t said anything because I was worried about hurting the therapist’s feelings. I felt like they would take my feedback to heart and feel professionally wounded. Clearly, this is a projection of my own feelings. It also talks to a lack of assertiveness – this is not self-criticism really, it’s an observation and something I am owning and working on 🙂
So what did I have to be honest about? What did I want to say? I went back and told him that I had been frustrated and that I felt like I hadn’t been heard in that first session. I told him that the exposure hadn’t changed the thought processes and I wanted to work on the those. I let it out. I wasn’t personal and I wasn’t emotional. I just stated what I needed and how I saw us working together.
The therapist, to his great credit, listened to me and thanked me for my honesty and told me he respected it. We agreed that our focus would shift towards the cognitive side of work and started on that immediately.
I left the therapy appointment much happier than I had the previous week. I felt like I was starting something significant. I felt inspired to do work outside of the sessions to try and maximise what I can achieve in these time limited sessions.
It remains to be seen how this works for me. The journey continues…
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