The recent death of Alice Miller, an influential European psychoanalyst, revives a question that has nagged people for decades, whether or not they’ve been in therapy: To what extent are our parents responsible for our own psychological problems?
Dr. Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, spotlighted the effects of childhood abuse and trauma on people’s emotional development. The headline version of her work is this: Blame your parents for your psychological problems. It’s a pretty simple, powerful idea, and one that has taken root as a stereotype of what happens in psychotherapy: An adult patient and his or her therapist sit around talking about how the patient’s parents are at fault for the psychological problems the patient is facing.
But this isn’t true. The lesson that I and most other psychotherapists have drawn from Dr. Miller and others is that adults’ psychological problems can indeed be rooted in childhood trauma. If a patient comes in wanting to address self-defeating behaviors, one step of the therapy process is to understand where and how these behavior patterns developed. Some of that may be traced to a patient’s parents or to other circumstances of one’s early life. But exploring how something started isn’t the same as blaming. And what gets explored in psychotherapy isn’t just what other people did, but also how the patient reacted to that, understood it at the time, and interprets it now. In other words, other people’s actions are only one part of the puzzle.
Furthermore, re-examining long-ago events isn’t the point of psychotherapy; it’s just a step. The ultimate goal, if you’re in therapy, is to change your life now. Reflecting on how you understand and interpret your past can help you better see why you’re engaging in counterproductive behavior in the present. Do you find yourself fighting with your coworkers or bosses over and over again? Do you keep having the same unsatisfying and destructive relationships with romantic partners? If so, that’s not your parents’ fault. What it may be instead is your treating people today as if you were the same person you were when you were a child. The responsibility is on you to take your awareness of what drives your behavior and use that to change.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Therapy and the Internet
Here’s one more arena in which Google has changed our lives: the process of psychotherapy.
How the internet can complicate the patient-therapist relationship is the subject of an interesting story by Dana Scarton that ran in The Washington Post this week. Scarton writes about the growing amount of information that patients can find about their therapist online -- and that therapists can find about their patients.
Googling your patient or therapist, or checking out the other’s Facebook page, if he/she has one, raises all sorts of issues relevant to the therapeutic relationship. The most significant, I think, is that the internet enables both the patient and therapist to learn all sorts of things about each other’s lives that they haven’t learned directly from the other.
I think it’s a bad idea for therapists to google their clients, and I don’t do it myself. I think it’s essential that my understanding of my clients be based on what they disclose during a therapy session. What patients tell me -- or don’t tell me -- about their lives, when they tell me, and how they tell me are all, in and of themselves, important things for us to talk about while helping them work out their problems. Researching a patient’s life online would put me in some awkward situations: If I don’t tell the patient what I’ve done, I end up with information about him or her that I know but can’t talk about. And if I do tell the patient what I’ve done, the patient may interpret my outside research as a sign that I don’t believe what he or she is telling me in person. Either way, my research would destroy the trust and honesty that are necessary for a productive therapist-client relationship.
I know that many people seeking therapy start by researching therapists online (I have my own website, after all). I also know that searching online for one’s friends and acquaintances is an inevitable part of modern-day life, and it’s a hard habit to break. If you’re a person googling your therapist while in treatment, I would suggest that you bring this up with your therapist. Searching online in this context is usually a reflection of a patient’s curiosity about the therapist and the therapist’s life. These questions and feelings can be extremely helpful when discussed in the course of therapy. What does a patient want to know about the therapist that he isn’t learning in therapy? Why does he want to know this? How does he think this knowledge will help him? Discussing these questions in therapy, and trying to answer them, can often give patients insight into their own problems and their relationships with people in their lives other than the therapist.
As a psychologist with a private practice, I think it’s important that I have a presence online; the challenge for me is to not be too online. But aside from my website and initial emails with potential clients, I try to keep my professional communications with clients on the phone or in person.
How the internet can complicate the patient-therapist relationship is the subject of an interesting story by Dana Scarton that ran in The Washington Post this week. Scarton writes about the growing amount of information that patients can find about their therapist online -- and that therapists can find about their patients.
Googling your patient or therapist, or checking out the other’s Facebook page, if he/she has one, raises all sorts of issues relevant to the therapeutic relationship. The most significant, I think, is that the internet enables both the patient and therapist to learn all sorts of things about each other’s lives that they haven’t learned directly from the other.
I think it’s a bad idea for therapists to google their clients, and I don’t do it myself. I think it’s essential that my understanding of my clients be based on what they disclose during a therapy session. What patients tell me -- or don’t tell me -- about their lives, when they tell me, and how they tell me are all, in and of themselves, important things for us to talk about while helping them work out their problems. Researching a patient’s life online would put me in some awkward situations: If I don’t tell the patient what I’ve done, I end up with information about him or her that I know but can’t talk about. And if I do tell the patient what I’ve done, the patient may interpret my outside research as a sign that I don’t believe what he or she is telling me in person. Either way, my research would destroy the trust and honesty that are necessary for a productive therapist-client relationship.
I know that many people seeking therapy start by researching therapists online (I have my own website, after all). I also know that searching online for one’s friends and acquaintances is an inevitable part of modern-day life, and it’s a hard habit to break. If you’re a person googling your therapist while in treatment, I would suggest that you bring this up with your therapist. Searching online in this context is usually a reflection of a patient’s curiosity about the therapist and the therapist’s life. These questions and feelings can be extremely helpful when discussed in the course of therapy. What does a patient want to know about the therapist that he isn’t learning in therapy? Why does he want to know this? How does he think this knowledge will help him? Discussing these questions in therapy, and trying to answer them, can often give patients insight into their own problems and their relationships with people in their lives other than the therapist.
As a psychologist with a private practice, I think it’s important that I have a presence online; the challenge for me is to not be too online. But aside from my website and initial emails with potential clients, I try to keep my professional communications with clients on the phone or in person.
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