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Good therapy or bad therapy

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Aspie1
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09 Oct 2014, 10:59 pm

BuyerBeware wrote:
NEVER give an Aspie "unconditional positive regard." I would NEVER, EVER again trust a therapist who did that to me. I HAVE to know if I'm just flat-out wrong and flat-out messed up. Unconditional positive regard is detrimental to an accurate self-assessment and therefore detrimental to functionality and mental health.
I had a therapist do that. We did a number of activities/exercises that involved drawing. Now, I'm a horrible drawer. Unless it's a diagram, a floorplan, or a flowchart, anything I draw turns out looking like crap. But when I drew pictures and such when she asked me to, she'd say it looks great. I was 13, which means I was well aware of my strengths and weaknesses. The compliments felt baby-ish, patronizing, and fake. It would be far better if she said something like: "Whether or not you like your own drawing, it's good enough for the activity/exercise we're doing; this is not an art class." That would be direct, sincere, and even complimentary. But of course, that would actually make sense, and NT therapists can't have that!

dianthus wrote:
I haven't been in any kind of counseling or therapy since I was a teenager. But that is what I remember the most about it, being asked over and over again how I felt, how something made me feel, how I was feeling in that moment, being asked to close my eyes and really feel the feeling, etc. And yeah not being believed when I gave an honest answer. It was extremely annoying and it made me think the counselor was a total idiot with nothing to offer me. It just went round and round and didn't accomplish anything.
I had a way of fighting back against that. I borrowed a psychology book from the school library, and memorized all the emotion words. Then I regurgitated them during therapy as I saw fit. The words didn't have to make sense or even be right; they just had to sound gushy and melodramatic. (For example, "victimized like a kitten surrounded by rabid dogs", rather than "bad".) Only when I did that, I got complimented on my---wait for it---honesty!



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05 Dec 2014, 8:27 pm

JSBACHlover wrote:
Rogerian psychotherapy is all about "getting in touch with my feelings" to determine my "true self" so that I might achieve "self-actualization." It's not about right or wrong, which is actually why it is so incredibly dangerous. Rogers' own daughter used his therapy to justify leaving her husband and three children. Rogers, at the end of his life, was very upset about how some were taking his theories because, personally, he was a fundamentalist Protestant.

Anyway, most therapists incorporate many of Rogers' theories, but they usually try to balance it with Ellis' CBT, which allows for a more right vs. wrong / healthy vs. unhealthy approach.

The thing about Aspies is that we can't find our core. So by actually just telling us what to frigging do to fit it - black and white, right / wrong - then we're fine. We Aspies are not fancy-shmancy people!

So the fancy-shmancy psychotherapists I've had were the ones who made something really simple into something very complicated. That's why I don't like them. They're like the kids on the playground who kept changing the rules as the game went along. :)


Rogers was very important in his time in providing a countervailing voice to the hardline behaviourists, standing for humanistic rather than mechanistic psychology and practice. His work, "Toward a More Human Science of the Person" was very important in that context and time. Ellis is going out of fashion a bit now; the newer version of CBT uses a more dialectical approach. There are fashions in psychology, counselling, and psychiatry; they come and go and come back in new disguises. A lot of it is political, not scientific.