Common misunderstandings about psychotherapy
Common misunderstandings about psychotherapy
Some ideas for therapy appear so often in fiction that I wonder how many authors use them intentionally and how many simply do not recognize that they are inaccurate. Here are six of the most common, together with some information about the current standard practice.
1. You lie on a couch
Reality: Therapy customers are not on a couch; Some therapist offices don't even have sofas.
where did that come from? Sigmund Freud left his patients lying on a couch so that he could sit on a chair behind her heads. Why? No deep psychological reason - he just didn't like it when people looked at him.
There are many reasons why modern therapy customers would not be satisfied with it. Imagine that you tell someone about difficult or embarrassing experiences and not only cannot see them, but also let them react with silence. Why do you want to go back to everything in the world?
The ideal therapeutic structure, and you actually teach this in the graduate school, is to turn both chairs in an angle of about 20 degrees inwards (give or take about 10 degrees), usually at a distance of 8 or 10 feet between them. Often the therapist and the client face each other because they turn to each other in their chairs, but with this attitude the client does not feel like being confronted.
Even if there is a couch in the room, the therapist's chair is almost always turned at an angle.
2. Therapists analyze everyone
Reality: Therapists do not analyze more than the average person and sometimes less often.
Ironically, only people who are in Freud's approach to lie on the couch and to be free about mother (also known as psychoanalysis) learn to analyze at all. All other therapists are taught to understand why people do things, but it requires a lot of energy to find out people. And to be honest, while therapists usually look after people who want to help their clients, they deal with their own problems in everyday life and do not necessarily have the time or space to take care of the problems of everyone else or behaviors.and the last thing that most therapists want to hear in their free time are the problems of strangers. Therapists are paid for a certain reason to deal with the problems of others!
3. Therapists have sex with their clients
Reality: Therapists never have sex with their clients or friends or family members of clients if they want to keep their licenses.
This includes sex therapists. Sex therapists do not watch their clients during sex or ask them to experiment in the office. Sex therapy is often about educating and addressing relationship problems, as these are two most common reasons why people have sexual problems.
therapists should also not have sex with former clients. The rule is: if two years have passed and the former client and the therapist meet and somehow understand (ie this was not planned), the therapist is not excluded from professional organizations and the licenses are canceled. But in most cases, other therapists will still see them as suspicious.
The reason for this is simple: therapists have to listen and help without involving their own problems or needs, which leads to a difference in power that is difficult to overcome.
and to be honest, the roles that therapists play in their offices are only facets of who they really are. Therapists concentrate their full attention on clients without ever complaining about their own concerns or uncertainties.
If people think they want to be friends, they usually want to be friends with the therapist, not with the person, and a real friendship includes sharing power and mistakes and being careful. To get to know a therapist as a real person can be disappointing, because now they want to talk about themselves and their own problems!
4. It's all about your mother (or childhood or past ...)
reality: A branch of psychotherapeutic theory focuses on childhood and the unconscious. The rest not.
The psychodynamic theory maintained Freud's psychoanalytic conviction that early childhood and unconscious mechanisms are important for later problems, but most modern practitioners know that we are exposed to many influences in everyday life.
Some therapists will with certainty that your past is not important if it is not directly relevant for the current problem. Some believe that a comprehensive discussion of the past is an attempt to escape responsibility (design therapy) or not to actively work on changes (some types of cognitive behavior theory). Some believe that the social and cultural environment in which we live today causes problems (systems, feminist and multicultural therapies).
5. Ect is painful and is used to punish bad patients
REALITY: Electrocracy treatment (referred to in the past as electric shock treatment) is a rare treatment of the last instance for patients who were in the hospital because of suicide and outside the hospital and does not matter for the traditional treatments such as medication. In some cases, the client is so depressed that she cannot do the work to get better until her brain chemistry works more effectively.
to ect is considered, some customers strive to try it. You tried everything else and just want to feel better. When death feels like her only other option, it doesn't sound like such a bad idea if someone flows painless electricity through their brain in their sleep.
ect is neither painful nor trembling or trembling. The patients receive muscle relaxers. Since it is scary to feel paralyzed, they are also briefly put under general anesthesia. Electrodes are usually only attached to one side of the head, and the electricity is initiated in short impulses, which leads to a Grand-Mal attack. Doctors monitor electrical activity on a screen.
The attack produces and uses the brain serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine, all brain chemicals that are low in depression. Some people wake up and feel like a miracle. As a rule, several sessions are required to maintain the changes. The person can then be switched to antidepressants and / or other medication.
The ECT is not more dangerous than any other procedure administered under general anesthesia, and many of the possible side effects (confusion, memory disorder, nausea) can be attributed to anesthesia as well as the treatment itself.
6. "Schizophrenia" is the same as "several personalities".
reality: schizophrenia is a biological disorder with a genetic basis. It usually causes hallucinations and / or delusions (strong ideas that violate cultural norms and are not supported by reality) as well as a deterioration in normal everyday life. Some people with schizophrenia regularly become catatonic, have paranoid thoughts or behave disorganized. You can speak strangely and become tangential (verbally hiking, often in a way that makes no sense for the listener) by using nelogisms (invented words), using clasp associations (rhymes) or, in extreme cases, word salads (sentences that do) sounds like a bundle of confused words and can be grammatical or not.
The dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder) is caused by trauma. In some misused situations, the normal defense mechanism of dissociation can be used to "split up" memories of trauma. In DID, the division also includes the part of the "Kern" personality, which is associated with this memory or a number of memories. The dissociated identity often has its own name, its own characteristics and quirks. and cannot or cannot age at the same speed as the rest of the personality (or personalities), if it is at all.
to call yourself a "schizo" or "schizoid" or "schizophrene", if you think that you have an alter ego or contradictory personality traits, therefore makes no sense (and guarantees the mentally well -versed person!
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