Posted by fallsfall on September 13, 2005, at 6:54:00
In reply to Re: Psychodynamic Therapy » 10derHeart, posted by Sonya on September 12, 2005, at 16:40:36
The article 10derheart mentioned is a pretty good explanation of Psychodynamic Therapy.
One difference I find between CBT and Psychodynamic (is there an abbreviation for this???) is that in Psycho (!?) the therapist works with the transference. A lot of people have impressions of what "transference" is - and usually they aren't good. But I have found that it can be very, very helpful. Transference isn't just falling in love with your therapist (though this *can* be a kind of transference). Transference is when you assume that a current relationship will be like past relationships and you make assumptions about the current relationship. This is a very reasonable thing to do - otherwise we would have to approach each new relationship from ground zero. Instead we can assume that people who look and act like Aunt Jane might actually *be* a bit like Aunt Jane. Most of the time this saves us time. But if Aunt Jane wasn't like most of the rest of the population that resembles her, then we'll make erroneous assumptions.
For instance, my father is very critical (of everybody). He is perfect and always right, and everyone else is a bit stupid and inferior. I was in Psycho therapy with my current therapist for about 6 weeks when I started being very uncomfortable when he would comment on things. Based on the filters of my life, his comments were saying that I had done something wrong (i.e. "and then you said 'no'?" or "why did you do that?" - even now as I try to come up with examples, they feel critical to me!). So I started to get defensive, and we ended up in an intense struggle. He was able to see what I wasn't able to see, and patiently (oh, so patiently) over a number of sessions we talked about how I was hearing his comments and what he meant by his comments. For instance, when he said "Why did you do that?" I heard "You should have done something else" (my father's critical voice), but he meant "What were your reasons for doing that?" - those two interpretations are very different. Because we had built some trust in the previous weeks, I was slowly able to believe that his motivation was different from what I believed (I believed that he was critical). I still have a lot of trouble thinking that people are critical, but because of the experience with my therapist, I can now stop and ask myself if there is another possible interpretation for someone else's comment, and I can actually even ask them about it sometimes to find out what they really mean.
A CBT approach might be to shore up the patient's self esteem so that they realize that the other person has no right to be critical of them - that their opinion is as valid as the other person's.
Transference is very intense - one way you know that there is transference going on is you say to yourself (incredulously) "Why, in the world, am I so upset by this? It doesn't make any sense for this situation to be this painful for me". So Psychodynamic therapy can be intense and painful, but it can also have deep results.
If you have had "a lot of" CBT, but you still seem to have issues, I would recommend Psychodynamic therapy.
poster:fallsfall
thread:554112
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050912/msgs/554542.html