Has anyone ever been through some kind of therapy and been told by a therapist that you know what is wrong and how to fix it, but yet you still have the same issues?

I guess then the next step is figuring out why the will to fix it is missing. The discussions have been focused on three (let’s say) of three ingredients, but the recipe obviously calls for four ingredients. It’s time to discuss the fourth ingredient.

I look forward to reading this. This is a “been there, done that, still haven’t fixed it” issue for me. I do wonder how much of it is a matter of being ready, as well as willing.

I have never had such an experience, but it sounds like the Dr. Phil school of therapy, one that is entirely disconnected from the modern scientific understanding of the human mind. I also think it is unethical. If someone comes to you with problems and they just can’t do what’s necessary to implement the solutions, then (if you have chosen the field of psychotherapy) you have an obligation to figure out why they can’t implement the solution or to refer them to someone who can, not to just say: “sorry, can’t help you”.

Can’t say I’ve been there specifically – but I’ve had my own inner demons before and in the end, it came down to me having to deal with them myself, without the help of anyone.

As a former therapist, I can say that I have told clients this before. However, I never let them find that “fourth ingredient” (as kevbo said) on their own. Rather I worked with them on why they weren’t using the “fourth ingredient”. Most times it was fear of moving on in a healthy manner. Being stuck with the same three ingredients that aren’t working can be a lot more comfortable because it’s known rather than the unknown of living healthily and healed.

My suggestion is to contact one of your former therapists and see if you can set up an appointment to see how to move forward and why you feel unable to. If they cannot (or I suspect don’t want to) help you contact your health insurance provider and ask for a recommendation.

I am so sorry this has happened to you three times, I find it completely unethical and inhumane!

Hey, I feel you. I have been having issues lately with the fact that I am 100% responsible for my own life. No therapist can help me change that. I have to change the mindset on my own. I have been feeling angry that I have to do this work.

After a lot of metaphorical head-banging, I have come to see that I felt angry because I had misguided beliefs that led to certain thoughts that caused me to have angry feelings. I must examine these beliefs, the thoughts I create from those beliefs, and how I’m causing myself to feel certain things with those thoughts.

I am seeing how I believe the word “responsible” to mean “blame”, “burden” “hardship”, “trial” and then when I read words like “You are 100% responsible for your own life,” I start thinking that being responsible is a burden and no fun and now everything will be hard and I’ll make mistakes and I’ll get blamed for ruining my life and then I feel angry.

I have to face that this belief about what “responsible” means, which I came to as a small child listening to the wrong people and drawing childish conclusions from situations I had no control over, is no longer helping me and that I must come to believe something else that’s more positive. But it’s been a habit for me to think in this way about responsibility.

Thinking these thoughts and then feeling bad is much like any other bad habit, like smoking, or doing drugs. In that sense, you can’t beat yourself up for not having healed miraculously in a week or a year. Bad habits, like any habit, take time to root themselves in. Don’t beat yourself up. Does a baby beat themselves up for falling over when they start walking?

Examine your deepest beliefs. Engage the possibility that everything you believe about yourself and your ability to handle life is wrong, in the sense that you can handle it. You are no longer a child and you are more capable than you think.

I’ve been at Mood Gym, because it helps me to force out what beliefs I actually have held onto for all these years and helps me to see them in the open and how they’re not true for who I am today. No, I’m not perfect, but it’s one day, one moment at a time that I can learn to live differently and stop hurting myself. It took one moment at a time for you to get where you are now, but you don’t realize it because you weren’t paying attention. Now you must pay attention. Is what you do in the next moment going to reaffirm your past beliefs, or are you ready to try something else? Your ego is invested in this persona because it’s all it knows and that’s why it’s fighting you. But this ego, created as it is from thoughts, feelings, behaviors and beliefs are not “you.”

Let go.

My therapist listened a lot (I was loquacious and not inhibited) and periodically gave me a nudge. For us it was the right technique, but rather mysterious. On several (rare) occasions, he gave me some very concrete advice, which I took.

I was lucky in finding the right guy on the first try. But I did the hard work, which meant changing several parts of life and my thought-processes.

I find it odd that three therapists told you the same thing. How many visits did it take for them to come to this conclusion? Did any of them offer any suggestions before brushing you off? Part of the problem may be the quick fix attitude that many therapists take. If the problem doesn’t go away after a few months then they run out of ideas, especially if there is no set of pills that they can push on you.

Is it possible that you are holding out on the therapists? That you are presenting something while leaving something out? Have you discussed with any therapist the fact that this has happened to you, but yet you remain stuck?

Many sessions over many periods of timewith different therapists… All sought out on my own to help better myself. It always boiled down to assessing me, questioning me and my revealing issues I have lived with, and then my stating what I know is wrong, why I do the things I do, and what I need to do to resolve it. I think there is something to be said for the motivation factor. Though I have always been one to try to work on continuous improvement of self. I do not lack a motivation to improve myself…habits are hard to break and especially when one has built up self protective strategies to deal with issues accumulated throughout life. We all want to feel whole and complete and we do whatever we can to survive this life.

Thanks for the mood gym link, @aprilsimnel – looks like a good resource.

Knowing how to do something and actually doing it are two different things.

That’s what therapy is. That’s the job of the therapist, to find the problem and help you find the way to fix it. It is not the job of the therapist to do the work for you. If you go into therapy expecting to be fixed and to do nothing to help yourself get there, you’re going to be disappointed.

You do know what’s wrong, you do know what to do to fix it, and yet you don’t. You’re not doing the work of therapy but want it to work. It won’t until you do your part. What you might be able to do if you choose to go in again is to ask for help in finding tools that will help you do the work. Discuss what tools you’ve used in the past and how they haven’t worked for you and ask for assistance in either finding new ones or using the old ones better. For example, if you’re trying to paint with the opposite end of a brush, its not going to work very well. But if you use it in a different way, it works just fine.

Unless you’re willing to do the work, no, therapy won’t work. And yes, you will be getting the same thing over and over again.

@Snarp Please read my words on the “job of the therapist.”

@gailcalled Therapists really aren’t supposed to tell you what to do. When they’re giving advice, they’re not being therapeutic.

@LostInParadise Its not “brushing off” to say that there isn’t anything that can be done in therapy until someone is ready to do the work of therapy. Ending therapy isn’t about pills or running out of ideas, its stopping taking people’s money when they’re not ready for change or aren’t doing their part for whatever reason. Would you prefer that they keep taking money from people when they know they’re not being helpful?

@Lightlyseared Exactly.

@avvooooooo Honestly, I don’t think we have enough information here to be so sure (either one of us). I have seen Dr. Phil tell people: “you know what to do, just do it!” If they could just do it, they wouldn’t be asking for help, Phil. Is it not willing to do the work, or is it not able to do what’s expected? We just don’t know in this case, but I’m giving @Holden_Caulfield the benefit of the doubt.

@avooooo: I started by saying he listened a lot and then added “On several (rare) occasions, he gave me some very concrete advice, which I took.”

I had the choice to accept or reject his advice. The piece of my statement that you referred to, which I wrote carefully, was out-of-context.

I said also that he periodically gave me a nudge.

@Snarp Dr. Phil is a quack without a valid license. What he does isn’t therapy, its exploitative entertainment. If that’s your idea of what therapy is, its really hard to understand what therapists are taught to do and how they’re taught to help people.

@avvooooooo Well, we certainly agree about Dr. Phil. I did not know that he didn’t have a license.

@Snarp After some sexual misbehavior, his license was taken away. Which is why I find his whole show of devotion to his wife very, very creepy. Not to mention the many other things about him that I dislike.

Yeah.

They said I had a “personality disorder”.

I understood it to mean I blew things w—aa-aaaay out of proportion when things “went wrong”.

The key to fixing that, it seems, is to “choose once again”.

How I (we) feel or my reaction to things is a direct result of how I think.
Feeling or reacting negatively indicates I’m entertaining negative thoughts.

So while I may not be able to change whatever circumstance that prompted me to think negatively, I always have the power to choose what I think (choose once again).

I’ve been told that they don’t like to give you answers because they want you to feel empowered to solve your own issues. This is a two edged sword of course.

At the same time, they don’t give you answers because many just aren’t that creative. They don’t really have an answer that they believe in for you. Many don’t even believe in a “right” answer.

That’s the thing about religions, they work for so many people because there’s a real sense of leadership that the general practice of psychology tries a little too hard to avoid, imo.

@ninjacolin The minute therapists start thinking they have all the right answers is the minute that they become crap therapists. Because they don’t listen. It is about empowerment. You can either come to a therapist for every bump in the road… or handle your problems yourself based on what you leaned in therapy. It goes back to the fact that the therapist can’t do it for you.

@avvooooooo no need to put that in small text, that’s directly relevant to the question! :)

Boot camp changes people for real. The reason, i imagine, is because MOST people aren’t born leaders. Once they get a taste of direction, they get an idea of how it can work for them.

Therapy, however, tends to assume (it seems to me) that 100% of people are fully capable of leading themselves immediately, when they just plainly aren’t. Most people are “sheep” as per se. And no, not in a condescending way. Jesus seemed to get this idea: Leadership is important. Leadership can be taught, yes, but it doesn’t come natural to most people. For that reason, I think people need a balance between guidance and leadership that isn’t currently being met by the system. Instead, lost sheep-like people kind go around in circles with these therapists who just don’t know how to provide the direction they need to become self-sufficient.

And I don’t mean for therapists to guess at answers wildly. Research into their client’s needs is important. Listen first, suggest later. But still, leaving suggestion completely out of the question seems useless for a lot of people until they learn how to think more independently. Balance is needed.

Seems to me that therapists are supposed to help you figure out how to achieve the changes you want to make.

If a therapists sends you away saying “you know how to do it,” that is a copout. Clearly the client doesn’t know how to do it. If they did, they would be doing it.

@Lightlyseared says ”Knowing how to do something and actually doing it are two different things” Yes. And if a therapist stops with the knowing, they aren’t doing their job. Their job is to help the client figure out how to actually do it, not merely know what to do.

If they don’t do it after that, then it seems to me that something went wrong. Either the client wasn’t truthful, or the therapist wasn’t trying very hard. If a client is lying, I think a good therapist will see this and figure out how to help the client see what is going on, and then they can focus on what the client really wants; not what the client thinks he or she wants. Or maybe it’s just me.

When I’m trying to help someone, I try to help them take action, not just think about taking action. I’m not a therapist, so I’m sure there’s a lot about it that I have no clue about. But I see this in the consulting business all the time. Consultants get hired to make a plan. They do that, and dump the plan on the client. Surprise, surprise, the plan is filed and never used. Consultants, I believe, should be responsible for not just planning, but helping clients carry out plans. If you’re not going to do that, you might as well not bother making a plan in the first place.

@avvooooooo makes a good point here.

It is so tempting as a therapist to say, “You know….. such and such is your problem and blah blah…... is what you need to do to fix it.

The problem with doing something like that is that the client does not get the experience of identifying what is holding them back and realising what they need to do to start changing their situation and how they perceive it.

It can be painfully frustrating as a therapist to just listen and reflect back to the client what you hear them saying and then shutting up and giving them the time and space they need to take the next step, however small.

If it was easy to know how to do good therapy, then we psychologists and other trained therapists would not be needed. It takes years of studying and practicing to know when to give guidance and when to facilitate the clients own process and then to do the right thing when just offering a solution would feel so much easier.

Clients sometimes resist doing the work in therapy they need to do and sometimes that resistance can be an interim focal point in the therapy process.

There are no magic answers unless the client works them out under the support and non-directive guidance of the therapist.

Nice ^ Maybe some people fit into a “type” of client who would respond better to direct advice while others are the sort who benefit more from drawing their own conclusions? Maybe people switch types depending on the issue..?

@ninjacolin – NOW I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
In simplistic terms, it takes ALL kinds to make a world, and, believe me, they are ‘out there’LOL!

How many therapists does it take to change a compact fluorescent light?

Only one, but the compact fluorescent light must really want to change.

There is a point in there somewhere!

^ but I believe there’s a really tricky reality to deal with, @Dr_Lawrence: You can only do what you’ve learned you need to do.. and on top of that: you can only learn what you’ve first learned how to learn.

Meaning, unless someone tells you directly: “you need to learn how to be more X” you may live another 20 years before you realize it on your own. Also, once you know that you need to learn how to be more X.. you need to be told how to go about learning it since, again, you may have to wait 20 years before you learn how to learn it on your own.

Yes; I have taught at variouslevels most of my life.
There isn’t the slightest doubt that different people learn better from different approaches.
Some kids love you to keep showing them the way in almost everythign they do… adn they like to learn that way.
Others, you only have to shoot a possibility into the air, and off they go for themselves.

Therapy should help teach people how to ask the right questions and where to look to find their answers. It should not spoon feed the client, however.

I think, though, Doc, you’d probably have to ask the therapists exactly what they are trained to achieve with a client – you and I are not professional ‘therapists”.
It would be my guess that their comprehensive courses would state an “ideal”, and then deal in the realities – that not everyone will fit a certain mould.
The skill of a therapist would also be largely in how you adjust your goals for each client according to the specifics of the client and case, and undertake regular evaluations in relation to any shifts.

@Dr_Lawrence Glad you’re here to hold up the professional side.

@denidowi Therapists are taught (I would know) to tailor their approach to the client. But they’re also given things they should never do, including giving advice and telling people things they need to find out for themselves. For example, therapists are not experts in “Bob,” “Bob” is an expert in “Bob” and only “Bob” can know for sure what’s right and true. Part of the process is constantly tailoring your approach to the client and the things you think therapists need to do is what they’re taught… in some approaches.

Well, I’ll leave it to you guys who say you are therapists… because I’m not a pro therapist

@denidowi I don’t practice, but I’ve had the training.

i have opinions.. does that count?

@denidowi I have a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from an APA accredited training Program. I did four years of Clinical practice at the Psychological Services Centre.
I am qualified to speak on such a topic.

What are you professionally qualified to do?
You have so many preachy contributions to offer on nearly ever topic

@denidowi (Denis Towers)
You are the author of the book “Two Birds… One Stone”.
It is published by Xulon Press – essentially a vanity press,
a self-publication described by you as:

Subject: Religion: general
Christian Theology – Cosmology
Science & Religion
Religion / Religion & Science
Religion-Christianity – Theology – Cosmology
General: Disproof of Evolution
Religion
Religion – Socialissues

Your shameless promotion of your pseudoscientific paperback is a combination of promoting your book for profit (SPAM) and promoting your own religious view as if it were science.

Your entitled to believe anything you want but don’t pretend to be a scientist.

Please list Your peer-reviewed scientific publications as first author on your research.

If you can’t, then stop pretending to be a scientist.

So… you thought, @Dr_Lawrence – DH for short that you would treat the case as some Sherlock Holmes… Did you??
I know you’re quite a vain man underneath that suave facade – or perhaps the facade itself gives you away.
Er… BTW, pehaps you should try reading other Questions or threads even on Fluther, and you will see that I state in many cases, not all, that I was the Kinesiologist, or that I was part of the team researching… If YOU happened not to pick that up, Please don’t run to me when you are looking for sleuth work: Will you??LOL!!
In instances, I just did not promote or expose that I was, but if you had been following my case with any sort of specific interest, you would have quickly picked up that it was I who was in the research.
Yes.

Sorry once again, to steal your ThunderLOL!!!

You DO try hard though to get that limelight: I will grant you that. ;)

In case you don’t see this thread, I’ll post this on your caseLOL!!
BTW, in actual fact, you DO remind me of the Sherlock Holmes movie, but in the role of the inspector [LOL] – Always well behind Holmes [who might Holmes be then?] Ha Ha Ha!
Oh you’re fun, “Doc”!!

@denidowi: What do all those “LOL”‘s signify? Irritation, amusement, some kind of new shorthand that I don’t get?

@gailcalled MrLOL is still seeking attention and recognition previously denied by the scientific community that demands empirical, peer reviewed evidence to support or refute a scientific theory. To completely overturn all previous support for a theory such as the theory of evolution in its current form, would require a methodologically sound scientific research study and probably much more than a single unreplicated study of questionable scientific value reported in a paperback book.

Let’s be understanding of the urgent desire some people have for recognition that they feel they have been denied, but we should avoid feeding into it.

This discussion more properly belongs under threads pertaining to evolution rather than therapy. MrLOL challenge my bona fides as a trained clinical therapist, so I responded to that point here.

I am disabled and no longer am able to work. I do not practice therapy on the internet (nor would any reputable clinician in any field) but I do try to help people evaluate for themselves whether they might need to seek professional help.

@Dr_Lawrence: Off-topic. The book “Two Birds…” is offered for sale if you have rupees. I found that curious.