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When Your “Other” Is Your Therapist

If you pick a therapist to help you with your problems, beware of becoming obsessed with loving or being loved by him or her. Good therapists can support and help you. They will care for you as an individual, and they have an incentive to help you become happier and less disturbed. Some of them may come to care for you personally, and would if they had met you outside the therapy office. But this also has its dangers. A therapist who cares too much for you personally may not see clearly what is needed to help you work on some of your basic problems. She may be too kind to you — too lenient and lax — and may not want to “hurt” you with needed honest confrontation of your self-defeating behavior. This type of “caring” may encourage you to have more therapy sessions than you actually require.

There are also dangers if you feel too close or maybe even in love with your therapist. You may not want to reveal your failings. You may want to keep disturbing yourself and stay in therapy for a long period of time. You may want to change mainly for the therapist and not for yourself. You may unthinkingly do what the therapist wants you to do and not what you really want to do in life.

If you are over-attached to your therapist, you may put your worth on the line for his or her love. The approach of your therapist giving you unconditional acceptance, in order to show you how to model it for yourself, may help you to accept yourself for the wrong reason: because your therapist accepts you. This is conditional self-acceptance!

If your therapist correctly teaches you how to achieve unconditional self-acceptance, you achieve it whether or not anyone else, including your therapist accepts you. So, by all means, pick a therapist who accepts you unconditionally — whether or not you do well at therapy or anything else. But don’t let his or her acceptance help you to conditionally accept yourself.

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Adapted from Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better, by Albert Ellis, Ph.D. Available at online and local book­stores or directly from Impact Publishers, PO Box 6016, Atascadero, CA 93423-6016, www.impactpublishers.com or phone 1-800-246-7228.
 

Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better
Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better
Price: $16.95

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