I feel like I have a lot of difficulty with people in positions of authority who feel like they can comment on me or my life.
This could include, for example, a white professor who studies my culture, who might say, "I know how people of your background are, your culture is like x" (I just steer clear of them and it's not a common problem). It also includes opening up to my therapist, because somehow I feel like... the therapist is in this position of authority, and once I tell them something personal about myself, they're in this weird position to tell me that there's something wrong with me and possibly be right about it, or even if they aren't right about it, have the authority to make that the official truth. I feel like then I'd be stuck in this bell jar from which I can't escape but could be seen from all angles.
The only similar childhood experience I can recall is that my parents told me that because they raised me, in some ways they knew me very well (better than myself?) and saw my every movement, knew all my mannerisms as a young child. I felt like they ascribed some attributes to me that were not accurate, but also not easily observed or proven, so there was no way to challenge their descriptions of me. It felt frightening, that my parents could claim to be able to discern qualities about me that I might not have awareness of or even have any real concrete way of changing, and that these things might not be positive. I might also have some other related experiences related to being a minority, in which the history and narrative is not always written by minority authors.
It feels to me that psychotherapy kind of looks for things that could be wrong when there might not be any, and I am afraid that this could be harmful. The only other similar experience I've had was a few years ago when I was subjected to tons of medical tests because I was seen in a tertiary care medical center, where the school of thought was to search for rare diseases, and write up case reports. I felt like there was a lack of faith that I could be a fundamentally healthy person who could be listened to and trusted to say what I suspected was wrong. (I had some wonky test results that triggered a gigantic workup, but at the end turned out to be stress-related and self-limited once I finally summoned the courage to tell the doctors I no longer wanted any testing.) The process of getting all that workup felt harmful. The process of therapy feels almost kind of the same to me, like an invasive process with somebody in a position of authority who tries to search for something "wrong" with me. In fact, I had recently refused a medical test (I think that American healthcare errs on the side of more procedures and testing, anyway) and my therapist interpreted my reluctance to get the procedure as being analogous to my reluctance to engage further in psychotherapy. Well, yeah. The last time I did that, it was super empowering and I achieved a great outcome.
I myself work as a therapist and feel kind of gross that when I tell my supervisor that it didn't work out with a patient, they are quick to say that it was more likely the patient's pathology / resistance that made it difficult to connect. I am not really comfortable with the degree of power I have as a therapist and feel like it isn't really talked about that much in training. I feel like there's a kind of archetype of the (perhaps grandiosely?) omniscient analyst that probably isn't true in practice but has a grain of truth to it. I feel like a patient could easily be diagnosed by a therapist and then there would be little immediate recourse for refuting that diagnosis. I've seen some people (minorities) get inappropriately involuntarily hospitalized due to a misperception by a well-intending mental health worker. I don't think that most therapists or doctors would intentionally diagnose to condemn, but I think it still happens.
As a person in my own psychotherapy, I recoil at the thought that if I disagreed with my therapist, or if the therapy didn't work out, I could well be construed as the person with the intractable problem, rather than the therapy working out due to some sort of empathic failure or mismatch in technique or a mistake. I'm pretty sure that I make mistakes in therapy with my own patients, but also feel this is underexamined in my training.
I guess I also don't want to think of myself as somebody with a deep flaw, but on some level probably worry that I have some deep flaw (i.e., in some sense, what if my parents were right?) even though I don't have anything that actively distresses me in my day to day life.... I don't notice anything similar in my relationships. I've had really great therapy before, during a time of need and before I trained as a therapist, where I honestly felt like I was opening up and talking about real issues, but in my current therapy I feel like I am intentionally being a little more distant. My current therapy could probably benefit from me articulating clearer goals, because for now I am basically in therapy for educational/training reasons.
It's interesting that I don't have this assumption of benevolence and goodwill and positive regard from my therapist, and assume that they will get something wrong about me, and that there would be little room to appraise that and come to a more shared understanding with them, and go so far to feel that this hypothetical mistaken assumption could be very harmful to me. Actually, it's not even that I don't think the therapist would view me positively-- it's more that the process feels so invasive and that the objective of the process feels like it could be to fix things that don't need fixing, and in that way cause harm.
Can somebody help me out here? I'm probably super defended and resistant and paranoid. Is there a reading out there that describes this type of dynamic / patient, and gives tips on how to help them? Could it be better to just not be in therapy, or is this a good reason to go deeper into my therapy? If it's the latter, though, how can I even get through this? I wish I could talk to my previous therapist who I don't feel I have this dynamic with, but can't because I moved away. |
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