No, you’re not wrong.
But is this a legitimate therapeutic approach that works for some people? Yes. Me included.
I fought it initially. My great big issue was X. Spent all my time, every day, really distressed about X, trying to resolve X.
My second T? Said “we aren’t gonna talk about X any more.” So when I went in for my appointment, X was all I wanted to talk about. X was the problem I wanted to resolve. What the hell are we doing if we don’t talk about X???
Several years of practice later? I’d managed to identify that actually there were other issues in my life unrelated to X that my t helped me work through. And spending a whole tonne of time in therapy talking about me, rather than X, helped me seperate out X as an issue that I could kind of coexist with while I was improving other aspects of my life.
If we’d spent those years analysing X from ever possible angle? X would probably still be the great big unresolved issue that it is today. But I wouldn’t have accomplished anything else, resolved any other issues.
When I first started with that T, I honestly thought that every other issue I had I could live with comfortably if only we could resolve X. But now? I think maybe X is an issue that may not have a solution, and working on the rest of me? Has ultimately been helpful.
Does that mean this approach is going to work for you? No. Just saying that it may be a deliberate strategy to try and explore other ways to bring you a life of less distress. Different strokes for different folks.
Maybe see what she’s got planned, if you aren’t allowed to talk about the key issue you want to deal with, what’s ber alternative proposal? If you literally can’t sit down with a T and talk about anything other than this one person, why is that? Because you and the way you experience life, ways to reduce your distress and improve your well-being - that’s a whole lot bigger than this one person.
