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Therapist asked what i need from them

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My psychiatrist often asks me that question. If I can't articulate what I need from them, I ask what they can offer me to manage or what their thinking is. Sometimes they offer some direction, sometimes they stay quiet it really depends.
They explain why they stay quiet but never tell me what to do or what not to do.

This can't-articulate feature is something I experience as well; but there's something even worse.
This something worse is not even being about notice or become-aware-of.
In a commencement address David Foster Wallace used fish-in-water as a metaphor to make this point.

When we are growing and developing as per `nurture' we become so accustomed to personalized norms that we end up like fish in water, incapable of noticing features of the contextual backdrop off which only certain things become even figural or noticeable ... let alone `things' we can articulate.
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After the pscyh eval portion of the physical I was `given' as part of the enlistment process for entering Uncle Sam's Canoe club (EG US navy) the psychiatrist blurted out -- in front of god and Everyone -- `They're going to have fun with you.", to which I responded `not if I don't let them.'
He was RIGHT ... because I wasn't aware of how my civilian life context was providing somethings as well as lacking others; once immersed in that CULT I was unable to retreat to MY ROOM, off to the woods, out on a bike ride, or any other place allowing me to disentangle from the madding crowd manifesting the cult which all branches of the military manifest-as.

How do we articulate what we've even failed to notice, let alone acknowledge as a beneficial satisfer or provider of a foundational or life-affirming need?

One of the problems I experience entails differentiating a `need' from a `want' or mere whim.
And the socio-impolitical Mother Culture -- which is NOT my friend -- does not help!

Advertisers pander to me as a consumer by attempting to elevate any urge I experience to BUY BUY BUY and consume, consume, consume into a `you deserve it' `need'.
Meanwhile, from the other end of the goods-and-services false economy, those fleshing out the service industry for `health care' disparage whatever I experience in The Present' -- anchored in Kairos -timed qualia and experience -- as nothing so important that it can't be addressed during a scheduled appointment as per their paint-by-numbers bureaucratic not-so-fine artistry ... okay, mere bullshit [Hawethorne effect]uated-by-authoritarian-functionaries face time ... while calling themselves `providers' as they provide themselves and their families INCOME as would-be `care' is doled out as if a material `good' I `deserve' ... by the Chrono-Procustean model epitomized by Henry Ford's assembly line and artistically comically lampooned by Charley Chaplin's Modern Times

So ... why can't I `articulate' -- using the same language those selling goods and services -- `needs' when any need in the first case equates to a mere impulsive whim and in the second case something which can be ignored until a scheduled appointment placates or appeases?

How do I magically, mystically become aware of what I've been clueless or clue-ignoring, as if living as a fish in water?

Though this seems personal, it also seems part and parcel with the human condition ... as well as more fishy conditions, where different.
 
That was beautiful to read eSp.

Thank you for the replies everyone. I think my conclusion is that it doesn't make me feel helpless - I am here, hoping she can help, if I knew what to do, I would just do that. And that I do also read it as her not knowing how to help me and that makes me feel not great. So I can ask her why she asked that question next time she (or anyone else, I always have a bad reaction to this qs).
 
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