Alan Rudolph
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
Blog
Why Won’t My Therapist Just Tell Me What to Do?
Posted on September 15, 2017 at 3:15 PM |
Why Won’t My Therapist Just Tell Me What to Do? Dear Therapist, I’m a woman who’s about to turn 30
and started therapy for the first time last year. I went because it became
apparent that what I thought was just “me” was actually “me with depression,”
and therapy has really helped me acknowledge it and start to work through
it. Now for maybe the first time in my life I know what it feels like not
to be moody all the time (I used to think this was “normal”) and that’s been
amazing. My point is that therapy has been useful and even life-changing —
except for one thing. I don’t understand why my therapist
won’t give me advice! Obviously, I don’t mean all the time, but I feel that in
certain situations, she could tell me what she thinks but won’t. She knows that
one of my issues is that I didn’t get guidance growing up — that I basically
had to figure everything out on my own because my parents either didn’t know
they should be advising me (for example, leaving my college search completely
to me) or they gave me inappropriate advice (once I almost lost a friend after
taking their advice when I was too young to know how bad their advice really
was). It’s not that my parents aren’t
well-meaning people. It’s just that in many ways they’re clueless. They
consistently made bad decisions in their own lives (some were disastrous, like
almost losing our house) so when it came to my own life — friends, dating,
college, grad school, career — I didn’t have role models or mentors in my
parents the way most of my friends did. To be fair to my therapist, I
understand that I’m not a child anymore and that she wants me to figure things
out on my own as an adult, and I get that — up to a point. But if it’s a simple
question, something practical or something that isn’t a deep psychological
issue, why not just say what she thinks? I’m talking about the kinds of
questions people my age routinely ask their parents’ advice on all the time:
Does it makes sense to buy a place now since I can afford it, or should I keep
my rent-controlled apartment until I’m more settled with a family? Or, if a guy
that an acquaintance at work dated for a few months over a year ago is asking
me out, is it okay to accept even though this acquaintance will probably be
unhappy about it? I just want to know what she would
suggest — not that I’d necessarily do that, but at least I’d have the opinion
of a stable adult I trust. Since you’re a therapist with an
advice column, do you ever give people advice in therapy? You must have
opinions about whether people should break up with their boyfriends or
girlfriends, stop talking to a friend, or (hint, hint) buy a home now or wait to
be more settled. Do you ever share this with your patients? And if not,
why not give them your perspective? I find this part of therapy so frustrating. Not Asking for Much Dear Not Asking for Much, Guess what? I’m going to give you
some advice. Here’s what I think you should do: 1. Buy a place now. 2. Go on the date. But wait — before you take that
advice, let me give you one last piece of advice: Please don’t take my advice.
Because if you do, you’re likely to end up as disappointed with me as you were
with your parents. My advice — like your parents’ or even your therapist’s
(were she to give it) — may be well-meaning, but it won’t help you in the ways
that you hope. For one, despite my good intentions,
whatever I suggest will be mediated by my own biases and life experiences. So
while I took your living situation into account, it’s also true that I advised
you to buy a place partly because I bought my first home in my 30s and in
hindsight I wish I’d bought earlier. In other words, my advice was clouded by
my personal beliefs about real-estate appreciation. Likewise, I suggested that
you go on the date because if it were me — if I were almost 30 and
really liked a guy and wasn’t close to a woman who briefly dated him over a
year ago — I’d go on the date. But you might have different ideas, values, and
tolerance for any potential fallout. What might be a good idea for me might be
a disaster for you. And by giving you advice, I might be projecting my own
values and beliefs about the world onto you, rather than helping you to gain a
stronger sense of your own. There’s always going to be a gap
between what the therapist might advise, and what’s best for the patient. A
therapist might see a couple and think they should divorce, but some people
prefer to be in a highly conflictual marriage than to be alone, no matter how
much the therapist might personally champion being alone for a time over a
highly conflictual marriage where one partner refuses to change. Our patients’
lives are theirs to live, not ours. Our patients’ lives are theirs to
live, not ours. Even so, you’re not alone in wanting
your therapist to tell you what to do. I’m asked all the time questions like
which job a person should take, whether they should have another kid or freeze
their eggs, and whether they should go to their chaotic family’s house for the
holidays or do something more pleasant instead. And when I don’t meet that
desire, it can feel like I’m sadistically withholding “the answer” that, in
their view, I can easily provide and that will solve their pressing problem. One of the surprises of becoming a
therapist has been how often people want to be told exactly what to do, as if I
have the “right answer” — or as if “right” or “wrong” answers exist for the
bulk of choices we make in our daily lives. Taped up over my desk is the word ultracrepidarianism,
which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of
one’s knowledge or competence.” As a therapist, I’m trained to understand
people and help them sort out what they want to do, but I can’t make
their life choices for them. I’m not a real-estate specialist, career
counselor or, most important, soothsayer. Part of what people want from my
advice is relief from uncertainty — if my therapist says X, I don’t have to
sit with my anxiety around ambiguity. But one thing that’s certain
about life is its uncertainty, and the inability to tolerate the uncertainty of
what will happen if they decide X or Y or Z leaves people trapped in
indecision. Learning to slow down and reflect on their choices and
anticipate the potential consequences of their actions helps to decrease their
anxiety in the long-term. Taking a therapist’s advice alleviates anxiety
in the moment, but it won’t last. Early in my training, I felt
tremendous pressure to give advice of the benign (or so I thought) sort, until
I realized that people resent being told what to do. Yes, they may ask —
repeatedly, relentlessly — but after you actually tell them, their initial
relief is often replaced by resentment. This happens even if things go
swimmingly, because ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives,
which is why children spend their childhoods begging to make their own
decisions rather than have them made for them. But if you were a certain kind of
child, a child like you, NAFM, a child who had to make decisions for yourself
before you were ready — either because nobody offered, or you couldn’t trust
the advice you got — decision-making and the agency that comes with it may feel
crippling. Instead of asking for more freedom on the way to adulthood, this
type of child will likely grow up and plead to have that freedom taken away. So you ask your therapist: Should I
do this? Should I do that? C’mon, just tell me: What would you do? Behind these questions lies the
assumption that your therapist is a more competent human being than you are.
The thinking goes: Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life?
Am I really qualified for this? Your therapist, on the other hand, is
believed to be the expert, the surrogate parent, the One Who Knows Best. And
you are the child in the adult body who fantasizes about how nice it would feel
to abdicate all of your responsibility and let a capable adult do the heavy
lifting of making hard choices. Even if it goes badly, having somebody else
decide seems safer. What a relief to be able to blame someone else for a wrong
decision, so that the pain of a bad outcome isn’t amplified by having been the
one to create the “mistake” in the first place. (And thus think: Oh, God, I’m
just like my parents — I make terrible decisions!) That’s a deceptive kind of
protection, though, because your therapist’s advice will actually make you feel
angry and unsafe. You may beg, plead, and cajole until your therapist, at 5
p.m. on a Friday, is so worn down that despite herself, she offers the advice
you want. And your first reaction might be elation! Finally! Initially, you
might feel supported and taken care of in a way you didn’t with your parents. But what might you do with this
nugget, this actual therapist-given, expert-approved, and longed-for gift of
concrete advice? Despite getting exactly what you asked for, you might not do
it. You might procrastinate, coming up with all sorts of reasons why you haven’t
gotten around to it yet. And then you’ll feel bad for not doing it. And you’ll
start to think, I feel bad because my therapist made me feel bad by trying
to tell me what to do. How dare she! I’m not doing this, dammit, just because
she told me so. Who is she to boss me around? And you’ll sit on her couch
every Friday at five, not telling her that you didn’t do the thing she
suggested, because you resent her for intruding on your voice, for making you
feel like your own opinion doesn’t matter; and on top of that you’ll be
consumed by the shame you feel for displeasing her by not doing the thing she
wants — which is what this whole interaction will have gotten twisted into in
your mind, even though the ostensible point of her giving the advice was to please
you, not her. In the end, nobody’s happy. That’s why getting advice is not the
solution to your problems, NAFM. Underlying all this hand-wringing about what
to do with your apartment and the guy who asked you out and the dozens of other
pieces of advice you may have pushed for is your therapist’s hope that you will
leave her. Not now, but when you’re ready, and her goal in each and every
session is to help you get ready. From Day One, we are thinking about how to
get our patients to leave us, not because we don’t care, but because we do. We
don’t want you to struggle so much. We want you to learn to trust yourself. We
want you to stop asking us to play God with your life because we are not gods.
We are mortals who do our best to understand our patterns and tendencies, our
pain and our yearnings, so that we can take responsibility for our lives. And
we want you to do the same. We all wage this internal battle to
some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? And no matter where we fall on
those continuums, ultimately, every decision we make is based around two
things: fear and love. Sometimes fear wins, and sometimes love does, and
sometimes it’s wise to listen to the fear, other times to the love. If there’s
one thing your therapist is trying to show you, it’s how to tell the two apart.
And she’s showing you by asking you to practice listening to yourself so that
you can use those feelings like a compass to point yourself in the best
possible direction. Therapists may not give advice, but
we do give guidance. And if there’s one thing your therapist knows, it’s that
the most powerful truths — the ones people take the most seriously — are those
they come to on their own. |
Categories: why therapy?
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